Michael Richard Ayers

Rationalism, Platonism and God comprises three main papers on Descartes, Spinoza and Leibniz, with extensive responses. It provides a significant contribution to the exploration of the common ground of the great early-modern Rationalist theories, and an examination of the ways in which the mainstream Platonic tradition permeates these theories. John Cottingham identifies characteristically Platonic themes in Descartes's cosmology and metaphysics, finding them associated with two distinct, even opposed attitudes to nature and the human condition, one ancient and 'contemplative', the other modern and 'controlling'. He finds the same tension in Descartes's moral theory, and believes that it remains unresolved in present-day ethics. Was Spinoza a Neoplatonist theist, critical Cartesian, or naturalistic materialist? Michael Ayers argues that he was all of these. Analysis of his system reveals how Spinoza employed Neoplatonist monism against Descartes's Platonist pluralism. Yet the terminology - like the physics - is Cartesian. And within this Platonic-Cartesian shell Spinoza developed a rigorously naturalistic metaphysics and even, Ayers claims, an effectually empiricist epistemology. Robert Merrihew Adams focuses on the Rationalists' arguments for the Platonist, anti-Empiricist principle of 'the priority of the perfect', i.e. the principle that finite attributes are to be understood through corresponding perfections of God, rather than the reverse. He finds the given arguments unsatisfactory but stimulating, and offers a development of one of Leibniz's for consideration. These papers receive informed and constructive criticism and development at the hands of, respectively, Douglas Hedley, Sarah Hutton and Maria Rosa Antognazza.

‘Empiricism’ has become for many a dirty word, and many writers have in mind the kind of neo-Humean Positivism that is the target of Wittgenstein’s Private Language Argument, Quine’s ‘Two Dogmas of Empiricism’, or Merleau-Ponty’s Phénoménologie de la perception. But examination of the Empiricist tradition before Hume uncovers views that do not involve anything like the much-abused “Myth of the Given” or twentieth-century sensedatum theory. This paper identifiesthe particular line of seventeenth-century thought that eventually gave rise to sense-datum theory, and discusses other notions of experience that avoid it. The aim of this history lesson is to point to the possibility of an essentially empiricist approach today, an approach that avoids the neo-idealism or conceptualism of popular modern alternatives to sensedatum theory.