Cartesian Imagery: Picturing Philosophy in the Early Modern Age

by Mattia Mantovani (Other), Davide Cellamare (Other)

Overview

Cartesian Imagery is the first collection of essays entirely devoted to the role of images in Cartesian philosophy and science. Its seventeen chapters study a wealth of sources from the most disparate disciplines – from printed treatises on astronomy to anatomical sketches, from students’ notebooks to board games. The collection investigates how images shaped the development of Descartes’s ideas and their creative reception among supporters and detractors alike. It shows that this rich and complex process brought about new visual languages, with a long-lasting legacy. Lavishly illustrated with three-hundred figures, the collection opens up new perspectives on early modern intellectual history.

Contributors are: Ilaria Ampollini, Delphine Bellis, Jip van Besouw, Erik-Jan Bos, Davide Cellamare, Maria Conforti, Fokko Jan Dijksterhuis, Mihnea Dobre, Gary Hatfield, Eric Jorink, Christoph Lüthy, Gideon Manning, Mattia Mantovani, Carla Rita Palmerino, Isabelle Pantin, David Rabouin, Christoph Sander, Luca Tonetti, and Wouter de Vries.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9789004539969
Publisher:	Brill Academic Publishers, Inc.
Publication date:	11/27/2025
Series:	Medieval and Early Modern Philosophy and Science , #45
Pages:	720
Product dimensions:	6.10(w) x 9.25(h) x 0.00(d)

About the Author

Mattia Mantovani, Ph.D. (2018), is FWO Senior-Postdoc Fellow at KU Leuven. He has published on late medieval and early modern philosophy and science, with a special focus on human and animal perception, and on Descartes. Together with Davide Cellamare, he is the editor of Descartes in the Classroom. Teaching Philosophy in the Early Modern Age (Brill, 2023).

Davide Cellamare, Ph.D. (2015), has published numerous articles on late medieval and early modern psychology (with a special focus on the institutional and confessional contexts) as well as on Cartesianism. Together with Mattia Mantovani, he is the editor of Descartes in the Classroom. Teaching Philosophy in the Early Modern Age (Brill, 2023).

Table of Contents

Contents
List of Figures and Tables
Notes on Contributors

Introduction: Thinking with Images
 Mattia Mantovani

1 The Drawings in Descartes’s Letters: from Autograph to Print
 Erik-Jan Bos

2 The Role of Images and Imagination in Descartes’s Geometry
 David Rabouin

3 Breaking with Balance: Why Did Descartes Need Such a Complicated Image of the Lever?
 Jip van Besouw

4 Playing with Descartes: Images and Mechanics in a Card Deck (London, 1697)
 Ilaria Ampollini

5 Paradoxical Microworlds from Descartes to De Raey
 Christoph Lüthy

6 Imagining Matter: Form and Meaning in Descartes’s Visual Language for Particles
 Wouter de Vries

7 Terra AB: Descartes’s Imagery of Magnetism and Its Legacy
 Christoph Sander

8 Tam verba quam diagramma: a Visual History of the Fortune and Misfortune of Galileo’s and Descartes’s Theories of the Tides
 Carla Rita Palmerino

9 Depicting Cartesian Cosmology in the Seventeenth Century
 Mihnea Dobre

10 Pictured Hypotheses: from the Renaissance to Descartes
 Isabelle Pantin

11 La Dioptrique, the Retinal Image, and the New Optics of Descartes
 Fokko Jan Dijksterhuis

12 Depicting Pictures: on Why the Retinal Picture was Puzzling (or Not) in Descartes, Scheiner, and Gassendi
 Delphine Bellis

13 The Medical Provenance of Cartesian Illustrations: History, Action, and Use in the Treatise on Man
 Gideon Manning

14 L’homme / De homine: Images as Interpretations
 Gary Hatfield

15 Visualizing Cartesian Anatomy at Leiden University: Steno, Schuyl, De Graaf, and Swammerdam
 Eric Jorink

16 Through the Eyes of a Fish: Imagery of Nerves after Descartes
 Maria Conforti and Luca Tonetti

17 The Philosopher Fool: Decoding a Seventeenth-Century Caricature
 Mattia Mantovani

Bibliography
Index