A Brill Calendar: January 31

Philosophy and The Northern Renaissance

Few primary branches of the tree of scholarly knowledge originating in early European Universities found more difficulty in adapting themselves to the Northern Renaissance in learning, (and the almost concurrent religious Reformation), than the branch of Philosophy.

During Medieval times, Christian presuppositions, beliefs and convictions were all-pervasive in the subcontinent as a whole and rarely challenged seriously, let alone refuted: from Cracow to Salamanca and from Uppsala to Bologna.

In this perspective the intellectual evolution of the philosopher Arnold Geulincx is characteristic. When he died at the comparatively young age of 45 in Leyden, November 1669, the University lost a Professor who can be considered to be a true convert to the Reformed religion. Parallels can be drawn to a later age with another (Anglican) philosopher dying after a spiritual conversion; John, Cardinal Newman.

Geulincx, was born in Antwerp on January 31, 1624 – a cosmopolitan harbour-city on the wane, with its access to sea then unremittingly blockaded by a Dutch fleet. He became a Professor at Louvain, the oldest University in the Low Countries; an institute still entrenched in pre-Reformation thought & practices. Once in Leyden, Geulincx could scarcely avoid immediate contact with second-generation followers of the revolutionary rational thought of René Descartes (1596 – 1650), who had always valued and loved Dutch cities as a catalyst for his work.

The abstract term ‘Cartesianism’ could originate in the history of philosophy due to a Gideon’s Band of colourful, often almost forgotten scholars in the 17th century, in the bloom of a ‘Scientific Revolution’; that could better be called an ‘Intellectual Revolution’.