A critical but sympathetic treatment of Pierre Bayle.

Probably the most celebrated controversy in all of the history of science was that between Newton and Leibniz over the invention of the calculus. The argument ranged far beyond a mere priority dispute and took on the character of a war between two different philosophies of nature. Newton was the first to devise the methods of the calculus, but Leibniz (who independently discovered virtually identical methods) was the first to publish, in 1684. Mutual toleration passed into suspicion and, at last, (...) denunciation of each by the other as a fraud and a plagiarist. The affair became a scandal, as British mathematicians asserted Newton's claims before the public while their Continental colleagues hotly defended Leibniz's priority. Professor Hall analyzes the situation out of which the dispute arose, the circumstances that caused it to become embittered, the dispositions of the chief actors, and the shifts in their opinions of each other. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Journal of the History of Ideas 63.2 (2002) 225-237 [Access article in PDF] Did Bayle Read Saint-Evremond? Thomas M. Lennon Of course Bayle read Saint-Evremond—he quotes him. Moreover, he published one of Saint-Evremond's texts. But there is reading, and then there is reading. There is selective, inattentive perusal of excerpts or even secondary sources, with no attempt to penetrate beyond a superficial understanding; and then there is (...) comprehensive, close scrutiny of the best primary sources, with sensitivity to nuance, and attention to context. In short, there is a difference between skimming and studying. Did Pierre Bayle (1647-1706) skim or study the work of Saint-Evremond (ca.1614-1703)?This article argues that Bayle's first-hand knowledge of Saint-Evremond's work was superficial and dependent on a secondary source that gives that work a less than obvious, and hitherto unappreciated meaning for Bayle. This shift matters because it bears on the question of the status of Bayle's religious faith. With her classic Pierre Bayle (1963-64), Elizabeth Labrousse set aside the traditional view of Bayle as a religious skeptic whose professions of faith cannot be taken at face value. Such had been the view held by many in Bayle's own time, most notably by Pierre Jurieu, and near-universally from the Enlightenment into the twentieth century. Very recently, in a work that is no less impressive than hers on this and other topics in Bayle, Gianluca Mori has defended the traditional view, basing a part of his argument on Bayle's use of Saint-Evremond. 1 Thus the question above. Moreover, the matter of Bayle's religious belief is not a merely biographical one. First, there is the fact of his [End Page 225] influence, especially given his huge readership, although Bayle's influence may well be other than anything he intended. Secondly, in any case, the interpretation of Bayle's work as a whole depends on it, for virtually everything he wrote besides the Dictionnaire has a religious dimension.To appreciate the importance of the question, something must first be said about Charles de Marguetel de St. Denis, sieur de Saint-Evremond. He was known in his time, and still is, as a libertine. It is difficult, however, to define libertinage beyond a combination of hedonistic mores and dubious religious beliefs—Epicureanism in some loose and popular sense. 2 What is more important, in any case, is how Bayle might have thought the term applied to Saint-Evremond; and here it is clear that outright atheism may have been at issue. Bayle reports that it was publicly known that Saint-Evremond "ended his long life, just as he had lived it, en esprit fort." He seems certainly to have died without benefit of religion. When asked on his deathbed whether he wished to be reconciled, says Bayle, he answered yes, "with all my heart. I would like to be reconciled with my appetite. For my stomach is no longer functioning in its usual way." Bayle was often at pains to insist upon the ultimate inaccessibility of others' real beliefs (and of the inappropriateness of attempting to reach them). In this case, however, he was prepared to hold up Saint-Evremond as a counter-example to the widely-held belief that there were no speculative atheists, i.e., people who would sincerely deny the existence of God, but only practical atheists, i.e., people who live as if they did not believe in the existence of God, but who, try as they may, are at least occasionally aware of it. 3This view of Saint-Evremond is important because, when accused of irreligion himself, Bayle cited the libertine's work as indicative of his own beliefs. To understand how Bayle came to be accused, and the significance of this response to it, some of the historical background is first necessary. Bayle's Dictionnaire historique et critique sold better than any text in the eighteenth century, philosophical or otherwise; and it was a best-seller right from the publication of its first edition, in... (shrink)

