I argue that Émilie Du Châtelet breaks with Christian Wolff regarding the scope and epistemological content of the principle of sufficient reason, despite his influence on her basic ontology and their agreement that the principle of sufficient reason has foundational importance. These differences have decisive consequences for the ways in which Du Châtelet and Wolff conceive of science.

This journal article has been superseded by a revised version, published in the collection _Essays on the Philosophy and Science of Rene Descartes_, ed. by Stephen Voss (Oxford University Press, 1993), 259–287.

Recent Cartesian scholarship postulates two Descartes, separating Descartes into a scientist and a metaphysician. The purpose varies, but one has been to show that the metaphysical Descartes, of the Meditations, is less genuine than the scientific Descartes. Accordingly, discussion of God and the soul, the evil demon, and the non-deceiving God were elements of rhetorical strategy to please theologians, not of serious philosophical argumentation. I agree in finding two Descartes, but the two I identify are not scientist and philosopher, but (...) practitioner and methodologist of the mathematical sciences on the one hand, and metaphysician of a new, general science of nature on the other. This chapter examines the transition to the second Descartes, and especially the metaphysical turn. It proposes that although Descartes' doubt was methodological and he felt no serious threat from skepticism and absolute certainty was not his primary goal. Rather, the doubt was used to reform the intellect, or to teach the use of the pure intellect (and to obtain certainty in that domain). Further, Descartes' metaphysics was primarily in the service of his natural philosophy (where in the main he did not claim absolute certainty). He did not talk about God and the soul in order to fool the theologians. His discussion of the relation between God and human reason was part of a metaphysical strategy in which, through his doctrine on the eternal truths, he separated knowledge of the first principles of natural philosophy (gained by the natural light) from theological cognition (through the light of grace), thereby seeking to render his metaphysics distinct from the proper domain of theology. (shrink)

Peter Anstey has suggested that in our analyses of early modern natural philosophy we should abandon a frequently used distinction: that between rationalism and empiricism. He argues that we should replace it with another distinction, that between experimental and speculative natural philosophy. The second distinction, he argues, was not only widely used at the time, but has a greater explanatory range. It follows, he suggests, that it is a better way of “carving up” the writings of that period.It is clear (...) that a distinction between experimental and speculative natural philosophy did become common in the late seventeenth-century. But I am less convinced that it is a useful one. This.. (shrink)

La idea de ciencia desarrollada por Aristóteles en sus tratados de lógica fue una referencia necesaria para los pensadores medievales. No obstante, la interpretación que propusieron Ockham y los nominalistas llevó a una revolución lingüística en la formulación de este concepto. Vincent Ferrer, aunque continuando con la tradición tomista, asume la transformación lingüística que trajo el nominalismo y reformula la doctrina aristotélica.

There is a crisis in philosophical rationality today—in which modern logic is implicated—that can be traced to the abandonment of a common background of principles. The situation has no parallel within the pre-modern tradition, which not only admits of such principles, but also refers them back to a set of assumptions grounded in a clearly religious frame of mind. Modern conceptions of rationality claim complete independence from religious sources, as from tradition more generally, and typically end up disposing of first (...) principles altogether. The result is a fragmentation of reason, which can be seen to be dramatically exemplified in the realm of modern logic, populated by countless different systems and incompatible conceptions of what it is to be a logic. Many of the conceptual choices that became implicit in the philosophical discussions eventually leading to the rejection of the religious picture, and ultimately to the aforementioned crisis, were themselves originally linked to religious premises, so that all along, a kind of religious subconscious has subsisted throughout those disputations; however, the lack of any proper recognition of this background obstructs the possibility of making a reasonable assessment of the nature and causes of the crisis. Alasdair MacIntyre, whose thought inspires the argument developed here, reached similar conclusions regarding practical rationality and the effects of abandoning the teleological framework of Aristotelian philosophy. MacIntyre’s arguments can be adapted, as he suggests, to deal with reason more generally, and his insistence upon the tradition-laden character of rational enquiry can help point toward the grounding of human reason in religion. (shrink)

Modern philosophy is often seen as characterized by a shift of focus from the things themselves to our knowledge of them, i.e., by a turn to the subject and subjectivity. The philosophy of Immanuel Kant is seen as the site of the emergence of the idea of a subject that constitutes the object of knowledge, and thus plays a central role in this narrative. This study examines Kant’s theory of knowledge at the intersection between the history of science and the (...) history of the modern subject, on the one hand, and in the tension between modern experimental and mathematical science and more traditional Aristotelian conceptions of epistemic perfection, on the other. The dissertation consists of four chapters. In the first chapter, I examine Kant’s concept of experience, and its relation both to Early Modern experimentalism and to the Wolffian tradition. In the second chapter, I argue that Kant adheres to a broadly Aristotelian conception of epistemic perfection – the ideal of understanding – but transforms this ideal into the self-understanding of reason, where reason can only have insight into the products of its own activity. In the third chapter, I use Kant’s conception of space and time to exemplify such products of reason, and argue that, for Kant, space and time are constructively generated representations that function as principles for ordering empirical knowledge. In the fourth and final chapter, I examine Kant’s conception of the subject, and situate it in relation to both the long history of the modern subject and German Enlightenment philosophy. Whereas the modern philosophical conception of the subject is usually taken to combine an ‘I’ functioning as the subject to which mental acts are attributed and an ‘I’ that has the ability to immediately perceive itself as the subject of these acts, I argue that Kant reconceives this relation between the ‘I’ and its acts as a purely intellectual self-relation. The unity of the ‘I’ is not a perceived unity, but a unity brought about by the intellect. (shrink)

Thomas Aquinas has long been understood to have reconciled faith and reason. Typically, he is understood as having provided justification for faith by means of proof, particularly, that the Five Ways prove the existence of God. Under this interpretation, faith becomes a species of justified belief, and the justification for faith rests upon the success of the Five Ways . In this dissertation, I argue that Aquinas' account of faith is not one of justified belief, at least as it is (...) understood in contemporary philosophy. Instead, I argue, faith has its own basis for epistemic "reasonableness"---a reasonableness that does not derive from ordinary evidence nor proof. Rather than requiring evidence accessible to the natural light of reason, Aquinas holds that faith has its own sort of "evidence"---that which results from the light of faith. Aquinas "Aristotelianizes" faith and argues that faith has the Aristotelian epistemic virtue of certitude, and in so doing reconciles faith and Aristotelian reason, at least as Aristotle was understood by Medieval philosophers. This reconciliation resolves important tensions between Aristotelian science and Christian doctrine. Further, I examine three contemporary accounts of what counts as an epistemically "responsible" belief and argue that under Aquinas' account, faith should be counted as rational, and in an important, though modified sense, as justified. (shrink)

This article presents a novel reading of Descartes’s critique of the traditional syllogistic. The reading differs from those previously presented by scholars who regard Descartes’s critique as a version of a well-known argument: that syllogisms are circular or non-ampliative and thus trivial. It is argued that Descartes did not see syllogisms as defective in themselves. For him the problem was rather that anyone considering a valid and informative syllogism must already know, by an intuition wholly independent of the syllogism, that (...) the conclusion follows from the premises. Moreover, without such an intuition the syllogistic on its own is incapable of determining whether the consequence truly holds. Thus the syllogistic is useless unless accompanied by an intuition that renders it otiose. This reading of Descartes’s view is supported and explained by examples drawn from Descartes’s writing and from the Port-Royal Logic—one of the first attempts to develop a logical system on Cartesian principles. (shrink)