Daniel Garber

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..

This paper explores Leibniz's conception of body and extension in the 1680s and 1690s. It is argued that one of Leibniz's central aims is to undermine the Cartesian conception of extended substance, and replace it with a conception on which what is basic to body is force. In this way, Leibniz intends to reduce extension to something metaphysically more basic in just the way that the mechanists reduce sensible qualities to size, shape and motion. It is also argued that this move is quite distinct from the reduction of body to monads and their appetitions and perceptions, so prominent in his later writings

The paper explores the philosophical implications of Descartes' views on mind-body interaction, specifically his correspondence with Princess Elisabeth. It critiques the traditional understanding of Descartes' dualism and argues that his explanations for causal interaction between the immaterial mind and the material body are both insightful and consistent within his broader philosophical framework. Moreover, the paper proposes a reinterpretation of Descartes' ideas that emphasizes the fundamental role of mind-body interaction as a basis for causal explanation.

everyone loves superheroes. superheroes, of course, have incredible powers; they can leap tall buildings in a single bound, excel in combat, and have X-ray vision. But, in addition, superheroes have a kind of simplicity of motive and focus that makes them pure and comprehensible in the way in which the people we actually know rarely are. For Superman it is about Truth, Justice, and the American Way. For Batman it is all about fighting evil: defeating the Joker, the Riddler, and other nefarious characters. For Spiderman it is an outsized sense of mission: “With great power comes great responsibility.” Superheroes are superhuman individuals, who have a simple philosophy of life that motivates their every action. Of..

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.

Oxford University Press is proud to announce an annual volume presenting a selection of the best new work in the history of philosophy. Oxford Studies in Early Modern Philosophy will focus 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 will also publish 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.

Christia Mercer’s magnum opus, Leibniz’s Metaphysics: Its Origin and Development, long awaited, is finally about to appear from Cambridge University Press. It was well worth the wait. The book is impressive in the wealth of detailed argumentation and historical background that fills the work. Mercer’s general thesis is still that Leibniz’s mature thought emerges from a view that Leibniz shares with his teachers, an eclectic philosophy that sees truth lurking in many places, and that he sees the task of the philosopher as mining the past for its truths, and showing how the different philosophies can be made consistent with one another and made into a single system. As in her earlier work, the resolution of the conflict between Aristotelianism and the new mechanism is important. But Mercer also claims to have discovered something else utterly unexpected, a strong Platonistic strain in seventeenth-century German thought. While Aristotelianism and mechanism may have dominated thought about the physical world, Mercer has discovered strongly Platonistic strains in the conception of God and the soul, both in the young Leibniz and in his teachers. Even more surprising, Mercer argues that the main tenets of Leibniz’s mature thought emerged out of this mixture, and did so as early as 1670 and 1671. In particular, she argues that both the pre-established harmony and the idealism characteristic of his mature thought emerged in these years, as the result of an attempt to harmonize different elements of Aristotelian, Platonic, and mechanist philosophies, in response to particular problems in philosophy, theology, and even physics that gripped him at that time. If she is right, this will fundamentally alter our view of Leibniz.

Important to Kuhn's account of scientific change is the observation that when paradigms are in competition with one another, there is a curious breakdown of rational argument and communication between adherents of competing programs. He attributed this to the fact that competing paradigms are incommensurable. The incommensurability thesis centrally involves the claim that there is a deep conceptual gap between competing paradigms in science. In this paper I argue that in one important case of competing paradigms, the Aristotelian explanation of the properties of bodies in terms of matter and form as opposed to the Cartesian mechanist paradigm, where the properties of bodies are explained on the model of machines, there was no such conceptual gap: the notion of a machine was as fully intelligible on the Aristotelian paradigm as it was on the Cartesian. But this does not mean that the debate between the two sides was conducted on purely rational terms. Rational argument breaks down not because of Kuhnian incommensurability, I argue, but because of other cultural factors separating the two camps