Forms of Cosmological Thinking in the Early Modern Period

The reception of Cartesian cosmology in the second half of the seventeenth century was not an easy one. It varied from fast adoption and identification with the philosophical narration of the Biblical cosmogony, to open accusations of atheism. Moreover, the mechanization of the celestial phenomena was equally worrisome for religious thinkers and for mathematically minded philosophers. The workshop on Forms of Cosmological Thinking in the Early Modern Period aims to explore the explanatory framework on which the vortex theory is founded. At a more general level, the workshop aims to revisit and chart the early reception of Cartesian cosmology.

Program:

17:00-17:10 Open Discussion

17:10-17:30 Ovidiu Babeș, “The Early Scope of the Vortex Theory, 1619-1644”

17:30-17:50 Mihnea Dobre, “Cosmological Imagination: Descartes and the early Cartesians”

17:50-18:10 Bogdan Deznan, “Eternal Ideas and the Issue of Divine Causality in the Cambridge Platonists”

18:10-18:30 Grigore Vida, “Descartes as Bezaliel and Aholiab. Mosaic Physics and Mechanism in Henry More’s Conjectura Cabbalistica (1662)”

18:30-18:50 Ioana Bujor, “The Quest for Reconciliation: J. Amerpoel’s Cartesius Mosaizans”

18:50-19:00 Coffee

19:00-20:00 Round-table discussion: Forms of Cosmological Thinking in the Early Modern Period

The workshop is organized within the project Early Modern Cosmology Between “Mosaic Physics” and Mechanical Philosophy (1650-1713) (PN-III-P1-1.1-TE-2016-0710)