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50From 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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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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22‘The Twin-Brother of Space’: Spatial Analogy in the Emergence of Absolute TimeIntellectual History Review 22 (1): 23-39. 2012.
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82Mixing 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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104Descartes 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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83The 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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65Descartes’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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52Planck's principle and jeans's conversionStudies in History and Philosophy of Science Part A 22 (3): 471-497. 1991.
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99God 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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82Spinoza 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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14Causation 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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61Mind-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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312Introduction 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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106Descartes 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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35‘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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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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21Review of Christia Mercer (ed.), Eileen O'Neill (ed.), Early Modern Philosophy: Mind, Matter, and Metaphysics (review)Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews 2005 (9). 2005.
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1John Leslie, The End of the World: The Science and Ethics of Human Extinction Reviewed byPhilosophy in Review 18 (2): 122-124. 1998.
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86Descartes on God's relation to timeReligious Studies 44 (4): 413-431. 2008.God and time play crucial, intricately related roles in Descartes' project of grounding mathematical physics on metaphysical first principles. This naturally raises the perennial theological question of God's precise relation to time. I argue, against the strong current of recent commentary, that Descartes' God is fully temporal. This means that God's duration is successive, with parts ordered 'before and after', rather than permanent or 'all at once'. My argument will underscore the seamless co…Read more
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120The Concept of Truth in Feminist SciencesHypatia 10 (3). 1995.If we view the aim of feminist science as truthlikeness, instead of either absolute or relative truth, then we can explain the sense in which the feminist sciences bring an objective advance in knowledge without implicating One True Theory. I argue that a certain non-linguistic theory of truthlikeness is especially well-suited to this purpose and complements the feminist epistemologies of Harding, Haraway, and Longino.
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136Cartesian causation: Continuous, instantaneous, overdeterminedJournal of the History of Philosophy 42 (4): 389-423. 2004.: Descartes provides an original and puzzling argument for the traditional theological doctrine that the world is continuously created by God. His key premise is that the parts of the duration of anything are "completely independent" of one another. I argue that Descartes derives this temporal independence thesis simply from the principle that causes are necessarily simultaneous with their effects. I argue further that it follows from Descartes's version of the continuous creation doctrine that …Read more
Saint Paul, Minnesota, United States of America
Areas of Specialization
17th/18th Century Philosophy |
Areas of Interest
Metaphysics |
General Philosophy of Science |