Henry More was an expounder of Cambridge Platonism, as he largely relied on a Platonicinspired standpoint in pursuing his aims: the demonstration of the immortality of soul, the critique of atheism and religious enthusiasm. He maintains that soul emanates from God (being therefore not created and pre-existing body) and argues for the existence of a spirit of nature as means to explain natural phenomena, which cannot be accounted for only in mechanical terms. Moreover, he argues for the extended nature of (...) God and spirits, as only in this way they can act on the world. Accordingly, More rejects Descartes’s theory of immaterial substance, but relies on his ontological argument provide a demonstration of the existence of God. His critique to enthusiasm (especially that one characterizing Neoplatonic mysticism) is medical, as he distinguishes between a rational, religious inspiration, and a melancholic one. (shrink)

A central project of Enlightenment thought is to ground claims to natural freedom and equality. This project is the foundation of Suchon’s view of freedom. But it is not the whole story. For, Suchon’s focus is not just natural freedom, but also the necessary and sufficient conditions for oppressed members of society, women, to avail themselves of this freedom. In this paper I, first, treat Suchon’s normative argument for women’s right to develop their rational minds. In Section 2, I consider (...) Suchon’s three necessary and sufficient conditions for freedom, and the manners in which women are blocked from meeting them. The normative argument together with the obstacles to women meeting the conditions for freedom raises the question of how to get women into a position where they can enjoy the freedom to which they are entitled. In Section 3, I outline Suchon’s answer: women must live a life without attachment. I argue this answer situates Suchon both chronologically and theoretically between the Béguines, a medieval women’s spiritual movement, and 20th century feminist separatism. I conclude that Suchon’s view of freedom is radical, both for its time and ours, and deserves greater attention from historians of philosophy and of feminist thought. (shrink)

. The concept of bodily health is problematic for mechanists like Descartes, as it seems that they need to appeal to something extrinsic to a machine, i.e., its purpose, to determine whether the machine is working well or badly, and so healthy or unhealthy. I take issue with this claim. By drawing on the history of medicine, I suggest that in the seventeenth century there was space for a non-teleological account of health. I further argue that mechanists can and did (...) appeal to structural integrity, as a non-teleological notion of form, to ground the norms required for ascriptions of health. (shrink)

The aim of this paper is twofold: (1) to show the principal aspects of the way in which Newton conceived his mathematical concepts and methods and applied them to rational mechanics in his Principia; (2) to explain how the editors of the Geneva Edition interpreted, clarified, and made accessible to a broader public Newton’s perfect but often elliptic proofs. Following this line of inquiry, we will explain the successes of Newton’s mechanics, but also the problematic aspects of his perfect geometrical (...) methods, more elegant, but less malleable than analytical procedures, of which Newton himself was one of the inventors. Furthermore, we will also consider the way in which Newtonianism was spread before in England and afterwards on continental Europe. In this respect the Geneva Edition plays a fundamental role because of its complete apparatus of notes, and because it appeared only thirteen years after the publication of the third edition of the Principia (1726). Finally, we will also confront some problems connected to the metaphysics of calculus. Therefore, the case of Newton is one of those in which, starting from mathematics applied to physics, it is possible to connect an impressive series of fundamental arguments such as the role of mathematics in science; the comparison between Newton’s geometrical methods and analytical methods; the way in which Newtonianism was spread as well as the philosophical implications of Newton’s mathematical concepts. (shrink)

The central question of this paper is: what has Kant’s Refutation of Idealism argument proven, if anything? What is the real scandal of philosophy and universal human reason? I argue that Kant’s Refutation argument can only be considered sound if we assume that his target is what I call ‘metaphysical external-world skepticism.’ What is in question is not the ‘existence’ of outside things but their very ‘nature,’ that is, the claim that the thing outside us, which appears to us as (...) a persistent body in space, exists in itself _as a substantia noumenon_. Assuming the indirect-realist view that we only immediately know ideas and that their putative objects are known by inference, the metaphysical external-world skeptic doubts that the nature of things outside oneself is mind-independent. (shrink)

En el escrito Vorläufige Thesen zur Refomation der Philosophie, Ludwig Feuerbach atribuye a Spinoza la autoría de la filosofía especulativa. A la zaga queda Schelling, considerado por Feuerbach únicamente como el restaurador de la misma. En la secuencia establecida por éste, Hegel sería, por su parte, solo un elemento más en la constitución de la filosofía especulativa, aunque tiene el mérito de completar tal sistema de pensamiento. En el presente artículo pretendo determinar en qué medida el autor de esta filosofía (...) se halla presente en el que la consuma. Esbozaré la forma y grado de esa presencia poniendo el foco en un aspecto nuclear, que, al mismo tiempo, servirá de guía del trabajo aquí propuesto: la negación. (shrink)

What causes winds was regarded as one of the most difficult questions of early modern natural philosophy. Vitruvius, the ancient Roman architectural author, put forth an alternative to Aristotle’s theory by likening the generation of wind to the actions of the aeolipile, which he believed made artificial winds. As Vitruvius’s work proliferated during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, numerous natural philosophers, including Descartes, used the aeolipile as a model for nature. Yet, interpretations of Vitruvius’s text and of the relation of (...) the aeolipile to natural winds varied according to definitions and conceptions of air, wind, rarefaction, condensation, and vapor. (shrink)

