Three general accounts of causation stand out in early modernphilosophy: Cartesian interactionism, occasionalism, and Leibniz's preestablished harmony. The contributors to this volume examine these theories in their philosophical and historical context. They address them both as a means for answering specific questions regarding causal relations and in their relation to one another, in particular, comparing occasionalism and the preestablished harmony as responses to Descartes's metaphysics and physics and the Cartesian account of causation. Philosophers discussed include Descartes, Gassendi, (...) Malebranche, Arnauld, Leibniz, Bayle, La Forge, and other, less well-known figures. (shrink)
IDEAS. and. MECHANISM. Essays on Early ModernPhilosophy MARGARET DAULER WILSON For more than three decades, Margaret Wilson's essays on early modernphilosophy have influenced scholarly debate. Many are considered ...
Some of these authors have “mixed” views: for example, MacKenzie (and perhaps Arbini) ... Topics in Early ModernPhilosophy of Mind, Studies in the History ..
The present state of the discussion on relativity -- The theory of motion according to Newton, Leibniz, and Huyghens -- Casualty and probability -- Aims and methods of modernphilosophy of nature -- The principle of causality and the possibility of its empirical confirmation -- Rationalism and empiricism -- The freedom of the will -- On the explication of ethical utterances.
In The Sublime in ModernPhilosophy: Aesthetics, Ethics, and Nature, Emily Brady takes a fresh look at the sublime and shows why it endures as a meaningful concept in contemporary philosophy. In a reassessment of historical approaches, the first part of the book identifies the scope and value of the sublime in eighteenth-century philosophy, nineteenth-century philosophy and Romanticism, and early wilderness aesthetics. The second part examines the sublime's contemporary significance through its relationship to the arts; (...) its position with respect to other aesthetic categories involving mixed or negative emotions, such as tragedy; and its place in environmental aesthetics and ethics. Far from being an outmoded concept, Brady argues that the sublime is a distinctive aesthetic category which reveals an important, if sometimes challenging, aesthetic-moral relationship with the natural world. (shrink)
Philosopher Roger Scruton offers a wide-ranging perspective on philosophy, from logic to aesthetics, written in a lively and engaging way that is sure to stimulate debate. Rather than producing a survey of an academic discipline, Scruton reclaims philosophy for worldly concerns.
M. F. Burnyeat taught for 14 years in the Philosophy Department of University College London, then for 18 years in the Classics Faculty at Cambridge, 12 of them as the Laurence Professor of Ancient Philosophy, before migrating to Oxford in 1996 to become a Senior Research Fellow in Philosophy at All Souls College. The studies, articles and reviews collected in these two volumes of Explorations in Ancient and ModernPhilosophy were all written, and all but (...) two published, before that decisive change. Whether designed for a scholarly audience or for a wider public, they range from the Presocratics to Augustine, from Descartes and Bishop Berkeley to Wittgenstein and G. E. Moore. Their subject-matter falls under four main headings: 'Logic and Dialectic' and 'Scepticism Ancient and Modern', which are contained in this first volume; 'Knowledge' and 'Philosophy and the Good Life' make up the second volume. The title 'Explorations' well expresses Burnyeat's ability to discover new aspects of familiar texts, new ways of solving old problems. In his hands the history of philosophy becomes itself a philosophical activity. (shrink)
This article contends that the central principle of modernphilosophy is obscured by a side-debate between two opposed camps that are united in accepting a deeper flawed premise. Consider the powerful critiques of Kantian philosophy offered by Quentin Meillassoux and Bruno Latour, respectively. These two thinkers criticize Kant for opposite reasons: Meillassoux because Kant collapses thought and world into a permanent “correlate” without isolated terms, and Latour because Kant tries to purify thought and world from each other (...) rather than realizing that they are always combined in “hybrid” form. What both critiques tacitly accept is the notion that “thought” and “world” are the two major poles of the universe. I claim that this stems from the post-Cartesian assumption that thought and world are the two basic kinds of things that exist. The name “onto-taxonomy” is introduced for this view. (shrink)
The leading anthology of its kind, this volume provides the key works of seven major philosophers, along with a rich selection of associated texts by other ...
