Catherine Wilson

Paul Guyer has shown us how misguided some early criticisms of Kant were, as well as how influential Kant’s views have been on contemporary moral philosophy. Here, I focus on Guyer’s summary judgements of what is of enduring value in Kantian moral philosophy. At issue are the claims that Kantian morality is affirmative of, rather than restrictive on human energy; that the conjunction of universal happiness and universal virtue, the summum bonum, was an important goal for Kant, able to guide individual and collective action; and that the enhancement of freedom, as Kant conceived it, is related to the forms of liberation that characterize contemporary conceptions of social justice and social progress. Such interpretations appear to take Kant in directions he would not himself have wanted to go.

What is a ‘veridical visual experience’? This irreducibly normative notion confusingly suggests a ‘match’ between experiences and an unseen or unperceivable reality. And although the notion of an ‘optical illusion’ appears in technical discussions of the processing of sensory stimuli, it is obvious that natural science cannot supply criteria for veridicality. The _Meditations_ seems to tell us both that all our visual experiences are radically false and that we can trust them as mostly true, but I argue that Descartes grasped the problem of understanding veridicality and provided the framework for a solution, which I develop in this chapter. Two key ideas are required: the notion of a ‘quasinormative’ animal machine whose experiences are not ‘matched’ to the world but to the behavioural outputs it needs to live, and the notion of a circumstantial ‘defeater’ of the organism’s efforts on some occasion.

This chapter shows how Spinoza's severe ontology is at odds with his commitment to the general ethical program. It then tries to explain why, as a recent commentator expresses it, “Spinoza's ethical theory has been historically less influential than the ethical theories of such early modern philosophers as Hume and Kant”. However, the same commentator suggests that “in its naturalism, its practical rationalism, its asymmetrical conception of moral freedom and responsibility, its nonretributivism, its emphasis on virtue as well as consequences, and its close relations to social and political theory, it is a forerunner of and of special relevance to contemporary trends in ethical theorizing”. It is argued that the vector of contemporary moral theory is irreversibly pointed away from Spinozism and shares few assumptions with it.

Moral Animals offers a set of anthropological and conceptual foundations for moral theory before turning to the problem of overdemandingness or exigency as it afflicts contemporary egalitarianism. The first half of the book is devoted to a discussion of the bearing of evolutionary theory on ethics and metaethics. After arguing that morality presupposes and compensates for asymmetrical relations of advantage and social power, the author addresses the problem of objectivity, showing in what sense moral judgements are susceptible of confirmation, whether or not moral realism is tenable. In the second half of the book, a number of vexed issues in the theory of social justice, including the problems of affluence and the subordination of women, are examined. Taking the fair division of the co‐operative surplus as the basic problem of distributive justice, the author shows how most co‐operation between human beings fails to allocate goods to individuals and groups according to appropriate standards of need and merit. It is shown that neither the special nature of the first‐person standpoint, nor the importance of non‐moral projects and ambitions, nor the different needs, social understandings, competencies, and emotions of different persons and groups pose a serious challenge to the view that greater global equality in levels of well‐being, as well as greater equality between the sexes, is not only morally desirable but morally required.

In the seventeenth century the microscope opened up a new world of observation, and, according to Catherine Wilson, profoundly revised the thinking of scientists and philosophers alike. The interior of nature, once closed off to both sympathetic intuition and direct perception, was now accessible with the help of optical instruments. The microscope led to a conception of science as an objective, procedure-driven mode of inquiry and renewed interest in atomism and mechanism. Focusing on the earliest forays into microscopical research, from 1620 to 1720, this book provides us with both a compelling technological history and a lively assessment of the new knowledge that helped launch philosophy into the modern era.Wilson argues that the discovery of the microworld--and the apparent role of living animalcula in generation, contagion, and disease--presented metaphysicians with the task of reconciling the ubiquity of life with human-centered theological systems. It was also a source of problems for philosophers concerned with essences, qualities, and the limits of human knowledge, whose positions are echoed in current debates about realism and instrument-mediated knowledge. Covering the contributions of pioneering microscopists (Leeuwenhoek, Swammerdam, Malpighi, Grew, and Hooke) and the work of philosophers interested in the microworld (Bacon, Descartes, Leibniz, Malebranche, Locke, and Berkeley), she challenges historians who view the abstract sciences as the sole catalyst of the Scientific Revolution as she stresses the importance of observational and experimental science to the modern intellect.

Leibniz has often been described as holding to a kind of phenomenalism. Yet Leibniz did not have a single account of perception, or of the embodied mind, or of the monad, but a set of conflicting and mutually inconsistent accounts that preclude the possibility that there is any such thing as “Leibniz's System.” This difficulty raises problems of interpretation, since it is sometimes maintained that the principle of charity precludes the assignment of frankly inconsistent views to a philosopher. The essay argues that we should not be misled by the intentionalist fallacy into looking for order within a text as opposed to order commentators can impose by making a philosopher's inconsistencies intelligible.

This short essay attempts to answer the question posed in the title. Answers to it tend to circularity; they refer to tender-hearted seventeenth century texts that prefigure, or cite other examples of eighteenth century texts that express the newly emotional and tearful mood. Stephen Gaukroger’s work suggests to the present author a new approach. Thanks to Descartes, philosophers were forced to and able to reconceive something in the world—the bodily machine and its conscious feelings—as divinely constituted, important, and good.