However, Theodoor Craanen was part of this constellation of Cartesian stars, some of whom, as we shall see, were his direct teachers and very influential on his work.īut Craanen also shone his own light. Very little has hitherto been written about Craanen, whose work has not enjoyed the same scholarly fame as that of the above-mentioned Dutch figures. 4 But what was this network of Cartesian physicians teaching? Did their teaching include the study of pathology and therapeutics that Descartes himself had not carried out? And if so, was Cartesian pathology limited to an application of Descartes’s mechanical philosophy, or did teaching concerning illnesses contribute to the explanation of Descartes’s ideas concerning the human body and human nature?Īs a case study concerning Cartesian medicine in the United Provinces, this chapter addresses the medical and philosophical teaching given by the Cartesian physician, Theodoor Craanen, at the short-lived Academy of Nijmegen and at the Statencollege of Leiden. As Schmaltz has documented, Regius inspired a network of Dutch Cartesian physicians, which contributed to the diffusion of Descartes’s ideas, alongside a group of Dutch Cartesian theologians including Abraham Heidanus (1597–1678) and Christoph Wittich (1625–1687), and philosophers such as Johannes Clauberg (1622–1665) and Johannes De Raey (1622–1702). 3 Tad Schmaltz, moreover, has drawn attention to the fact that it was at the Utrecht faculty of medicine, and more precisely thanks to the physician Henricus Regius (1598–1679), that Descartes’s philosophy was first introduced into Dutch universities. Justin E. Smith, for instance, has pointed out that Descartes himself considered the preservation of health as the principal end of his studies. Whilst he did not produce works in pathology and therapeutics, he nevertheless devoted much space to physiology. These well-known aspects of Cartesian philosophy notwithstanding, recent scholarship has highlighted Descartes’s keen interest in medicine. His failure to produce systematic accounts of ethics and medicine made it even more difficult for his new philosophy to replace the old one. 2 However, he devoted comparatively less space to these disciplines. In the same context, Descartes had imagined the branches of the tree as representing the other disciplines that should develop out of the roots and the trunk, notably, mechanics, morals, and medicine. 1 These two disciplines were of course very important in university teaching Descartes himself, in the French Preface to his Principles of Philosophy (1647), had described them as respectively the roots and the trunk of the tree of philosophy. By contrast, as Roger Ariew observes, Descartes had not manged to produce much more than a general metaphysics and a partial physics. The tradition of Aristotelian commentaries and textbooks that had dominated European universities, since their establishment around 1200, encompassed a great array of disciplines, including logic, physics, metaphysics, and ethics. One aspect of his philosophy that made it difficult for Cartesianism to find its place within the early modern university was the fact that Cartesian philosophy seemed incomplete when compared to Aristotelian philosophy, which Descartes’s new ideas aimed to replace. René Descartes was no university teacher.
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