Richard Kennington , a professor for many years at Pennsylvania State University and the Catholic University of America, was renowned for his insight in reading and teaching early modernphilosophy. Although he published articles and spoke widely, never before have his writings been collected in a book. On Modern Origins deftly shows how modern thinkers assessed the errors of the classical tradition and established in its place a philosophy that fuses a new meaning of nature (...) and of theory with humanitarian goals. This volume is an essential source for scholars seeking to understand the contemporary significance of the dawning of the modern era. (shrink)
"Modern" philosophy in the West is said to have begun with Bacon and Descartes. Their methodological and metaphysical writings, in conjunction with the discoveries that marked the seventeenth-century scientific revolution, are supposed to have interred both Aristotelian and scholastic science and the philosophy that supported it. But did the new or "modern" philosophy effect a complete break with what preceded it? Were Bacon and Descartes untainted by scholastic influences? The theme of this book is that (...) the new and traditional philosophies have much more in common than the orthodox account suggests. The contributors consider not only modernity in metaphysics and the sciences but also the claims of Machiavelli, Hobbes, and Spinoza to have invented "modern" ethics and politics. These two aspects of "modernity" in philosophy are connected for the first time. The book offers a broad view of the early modern philosophers, covering not only the much-studied major figures but also relatively neglected writers: Mersenne, Gassendi, White, and Sergeant. (shrink)
In 1947 America’s premier philosopher, educator, and public intellectual John Dewey purportedly lost his last manuscript on modernphilosophy in the back of a taxicab. Now, sixty-five years later, Dewey’s fresh and unpretentious take on the history and theory of knowledge is finally available. Editor Phillip Deen has taken on the task of editing Dewey’s unfinished work, carefully compiling the fragments and multiple drafts of each chapter that he discovered in the folders of the Dewey Papers at the (...) Special Collections Research Center at Southern Illinois University Carbondale. He has used Dewey’s last known outline for the manuscript, aiming to create a finished product that faithfully represents Dewey’s original intent. An introduction and editor’s notes by Deen and a foreword by Larry A. Hickman, director of the Center for Dewey Studies, frame this previously lost work. In Unmodern Philosophy and ModernPhilosophy, Dewey argues that modernphilosophy is anything but; instead, it retains the baggage of outdated and misguided philosophical traditions and dualisms carried forward from Greek and medieval traditions. Drawing on cultural anthropology, Dewey moves past the philosophical themes of the past, instead proposing a functional model of humanity as emotional, inquiring, purposive organisms embedded in a natural and cultural environment. Dewey begins by tracing the problematic history of philosophy, demonstrating how, from the time of the Greeks to the Empiricists and Rationalists, the subject has been mired in the search for immutable absolutes outside human experience and has relied on dualisms between mind and body, theory and practice, and the material and the ideal, ultimately dividing humanity from nature. The result, he posits, is the epistemological problem of how it is possible to have knowledge at all. In the second half of the volume, Dewey roots philosophy in the conflicting beliefs and cultural tensions of the human condition, maintaining that these issues are much more pertinent to philosophy and knowledge than the sharp dichotomies of the past and abstract questions of the body and mind. Ultimately, Dewey argues that the mind is not separate from the world, criticizes the denigration of practice in the name of theory, addresses the dualism between matter and ideals, and questions why the human and the natural were ever separated in philosophy. The result is a deeper understanding of the relationship among the scientific, the moral, and the aesthetic. More than just historically significant in its rediscovery, Unmodern Philosophy and ModernPhilosophy provides an intriguing critique of the history of modern thought and a positive account of John Dewey’s naturalized theory of knowing. This volume marks a significant contribution to the history of American thought and finally resolves one of the mysteries of pragmatic philosophy. (shrink)
Malebranche argues that ideas are representative beings existing in God. He defends this thesis by an inference to the best explanation of human perception. It is well known that Malebranche’s theory of vision in God was forcefully rejected by philosophers such as Arnauld, Locke, and Berkeley. However, the notion that ideas exist in God was not the only controversial aspect of Malebranche’s approach. Another controversy centered around Malebranche’s view that ideas are to be understood as posits in an explanatory theory. (...) Opponents of this approach, including Arnauld and Locke, held that our talk about ideas was not explanatory but instead merely descriptive: we use the word ‘idea’ to describe phenomena that we observe by reflecting on our own minds. This controversy has not received much attention from scholars, but in the present paper I will show that it was an explicit and important subject of concern for Malebranche, Arnauld, Locke, and Berkeley and that attention to this controversy can illuminate several aspects of these philosophers’ work. (shrink)
