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324Unity in the multiplicity of Suárez's soulIn Benjamin Hill & Henrik Lagerlund (eds.), The Philosophy of Francisco Suárez, Oxford University Press. 2012.Suárez held that the vital faculties of the soul are really distinct from the soul itself and each other and that they cannot causally interact. This means that he needed to account for the connections between the activities of the faculties: they both interfere with and contribute to each other’s activities. Suárez does so by giving the soul a direct causal role in these activities. This role requires the unity of the soul of a living being and Suárez used it to argue against the view that a…Read more
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30Descartes’s DualismIn Janet Broughton & John Carriero (eds.), A Companion to Descartes, Blackwell. 1998.This chapter contains section titled: Descartes's Novel Conception of the Mind Dualism, Substances, and Principal Attributes Thinking Without a Body Principal Attributes and the Nature of Body Conclusion References and Further Reading.
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23Roger Ariew. Descartes among the Scholastics. Leiden: Brill, 2011. Pp. xii+358. $136.00 (review)Hopos: The Journal of the International Society for the History of Philosophy of Science 3 (1): 186-190. 2013.
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120Leibniz on the Union of Body and SoulArchiv für Geschichte der Philosophie 79 (2): 150-178. 1997.Leibniz took pride in the Pre-established Harmony as an account of mind-body union. On the other hand, he sometimes claimed that he did not have a good account of such a union. I explain the tension by distinguishing between two importantly different issues that concern the union: body-soul interaction and the per se unity of the composite. Leibniz's positive evaluation concerns the issue of interaction rather than per se unity, R.M. Adams proposed that Leibniz did have the philosophical res…Read more
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31John Cottingham, editor, "The Cambridge Companion to Descartes" (review)Journal of the History of Philosophy 32 (2): 304. 1994.
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222Descartes’s DualismHarvard University Press. 1998.In her first book, Marleen Rozemond explicates Descartes's aim to provide a metaphysics that would accommodate mechanistic science and supplant scholasticism.
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68The Faces of Simplicity in Descartes’s SoulIn K. Corcilius, D. Perler & C. Helmig (eds.), The Parts of the Soul, De Gruyter. pp. 219-244. 2014.In this paper I explain several ways in which Descartes denied that the human soul or mind is composite and the role this idea played in his thought. The mind is whole in the whole and whole in the parts of the body because it has no parts. Unlike body, the mind is indivisible, and this is a different idea from the thought that mind and body are incorruptible. Descartes connects the immortality of the soul with its status as a substance and as incorruptible rather than with its indivisibility…Read more
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75Pasnau on the material–immaterial divide in early modern philosophyPhilosophical Studies 171 (1): 3-16. 2014.In Metaphysical Themes: 1274–1671, Robert Pasnau compares the medieval and early modern approaches to the material-immaterial divide and suggests the medievals held the advantage on this issue. I argue for the opposite conclusion. I also argue against his suggestion that we should approach the divide through the notion of a special type of extension for immaterial entities, and propose that instead we should focus on their indivisibility
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330Descartes on mind-body interaction: What's the problem?Journal of the History of Philosophy 37 (3): 435-467. 1999.I argue that Descartes treated the action of body on mind differently from the action of mind on body, as was common in the period. Descartes explicitly denied that there is a problem for interaction but his descriptions of interaction seem to suggest that he thought there was a problem. I argue that these descriptions are motivated by a different issue, the seemingly arbitrary connections between particular physical states and the particular mental states they produce. Within scholasticism ther…Read more
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31Critical Notice of Janet Broughton, Descartes's Method of Doubt (review)Canadian Journal of Philosophy 34 (4): 591-613. 2004.
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1Descartes’s Ontology of the Eternal TruthsIn Paul Hoffman, David Owen & Gideon Yaffe (eds.), Contemporary Perspectives on Early Modern Philosophy: Essays in Honor of Vere Chappel, Broadview. 2008.Descartes argued that the eternal truths, most prominently the truths of mathematics, are created by God. He was not explicit, however, about the ontological status of these truths. Interpreters have proposed interpretations ranging from Platonism and conceptualism. I argue for an intermediate interpretation: Descartes held they have objective being in God’s mind. In this regard his view was line with a prominent view in Aristotelian scholasticism. I defend this interpretation against obje…Read more
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148Real Distinction, Separability, and Corporeal Substance in DescartesMidwest Studies in Philosophy 35 (1): 240-258. 2011.
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Margaret Dauler Wilson: Ideas and Mechanism. Essays on Early Modern PhilosophyBritish Journal for the History of Philosophy 9 (1): 167-169. 2001.
Areas of Specialization
Medieval and Renaissance Philosophy |
17th/18th Century Philosophy |