Cartesian Physics and Their Receptions: Scientific and Learned Cultures (Scientific and Learned Cultures and Their Institutions, 38)

The volume explores a variety of forms of reception of Cartesian natural philosophy in the early modern period. It addresses questions pertaining to several disciplines, such as philosophy, religion, and science. It offers a broad account of the philosophical change favoured by the spread of Cartesianism in the early modern period, illustrating this diffusion with case studies on cosmology, medicine, theory of causality, experiments, etc.

Mihnea Dobre, Ph.D. (2010), is teaching and doing research at the University of Bucharest. His research focus is on the history of philosophy and science; in particular, on the relations between philosophy, science, and religion in the early modern period. His publications include Descartes and Early French Cartesianism: between metaphysics and physics (Zeta Books, 2017), the co-edited volume Cartesian Empiricisms (Springer, 2013) and the co-authored Open Access scholarly edition “Jacques Rohault, Preface to the Traité de Physique. A critical edition and commentary of four early modern versions of Rohault’s preface” (2021).

Rodolfo Garau, PhD (2015), is a Wissenschaftlicher Mitarbeiter in the Department of Liberal Arts & Social Sciences at Technische Universität Nürnberg. His research focuses on the intellectual history of early modernity, with particular attention to the intersections of science, philosophy, scholarly production, and political, institutional, and religious agency. His publications include the special issue "Cultural Politics of Cosmology: Arguing about the Stars on the Southern Side of the Confessional Divide" (British Journal for the History of Science, 2024, co-edited with Pietro Omodeo) and the forthcoming volume Continental Empiricism (Routledge, with Arnaud Pelletier).

Pietro Daniel Omodeo is professor of historical epistemology at Ca’ Foscari University of Venice, Italy, and the director of the UNESCO Chair in Water Heritage and Sustainable Development. He has published widely across the fields of early modern science and critical science studies. He is the author, among others, of Defending Descartes in Brandenburg-Prussia: The University of Frankfurt an der Oder in the Seventeenth Century (2022) and co-editor of Science and Praxis: Historical Cases of Political Epistemology (2025).