Abstract

In this article, I analyze Johann Christoph Sturm’s characterization of Cartesianism and his response to Descartes’s philosophy and that of his followers. In his days, Sturm (1635–1703) was an important philosopher and professor of physics and mathematics at the University of Altdorf. Sturm has a balanced reading of Descartes, neither echoing the polemics of Descartes’s adversaries nor blindly following the Frenchman’s philosophy. However, Sturm explicitly rejects being a Cartesian. In his On the Cartesians and Cartesianism (1677), Sturm differentiates three main meanings of Cartesianism: (1) sectarianism, (2) the method of radical doubt, and (3) radical theology. (1) Sturm rejects Cartesianism on the grounds of his eclecticism. (2) He questions Descartes’s method of doubt. (3) He argues that this constitutes a misrepresentation of Descartes’s own theological position. Sturm’s differentiated position on Cartesianism adds in significant ways to our knowledge of the reception of Cartesianism in early modern Germany. What’s more, it offers further insights into how early modern philosophers themselves thought about Cartesianism as a meta-philosophical label.