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1Leibniz’s Metaphysics: the Path to the MonadologyIn Continuum Companion to Leibniz, Continuum. pp. 89-109. 2011.
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96Individuation 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
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7Book reviews (review)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
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12Simplicity of Substance in Leibniz, Wolff and BaumgartenStudia Leibnitiana 45 (2): 191-208. 2013.
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10Unity and Reality in Leibniz’s Correspondence with Des BossesThe 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
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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
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8Substance 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.
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12Cartesian 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
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12Leibniz 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
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9Kant 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
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10Descartes 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
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22Hylozoism and Dogmatism in Kant, Leibniz and NewtonIn Ralph Schumacher, Rolf-Peter Horstmann & Volker Gerhardt (eds.), Kant Und Die Berliner Aufklärung: Akten des Ix. Internationalen Kant-Kongresses. Bd. I: Hauptvorträge. Bd. Ii: Sektionen I-V. Bd. Iii: Sektionen Vi-X: Bd. Iv: Sektionen Xi-Xiv. Bd. V: Sektionen Xv-Xviii, De Gruyter. pp. 590-596. 2001.
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115Towards Non‐Being: The Logic and Metaphysics of Intentionality ‐ By Graham Priest (review)Philosophical Books 48 (1): 83-84. 2007.
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125Descartes on Causation – Tad SchmaltzPhilosophical Quarterly 60 (239): 418-420. 2010.No Abstract
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Leibniz and the Vinculum SubstantialeDissertation, 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
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86Tom Sorell, G. A. J. Rogers, and Jill Kaye, eds. Scientia in Early Modern Philosophy: Seventeenth-Century Thinkers on Demonstrative Knowledge from First Principles. Dordrecht: Springer, 2010. Pp. xvi+139. $139.00 (review)Hopos: The Journal of the International Society for the History of Philosophy of Science 1 (2): 367-371. 2011.
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Roger S. Woolhouse: Leibniz's' New System'(1695)British Journal for the History of Philosophy 7 (1): 173-175. 1999.
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8Continuum Companion to Leibniz (edited book)Continuum. 2011.With entries written by leading scholars in the field of Modern Philosophy, this Companion is an accessible and authoritative reference guide to Leibniz's life, work and legacy. The book includes extended biographical sketches, and an up-to-date fully comprehensive bibliography. Gathering all these resources in one place, the book is an extremely valuable tool for those interested in Leibniz and the era in which he wrote"--Back cover.
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71Monaden im Diskurs. Monas, Monaden, Monadologien (1600 bis 1770) by Hanns-Peter NeumannJournal of the History of Philosophy 53 (3): 550-551. 2015.
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818Leibniz and the Substance of the Vinculum SubstantialeJournal of the History of Philosophy 38 (2): 203-220. 2000.This paper analyzes Leibniz's notorious 'vinculum substantiale', or 'substantial bond', as it appears in his correspondence with the Jesuit philosopher and theologian, Bartholomew Des Bosses. It is shown that, while Leibniz employs the vinculum to address a problem relating to the unity of corporeal substance, it ultimately violates other key principles in his philosophy.
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32Leibniz and the Shelf of EssenceThe Leibniz Review 15 27-47. 2005.This paper addresses D. C. Williams’s question, “How can Leibniz know that he is a member of the actual world and not merely a possible monad on the shelf of essence?” A variety of answers are considered. Ultimately, it is argued that no particular perception of a state of affairs in the world can warrant knowledge of one’s actuality, nor can the awareness of any property within oneself; rather, it is the nature of experience itself, with the flow of perceptions, that guarantees our actuality. A…Read more
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10Kant's Transcendental Proof of Realism (review) (review)Journal of the History of Philosophy 44 (4): 665-666. 2006.In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:Kant’s Transcendental Proof of RealismBrandon C. LookKenneth R. Westphal. Kant’s Transcendental Proof of Realism. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2004. Pp. x + 299. Cloth, $80.00.Westphal's book is a rich and exciting contribution to the field of Kant studies. Its claims run counter to much contemporary discussion of Kant's theoretical philosophy and indeed challenge some of Kant's fundamental doctrines, but the arg…Read more
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10The Leibniz-des Bosses Correspondence (edited book)Yale University Press. 2007.This volume is a critical edition of the ten-year correspondence between Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz, one of Europe’s most influential early modern thinkers, and Bartholomew Des Bosses, a Jesuit theologian who was keen to bring together Leibniz’s philosophy and the Aristotelian philosophy and religious doctrines accepted by his order. The letters offer crucial insights into Leibniz’s final metaphysics and into the intellectual life of the eighteenth century. Brandon C. Look and Donald Rutherford p…Read more
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107From the Metaphysical Union of Mind and Body to the Real Union of Monads: Leibniz on Supposita and Vincula SubstantialiaSouthern Journal of Philosophy 36 (4): 505-529. 2010.
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146On monadic domination in Leibniz’s metaphysicsBritish Journal for the History of Philosophy 10 (3). 2002.I shall proceed in the following way. In parts II and III of this paper, I shall discuss the strengths and weaknesses of the interpretation put forward by Robert Merrihew Adams in his recent book, and I shall expand upon this account, discussing a crucial but hitherto unexamined aspect of the relation between dominant and subordinate monads, reconstructed from Leibniz's letters to Des Bosses and his essays of 1714, _Principles of Nature and Grace and Monadology. In part IV of this paper, I shall…Read more
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7Books Received: Volume 11, Issue 1 (review)British Journal for the History of Philosophy 11 (1): 173-178. 2003.
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169Leibniz's modal metaphysicsStanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. 2008.In the main article on Leibniz, it was claimed that Leibniz's philosophy can be seen as a reaction to the Cartesian theory of corporeal substance and the necessitarianism of Spinoza and Hobbes. This entry will address this second aspect of his philosophy. In the course of his writings, Leibniz developed an approach to questions of modality—necessity, possibility, contingency—that not only served an important function within his general metaphysics, epistemology, and philosophical theology but al…Read more
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666Grounding the Principle of Sufficient Reason: Leibnizian Rationalism versus the Humean ChallengeIn Carlos Fraenkel, Dario Perinetti & Justin Smith (eds.), The Rationalists: Between Tradition and Revolution, Springer. pp. 201--219. 2011.This essay examines arguments offered in support of the Principle of Sufficient Reason (PSR) by Leibniz and his followers as well as Hume's critique of the PSR. It is shown that Leibniz has a defensible argument for the PSR, whereas the arguments of his self-proclaimed followers are weak. Thus, Hume's challenge is met by Leibniz, by Wolff and Baumgarten not so much.
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