Christia Mercer

In this paper, I examine the arguments offered by prominent ancient philosophers and medical theorists to justify the view that female bodies are imperfect or “mutilated” compared to male bodies from which it is supposed to follow that women are morally inferior to men. These arguments rendered men superior to women and justified the need for women to subjugate themselves to their procreative powers and to the wisdom of their superiors. Western sexism and misogyny has its roots here. It is unsettling to witness the ease with which a few men writing millennia ago laid the groundwork for centuries of sexism and depressing to realize that many of our contemporaries embrace the residue of these ancient ideas. But it is important for us to understand how these sexist attitudes arose, how they maintained themselves, and how utterly contingent they are.

The main goal of this chapter is to present the basic components of Anne Conway’s metaphysics of sympathy. To that end, I will explicate her concepts of God or first substance and second substance or Christ with special emphasis on the key role that the second substance plays in her philosophy. I argue that one of the keys to Conway’s system lies in her reinterpretation of the Christian narrative about suffering. She combines Christian imagery with ancient and modern ideas in an attempt to create a philosophy that will appeal to people of all faiths and explain ‘all phenomena in the entire universe’ ). Christ’s role as a metaphysical and moral figure is crucial to Conway’s philosophy and helps explain her views about suffering and the importance of sympathy in her philosophy.

while no one was looking, contextualism replaced rational reconstructionism as the dominant methodology among English-speaking early modern historians of philosophy. In this paper, I expose the contours of this silent revolution, show that rational reconstructionism is a thing of the past among early modern historians, and examine the current state of early modern scholarship.1 As the contextualist revolution has increasingly widened our perspective and revealed the period’s philosophical diversity, it has encouraged early modernists to develop new skills and expertise. I propose here that current early modern historians are devoted to maximize...

This volume showcases the best current work now being written on a wide range of issues in early modern philosophy, when some of the most influential current philosophical problems were first identified by figures like Locke, Berkeley, Kant, Spinoza, and Descartes. Collectively the articles exemplify the wide range of methodological perspectives currently being employed by top figures in the field. Indeed the selling point of the volume is the very high level of the fourteen contributors, each of whom has a highly distinguished international reputation.

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:Leibniz and the Rational Order of Nature by Donald RutherfordChristia MercerDonald Rutherford. Leibniz and the Rational Order of Nature. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1995. Pp. xiii + 301. Cloth, $54.95. Paper, $18.95.During the twentieth century, scholars of Leibniz have mostly ignored his theology. The tide has recently turned, however, and a few brave souls have begun to disentangle the subtle complications of the relations between Leibniz’s philosophical theology and the rest of his thought. Donald Rutherford is such a brave soul. In his book, he intends to recover “the theodicy as an essential part of Leibniz’s philosophy” (1). To this end, he offers “a comprehensive interpretation of Leibniz’s metaphysical theories—particularly those of his late writings,” and attempts to show “how theodicy [End Page 139] and metaphysics inform each other in his thought” (1). The book has three parts and ten chapters. In the three chapters of Part I, Rutherford “focuses on Leibniz’s theodicy: his vindication of divine justice, the character of the goods that make this the best of all possible worlds, and the special role assigned to rational minds as agents within God’s providential plan for the world” (1). In the three chapters of Part II, Rutherford turns his attention to “Leibniz’s conception of metaphysics as a rational science” and to the notion of substance at its center (2). Finally, in the four chapters of Part III, Rutherford presents an account of Leibniz’s late metaphysics.The structure of Rutherford’s general argument is ingenious. Most fundamentally, he argues that “the guiding force behind” the theodicy is a commitment to reason: “reason as it directs the creative will of God, reason as it is... realized in the intelligible order of the created world, and reason as it helps human beings discern and appreciate that order.” Moreover, “Leibniz’s metaphysical theories are designed to promote the goals of his theodicy” by evidencing as much as possible that rational order (2). Therefore, once we see the metaphysics in light of its theological goal, the close interconnections among its parts will become evident. As Rutherford nicely puts it: “The Leibniz who emerges in this book is one for whom theoretical and practical ends are inextricably linked” (3).In Part I, Rutherford describes the project of the theodicy and, along the way, offers answers to questions which have plagued scholars for decades: What is the relation between variety and simplicity as (apparently conflicting) criteria of worldly goodness? How is the demand for the maximization of perfection related to the (apparently conflicting) commitment to the optimization of the happiness of rational creatures? How can there be different orders and harmonies in one world? Although many of Rutherford’s proposals are both plausible and interesting, they are painted with such broad strokes that they are sometimes difficult to evaluate. Some of the missing details are supplied later in the book, but others are not. For example, a clear picture of the relation between God’s power, goodness, will, and rationality never emerges. In Part II, Rutherford surveys some important texts and topics which concern Leibniz’s methodology, and he presents an intelligent interpretation of Leibniz’s theory of substance. There is much that is interesting here. In Part III, Rutherford is at his best. He ties together many of the separate strands of the late philosophy and tells a plausible story about monads, panorganism, and corporeal substance. This is a genuine achievement and one that will generate a lot of discussion.While I applaud Rutherford’s attempt to construct a coherent account of Leibniz’s philosophy, it is my opinion that he has attached too much importance both to the rational order that is supposed to please the faculty of reason, whether divine or human, and to that faculty itself. According to the Christianized Platonism that Leibniz learned (among many other things) from his teachers in Leipzig, it is the intellect or understanding (intellectus) and not the reason that comes to know the most fundamental truths; and moreover the goodness that created beings (and their interrelations) are supposed to have is based on the fact that they are expressions of God...

