Historical Dictionary of Descartes and Cartesian Philosophy

Descartes is perhaps most closely associated with the title, “the Father of Modern Philosophy.” Generations of students have been introduced to the study of philosophy through a consideration of his Meditations on First Philosophy. His contributions to natural science is shown by the fact that his physics, as promulgated by the Cartesians, played a central role in the debates after his death over Isaac Newton’s theory of gravitation. Descartes also made major contributions to the field of analytic geometry; we still speak today of “Cartesian coordinates” and the “Cartesian product.”

This second edition of Historical Dictionary of Descartes and Cartesian Philosophy covers the history through a chronology, an introductory essay, and an extensive bibliography. The dictionary section has over 300 cross-referenced entries on various concepts in Descartes’ philosophy, science, and mathematics, as well as biographical entries about the intellectual setting for Descartes’ philosophy and its reception, both with Cartesians and anti-Cartesians. This book is an excellent access point for students, researchers, and anyone wanting to know more about Descartes.

Roger Ariew, Professor and Chair, Department of Philosophy, University of South Florida, works on the reception of Descartes' philosophy and science in seventeenth-century France. He is the author of Descartes among the Scholastics, Descartes and the First Cartesians, and the editor and translator such works as Descartes, Philosophical Essays and Pascal, Pensées.

Dennis Des Chene is professor of philosophy at Washington University in St. Louis. He is the author of Physiologia: Philosophy of Nature in Descartes and the Aristotelians; Life’s Form, Late Aristotelian Conceptions of the Soul; and Spirits and Clocks: Machine and Organism in Descartes.

Douglas M. Jesseph is professor of philosophy at the University of South Florida. He is the author of Squaring the Circle: The War between Hobbes and Wallis and Berkeley’s Philosophyof Mathematics. He is the editor and translator of Berkeley’s De Motu and The Analyst and the editor of the forthcoming three-volume Hobbes’s Mathematical Works.

Tad M. Schmaltz is professor of philosophy and James B. and Grace J. Nelson Fellow at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor. He is the author of Malebranche’s Theory of the Soul: A Cartesian Interpretation, Radical Cartesianism: The French Reception of Descartes and Descartes on Causation. He is also the editor of Receptions of Descartes: Cartesianism and Anti-Cartesianism in Early Modern Europe, and of the forthcoming Efficient Causation: A History, for the Oxford Philosophical Concepts series.

Theo Verbeek is emeritus professor of philosophy at the University of Utrecht. He is the author of La querelle d’Utrecht; Descartes and the Dutch: Early Reactions to Cartesianism(1637–1650); and Spinoza’s Theologico-political Treatise: Exploring the “Will of God.” He is the editor of Descartes et Regius: Autour de l’explication de l’esprit and Johannes Clauberg (1622–1665) and Cartesian Philosophy in the Seventeenth Century.