Actio immanens - as many other terms, coined by the Aristotelian-Thomist philosophical tradition - is a biological concept par excellence. It was formed as a mental result of biological observation, on the strength of studies on living beings and so, refers to them first and foremost. During the last century, the term actio immanens gradually disappeared from philosophical encyclopedias and has totally vanished from the biological and philosophical language used to describe the dynamism of life. Moreover, if this term does (...) appear at all, its meaning is rather vague. However, actio immanens belongs to the group of key concepts, without which it would seem not possible to properly describe, nor to properly understand biological phenomena. (shrink)

Recent literature on Spinoza has emphasized his commitment to universal intelligibility, understood as the claim that there are no brute facts. We draw attention to an important but overlooked element of Spinoza's commitment to intelligibility, and thereby question its most prominent interpretation, on which this commitment results in the priority of conceptual relations. We argue that such readings are both incomplete in their account of Spinozistic intelligibility and mistaken in their identification of the most fundamental relation. We argue that Spinoza (...) is one of the first moderns to address the problem of conditions of intelligibility, and show that, in his metaphysics, expressive relations are best understood as relations of dependence for intelligibility: what a thing ‘expresses’ is its condition of intelligibility, that which determines how, through what concepts, it can be conceived. (shrink)

Descartes developed an elaborate theory of animal physiology that he used to explain functionally organized, situationally adapted behavior in both human and nonhuman animals. Although he restricted true mentality to the human soul, I argue that he developed a purely mechanistic (or material) ‘psychology’ of sensory, motor, and low-level cognitive functions. In effect, he sought to mechanize the offices of the Aristotelian sensitive soul. He described the basic mechanisms in the Treatise on man, which he summarized in the Discourse. However, (...) the Passions of the soul contains his most ambitious claims for purely material brain processes. These claims arise in abstract discussions of the functions of the passions and in illustrations of those functions. Accordingly, after providing an intellectual context for Descartes’s theory of the passions, especially by comparison with that of Tho- mas Aquinas, I examine its ‘machine psychology’, including the role of habituation and association. I contend that Descartes put forth what may reasonably be called a ‘psychology’ of the unensouled animal body and, correspondingly, of the human body when the soul does not intervene. He thus conceptually distinguished a mechanistically explicable sensory and motor psychology, common to nonhuman and human animals, from true mentality involving higher cognition and volition and requiring (in his view) an immaterial mind. (shrink)

The debate on personal persistence has been characterized by a dichotomy which is due to its still Cartesian framwork: On the one side we find proponents of psychological continuity who connect, in Locke’s tradition, the persistence of the person with the constancy of the first-person perspective in retrospection. On the other side, proponents of a biological approach take diachronic identity to consist in the continuity of the organism as the carrier of personal existence from a third-person-perspective. Thus, what accounts for (...) someone’s persistence over time, is the continuity of his mind on the one hand, and the continuity of his body on the other. In contrast to those views, the paper intends to show that bodily existence represents the basis of selfhood across time, both as the continuity of the experiential self and as the continuity of the autopoietic organism. On the one hand, the lived body conveys a continuity of the self from a first-person perspective, namely a pre-reflective feeling of sameness or a felt constancy of subjectivity. Moreover, an analysis of awakening and sleep shows that there is a continuous transition from full wakefulness to periods of deep sleep which may thus not be regarded as a complete interruption of subjective experience. On the other hand, this constancy converges with the continuity of the organismic life process as conceived from a third-person perspective. Thus, the experiential self of bodily subjectivity and the autopoietic self of the living organism should be regarded as two aspects of one and the same life process. Finally, the lived body also exhibits a specific form of memory that results from the continual embodiment of existence: it consists of all the affinities, capacities and experiences, which a person has acquired throughout his life. Thus, it provides a continuity of self that must not be actively produced through remembering, but rather integrates the person’s entire past in his present being and potentiality. (shrink)

Historians of philosophy are increasingly likely to emphasize the extent to which their work offers a pay‐off for philosophers of un‐historical or anti‐historical inclinations; but this defence is less familiar, and often seems less than self‐evident, to intellectual historians. This article examines this tendency, arguing that such arguments for the instrumental value of historical scholarship in philosophy are often more problematic than they at first appear. Using the relatively familiar case study of René Descartes' reading of his scholastic and Aristotelian (...) contemporaries, the article attempts to problematize this notion of pay‐off from an historian's perspective. (shrink)

