Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz (1646–1716) was one of the great thinkers of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries and is known as the last “universal genius”. He made deep and important contributions to the fields of metaphysics, epistemology, logic, philosophy of religion, as well as mathematics, physics, geology, jurisprudence, and history. Even the eighteenth century French atheist and materialist Denis Diderot, whose views could not have stood in greater opposition to those of Leibniz, could not help being awed by his achievement, writing (...) in his Encyclopedia, “Perhaps never has a man read as much, studied as much, meditated more, and written more than Leibniz… What he has composed on the world, God, nature, and the soul is of the most sublime eloquence. If his ideas had been expressed with the flair of Plato, the philosopher of Leipzig would cede nothing to the philosopher of Athens.” (Vol. 9, p. 379) Indeed, Diderot's mood was almost despairing in a remark from another piece, which also has a great deal of truth in it: “When one compares the talents one has with those of a Leibniz, one is tempted to throw away one's books and go die quietly in the dark of some forgotten corner.” More than a century later, Gottlob Frege, who fortunately did not cast his books away in despair, expressed similar admiration, declaring that “in his writings, Leibniz threw out such a profusion of seeds of ideas that in this respect he is virtually in a class of his own.” (“Boole's logical Calculus and the Concept script” in Posthumous Writings , p. 9) The aim of this entry is primarily to introduce Leibniz's life and summarize and explicate his views in the realms of metaphysics, epistemology, philosophical theology, and natural philosophy. (shrink)

That Leibniz finds the philosophy of Spinoza horrifyingly wrong is obvious to anyone who reads Leibniz’s work; that Leibniz finds Spinozism so seductive that his own system is in danger of collapsing into it is less obvious but, I believe, equally true. The difference here is not so much between an exoteric and an esoteric philosophy suggested by Russell2 but between a thorough-going rationalism on the part of Spinoza and Leibniz’s “mitigated rationalism” – mitigated by the exigencies of his orthodox (...) Christianity. In other words, it is Leibniz’s traditional view of the nature of God and his creatures that leads him to abhor Spinoza’s vision, while his own commitment to a number of principles and ideas pushes him to rationalism. And if Kant is right that the mind naturally desires a system, then Leibniz ought to see the Spinozistic consequences of many of his philosophical principles. Of course, there is nothing new in saying that the God of Spinoza and the God of Leibniz are fundamentally different, but I believe that if we focus on Leibniz’s critique of Spinoza’s account of the nature of God and a constellation of related concepts, we can come to a deeper understanding of the thought of both philosophers. (shrink)

This paper addresses D. C. Williams’s question, “How can Leibniz know that he is a member of the actual world and not merely a possible monad on the shelf of essence?” A variety of answers are considered. Ultimately, it is argued that no particular perception of a state of affairs in the world can warrant knowledge of one’s actuality, nor can the awareness of any property within oneself; rather, it is the nature of experience itself, with the flow of perceptions, (...) that guarantees our actuality. A consequence of this view is that no non-actual individuals can truly be said to experience their worlds, nor can they ask the question if they are actual or not. (shrink)

Kant’s Thinker is an excellent and important addition to the literature. In it, Patricia Kitcher aims at arriving at a comprehensive understanding of Kant’s theory of the cognitive subject. To this end, she analyzes a central component of the most notoriously difficult part of the Critique of Pure Reason, the theory of the unity of apperception in the chapter on the Transcendental Deduction of the Categories. In Kitcher’s view, the ultimate payoff of such a study is that Kant’s theory (...) can “provide a ‘new’ source of illumination for current attempts to understand the nature of cognition and the mind” (3). This may be so. But the main value of the book will likely be for Kant scholars, who will appreciate the depth .. (shrink)

