although mostly known to specialists nowadays, Kenelm Digby was a remarkable figure on the intellectual scene of the early seventeenth century. He has been described as “one of the most influential natural philosophers” of his time,1 and corresponded with many of the great scholars of his days, including Descartes, and the French pioneer of atomism, Pierre Gassendi. In the later years of his life, Digby, alongside men like Robert Boyle, became one of the founding members of the Royal Society.2Digby authored (...) one major work of philosophy: the Two Treatises of 1644. This work consisted of a long First Treatise on bodies, and a shorter, Second Treatise on the human soul. In the First Treatise, Digby argued... (shrink)

In Leibniz on Causation and Agency, Julia Jorati provides an account of Leibniz’s mature views regarding causation, freedom, and moral responsibility. Few monographs treat these central topics in Leibniz in such a sustained and helpful way. The focus on appetition and action is most welcome, and the book is well written and usually well argued. Even on the few occasions when Jorati’s arguments are unpersuasive, the theoretical benefits of her readings are clear, and the work displays an impressive command of (...) the primary and secondary literature.The first three chapters treat monads, spontaneity, and teleology, respectively. Jorati gives useful accounts of the motivations for Leibniz’s bold theses. A clear strength... (shrink)

This book is, as the editor claims, the first collection of essays dedicated to Berkeley’s Three Dialogues between Hylas and Philonous. It also derives largely from a conference held at Trinity College, Dublin in 2014. The editor, therefore, was somewhat at the mercy of those who submitted papers to the conference to determine the contents of the volume. In pointing this out, I do not intend to be casting aspersions on the quality of the papers included. By and large, the (...) contributors are among the most prominent Berkeley scholars working today and the quality is high. I will want, however, to think about the extent to which this collection provides materials for an overall understanding and assessment of Three... (shrink)

This book, comprised of thirteen essays and an introduction by the editors, is an exploration of the concept of liberty—moral and political, theological and metaphysical —in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. The topic in itself is interesting, raising the question of the extent to which moral and political liberty are related to metaphysical liberty. With the possible exception of Catherine Cockburn, these types of liberty seem harder to separate in the centuries under discussion than they would be now. This could (...) be because moral and political liberty were more of an omnipresent concern to philosophers generally then than they are now, but it is also relevant that all but one... (shrink)

In this ambitious first book, Erick Raphael Jiménez argues that a good model for understanding Aristotle’s concept of mind (nous) lies in Aristotle’s account of the perception of time. This “time-perception model” of mind and its activity, thinking, bridges a gap between Jiménez’s unorthodox readings of Aristotelian mind and its objects. The book will attract the interest of specialists in Aristotle’s psychology, as well as other scholars interested in Aristotle’s concept of mind and its influence, for instance, theologians interested in (...) Aristotle’s tantalizing discussion of active or maker mind in De Anima 3.5 (DA). (shrink)

This volume is the product of a pair of conferences on book I of Aristotle’s Physics at Sapienza University of Rome in 2013 and 2015. Each chapter of book I receives a philosophical commentary by a prominent specialist in ancient philosophy. The contributions offer systematic and thorough exegesis, as well as new and interesting solutions to interpretative problems. In what follows, I will focus chiefly on the latter.Diana Quarantotto begins the volume with a discussion of the overall structure, role, and (...) status of book I, and offers a number of considerations in favor of viewing it as “introductory.” Perhaps her most interesting claim is that the principles introduced there are “not distinctly physical,” which... (shrink)

Janssens’s careful edition brings to a close the publication of the Medieval Latin version of the Avicennian appropriation of Aristotle’s Physics. Avicenna’s “encyclopedia” called al-Shifâ’ comprises a series of writings on natural philosophy. The first of them corresponds to the Physics, and Janssens gives here the translation of the third treatise of this book, made in Spain in the twelfth and the thirteenth centuries.Editing the Medieval Latin text of Avicenna’s Physics is fraught with difficulties. First, the translation was left incomplete, (...) as it does not include the last four chapters of... (shrink)

