1st Edition
Translating the New Philosophy in the Dutch Early Enlightenment (1640-1720)
By Lucas van der Deijl
Copyright 2025
296 Pages
by
Routledge
A small group of freethinkers from the Dutch Republic played a key role in the major intellectual changes of the Early Enlightenment (1640–1720). In the wake of Cartesianism, their rationalist ideas transformed debates about science, theology, medicine, and political theory. This book studies the position of four translators in these debates on the ‘New Philosophy’: Jan Hendriksz Glazemaker,... Read more
List of illustrations, 1 Introduction, Part I Reforming the language of philosophy, 2 The Hobbesian Turn,Language and reason in the Dutch Early Enlightenment, 3 Enlightened vocabularies,Linguistic purism and philosophical terminology in early modern Dutch discourse, Part II Translating the New Philosophy, 4 The search for linguistic transparency, Jan Hendriksz Glazemaker's translations of Descartes and Spinoza, 5 The politics of linguistic purism, Pieter Balling's translations of Spinoza, 6 The rhetoric of translation, Abraham van Berkel's translation of Hobbes, 7 The eclecticism of the marketplace, Stephan Blankaart's translations of Descartes, 8 Conclusion,A new language for the natural light? Bibliography, Index. of persons, Appendix A. The Translation Corpus, Appendix B. The Test Corpus.
Biography
Lucas van der Deijl is assistant professor of early modern Dutch literature at the University of Groningen. His research focuses on the history of the Dutch Early Enlightenment and on early modern drama, integrating computational text analysis with methods from cultural history, translation studies, and literary studies