This paper addresses D. C. Williams’s question, “How can Leibniz know that he is a member of the actual world and not merely a possible monad on the shelf of essence?” A variety of answers are considered. Ultimately, it is argued that no particular perception of a state of affairs in the world can warrant knowledge of one’s actuality, nor can the awareness of any property within oneself; rather, it is the nature of experience itself, with the flow of perceptions, (...) that guarantees our actuality. A consequence of this view is that no non-actual individuals can truly be said to experience their worlds, nor can they ask the question if they are actual or not. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Journal of the History of Philosophy 39.3 (2001) 440-442 [Access article in PDF] Reinhard Lauth. Descartes ' Konzeption des Systems der Philosophie. Stuttgart (Bad Cannstatt): Frommann-Holzboog, 1998. Pp. x + 227 pp. Cloth, DM 64.00. Reinhard Lauth's Descartes ' Konzeption des Systems der Philosophie is an interesting addition to the literature on Descartes. Written by a renowned scholar of German Idealism, it does not represent an attempt to respond (...) to scholars of Descartes, to take part in the debate regarding aspects of Descartes's philosophy, nor to explain the role of Descartes's thought in the tumultuous seventeenth century, but rather to explain to scholars of German Idealism why Descartes should be considered the first and one of the greatest transcendental philosophers. It is no accident that in the index we find close to 50 references each to Kant and Fichte, while Descartes's important "rationalist" comrades, Spinoza and Leibniz, receive half as much attention; nor is it an accident that the first and last philosopher mentioned in the book is Fichte.Lauth's book is in the tradition of Gueroult's monumental Descartes selon l ' ordre des raisons (Paris, 1968, 2nd edition) and, as the title indicates, the subject of the book is Descartes's philosophy as a system, not as a collection of independent theses about various philosophical problems. However, unlike Gueroult, who concentrated on an [End Page 440] analysis of the Meditations, Lauth draws extensively on the Rules for the Direction of the Mind, Discourse on Method, Meditations, and Descartes's correspondence. That Descartes viewed philosophy as ideally constituting a system of human knowledge should not come as news to anyone who recalls Descartes's claim in the Preface to the Principles of Philosophy that all of philosophy is like a tree whose roots are metaphysics, trunk physics, and branches medicine, mechanics, and morals, or his claim in the Preface to the Meditations that there is a clear order of argumentation or reasons and that his goal is to lay bare the foundations of philosophy. How exactly Descartes's philosophy is to constitute a system is the trickier question that is Lauth's concern.According to Lauth, the order of reasons that one finds expressed in Descartes's first philosophy is not simply a series of biographical events, filling a psychological need in Descartes (cf. Alquié, La Découverte métaphysique de l ' homme chez Descartes [Paris, 1966]), but rather the "systematic path of the cogito itself" (X). And Lauth attempts to show that there is something inexorable in the way that conclusions about the world from the point of view of the thinking subject are made and follow from one another. This takes him along the well-known path of the Meditations: from the existence of the self, to the nature of the self, to the existence and nature of God, to the external world, and finally to the relation of mind and body. And here two interesting observations on Lauth's part should be singled out. First, Lauth does an admirable job in intimating the tension regarding the places of the thinking subject and God as the supreme principles in Descartes's system. On the one hand, it would seem that the thinking subject should be the highest principle in Descartes's philosophy insofar as its existence is the first thing known; but, according to Lauth, it cannot be the highest principle because it does not contain the principle of its own existence (76). On the other hand, if we claim that God is the highest principle then we must recognize that a system following from this principle must fail insofar as genuine knowledge of God surpasses the bounds of our finite, human knowledge (99-100). Second, in claiming that Descartes was a "transcendental philosopher," Lauth reminds us of the extent to which Descartes is concerned with the bounds of human knowledge as determinable from the thinking subject itself.While this work contains many useful insights—especially for those scholars of German Idealism who are looking for new ways of reflecting on their subject—it has... (shrink)

The connection between Spinoza and Nietzsche has often been remarked upon in the literature on the two thinkers.1 Not surprisingly, Nietzsche himself first noticed the similarity between his (earlier) thought and the thought of Spinoza, remarking to Overbeck in an oft-quoted postcard, “I have a precursor, and what a precursor!” He goes on to say, “Not only is his over-all tendency like mine – making knowledge the most powerful affect – but in five main points of his doctrine I recognize (...) myself; this most unusual and loneliest thinker is closest to me in precisely these matters: he denies the freedom of the will, teleology, the moral world order, the unegoistic, and evil. Even though the divergences are admittedly tremendous, they are due more to the difference in time, culture, and science.”2 One aspect of his own thought that Nietzsche does not list here, however, is his “doctrine” of “becoming who one is.” Is this an example of a point at which Spinoza and Nietzsche’s views separate? In this paper, I should like to consider whether or not Spinoza could plausibly be understood to have had a similar view; that is, I should like to examine whether or not the process for Spinoza of achieving happiness and beatitude can be seen principally as an instance of “becoming who one is.” There are, of course, some obvious and notorious difficulties in trying to understand what Nietzsche meant by the phrase “to become who one is.” After all, Nietzsche seems to deny both the existence of the self (as substance) and being in general, saying that there is only becoming. What, then, might this phrase mean? As this paper concerns principally the philosophy of Spinoza, I do not want to get too bogged down in the difficulties involved in interpreting Nietzsche; rather, I wish to follow without further argument the.. (shrink)

