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168Hume's missing shade of blue reconsidered from a Newtonian PerspectiveJournal of Scottish Philosophy 2 (2): 164-175. 2004.Click to decrease image size.
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84Spinoza's Conatus as an essence preserving, attribute-neutral immanent cause: toward a new interpretation of attributes and modesIn Keith Allen & Tom Stoneham (eds.), Causation and Modern Philosophy, Routledge. pp. 3--65. 2011.
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39Epicureanism at the Origins of Modernity, by Catherine WilsonMind 119 (474): 535-539. 2010.(No abstract is available for this citation)
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Review of James Otteson's Adam Smith's Marketplace of Life (review)Philosophy in Review 23 364-6. 2003.
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20Private epistemic virtue, public vices: moral responsibility in the policy sciencesExperts and Consensus in Social Science 50 275-295. 2014.In this chapter we address what we call “The-Everybody-Did-It” (TEDI) Syndrome, a symptom for collective negligence. Our main thesis is that the character of scientific communities can be evaluated morally and be found wanting in terms of moral responsibility. Even an epistemically successful scientific community can be morally responsible for consequences that were unforeseen by it and its members and that follow from policy advice given by its individual members. We motivate our account by a c…Read more
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164Women in Early Analytic Philosophy: Volume IntroductionJournal for the History of Analytical Philosophy 5 (2). 2017.Introduction to the special issue including papers about Susan Stebbing, Susanne Langer and Maria Kokoszyńska.
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60Newton and Newtonianism in eighteenth-century british thoughtIn James A. Harris (ed.), The Oxford Handbook of British Philosophy in the Eighteenth Century, Oxford University Press. pp. 41. 2013.This chapter describes various aspects of the impact on philosophy of Newton’s Principia. It shows how Newton’s achievement dramatically influenced debates over the way subsequent philosophers conceived of their activity, and thus prepared the way for an institutional and methodological split between philosophy and science. These large-scale themes are illustrated by attention to a number of detailed debates over the nature and importance of Newton’s legacy: debates concerning gravity and matter…Read more
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73“The Obituary of a Vain Philosopher”: Adam Smith’s Reflections on Hume’s LifeHume Studies 29 (2): 327-362. 2003.
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21Insiders and outsiders in seventeenth-century philosophyNotre Dame Philosophical Reviews. forthcoming.
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10811. “Two Definitions of ‘Cause,’ Newton, and the Significance of the Humean distinction between Natural and Philosophical Relations,”Journal of Scottish Philosophy, 5 (1): 83-101. 2007.The main aim of this paper is to explore why it is so important for Hume to defi ne ‘cause’ as he does. This will shed light on the signifi cance of the natural/philosophical relation (hereafter NPR) distinction in the Treatise. Hume's use of the NPR distinction allows him to dismiss on general grounds conceptions of causation at odds with his own. In particular, it allows him to avoid having to engage in detailed re-interpretation of potentially confl icting theories formulated by natural philo…Read more
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112In this paper I clarify what Newton could have meant when he insisted that gravity is a real force. I interpret Newton’s speculative treatment of gravity as a relational, accidental quality of matter that arises through what Newton calls “the shared action” of two bodies. I argue that when Newton drafted the first edition of the Principia in the mid 1680s, he thought that (at least a part of) the cause of gravity is the disposition inherent in any individual body, but that the force of gravity i…Read more
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25Critical Notice: New Essays on David Hume (review)Journal of Scottish Philosophy 6 (2): 203-208. 2008.
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45Review of Douglas Hedley, Sarah Hutton (eds.), Platonism at the Origins of Modernity: Studies on Platonism and Early Modern Philosophy (review)Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews 2008 (8). 2008.
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300Newtonian Emanation, Spinozism, Measurement and the Baconian Origins of the Laws of NatureFoundations of Science 18 (3): 449-466. 2013.The first two sections of this paper investigate what Newton could have meant in a now famous passage from “De Graviatione” (hereafter “DeGrav”) that “space is as it were an emanative effect of God.” First it offers a careful examination of the four key passages within DeGrav that bear on this. The paper shows that the internal logic of Newton’s argument permits several interpretations. In doing so, the paper calls attention to a Spinozistic strain in Newton’s thought. Second it sketches four in…Read more
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18Without God: gravity as a relational quality of matter in Newton's treatiseIn Dana Jalobeanu & Peter R. Anstey (eds.), Vanishing Matter and the Laws of Motion: Descartes and Beyond, Routledge. pp. 13--80. 2011.
