Figures et enjeux de la réception de Descartes dans la modernité napolitaine

Figures and repercussions of Descartes’s reception in Neapolitan modernity

Abstract

This study starts from the observation of the extreme ambiguity of Vico’s reception of Descartes. In order to handle it, we propose to take up the unique way in which Descartes’s thought and his main texts were received in Naples in the second half of the seventeenth century, as well as the quarrels engendered by this diffusion. Bringing these conditions to light gives a peculiar perspective to this reception, which is also a way of giving rise to very original aspects of Descartes’s thinking, made possible especially when Cartesianism is translated into an original context. One of the main aspects of this reception is to discern the conditions of possibility of a fruitful relationship between Descartes’s thought, the spread of the Galilean school within the Neapolitan Academies (especially “l’Accademia degli Investiganti”), as well as the articulation with the materialistic tradition, with a strong presence in the southern Italian world, especially through the thought of Lucretius, but also through the very important presence of Gassendi in Naples.