_A Short History of Modern Philosophy_ is a lucid, challenging and up-to-date survey of the philosophers and philosophies from the founding father of modernphilosophy, René Descartes, to the most important and famous philosopher of the twentieth century, Ludwig Wittgenstein. Roger Scruton has been widely praised for his success in making the history of modernphilosophy cogent and intelligible to anyone wishing to understand this fascinating subject. In this new edition, he has responded to the (...) explosion of interest in the history of philosophy by substantially rewriting the book, taking account of recent debates and scholarship. (shrink)
Discover for yourself the pleasures of philosophy! Written both for the seasoned student of philosophy as well as the general reader, the renowned writer Roger Scruton provides a survey of modernphilosophy. Always engaging, Scruton takes us on a fascinating tour of the subject, from founding father Descartes to the most important and famous philosopher of the twentieth century, Ludwig Wittgenstein. He identifies all the principal figures as well as outlines of the main intellectual preoccupations that (...) have informed western philosophy. Painting a portrait of modernphilosophy that is vivid and animated, Scruton introduces us to some of the greatest philosophical problems invented in this period and pursued ever since. Including material on recent debates, _A Short History of Modern Philosophy_ is already established as _the_ classic introduction. Read it and find out why. (shrink)
This book provides a reasoned, comprehensive understanding of what religion is as well as a clear and critical assessment of whether, in the light of modern developments in philosophy, contemporary thinking people can responsibly maintain religious belief in God. The book is divided into three major sections: the first deals with what all religions may be said to have in common; the second discusses theistic religion and the issue of intellectually responsible belief in God; the third examines current (...) developments within a particular theistic religion, Christianity. Originally published in 1968, the book is basic, both in the nature of the issues it discusses and in the clarity and comprehensiveness of its presentation; it is varied in the arguments and perspectives dealt with; it provides an introduction to philosophical thinking through the problems of philosophy of religion; and it deals seriously with controversial movements in theology. (shrink)
The articles in the symposium “Teaching Early ModernPhilosophy: New Approaches” provide theoretical reflections and practical advice on new ways of teaching undergraduate survey courses in early modernphilosophy. This introduction lays out the rationale for the symposium and summarizes the articles that compose it.
Three general accounts of causation stand out in early modernphilosophy: Cartesian interactionism, occasionalism, and Leibniz's preestablished harmony. The contributors to this volume examine these theories in their philosophical and historical context. They address them both as a means for answering specific questions regarding causal relations and in their relation to one another, in particular, comparing occasionalism and the preestablished harmony as responses to Descartes's metaphysics and physics and the Cartesian account of causation. Philosophers discussed include Descartes, Gassendi, (...) Malebranche, Arnauld, Leibniz, Bayle, La Forge, and other, less well-known figures. (shrink)
Table of Contents Note from the Editors 1. Deflating Descartes’ Causal Axiom, Tad Schmaltz 2. The Dustbin Theory of Mind: A Cartesian Legacy?, Lawrence Nolan and John Whipple 3. Is Descartes a Libertarian?, C. P. Ragland 4. The Scholastic Resources for Descartes’ Concept of God as Causa Sui, Richard Lee 5. Hobbesian Mechanics, Doug Jesseph 6. Locks, Schlocks, and Poisoned Peas: Boyle on Actual and Dispositive Qualities, Dan Kaufman 7. Atomism, Monism, and Causation in the Natural Philosophy of Margaret (...) Cavendish, Karen Detlefsen 8. Descartes, the First Cartesians, and Logic, Roger Ariew 9. On the Necessity and Nature of Simples: Leibniz, Wolff, Baumgarten, and the Pre-Critical Kant, Eric Watkins 10. Review Essay: Descartes’ Theory of Mind, by Desmond Clarke, Dennis Des Chene. (shrink)
Debates in ModernPhilosophy: Essential Readings and Contemporary Responses provides an in-depth, engaging introduction to important issues in modernphilosophy. It presents 13 key interpretive debates to students, and ranges in coverage from Descartes' Meditations to Kant's Critique of Pure Reason. -/- Debates include: -/- Did Descartes have a developed and consistent view about how the mind interacts with the body? Was Leibniz an idealist, or did he believe in corporeal substances? What is Locke's theory of (...) personal identity? Could there be a Berkeleian metaphysics without God? Did Hume believe in causal powers? What is Kant's transcendental idealism? -/- Each of the thirteen debates consists of a well known article or book chapter from a living philosopher, followed by a new response from a different scholar, specially commissioned for this volume. Every debate is prefaced by an introduction written for those coming upon the debates for the first time and followed by an annotated list for further reading. The volume starts with an introduction that explains the importance and relevance of the modern period and its key debates to philosophy and ends with a glossary that covers terms from both the modern period and the study of the history of philosophy in general. -/- Debates in ModernPhilosophy will help students evaluate different interpretations of key texts from modernphilosophy, and provide a model for constructing their own positions in these debates. (shrink)
