Don Garrett

Stefanie Rocknak's stimulating, challenging, and highly original new book, Imagined Causes: Hume's Conception of Objects, is helpfully summarized on its back cover as follows: This book provides the first comprehensive account of Hume's conception of objects in Book I of A Treatise of Human Nature. What, according to Hume, are objects? Ideas? Impressions? Mind-independent objects? All three? None of the above? Through a close textual analysis, Rocknak shows that Hume thought that objects are imagined ideas. But, she argues, he struggled with two accounts of how and when we imagine such ideas. On the one hand, Hume believes that we always and universally imagine that objects are the causes of our perceptions. On...

BOOK REVIEWS ~99 edge of Hebrew and Hebrew texts, from encounters with Iberian Jews, and from polemical Christian concerns. The changing situation within German Christendom greatly influenced the way Jews, their history, and their customs were seen. Arthur Williamson, an expert in Scottish intellectual history, treats a somewhat amazing phenomenon: the Scots from the Reformation onward saw themselves as Jews, and developed a Judaized political history. From sometime in the late Middle Ages, the Scots were notorious with their southern neighbors for not eating pork. They were even accused of being the descendants of the Jews expelled from England in 129 o. During the Reformation some of their leaders saw themselves as recreating the Hebrew Commonwealth and the Jewish Covenant with God. This Judaized politics played a very significant role in the emergence first of Great Britain, and then of the United Kingdom. In the closing essay James E. Force develops his Judaized interpretation of Isaac Newton's theology, stressing the role of Jewish monotheism in Newton's anti-Trinitarian Christianity and in his science. Most Newton commentators have been content to exile Newton's theology to his infancy or his senility, and to insist, no matter what the great man believed about the Book of Revelation, that it had nothing to do with his scientific theories. Force both expounds a crucial center of the religious views, and shows how they explain what Newton thought he..

The significance of Friedrich Nietzsche for twentieth century culture is now no longer a matter of dispute. He was quite simply one of the most influential of modern thinkers. The opening essay of this 1996 Companion provides a chronologically organised introduction to and summary of Nietzsche's published works, while also providing an overview of their basic themes and concerns. It is followed by three essays on the appropriation and misappropriation of his writings, and a group of essays exploring the nature of Nietzsche's philosophy and its relation to the modern and post-modern world. The final contributions consider Nietzsche's influence on the twentieth century in Europe, the USA, and Asia. New readers and non-specialists will find this the most convenient, accessible guide to Nietzsche currently available. Advanced students and specialists will find a conspectus of recent developments in the interpretation of Nietzsche.

Commentators have offered interpretations over many years of the nature and status of the attributes in Spinoza's metaphysics, but attributes are best understood as diverse manners of existence, so that a substance having more than one attribute exists in more than one manner. Spinoza's monistic metaphysics of substance and mode allows him to offer an appealing conception of the nature of space. Spinoza's monistic metaphysics provides the basis for a positive account of how particular things constitute things at all. All the philosophers of the seventeenth century, arguably none has more direct bearing on recent work in metaphysics than Spinoza. In Spinoza's monism, there is only one perfectly real being, which grounds and is more real than all of the other existing things, and in which they inhere. Spinoza's panpsychism at the same time provides a model of cosmopsychism, in which the mental character of the cosmos grounds the mental character of each particular thing.

Henry Allison’s Benedict de Spinoza was a clear, concise, and reliable introduction to a broad range of topics in Spinoza’s philosophy. This revised and retitled edition preserves those virtues while reflecting important developments since 1974, including Edwin Curley’s superb translations of the Ethics and the earlier works, and important books on Spinoza by Martial, Gueroult, R. J. Delahunty, and Jonathan Bennett. Of the book’s seven chapters, it is primarily the three central ones—those dealing with the Ethics—that have been revised.

Featuring more than 150 articles by more than 70 leading scholars, this is the first encyclopedia devoted to empiricism. The _Encyclopedia of Empiricism_ serves four main purposes. First, it provides a convenient source for scholars and students seeking information on particular figures, topics, or doctrines, specifically in their relation to empiricism as an historical movement or to empiricism as a broader tendency of thought. Because each entry contains a brief bibliography of primary and secondary sources, it can usefully serve as a point of first reference. Second, the _Encyclopedia_ illustrates the continuity and logical development of the Empiricist movement by examining, within topical articles, the contributions of a number of different philosophers related to the statement and solution of particular issues. Third, it explicates the relations, both logical and historical, between empiricism as a movement of the 17th and 18th centuries and the various species of empiricism that preceded and succeeded it. Finally, the _Encyclopedia_ explores some of the most important intellectual influences on empiricism as a methodology of thought. Outstanding Academic Book.

The nature and consistency of John Locke's views about liberty and suspension, as well as their bearing on what is now called determinism, remain matters of controversy and sometimes, despair. This chapter explains what it is that "determines the will" according to John Locke. It begins by explaining the central terms Locke employs and the meanings he assigns them. Next, the chapter cites and discusses some of the main doctrines that he formulates using that terminology. In light of these explanations, the chapter analyzes two recent interpretations of Locke's doctrines about liberty, suspension, and the will. The first of these, offered by Vere Chappell, convicts Locke of inconsistency; the second, offered by Gideon Yaffe, proposes away to acquit him. Finally, drawing on the lessons of those examinations, the chapter presents and develops a consistent and more satisfying interpretation of Locke's treatments of liberty and suspension in relation to the will.

This chapter seeks to establish that Spinoza accepts the legitimacy of many teleological explanations; that in two important respects, Leibniz's view of teleology is not more, and perhaps even less, Aristotleian than Descartes's; and that among Descartes, Spinoza, and Leibniz, it is Spinoza who holds the view of teleology closest to that of Aristotle. The arguments for derive from examinations of Spinoza's doctrine of conatus, critical analysis of Jonathan Bennett's proposed grounds for interpreting Spinoza as denying all teleology, and the application of Spinoza's distinction of three kinds of knowledge to the distinction between mechanistic and teleological explanation. The arguments for and are based on an examination of the answers given by Aristotle, Descartes, Leibniz, and Spinoza to four basic questions about the nature and range of teleology and teleological explanation. These questions concern the dependence of teleology on thought, the relation of teleology to divine will or purpose, the existence of “sub‐human” teleology, and the role of teleological explanation in natural philosophy.

David Hume’s “Title Principle,” as it has come to be called, is a specification of the normative scope of reason: “Where reason is lively, and mixes itself with some propensity, it ought to be assented to. Where it does not, it never can have any title to operate on us.” This chapter seeks to answer four central questions about the principle. First, what does Hume mean by “reason” in it? Second, what particular kinds of beliefs does it mandate or disallow? Third, what kind of normativity is expressed by its use of “ought”? Fourth, can it permit Hume properly to overcome—if only to some extent—the “doubts,” “contradictions and imperfections,” and “objections” concerning the use of reason that he describes prior to stating the principle? The chapter concludes with brief reflections on the significance for contemporary epistemology of Hume’s use of the Title Principle.