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557Berkeley's Doctrine of Mind and the “Black List Hypothesis”: A DialogueSouthern Journal of Philosophy 51 (1): 24-41. 2013.Clues about what Berkeley was planning to say about mind in his now-lost second volume of the Principles seem to abound in his Notebooks. However, commentators have been reluctant to use his unpublished entries to explicate his remarks about spiritual substances in the Principles and Dialogues for three reasons. First, it has proven difficult to reconcile the seemingly Humean bundle theory of the self in the Notebooks with Berkeley's published characterization of spirits as “active beings or pri…Read more
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14Myth and modern philosophyTemple University Press. 1990.A study of the historiographic significance and use of mythic or fabular thinking in Bacon, Descartes, Mandeville, Vico, Herder, and others.
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Ramist Dialectic in Leibniz's Early ThoughtIn Mark Kulstad, Mogens Laerke & David Snyder (eds.), The philosophy of the young Leibniz, Steiner. pp. 59-66. 2009.
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24The Philosophy of Jonathan Edwards: A Study in Divine SemioticsIndiana University Press. 1994.An examination of Edwards’ ontology and his ideas on creation, God, sin, freedom, virtue, and beauty.
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19Seventeenth-Century Scholastic Treatments of TimeJournal of the History of Ideas 42 (4): 587-606. 1981.
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574Berkeley, Suárez, and the Esse-Existere DistinctionAmerican Catholic Philosophical Quarterly 74 (4): 621-636. 2000.For Berkeley, a thing's existence 'esse' is nothing more than its being perceived 'as that thing'. It makes no sense to ask (with Samuel Johnson) about the 'esse' of the mind or the specific act of perception, for that would be like asking what it means for existence to exist. Berkeley's "existere is percipi or percipere" (NB 429) thus carefully adopts the scholastic distinction between 'esse' and 'existere' ignored by Locke and others committed to a substantialist notion of mind. Following the …Read more
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74Metaphor in the Historiography of PhilosophyClio: A Journal of Literature, History, and the Philosophy of History 15 (2): 191-210. 1986.
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51Berkeley's 'Alciphron': English Text and Essays in Interpretation (review)British Journal for the History of Philosophy 19 (3). 2011.
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10John Toland: His Methods, Manners, and MindMcGill-Queen's University Press. 1984.Drawing on a variety of published and unpublished material representing Toland's broad interests, Professor Daniel reveals a common theme emphasizing man's capacity for independent thought on basic philosophical, religious, and political issues. Roughly chronological, Daniel's treatment describes Toland's progressive refinement of this fundamental aspect of his thought. After examining, in his early works, the process whereby religion becomes mystified, Toland turned to biography, demonstrating …Read more
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63Vico's historicism and the ontology of argumentsJournal of the History of Philosophy 33 (3): 431-446. 1995.Vico's historicist claims (1) that different ages are intelligible only in their own terms and (2) that the certainty and authority of history depend on its narrative formulation seem at odds with his doctrines of ideal eternal history and divine providence. He resolves these issues, however, in his treatment of ideal eternal history by using the distinction between the certain and the true to show how rhetorical expression generates meaning in and as history. Specifically, by appealing to an on…Read more
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627Edwards' OccasionalismIn Don Schweitzer (ed.), Jonathan Edwards as Contemporary, Peter Lang. pp. 1-14. 2010.Instead of focusing on the Malebranche-Edwards connection regarding occasionalism as if minds are distinct from the ideas they have, I focus on how finite minds are particular expressions of God's will that there be the distinctions by which ideas are identified and differentiated. This avoids problems, created in the accounts of Fiering, Lee, and especially Crisp, about the inherently idealist character of Edwards' occasionalism.
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37Ethical Theory and Journalistic EthicsInternational Journal of Applied Philosophy 1 (1): 19-25. 1982.
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17Current continental theory and modern philosophy (edited book)Northwestern University Press. 2005.For decades Continental theorists from Derrida to Deleuze have engaged in provocative, penetrating, and often extensive examinations of modern philosophers-studies that have opened up new ways to think about figures such as Descartes, Spinoza, Leibniz, Locke, Hume, Rousseau, and Kant. This volume, for the first time, gives this work its due. A systematic rereading of early modern philosophers in the light of recent Continental philosophy, it exposes overlooked but critical aspects of sixteenth- …Read more
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Some Conflicting Assumptions of Journalistic EthicsIn Elliot D. Cohen (ed.), Philosophical Issues in Journalism, Oxford University Press. pp. 50--58. 1992.
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43Pierre Gassendi and the Birth of Early Modern Philosophy (review)International Philosophical Quarterly 48 (3): 410-412. 2008.
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1253Berkeley's pantheistic discourseInternational Journal for Philosophy of Religion 49 (3): 179-194. 2001.Berkeley's immaterialism has more in common with views developed by Henry More, the mathematician Joseph Raphson, John Toland, and Jonathan Edwards than those of thinkers with whom he is commonly associated (e.g., Malebranche and Locke). The key for recognizing their similarities lies in appreciating how they understand St. Paul's remark that in God "we live and move and have our being" as an invitation to think to God as the space of discourse in which minds and ideas are identified. This way o…Read more
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29Myth and Rationality in MandevilleJournal of the History of Ideas 47 (4): 595-609. 1986.Bernard Mandeville's early work *Typhon* reveals how his *Fable of the Bees* can be understood not only as an extended commentary of an Aesopic fable but also as a form of mythic writing. The appeal to the mythic in discourse provides him with the opportunity to give both a genetic account of the development of language and social practices and a functional account of the the socializing impact of myths (including classical ones). The artificial distinction between treating Mandeville's writings…Read more
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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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433Stoicism in Berkeley's PhilosophyIn Timo Airaksinen & Bertil Belfrage (eds.), Berkeley's lasting legacy: 300 years later, Cambridge Scholars Press. pp. 121-34. 2011.Commentators have not said much regarding Berkeley and Stoicism. Even when they do, they generally limit their remarks to Berkeley’s Siris (1744) where he invokes characteristically Stoic themes about the World Soul, “seminal reasons,” and the animating fire of the universe. The Stoic heritage of other Berkeleian doctrines (e.g., about mind or the semiotic character of nature) is seldom recognized, and when it is, little is made of it in explaining his other doctrines (e.g., immaterialism). None…Read more
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589How Berkeley's Works are InterpretedIn Silvia Parigi (ed.), George Berkeley: Science and Religion 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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2081Berkeley, 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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47Descartes' 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 P. Phemister & S. Brown (eds.), Leibniz and the English-Speaking World, Springer. pp. 163--180. 2007.
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651Berkeley'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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Areas of Specialization
17th/18th Century Philosophy |
Areas of Interest
17th/18th Century Philosophy |
History of Western Philosophy |