The Causation Debate in ModernPhilosophy examines the debate that began as modern science separated itself from natural philosophy in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. The book specifically explores the two dominant approaches to causation as a metaphysical problem and as a scientific problem. As philosophy and science turned from the ideas of Aristotle that dominated western thought throughout the renaissance, one of the most pressing intellectual problems was how to replace Aristotelian science with its (...) doctine of the four causes. This is the first book to look at the historical discussion as a debate that surrounds certain themes and ideas, and combines classical discussions of causation with recent thinking on the topic. (shrink)
The history of modernphilosophy is a major topic in philosophy and is crucial to an understanding of the advent of feminist philosophy. Feminism and ModernPhilosophy introduces fundamental topics in modernphilosophy from a feminist perspective. It takes the student through the subject step by step by looking at the main thinkers most usually examined on a course in modernphilosophy and by examining the role of gender in studying (...) classic philosophical texts. The book covers the following structure looking at the ideas and work of the important thinkers in this period: * Rereading the canon * The attack on modernist philosophical reason * The nature of "Man" * The search for male allies * Discovering women philosophers * Are there universal philosophical truths? * The function of history within the discipline of philosophy Each chapter looks closely at the way in which the traditional philosophical canon has been re-interpreted by feminist theory and examines the implications for our interpretation of specific texts. It looks at, for example: * A feminist critique of Cartesian rationalism * The implications of Locke's state of nature for the idea of the family * An appreciation of Hume's unique "collaboration" with Annette Baier Chapters close with a summary and the book contains an extensive annotated bibliography. Andrea Nye's style is student friendly and will be ideal for anyone coming to the topic for the first time. It will be appropriate for philosophy as well as gender studies courses looking at the development of modern Western thought. (shrink)
This essay presents the challenges facing those preparing to teach the history of modernphilosophy and proposes some solutions. I first discuss the goals for such a course, as well as the particular methodological challenges of teaching a history of modernphilosophy course. Next a standard set of thinkers, readings, and themes is presented, followed by some alternatives. I then argue that one ought to diversify one’s syllabus beyond the canonical set of six or seven white (...) men. As a first step toward that goal, I propose several ways to include women philosophers in the syllabus. I then lay out assignments and in-class activities that aid students toward the course goals. I conclude with a consideration of the challenges and rewards of teaching modernphilosophy. (shrink)
Early modern philosophers looked for inspiration to the later ancient thinkers when they rebelled against the dominant Platonic and Aristotelian traditions. The impact of the Hellenistic philosophers on such philosophers as Descartes, Leibniz, Spinoza and Locke was profound and is ripe for reassessment. This collection of essays offers precisely that. Leading historians of philosophy explore the connections between Hellenistic and early modernphilosophy in ways that take advantage of new scholarly and philosophical advances. The essays display (...) a challenging range of methods and will be an invaluable point of reference for philosophers, historians of ideas and classicists. (shrink)
Philosophers of the modern period are often presented as having made an elementary error: that of confounding the atttitude one adopts toward a proposition with its content. By examining the works of Locke and the Port-Royalians, I show that this accusation is ill-founded and that Locke, in particular, has the resources to construct a theory of propositional attitudes.
Modernity seemed to be the autumn of eternity. The secularization of European culture provided little sustenance to the concept of eternity with its heavy theological baggage. Yet, our hero would not leave the stage without an outstanding performance of its power and temptation. Indeed, in the first three centuries of the modern period – the subject of the third chapter by Yitzhak Melamed - the concept of eternity will play a crucial role in the great philosophical systems of the (...) period. The first part of this chapter concentrates on the debate about the temporality of God. While most of the great metaphysicians of the seventeenth century – Suarez, Spinoza, Malebranche, and Leibniz – ascribed to God eternal, non-temporal, existence, a growing number of philosophers conceived God as existing in time. For Newton, God’s eternity was simply the fact that “He was, he is, and is to come.” A similar view of God as being essentially in time was endorsed by Pierre Gassendi, Henry More, Samuel Clarke, Isaac Barrow, John Locke, and most probably Descartes as well. In the second part of the chapter we study the concept of eternal truth, and its relation to the emerging notion of Laws of Nature. The third part of the chapter explicates Spinoza’s original understanding of eternity as a modal concept. For Spinoza, eternity is a unique kind of necessary existence: it is existence that is self-necessitated (unlike the existence of other things whose necessity derives from external causes). Eternity is the existence of God or the one substance. Yet, Spinoza claims that if we conceive finite things adequately - “sub specie aeternitatis” – as nothing but modes flowing from the essence of God, even finite things (like our minds) can take part in God’s eternity. The fourth and final part of the chapter is mostly focused on the reception of Spinoza’s original conception of eternity by Leibniz and other eighteenth century philosophers. (shrink)
From Locke' treatment of the issue of slavery and Descartes' silence on the issue to Hegel' philosophy of religion and Nietzsche' "racial profiling," this book ...
