ABSTRACT
What brought one of Descartes’ first followers in the United Provinces to express serious concerns about the development of Dutch Cartesianism in his old age? When examining Johannes de Raey’s intellectual development we find a growing interest in the separation of disciplines. In his youth, he endorsed this separation in order to protect philosophy from the domination of theology. From the late 1660s onward, however, De Raey instead sought to prevent that the criterion of evidence was applied in the higher faculties (law, medicine, and theology.) De Raey claimed that any such application would be very dangerous, as attested by the writings of Lodewijk Meyer and Baruch Spinoza. Whereas the link between metaphysics and physics is a matter of primary importance for Descartes, according to De Raey, this relationship can only be fully understood in the context of a broader and more important issue, namely, that of the separation between philosophy and theology.
