READESCARTES · Reading Descartes: A Reassessment of the Shaping and Transmission of Knowledge in the Seventeenth Century

Reading Descartes: A Reassessment of the Shaping and Transmission of Knowledge in the Seventeenth Century

The objective of READESCARTES (March 2021–February 2023) is to provide the first in-depth study of the handwritten commentaries on the treatises of René Descartes (1696–1650). This study is important because such sources had a crucial role in shaping the intellectual revolution occurring in Europe during the seventeenth century, informing intellectual dynamics with longstanding impact, and determining the birth of philosophical and scientific modernity. In fact, we still do not have a complete grasp of why his ideas were so important to this revolution, precisely because we do not know how Descartes’s texts were closely read, thereby generating new world-views across Europe, and how genetic epistemic processes actually worked in the seventeenth century. The key to understand this process of reading and knowledge-building is the analysis of a kind of sources up to now neglected by historians, namely the handwritten academic commentaries on Descartes’s treatises (Principia philosophiae, Discours de la méthode and Meditationes de prima philosophia), dictated by professors to students. Their study is urgent and timely. It is urgent, because we cannot have a clear grasp of the history of European philosophical and scientific culture if we do not look at how the texts of one of its crucial protagonists were read. It is timely, because it benefits from new directions of investigation and methodologies in the history of early modern philosophy, science and intellectual history. Through READESCARTES, a selection of these sources is explored by an integration of avant-garde approaches: (a) the study of early modern reading and note-taking practices, (b) a transnational approach to the history of thought, and (c) the application of digital humanities instruments aimed at the textual mapping of large amounts of texts. These approaches are essential to READESCARTES’s more specific objectives of (1) searching uncatalogued handwritten sources, (2) textually reconstructing and mapping them, and (3) analysing their use and dissemination.

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