Daniel Garber

My project is to study the emergence of a self-consciously modern philosophy in the early seventeenth century. Descartes is widely considered the father of modern philosophy. But this is false. Already when Descartes was a student, there was a lively and very diverse group challenging the Aristotelian orthodoxy of the schools, the so-called novatores, or innovators. It was against the background of these very controversial figures that Descartes wrote his philosophy and his contemporaries read his first publications. My goal is to understand how the idea of a modern philosophy emerged in the early and mid-seventeenth century, and how novelty in philosophy, at one time widely considered dangerous and threatening to religious orthodoxy, later became accepted and encouraged. Furthermore, I want to understand how these novatores related to the Aristotelian traditions that they were rejecting, how they conceived of themselves with respect to other moderns, and how the actors in the period regarded their place in the history of philosophy. In short, I want to capture the complexity of the period, what it was like to be writing and sorting out the world at a moment when the authority of the scholastic Aristotelian philosophy was being challenged, in which it wasn’t clear where the intellectual world was going, and when the figures, like Descartes, whom we now take to be canonical were not yet canonical.