1 Postprint. Please cite published version in History of Universities 30/2 (2020):57-84. Domesticating Descartes, Renovating Scholasticism: Johann Clauberg And The German Reception Of Cartesianism Nabeel Hamid Abstract This article studies the academic context in which Cartesianism was absorbed in Germany in the mid-seventeenth century. It focuses on the role of Johann Clauberg (1622-1665), first rector of the new University of Duisburg, in adjusting scholastic tradition to accommodate Descartes’ philosophy, thereby making the latter suitable for teaching in universities. It highlights contextual motivations behind Clauberg’s synthesis of Cartesianism with the existing framework such as a pedagogical interest in Descartes as offering a simpler method, and a systematic concern to disentangle philosophy from theological disputes. These motivations are brought into view by situating Clauberg in the closely-linked contexts of Protestant educational reforms in the seventeenth century, and debates around the proper relation between philosophy and theology. In this background, it argues that Clauberg nevertheless retains an Aristotelian conception of ontology for purely philosophical reasons, specifically, to give objective foundations to Descartes’s metaphysics of substance. In conclusion, Clauberg should not be assimilated either to Aristotelianism or to Cartesianism or, indeed, to syncretic labels such as ‘Cartesian Scholastic’. Instead, he should be read as transforming both schools by drawing on a variety of elements in order to address issues local to the academic milieu of his time. Keywords: Johann Clauberg; Cartesian Scholastic; German Cartesianism; Protestant Scholasticism; Early Modern Aristotelianism; University of Duisburg; Ontology; German Reformed Education. 1. Descartes In Germany A century and a half ago, Francisque Bouillier observed that ‘Cartesianism did not have as great an influence in Germany as in Holland or France.’1 Descartes’s appearance in Germany faced unique circumstances. It occurred in the midst of ongoing projects to craft distinct Protestant identities driven by the demands of religious apologetics in the closing years of the Thirty Years’ War. It also had to confront a culture of university philosophy which had become deeply entangled in the religio-political disputes dividing German states. That Cartesianism did make 1 Histoire de la philosophie cartésienne (Paris, 1868), 405. 2 gradual inroads there to become an important current by the late-seventeenth century owed, above all, to the efforts of Johann Clauberg (1622-1665) in situating and disseminating Descartes’s thought. The object of this essay is to understand the motivations and outcomes of those efforts. In particular, this essay asks why Clauberg preserved certain aspects of the prevailing Aristotelian framework even as he embraced many of Descartes’s novelties. In the process, it examines the mediating role in this confluence of ideas of the educational culture of the early modern German Reformed community and, specifically, of the circumstances surrounding the creation of the University of Duisburg, where Clauberg taught and wrote. The label ‘Cartesian Scholastic’ (and its variants) has been used to describe Clauberg’s work at least since Josef Bohatec’s Die cartesianische Scholastik in der Philosophie und reformierten Dogmatik des 17. Jahrhunderts (1912). It has remained in use in recent scholarship.2 The label arises out of an interpretive challenge presented by Clauberg’s writings. On the one hand, he positioned himself as an ardent proponent of a bold new philosophy as being superior to the traditional one in various respects. In a polemical juxtaposition of Cartesianism and school philosophy, Unterschied zwischen den cartesianischer und der sonst in Schulen gebräuchlicher Philosophie (1658; henceforth Unterschied), Clauberg underscores the distance between the two frameworks in dramatic terms. The Cartesian philosophy, he boldy declares, is as different from the Scholastic or Jesuit as the Roman Catholic Church is from the Evangelical 2 Eugenio Viola, ‘Scolastica e Cartesianesimo nel pensiero di J. Clauberg’, Rivista di Filosofia Neo-Scolastica 67 (1975), 247–66; Francesco Trevisani, Descartes in Germania: La ricezione del Cartesianesimo nella facoltà filosofica e medica di Duisburg (Milan, 1992), 97; Vincent Carraud, ‘L’ontologie peut-elle être cartésienne? L'exemple de l'ontosophia de Clauberg, de 1647 à 1664: de l'ens à la mens’, In Johannes Clauberg (1622-1665) and Cartesian Philosophy in the Seventeenth Century, ed. Theo Verbeek (Dordrecht, 1999), 13–38; Winfried Weier, ‘Leibnitiana bei Johannes Clauberg’, Studia Leibnitiana 32 (2000): 21–42; Andrea Strazzoni, ‘The Foundation of Early Modern Science: Metaphysics, Logic and Theology’, (Ph.D. Diss., Erasmus University Rotterdam, 2015). 