Symposium / Seminar, Workshop

The Foundations of Another Modernity

Du 17 May 2019 au 18 May 2019

Seventeenth century alternative philosophies: The dominant historiography presents the philosophy of the Seventeenth Century as a giant battle opposing two clans: one the one hand, the “Cartesian” and “rationalist” metaphysicians, one the other, those who see metaphysics as an extension of physics and defend an empiricist or materialist conception of the human mind. Focusing on these alternative philosophies, this workshop questions the customary way of understanding the roots of our modernity.

The obsoleteness of the oppositions, largely inherited from Descartes himself, are at the heart of the research agenda in the history of modern philosophy. For there are philosophers who are at the same time anti-Cartesian and anti-Aristotelian (Gassendi and Hobbes); empiricist Cartesians (Regius, Desgabets, Regis); anti-Cartesians who are Platonists (More, Cudworth); or, again, anti-Cartesians opening up to the historical and social dimensions (Vico). And then there are clandestine writers who situate themselves at the margins of the great philosophical systems, rejecting the spirit of systems itself (Fontenelle); and also women philosophers who take a polemical stance in relation to the dominant patriarchialism.