Descartes-Agonistes Physico-mathematics, Method & Corpuscular-Mechan
This book reconstructs key aspects of the early career of Descartes from 1618 to 1633; that is, up through the point of his composing his first system of natural philosophy, Le Monde, in 1629-33. It focuses upon the overlapping and intertwined devel
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Conceptual and Historiographical Foundations—Natural Philosophy, Mixed Mathematics, Physico-mathematics, Method
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Jesuit neo-Scholasticism for the noblesse de robe
Born on 31 March 1596 in La Haye (now Descartes) in Touraine, Descartes was the product of a relatively recently risen family of the noblesse de robe. His father, Joachim, was a conseiller of the Parlement of Brittany in Rennes. Joachim’s father, Pierre, had been a prominent physician, as had been his mother’s father. Descartes’ mother was Jeanne Brochard, daughter of René Brochard, lieutenant générale of the Presidial of Poitiers. Her mother was Jeanne Sain, whose father, had been a merchant from a family of merchants. Descartes’ family styled themselves noble. René Brochard, Joachim and his father called themselves, écuyers, squires, and thus appropriated themselves to the lowest rank of the nobility. As early as 1547, Pierre Descartes had sought and obtained the all important exclusion from the taille. In early adulthood, René Descartes sported the title Sieur du Perron, after a small seigneurie which he was due to inherit. He was accustomed to bearing a sword, and served for a time as a gentleman volunteer in the army of Maurice of Nassau. Descartes’ family thus offers a rather typical example of the extrusion of provincial upper professional and mercantile families into the ranks of the administrative nobility, from which position they proceeded to try to ape the proprietary and social habits of the landed nobility. Although Descartes eventually trained in law, he did not follow the profession of his father and older brother, Pierre, who, in 1618, also became a conseiller in the Parlement of Brittany. Though they might aspire to the status and bearing of the landed nobility, and often acted out of the narrow self-interest of men holding venal offices and defending provincial liberties and nepotistic excesses, royal officials of the generation of Joachim Descartes also had a broader role to play in upholding the King’s law and administration. If anything, this key role could only have appeared in sharp contrast to the background of administrative paralysis, political maneuvering and popular and religious discontent, and endemic civil war in evidence in the late sixteenth century and again (absent civil war as such) after the assassination of Henri IV in 1610. It is not drawing too long a bow to conjecture that for the post-adolescent J. Schuster, Descartes-Agonistes: Physico-mathematics, Method & CorpuscularMechanism 1618-33, Studies in History and Philosophy of Science 27, DOI 10.1007/978-94-007-4746-3_2, © Springer Science+Business Media Dordrecht 2013
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Conceptual and Historiographical Foundations—Natural Philosophy…
Descartes, who in 1615 and 16 considered a career in the law, idealized hopes for good order and administration—to be asserted and actualized in the face of apparently endemic unrest and turbulence—weighed more upon his student mind than did those cynical, short range calculations of interests—in patronage, bureaucrat
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