Descartes intended to revolutionize seventeenth-century philosophy and science. But first he had to persuade his contemporaries of the truth of his ideas. Of all his publications, Meditations on First Philosophy is methodologically the most ingenuous. Its goal is to provoke readers, even recalcitrant ones, to discover the principles of “first philosophy.” The means to its goal is a reconfiguration of traditional methodological strategies. The aim of this chapter is to display the methodological strategy of the Meditations. The text’s method is more subtle and more philosophically significant than has generally been appreciated. Descartes’ most famous work is best understood as a response to four somewhat separate philosophical concerns extant in the seventeenth century. Section 1 describes these. Section 2 discusses how Descartes uses and transforms them. A clearer sense of the Meditations’ methodological strategy provides a better understanding of exactly how Descartes intended to revolutionize seventeenth-century thought.

Scholars have long noted that, for Leibniz, the attributes or Ideas of God are the ultimate objects of human knowledge. In this paper, I go beyond these discussions to analyze Leibniz’s views about the nature and limitations of such knowledge. As with so many other aspects of his thought, Leibniz’s position on this issue—what I will call his divine epistemology—is both radical and conservative. It is also not what we might expect, given other tenets of his system. For Leibniz, “God is the easiest and the hardest being to know.” God is the easiest to know, in that to grasp some property of an essence is to attain a knowledge of the divine essence, but God is also the most difficult to know, in that “real knowledge” of the divine essence is not available to finite beings. There is an enormous gap between the easy and the real knowledge of God, but for Leibniz, this gap is a good thing, since the very slowness of our epistemological journey prepares us morally for its end.

