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This monograph details the entire scientific thought of an influential natural philosopher whose contributions, unfortunately, have become obscured by the pages of history. Readers will discover an important thinker: Burchard de Volder. He was instrumental in founding the first experimental cabinet at a European University in 1675.
The author goes beyond the familiar image of De Volder as a forerunner of Newtonianism in Continental Europe. He consults neglected materials, including handwritten sources, and takes into account new historiographical categories. His investigation maps the thought of an author who did not sit with an univocal philosophical school, but critically dealt with all the 'major' philosophers and scientists of his age: from Descartes to Newton, via Spinoza, Boyle, Huygens, Bernoulli, and Leibniz. It explores the way De Volder's un-systematic thought used, rejected, and re-shaped their theories and approaches. In addition, the title includes transcriptionsof De Volder's teaching materials: disputations, dictations, and notes.
Insightful analysis combined with a trove of primary source material will help readers gain a new perspective on a thinker so far mostly ignored by scholars. They will find a thoughtful figure who engaged with early modern science and developed a place that fostered experimental philosophy.
List of contents
1. The Philosophical and Scientific Background of De Volder.- 2. De Volder's Methodological and Epistemic Considerations.- 3. De Volders's Natural-Philosophical Theories.- 4. De Volder on Metaphysics.- 5. Conclusion.- 6. Commented Edition of De Volder's Experimental Lectures and Disputations.- 7. Bibliography.
About the author
Andrea Strazzoni (1984) has completed his undergraduate education at the University of Parma, and has obtained his PhD in the history of philosophy at the Erasmus University Rotterdam (2015), with a dissertation on the Dutch reception of Descartes and the problem of the foundation of natural philosophy. He is currently a post-doctoral fellow at the Gotha Research Centre of the University of Erfurt, where he works on the ways in which Cartesian ideas were entangled with different scientific and philosophical paradigms.
Report
"Andrea Strazzoni's new book is really a demanding one ... . This book is complex but worthwhile, and represents a very valuable contribution to the history of science. ... His book is very rich in primary sources, and the numberless footnotes contain substantial quotations and references to original texts in Latin, French, Dutch and so on. " (Ferdinando Abbri, Nuncius, Vol. 36, 2021)