According to the standard view of his metaphysics, Leibniz endorses idealism: the thesis that the world is made up solely of minds or monads and their perceptual and appetitive states. Recently,this view has been challenged by some scholars, who argue that Leibniz can be seen as admitting corporeal substances, that is, animals or embodied souls, into his ontology, and that, therefore, it is false to attribute a strict idealism to him. Subtler accounts suggest that Leibniz begins his philosophical (...) career as an advocate of (some form of) the modern ‘mechanical’ philosophy and ends his career as an idealist, raising the issue when and why Leibniz adopts his monadological metaphysics. This article argues that, given a constellation of metaphysical, logical, and theological views, Leibniz is committed to the ontological primacy of mind or form even in his ‘middle years’. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:Individuation und Einzelnsein: Nietzsche, Leibniz, AristotelesBrandon C. LookPaola-Ludovika Coriando. Individuation und Einzelnsein: Nietzsche, Leibniz, Aristoteles. Frankfurt: Klostermann, 2003. Pp. ix. + 318. €28,00.What is a singular thing? Is there a first or last principle that allows us to call something an individual or one? What is the relation between the particular and the universal? Does the being of a particular mean the separation from the universal, or, on (...) the contrary, is the universal a post facto aggregation of individual subjects? What constitutes the individuality of man? This book, based on a lecture course given at the University of Freiburg, addresses these difficult questions and their answers by Nietzsche, Leibniz, and Aristotle.The author claims to limit the discussion to these philosophers because their philosophies represent distinct stations in the development of the question of individuation and the nature of individuality and, at the same time, because their different positions are both explicitly and implicitly related to each other (15). Coriando begins her discussion with Nietzsche, a philosopher one might not have linked at all to the "problem of individuation" per se, and moves backward in time to Leibniz and finally to Aristotle. The point of this order of presentation, the reader is told, is to trace back the essentials of the question of individuation to its origin: Aristotle (16). This strategy is largely successful.Nietzsche's primary concern, of course, is with the nature of the individual, or more particularly, the individual Mensch, and how he is distinguished from or distinguishes himself from the rest of the world. The answer, for Nietzsche, is to be found in his concept of the "will to power," which provides what Coriando calls his "ontological principle of individuation": the inherent drive for perspectival self-affirmation and self-increase (131). There is also, however, an "ethical principle of individuation": the attitude of a person vis-à-vis the eternal recurrence of the same. In accepting and letting go of the entirety of the world and its eternal recurrence, one "becomes who one is," and one can know one's individuality.Whereas Nietzsche tries to approach the problem of individuation independently of the entire western tradition of metaphysics, Leibniz is squarely within this tradition. Indeed, [End Page 121] in his first philosophical work, the Metaphysical Disputation on the Principle of Individuation, the sixteen-year-old Leibniz throws himself into a scholastic fray, carving out a strongly nominalist position. Leibniz's belief that only genuine individuals exist would, of course, stay with him throughout his career; the problem will be, as Coriando nicely shows, to give a precise account of the nature of individual substance. Coriando focuses on two works in her discussion, On the Correction of Metaphysics and the Concept of Substance and, to a much greater extent, the Monadology. The view that she extracts from these works should not be surprising. The principle of individuation, for Leibniz, rests in the active force of a monad and in the particular representation of the rest of the world from the monad's own point of view. Put this way, there is an interesting commonality with Nietzsche at work here.A similar commonality is shown with the thought of Aristotle. Here the principal concern is to explicate Aristotle's conception of ousia in De anima and MetaphysicsZ, H, and Q. Naturally, this leads into an account of how matter can be living and a further explication of Aristotle's energeia and entelecheia. In the end, it becomes clear that the set of concepts—energeia, conatus, will to power—are all, if not equivalent, at least performing largely the same role in guaranteeing the being of individuals. What has become "lost" in Aristotle's philosophy, however, is a notion like the perspectivalism present in Leibniz and Nietzsche, something that Coriando does not discuss at any length.This book offers a broad perspective on the question of individuation, and the choice of Nietzsche, Leibniz, and Aristotle allows Coriando to highlight interesting answers to this metaphysical problem. I do have two small quibbles. First, the problem of individuation, or the desire for a principium individuationis is so much a problem associated with medieval philosophy that... (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:Kant’s Transcendental Proof of RealismBrandon C. LookKenneth R. Westphal. Kant’s Transcendental Proof of Realism. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2004. Pp. x + 299. Cloth, $80.00.Westphal's book is a rich and exciting contribution to the field of Kant studies. Its claims run counter to much contemporary discussion of Kant's theoretical philosophy and indeed challenge some of Kant's fundamental doctrines, but the arguments are very compelling and therefore likely (...) to force us to rethink both the Critique of Pure Reason [CPR] and Kant's relevance to contemporary epistemology.The central point of this work is that, if we follow Kant's injunction to engage in reflection on our cognitive capacities, then we will be led not to Kantian transcendental idealism but to an unqualified realism about objects and events in space and time. The book's first three chapters are devoted to analyzing Kant's methodology and the much-overlooked idea of transcendental affinity. Westphal focuses on the Kantian duty of engaging in "transcendental reflection," which is "the action through which I make the comparison of representations in general with the cognitive power in which they are situated, and through which I distinguish whether they are to be compared with one another as belonging to pure understanding or to sensible intuition" (CPR, A 261/B 317). And he adds to this the more general methodological obligation of "epistemic reflection," or the duty to determine precisely our cognitive capacities and incapacities. If, then, we reflect on our representations, their origins in sensibility and the understanding, and on our powers to know things of ourselves and the world in general, then certain puzzles arise—puzzles that were confronted by Kant (and Hume and Hegel) but that have not received the attention they have deserved. Chief among these puzzles is our ability to identify single objects and events and track them in space through time. But, as Westphal is keen to point out, identifying any particular over time requires that we be able to re-identify that particular. Now, while this puzzle is addressed by Kant in the Transcendental Deduction and Analogies of Experience, it is important to see that there is a material condition necessary for the possibility of self-conscious experience of the world that is not fleshed out in great detail by Kant and seems to be completely overlooked in the literature on Kant, namely, "the presupposition of diversity in nature" and the homogeneity of its objects among themselves (CPR, A 657/B 685). In other words, the fact that we are able to associate our various sensations with each other at all (and thereby identify and re-identify objects) is due to their "transcendental affinity." And it is Westphal's contention that "on Kant's own principles, the transcendental affinity of the manifold of sensory intuition can only be reconstructed, but not constructed, by intellectual syntheses of the understanding" (91). Therefore, pace Kant, who held that only his transcendental idealism could explain the possibility of experience, Westphal argues that transcendental idealism runs afoul of many of Kant's own arguments and observations in the Transcendental Aesthetic and Transcendental Analytic and, more important, that transcendental affinity provides grounds for "realism sans phrase" (the author's phrase) about objects and events in space and time, and for the view that our mental states are determined by external objects. As Westphal puts it in his conclusion: "Kant's analysis of transcendental affinity is in fact a transcendental argument for mental content externalism" (266). [End Page 665]The second part of Westphal's argument revolves around a detailed examination of Kant's theses about transeunt causality and the nature of matter as expressed not only in the Critique of Pure Reason, but also in the Metaphysical Foundations of Natural Science and the Opus postumum. Roughly the problem is this: in order to have an adequately grounded metaphysics of nature, Kant needs not only the results of the Analogies of Experience, the transcendental causal thesis that every event has a cause, but also the metaphysical causal thesis that every physical event has an external physical cause. But, according to Westphal, in the Metaphysical Foundations... (shrink)

