Andrea Sangiacomo

Kant’s _New Elucidation_ (1755) is an important source for understanding how early modern debates managed to import and adapt the notion of _sine qua non_ causation in the domain of natural philosophy. In order to clarify Kant’s position, the chapter focuses on two preliminary historical moments: the marginalization of _sine qua non_ causation in Suárez’s account of efficient causation and the forceful revival of _sine qua non_ causation in Malebranche’s occasionalism. In the _New Elucidation_ Kant adopts an understanding of causation similar to that of Malebranche, while also clarifying the way in which God’s involvement in nature has to be understood. In so doing, Kant takes issue with some of the ambiguities of Malebranche’s own account that were hotly debated by his contemporaries.

Spinoza deals with humans and “human essence” but it is not clear how consistent his use of these notions is. The problem evoked by Spinoza’s anthropology concerns in turn the status of singular versus general essences and the relationship between those essences and their concrete condition of existence. In this paper, I propose to distinguish between these levels in order to argue that humanity exists insofar as different individuals can agree among themselves and become adapted to each other to live and operate together. Firstly, I examine Spinoza’s use of the term “aptus” in order to show that eternal singular essences can exist in different ways according to the extent they can be “adapted” to their environment, that is, to external causes. Secondly, I claim that “human essence” has to be understood as a general essence which therefore results from the “agreements” produced among certain singular essences. Thirdly, I argue that, contrary to the remarkable interpretation provided by Valtteri Viljanen, this ontological picture cannot be explained only by reference to formal causation but needs a genuine kind of efficient causation.

ArgumentOngoing debates among historians of early modern philosophy are concerned with how to best understand the context of historical works and authors. Current methods usually rely on qualitative assessments made by the historians themselves and do not define constraints that can be used to profile a given context in more quantitative terms. In this paper, we present a computational method that can be used to parse a large corpus of works based on their linguistic features, alongside some preliminary information that can be retrieved from the associated metadata. The goal of the method is to use the available information about the corpus to create broad groups that can work as sub-contexts for better understanding different sorts of works and authors. In turn, this makes it possible to better profile each group and identify its most distinguishing linguistic features. Once these features are clarified, it will eventually become possible to also identify what the most representative works and authors in each group are and which of them may be worth exploring in greater detail. This classification method thus allows historians to integrate their qualitative assessments with quantitative studies in order to better define the relevant context for any given work.

In the Pāli discourses of the Buddha, ‘conditioned co-origination’ (paṭicca-samuppāda) is the key insight that underpins the Buddha’s own awakening and his teaching. This paper aims to shed light on three connected aspects of conditioned co-origination: the synchronic and non-linear nature of the conditional relations it establishes, the non-causal nature of this relation, and how the whole teaching can be seen as a deepening and expansion of the Buddha’s core insight about the impermanence and uncertainty (anicca) of all conditioned phenomena, which is also central in several forms of Buddhist meditation. These three points are connected. (1) By realizing how any given experience arises out of the systematic conditional relationship among several factors, (2) the practitioner’s attention is directed to contemplate the constitutively conditional nature of phenomenal experience as a whole (instead of focusing on specific causal relations), (3) by thus becoming able to directly see that ‘whatever has the nature of arising, all of that has the nature of ceasing’ (SN 56.11), which is the key insight that unlocks the path towards nibbāna.

Late-eighteenth century science tends to dismiss the search for the true causes of natural phenomena and tries instead to offer a quantifiable and eventually mathematical account of them. By taking the debates on electricity during that period as a case study, this paper aims to ascertain whether, and to what extent, later more quantified and even mathematized approaches are directly supported or continuously connected with earlier approaches. In order to do so, we consider a relatively large pool of early modern works devoted to electricity and contextualize them within a much larger corpus of natural philosophy works. By using a computational approach, we then represent these two corpora as networks based on similarity measures derived from how language is used in each work. Network representation helps us to investigate the place and impact of several works within our corpus, extract information on possible trends, and select key samples for close reading. Based on our results, we surmise that the effort towards mathematization does not arise from having dismissed the quest for the actual physical causes of phenomena, nor is it necessarily correlated with a more skeptical or instrumental attitude towards the knowledge attainable in natural philosophy.

ABSTRACT Although natural philosophy underwent dramatic transformations during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, studying its evolution as a whole remains problematic. In this paper, we present a method that integrates traditional reading and computational tools in order to distil from different resources (the four existing Dictionaries of early modern philosophers and WorldCat) a representative corpus (consisting of 2,535 titles published in Latin, French, English, and German) for mapping the evolution of natural philosophy. In particular, we focus on gathering authors and works that were (directly or indirectly) engaged with the teaching of natural philosophy in the early modern academic milieu. We offer a preliminary assessment of the relevance of our corpus by investigating one aspect of this evolution, namely the trends in the acknowledgments of authorities linked with different and competing approaches to natural philosophy (scholastic, Cartesian, and Newtonian). The results not only corroborate existing knowledge, but they also show distinctive features and differences within these trends that were not observed previously, thus illustrating the heuristic potential of our computational method for corpus collection.

Friendliness (metta in Pali) is an emotional and intentional attitude of goodwill and non-aversion towards all sentient beings, including oneself. It is rooted in both feeling and understanding. In the Pali discourses of the Buddha, friendliness is repeatedly stressed and encouraged for its numerous benefits. It supports and develops a form of emotional intelligence and provides an ideal pathway to explore deeper aspects of one's experience and their philosophical implications. Friendliness is best understood not in isolation, but rather in the broader context of the Buddha's teachings. In that context, it plays an essential role as a catalyst for the unfolding of the whole Buddhist path. Friendliness, then, can be a particularly interesting thread to follow in order to unpack the meaning and practical implications of the core teachings conveyed in the discourses. This introduction combines meditation practice, philosophy, and the reading of ancient texts in order to show how friendliness can function both as an entry point to explore the landscape of the discourses, and how that same landscape unfolds from the perspective disclosed by friendliness.

