Catherine Wilson

In this introduction to a classic philosophical text, Catherine Wilson examines the arguments of Descartes' famous Meditations, the book which launched modern philosophy. Drawing on the reinterpretations of Descartes' thought of the past twenty-five years, she shows how Descartes constructs a theory of the mind, the body, nature, and God from a premise of radical uncertainty. She discusses in detail the historical context of Descartes' writings and their relationship to early modern science, and at the same time she introduces concepts and problems that define the philosophical enterprise as it is understood today. Following closely the text of the Meditations and meant to be read alongside them, this survey is accessible to readers with no previous background in philosophy. It is well-suited to university-level courses on Descartes, but can also be read with profit by students in other disciplines.

This paper argues that we can acknowledge the existence of moral truths and moral progress without being committed to moral realism. Rather than defending this claim through the more familiar route of the attempted analysis of the ontological commitments of moral claims, I show how moral belief change for the better shares certain features with theoretical progress in the natural sciences. Proponents of the better theory are able to convince their peers that it is formally and empirically superior to its rivals, and the better theory may be promoted to the status of the truth. Yet there is no 'decision-procedure' for ethics any more than there is for molecular biology. The betterness of true theories can be grasped through what I term 'undirectional narratives' of progress. And while there are true moral claims and perhaps numerous moral truths yet to be discovered, we should reject currently popular forms of moral realism with bivalence. Some moral claims lend themselves to the construction of fully reversible, bi-directional narratives and are likely neither true nor false

Moral properties are widely held to be response‐dependent properties of actions, situations, events and persons. There is controversy as to whether the putative response‐dependence of these properties nullifies any truth‐claims for moral judgements, or rather supports them. The present paper argues that moral judgements are more profitably compared with theoretical judgements in the natural sciences than with the judgements of immediate sense‐perception. The notion of moral truth is dependent on the notion of moral knowledge, which in turn is best understood as a possible endpoint of theory change for the better.

This landmark study examines the role played by the rediscovery of the writings of the ancient atomists, Epicurus and Lucretius, in the articulation of the major philosophical systems of the seventeenth century, and, more broadly, their influence on the evolution of natural science and moral and political philosophy. The target of sustained and trenchant philosophical criticism by Cicero, and of opprobrium by the Christian Fathers of the early Church, for its unflinching commitment to the absence of divine supervision and the finitude of life, the Epicurean philosophy surfaced again in the period of the Scientific Revolution, when it displaced scholastic Aristotelianism. Both modern social contract theory and utilitarianism in ethics were grounded in its tenets. Catherine Wilson shows how the distinctive Epicurean image of the natural and social worlds took hold in philosophy, and how it is an acknowledged, and often unacknowledged presence in the writings of Descartes, Gassendi, Hobbes, Boyle, Locke, Leibniz, Berkeley. With chapters devoted to Epicurean physics and cosmology, the corpuscularian or "mechanical" philosophy, the question of the mortality of the soul, the grounds of political authority, the contested nature of the experimental philosophy, sensuality, curiosity, and the role of pleasure and utility in ethics, the author makes a persuasive case for the significance of materialism in seventeenth-century philosophy without underestimating the depth and significance of the opposition to it, and for its continued importance in the contemporary world. Lucretius's great poem, On the Nature of Things, supplies the frame of reference for this deeply-researched inquiry into the origins of modern philosophy

Leibniz entertained the idea that, as a set of “striving possibles” competes for existence, the largest and most perfect world comes into being. The paper proposes 8 criteria for a Leibniz-world. It argues that a) there is no algorithm e.g., one involving pairwise compossibility-testing that can produce even possible Leibniz-worlds; b) individual substances presuppose completed worlds; c) the uniqueness of the actual world is a matter of theological preference, not an outcome of the assembly-process; and d) Goedel’s theorem implies that there can be no algorithm for producing optimal worlds, assuming an optimal world contains truth-discerning creatures, though this is not to say that such worlds cannot arise naturally

There is probably no subject in the philosophy of art which has prompted more impassioned theorizing than the question of the ‘cognitive value’ of works of art. ‘In the end’, one influential critic has stated, ‘I do not distinguish between science and art except as regards method. Both provide us with a view of reality and both are indispensable to a complete understanding of the universe.’ If a man is not prepared to distinguish between science and art one may well wonder what he is prepared to distinguish between, but in all fairness it should be pointed out that the writings of anti-cognitivists contain equally strenuous statements of doctrine. For I. A. Richards, poetry consists of ‘pseudo-statements’ which are ‘true’ if they ‘suit and serve some attitude or link together attitudes which on other grounds are desirable’

The claim that the level of well-beingeach enjoys ought to be to some extent afunction of individuals'' talents, efforts,accomplishments, and other meritoriousattributes faces serious challenge from bothegalitarians and libertarians, but also fromskeptics, who point to the poor historicalrecord of attempted merit assays and theubiquity of attribution biases arising fromlimited sweep, misattribution, custom andconvention, and mimicry. Yet merit-principlesare connected with reactive attitudes andinnate expectations, giving them some claim torecognition and there is a widespread beliefthat their use indirectly promotes thewell-being of all. After critically evaluatingarguments for and against assigning a prominentrole to merit in a distributive protocol, it isargued that an entitlement to the ``doubtful andspeculative'''' but not the ``known andpresumptive'''' components of well-being can flowfrom perceived relative merit. However,statistical equality of outcome with respect togroups is mandatory. Semi-meritocracies aredefensible institutions, but existing rewardschemes by and large do not meet the conditionsof social justice.