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:nook REVIEWS 689 if everyone behaves as if everyone is saved the result is a world in which God could appear and not be crucified. To be sure, there is a chance of an infinite life. Pascal believed human beings are potentially infinite--as is shown by our capacity for extending our knowledge to the infinite--but we are also potentially nothing, as is shown by the fact that the person never really appears in our scientific accounts. It is through God that our infinity is to be achieved, and so betting on God is also betting on ourselves in a perfectly intelligible way. This involw~s a notion of infinity not explored in any of these essays, which makes it possible to share with God without changing the divine nature (or losing ours). This sharing is a payoff which cannot be attained by.just any act. Our lives may also be endless and possessed of positive value because they are not lived in hell, but this is icing on a cake which you are supposed to eat anyhow. Still, though Pascal might have taught the authors a thing or two, he would have found this book handy for some of its new conceptual analyses and some of its classic essays. Ian Hacking's 1972 analysis of what he takes to be three different arguments in Pascal remains a good starting point and John K. Ryan's historical article of 1945 still has useful things to say about Tillotson, whose maximization-of-utility argument really was the one many commentators have taken to be Pascal's. (But Ryan misses much of the background in the combination of scepticism and fideism in Charron and La Mothe le Vayer.) Among the others Jeff Jordan does a good job on the "many gods" objections, Richard Foley's account of pragmatic grounds for belief adds some clear insights (though his account of rationality is open to some objections), and Thomas V. Morris's account of the problems of wagering and evidence will be a handy reference point. Edward F. McClennen's account of finite decision is a necessary counterpart to Sorensen's infinity paper, and Philip L. Quinn opens some of the moral issues involved in all such wagers. Finally, George Schlesinger's assessment of the subtleties of theistic argument well repays the time spent reading it. The bibliography is useful and up-to-date. The editor would probably cheerfully admit his book's shortcomings as a work in the history of philosophy, but the volume must nevertheless have a place on the bookshelf of everyone for whom these issues are central. LESI,IE ARMOUR Universityof Ottawa G. W. Leibniz. De Summa Rerum: MetaphysicalPapers, z675-76. Translated, with an Introduction and Notes, by G. H. R. Parkinson. The Yale Leibniz. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1992. Pp lxiv + 145. Cloth, $37.oo. The YaleLeib,niz, under the general editorship of Daniel Garber and Robert C. Sleigh, Jr., will provide scholarly editions of Leibniz's original texts along with an English translation on facing pages. As the general editors explain in their introduction, each volume in the series will be "a collection of texts that constitute a natural unit," each will be edited and translated by a specialist who will also contribute an introduction, and 690 JOURNAL OF THE HISTORY OF PHILOSOPHY 33:4 OCTOBER i99 5 each will include writings most of which either have not been published or, if published, have not been translated. The first volume of The Yale Leibniz, edited by G. H. R. Parkinson, is a tantalizing beginning. In it, Parkinson has collected, translated, and introduced some of the most interesting papers from the Academy edition's Series VI, Vol. 3, first published in 198o. In this volume the Academy editors have placed under the title of De Summa Return those papers which Leibniz wrote between late 1675 and December 1676 and which treat problems in the philosophy of mathematics (especially those of the infinite) and in metaphysics and philosophical theology. The papers are enormously important. Toward the end of his Paris stay (which lasted from March, 1672 to October 4, 1676) and after a breakthrough in his work on...

In his thoughtful and generous review of my book, Leibniz’s Metaphysics: Its Origins and Development, Cees Leijenhorst accepts many of its most radical conclusions: that Leibniz’s metaphysics evolved out of an attempt to combine ideas gathered from the great philosophers of the past and to do so in a manner that would solve the theological, legal, and philosophical questions that most concerned him; that although Leibniz’s notion of substance developed out of his interpretation of the philosophy of Aristotle, his conception of the relation between God and creatures has its roots in the Platonism that he learned as a young man in Leipzig and Jena; that the views constituting the core doctrines of the mature philosophy were conceived by the time Leibniz went to Paris in early 1672; and that Leibniz rejects the reality of passive extended matter and embraces his own version of idealism as early as 1671. I am tempted to respond with a loud rodeo yell and end it at that. But because the few points on which.

Anyone interested in Leibniz, the Kabbalah, the Cambridge Platonists, Gnosticism, Platonism, or seventeenth-century metaphysics will want to read Allison P. Coudert’s Leibniz and the Kabbalah. Coudert argues that core features of Leibniz’s mature philosophy were directly influenced by the Kabbalah in general and Francis Mercury van Helmont’s Lurianic Kabbalah in particular. This is a provocative thesis to which Coudert brings an impressive amount of scholarly detective work. Her argument in brief goes as follows: there are important differences between the philosophy of Leibniz’s middle period and that of the late; some of the most distinctive features of the late philosophy are very similar to key aspects of the Lurianic Kabbalism of van Helmont, with whose works and ideas Leibniz became increasingly familiar after 1687; therefore, Leibniz’s late philosophy was significantly influenced by the thought of van Helmont.

