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23The Deconstructive Turn: Essays in the Rhetoric of Philosophy by Christopher Norris (review)Philosophy and Literature 9 (1): 117-119. 1985.
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2151Berkeley, Hobbes, and the Constitution of the SelfIn Sébastien Charles (ed.), Berkeley Revisited: Moral, Social and Political Philosophy, Voltaire Foundation. pp. 69-81. 2015.By focusing on the exchange between Descartes and Hobbes on how the self is related to its activities, Berkeley draws attention to how he and Hobbes explain the forensic constitution of human subjectivity and moral/political responsibility in terms of passive obedience and conscientious submission to the laws of the sovereign. Formulated as the language of nature or as pronouncements of the supreme political power, those laws identify moral obligations by locating political subjects within those…Read more
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605How Berkeley's Works are InterpretedIn Silvia Parigi (ed.), George Berkeley: Religion and Science in the Age of Enlightenment, Springer. 2010.Instead of interpreting Berkeley in terms of the standard way of relating him to Descartes, Malebranche, and Locke, I suggest we consider relating him to other figures (e.g., Stoics, Ramists, Suarez, Spinoza, Leibniz). This allows us to integrate his published and unpublished work, and reveals how his philosophic and non-philosophic work are much more aligned with one another. I indicate how his (1) theory of powers, (2) "bundle theory" of the mind, and (3) doctrine of "innate ideas" are underst…Read more
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The Philosophy of Jonathan Edwards: A Study in Divine Semiotics (review)Transactions of the Charles S. Peirce Society 32 (4): 720-726. 1994.
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48Descartes' Treatment of 'lumen naturale'Studia Leibnitiana 10 (1). 1978.Descartes’ “natural light” has been interpreted as a faculty of the mind, the sense-imagination-reason-under-standing composite, the principle of intellectual integrity and growth, or even God himself. In Meditations III and IV in particular, the meaning of lumen natural depends on recognizing how light and nature define one another and how “my nature” serves as the basis for pointing to what is beyond the domain of natural reason, including religious faith and natural belief (especially regardi…Read more
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48The harmony of the Leibniz-Berkeley juxtapositionIn Pauline Phemister & Stuart Brown (eds.), Leibniz and the English-Speaking World, Springer. pp. 163--180. 2007.
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668Berkeley's stoic notion of spiritual substanceIn Stephen Hartley Daniel (ed.), New interpretations of Berkeley's thought, Humanity Books. 2008.For Berkeley, minds are not Cartesian spiritual substances because they cannot be said to exist (even if only conceptually) abstracted from their activities. Similarly, Berkeley's notion of mind differs from Locke's in that, for Berkeley, minds are not abstract substrata in which ideas inhere. Instead, Berkeley redefines what it means for the mind to be a substance in a way consistent with the Stoic logic of 17th century Ramists on which Leibniz and Jonathan Edwards draw. This view of mind, I co…Read more
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56Reexamining Berkeley's Philosophy (edited book)University of Toronto Press. 2007.This collection confronts the question: how can we know anything about the world if all we know are our ideas?
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67Berkeley and SpinozaRevue Philosophique de la France Et de l'Etranger 135 (1): 123-134. 2010.There is a widespread assumption that Berkeley and Spinoza have little in common, even though early Jesuit critics in France often linked them. Later commentators have also recognized their similarities. My essay focuses on how Berkeley 's comments on the Arnauld-Malebranche debate regarding objective and formal reality and his treatment of god's creation of finite minds within the order of nature relate his theory of knowledge to his doctrine in a way similar to that of Spinoza. On estime souve…Read more
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35New interpretations of Berkeley's thought (edited book)Humanity Books. 2008.In this set of previously unpublished essays, noted scholars from North America and Europe describe how the Irish philosopher George Berkeley (1684-1753) continues to inspire debates about his views on knowledge, reality, God, freedom, mathematics, and religion. Here discussions about Berkeley's account of physical objects, minds, and God's role in human experience are resolved within explicitly ethical and theological contexts. This collection uses debates about Berkeley's immaterialism and the…Read more
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1364How Berkeley Redefines SubstanceBerkeley Studies 24 40-50. 2013.In several essays I have argued that Berkeley maintains the same basic notion of spiritual substance throughout his life. Because that notion is not the traditional (Aristotelian, Cartesian, or Lockean) doctrine of substance, critics (e.g., John Roberts, Tom Stoneham, Talia Mae Bettcher, Margaret Atherton, Walter Ott, Marc Hight) claim that on my reading Berkeley either endorses a Humean notion of substance or has no recognizable theory of substance at all. In this essay I point out how my inter…Read more
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24L'Anthropologie de saint Thomas, ed. N. A. Luyten (review)Modern Schoolman 53 (3): 319-319. 1976.
