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9Some Motives and Incentives to the Study of Natural PhilosophyIn Moritz Epple & Claus Zittel (eds.), Science as Cultural Practice: Vol. I: Cultures and Politics of Research From the Early Modern Period to the Age of Extremes, Akademie Verlag. pp. 13-30. 2010.
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1Works consultedIn Donald Rutherford (ed.), Leibniz's Metaphysics: A Historical and Comparative Study, Duke University Press. pp. 332-344. 1992.
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27The Scientific Perspective on Moral ObjectivityEthical Theory and Moral Practice 20 (4): 723-736. 2017.The naturalistic approach to metaethics is sometimes identified with a supervenience theory relating moral properties to underlying descriptive properties, thereby securing the possibility of objective knowledge in morality as in chemistry. I reject this approach along with the purely anthropological approach which leads to an objectionable form of relativism. There is no single method for arriving at moral objectivity any more than there is a single method that has taken us from alchemy to mode…Read more
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70Two Opponents of Material Atomism: Cavendish and LeibnizIn Pauline Phemister & Stuart Brown (eds.), Leibniz and the English-Speaking World, Springer. pp. 35-50. 2007.
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2The Illusory Nature of Leibniz's SystemIn Rocco J. Gennaro & Charles Huenemann (eds.), New essays on the rationalists, Oxford University Press. 1999.Leibniz has often been described as holding to a kind of phenomenalism. Yet Leibniz did not have a single account of perception, or of the embodied mind, or of the monad, but a set of conflicting and mutually inconsistent accounts that preclude the possibility that there is any such thing as “Leibniz's System.” This difficulty raises problems of interpretation, since it is sometimes maintained that the principle of charity precludes the assignment of frankly inconsistent views to a philosopher. …Read more
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Thomas Hobbes’ LeviathanIn Peter R. Anstey (ed.), The Oxford handbook of British philosophy in the seventeenth century, Oxford University Press. 2013.This chapter examines Thomas Hobbes's book entitled Leviathan. It suggests that this work is more than just an account of social contract, and explains that Hobbes also explored the issues concerning the human mind and its affects and powers, the psychology of religion, language and reasoning, and the condition of English higher education. The chapter also considers the place of natural persons in Hobbes's systems and suggests that Hobbes deployed two conflicting images of humanity in his writin…Read more
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56The Doors of Perception and the Artist withinAristotelian Society Supplementary Volume 89 (1): 1-20. 2015.This paper discusses the significance for the philosophy of perception and aesthetics of certain productions of the ‘offline brain’. These are experienced in hypnagogic and other trance states, and in disease- or drug-induced hallucination. They bear a similarity to other visual patterns in nature, and reappear in human artistry, especially of the craft type. The reasons behind these resonances are explored, along with the question why we are disposed to find geometrical complexity and ‘supercol…Read more
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The explanation of consciousness and the interpretation of philosophical textsIn Peter Machamer & Gereon Wolters (eds.), Interpretation: Ways of Thinking About the Sciences and the Arts, University of Pittsburgh Press. 2010.
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27Review of Alan Thomas (ed.), Bernard Williams (review)Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews 2008 (5). 2008.
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59Response to Ohad Nachtomy’s “Individuals, Worlds, and Relations: A Discussion of Catherine Wilson’s ‘Plenitude and Compossibility in Leibniz’”The Leibniz Review 11 125-129. 2001.Ohad Nachtomy restates the main points of “Plenitude and Compossibility” with admirable fidelity and economy. His proposed revisions, based on the distinction between incomplete and complete substances and on the mind-relativity of relations, are intriguing additions to his earlier paper in Studia Leibnitiana and deserve careful consideration. Some brief remarks on the context of the problem, will, I hope, help to set the stage for the assessment of our various views.
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28Review of Victoria Kahn, Neil saccamano, Daniela coli (eds.), Politics and the Passions, 1500-1850 (review)Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews 2006 (11). 2006.
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9Picturing Knowledge (review)Dialogue 38 (3): 664-666. 1999.Picturing Knowledge is a collection of papers on scientific illustration written by historians and philosophers of science. While the philosophers of science tend to focus on the question whether illustrations are more than helpful aids to symbolic proofs and linguistic explications, the historians are interested in the presuppositions attaching to particular modes of representation—the decision what to depict and how to depict it. David Knight discusses the conventions determined what were appr…Read more
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2IX. Critical and compensatory metaphysicsIn Donald Rutherford (ed.), Leibniz's Metaphysics: A Historical and Comparative Study, Duke University Press. pp. 304-331. 1992.
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7Leibniz and Clarke: A Study of Their Correspondence by Ezio Vailati (review)Isis 91 155-156. 2000.
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4I. language, logic, encyclopediaIn Donald Rutherford (ed.), Leibniz's Metaphysics: A Historical and Comparative Study, Duke University Press. pp. 7-44. 1992.
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IntroductionIn Desmond M. Clarke & Catherine Wilson (eds.), The Oxford handbook of philosophy in early modern Europe, Oxford University Press. 2011.This introductory article explains the coverage of this book, which is about the history of philosophy in Europe during the early modern period. This book explores the most important developments in the philosophy of the period as these are expounded both in texts that have since become very familiar and in other philosophical texts that are undeservedly less well-known. It attempts to make evident the fluid boundaries in the early modern period between deductions from experimental science and p…Read more
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1IndexIn Donald Rutherford (ed.), Leibniz's Metaphysics: A Historical and Comparative Study, Duke University Press. pp. 345-350. 1992.
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1IntroductionIn Donald Rutherford (ed.), Leibniz's Metaphysics: A Historical and Comparative Study, Duke University Press. pp. 1-6. 1992.
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2Edward Craig, The Mind of God and the Works of Man Reviewed byPhilosophy in Review 8 (7): 254-257. 1988.
Catherine Wilson
CUNY Graduate Center
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CUNY Graduate CenterDistinguished Professor (Part-time)
Areas of Specialization
Meta-Ethics |
17th/18th Century Philosophy |
Social and Political Philosophy |