3 or Reformed.3 More generally, Clauberg valorizes the difference and modernity of Cartesian thought and downplays its points of continuity with Scholasticism. Indeed, his defenses and elaborations of Descartes in titles such as Defensio cartesiana (1652), Initiatio philosophi sive dubitatio cartesiana (1655), and Paraphrasis in meditationes cartesii (1658) would introduce the next few generations of German intellectuals to Cartesianism and establish Clauberg’s reputation as a key representative of the new philosophy. G.W. Leibniz, notably, esteemed Clauberg as ‘the most learned of the Cartesian sect’ and as ‘being clearer than the master’.4 Christian Wolff similarly pronounced Clauberg as the best interpreter of Descartes, and credited him with having initiated an emendation of metaphysics which Leibniz further advanced.5 At the same time, Clauberg’s systematic treatises such as Metaphysica de ente (1664) and Disputationes physicae (1664) retain much of the form, vocabulary, and substance of the scholastic tradition. His conception of metaphysics as a theory of being and its transcendental attributes, and his penchant for exhaustive conceptual distinctions has struck many readers as squarely in the tradition of school philosophy, the target of self-styled intellectual revolutionaries such as Descartes. Indeed, Clauberg himself sometimes suggests that his work should be viewed as a synthesis, describing his Logica vetus et nova, for instance, as ‘aristotelico-cartesiana’. To some extent, he can plausibly be read as aligned with various mid-seventeenth century attempts to blend new and old philosophies, a project sometimes termed by its exponents as novantiqua. Several of Descartes’s early followers and sympathizers, in fact, attempted to integrate his views 3 Unterschied zwischen den cartesianischer und der sonst in Schulen gebräuchlicher Philosophie (Duisburg, 1658), 4-6; (cited as Unterschied, by page number). 4 Sämtliche Schriften und Briefe. ed. Berlin-Brandenburgische Akademie der Wissenschaften (Berlin, 1923-), II.1.112; II.1.15 (cited by series, volume, and page). It is worth noting that Descartes’s complete works were not published in Germany until 1692. 5 Philosophia prima sive ontologia (Renger, 1730), §7n. Wolff prominently cites Clauberg, alongside Aristotle, Descartes, and Leibniz, throughout the work. 4 with the reigning orthodoxy. Johannes de Raey, one of Clauberg’s teachers in Holland, undertook such a project in his Clavis philosophiae naturalis, seu introductio ad contemplationem naturae Aristotelico-Cartesiana (1654). Not without good reason, the labels ‘Cartesian Scholastic’ and ‘Cartesian Aristotelian’--since Aristotle’s name was intimately tied to university or scholastic philosophy--intend to capture this dual character of Clauberg’s self- presentation.6 In fact, a tension between narratives of rupture and continuity is evident even in Descartes’s own presentation of his relation to the past. In concluding his account of material nature in Principles of Philosophy, for example, Descartes states that he has not used any principle ‘which was not accepted by Aristotle and by all other Philosophers of all periods: so that this Philosophy is not new, but the oldest and most commonplace of all’, a claim he repeats 6 The words ‘Aristotelian’ and ‘Scholastic’ are deeply entangled. For many early modern detractors of university philosophy, labels such as ‘school philosophy’, ‘Aristotle’, and ‘Scholastic’ are interchangeable terms of abuse connoting empty word-play, pedantry, or obstacles to the progress of knowledge. As we shall see in Section Four, Clauberg has a more nuanced view of the relationship between Aristotle, Descartes, and Scholasticism. To preview, Clauberg hopes to recover an Aristotle who is distinct in key respects from how the earlier scholastic tradition had understood him. On the topic of the varieties of Aristotelianisms in the Renaissance, see Charles B. Schmitt, ‘Towards a Reassessment of Renaissance Aristotelianism’, History of Science 11 (1973), 159–193. See also Edward Grant, ‘Ways to Interpret the Terms “Aristotelian” and “Aristotelianism” in Medieval and Renaissance Natural Philosophy’, History of Science 25 (1987), 335–358, who highlights the elasticity of the Aristotelian framework and its ability to absorb new challenges and influences as a feature of the tradition throughout its history: ‘Aristotelianism often included conflicting earlier and later opinions simultaneously. It was always a domain of both traditional and innovative concepts and interpretations and was therefore inevitably elastic and absorbent’ (352). See Stephen Menn, ‘The Intellectual Setting’, in The Cambridge History of Seventeenth