Consciousness is connected with the fact that a subject is aware and open to the manifestation of whatever appears. Existence, by contrast, is used to express the fact that something is given in experience, is present, or is real. Usually, the two notions are taken to be somehow related. This chapter suggests that existence is at best introduced as a metaphysical (or meta-experiential) concept that inevitably escapes the domain of conscious experience. In order to illustrate this claim, two case studies are considered. The first case is provided by Descartes’s famous treatment of consciousness and existence in his Meditations on First Philosophy. The second case is meant to contrast the Cartesian approach by taking the opposite route, as delineated by Emanuele Severino (1929–2020) in his ‘fundamental ontology’.

In the third part of the Ethics, Spinoza provides a naturalistic picture of human psychology. Spinoza's account distinguishes between active and passive affects. This chapter discusses how Spinoza's theory of affects demonstrates that the self with which human individuals identify in daily life is the result of a complex and constantly on‐going imaginative construction shaped by desires and causal interactions with other individuals and external causes. The core of the affective field is occupied by desire, which is the expression of the individual's conatus to persevere in its own existence. The whole social world arises as a product of the imaginative desire of the mind. Spinoza's account of the affects shows how both of these ideas originate from the complex interplay of affective conditionings and external causes, structured and shaped in the affective field produced by each individual's desiderative imagination.

This paper argues that Spinoza's notions of “conatus” and “power of acting” are derived by means of generalization from the notions of “force of motion” and “force of determination” that Spinoza discussed in his Principles of Cartesian Philosophy to account for interactions among bodies on the basis of their degrees of contrariety. I argue that in the Ethics, Spinoza's ontology entails that interactions must always be accounted for in terms of degrees of “agreement or disagreement in nature” among interacting things. The notion of “power of acting” is used to express the extent to which a thing's conatus is aided or restrained by external causes on the basis of its degree of agreement or disagreement in nature with them. “Power of acting” generalizes the same approach and method of resolution at the basis of the notion of “force of determination” in order to account for causal interactions not only among the simplest bodies but also among more complex individuals.

The goal of this article is to suggest that in early modern discussions of agency and causal efficacy it is possible to detect an attempt at pushing to its extreme consequences a specific account of agency and causality that was developed in late scholastic thought. More specifically, the article examines Francisco Suárez's (1548–1617) account of freedom and how this relates to his views on efficient causality. Despite Suárez's careful way of differentiating between natural (necessary) and human (free) agents, his view can be exploited to drive home occasionalist positions that deny causal efficacy for natural agents lacking reason. The family resemblance that might be noted between early modern positions could be traced back to the reception of a common late scholastic background and to the tensions and potential nestled there.

This paper seeks to reconstruct the meaning of existence in the Pāli discourses of the Buddha by considering how the notion is used in the most systematic contexts in which it appears, and how it could be best interpreted. The discourses are concerned with how existence is used to support and consolidate a certain attitude of ownership, appropriation, and entitlement over contents of experience, in virtue of which one can claim that this or that is ‘mine’. The problem with this move is that it seems to require a degree of stability that is at odds with the fundamental uncertainty (anicca) of all conditioned realities. Existence is used to somehow cover up uncertainty, and thus allow for a semblance of genuine ownership and possession, while in fact possession and ownership are just deluded views doomed to be contradicted by the structural uncertainty of actual experience. This reading entails that the early discourses do share with later traditions an anti-realist inspiration, which is worth exploring in its own right.

In the third intermède of Le Malade Imaginaire, Molière imagines a sort of medical convention in which "the wisest experts and professors of Medicine" examine whether a bachelor candidate can be deemed to enter the medical profession. As the first question in this examination, the "Chief physician" asks, "What is the cause and reason [causam et rationem] why opium induces sleep?" The candidate answers without the least hesitation: "Because it contains a sleeping virtue [virtus dormitiva], whose nature is to put the senses to sleep." The answer is followed by a jubilant reaction by the choir: "Good, good, good, he answers well, he is worthy of entering in our wise gild."1The scene is intended to be a...

This article aims to study the relationship between today’s canonical and noncanonical authors in the domain of early modern natural philosophy through the lens of social network analysis. By studying a massive corpus of letters (Electronic Enlightenment project), we examine the structural relationship between several of today’s canonical authors in natural philosophy and noncanonical women philosophers operating in the same network. We demonstrate the structure of this network and its effects on noncanonical authors. By modeling the case of women philosophers, we show that our model can be used to identify further noncanonical authors who had similar profiles.

This bibliographical essay reconstructs the scholarly debate concerning Spinoza’s account of the body over the last ninety years. The paper focuses on the notion of body considered only from a physical point of view. Questions concerning the ontological status of bodies, the nature of their essence, their power of operating, or the sources of Spinoza’s views have originated a long-standing discussion. This reconstruction presents the main solutions developed so far, and pinpoints the still understudied areas in the field.

This new Cambridge Critical Guide to Spinoza’s Ethics offers an extensive, thought-provoking, and up-to-date state of the scholarly conversation that surrounds one of Spinoza’s most studied masterpieces. The first six chapters address topics mostly related to parts one and two of the Ethics. Don Garrett discusses the identity of the attributes. Warren Zev Harvey suggests that Maimonides’s critique of final causes can be considered as an important source for Spinoza’s treatment of the same topic in the appendix to part one. John Morrison argues that Spinoza’s treatment of the nature of the human mind entails a rejection of the indiscernibility of the identicals. Martin Lin contributes a new interpretation of...