Daniel Garber

Oxford Studies in Early Modern Philosophy is an annual series, presenting a selection of the best current work in the history of early modern philosophy. It focuses on the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries--the extraordinary period of intellectual flourishing that begins, very roughly, with Descartes and his contemporaries and ends with Kant. It also publishes papers on thinkers or movements outside of that framework, provided they are important in illuminating early modern thought. The articles in OSEMP will be of importance to specialists within the discipline, but the editors also intend that they should appeal to a larger audience of philosophers, intellectual historians, and others who are interested in the development of modern thought.

Daniel Garber - Elements, Principles, and Corpuscles: A Study of Atomism and Chemistry in the Seventeenth Century - Journal of the History of Philosophy 40:3 Journal of the History of Philosophy 40.3 400-401 Book Review Elements, Principles, and Corpuscles: A Study of Atomism and Chemistry in the Seventeenth Century Antonio Clericuzio. Elements, Principles, and Corpuscles: A Study of Atomism and Chemistry in the Seventeenth Century. Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic Publishers, 2000. Pp. xi + 223. Cloth, $89.00. Over the last few decades, historians of early-modern philosophy have tried to relate the main figures in the canon to contemporary developments in the sciences. Chief among these scientific developments has been the rise of the mechanical/corpuscular philosophy. On that view, everything in the physical world can be explained in terms of the size, shape, and motion of the tiny..

Oxford University Press is proud to present the third volume in a new annual series, presenting a selection of the best current work in the history of philosophy. Oxford Studies in Early Modern Philosophy focuses on the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries---the extraordinary period of intellectual flourishing that begins, very roughly, with Descartes and his contemporaries and ends with Kant. It also publishes papers on thinkers or movements outside of that framework, provided they are important in illuminating early modern thought. The articles in OSEMP will be of importance to specialists within the discipline, but the editors also intend that they should appeal to a larger audience of philosophers, intellectual historians, and others who are interested in the development of modern thought.

This volume collects some of the seminal essays on Descartes by Daniel Garber, one of the pre-eminent scholars of early-modern philosophy. A central theme unifying the volume is the interconnection between Descartes' philosophical and scientific interests, and the extent to which these two sides of the Cartesian program illuminate each other, a question rarely treated in the existing literature. Amongst the specific topics discussed in the essays are Descartes' celebrated method, his demand for certainty in the sciences, his account of the relation of mind and body, and his conception of God's activity on the physical world. This collection will be a mandatory purchase for any serious student of or professional working in seventeenth-century philosophy, history of science, or history of ideas.

Table of Contents Note from the Editors 1. Deflating Descartes’ Causal Axiom, Tad Schmaltz 2. The Dustbin Theory of Mind: A Cartesian Legacy?, Lawrence Nolan and John Whipple 3. Is Descartes a Libertarian?, C. P. Ragland 4. The Scholastic Resources for Descartes’ Concept of God as Causa Sui, Richard Lee 5. Hobbesian Mechanics, Doug Jesseph 6. Locks, Schlocks, and Poisoned Peas: Boyle on Actual and Dispositive Qualities, Dan Kaufman 7. Atomism, Monism, and Causation in the Natural Philosophy of Margaret Cavendish, Karen Detlefsen 8. Descartes, the First Cartesians, and Logic, Roger Ariew 9. On the Necessity and Nature of Simples: Leibniz, Wolff, Baumgarten, and the Pre-Critical Kant, Eric Watkins 10. Review Essay: Descartes’ Theory of Mind, by Desmond Clarke, Dennis Des Chene.

La physique métaphysique de Descartes permet de synthétiser plusieurs aspects de la philosophie naturelle de Descartes et de comprendre pourquoi elle repose sur une approche métaphysique. Cet ouvrage, qui n'a jusqu'à aujourd'hui aucun équivalent même en France, se présente comme une sorte de manuel de physique cartésienne, une introduction à sa philosophie mécaniste, telle que lui-même, ou un homme de son époque, bienveillant, mais non dénué de réserves critiques, l'aurait présentée. C'est, en effet, en tant que métaphysicien, c'est-à-dire en ayant fait de la métaphysique le fondement de sa physique, que Descartes tranche les questions qui se posent au sujet des atomes, des espaces vides, des lois de la matière. Par là, Descartes rompt avec la tradition et se démarque de son époque, souligne Daniel Garber. Mais il ne se borne pas à ce constat : il expose aussi soigneusement les termes du débat et les nombreuses controverses auxquelles les options métaphysiques de Descartes ont donné lieu. Au fur et à mesure se dégage le portrait d'un homme de plus en plus préoccupé par la construction de son système et de moins en moins attaché à résoudre des problèmes particuliers, fussent-ils scientifiques ou métaphysiques.

The Cambridge History of Seventeenth-Century Philosophy offers a uniquely comprehensive and authoritative overview of early-modern philosophy written by an international team of specialists. As with previous Cambridge histories of philosophy the subject is treated by topic and theme, and since history does not come packaged in neat bundles, the subject is also treated with great temporal flexibility, incorporating frequent reference to medieval and Renaissance ideas. The basic structure of the volumes corresponds to the way an educated seventeenth-century European might have organised the domain of philosophy. Thus, the history of science, religious doctrine, and politics feature very prominently. The narrative that unfolds begins with an intellectual world dominated by a synthesis of Aristotelianism and scholastic philosophy, but by the end of the period the mechanistic or 'corpuscularian' philosophy has emerged and exerted its full impact on traditional metaphysics, ethics, theology, logic, and epistemology.