Defending Descartes in Brandenburg-Prussia

Pietro Daniel Omodeo is a cultural historian of science and a professor of historical epistemology at the Department of Philosophy and Cultural Heritage, Ca' Foscari University of Venice (Italy). He is the principal investigator of the ERC Consolidator research endeavor "Institutions and Metaphysics of Cosmology in the Epistemic Networks of Seventeenth-Century Europe" (Horizon 2020, GA 725883). Among others, he is the author of Political Epistemology: The Problem of Ideology in Science Studies (2019) and Science in Court Society: Giovanni Battista Benedetti's Diversarum speculationum mathematicarum et physicarum liber (Turin, 1585) (with Jürgen Renn) (2019). His books also include the edited volumes Cultural Hegemony in a Scientific World: Gramscian Concepts for the History of Science (with Massimiliano Badino) (2020); Bernardino Telesio and the Natural Sciences in the Renaissance (2019); and Contingency and Natural Order in Early Modern Science (with Rodolfo Garau) (2019).

Chapter 1. Cartesianismus-Streit at Frankfurt an der Oder: Johannes Placentinus and His Opponents, 1653-1656.- Chapter 2. Nature and Scripture: Confessional Networks and Cross-Confessional Exegetic Problems.- Chapter 3. A Cartesian-Scholastic Controversy over the Origin of Life Opposing Frankfurt and Wittenberg, 1659-1660.- Chapter 4. The Mechanization of Astrology, 1661-1665.- Chapter 5. Placentinus's Cometary Correspondence with Hevelius and Lubieniecki.- Chapter 6. Medical and Demonological Approaches to Descartes's Psychophysical Dualism: Andreae and Brecht.- Chapter 7. Cartesian Bodies: Experiments on Embalmment.- Chapter 8. The Cultural Politics of Cartesianism.