Margaret Wilson, who died last year, has been described as the most eminent English-language historian of early modern philosophy of her generation. She was President of the Leibniz Society of North America for four years, from 1986 to 1990. Within this organization she is remembered both for her contributions to Leibniz-studies and for her attention to and support of younger researchers and her governing role in the Society. Her Harvard Ph.D. dissertation on “Leibniz’s Doctrine of Necessary Truth,” written under the supervision of Morton White, was completed in 1965, and she went on to write a number of papers on Leibniz in the late 1960s and early-to-mid 1970s, including “Leibniz and Materialism,” “Confused Ideas” and “Leibniz’s Dynamics and Contingency in Nature,” returning to Leibniz in the late 1980s and early 1990s with such articles as “Compossibility and Law” and “The Phenomenalisms of Leibniz and Berkeley. ” Over the course of her career, Wilson published two books, her dissertation, which appeared in a series issued by Garland in 1990, and Descartes, published by Routledge and Kegan Paul in 1978, as well as more than thirty papers on seventeenth and eighteenth century philosophy, nearly all of which are included in the recent volume from Princeton University Press, Ideas and Mechanism. She held a number of research awards and honorary fellowships, including a Fellowship in the American Academy of Arts and Sciences to which she was elected in 1992.

In this fascinating but sometimes baffling book, the reader engages with a series of conditionals like the following: “If [the psychiatrist] Clérimbault manifests a delirium, it is because he discovers the tiny hallucinatory perceptions of ether addicts in the folds of clothing”. “If Leibniz’s principles [of identity and sufficient reason] appear to us as cries, it is because each one signals the presence of a class of beings that are themselves crying and draw attention to themselves by these cries...”. Deleuze’s study is concerned with Leibniz and with leibnizianism; with the Baroque considered as a historical period and with the baroque considered as a persistent impulse in architecture, decoration, and in human thinking and system construction. Baroque and baroque are explorations, in his view, of curvilinearity, and Deleuze explores Leibniz’s use of mathematical analogies from topology, projective geometry and the calculus. But his attention in the book is mainly fixed on two Leibnizian images. The first image is that of the two-storied house, typically represented in baroque painting by an angelic realm in the upper half of the picture hovering above the human realm. In Leibniz’s writings, this translates into the world of matter and the world of intelligent, self-conscious spirits on the upper level. The second image is that of the fold, which appears in the pleats and draperies of Baroque costume, sculpture, and interior decoration, and which reappears in Leibniz’s mind-as-folded curtain, in his enveloped organisms, preformed under folds, and in the continuum, from whose recesses ever more numbers or particles can be pulled out. In clothing, waves, the brain, pleats of all sorts, surface disappears into interior. Deconstruction! But is it philosophy? Yes! Though Deleuze pulls his comparison-objects out of every corner of contemporary French culture, they are never arbitrary, and the book is focused clearly on its subject.

Poetry, drama and the novel present readers and viewers with emotionally significant situations that they often experience as moving, and their being so moved is one of the principal motivations for engaging with fictions. If emotions are considered as action-prompting beliefs about the environment, the appetite for sad or frightening drama and literature is difficult to explain, insofar nothing tragic or frightening is actually happening to the reader, and people do not normally enjoy being sad or frightened. The paper argues that the somewhat limited and problematic epistemological framework for dealing with the question of fiction-induced emotions has been enhanced by a better empirical understanding of the role of the emotions in social animals and in our individual hedonic economies, as well as by a more generous philosophical assessment of what counts as ‘real’. Literary works can be understood further as monuments to experiences of loss that memorialize the highly pleasurable attachments associated with them

This essay offers a defence of the non-cognitivist approach to the interpretation of moral judgments as disguised imperatives corresponding to social rules. It addresses the body of criticism that faced R. M. Hare, and that currently faces moral anti-realists, on two levels, by providing a full semantic analysis of evaluative judgments and by arguing that anti-realism is compatible with moral aspiration despite the non-existence of obligations as the externalist imagines them. A moral judgment consists of separate descriptive and prescriptive components and is to be understood as a declarative statement prefaced by an 'ideality operator'. Moral beliefs are genuinely representational, but their truth conditions can only be stated with reference to imaginary ideal worlds. Moral judgments are neither confirmed nor verified, but alternative moral positions are preferentially endorsed and adopted by individual agents on the basis of their perceived all-things-considered optimality. High aspiration moralities are normally very costly to agents in terms of their prudential and aesthetic interests, but they are theoretically as eligible as the adoption of other, less demanding sets of rules.

The French philosopher and theologian Nicholas Malebranche was one of the most important thinkers of the early modern period. A bold and unorthodox thinker, he tried to synthesize the new philosophy of Descartes with the religious Platonism of St. Augustine. This is the first collection of essays to address Malebranche's thought comprehensively and systematically. There are chapters devoted to Malebranche's metaphysics, his doctrine of the soul, his epistemology, the celebrated debate with Arnauld, his philosophical method, his occasionalism and theory of causality, his philosophical theology, his account of freedom, his moral philosophy, and his intellectual legacy