A Dispute in the world of the dead: René Descartes and Andreas Rüdiger

In 1731 an anonymous German author published a dialogue of the dead, continuing the tradition started in ancient Greece by Lucian of Samosata. Today a single complete copy of the text survives, published without indication of the place of publication or the printer and now in the Evangelisches Predigerseminar Bibliothek in Wittenberg. The protagonists are the philosopher and physician Andreas Rüdiger (1673-1731) and René Descartes, who in the dialogue represents a very different type of philosopher from the “historical” figure passed down to us in his works. This article aims to reconstruct the composition of this rare and enigmatic text and to contextualize the author’s ideological perspective in the controversies animating the philosophical underground of early 18 th-century German universities.