Translating the New Philosophy in the Dutch Early Enlightenment (1640-1720)
Title
Translating the New Philosophy in the Dutch Early Enlightenment (1640-1720)
Price
€ 134,00 excl. VAT
ISBN
9789048563753
Format
Hardback
Number of pages
296
Language
English
Publication date
Dimensions
15.6 x 23.4 cm
Table of Contents
Show Table of ContentsHide Table of Contents
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 .

Lucas van der Deijl

Translating the New Philosophy in the Dutch Early Enlightenment (1640-1720)

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, Pieter Balling, Abraham van Berkel, and Stephan Blankaart. It presents a comparative history of their Dutch translations of philosophical treatises by René Descartes, Thomas Hobbes, and Benedictus de Spinoza. A combined methodology of computational and qualitative analysis offers new insights into the form and function of translated philosophical texts within the intellectual debates about language, reason, and knowledge that were partly inspired by those texts. These insights change our understanding of the crucial function of translations, multilingualism, and linguistic purism in the Dutch Early Enlightenment.
Author

Lucas van der Deijl

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