The book under review contains a selection of the papers presented at the conference “Leibniz and Adam,” held in Tel Aviv and Jerusalem from December 29, 1991 to January 2, 1992. The object of the conference and the book was to consider the role of Adam, the first man, in Leibniz’s thought and, in doing so, “to provide an unusual view of the interrelations between his metaphysics, philosophy of religion, philosophy of language, theory of knowledge, logic, attidude vis-à-vis mysticism, (...) philosophy of history, philosophy of nature, ethics, and philosophical anthropology”. (shrink)

Leibniz's correspondence with Des Bosses presents students of his thought with a problem. It contains some of Leibniz's longest and most detailed discussions of the nature of substance while at the same time introducing two concepts into Leibniz's metaphysics that continually baffle commentators: scientia visionis and the vinculum substantiale. The aim of this paper is to explicate the relationship between scientia visionis, or God's knowledge by vision, and the vinculum substantiale, or the substantial bond, and to show how these concepts (...) are used by Leibniz in the correspondence with Des Bosses to account for the unity and reality of corporal substances. In my view, the vinculum substantiale and scientia visionis do not represent rival strategies, as they have been recently portrayed in the literature; rather, they work together. But scientia visionis, when applied to questions of ontology, gives us a rather vacuous kind of reality, while the vinculum substantiale represents a much more significant, albeit problematic, account of the nature of substance. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Journal of the History of Philosophy 40.3 (2002) 399-400 [Access article in PDF] Book Review Radical Enlightenment: Philosophy and the Making of Modernity, 1650-1750 Jonathan I. Israel. Radical Enlightenment: Philosophy and the Making of Modernity, 1650-1750. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001. Pp. xx + 810. Cloth, $45.00. Jonathan Israel's goal in this excellent book is to show that we cannot fully understand the high Enlightenment—the age of the philosophes (...) and the French Revolution—without looking at the work and influence of that "most unusual and loneliest thinker" (to borrow a phrase from a later admirer): Spinoza. Israel gives us a detailed and nuanced account of the history of ideas in early modern Europe, focusing especially on the generations before Voltaire and Rousseau. Not only does Israel describe the general struggle between Enlightenment ideas and the status quo ante, he also discusses in depth the tensions between "mainstream" Enlightenment and its "radical" wing. More precisely and importantly, Israel argues that the high Enlightenment ought to be seen as the outcome of "a four-way conflict between Newtonians, neo-Cartesians, Leibnitio-Wolffians, and radicals" (715), a conflict that took place across Europe and whose dust had essentially settled by 1740. Thus, Israel is arguing against the view that the French philosophes were the dominant force in the intellectual world that led to the Revolution, against the view that Newton and Locke played a dominant role throughout Europe, and against the view that there were several distinct enlightenments with different national characters.What is meant by the term "radical Enlightenment"? According to Israel, radical Enlightenment comprises several views and tendencies in the realms of science, theology, and politics: in scientific matters, it embraces naturalism, mechanism, and materialism; in theological matters, it denies a moral order to the universe, a providential god, the Judeo-Christian(-Islamic) account of creation, miracles, and reward and punishment in an afterlife, and is critical of the idea of the divine inspiration of religious texts; in political matters, it unequivocally supports republicanism, even democracy; and, in all matters, it argues for the necessity of toleration and the "freedom to philosophize." For those who know Spinoza's philosophy, this ought to sound familiar.Israel's book is divided into five parts. In the first, he sketches the general intellectual milieu of early seventeenth-century Western Europe. The second part describes Spinoza and his circle and the philosophy of the Ethics and Tractatus Theologico-Politicus. In Parts III and IV, Israel discusses the immediate reactions to Spinozism, the varieties of radical Enlightenment made possible by Spinoza, and the "intellectual counter-offensive" to naturalism, materialism, atheism, and republicanism. Part V concerns the "clandestine progress" of Spinozism and radical ideas in different countries after the banning and censorship of so many radical works, and, in a brief epilogue, Israel argues that it is Rousseau who effectively reconciled mainstream Enlightenment thought with its radical relative. This is a lot of territory to cover, and Israel covers it admirably, offering illuminating discussions of other key figures of the time: Leibniz, Malebranche, Bossuet, Locke, Bayle, Wolff, Vico, Diderot, and La Mettrie. Another strength of Israel's book is, however, the extent to which he portrays thinkers (some radicals, some reactionaries) and works that are less familiar to most working in the field today. We learn not only about such figures as Bredenburg, Fontenelle, Le Clerc, Leenhof, and Boulainvilliers, but also, in a charming but unfortunately short chapter, about Spinozistic novels from the eighteenth century.As someone trained in a philosophy department to work on the history of philosophy, I felt uneasy in one respect with this book. While Israel emphasizes the battles between philosophies and ideas, he does not concern himself so much with the process of doing philosophy. That is, if there is a failing in this book, it is that we are presented with descriptions of philosophical views without always being given an adequate account of why such views were held by individual thinkers or how the theses of the radical Enlightenment, say, are related to each... (shrink)