By the mid-1600s, the commonsense, manifest picture of the world associated with Aristotle had been undermined by skeptical arguments on the one hand and by the rise of the New Science on the other. What would be the scientific image to succeed the Aristotelian model? Thomas Lennon argues here that the contest between the supporters of Descartes and the supporters of Gassendi to decide this issue was the most important philosophical debate of the latter half of the seventeenth (...) century. Descartes and Gassendi inspired their followers with radically opposed perspectives on space, the objects in it, and how these objects are known. Lennon maintains that differing concepts on these matters implied significant moral and political differences: the Descartes/Gassendi conflict was typical of Plato's perennial battle of the gods and giants, and the crux of that enduring philosophical struggle is the exercise of moral and political authority. Lennon demonstrates, in addition, that John Locke should be read as having taken up Gassendi's cause against Descartes. In Lennon's reinterpretation of the history of philosophy between the death dates of Gassendi and Malebranche, Locke's acknowledged opposition to Descartes on some issues is applied to the most important questions of Locke exegesis. Originally published in 1993. The Princeton Legacy Library uses the latest print-on-demand technology to again make available previously out-of-print books from the distinguished backlist of Princeton University Press. These editions preserve the original texts of these important books while presenting them in durable paperback and hardcover editions. The goal of the Princeton Legacy Library is to vastly increase access to the rich scholarly heritage found in the thousands of books published by Princeton University Press since its founding in 1905. (shrink)

Nicolas Malebranche is now recognised as a major figure in the history of philosophy, occupying a crucial place in the Rationalist tradition of Descartes, Spinoza and Leibniz. The Search after Truth is his first, longest and most important work; this volume also presents the Elucidations which accompanied its third edition, the result of comments that Malebranche solicited on the original work and an important repository of his theories of ideas and causation. Together, the two texts constitute the complete expression of (...) his mature thought, and are written in his subtle, argumentative and thoroughly readable style. They are presented in the distinguished translations by Thomas M. Lennon and Paul J. Olscamp, together with a historical introduction, a chronology of Malebranche's life, and useful notes on further reading. (shrink)

: Given Descartes's conception of extension, space and body, there are deep problems about how there can be any real motion. The argument here is that in fact Descartes takes motion to be only phenomenal. The paper sets out the problems generated by taking motion to be real, the solution to them found in the Cartesian texts, and an explanation of those texts in which Descartes appears on the contrary to regard motion as real.

People -- Who was Huet? -- The censura : why and when? -- The birth of skepticism -- Malebranche's surprising silence -- The downfall of cartesianism -- Kinds -- Huet a cartesian? -- Descartes and skepticism : the standard interpretation -- Descartes and skepticism : the texts -- Thoughts -- The cogito : an inference? -- The transparency of mind -- The cogito as pragmatic tautology -- Doubts -- The reality of doubt -- The generation of doubt -- The response (...) to doubt -- Rules -- The criterion of truth -- The trump argument -- Circles -- The simple circularity of the meditations -- The inner circle(s) -- Gods -- Gassendist influences -- The objections of objections -- The rejection of intentionality -- Virtues -- Descartes's voice -- Betting the family farm -- The propagation of light -- The heart-beat -- The moving earth -- Faith and reason -- Descartes as methodological academic skeptic. (shrink)

The expression “continental rationalism” refers to a set of views more or less shared by a number of philosophers active on the European continent during the latter two thirds of the seventeenth century and the beginning of the eighteenth. Rationalism is most often characterized as an epistemological position. On this view, to be a rationalist requires at least one of the following: (1) a privileging of reason and intuition over sensation and experience, (2) regarding all or most ideas as innate (...) rather than adventitious, (3) an emphasis on certain rather than merely probable knowledge as the goal of enquiry. While all of the continental rationalists meet one or more of these criteria, this is arguably the consequence of a deeper tie that binds them together—that is, a metaphysical commitment to the reality of substance, and, in particular, to substance as an underlying principle of unity. (shrink)

An attempt at defending a version of John Yolton's non‐representationalist reading of Locke's account of perception against Vere Chappell's very threatening criticisms. Concerning this version, which takes ideas to be appearances, Chappell questioned their identity criteria, their relation to what they are appearances of, and their nature in general.

