Cartesian Networks in Early Modern Europe: A Quantitative and Interdisciplinary Approach

Project Information

Cartesian Networks

Grant agreement ID: 891747

DOI

10.3030/891747

Project closed

EC signature date 26 February 2020

Start date 1 April 2020

End date 31 March 2022

Funded under

• EXCELLENT SCIENCE - Marie Skłodowska-Curie Actions

Total cost

€ 175 572,48

EU contribution

€ 175 572,48

Coordinated by

ERASMUS UNIVERSITEIT ROTTERDAM
Netherlands

Periodic Reporting for period 1 - Cartesian Networks (Cartesian Networks in Early Modern Europe: A Quantitative and Interdisciplinary Approach)

Reporting period: 2020-04-01 to 2022-03-31

Summary of the context and overall objectives of the project

The MSCA project Cartesian Networks explores how the ideas of French philosopher René Descartes spread across 17th-century Europe. In recent years, philosophers have paid increasing attention to the role of social networks in knowledge dissemination. At the same time, the last two decades or so have witnessed the rise of network science as an interdisciplinary area of research. By combining philosophy and network science, Cartesian Networks unveils the factors that drove the diffusion of Descartes's innovative ideas. The results show that ideas do not spread like viruses--contrary to what popular terms such as "going viral" may suggest. Instead, in order to understand diffusion, we need models that take into account the complexity of the ideas at hand and the relational proximity of the potential adopters. This, in turn, will yield a better understanding of how innovations circulate and become accepted in today's world.

Work performed from the beginning of the project to the end of the period covered by the report and main results achieved so far

In the first phase of the project, I collected data to reconstruct the social networks of Descartes and his contemporaries. This included searching, collecting, and reading more than three hundreds 17th-century letters, as well as gathering information about their sender, recipient, origin, destination, and date. These latter data have been made available online through Zenodo for researchers across the global to reuse them. (As of 21 April 2022, the data set has been viewed 93 times and downloaded 79 times.) Based on the data, I went on to analyse the factors that drove the diffusion of Descartes's ideas. The findings of this analysis are now presented in the article "The Networked Origins of Cartesian Philosophy and Science,” which has just been accepted for publication in HOPOS, the journal of the International Society for the History of Philosophy of Science.

In addition, I followed online courses and workshops to deepen my knowledge of network science, including a two-day virtual event organised by network scientist Demival Vasques Filho. In this way, I learned how to use software applications such as Gephi and how to write scripts with programming languages R and Python.

I presented the results of my research at various international conferences, including those organised by the Historical Network Research Community (HNR), the Dutch School Research School of Philosophy (OZSW), and the Italian Society for the History of Science (SISS). In April 2022, I took part in an expert meeting hosted by the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science in Berlin to discuss ways to build a common platform for historical network research. In the context of my dissemination activities, I organised two online events with dozens of speakers from different countries and institutions. The seminar "Networks of Philosophy, Philosophy of Networks" shed light on the interactions between philosophy and network science. The workshop "Framing Innovation in a Networked World" fostered a discussion across disciplines about how social networks have changed the way of making and spreading innovation. Furthermore, I was invited to give talks by the Erasmus Institute for Philosophy and Economics (EIRE) and the American University of Central Asia (AUCA), and gave a course for the students of the Erasmus School of Philosophy (ESPhil) on "Networks of Philosophy."

Work in progress includes two articles, one on the concept of network growth in the history of science, and one on networks as interpretative frameworks. Besides, I plan to publish the Python and R scripts I have developed for these articles as well as the underlying data so that scholars can replicate my research or build on it to reach new outcomes.

Progress beyond the state of the art and expected potential impact (including the socio-economic impact and the wider societal implications of the project so far)

Most studies of René Descartes’s legacy have focused on the novelty of his ideas, but little has been done to uncover the conditions that allowed these ideas to spread. 17th-century Europe was already a “small world”—it presented a high degree of connectedness with a few brokers bridging otherwise disparate regions. A communication network known as the “Republic of Letters” enabled scholars to trade ideas—including Descartes’s—by means of correspondence. Cartesian Networks offers an analysis—both qualitative and quantitative—of a corpus of letters written during Descartes’s lifetime and mentioning his name. The aim is to unveil the factors that drove the diffusion of Descartes’s ideas. The results are twofold: First, the close reading of the letters reveals that these were not used to create awareness about Descartes and his works, but rather to discuss his ideas. Second, the network analysis of the letters shows that ideas do not spread like viruses, thus undermining the ‘social contagion’ model; and that weak ties are not as effective in promoting innovations as they are in circulating information.

A geographical visualisation of the correspondence network being studied in the project