Mechanical Philosophy in an Enchanted World. Cartesian Empiricism in Balthasar Bekker's Radical Reformation

Koen Vermeir ()
Additional contact information
Koen Vermeir: SPHERE (UMR_7219) - Sciences, Philosophie, Histoire - UPD7 - Université Paris Diderot - Paris 7 - CNRS - Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique

Post-Print from HAL

Abstract: Balthasar Bekker is seen as one of the seminal thinkers sparking off the early (radical) Enlightenment, the battle against superstition and the ‘disenchantment' of the world. The secondary literature has interpreted him a Cartesian rationalist, focussing on his a priori treatment of theology and metaphysics. In this article, I stress the importance of Bekker's Cartesian empiricism instead, which will allow me to reassess the traditional historiography. I show that Bekker was not a forerunner of the enlightenment, but instead aimed at radicalizing the reformation. He did not battle superstition in the enlightenment sense of the term, but inveighed against what he considered corrupted forms of religion. Furthermore, he did not disenchant the world in the sense of freeing it from occult and magical powers, powers which Bekker accepted and explained in natural terms. For Bekker, instead, disenchantment meant denying all demonic activity in the world. He argued that belief in the action of the devil was a pagan remnant in Christianity, which had to be weeded out in order to purify Protestantism. In this article, I argue that not only Bekker's Cartesian metaphysics or hermeneutics, but especially his Cartesian empiricism buttressed his project of disenchanting the world. His theological and philosophical empiricism was necessary in order to shield his system from otherwise fatal criticisms. In particular, I show here how the mechanical philosophy provided him with the tools to develop his empirical approach to natural philosophy. Even if he did not initiate the Enlightenment, Bekker's work did play a crucial role in early modern discussions of Cartesianism, reformed theology and the radical reformation, and some of his ideas would be taken up by later Enlightenment thinkers.

Keywords: Radical Enlightenment; Cartesianism; Mechanical philosophy; superstition; Reformation; radical reformation; science and religion; disenchantment (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2013
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Published in Dobre, Mihnea and Nyden, Tammy. Cartesian Empiricisms, Springer, pp.275--306, 2013

There are no downloads for this item, see the EconPapers FAQ for hints about obtaining it.

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:hal:journl:halshs-01421955

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Post-Print from HAL
Bibliographic data for series maintained by CCSD ().