The book under review contains a selection of the papers presented at the conference “Leibniz and Adam,” held in Tel Aviv and Jerusalem from December 29, 1991 to January 2, 1992. The object of the conference and the book was to consider the role of Adam, the first man, in Leibniz’s thought and, in doing so, “to provide an unusual view of the interrelations between his metaphysics, philosophy of religion, philosophy of language, theory of knowledge, logic, attidude vis-à-vis mysticism, (...) philosophy of history, philosophy of nature, ethics, and philosophical anthropology”. (shrink)

Roger Ariew begins this book with the following sensible claim: “A philosophical system cannot be studied adequately apart from the intellectual context in which it is situated”. His book, naturally enough, attempts to demonstrate the way in which Descartes responded to and affected the philosophical world of late Scholasticism. The ten chapters themselves are all previously, or soon to be, published essays, unified by the view that our knowledge of late Scholasticism is deeply imperfect and that our resulting picture (...) of Descartes is also imperfect. Each chapter provides an example of how, with a proper understanding of Scholastic philosophy, we arrive at a slightly different and more refined picture of Descartes. Indeed, Ariew’s work is the product of an admirably broad and detailed knowledge of the works of the major thinkers of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries; Toletus, Suarez, Eustachius, Basso, Clavius, Dupleix, Mersenne, Arnauld, and many others are the actors in this drama of the rise of Cartesianism. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:Kant’s Transcendental Proof of RealismBrandon C. LookKenneth R. Westphal. Kant’s Transcendental Proof of Realism. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2004. Pp. x + 299. Cloth, $80.00.Westphal's book is a rich and exciting contribution to the field of Kant studies. Its claims run counter to much contemporary discussion of Kant's theoretical philosophy and indeed challenge some of Kant's fundamental doctrines, but the arguments are very compelling and therefore likely (...) to force us to rethink both the Critique of Pure Reason [CPR] and Kant's relevance to contemporary epistemology.The central point of this work is that, if we follow Kant's injunction to engage in reflection on our cognitive capacities, then we will be led not to Kantian transcendental idealism but to an unqualified realism about objects and events in space and time. The book's first three chapters are devoted to analyzing Kant's methodology and the much-overlooked idea of transcendental affinity. Westphal focuses on the Kantian duty of engaging in "transcendental reflection," which is "the action through which I make the comparison of representations in general with the cognitive power in which they are situated, and through which I distinguish whether they are to be compared with one another as belonging to pure understanding or to sensible intuition" (CPR, A 261/B 317). And he adds to this the more general methodological obligation of "epistemic reflection," or the duty to determine precisely our cognitive capacities and incapacities. If, then, we reflect on our representations, their origins in sensibility and the understanding, and on our powers to know things of ourselves and the world in general, then certain puzzles arise—puzzles that were confronted by Kant (and Hume and Hegel) but that have not received the attention they have deserved. Chief among these puzzles is our ability to identify single objects and events and track them in space through time. But, as Westphal is keen to point out, identifying any particular over time requires that we be able to re-identify that particular. Now, while this puzzle is addressed by Kant in the Transcendental Deduction and Analogies of Experience, it is important to see that there is a material condition necessary for the possibility of self-conscious experience of the world that is not fleshed out in great detail by Kant and seems to be completely overlooked in the literature on Kant, namely, "the presupposition of diversity in nature" and the homogeneity of its objects among themselves (CPR, A 657/B 685). In other words, the fact that we are able to associate our various sensations with each other at all (and thereby identify and re-identify objects) is due to their "transcendental affinity." And it is Westphal's contention that "on Kant's own principles, the transcendental affinity of the manifold of sensory intuition can only be reconstructed, but not constructed, by intellectual syntheses of the understanding" (91). Therefore, pace Kant, who held that only his transcendental idealism could explain the possibility of experience, Westphal argues that transcendental idealism runs afoul of many of Kant's own arguments and observations in the Transcendental Aesthetic and Transcendental Analytic and, more important, that transcendental affinity provides grounds for "realism sans phrase" (the author's phrase) about objects and events in space and time, and for the view that our mental states are determined by external objects. As Westphal puts it in his conclusion: "Kant's analysis of transcendental affinity is in fact a transcendental argument for mental content externalism" (266). [End Page 665]The second part of Westphal's argument revolves around a detailed examination of Kant's theses about transeunt causality and the nature of matter as expressed not only in the Critique of Pure Reason, but also in the Metaphysical Foundations of Natural Science and the Opus postumum. Roughly the problem is this: in order to have an adequately grounded metaphysics of nature, Kant needs not only the results of the Analogies of Experience, the transcendental causal thesis that every event has a cause, but also the metaphysical causal thesis that every physical event has an external physical cause. But, according to Westphal, in the Metaphysical Foundations... (shrink)

