historical and political thought in the seventeenth - RePub - Erasmus ...

Chapter 6. New tidings
curators responded, and in a meeting on May 20, 1647, they forbade both
Revius and Heereboord to discuss Descartes’s philosophy or to even mention
his name in their lectures. In practice, however, this prohibition proved to be
a death letter. In the summer of that same year Heereboord was already trying
to include some of Descartes’s ideas in his disputations and in December a
disputation that dealt with ‘certain new philosophers’ who believed that ‘philosophers
could deny God and doubt His existence’, presided over by the Scot
and Aristotelian professor of philosophy Adam Stuart (1591-1654), ended in a
small uproar. 57 Once again the curators stepped in, but again their measures
failed to sort the right effect. In reality, they did little to nothing to block the
spread of Cartesian ideas and in the decades to come ‘Leiden university was
to become largely dominated by Descartes’ new philosophy’. 58
Against the background of the scholarly dispute over Descartes’s ideas that
infested the lecture halls of the Republic’s oldest university some of Boxhorn’s
opening statements on the first two pages of the Antwoord become of interest.
Rejoicing over the fact that, in reply to his treatise on the goddess Nehalennia,
he had ‘in this quarrelsome and blind century’ received some questions ‘from
a good hand’, Boxhorn begins the Antwoord with the contention that ‘in discovering
the truth, doubt must be the point of departure, because the end of
it [i.e. doubt-JN] is, not to doubt’, 59 a statement that he enforces by claiming
that he only expects persons who are just to doubt, for to doubt ‘is the right
and main road to attain the truth someday’. 60 These are bold contentions, both
clearly in line with Descartes’s method of doubt that was defended by Golius
and Heereboord in 1646 and 1647. 61 But what are we to make of them? Do
they stand on their own and did Boxhorn merely utter them to support Golius
and Heereboord in their struggle with those meddling theologians, who, as
Boxhorn scornfully puts it at the end of a long letter to one Johan Werner
Blaespilius, dated August 1645, ‘in these times, especially recently, have dared
with such great indiscretion to disagree publicly not only with them, who are
57 Frijhoff and Spies, Hard-Won Unity, pp. 303-5.
58 Verbeek, Descartes and the Dutch, pp. 46-70, and Van Bunge, From Stevin to Spinoza, pp. 45-46.
59 Boxhorn, Antwoord, p. 3. ‘Twijfelen moet het beginsel zijn in het uytvinden van de waerheyt,
omdat het einde daer van is, niet te twijfelen.’
60 Ibidem, p. 4. ‘Twijfelen alleen hebbe ick van rechtsinnige verwacht. Dese is de rechte ende heerewech
om eenmael tot de waerheit te geraecken.’ ‘Rechtsinnig’ can also be translated as ‘orthodox’ or
‘frank’.
61 In his Discours Descartes explained his method of doubt in four maxims of which the first reads
‘never to accept anything for true which I did not clearly know to be such; that is to say, carefully
to avoid precipitancy and prejudice, and to comprise nothing more in my judgment that what was
presented to my mind so clearly and distinctly as to exclude all ground of doubt’. René Descartes, A
Discourse on Method. Meditations on the First Philosophy. Principles of Philosophy. Translated by John Veitch
and an Introduction by A.D. Lindsay (Dent; London, 1 st ed. 1912, 1975), p. 15.
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