How did the relations between philosophy and science evolve during the 17th and the 18th
century? This book analyzes this issue by considering the history of Cartesianism in Dutch
universities as well as its legacy in the 18th century. It takes into account the ways in
which the disciplines of logic and metaphysics became functional to the justification and
reflection on the conceptual premises and the methods of natural philosophy changing their
traditional roles as art of reasoning and as science of being. This transformation took place
as a result of two factors. First logic and metaphysics (which included rational theology)
were used to grant the status of indubitable knowledge of natural philosophy. Second the
debates internal to Cartesianism as well as the emergence of alternative philosophical
world-views (such as those of Hobbes Spinoza the experimental science and Newtonianism)
progressively deprived such disciplines of their foundational function and they started to
become forms of reflection over given scientific practices either Cartesian experimental or
Newtonian.