The Quietist affair at the end of the seventeenth century has much to teach us about theories of the will in the period. Although Bossuet and Fénelon are the names most famously associated with the debate over the Quietist conception of pure love, Malebranche and his erstwhile disciple Lamy were the ones who debated the deep philosophical issues involved. This paper sets the historical context of the debate, discusses the positions as well as the arguments for and against them, and (...) opens up investigation of important material that is all but ignored in the English literature and only incompletely addressed in the French. (shrink)

A continuation of the debate over the intelligibility, and plausibility, of Yolton's reading of Locke's account of perception. Here, the issue turns on the de‐reification of ideas and its implications for the putative axioms of symmetry and transitivity governing the identity of ideas. The issue is illustrated by what Locke says about confused ideas.

Descartes’s View of the Will Has generally been found problematic and unsatisfactory, especially by those who have read it, or elements of it, in libertarian terms. Attempts to repair the theory, even by sympathetic interpreters, seem only to have aggravated the view’s putative shortcomings—again, especially among those who have read it, or part of it, in libertarian terms—which suggests that the libertarian reading itself might be unsatisfactory. The aim of this paper is to show that the linchpin text on which (...) libertarian readings have been based provides no basis for such readings. The text is the so-called letter to the Jesuit Denis Mesland of 9 February 1645. Among seminal authors—those most .. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:A Rejoinder to MoriThomas M. LennonGianluca Mori and I are broadly in agreement about everything in my paper except the answer to its main question, viz., how Bayle's use of Saint-Evremond is to be understood in the third Eclaircissement. Mori thinks that Bayle's use of Saint Evremond was one of his "provocations aimed at orthodox readers." It is an instance of his thesis that "Bayle's professions of Christian faith, (...) though frequent, are generally far from being above suspicion: indeed almost every one of them raises questions about their actual significance."1 On my view, one line of argument for not taking Bayle's use of Saint-Evremond "at face value in his profession of religious faith... is highly questionable."2 That is, as far as his use of Saint-Evremond is concerned, Bayle should be taken as the fideist that he, here and in many other places, in effect claimed to be.We are in agreement about the nature of the key text itself that Bayle cites from the Conversation. It is a "ridiculous" text, dripping with sarcasm, an ironic parody of the very views that Bayle claims to believe. Moreover, Bayle himself is in agreement with this view of the text, and expresses it in so many words. The knot of our disagreement consists in how Bayle could have used such a text to express fideist views. Mori thinks that the very use of the text itself is sufficient to call those views into doubt. "Bayle was fully aware that the text he presented as a 'clarification' of his fideism had very little right to be considered as Christian orthodoxy,... In a word, Bayle knew full well that his fideism would be regarded as insincere and destructive of faith."3The basis for my view begins with what Bayle says about this text in a statement that Mori has so far not acknowledged either in his book or in his reply to me. Says Bayle after citing Saint-Evremond, "Give this thought a more serious and proper tone and it will become reasonable." It is here that Bayle [End Page 335] acknowledges the inappropriateness of Saint-Evremond's text, but he does so to reject it as it stands. Bayle did not, as Mori claims, present the text "as a clarification of his fideism." Only when the text is given a "more serious and proper tone," that is, when it is stripped of its irony and sarcasm, does it cease to be a parody of his views and become an accurate expression of them. Bayle explicitly dissociates himself from the unamended text, introducing it with the comment that "this thought has been given a ridiculous sense, in the hands of a master."4 But Mori takes this text as it stands to convey Bayle's message, as if Bayle had not commented on it at all. It is as if, to repeat the text at the end of my paper, the Bible were to be cited as stating the claim that there is no God. It does so, of course, but only preceded by the disclaimer that only "the fool hath said in his heart there is no God" (Psalm 14: 1).According to Mori, Bayle's use of Saint-Evremond was provocative. Bayle's text is not provocative, however. Had he intended it to be, he would have directly cited Saint-Evremond, without comment. Instead, he is perfectly clear about whom he is quoting and how that source should be understood. To be sure, such a citation is dramatic, and no doubt designed for effect, but the effect is to show how unexceptional Bayle took his conception of the faith-reason relation to be. Bayle in the Eclaircissement is not trying to convert anyone but to explain his position in a way that makes it acceptable to the Consistory of the Walloon Church. To be sure, it is an irony that Saint-Evremond's text, slightly but importantly corrected, expresses Bayle's view, but it is not an irony in the sense of winking sarcasm.Mori insists that, as a matter of historical fact, Bayle's text was found to be provocative... (shrink)

These paperback editions preserve the original texts of these important books while presenting them in durable paperback editions.