It is common in the history of philosophy to view the Leibniz-Clarke correspondence as essentially a debate between Leibniz and Newton. According to this view, Clarke was merely Newton’s mouthpiece, or perhaps his amanuensis taking dictation from the “incomparable Mr. Newton” as Newton sought to demolish the philosophical views of his archenemy, Leibniz. In his new book, however, Ezio Vailati argues that we abandon this simplified view, first, because there is little historical evidence proving Newton’s role in (...) the correspondence, and second, because this common view does Clarke himself, described by Voltaire as “a veritable thinking machine”, a great injustice. Vailati’s approach is, then, to consider “the correspondence essentially as a confrontation between Leibniz and Clarke, the most important exponent of Newtonianism”. (shrink)

Success is a positive outcome resulting from an evaluation based on cer-tain criteria. Changes in these criteria will directly affect people's assessment of success. Today's world is living in a period dominated by a modern point of view. Therefore, evaluations of human achievement are usually made from this perspective. Since existence is composed of matter in the desecrated perception of the modern period, the first criterion of success is material gains. However, according to the Qur'an's conception of existence, matter (...) is only one dimension of existence. For this reason, the success criteria of the Qur'an differ from the criteria accepted by modernity, which excludes the sacred and metaphysics. In this case, the issue of what characteristics a successful person should have comes to the fore. In this article, the values of the Qur'an and the successful human profile it draws are examined from a comparative perspective in the context of the worldview of modernity that is based only on matter. This examination will be tried to be made through the equivalents of concepts and values such as freedom, good/right work, success and martyrdom in the Qur'an and positivist modern thought. Detection, analysis and comparison methods are used throughout the study. This study, aims to determine what the success criteria are in the general understanding of modernity and the Qur'an in theory, so that today's people living in modern times will be able to provide an opportunity to inquire about what understanding and values they have built their lives on. (shrink)

Religion is undergoing a transformation in current Western society. In addition to organized religions, there is a notable movement towards spirituality that is not associated with any institutions but in which experiences and notions of transcendence are still important. Transcendence can be described as God, the absolute, Mystery, the Other, the other as alterity, depending on one's worldview. In this book, these shifts in the views of transcendence in various areas of culture such as philosophy, theology, art, and politics are (...) explored on the basis of a fourfold heuristic model (proposed by Wessel Stoker)"--Back cover. (shrink)

According to what is known as the classic theory, beauty can be defined as unity or formal harmony. To overcome some of the criticisms that it encountered, the American philosopher Jared S. Moore proposed, in his paper from 1942, a modernisation of such theory, by distinguishing various types and subtypes of harmony which, taken together, are intended to cover both the objective and the subjective sides of beauty. Our goal is to look closer to some of the main principles that (...) emerge within Moore’s intricate taxonomy of harmony – most notably, the principles of organic unity, fittingness, and empathy – which in his article are only sketched or implicitly suggested. Employing such supplementations, we hope to make J.S. Moore’s comprehensive view of beauty even more complete from a theoretical standpoint and suitable to face the challenge posed by the modernist and postmodern artistic practices, which seemingly undermined the notions of beauty and formal harmony. (shrink)

