List of illustrations1Introduction Part IReforming the language of philosophy2The Hobbesian TurnLanguage and reason in the Dutch Early Enlightenment3Enlightened vocabulariesLinguistic purism and philosophical terminology in early modern Dutch discoursePart IITranslating the New Philosophy4The search for linguistic transparencyJan Hendriksz Glazemaker’s translations of Descartes and Spinoza5The politics of linguistic purismPieter Balling’s translations of Spinoza6The rhetoric of translationAbraham van Berkel’s translation of Hobbes7The eclecticism of the marketplaceStephan Blankaart’s translations of Descartes8ConclusionA new language for the natural light?BibliographyIndex of personsAppendix A. The Translation CorpusAppendix B. The Test Corpus.A small group of freethinkers from the Dutch Republic played a key role in the major intellectual changes of the Early Enlightenment (1640–1720). In the wake of Cartesianism, their rationalist ideas transformed debates about science, theology, medicine, and political theory. This book studies the position of four translators in these debates on the ‘New Philosophy’: Jan Hendriksz Glazemaker, Pieter Balling, Abraham van Berkel, and Stephan Blankaart. It presents a comparative history of their Dutch translations of philosophical treatises by René Descartes, Thomas Hobbes, and Benedictus de Spinoza. A combined methodology of computational and qualitative analysis offers new insights into the form and function of translated philosophical texts within the intellectual debates about language, reason, and knowledge that were partly inspired by those texts. These insights change our understanding of the crucial function of translations, multilingualism, and linguistic purism in the Dutch Early Enlightenment.