Overview

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.

Full Product Details

Author:   Lucas van der Deijl
Publisher:   Pallas Publications
Imprint:   Pallas Publications
ISBN:  

9789048563753

ISBN 10:   9048563755
Pages:   296
Publication Date:   10 September 2025
Audience:   Professional and scholarly ,  College/higher education ,  Professional & Vocational ,  Postgraduate, Research & Scholarly
Format:   Hardback
Publisher's Status:   Active
Availability:   Manufactured on demand  
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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 .

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Author Information

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

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