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As such, in 546 pages of richly detailed argument, she submits that Digby founded his philosophy on a baroque recognition of the instability of the material world at the same time as seeking to find some way to discern order in the chaos. De Meyer further argues that this perception of an epistemic and spiritual "crisis" ("crise") was heightened in Digby's case by the "dramatic context" ("contexte dramatique") of civil war England, in which political upheaval was ever-present and the place of English Catholics constantly precarious (p. 28). Sir Kenelm Digby (1603-1665): un penseur à l'âge du baroque: by Anne-Laure de Meyer. [Extracted from the article]

The English Catholic philosopher Sir Kenelm Digby (1603–1665) has enjoyed a recent spate of scholarly attention as a prodigious traveller, political figure, and man of diverse intellectual interests. This article contributes to this scholarship by assessing the commentary on salvation at the heart of Digby's philosophy of the soul and the historical contexts in which it was produced. It argues that Digby's thinking on the soul was a meditation on the worldly interactions a Catholic must undertake or avoid in order to achieve salvation. As such, our intellectual historical understanding of Digby is much improved when he is viewed as a scholar who constructed an identity as a thinker adept at advising others on the correct path to beatitude. This article also makes the broader argument for salvation as an important conceptual tool for early modern intellectual historians wishing to accurately map the complex relationship between theology, scholarly argument, and scholarly ambition in the seventeenth century. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The seventeenth-century French Benedictine philosopher Dom Robert Desgabets (1610–1678) has been taken by many historians as an idiosyncratic but ultimately loyal proponent of Cartesianism in the years following Descartes' death. As a Catholic cleric aware of the importance of squaring the new philosophical conclusions of the seventeenth-century with Church theology, Desgabets wrote extensively on the ways in which this could be achieved with regard to the most contentious and complex theological Church dogma of the time: transubstantiation. Through an examination of Desgabets' writings on transubstantiation, this article argues that he was emboldened by his particular religious context and preoccupations to undertake an in-depth theological interrogation and revision of Descartes' eucharistic thought, which motivated him to offer a more epistemologically and theologically ambitious account of transubstantiation than Descartes himself thought possible or wise. This article therefore uses Desgabets as an example of the complex interplay between theology and "new" philosophy in the early reception of Cartesianism. It shows how this interplay allowed early, theologically minded Cartesians like Desgabets to use the intellectual resources of the Catholic Church to fortify and safeguard the legacy of Cartesianism in a way Descartes himself did not do. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]