Imagine I hold up a Granny Smith apple for all to see. You would thereby gain justified beliefs that it was green, that it was apple, and that it is a Granny Smith apple. Under classical foundationalism, such simple visual beliefs are mediately justified on the basis of reasons concerning your experience. Under dogmatism, some or all of these beliefs are justified immediately by your experience and not by reasons you possess. This paper argues for what I call the (...) class='Hi'>looks view of the justification of simple visual beliefs. According to the looks view, such beliefs are mediately justified on the basis of reasons concerning how the relevant things look. Unlike under classical foundationalism, under the looks view as I develop it, these reasons are public. They are public with respect to both their content and possession: with respect to content, they are not about ourselves and our experiences, and with respect to their possession, many people can have the very same looks-related reasons. (shrink)

As is well known, A. C. Haddon visited Torres Straits for the first time in the\nsummer of 1888 with the purpose of studying, as a marine biologist, the fauna\nand the structure and mode of formation of the coral reefs in Torres Straits. There\nbegan Haddon’s ’conversion’ from zoology to anthropology.’ It seems that\nHaddon felt an urgent need to collect ethnographic information on the islanders\nbecause he saw they were changing and diminishing in number very quickly, and\ntherefore their customs were vanishing.\nVery soon after (...) my arrival in the Straits I found that the natives of the\nislands had of late years been greatly reduced in number, and that, with the\nexception of but one or two individuals, none of the white residents knew\nanything about the customs of the natives, and not a single person cared\nabout them personally. When I began to question the natives I discovered\nthat the young men had a very imperfect acquaintance with the old habits\nand beliefs, and that only from the older men was reliable information to be\nobtained. So it was made clear to me that if I neglected to avail myself of the\npresent opportunity of collecting information on the ethnography of the\nislanders, it was extremely probable that that knowledge would never be\ngleaned - for if no one interested himself in the matter meanwhile, it was\nalmost certain that no trustworthy information could be collected in, say, ten years’ time. This being my opinion, I felt it my duty to fill up all the\ntime not actually employed in my zoological researches in anthropological\nstudies. (shrink)

Together this August, Hastings Center fellows and staff scholars left their respective studies to look up. Over a three-day period, we engaged with one another, renewing ties with beloved old friends and welcoming new ones. We asked what each other was passionate about. We asked how our field could be better. We shared works-in-progress and imagined how we might work together across institutions, across miles to accomplish things we couldn't do alone.

This essay argues that Hume's theory of justice can be useful in framing a more persuasive case for universal access in health care. Theories of justice derived from a Rawlsian social contract tradition tend to make the conditions for deliberation on justice remote from the lives of most persons, while religiously-inspired views require superhuman levels of benevolence. By contrast, Hume's theory derives justice from the prudent reflections of socially-encumbered selves. This provides a more accessible moral theory and a more realistic (...) path to the establishment of universal access. (shrink)

Matthew McGrath has recently challenged all theories that allow for immediate perceptual justification. This challenge comes by way of arguing for what he calls the “Looks View” of visual justification, which entails that our visual beliefs that are allegedly immediately justified are in fact mediately justified based on our independent beliefs about the looks of things. This paper shows that McGrath’s arguments are unsound or, at the very least, that they do not cause genuine concern for the (...) species of dogmatism called “Phenomenal Explanationism”, recently introduced and defended by Kevin McCain and Luca Moretti. (shrink)

Picture perception and ordinary perception of real objects differ in several respects. Two of their main differences are: Depicted objects are not perceived as present and We cannot perceive significant spatial shifts as we move with respect to them. Some special illusory pictures escape these visual effects obtained in usual picture perception. First, trompe l'oeil paintings violate : the depicted object looks, even momentarily, like a present object. Second, anamorphic paintings violate : they lead to appreciate spatial shifts resulting (...) from movement. However, anamorphic paintings do not violate : they are still perceived as clearly pictorial, that is, nonpresent. What about the relation between trompe l'oeil paintings and? Do trompe l'oeils allow us to perceive spatial shifts? Nobody has ever focused on this aspect of trompe l'oeil perception. I offer the first speculation about this question. I suggest that, if we follow our most recent theories in philosophy and vision science about the mechanisms of picture perception, then, the only plausible answer, in line with phenomenological intuitions, is that, differently from nonillusory, usual picture perception, and similarly to ordinary perception, trompe l'oeil perception does allow us to perceive spatial shifts resulting from movement. I also discuss the philosophical implications of this claim. (shrink)

