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50Cartesian temporal atomism: A new defence, a new refutationBritish Journal for the History of Philosophy 16 (3). 2008.
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72The metaphysical roots of cartesian physics: The law of rectilinear motionPerspectives on Science 13 (4): 431-451. 2005.: This paper presents a detailed account of Descartes' derivation of his second law of nature—the law of rectilinear motion—from a priori metaphysical principles. Unlike the other laws the proof of the second depends essentially on a metaphysical assumption about the temporal immediacy of God's operation. Recent commentators (e.g., Des Chene and Garber) have not adequately explained the precise role of this assumption in the proof and Descartes' reasoning has continued to seem somewhat arbitrary…Read more
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44From form to mechanism: Helen Hattab: Descartes on forms and mechanisms. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009, x+236 pp, US$ 90.00 HBMetascience 20 (2): 287-290. 2010.From form to mechanism Content Type Journal Article DOI 10.1007/s11016-010-9455-7 Authors Geoffrey Gorham, Department of Philosophy, Macalester College, St. Paul, MN 55105, USA Journal Metascience Online ISSN 1467-9981 Print ISSN 0815-0796.
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2David Hausman and Alan Hausman, Descartes's Legacy: Minds and Meaning in Early Modern Philosophy Reviewed byPhilosophy in Review 18 (4): 264-266. 1998.
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18‘The Twin-Brother of Space’: Spatial Analogy in the Emergence of Absolute TimeIntellectual History Review 22 (1): 23-39. 2012.
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9Stephen Gaukroger , Collapse of Mechanism and the Rise of Sensibility: Science and the Shaping of Modernity, 1680 -1760 . Reviewed by (review)Philosophy in Review 31 (4): 274-277. 2011.
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79Mixing Bodily Fluids: Hobbes’s Stoic GodSophia 53 (1): 33-49. 2014.The pantheon of seventeenth-century European philosophy includes some remarkably heterodox deities, perhaps most famously Spinoza’s deus-sive-natura. As in ethics and natural philosophy, early modern philosophical theology drew inspiration from classical sources outside the mainstream of Christianized Aristotelianism, such as the highly immanentist, naturalistic theology of Greek and Roman Stoicism. While the Stoic background to Spinoza’s pantheist God has been more thoroughly explored, I mainta…Read more
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102Descartes on the Innateness of All IdeasCanadian Journal of Philosophy 32 (3). 2002.Though Descartes is traditionally associated with the moderately nativist doctrine that our ideas of God, of eternal truths, and of true and immutable natures are innate, on two occasions he explicitly argued that all of our ideas, even sensory ideas, are innate in the mind. One reason it is surprising to find Descartes endorsing universal innateness is that such a view seems to leave no role for bodies in the production of our ideas of them.
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63Descartes’s Dilemma of Eminent ContainmentDialogue 42 (1): 3-. 2003.In his recent survey of the “dialectic of creation” in seventeenth-century philosophy, Thomas Lennon has suggested that Descartes’s assumptions about causality encourage a kind of “pantheistic emanationism”. Lennon notes that Descartes regularly invokes the principle that there is nothing in the effect which was not previously present, either formally or eminently, in the cause. Descartes also believes that God is the continuous, total, and efficient cause of everything. From these assumptions i…Read more
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76The Theological Foundation of Hobbesian Physics: A Defence of Corporeal GodBritish Journal for the History of Philosophy 21 (2). 2013.(2013). The Theological Foundation of Hobbesian Physics: A Defence of Corporeal God. British Journal for the History of Philosophy: Vol. 21, No. 2, pp. 240-261. doi: 10.1080/09608788.2012.692663
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50Planck's principle and jeans's conversionStudies in History and Philosophy of Science Part A 22 (3): 471-497. 1991.
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95God and the natural world in the seventeenth century: Space, time, and causalityPhilosophy Compass 4 (5): 859-872. 2009.The employment by seventeenth-century natural philosophers of stock theological notions like creation, immensity, and eternity in the articulation and justification of emerging physical programs disrupted a delicate but longstanding balance between transcendent and immanent conceptions of God. By playing a prominent (if not always leading) role in many of the major scientific developments of the period, God became more intimately involved with natural processes than at any time since antiquity. …Read more
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13Causation and similarity in DescartesIn Gennaro Rocco & Huenemann Charles (eds.), New Essays on the Rationalists, Oxford University Press. pp. 296--309. 1999.
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76Spinoza on the Ideality of TimeIdealistic Studies 43 (1-2): 27-40. 2013.When McTaggart puts Spinoza on his short list of philosophers who considered time unreal, he is falling in line with a reading of Spinoza’s philosophy of time advanced by contemporaneous British Idealists and by Hegel. The idealists understood that there is much at stake concerning the ontological status of Spinozistic time. If time is essential to motion then temporal idealism entails that nearly everything—apart from God conceived sub specie aeternitatis—is imaginary. I argue that although tim…Read more
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54Mind-body dualism and the Harvey-Descartes controversyJournal of the History of Ideas 55 (2): 211-234. 1994.Descartes and William Harvey engaged in a polite dispute about the cause of the heart's motion. Descartes saw the heart's motion of passive; Harvey saw it as active. I criticize three prominent explanations for Descartes' opposition to Harvey's theory. I argue that Descartes found Harvey's model to be inconsistent with mind-body dualism and this was the reason he opposed it
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284Introduction to Special Issue on Seventeenth Century Absolute Space and TimeIntellectual History Review 22 (1): 1-3. 2012.The articles that comprise this special issue of Intellectual History Review are briefly described.
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98Descartes on Time and DurationEarly Science and Medicine 12 (1): 28-54. 2007.Descartes' account of the material world relies heavily on time. Most importantly, time is a component of speed, which figures in his fundamental conservation principle and laws. However, in his most systematic discussion of the concept, time is treated as some-how reducible both to thought and to motion. Such reductionistic views, while common among Descartes' late scholastic contemporaries, are very ill-suited to Cartesian physics. I show that, in spite of the apparent identifications with tho…Read more
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13Descartes’s Dilemma of Eminent ContainmentDialogue 42 (1): 3-26. 2003.RésuméDans sa présentation récente de la «dialectique de la création» dans la philosophie du XVIIe siècle, Thomas Lennon suggère que les hypothèses de Descartes concernant la causalité conduisent à un dilemme : Descartes doit accepter soit une certaine sorte d'émanationnisme panthéiste, soit l'émergence de la réalité ex. nihilo. Dans cet article, je défends en détail cette suggestion de Lennon. Au cœur de la question se trouve la notion cartesienne de la possession éminente. Si cette notion est …Read more
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27‘The Twin-Brother of Space’: Spatial Analogy in the Emergence of Absolute TimeIntellectual History Review 22 (1): 23-39. 2012.Seventeenth-century authors frequently infer the attributes of time by analogy from already established features of space. The rationale for this can be traced back to Aristotle's analysis of time as ?the number of movement?, where movement requires a prior understanding of spatial magnitude. Although these authors are anti-Aristotelian, they were concerned, contra Aristotle, to establish the existence of ?empty space?, and a notion of absolute space which fit this idea. Although they had no ind…Read more
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18Review of Christia Mercer (ed.), Eileen O'Neill (ed.), Early Modern Philosophy: Mind, Matter, and Metaphysics (review)Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews 2005 (9). 2005.
Saint Paul, Minnesota, United States of America
Areas of Specialization
17th/18th Century Philosophy |
Areas of Interest
Metaphysics |
General Philosophy of Science |