The French government has awarded the Descartes-Huygens Prize for 2004 to Hans Bots, Dean of the Faculty of Arts at the University of Nijmegen.

Prof. Bots was honoured for his research on intellectual exchanges between France and the United Provinces of the Netherlands in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. The French government has awarded the Descartes-Huygens Prize for 2004 to Hans Bots, Dean of the Faculty of Arts at the University of Nijmegen. Prof. Bots was honoured for his research on intellectual exchanges between France and the United Provinces of the Netherlands in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. He is currently researching important works on Bayle and Montesquieu.

Under the terms of the prize, Prof. Bots will spend some time as a visiting research fellow at the Institute for the History of Classical Philosophy of the French National Centre for Scientific Research (CNRS), in which the University of Lyon II, the University of Saint-Etienne and the Ecole Normale Supérieure in Lyon are represented.

Earlier, the Academy awarded the Descartes-Huygens Prize for 2004 to the French nanotechnologist Marie-Paule Pileni.