In this paper I explore the following threefold question: first, is there a genuine problem of grounding aesthetic judgement in testimony? Second, if there is such a problem, what exactly is its nature? And lastly, can Kant help us get clearer on the problem? Following Kant, I argue that the problem with aesthetic testimony is explained by norms that govern what it takes to judge a beautiful object aesthetically, rather than theoretically or practically, not by norms that govern what it (...) takes to judge aesthetically with a sufficient epistemic basis rather than without it. I thus propose a normative and aesthetic approach to testimony. (shrink)

Clowns seem suspect when it comes to respect. The combination of clowning and people with dementia may seem especially suspicious. In this argument, I take potential concerns about clowning in dementia care as an opportunity to explore the meaning of a respectful approach of people with dementia. Our word ‘respect’ is derived from the Latin respiciō, meaning ‘looking back’ or ‘seeing again’, as well as ‘looking after’ or ‘having regard’ for someone or something. I build upon this double meaning of (...) respiciō by examining how simultaneously we look to and after people with dementia. I do so empirically by studying how miMakkus clowns in their practice learn to look with new eyes to people and things around them. I call this clown’s view and differentiate it from the predominant way of observing people in dementia care. I argue that respiciō comes in two guises, each of which merges specific forms of looking to and looking after the other. By making conventional, solidified ways of seeing the other fluid again, clowns remind us of the value that comes with a veiled way of paying respect to people with dementia. (shrink)

Most people are familiar with the traditional view of the role of ethics in the auditing profession - the need for auditors with integrity and objectivity. This essay addresses a second dimension of ethics in the auditing profession - the demand for auditors to assess the integrity and ethical values of clients. This second dimension is a difficult task for auditors in practice and demands a deep and robust understanding of ethics, ethical infrastructures, and the products of those infrastructures. (...) The essay proposes how educators and researchers might facilitate that understanding. (shrink)

This article examines historical and ideological trajectories that have made looking at the fetus via ultrasound a normal part of being pregnant for many women around the world. How did looking into so unlit a bodily space as the uterus become so natural? So everyday? So habit-forming? The answers lie in the convergence over time of technological hardware with knowledge practices that moved from medical to public domains. Germany serves as a site for an interrogation of how learned ways of (...) thinking about anatomy, the development of technologies that “look,” a privileging of the visual in medical domains, and seeing as metaphor for truth about health reinforced and normalized prenatal ultrasound use. (shrink)

Looking back on the many prophets who tried to predict the future as if it were predetermined, at first sight any forward-looking activity is reminiscent of making predictions with a crystal ball. In contrast to fortune tellers, today’s exercises do not predict, but try to show different paths that an open future could take. A key motivation to undertake forward-looking activities is broadening the information basis for decision-makers to help them actively shape the future in a desired way. Experts, laypeople, (...) or stakeholders may have different sets of values and priorities with regard to pending decisions on any issue related to the future. Therefore, considering and incorporating their views can, in the best case scenario, lead to more robust decisions and strategies. However, transferring this plurality into a form that decision-makers can consider is a challenge in terms of both design and facilitation of participatory processes. In this paper, we will introduce and critically assess a new qualitative method for forward-looking activities, namely CIVISTI (Citizen Visions on Science, Technology and Innovation; www.civisti.org), which was developed during an EU project of the same name. Focussing strongly on participation, with clear roles for citizens and experts, the method combines expert, stakeholder and lay knowledge to elaborate recommendations for decision-making in issues related to today’s and tomorrow’s science, technology and innovation. Consisting of three steps, the process starts with citizens’ visions of a future 30–40 years from now. Experts then translate these visions into practical recommendations which the same citizens then validate and prioritise to produce a final product. The following paper will highlight the added value as well as limits of the CIVISTI method and will illustrate potential for the improvement of future processes. (shrink)

Looking back on the many prophets who tried to predict the future as if it were predetermined, at first sight any forward-looking activity is reminiscent of making predictions with a crystal ball. In contrast to fortune tellers, today’s exercises do not predict, but try to show different paths that an open future could take. A key motivation to undertake forward-looking activities is broadening the information basis for decision-makers to help them actively shape the future in a desired way. Experts, laypeople, (...) or stakeholders may have different sets of values and priorities with regard to pending decisions on any issue related to the future. Therefore, considering and incorporating their views can, in the best case scenario, lead to more robust decisions and strategies. However, transferring this plurality into a form that decision-makers can consider is a challenge in terms of both design and facilitation of participatory processes. In this paper, we will introduce and critically assess a new qualitative method for forward-looking activities, namely CIVISTI (Citizen Visions on Science, Technology and Innovation; www.civisti.org ), which was developed during an EU project of the same name. Focussing strongly on participation, with clear roles for citizens and experts, the method combines expert, stakeholder and lay knowledge to elaborate recommendations for decision-making in issues related to today’s and tomorrow’s science, technology and innovation. Consisting of three steps, the process starts with citizens’ visions of a future 30–40 years from now. Experts then translate these visions into practical recommendations which the same citizens then validate and prioritise to produce a final product. The following paper will highlight the added value as well as limits of the CIVISTI method and will illustrate potential for the improvement of future processes. (shrink)