The Secretive Diffusion of the New Philosophy in the Low Countries: Evidence on the Teaching of Cartesian Philosophy from Student Notebooks 1650-1750

The diffusion of Descartes’ new philosophy was a story of both success and opposition. In the Low Countries, where Descartes has settled in 1628, his dualistic and materialistic physics and metaphysics were welcomed because of their novelty, and rejected because of several incompatible views with the prevalent Aristotelian, c.q. Catholic doctrine. Yet, if this famous chapter of the history of philosophy seems to have been written already in its final version, new manuscript sources, viz. hundreds of student notebooks of the 17th and 18th centuries, offer new ways of analyzing the way in which Cartesian philosophy has been taught at universities in the Low Countries, both North and South. These student notebooks have been retrieved, collected and inventoried and (already partly) digitalized in the running project ‘Magister Dixit’ (KU Leuven) so that a first firm basis has been laid to deepen our knowledge of how Cartesian physics and metaphysics, together with its logic, penetrated the university classrooms in the Low Countries. An in-depth study, with a sharp comparison between the reception and praxis in North and South, will advance our knowledge about one of the most fascinating periods in the history of science: how did Cartesian methods and views integrate with traditional Aristotelian philosophy, how did the new science emerge through the transmission of knowledge in universities in the Low Countries ?