RÉSUMÉ: Moore attribuait l’idéalisme de Berkeley à sa négligence de la distinction entre l’acte d’appréhension et son objet. Bien que Berkeley ait justement tracé cette distinction dans le premier Dialogue, et l’ait rejetée, peu s’en sont aperçu, et ceux qui l’ont remarqué lui reprochent habituellement de confondre l’acte d’appréhension avec une action. La thèse ici développée est que Berkeley n’est pas coupable de cette confusion et qu’il rejette la distinction, en fait, pour de bonnes raisons à caractère empiriste, qui ont (...) à voir avec ce que l’on tient pour son argument principal. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Journal of the History of Philosophy 41.1 (2003) 128-129 [Access article in PDF] Robert Crocker, editor. Religion, Reason and Nature in Early Modern Europe. Dordrecht: Kluwer, 2001. Pp. xix + 228. Cloth, $77.00. By describing the early modern period as such, we thereby avow a continuity with it that ill squares with the following, insufficiently appreciated fact. The early modern counterparts of the largely atheistic American Philosophical Association, let's (...) say, were to an even greater degree theistic, and, moreover, theism affected their description and explanation of the world in a profound way—certainly more so than it does their few theistic descendents. This is true even of authors, like Hobbes and Spinoza, who might be read as leading to later atheism. The fact of early modern theism and its centrality in early modern philosophy and science are amply demonstrated in one after another of the eleven essays of this book.An emblematic figure is Robert Boyle, who figures as a main player in three of the essays, and is at least mentioned in five of the others. Lotte Mulligan, for example, investigates the role of "right reason" in Boyle's argument that religion is illuminated and made [End Page 128] plausible by metaphorically expressed analogies with natural philosophy, and conversely. The upshot is that only the "Christian Virtuoso," endowed with right reason whereby he is inspired to notice and express these analogies, was in a position to interpret the codes expressed both in the book of revelation and in the book of nature, one being incomplete without the other.Luisa Simonutti treats Boyle's engagement with the theological and scientific work of Spinoza through Spinoza's correspondence with Oldenburg. And G. A. J. Rogers deploys the work of Boyle, as well as of Locke, Newton, and the Cambridge Platonists, against the once-standard view (vide Butterfield) that "a major feature of the seventeenth-century was a secularization of knowledge." (Given just the other papers in this volume, this may seem like shooting fish in a barrel. Even so, perhaps one or two of the shots appear to miss. Newton seems proleptically to answer Hume's skepticism about induction by invoking, not divine simplicity, but an argument to the best explanation.)These papers overlap with two others, forming the core of the book. Sarah Hutton and Robert Crocker take on Cambridge Platonism. The former deals with Ralph Cudworth's rejection of Cartesian voluntarism in favor of an intellectualism of goodness and wisdom that grounds both the providential governance of the world and its intelligibility to human inquiry. The latter deals with Henry More's doctrine of the soul's pre-existence, a prima facie unlikely doctrine, but one that is less problematic, according to More, than the orthodox alternatives (creationism and traducianism).Three other papers fall outside this core, but their topics are no less relevant. Perhaps the most undeniable connection between the natural and the supernatural is to be found in Grotius, here studied by Jacqueline Lagree. Likely the most unexpected player will be the eccentric esprit fort, Cyrano de Bergerac. His work of nearly pure fantasy, in the Rabelaisian tradition, might well have made later, more serious heterodoxies possible. James E. Force provides a nice case study in Newton's reliance on what he took to be providentially guided comets as sources for the replenishment of otherwise declining celestial motion and matter (a line which, ironically, was picked up by Hume as a premise of an argument designed to undo the argument from design). Richard H. Popkin outlines three views of Judaism in the period. There is little connection with nature, but an important one with reason via a