'Philosophy' in the context of this book means that the author is looking at education as a whole, without restrictions or simplifications; looking at ends and purposes, not merely at methods and means.
This edited volume systematically addresses the connection between Wilfrid Sellars and the history of modernphilosophy, exploring both the content and method of this relationship. It intends both to analyze Sellars’s position in relation to singular thinkers of the modern tradition, and to inquire into Sellars’s understanding of philosophy as a field in reflective and constructive conversation with its past. The chapters in Part I cover Sellars’s interpretation and use of Descartes, Leibniz, Hume, Kant and Hegel. (...) Part II features essays on his relationship with Peirce, Frege, Carnap, Wittgenstein, American pragmatism, behaviorism and American realism, particularly his father, Roy Wood. Sellars and the History of ModernPhilosophy features original contributions by many of the most renowned Sellars scholars throughout the world. It offers an exhaustive survey of Sellars’s views on the historical antecedents and metaphilosophical aspects of his thought. (shrink)
Many historical and philosophical studies treat infinity as an exclusively quantitative notion, whose proper domain of application is mathematics and physics. The main aim of this paper is to disentangle, by critically examining, three notions of infinity in the early modern period, and to argue that one—but only one—of them is quantitative. One of these non-quantitative notions concerns being or reality, while the other concerns a particular iterative property of an aggregate. These three notions will emerge through examination of (...) three central figures in the period: Locke, Descartes, and Leibniz. (shrink)
In a powerful and original contribution to the history of ideas, Hannah Dawson explores the intense preoccupation with language in early-modernphilosophy, and presents a groundbreaking analysis of John Locke's critique of words. By examining a broad sweep of pedagogical and philosophical material from antiquity to the late seventeenth century, Dr Dawson explains why language caused anxiety in writers such as Montaigne, Bacon, Descartes, Hobbes, Gassendi, Nicole, Pufendorf, Boyle, Malebranche and Locke. Locke, Language and Early-ModernPhilosophy (...) demonstrates that new developments in philosophy, in conjunction with weaknesses in linguistic theory, resulted in serious concerns about the capacity of words to refer to the world, the stability of meaning, and the duplicitous power of words themselves. Dr Dawson shows that language so fixated all manner of early-modern authors because it was seen as an obstacle to both knowledge and society. She thereby uncovers a novel story about the problem of language in philosophy, and in the process reshapes our understanding of early-modern epistemology, morality and politics. (shrink)
In this wide-ranging study of subjectivity and intersubjectivity, Roger Frie develops a critical account of recent conceptions of the subject in philosophy and pdychoanalytic theory. Using a line of analysis strongly grounded in the European tradition, Frie examines the complex relationship between the theories of subjectivity, intersubjectivity, language and love in the work of a diverse body of philosophers and psychoanalyists. He provides lucid interpretations of the work of Sartre, Binswanger, Lacan, Habermas, Heidegger, Freud and others. Because it integrates (...) perspectives from continental philosophy, analytical philosophy, and psychoanalytic theory, this book will appeal to a wide audience in the areas of philosophy, history of philosophy, psychoanalysis, and social theory. (shrink)
This book traces the linguistic turns in the history of modernphilosophy and the development of the philosophy of language from Locke to Wittgenstein. It examines the contributions of canonical figures such as Leibniz, Mill, Frege, Russell, Wittgenstein, Austin, Quine, and Davidson, as well as those of Condillac, Humboldt, Chomsky, and Derrida. Michael Losonsky argues that the philosophy of language begins with Locke's Essay Concerning Human Understanding. He shows how the history of the philosophy of (...) language in the modern period is marked by a dichotomy between formal and pragmatic perspectives on language and that modernphilosophy has not been able to integrate these two aspects of human language. Language as a human activity and language as a syntactic and semantic system remain distinct and competing focal points, although the interplay between these points of view has driven the development of the philosophy of language. (shrink)
