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124The first meditation and the sensesBritish Journal for the History of Philosophy 4 (1). 1996.One question that has created controversy among interpreters is just how much is in doubt at the end of the Dream Argument in Meditation I. I argue that there is doubt about the existence of composite bodies not yet about the existence of a physical world. I also caution against using later parts of the Meditations to interpret the First Meditation on account of the order of reasons in this work. I connect the Omnipotent God argument to Descartes's views about innate ideas and analyze the Fir…Read more
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32Physiologia (review)Philosophical Review 107 (2): 330-332. 1998.In recent years more and more scholars of early modern philosophy have come to acknowledge that our understanding of Descartes’s thought benefits greatly from consideration of his intellectual background. Research in this direction has taken off, but much work remains to be done. Dennis Des Chene offers a major contribution to this enterprise. This erudite book is the result of a very impressive body of research into a number of late Aristotelian scholastics, some fairly well known, such as Suár…Read more
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81Lilli Alanen, Descartes's concept of the mind, Harvard university press, 2003, 455 pages, isbn 0-674-01043- (review)Theoria 72 (1): 91-95. 2006.
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2The Role of the Intellect in Descartes's Case for the Incorporeity of the MindIn Stephen Voss (ed.), Essays on the Philosophy and Science of René Descartes, . 1993.I argue that Descartes's best known argument for dualism relies on claims about intellectual activity and not on claims about mental states generally to establish dualism. I explain that this must be so give his historical context, where arguments for the immateriality of the mind on the basis of the intellect were common. But sensation and other non-intellectual states were regarded as pertaining to the body-soul composite.
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8Descartes and the Immortality of the SoulIn John Cottingham & Peter Hacker (eds.), Mind, Method and Morality: Essays in Honour of Anthony Kenny, Oxford University Press. 2010.Descartes held that the human mind or soul is indivisible, unlike body. In this paper I argue that his treatment of this feature of the soul is intimately connected to his engagement with Aristotelian scholasticism. I discuss two strands in Descartes. There is a long tradition of arguing for the immortality of the human soul on the basis of this view. Descartes did use this view in defense of dualism, but I argue that he held that the soul’s immortality should be established rather on the ba…Read more
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2Leibniz on final causationIn Samuel Newlands & Larry M. Jorgensen (eds.), Metaphysics and the good: themes from the philosophy of Robert Merrihew Adams, Oxford University Press. 2009.Early modern philosophers rejected various important aspects of Aristotelianism. Current scholarship debates the question to what extent the early moderns rejected final causation. Leibniz explicitly endorsed it. I argue that his notion of final causation should be understood in connection with his resurrection of substantial forms and his seeing such forms on the model of the soul. I relate Leibniz’ conception of final causation to the Aristotelian background as well as Descartes’s treatm…Read more
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3The Achilles Argument and the Nature of Matter in the Clarke-Collins CorrespondencIn Tom Lennon & Robert Stainton (eds.), The Achilles of Rational Psychology, . 2008.The Clarke-Collins correspondence was widely read and frequently printed during the 18th century. Its central topic is the question whether matter can think, or be conscious. Samuel Clarke defends the immateriality of the subject of the mental against Anthony Collins’ materialism. This paper examines important assumptions about the nature of body that play a role in their debate. Clarke argued that consciousness requires an “individual being”, an entity with some sort of significant unity a…Read more
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72Passion and Action (review)Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 61 (3): 723-726. 2000.Book synopsis: Passion and Action explores the place of the emotions in seventeenth-century understandings of the body and mind, and the role they were held to play in reasoning and action. Interest in the passions pervaded all areas of philosophical enquiry, and was central to the theories of many major figures, including Hobbes, Descartes, Malebranche, Spinoza, Pascal, and Locke. Yet little attention has been paid to this topic in studies of early modern thought. Susan James surveys the inheri…Read more
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6Leibniz: Nature and Freedom (review)The Leibniz Review 15 155-162. 2005.Donald Rutherford and Jan Cover have put together an excellent volume of essays on Leibniz. Cover and Rutherford begin the volume with a clear and informative introduction, that should serve the less initiated extremely well. They explain the developments of Leibniz scholarship over the course of the twentieth century: the early twentieth century saw a focus on logic, truth and closely connected issues sparked by Russell and Couturat. In the second half of the century the scholarship changed cou…Read more
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287Descartes, Mind-Body Union, and HolenmerismPhilosophical Topics 31 (1-2): 343-367. 2003.In this paper I analyze Descartes's puzzling claim that the mind is whole in the whole body and whole in its parts, what Henry More called "holenmerism". I explain its historical background, in particular in scholasticism. I argue that like his predecessors, Descartes uses the idea for two purposes, for mind-body interaction and for the union of body and mind
Areas of Specialization
Medieval and Renaissance Philosophy |
17th/18th Century Philosophy |