Insofar as historians of philosophy aim to get the story right, it is now widely recognized that they must reckon with works of early modern women philosophers—oft-neglected philosophers who read, and were read by, canonical luminaries such as Descartes and Leibniz. Thomas’s volume collects thirteen new contributions to the scholarship on the metaphysics of such authors: Mary Astell, Elisabeth of Bohemia, Margaret Cavendish, Catharine Trotter Cockburn, Émilie Du Châtelet, Bathsua Makin, Damaris Masham, and Anna Maria van Schurman. Cavendish, Conway, and (...) Du Châtelet receive multiple chapters.The quality of each chapter is excellent. Most could have been published as journal articles in their own right. Thus, though... (shrink)

“It would take a book to work through all the literature in detail,” observes Michael Gorman on the question of how to interpret Thomas Aquinas’s views on whether Christ had a single esse or two, “and it would be one of the most tedious books ever written”. To the nonspecialist, the details of how a medieval theologian thought the divinity and humanity of Christ relate to each other in terms drawn from Aristotelian metaphysics must rank as one of the most (...) obscure, not to mention uninteresting, problems in the history of philosophy. Sometimes it can seem like that to the specialist, too.Luckily, Gorman’s authoritative and engaging book not only avoids the tedium of the volume he imagines, it makes an excellent... (shrink)

it is common in reid scholarship to use the notion of intentionality both to explicate his notion of conception and to explain his talk of acts such as perception having objects distinct from themselves. With regard to conception, Reid states that every act of conception “must have an object; for he that conceives, must conceive something.”1 Using the notion of intentionality, commentators interpret this to mean that, through conception, the mind is directed on an object, and that acts of conception (...) are always of an object or about something.2 Commentators further explicate the purported intentionality of conception in terms of it being an act of representing something or having representational content, where... (shrink)

there can be little doubt that in its influence on the development of post-Kantian German Idealism, Spinoza’s philosophy is second only to Kant’s. Important strands of philosophical debate within the idealist movement go back to the famous dispute on Spinozism that is triggered by Jacobi’s On the Doctrine of Spinoza. Idealists like Maimon, Schelling, and Hegel thoroughly engaged with Spinoza’s writings, and Schelling himself even adopts a version of Spinozism at some stages of his career. Yet, while a substantive amount (...) of scholarship has been devoted to Spinoza’s influence on the idealist movement,1 there is surprisingly little discussion in the literature about the idealists’ views on one of the most crucial... (shrink)

This volume includes fifteen chapters, case studies and broader reflections, on the notion of ‘radical enlightenment,’ separated into three main sections entitled, respectively, “The Big Picture,” “Origins and Fate of the Radical Enlightenment, ca. 1660–1720,” and “The Radical Enlightenment in Europe and the New World after ca. 1720.” It is presented as “the first stand-alone collection of studies in English on the Radical Enlightenment.” It is worth mentioning, however, that two very similar volumes already exist in French and German. Like (...) its French and German... (shrink)

did plato and aristotle have anything to say about belief? The answer to this question might seem blindingly obvious: of course they did. Plato distinguishes belief from knowledge in the Meno, Republic, and Theaetetus, and Aristotle does so in the Posterior Analytics. Plato distinguishes belief from perception in the Theaetetus, and Aristotle does so in the De anima. They talk about the distinction between true and false beliefs, and the ways in which belief can mislead and the ways in which (...) it can steer us aright. Indeed, they make belief a central component of their epistemologies.The view underlying these claims—one so widespread these days as to remain largely unquestioned—is that when Plato and Aristotle talk... (shrink)

ball a hits ball b and thereby changes the motion of the balls. Ball B then hits another ball C which in turn changes the motion of these balls. This is an instance of what I shall call a ‘causal chain.’ There are two rival approaches on how Kant deals with causal chains. For a long time, Kant scholars would not have hesitated to analyze this as follows: the event of the rolling of A causes the event of the rolling (...) of B, which in turn causes the event of the rolling of C.1 And, indeed, Kant not only speaks of a “series of causes and effects”, but even says that events presuppose preceding events.2 However, Eric Watkins’s game-changing interpretation of Kant’s metaphysics of causality effectively rules... (shrink)

