Open Access

Sietske Fransen

• In the first half of this article I will explore Van Helmont's philosophy of language and translation, in part by contextualizing it within the sixteenth- and seventeenth-century traditions upon which he drew. Since Van Helmont is so explicit about the philosophy of language and translation that he developed, I will investigate in this article if he turned his philosophy into practice. Therefore, the second half of this article will discuss Van Helmont's practices of using and translating between his two main languages (Dutch and Latin). The way in which he employed the languages in which he wrote raises questions about his practice of self-translation and the use of language. Did his mother tongue always figure as the first language into which his thoughts were translated, or could it also have been Latin as the first language for his profession? Van Helmont might have been switching primary languages for the different purposes of his writings. Before going into more detail about his philosophy and use of language, I will briefly introduce this relatively unknown author to the reader.