Linguaggio come strumento: un'analisi digitale degli scritti filosofici (1686-1698) e della corrispondenza di Christiaan Huygens.

The aim of my PhD thesis is to analyse the thought of the Dutch scientist Christiaan Huygens in the last part of his life, in particular regarding epistemology, cosmology and theology. During my research, I collected in a unique corpus some selected writings and the whole correspondence of Huygens, published in the Oeuvres Complètes and now also available on the website of the Digitale Bibliotheek voor de Nederlandse Letteren. My methodology consisted of a digital text analysis with AntConc computational linguistics tool in order to find, list and compare the occurrences of the most important keywords (e.g. nouns and related adjectives) and collocations in the last works of Huygens, from 1686 to 1695 and posthumous. The greatest attention is focused on three keywords, such as Law, Power and Soul, related to the themes of God’s power, divine and human intelligence, probabilistic epistemology, natural theology and plurality of worlds. In addition, I used these keywords to select the letters written by Huygens to the most important of his contemporaries, such as Spinoza, Leibniz, Newton, Oldenburg, Moray, etc., and their replies, in order to create a secondary and complementary database related to the same themes. Inspired by Huygens who built his own scientific instrument, my aim was to create a database with a lexicon that provides not only all references to the pieces of the corpus examined, but is also conceptually readable through a system of internal (writings and letters) and external (critical literature) references. The challenge firstly involve demonstrating that his last writings on philosophical and theological reflections on mechanistic philosophy are not an anomaly within Huygens’ wider scientific work, and secondly showing that these are indications of Huygens’ involvement in a number of theoretical debates in the second half of the Seventeenth-century.