problem that exercised Cudworth and Newton: most peoples are polytheistic despite the clear monotheism of revelation. One theory had it that Judaism was the original, pure religion, which degenerated into various forms of paganism. But this degeneracy was soon read by the English deists such that originally there was a natural religion, of which Judaism and all others were a degeneration. Transmitted to the Enlightenment by Spinoza... (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Proust and the Phenomenology of MemoryThomas M. Lennon"I still believe that anything that I do outside of literature and philosophy will be so much time wasted." Thus did the twenty-two year old Marcel Proust (1871–1922) write to his father, reluctantly agreeing to consider a career in the foreign service as an alternative to the legal profession otherwise being urged upon him. ("I should vastly prefer going to work (...) for a stockbroker," was his comment.)1 Happily for us all, Proust was obliged to do neither, and in fact was able to do both philosophy and literature. As André Maurois puts it, "[Proust's] great novel is philosophy incarnate."2 Certainly, In Search of Lost Time is saturated with philosophy, the appreciation of which cannot help but enhance our understanding of this great work. The thesis here will be that a loosely phenomenological account of the work's central concept of memory gives us the structure of the work as a whole.The biographical facts suggest such an approach. Proust received a license from the Sorbonne in 1895, and, more importantly, had previously been a student of the philosopher Alphonse Darlu at the Lycée Condorcet. Although he published very little, Darlu was a charismatic, inspirational figure for his students—not least of all for Proust himself, who described him as "the great philosopher whose inspired words, more certain to last than any writing would, gave birth in me as in so many others to thought itself."3 A touching artifact of Proust's time with Darlu is his report card, preserved in the Proust Museum at Illiers-Combray. Not incidentally, it shows a concentration on the classical authors who will be deployed here. We also have a wonderful little text that argues a kind of phenomenalism influenced perhaps by Hume, and certainly by Kant.4 The one author important to our account whose name does not figure as such in any of this material is Malebranche; but we know [End Page 52] that Proust was familiar with the great Oratorian since he quotes him.5 In fact, the only author appearing below who could not have been on Proust's shelf is Kundera, the most philosophical and Proustian of all recent novelists.We begin with a text; it is the most famous of all in French literature, the episode of the madeleine from the Search. The text has become so well known—through hearsay more than from having been read, no doubt—that it has invited "kitchification."6 Even so, it is an exquisite piece of writing, which, in any case, is essential to the thesis here.Many years had elapsed during which nothing of Combray... had any existence for me, when one day in winter as I came home, my mother, seeing that I was cold, offered me some tea, a thing that I did not ordinarily take.... She sent out for one of those plump little cakes called 'petites madeleines'.... I raised to my lips a spoonful of the tea in which I had soaked a morsel of the cake. No sooner had the warm liquid, and the crumbs with it, touched my palate than a shudder ran through my whole body.... And suddenly the memory [le souvenir] returns. The taste was that of the little crumb of 'madeleine' which on Sunday mornings at Combray... my Aunt Léonie used to give me, dipping it first in her own cup of real or lime-flower tea.... Immediately the old grey house upon the street rose up like the scenery of a theatre... in a moment all the flowers in our garden and in M. Swann's park, and the water-lilies on the Vivonne and the good folk of the village and their little dwellings and the parish church and the whole of Combray and of its surroundings, taking their proper shapes and growing solid, sprang into being, town and gardens alike, from my cup of tea.7There are other such episodes of the past springing into being, but not many, and they occur but infrequently, until the very end of this vast work, when they come upon the narrator rapidly and almost... (shrink)