This paper aims both to tackle the technical issue of deciphering Hobbes’s derivation of the sine law of refraction and to throw some light to the broader issue of Hobbes’s mechanical philosophy. I start by recapitulating the polemics between Hobbes and Descartes concerning Descartes’ optics. I argue that, first, Hobbes’s criticisms do expose certain shortcomings of Descartes’ optics which presupposes a twofold distinction between real motion and inclination to motion, and between motion itself and determination of motion; second, Hobbes’s optical (...) theory presented in Tractatus Opticus I constitutes a more economical alternative, which eliminates the twofold distinction and only admits actual local motion, and Hobbes’s derivation of the sine law presented therein, which I call “the early model” and which was retained in Tractatus Opticus II and First Draught, is mathematically consistent and physically meaningful. These two points give Hobbes’s early optics some theoretical advantage over that of Descartes. However, an issue that has baffled commentators is that, in De Corpore Hobbes’s derivation of the sine law seems to be completely different from that presented in his earlier works, furthermore, it does not make any intuitive sense. I argue that the derivation of the sine law in De Corpore does make sense mathematically if we read it as a simplification of the early model, and Hobbes has already hinted toward it in the last proposition of Tractatus Opticus I. But now the question becomes, why does Hobbes take himself to be entitled to present this simplified, seemingly question-begging form without having presented all the previous results? My conjecture is that the switch from the early model to the late model is symptomatic of Hobbes’s changing views on the relation between physics and mathematics. (shrink)

The paper distinguishes between two kinds of mathematics, natural mathematics which is a result of biological evolution and artificial mathematics which is a result of cultural evolution. On this basis, it outlines an approach to the philosophy of mathematics which involves a new treatment of the method of mathematics, the notion of demonstration, the questions of discovery and justification, the nature of mathematical objects, the character of mathematical definition, the role of intuition, the role of diagrams in mathematics, and the (...) effectiveness of mathematics in natural science. (shrink)

Critique as a philosophical concept needs to be recast once it is linked to the possibility of a productive opening. In such a context critique has an important affinity to destruction and forms of inauguration. Working through writings of Marx and Walter Benjamin, specifically Benjamin's 'The Meaning of Time in the Moral World', destruction and inauguration are repositioned in terns of othering and the caesura of allowing.

Resumen¿Es relevante la propuesta moral cartesiana? La influencia de Montaigne sobre Descartes se sitúa no sólo al inicio (como lo que debe ser superado) sino también al final de la filosofía cartesiana, porque la moral cartesiana recoge aspectos clave de la actitud vital que aparece en los Ensayos de Montaigne. El análisis de los textos cartesianos de la década de los 40, y en especial de Principios de la Filosofía, permite precisar la peculiaridad de la moral cartesiana, que sin abandonar (...) Montaigne apunta a Kant.Palabras claveDescartes, Filosofía Moral, Montaigne, Principios de la FilosofíaAbstractIs the Cartesian moral proposal relevant? Montaigne’s influence on Descartes stands at the beginning and end of Cartesian philosophy; at the beginning because it is in the epistemological field, which must be surpassed; at the end, because the Cartesian moral collects key aspects of the attitude towards life that appear in Montaigne’s Essays. The analysis of Principles of Philosophy, among other texts, allows us to specify the peculiarity of the Cartesian moral, which without moving away from Montaigne approaches Kant.KeYwordsDescartes, Moral Philosophy, Montaigne, Principles of Philosophy. (shrink)

Laetitia in Spinoza has a twofold meaning: on the one hand is a passion, then is a product of inadecuates ideas and is associated with the first kind of knowledge (Imaginatio); on the other hand is expression of the Conatus and is an active affect (Fortitudo) connected with the third kind of knowledge (Scientia intuitiva). This second meaning confront us to a happines no human, frozen, abyssal which prefigure thinkers as Nietzsche, Bataille or lanchot.

Leibniz frequently argued that reasons are to be weighed against each other as in a pair of scales, as Professor Marcelo Dascal has shown in his article "The Balance of Reason." In this kind of weighing it is not necessary to reach demonstrative certainty – one need only judge whether the reasons weigh more on behalf of one or the other option However, a different kind of account about rational decision-making can be found in some of Leibniz's writings. In his (...) article "Was Leibniz's Deity an Akrates?" Professor Jaakko Hintikka has argued that Leibniz developed a new vectorial model for rational decisions which is better suited to complicated decisions, where values are complementary to each other. This model, related closely to his work in metaphysics and the philosophy of mind, is a heuristic device which helps in finding rational combinations - and in an ideal case an optimum - between plural inclinations to the good. I shall argue that Leibniz applies more or less implicitly both of these models in his practical rationality. In simple situations he applied the pair of scales model and in more complicated situations he applied the vectorial model. (shrink)

This essay is a critical assessment of Sellars' interpretation and criticism of Descartes. It argues that Sellars made several mistakes in his view of Descartes, although the general thrust of his critique is sound.

Since the demise of the Sense-Datum independent objects or events to be objects Theory and Phenomenalism in the last cenof perception; however, unlike Direct Retury, Direct Realism in the philosophy of alists, Indirect Realists take this percepperception has enjoyed a resurgence of tion to be indirect by involving a prior popularity.1 Curiously, however, although awareness of some tertium quid between there have been attempts in the literature the mind and external objects or events.3 to refute some of the arguments against (...) Idealists and Phenomenalists agree with Direct Realism, there has been, as of yet, the Indirect Realists. (shrink)