Daniel Garber

Estudos sobre Marin Mersenne enfatizam freqüentemente o serviço prestado por ele à ciência européia, por ajudar na circulação das idéias, tanto pela correspondência como por suas publicações. Mas o próprio Mersenne foi uma figura importante na Revolução Científica com seu próprio programa intelectual. O propósito do artigo é discutir o papel que o contato epistolar com a Itália exerceu no seu próprio desenvolvimento intelectual. Quero discutir também que a transmissão da ciência italiana para a França feita por Mersenne, no final do anos 1620 e início dos anos 1630, precisamente no momento em que Galileu estava em dificuldades em Roma, foi crucial para a derradeira transformação da ciência e filosofia européias. Minha tese é que por causa de seus contatos com a Italia Mersenne continua, de certo modo, a tradição jesuítica das matemáticas mistas que, em virtude da condenação de Galileu em 1633, não poderia por muito tempo ser praticada na Itália, uma tradição que conduzirá a Descartes, Gassendi, e à filosofia mecânica que dominará o restante do século

In recent years philosophers of science have turned away from positivist programs for explicating scientific rationality through detailed accounts of scientific procedure and turned toward large-scale accounts of scientific change. One important motivation for this was better fit with the history of science. Paying particular attention to the large-scale theories of Lakatos and Laudan I argue that the history of science is no better accommodated by the new large-scale theories than it was by the earlier positivist philosophies of science; both are, in their different ways, parochial to our conception of rationality. I further argue that the goal of scientific methodology is not explaining the past but promoting good scientific practice, and on this the large-scale methodologies have no obvious a priori advantages over the positivist methodologies they have tried to replace.

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