Overview
- Engages with the changes of Descartes’s epistemology
- Sheds new light on Descartes’s invention of nature, and observations and experiments with natural bodies
- Analyses Descartes’s short history of all natural phenomena—minerals, plants, and animals
Part of the book series: Studies in History and Philosophy of Science (AUST, volume 60)
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Table of contents (7 chapters)
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Front Matter
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Back Matter
Keywords
About this book
This book explores René Descartes’s attempts to describe particular bodies, such as rocks, minerals, metals, plants, and animals, within the mechanistic interpretation of nature of his philosophical program. Despite his early rationalistic epistemology, Descartes’s increasing attention to collections, histories, lists of qualities, and particular bodies results in a puzzling ‘short history of all natural phenomena’ contained in the Principles of philosophy (1644). The present book outlines the role of Descartes's observations and experimentation as he aimed to construct a universal science of nature, ultimately revealing the mechanization of nature in detail, and for curious bodies such as the Bologna Stone or the sensitive herb. What results is a theoretical natural history consistent with the mechanical principles of his philosophy, ultimately shedding new light on his attempt to produce a complete philosophy of nature.
Authors and Affiliations
About the author
Dr. Fabrizio Baldassarri is an expert of Descartes's philosophy and science. He has been the recipient of a Marie-Curie Fellowship at Ca’ Foscari University Venice and Indiana University Bloomington. He has edited volumes, such as Vegetative Powers (Springer 2021), Descartes and Medicine (Brepols 2023), Andrea Cesalpino and Renaissance Aristotelianism (Bloomsbury 2023), Plants in 16th and 17th century (De Gruyter 2023) and several special issues for Early Sciene and Medicine, the Journal for Early Modern Studies, Nuncius. He is the author of a monograph entitled, Il metodo al tavolo anatomico: Descartes e la medicina (Rome 2021).
Bibliographic Information
Book Title: René Descartes’s Natural Philosophy and Particular Bodies
Authors: Fabrizio Baldassarri
Series Title: Studies in History and Philosophy of Science
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-48663-0
Publisher: Springer Cham
eBook Packages: Religion and Philosophy, Philosophy and Religion (R0)
Copyright Information: The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023
Hardcover ISBN: 978-3-031-48662-3Published: 02 January 2024
Softcover ISBN: 978-3-031-48665-4Due: 31 January 2024
eBook ISBN: 978-3-031-48663-0Published: 01 January 2024
Series ISSN: 1871-7381
Series E-ISSN: 2215-1958
Edition Number: 1
Number of Pages: XV, 208
Number of Illustrations: 1 b/w illustrations
Topics: History of Philosophy, Philosophy of Nature, Philosophy, general