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26Vico on Mythic Figuration as Prerequisite for Philosophic LiteracyNew Vico Studies 3 (n/a): 61-72. 1985.
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17C.J. Mccracken And I.C. Tipton, Eds., Berkeley's Principles And Dialogues: Background Source Materials (review)Philosophy in Review 21 (5): 362-364. 2001.
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29Postmodernity, Poststructuralism, and the Historiography of Modern PhilosophyInternational Philosophical Quarterly 35 (3): 255-267. 1995.Well-known for its criticism of totalizing accounts of reason and truth, postmodern thought also makes positive contributions to our understanding of the sensual, ideological, and linguistic contingencies that inform modernist representations of self, history, and the world. The positive side of postmodernity includes structuralism and poststructuralism, particularly as expressed by theorists concerned with practices of the body (Lacan, Foucault, Deleuze), commodity differences (Adorno, Althusse…Read more
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Teaching Recent Continental PhilosophyIn Tziporah Kasachkoff (ed.), Teaching Philosophy: Theoretical Reflections and Practical Suggestions, Rowman & Littlefield Publishers. pp. 197-206. 2004.An explanation of how to organize and teach a course in recent continental thought, including treatments of the major figures in critical theory, hermeneutics, structuralism, deconstruction, psychoanalytic feminism, poststructuralism, postcolonialism, and postmodernism. Reprint from *In the Socratic Tradition: Essays on Teaching Philosophy*, ed. Tziporah Kasachkoff (Lanham, Md: Rowman and Littlefield, 1998).
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13Contemporary Continental ThoughtPrentice-Hall. 2004.A survey with readings in critical theory, hermeneutics, structuralism, deconstruction, psychoanalytic feminism, poststructuralism, postcolonialism, and postmodernism. Aimed at students and scholars interested in an overview of movements in continental philosophy in the past century.
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IntroductionIn Stephen Hartley Daniel (ed.), Reexamining Berkeley's Philosophy, University of Toronto Press. 2007.
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1103The ramist context of Berkeley's philosophyBritish Journal for the History of Philosophy 9 (3). 2001.Berkeley's doctrines about mind, the language of nature, substance, minima sensibilia, notions, abstract ideas, inference, and freedom appropriate principles developed by the 16th-century logician Peter Ramus and his 17th-century followers (e.g., Alexander Richardson, William Ames, John Milton). Even though Berkeley expresses himself in Cartesian or Lockean terms, he relies on a Ramist way of thinking that is not a form of mere rhetoric or pedagogy but a logic and ontology grounded in Stoicism. …Read more
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52Edwards, Berkeley, and Ramist LogicIdealistic Studies 31 (1): 55-72. 2001.I will suggest that we can begin to see why Edwards and Berkeley sound so much alike by considering how both think of minds or spiritual substances notas things modeled on material bodies but as the acts by which things are identified. Those acts cannot be described using the Aristotelian subject-predicatelogic on which the metaphysics of substance, properties, attributes, or modes is based because subjects, substances, etc. are themselves initially distinguishedthrough such acts. To think of mi…Read more
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37The Narrative Character of Myth and Philosophy in VicoInternational Studies in Philosophy 20 (1): 1-9. 1988.
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John R. Roberts. A Metaphysics for the Mob: The Philosophy of George Berkeley (review)Berkeley Studies 18 36-39. 2007.
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957Berkeley's Christian neoplatonism, archetypes, and divine ideasJournal of the History of Philosophy 39 (2): 239-258. 2001.Berkeley's doctrine of archetypes explains how God perceives and can have the same ideas as finite minds. His appeal of Christian neo-Platonism opens up a way to understand how the relation of mind, ideas, and their union is modeled on the Cappadocian church fathers' account of the persons of the trinity. This way of understanding Berkeley indicates why he, in contrast to Descartes or Locke, thinks that mind (spiritual substance) and ideas (the object of mind) cannot exist or be thought of apart…Read more
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Areas of Specialization
17th/18th Century Philosophy |
Areas of Interest
17th/18th Century Philosophy |
History of Western Philosophy |