The paper presents the notion of “Spirit of Nature” in Henry More and describes its position within More’s philosophical system. Through a thorough analysis, it tries to show in what respects it can be considered a scientific object and in what respects it cannot. In the second part of this paper, More’s “Spirit of Nature” is compared to Newton’s various attempts at presenting a metaphysical cause of the force of gravity, using the similarities between the two to see this notorious (...) problem of Newton scholarship in a new light. One thus sees that if Newton drew from Stoic and Neo-Platonic theories of aether or soul of the world, we need to fully acknowledge the fact that these substances were traditionally of a non-dualistic, half-corporeal, half-spiritual nature. Both More’s “Spirit of Nature” and Newton’s aether can thus be understood as different attempts at incorporating such a pneumatic theory into the framework of modern physics, as it was then being formed. (shrink)

In my paper, I dispute Christian Hengstermann’s analysis of More’s philosophical system as a form of panentheistic panpsychism in which matter is alive by virtue of being the last emanation from God. I show that, in his mature period, More explicitly rejected such an emanationist doctrine and attributed the non-mechanical powers of matter to an outside immaterial principle, the Spirit of Nature. Ultimately, this leads to a system in which divine space, the Spirit of Nature and the spirit of God (...) are representations of various aspects of the divine essence, as it is at work in the world. On the other hand, matter is not part of this triadic structure and can only be said to be alive at the cost of a rather counterintuitive redefinition of the notion of “life”. (shrink)

The text is divided into two parts. In the first part, the author describes the eternalists’ and presentists’ positions as the two basic possible statements of the ontology of time . The eternalist position and the emphasis it puts on the actual existence of past and future events are thoroughlly analysed in order to show that in fact, they end up making strings of symbols that are not correct statements. It is therefore necessary to step beyond these clumsy statements and (...) try to understand more exactly the eternalist intuitions on a deeper, metaphysical level. That is the main concern of the second part of the text, in which the metaphysical implications of both positions are compared. At the end of the linguistical analysis in the first part, we got to a point where it may seem that presentism and eternalism are only different attempts at expressing what is in fact the same understanding of the nature of time, but in the metaphysical analysis that follows, it will turn out that they are not. Presentism and eternalism are shown to be two different ontological approaches of time in relation to space . The author then focuses on the consequences these two positions have especially on the concept of the present and of its flow through time. In the end, presentism and eternalism turn out to be completely different positions that – in parallel with the famous McTaggart’s argument – claim a very strong reality of time on the one hand or, on the other hand, its utter unreality. (shrink)

Some connection between the philosophy of Henry More and Francesco Patrizi is often assumed but rarely receives detailed attention.1 When it does, researchers’ attention tends to focus on their doc...