Physique et métaphysique, intervention de Justin Smith

Intervention de Justin Smith dans le Colloque international "Physique et métaphysique : quels enjeux dans la constitution des cartésianismes et des anti-cartésianismes ?"
Organisé par : Delphine Kolesnik-Antoine (MCF HDR, ENS de Lyon) et Sophie Roux (PU, ENS-Ulm)

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Descartes dans la Lune : astronomie lunaire et métaphysique dans le Voyage du monde de Descartes de Gabriel Daniel

By the end of the 17th century, attacks on the Cartesian philosophy were often rather unoriginal and derivative, philsoophically speaking. Yet many continued to reflect new preoccupations of philosophy in the post-Cartesian period in imaginative ways. A good example of this is the Jesuit Gabriel Daniel's 1690 satire, Voiage du Monde de Descartes, which envisions an interstellar journey through Descartes's 'World', now conceived not as a mere thought experiment, but as a sort of science-fiction construction, as a parallel possible world. Such a construal, as I would like to argue, though not so significant with respect to the history of critiques of Cartesianism, nonetheless reveals important developments in the deployment of the philosophical concept of 'world' in the era that also saw Leibniz's infinite multiplication of worlds, for example.