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James Otteson, Adam Smith's Marketplace of Life Reviewed byPhilosophy in Review 23 (5): 356-359. 2003.
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9Ten Neglected Classics of Philosophy (edited book)Oxford University Press USA. 2016.What makes for a philosophical classic? Why do some philosophical works persist over time, while others do not? The philosophical canon and diversity are topics of major debate today. This stimulating volume contains ten new essays by accomplished philosophers writing passionately about works in the history of philosophy that they feel were unjustly neglected or ignored-and why they deserve greater attention. The essays cover lesser known works by famous thinkers as well as works that were once …Read more
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112Hume's newtonianism and anti-newtonianismStanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. 2008.David Hume's philosophy, especially the positive project of his science of man, is often thought to be modeled on Newton's successes in natural philosophy. Hume's self-described experimental method (see the subtitle to Treatise) and the resemblance of his rules of reasoning (Treatise, 1.3.15)1 with Newton's are said to be evidence for this position (Noxon 1973; De Pierris 2002). Hume encourages this view of his project by employing Newtonian metaphors: he talks of an attraction in the mental wor…Read more
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156Spinoza on the politics of philosophical understanding Susan James and Eric Schliesser angels and philosophers: with a new interpretation of Spinoza's common notionsProceedings of the Aristotelian Society 111 (3pt3): 497-518. 2011.In this paper I offer three main challenges to James (2011). All three turn on the nature of philosophy and secure knowledge in Spinoza. First, I criticize James's account of the epistemic role that experience plays in securing adequate ideas for Spinoza. In doing so I criticize her treatment of what is known as the ‘conatus doctrine’ in Spinoza in order to challenge her picture of the relationship between true religion and philosophy. Second, this leads me into a criticism of her account of the…Read more
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11“Every System of Scientific Theory Involves Philosophical Assumptions”(Talcott Parsons). The Surprising Weberian Roots to Milton Friedman's MethodologyIn Dennis Dieks, Wenceslao Gonzalo, Thomas Uebel, Stephan Hartmann & Marcel Weber (eds.), Explanation, Prediction, and Confirmation, Springer. pp. 533--543. 2011.
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35Review of Knud Haakonssen (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to Adam Smith (review)Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews 2007 (8). 2007.
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15New Voices on Adam Smith (edited book)Routledge. 2006.n recent years, there has been a resurgence of academic interest in Adam Smith. As a consequence, a large number of PhD dissertations on Smith have been written by international scholars - in different languages, and in many diverse disciplines, including economics, women’s studies, philosophy, science studies, political theory and english literature: diversity which has enriched the area of study. In response to this activity, and in order to making these contributions more easily accessible t…Read more
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101ON THE ORIGIN OF MODERN NATURALISM: THE SIGNIFICANCE OF BERKELEY’S RESPONSE TO A NEWTONIAN INDISPENSIBILITY ARGUMENTPhilosophica 76 (2): 45-66. 2005.I call attention to Berkeley’s treatment of a Newtonian indispensability argument against his own main position. I argue that the presence of this argument marks a significant moment in the history of philosophy and science: Newton’s achievements could serve as a separate and authoritative source of justification within philosophy. This marks the presence of a new kind of naturalism. A long the way, I argue against the claim tha t there is no explicit opposition or distinction between “philosoph…Read more
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85This paper focuses on Warren Nutter’s The Extent of Enterprise Monopoly in the United States, 1899-1939. This started out as a (1949) doctoral dissertation at The University of Chicago, part of Aaron Director’s Free Market Study. Besides Director, O.H. Brownlee and Milton Friedman were closely involved with supervising it. It was published by The University of Chicago Press in 1951. In the 1950s the book was explicitly understood as belonging to the “Chicago School” (Dow and Abernathy 1963). By …Read more
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34Two Definitions of ‘cause,’ Newton, and The Significance of the Humean Distinction Between Natural and Philosophical RelationsJournal of Scottish Philosophy 5 (1): 83-101. 2007.The main aim of this paper is to explore why it is so important for Hume to defi ne ‘cause’ as he does. This will shed light on the signifi cance of the natural/philosophical relation (hereafter NPR) distinction in the Treatise. Hume's use of the NPR distinction allows him to dismiss on general grounds conceptions of causation at odds with his own. In particular, it allows him to avoid having to engage in detailed re-interpretation of potentially confl icting theories formulated by natural philo…Read more
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