The discovery and publication, in the first half of the twentieth century, of Isaac Beeckman's Journal made it possible to understand the role played by Beeckman in the development of the new ‘mechanistic’ physics, of which the principal actors were already well-known: Marin Mersenne, René Descartes, Pierre Gassendi, and Thomas Hobbes. In this context, Beeckman was first perceived as the missing piece in an already fully-formed puzzle, one in which he simply had to be fitted, with perhaps some rounding off at the edges where the new piece failed to fit perfectly into the space allocated for it. Since then, studies more specifically centred on Beeckman – including Klaas van Berkel's eminent and pioneering work – have made it possible to better understand the particularities of Beeckman's ‘mathematico-physical’ philosophy without measuring him against the standards of this ‘greater picture’ in which his philosophy had haphazardly been integrated, as was done previously.

A third step, which I aim to sketch here, might involve trying to understand how Beeckman's original philosophy was created by situating itself into a fabric of local relationships, through intensive and ongoing exchanges on specific well-defined questions that bore not so much on the great scientific discoveries of Galileo Galilei or Johannes Kepler, but on what made these discoveries possible in the first place.