Plato’s Symposium offers an enticing range of topics for the critical-guide treatment of philosophical classics now in vogue. The current volume contains thirteen essays of consistently high quality devoted to such issues as the nature of erotic desire and its orientation toward the forms, the ethical question of how best to live in the pursuit of wisdom, Plato’s engagement with poetry, and his use of dramatic interaction between speakers to advance his philosophical agenda.An admirable feature of the volume is the (...) close attention that is paid to all parts of the Symposium. Many discussions of the dialogue focus exclusively on Socrates’s speech, but Destrée and Giannopoulou have taken care to avoid this narrowly... (shrink)

as much new research has shown,1 the influence that Albert the Great had upon succeeding generations of Dominican thinkers cannot be overestimated, and is directly linked not only to the relatively better known synthesis of Neoplatonic and Aristotelian thought found in Thomas Aquinas,2 but also to the theological mysticism of the German Dominican tradition, which includes Ulrich of Strasburg, Dietrich of Freiberg, Meister Eckhart, and Berthold of Moosburg.3 Among these latter Dominicans, Ulrich of Strasburg is often regarded as Albert’s most (...) faithful disciple4—even more so than Aquinas, one could argue5—who helped initiate what Alain de Libera calls “Rhenish”... (shrink)

This collection includes material from the international conference, “Spinoza-Malebranche,” held in 2015, first at the Université Paris I Panthéon-Sorbonne and subsequently at the École Normale Supérieure in Lyon. The justification for the volume, as indicated in Chantel Jaquet’s preface, is that the relations between Spinoza and Malebranche have not recently drawn the sort of attention from scholars that the relations of each to Descartes have received. Of course, there is the question of why the former relations are worthy of investigation, (...) a question that is perhaps not as pressing in the case of the relations that Spinoza and Malebranche each bear to Descartes. I return to this “why” question... (shrink)

James Doyle’s book interprets and defends the arguments of G. E. M. Anscombe’s essays “Modern Moral Philosophy” and “The First Person.” Though both essays are widely cited, Doyle argues that in each instance Anscombe’s readers have missed the force of her arguments, which, when properly understood, are able to withstand the common objections to them.Anscombe’s “Modern Moral Philosophy” is commonly read as arguing that talk of moral obligation, permission etc., once had a legitimate place within conceptual frameworks that included the (...) existence of a divine legislator, and can be vindicated outside that framework by adopting the schema of a neo-Aristotelian virtue ethics. But Doyle argues convincingly that this is... (shrink)

James Doyle’s book interprets and defends the arguments of G. E. M. Anscombe’s essays “Modern Moral Philosophy” and “The First Person.” Though both essays are widely cited, Doyle argues that in each instance Anscombe’s readers have missed the force of her arguments, which, when properly understood, are able to withstand the common objections to them.Anscombe’s “Modern Moral Philosophy” is commonly read as arguing that talk of moral obligation, permission etc., once had a legitimate place within conceptual frameworks that included the (...) existence of a divine legislator, and can be vindicated outside that framework by adopting the schema of a neo-Aristotelian virtue ethics. But Doyle argues convincingly that this is... (shrink)

This bold and wide-ranging study aims to revise a common picture of Plato’s thinking about human motivation. Kamtekar identifies the picture as one whereby Plato’s Socrates initially embraces intellectualism because he holds that an agent is motivated only by rational considerations based on her own good, and rejects that standpoint in the Republic with the doctrine of the tripartite soul. Kamtekar argues instead that, for Socrates, “human beings have a natural desire for our own good,” and that this principle is (...) the theoretical basis for both Socratic intellectualism and the tripartite soul.Chapter 1 is methodological and emphasizes the importance of dialogical context. Specifically, it stresses that... (shrink)

This new essay collection edited by Eric Watkins features distinguished and established scholars, and it will be an attractive volume for those who work in the field. The essays are divided under three headings: Part I contains essays on agency, Part II features essays on freedom, and Part III is dedicated to essays on persons. An essay by Karl Ameriks on Kant’s work “The End of All Things” concludes the collection. Most of the essays in the collection were originally presented (...) in early form at the conference “Agency, Persons, and Kant” in 2016, which was held in honor of Karl Ameriks. Although there are mentions of Ameriks’s work in the essays, the contributions largely do not discuss his work in detail. Rather... (shrink)

The primary aim of this volume is to contribute to the growing body of scholarship on Kant’s relation to his German contemporaries. Each of the essays explores one or two of Kant’s views in relation to one or two of his German contemporaries. With three exceptions, every essay contends that we can gain a deeper understanding of Kant’s views by considering their relation to the contemporaries in question.The book is quite successful at accomplishing this aim. In almost every contribution, the (...) case is convincingly made that one’s understanding of Kant on some issue would at the least be greatly enhanced, if not simply impossible without, a significant engagement... (shrink)