•  92
    Individuation und Einzelnsein: Nietzsche, Leibniz, Aristoteles (review)
    Journal of the History of Philosophy 43 (1): 121-122. 2005.
    In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:Individuation und Einzelnsein: Nietzsche, Leibniz, AristotelesBrandon C. LookPaola-Ludovika Coriando. Individuation und Einzelnsein: Nietzsche, Leibniz, Aristoteles. Frankfurt: Klostermann, 2003. Pp. ix. + 318. €28,00.What is a singular thing? Is there a first or last principle that allows us to call something an individual or one? What is the relation between the particular and the universal? Does the being of a particul…Read more
  •  3
    Book reviews (review)
    with M. W. F. Stone, Luciano Floridi, John Henry, Patricia Springborg, Patrick Riley, Paul Schuurman, Sarah Hutton, D. O. Thomas, and Christopher Adair‐Toteff
    British Journal for the History of Philosophy 7 (1): 155-183. 1999.
    The Cambridge Companion to Humanism. Jill Kraye. Cambridge Companions to Literature. Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1996, pp. xvii + 320. £35.00 hbk, £12.95 pbk. ISBN 0–521–43038–0, 0–521–43624–9. Scepticism in the History of Philosophy ‐ A Pan‐American Dialogue. Edited by Richard H. Popkin. Dordrecht‐Boston‐London, Kluwer Academic Publishers, 1996. pp. xxii + 285, hbk, £99.00, ISBN 0–7923–3769–7 Jewish Thought and Scientific Discovery in Early Modern Europe. David B. Ruderman. Yale Univ…Read more
  •  5
    Unity and Reality in Leibniz’s Correspondence with Des Bosses
    The Paideia Archive: Twentieth World Congress of Philosophy 11 95-101. 1998.
    Leibniz's correspondence with Des Bosses presents students of his thought with a problem. It contains some of Leibniz's longest and most detailed discussions of the nature of substance while at the same time introducing two concepts into Leibniz's metaphysics that continually baffle commentators: scientia visionis and the vinculum substantiale. The aim of this paper is to explicate the relationship between scientia visionis, or God's knowledge by vision, and the vinculum substantiale, or the sub…Read more
  • Kant: A Biography (review)
    Review of Metaphysics 55 (4): 865-866. 2002.
    Philosophers are often thought to be aloof, unworldly, and perhaps even boring people, who, at least from the time of Aristophanes’ characterization of Socrates, have been frequently represented as having their heads or their whole beings in the clouds. Add to these qualities, the dryness that appears in many of Immanuel Kant’s works and the primness and propriety associated with Prussia, and one gets a picture of Immanuel Kant that is not very appealing and certainly not one that would make one…Read more
  •  6
    Substance and Individuation in Leibniz (review)
    Review of Metaphysics 55 (4): 849-849. 2002.
    This is an excellent book and an important contribution to the field. Cover and O’Leary-Hawthorne show themselves to be not only at home in the philosophical tradition and hence able to situate Leibniz’s metaphysics within a context of scholastic and modern thought, but also adept at doing metaphysics with a historical figure serving as the springboard for further reflection. By arguing with and sometimes for Leibniz, they explicate his philosophy.
  •  7
    Cartesian Questions: Method and Metaphysics (review)
    Review of Metaphysics 54 (1): 160-161. 2000.
    In the last twenty-five years, Jean-Luc Marion has established himself as the preeminent interpreter of the philosophy of Descartes as well as one of the most interesting philosophers working in the phenomenological tradition. His earlier books, Sur l’ontologie grise de Descartes, Sur la théologie blanche de Descartes, and Sur le prisme métaphysique de Descartes, are all subtle and provocative examinations of Descartes’s philosophy, informed by an unparalleled knowledge of the history of ancient…Read more
  •  10
    Leibniz and Clarke: A Study of Their Correspondence (review)
    Review of Metaphysics 54 (1): 176-176. 2000.
    It is common in the history of philosophy to view the Leibniz-Clarke correspondence as essentially a debate between Leibniz and Newton. According to this view, Clarke was merely Newton’s mouthpiece, or perhaps his amanuensis taking dictation from the “incomparable Mr. Newton” as Newton sought to demolish the philosophical views of his archenemy, Leibniz. In his new book, however, Ezio Vailati argues that we abandon this simplified view, first, because there is little historical evidence proving …Read more
  •  7
    Kant and the Demands of Self-Consciousness (review)
    Review of Metaphysics 54 (2): 446-446. 2000.
    In this book, Pierre Keller addresses some of the most difficult issues in Kant scholarship and provides us with an interesting and new interpretation of Kant’s doctrine of self-consciousness and its relation to the Critical project. In the process of doing so, he skillfully steers between the now treacherous reefs of rival interpretations of Kant. Just as the Critique of Pure Reason is difficult because Kant has so many opponents on so many different issues, so Keller’s book is difficult and de…Read more
  •  8
    Descartes and the Last Scholastics (review)
    Review of Metaphysics 54 (1): 128-129. 2000.
