Cartesian Empiricisms considers the role Cartesians played in the acceptance of experiment in
natural philosophy during the seventeenth century. It aims to correct a partial image of
Cartesian philosophers as paradigmatic system builders who failed to meet challenges posed by
the new science's innovative methods. Studies in this volume argue that far from being
strangers to experiment many Cartesians used and integrated it into their natural
philosophies. Chapter 1 reviews the historiographies of early modern philosophy science and
Cartesianism and their recent critiques. The first part of the volume explores various
Cartesian contexts of experiment: the impact of French condemnations of Cartesian philosophy in
the second half of the seventeenth century the relation between Cartesian natural philosophy
and the Parisian academies of the 1660s the complex interplay between Cartesianism and
Newtonianism in the Dutch Republic the Cartesian influence on medical teaching at the
University of Duisburg and the challenges chemistry posed to the Cartesian theory of matter.
The second part of the volume examines the work of particular Cartesians such as Henricus
Regius Robert Desgabets Jacques Rohault Burchard de Volder Antoine Le Grand and Balthasar
Bekker. Together these studies counter scientific revolution narratives that take rationalism
and empiricism to be two mutually exclusive epistemological and methodological paradigms. The
volume is thus a helpful instrument for anyone interested both in the histories of early modern
philosophy and science as well as for scholars interested in new evaluations of the
historiographical tools that framed our traditional narratives.