ABSTRACT: Indifference is a term often used to describe the sort of freedom had by the will according to the libertarian, or Molinist account. It is thought to be a univocal term. In fact, however, it is used in at least seven different ways, in a variety of domains during the early modern period. All of them have plausible roots in Descartes, but he himself uses the term in only one sense, and failure to notice this consistent use by him (...) has bedeviled interpretations of his account of the will. (shrink)

This chapter contains sections titled: Two Philosophical Impulses Substance The Empiricists on Substance Descartes on Substance Spinoza on Attribute The Subjective Interpretation The Objective Interpretation Gueroult OI and SI Descartes and Spinoza.

A dozen papers by internationally known scholars explore questions largely unthinkable without Richard Watson's classic Downfall of Cartesianism: Descartes in Holland, Descartes and Simon Foucher, and issues raised by Descartes for philosophy of mind, philosophy of science, translation and toleration.

The recent literature has seriously challenged, and in my view defeated, the traditional representationalist interpretation of Descartes. One contributor to it, John Yolton, has recently extended its arguments to argue that the traditional representationalist interpretation of Locke must be relinquished as well, that Locke, following the Cartesian path of Arnauld, held a semiotic theory of ideas which “de-ontologized” them and construed them as signs or cues in the direct perception of physical objects. The Cartesian support for this view, especially in (...) La Dioptrique, has been questioned by R.F. McRae, who argues that “if Locke accepts Descartes' theory of vision, then Descartes' conception of sensations as signs provides no support for the direct realist interpretation of Locke.” My aim here is not to resolve the representationalism issue, but to show the irrelevance to it of the kinds of questions the Yolton-McRae exchange raises concerning sense perception. I shall try to show that there stems from Descartes a single account of those questions the essentials of which are embedded in theories falling on both sides of the representationalism issue. That single account involves a theory of judgment and vision, especially of distance, which in the case of Malebranche and Berkeley, even involves the same confusions. (shrink)

: An attempt at defending a version of John Yolton's non‐representationalist reading of Locke's account of perception against Vere Chappell's very threatening criticisms. Concerning this version, which takes ideas to be appearances, Chappell questioned their identity criteria, their relation to what they are appearances of, and their nature in general.

: A continuation of the debate over the intelligibility, and plausibility, of Yolton's reading of Locke's account of perception. Here, the issue turns on the de‐reification of ideas and its implications for the putative axioms of symmetry and transitivity governing the identity of ideas. The issue is illustrated by what Locke says about confused ideas.