    Roger Ariew begins this book with the following sensible claim: “A philosophical system cannot be studied adequately apart from the intellectual context in which it is situated”. His book, naturally enough, attempts to demonstrate the way in which Descartes responded to and affected the philosophical world of late Scholasticism. The ten chapters themselves are all previously, or soon to be, published essays, unified by the view that our knowledge of late Scholasticism is deeply imperfect and tha…Read more
  •  121
    Descartes on Causation – Tad Schmaltz
    Philosophical Quarterly 60 (239): 418-420. 2010.
    No Abstract
  •  7
    Leibniz: Metaphilosophy and Metaphysics, 1666-1686 (review)
    The Leibniz Review 16 119-121. 2006.
  • Leibniz and the Vinculum Substantiale
    Dissertation, The University of Chicago. 1997.
    One of the most curious features of Leibniz's late metaphysics is no doubt the idea of the vinculum substantiale, or substantial bond, found principally in the correspondence with Des Bosses. Apparently out of the blue, Leibniz posits some kind of thing that will help account for transubstantiation, "realize" phenomena and ground the reality of corporeal or composite substances. This dissertation is the first extended treatment of Leibniz's doctrine of the vinculum substantiale in English. It be…Read more
  • Leibniz's Correspondence with Des Bosses
    In Paul Lodge (ed.), Leibniz and His Correspondents, Uk ;cambridge University Press. 2004.
  •  158
    Leibniz
    The Leibniz Review 16 119-121. 2006.
  •  206
    Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz
    Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. 2008.
    Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz (1646–1716) was one of the great thinkers of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries and is known as the last “universal genius”. He made deep and important contributions to the fields of metaphysics, epistemology, logic, philosophy of religion, as well as mathematics, physics, geology, jurisprudence, and history. Even the eighteenth century French atheist and materialist Denis Diderot, whose views could not have stood in greater opposition to those of Leibniz, could n…Read more
  •  112
    Between Two Worlds: A Reading of Descartes’s Meditations
    Journal of the History of Philosophy 48 (1). 2009.
    In his Between Two Worlds: A Reading of Descartes’s Meditations, John Carriero presents a sustained and sensitive interpretation of this seminal work of modern philosophy. The two worlds of the title are the worlds of Scholastic philosophy on the one side, and of the mechanical philosophy on the other, and it is Carriero’s argument that the Meditations are most helpfully understood against the background of Thomistic Scholasticism. In particular, Carriero shows that there is a deep difference be…Read more
  •  187
    Perfection, power and the passions in Spinoza and Leibniz
    Revue Roumaine de la Philosophie 51 (1-2): 21-38. 2007.
    In a short piece written most likely in the 1690s and given the title by Loemker of “On Wisdom,” Leibniz says the following: “...we see that happiness, pleasure, love, perfection, being, power, freedom, harmony, order, and beauty are all tied to each other, a truth which is rightly perceived by few.”1 Why is this? That is, why or how are these concepts tied to each other? And, why have so few understood this relation? Historians of philosophy are familiar with the fact that both Spinoza and Leib…Read more
  •  1
    In this paper, the author examines Leibniz inconsistent treatments of the existence predicate in his formulations of the ontological argument and elsewhere. It is shown that, contrary to expectations, Leibniz at times adumbrates insights often attributed to Kant and Frege.
  •  181
    One of the more interesting topics debated by Leibniz and Locke and one that has received comparatively little critical commentary is the nature of essences and the classification of the natural world.1 This topic, moreover, is of tremendous importance, occupying a position at the intersection of the metaphysics of individual beings, modality, epistemology, and philosophy of language. And, while it goes back to Plato, who wondered if we could cut nature at its joints, as Nicholas Jolley has poin…Read more
  •  97
    Keller, Pierre. Kant and the Demands of Self-Consciousness (review)
    Review of Metaphysics 54 (2): 446-447. 2000.
  •  379
    Kant’s Thinker
    Journal of the History of Philosophy 49 (4): 502-503. 2011.
    Kant’s Thinker is an excellent and important addition to the literature. In it, Patricia Kitcher aims at arriving at a comprehensive understanding of Kant’s theory of the cognitive subject. To this end, she analyzes a central component of the most notoriously difficult part of the Critique of Pure Reason, the theory of the unity of apperception in the chapter on the Transcendental Deduction of the Categories. In Kitcher’s view, the ultimate payoff of such a study is that Kant’s theory can “provi…Read more
  •  84
    Descartes' Konzeption des Systems der Philosophie (review)
    Journal of the History of Philosophy 39 (3): 440-442. 2001.
    In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Journal of the History of Philosophy 39.3 (2001) 440-442 [Access article in PDF] Reinhard Lauth. Descartes ' Konzeption des Systems der Philosophie. Stuttgart (Bad Cannstatt): Frommann-Holzboog, 1998. Pp. x + 227 pp. Cloth, DM 64.00. Reinhard Lauth's Descartes ' Konzeption des Systems der Philosophie is an interesting addition to the literature on Descartes. Written by a renowned scholar of German Idealism, it does not represent an a…Read more
  •  70
    The Cambridge Companion to Leibniz
    Journal of the History of Philosophy 35 (1): 142-144. 1997.