Teaching Philosophy in Early Modern Europe

1. Front Matter

   Pages i-xiii

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2. Introduction

   • Susanna Berger, Daniel Garber

   Pages 1-9

3. The Dialogue of Ingenuous Students: Early Printed Textbooks at Paris

   • Richard J. Oosterhoff

   Pages 11-30

4. “Le meilleur livre qui ait jamais été fait en cette matière”: Eustachius a Sancto Paulo and the Teaching of Philosophy in the Seventeenth Century

   • Roger Ariew

   Pages 31-46

5. Philosophical Cartography in Seventeenth-Century Paris

   • Susanna Berger

   Pages 47-78

6. The Mathematics Theses Defended at collège de Clermont (1637–1682): How to Guard a Fortress in Times of War

   • Domenico Collacciani, Sophie Roux

   Pages 79-137

7. Subtilis, Inutilis: The Jesuit Pedagogy of Ingenuity at La Flèche in the Seventeenth Century

   • Raphaële Garrod

   Pages 139-164

8. Manuscripts as Pedagogical Tools in the Philosophy Teaching of Jean-Robert Chouet (1642–1731)

   • Ann Blair, Anja-Silvia Goeing

   Pages 165-203

9. Pierre Bayle as a Teacher of Philosophy

   • Martine Pécharman

   Pages 205-240

10. Literary Technology and Its Replication: Teaching the Torricellian Void and Air-Pump at the Collegio Romano

    • Renée Raphael

    Pages 241-263

11. A Mirror of Wisdom: Simon Vouet’s Satyrs Admiring the Anamorphosis of an Elephant and Its Afterlives

    • Alexander Marr

    Pages 265-301

12. Back Matter

    Pages 303-314

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This book examines how philosophy was taught in the early modern period in Europe. It breaks new ground in a number of ways. Firstly, it seeks to bring text-based scholars in the history of philosophy together with social and cultural historians to examine the interaction between tradition and innovation in the early modern classroom, the site where traditional views of the world were transmitted to the generation that was to give birth to modern philosophy and science. Secondly, it draws together scholars who are centered on ideas and words with other scholars who focus on the role of images in the classroom and the intellectual world in this central period of history. The volume advances our understanding of how philosophy was understood and transmitted in this rich and crucial era. The principal audience for Teaching Philosophy are historians of science, philosophy, art, visual culture, and print culture. The chapters are written in a tone accessible to upper-level undergraduates and graduate students. It also reaches non-specialist readers interested in subjects including the “scientific revolution,” the organization of information, and Renaissance and Baroque visual art.

• Anti-Aristotelianism
• Aristotelian Scholasticism
• Berger on Philosophy
• Garber on Philosophy
• Philosophy Textbooks
• Student Lecture Notebooks
• Text and Image Relations
• the Organization of Information
• the “Scientific Revolution”
• Visual Thinking

“The book has many illustrations that supplement the texts. All of the articles are clearly written. All have good bibliographies with complete references … . Overall, the book demonstrates that seventeenth-century teachers of philosophy were a cautions lot but open to new ideas.” (Paul F. Grendler, Journal of Jesuit Studies, Vol. 10 (1), 2023)

• USC Dornsife, Department of Art History and School of Philosophy, University of Southern California, Los Angeles, USA

  Susanna Berger

• Department Philosophy, Princeton University, Princeton, USA

  Daniel Garber

Susanna Berger is Associate Professor of Art History and Philosophy at the University of Southern California. Her research and teaching explore diverse facets of visual art and intellectual history in early modern Europe (ca. 1500–1800), from forgotten prints and drawings of philosophical knowledge to celebrated works in the history of European painting by Caravaggio and other artists. Her first book, The Art of Philosophy: Visual Thinking in Europe from the Late Renaissance to the Early Enlightenment, appeared with Princeton University Press in 2017 and was awarded the 2018 Bainton Prize. Her articles are published and forthcoming in The Art Bulletin, The Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes, Art History, Intellectual History Review, Word & Image, Early Science and Medicine, Global Intellectual History, British Art Journal, and Gutenberg-Jahrbuch. Bergerwas previously a member of the Princeton Society of Fellows and has been awarded a 2019 Guggenheim Foundation Fellowship.

Daniel Garber is the A. Watson Armour III University Professor of Philosophy at Princeton University. Garber's principal interests are the relations between philosophy, science, religion and society in the period of the Scientific Revolution. In addition to numerous articles, Garber is the author of Descartes' Metaphysical Physics (1992), Descartes Embodied (2001), and Leibniz: Body, Substance, Monad (2009) and is co-editor with Michael Ayers of the Cambridge History of Seventeenth-Century Philosophy (1998). Most recently, he has been working on a project to understand the idea of a “new philosophy” in the early modern period, the emergence of the novatores or “innovators” in tension with more traditional philosophical and scientific projects, largely (though not exclusively) at universities. In this connection, he has been particularly interested in understanding the interaction between tradition and innovation at the various sites in which they have been in contact with one another, and both the dismissal of the tradition by self-styled innovators, and the hostility toward the new on the part of more traditional scholars and thinkers.

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