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2400Knowledge of God in LeviathanHistory of Philosophy Quarterly 22 (1): 31-48. 2005.Hobbes denies in Leviathan that we have an idea of God. He does think, though, that God exists, and does not even deny that we can think about God, even though he says we have no idea of God. There is, Hobbes thinks, another cognitive mechanism by means of which we can think about God. That mechanism allows us only to think a few things about God though. This constrains what Hobbes can say about our knowledge of God, and grounds his belief in a fairly strong version of the thesis that God is inc…Read more
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1116Materialism and the Activity of Matter in Seventeenth‐Century European PhilosophyPhilosophy Compass 11 (11): 671-680. 2016.Early modern debates about the nature of matter interacted with debates about whether matter could think. In particular, some philosophers (e.g., Cudworth and Leibniz) objected to materialism about the human mind on the grounds that matter is passive, thinking things are active, and one cannot make an active thing out of passive material. This paper begins by looking at two seventeenth-century materialist views (Hobbes’s, and one suggested but not endorsed by Locke) before considering that objec…Read more
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2762Debating Materialism: Cavendish, Hobbes, and MoreHistory of Philosophy Quarterly 29 (4): 391-409. 2012.This paper discusses the materialist views of Margaret Cavendish, focusing on the relationships between her views and those of two of her contemporaries, Thomas Hobbes and Henry More. It argues for two main claims. First, Cavendish's views sit, often rather neatly, between those of Hobbes and More. She agreed with Hobbes on some issues and More on others, while carving out a distinctive alternative view. Secondly, the exchange between Hobbes, More, and Cavendish illustrates a more general puzzle…Read more
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879Review of James R. Martel, Subverting the Leviathan (review)Restoration, Studies in English Literary Culture, 1660-1700 33 57-9. 2009.
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2628Hobbes: Metaphysics and MethodDissertation, Rutgers the State University of New Jersey - New Brunswick. 2003.This dissertation discusses the work of Thomas Hobbes, and has two main themes. The first is Hobbes's materialism, and the second is Hobbes's relationships to other philosophers, in particular his place in the mechanist movement that is said to have replaced Aristotelianism as the dominant philosophy in the seventeenth century. I argue that Hobbes does not, for most of his career, believe the general materialist view that bodies are the only substances. He believes, rather, that ideas, which ar…Read more
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2361Leibniz's Mill Arguments Against MaterialismPhilosophical Quarterly 62 (247): 250-72. 2012.Leibniz's mill argument in 'Monadology' 17 is a well-known but puzzling argument against materialism about the mind. I approach the mill argument by considering other places where Leibniz gave similar arguments, using the same example of the machinery of a mill and reaching the same anti-materialist conclusion. In a 1702 letter to Bayle, Leibniz gave a mill argument that moves from his definition of perception (as the expression of a multitude by a simple) to the anti-materialist conclusion. Soo…Read more
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134Thomas HobbesStanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. 2009.Thomas Hobbes (1588-1679), whose current reputation rests largely on his political philosophy, was a thinker with wide ranging interests. In philosophy, he defended a range of materialist, nominalist, and empiricist views against Cartesian and Aristotelian alternatives. In physics, his work was influential on Leibniz, and lead him into disputes with Boyle and the experimentalists of the early Royal Society. In history, he translated Thucydides's History of the Peloponnesian War into English, and…Read more
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2063Leibniz on Hobbes’s MaterialismStudies in History and Philosophy of Science Part A 41 (1): 11-18. 2010.I consider Leibniz's thoughts about Hobbes's materialism, focusing on his less-discussed later thoughts about the topic. Leibniz understood Hobbes to have argued for his materialism from his imagistic theory of ideas. Leibniz offered several criticisms of this argument and the resulting materialism itself. Several of these criticisms occur in texts in which Leibniz was engaging with the generation of British philosophers after Hobbes. Of particular interest is Leibniz's correspondence with Damar…Read more
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2052Margaret Cavendish (1623-73) held a number of surprising philosophical views. These included a materialist panpsychism, and some views in what we might call environmental ethics. Panpsychism, though certainly not unheard of, is still often a surprising view. Views in environmental ethics - even just views that involve a measure of environmental concern - are unusual to find in early modern European philosophy. Cavendish held both of these surprising views. One might suspect that panpsychism prov…Read more
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3517Hobbes on Language: Propositions, Truth, and AbsurdityIn A. P. Martinich & Kinch Hoekstra (eds.), The Oxford Handbook of Thomas Hobbes, Oxford University Press. pp. 57-72. 2016.Language was central to Hobbes's understanding of human beings and their mental abilities, and criticism of other philosophers' uses of language became a favorite critical tool for him. This paper connects Hobbes's theories about language to his criticisms of others' language, examining Hobbes's theories of propositions and truth, and how they relate to his claims that various sorts of proposition are absurd. It considers whether Hobbes in fact means anything more by 'absurd' than 'false'. And i…Read more
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Areas of Specialization
17th/18th Century Philosophy |
Areas of Interest
17th/18th Century Philosophy |
PhilPapers Editorships
Thomas Hobbes |
17th/18th Century British Philosophy, Misc |