Leibniz avait certes raison d'opposer Locke à Descartes et de le situer plutôt dans la lignée de Gassendi et l'atomisme antique. Mais le problème est de distinguer entre Gassendi et ses disciples contemporains de Locke comme source immédiate d'inspiration pour celui-ci. Ses Commonplace Books attestent que Locke avait lu Gassendi avec attention, et son Journal indique que pendant ses séjours à Paris, il fut en contact avec des gassendistes tels Bernier et Launay, dont il acheta les oeuvres pour les emporter (...) en Angleterre. L'analyse que Locke fournit de l'espace est d'un intérêt particulier, car tout en témoignant de l'orientation que Leibniz attribuait à Locke, elle s'écarte nettement des vues de Gassendi sur la question. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:119. HUME'S CONDITIONS FOR' CAUSATION: FURTHER TO GRAY AND IMLAY As part of his second proof of the existence of God, Descartes in Meditations III argues a causal premise derived from the nature of time. He argues it follows from the nature of time "that, in order to be conserved in each moment in which it endures, a substance has need of the same power and action as would (...) be necessary to produce and create it anew, supposing it did not yet exist; so that the light of nature shows us clearly that the distinction between creation and conservation is solely a distinction of reason." The nature of time to which he refers allows only a finite divisibility into durationless moments, each of which is entirely independent of every other. In the ultimate analysis, nothing true of one moment is deducible from what is true of any other, even what happens to be eternally true. The doctrine of the creation of the eternal verities is of a piece with this conception of time, and following with it from the conception of the divinity as sheer omnipotence, points to Hume's view that experience is the only guide to the world. It would seem to be Descartes' view, that nothing at a given time can stand in the necessary relation it must have to be a cause of something at another time; or, only something outside time can be a cause, for whose operation things in time can serve as but occasions. To what extent this dialectic in fact led to later occasionalist views is an historical question we need not consider. My only suggestion here concerns Hume's réponse to the occasionalists. With all but psychological necessity eliminated from his analysis of causation, Hume effectively argues the familiar case that occasional causes are the only causes by arguing the finite divisibility of time. In the literature only Laporte has held that for Descartes time is infinitely divisible and in this sense continuous. The separability of the parts of time, he 120. thought, suffice for their independence and contingency. But if time is continuous, its parts are inseparable; as Gueroult correctly observes, by discontinuity is meant con2 tingence, independence and separability. In addition, if a moment had duration, light would not be propagated instant aneously, thus according to Descartes upsetting his entire 3 physics. Gueroult maintains, rather, that Descartes' view of time is determined by his view of motion. Whatever the historical and logical priorities, there clearly is a connection between the above and what Bergson called the cinematographic conception of motion as a succession of static objects. It is a conception that precludes events as such. Motion occurs only in time, never at the moment, and occurs as a result of the re-creation of matter with regularly differing spatial relations. Due to metaphysical consideration expressed in theological terms, especially with reference to the immutability and simplicity of divine ways, this recreation of matter is constrained in certain ways, some of which we pick out as conditions for what was later called occasional causation. Put very simply, only what is constantly conjoined can stand in this relation; and that there should be instances of constant conjunction follows from the metaphysical considerations. With Hume's elimination of these metaphysical considerations, the status of the conditions, which he takes over as conditions for causation simpliciter, becomes problematic. But a recent challenge to Hume's program is still more problematic. The contention is that there is a case in which Hume's conditions necessary fo constant conjunction cannot all be satisfied. Even worse, i is a case in which his analysis ought to be conspicuously successful, viz. collision, which Hume like Descartes con4 ceives in cinematographic terms. The aim of this paper is to show that Hume's analysis stands against the challenge. Consider the following diagram which illustrates the positions (A3, A_...) of two balls (x,y) at successive moments (t_, t.,...)· 121. A3 A2 A1 A B -B1 B2 B3 fc0 T T T ©© © G®©T©T h fc3 fc4 fc5 H Robert Gray's thesis is that in at least one case of causation, collision which results in... (shrink)

Peter Winch prefaced The Idea of A Social Science with the above quotation adumbrating his thesis that the rules endowing actions with their sense are, like all rules, relative to a social context. A good example, no less illustrative for being imaginary, is Wittgenstein’s of a society in which lumber is piled in arbitrarily varying heights and priced according to the area occupied by the base of the piles. When asked why they do not price the lumber according to the (...) amount, the members of this society insist that they do. Precisely what these people are doing in their commercial practice has no sense apart from the rules which define the practice itself. I shall not here directly argue for this idealistic approach to behavior, but instead exploit it to make three related points. 1) The literature discussing the extensional equivalence of act and rule utilitarianism over the past two decades has taken a different approach, one which is more congenial with realism. The result, in my view, is that this literature has contested the issue using a conception of an act which is inapplicable to rule utilitarian theories. 2) With the more appropriate idealistic conception of an act, rule utilitarianism clearly emerges as inequivalent to act utilitarianism, for they are seen to be theories about different kinds of events. When a rule utilitarian asks, what if everyone did the same, he is asking about the consequences of something which differs more than just numerically from what brings about the consequences of interest to an act utilitarian. Indeed, he must be asking about acts as we ordinarily conceive them, whereas the act utilitarian must be asking about something else. 3) Though it appeals to the consequences of the universal practice of acts so conceived, rule utilitarianism is nonetheless the deontological theory it was intended to be. This is important because, as it will be seen, its prescriptions are thus more practicable than those of the teleological act utilitarianism. (shrink)

