ABSTRACT
As a concluding essay, this chapter reflects on the main outcomes of Translating the New Philosophy in the Dutch Early Enlightenment. It reassesses the study’s central thesis, viewing the Dutch Early Enlightenment as a rationalist attempt to revisit the relationship between reason and language. That attempt was characterised by the so-called Hobbesian Turn: the intellectual realisation that despite the fundamental unreliability inherent in language, reason required rhetoric because reason alone was not persuasive enough. Like the late Hobbes, the first Dutch translators of the New Philosophy tried to stimulate philosophical and theological reform with rhetorical means or linguistic reform. Translation was the main strategy to achieve that grand ideal, which nevertheless eventually failed to become reality.
