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A Letter on the Principles of Justness and Decency, Containing a Defence of the Treatise de Cive of the Learned MR Hobbes: 218 Bilingual Edition
Author(s): Lambert Van Velthuysen (Author), Malcolm de Mowbray (Editor, Translator)
- Publisher: Brill
- Publication Date: 11 Jan. 2013
- Edition: Bilingual
- Language: English
- Print length: 314 pages
- ISBN-10: 900422565X
- ISBN-13: 9789004225657
Book Description
Although little known today, the Utrecht physician and town councillor Lambert van Velthuysen (1622-1685) was a prolific Dutch seventeenth-century philosopher and a vociferous advocate of the new philosophies of Descartes and Hobbes. The Letter on the Principles of Justness and Decency of 1651 constitutes both the first published reaction to Hobbes’s political philosophy and the first attempt by a Dutch philosopher at using Hobbes to supply a ‘Cartesian’ moral philosophy. It is also a highly original work that seeks to define the nature of virtue and vice and to justify the magistrate’s right to punish crimes. It will thus be of interest not only to historians of philosophy but to all those interested in the social and cultural history of the Dutch Golden Age.
Editorial Reviews
About the Author
Malcolm de Mowbray is an author and translator specializing in the history of science and philosophy. He has worked extensively on Dutch seventeenth-century philosophy and, more recently, the Middle Ages.
Catherine Secretan, Ph. D. (1980), is Directrice de recherche at the Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique (France). She has published monographs, translations and many scholarly papers, including Le marchand philosophe de Gaspar Barlaeus (Champion, 2002) and The Self-Perception of Early Modern Capitalists (Palgrave Macmillan, 2008, with Margaret Jacob).