Leibniz avait certes raison d'opposer Locke à Descartes et de le situer plutôt dans la lignée de Gassendi et l'atomisme antique. Mais le problème est de distinguer entre Gassendi et ses disciples contemporains de Locke comme source immédiate d'inspiration pour celui-ci. Ses Commonplace Books attestent que Locke avait lu Gassendi avec attention, et son Journal indique que pendant ses séjours à Paris, il fut en contact avec des gassendistes tels Bernier et Launay, dont il acheta les oeuvres pour les emporter (...) en Angleterre. L'analyse que Locke fournit de l'espace est d'un intérêt particulier, car tout en témoignant de l'orientation que Leibniz attribuait à Locke, elle s'écarte nettement des vues de Gassendi sur la question. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Bayle’s Anticipation of PopperThomas M. LennonA comprehensive history of skepticism might someday argue, what now perhaps seems prima facie implausible, that Karl Popper (1902–96) was anticipated by Pierre Bayle (1647–1706). Now, pointing out adumbrations, anticipations, or even outright earlier statements of later philosophical views is by itself of only antiquarian interest. Questions of priority may be of importance in the history of science but not in the history of (...) philosophy, in which the exercise must pay off in a better understanding of the connected authors.For example, in a paper called “Locke’s Anticipation of Kripke,” J. L. Mackie drew attention to passages in Locke where the so-called causal theory of reference recently advanced by Kripke and others is at least adumbrated. 1 The so-called traditional theory of reference has it that denotation is fixed by connotation—in the terminology of Locke, reference to a thing requires the idea of that thing. But Mackie discovered that Locke thought it possible, at least under certain circumstances, to refer to the real essence of gold, for example, even though we have no idea whatsoever of that essence. The causal theory is supposed to overthrow the traditional theory precisely in that it systematically allows such reference in ignorance of essence. Mackie’s discovery is ironic, for Locke is the author most often associated with the traditional theory.Mackie himself did nothing with the Locke-Kripke connection, which he seems to have regarded as a curiosity. In fact the anticipation, if startling, seems rather slight and circumscribed considering that, in the passages cited by Mackie, Locke sees such reference only when an instance of gold is present to be referred to. But there is at least this payoff, that the so-called traditional theory of [End Page 695] reference may not be quite traditional. Moreover, it may be, not just Locke, but the whole skeptical tradition that anticipates Kripke. 2There is a close analogy between the Locke-Kripke connection and a connection that will be drawn here between Bayle and Popper. In both cases the seventeenth-century anticipator specifically sets out but clearly rejects a view that is later central to the twentieth-century anticipated. That Kripke should be anticipated by the very author whose “traditional” view is most often held up as a foil to the causal theory obviously involves a certain irony, but any irony in Popper’s being anticipated by such a figure as Bayle will be dispelled by the more systematic connections between them. 3 Here, at the end, some indication of these systematic connections will be sketched, but the main purpose of this paper is only to provide a program for interpreting Bayle. The payoff of Bayle’s anticipation of Popper, then, is an optic that focuses for us this key figure of the early Enlightenment.Some brief indication of the systematic connections between Bayle and Popper will be useful at the outset, lest the main thrust of the paper be missed. After all, the specific anticipation of Popper by Bayle that is likened to Mackie’s Locke-Kripke connection is, like that connection, something of a curiosity—mildly interesting in its own right but without systematic significance by itself—for in both cases, the views are stated only to be rejected. In the case of Bayle and Popper, however, the negative connection leads one to further reflections that yield positive connections—rather as if Locke should be reread as Kripkean in other respects.This result is more interesting in the case of Bayle for two reasons. First, a rereading based on Popper is going to be far more comprehensive and programmatic than would anything based on Kripke. Second, readers of Bayle, far more than those of Locke, are in need of all the interpretive help they can get. Interpretations of Bayle notoriously vary with respect to every one of his views, and do so more widely than for any other figure in his period. Despite his universally acknowledged importance, 4 the literature has taken to referring to the actual views underlying that importance as “the Bayle enigma.” 5 [End Page 696]Here some of that enigma may be dispelled if... (shrink)

i began my “eleatic descartes” with a reminder of, what nobody denies, that Descartes is a convinced mechanist. Therefore, he must, in some sense, recognize motion. No less widely accepted is that Descartes is a plenum theorist. The main argument of the Eleatic interpretation is that given his articulation of the corporeal plenum in part two of the Principles, he cannot recognize motion by conceiving of it as real. And, because motion is what individuates bodies, there cannot be a multiplicity (...) of real bodies. Thus, as far as the material world is concerned, the two Eleatic elements are in place: as for Parmenides, so for Descartes, there is but one thing, and it does not change.For Descartes, that one thing.. (shrink)