When Bruno was burned at the stake in 1600, philosophers were still inclined to offer natural explanations in Aristotelian terms. Neither the physical proposals of Bruno himself, nor those of other prominent non-Aristotelians like Paracelsus had diminished the power of the explanatory model offered by the scholastics. For those philosophers watching the demise of Bruno in the Campo dei Fiori in Rome, the burning of the wood and its subsequent effects would have been explained adequately in terms of matter and substantial form. For such Aristotelian philosophers, all natural objects are constituted of matter and form, and natural events are explained in terms of the actualization of the potency of these two “principles of nature.” By the time Kenelm Digby composed his Two Treatises of 1644 and Thomas Hobbes his De Corpore in 1655, there was a new explanatory model available to explain such events, one that had greatly diminished the power of the scholastic model. According to the mechanical philosophy, nature is composed of matter—whether the res extensa of Descartes, the atoms of Gassendi, or one of the many less popular accounts of corporeity—whose actions and interactions cause and explain all the phenomena of nature. For the mechanist, therefore, all physical phenomena are to be explained in terms of some kind of matter and motion. Although these thinkers disagreed about how to define the material component in nature, they all took it to be entirely devoid of substantial forms. For our purposes here, it will be helpful to distinguish between first wave and second wave mechanists. A first wave mechanist is someone like Descartes, Galileo, Hobbes, or Gassendi who proposed a version of the mechanical explanatory model before 1650. A second wave mechanist is a philosopher working in the second half of the seventeenth century who accepts the mechanical explanatory model. For our purposes, it is important that many second wave mechanists were prepared to reject the scholastic explanatory model, replace it with the mechanical one, and yet were not content to accept the metaphysical grounding of the mechanical physics offered by the first wave mechanists.

Working on Leibniz’s vast essays and texts can seem overwhelming. As exciting as it is to study the details of the Monadology and Discourse on Metaphysics, the Theodicy and the letters to Arnauld, it can be terrifying to sit back and think that there are thousands of other pages of equally sublime and often more difficult philosophical material. The personal notes are particularly daunting. Because Leibniz wrote these for himself, it is often difficult to grasp his reasoning and decipher his underlying philosophical motivation: he typically neither states his most basic assumptions nor articulates how the piece he is presently writing fits into a general plan or project. Sometimes he just plays with an idea or tries out an argument. As Leibniz himself wrote about his notes: “instead of treasure..., you will only find ashes; instead of elaborate works, a few sheets of paper and some poorly expressed vestiges of hasty reflections, which were only saved for the sake of my memory.” But even Leibniz’s more polished essays can be unnerving in manuscript. These sheets—which contain deletions, additions, an enormous number of reformulations, and reconsiderations—reveal an impatient intellect hurrying to express its ideas. Because Leibniz is so often reluctant to set the stage for a philosophical proposal or to acknowledge its various implications, one often has to go well beyond the text in order to understand how the proposal at hand relates to other parts of his thought. Moreover, Leibniz encourages confusion by using one terminology in one text and an entirely different one in another. The moral to the story is clear: one cannot depend either on a single essay or on a small group of passages taken in isolation from others in the same period. When it comes to Leibniz’s writings, it is necessary to take the widest possible textual perspective.

In his thoughtful and generous review of my book, Leibniz’s Metaphysics: Its Origins and Development, Cees Leijenhorst accepts many of its most radical conclusions: that Leibniz’s metaphysics evolved out of an attempt to combine ideas gathered from the great philosophers of the past and to do so in a manner that would solve the theological, legal, and philosophical questions that most concerned him; that although Leibniz’s notion of substance developed out of his interpretation of the philosophy of Aristotle, his conception of the relation between God and creatures has its roots in the Platonism that he learned as a young man in Leipzig and Jena; that the views constituting the core doctrines of the mature philosophy were conceived by the time Leibniz went to Paris in early 1672; and that Leibniz rejects the reality of passive extended matter and embraces his own version of idealism as early as 1671. I am tempted to respond with a loud rodeo yell and end it at that. But because the few points on which.