Daniel Garber

Human beings have different likes and dislikes, different beliefs and prejudices, different hopes and fears. These features of one’s temperament (or ingenium, as Spinoza often calls it) contribute to our individuality. This conception of individuality plays a special role in some of Spinoza’s discussions of religious freedom. Because of their different ingenia, some people are attracted to different religions, which, Spinoza argues, is deserving of toleration. But, for Spinoza, ingenia pertain not only to individuals, but to groups of individuals. One might think that the argument for toleration would transfer more or less directly from individuals to groups of individuals. But, I argue, it is more complicated than that.

The chapter presents a contradiction on the disposition of Descartes as a scholar. First, the chapter states that Descartes believes in knowledge as the clear and distinct perception of propositions by the intellect; knowledge in the strictest sense is certain, indeed indubitable, and grounded in the purely rational apprehension of truth. But it is also generally recognized that Descartes was a serious experimenter, at least in his biology and his optics, and that in these areas, at least, he seemed to hold that knowledge requires an appeal to experience and experiment. To the 20th-century philosopher this looks a bit puzzling: how can Descartes be both a rationalist, who sees knowledge as deriving from the intellect, and an experimentalist, who sees experiment and observation as essential to the enterprise of knowledge? This is the puzzle that the chapter would like to address. It argues that not only is there no contradiction here, but that the appeal to experience is an essential part of the method for constructing a deductive science.

This chapter the Cartesian nature of the _Short Treatise on God, Man, and His Well-Being_. Spinoza is best known for the monism of his _Ethics_ and his account of mind as identical to body. However, the chapter argues, he took quite a different view in the _Korte Verhandeling_ (KV). Although in many ways Spinoza’s early view of mind and its relation to body shows many affinities with the view that he was later to take, the chapter argues that in the KV Spinoza held that the mind is a thing (a mode, though not a substance) genuinely distinct from the body. More generally, the chapter argues, in the KV Spinoza is much more directly engaged with debates coming out of Descartes and early Cartesianism than he would be in the _Ethics_, where the influence of Hobbes is stronger.

This chapter concerns the question as to considers why monads play such a negligible role in Leibniz’s _Theodicy_. Against those who argue that the _Theodicy_ is an exoteric text and thus not an appropriate place for Leibniz to present his esoteric doctrines, the chapter argues that Leibniz did not include his esoteric doctrines in the Theodicy them simply because they are not directly relevant to the main theme: of the _Theodicy_, the problem of evil. More generally, it is argued that even though Leibniz’s philosophy is unified and systematic, Leibniz quite self-consciously sought to present his thought in a way that it could be communicated in discrete units, absorbed piece by piece, without having to absorb the entire system at once. In this sense it is modular. This explains why Leibniz’s preferred form is the short essay or note, and why most of his publications were in learned journals. Finally, it is argued that at the time of the _Theodicy_ (1710), the monadological metaphysics was still a somewhat amorphous and incompletely digested collection of doctrines, nothing that could easily have been inserted into the book, even if Leibniz had judged it appropriate. The monadological metaphysics is not fully formulated until the _Principles of Nature and Grace_ and the _Monadology_, both of 1714, it is claimed.

Spinoza's doctrine of the eternal existence of the mind has given rise to an enormous amount of speculation, both as to what he meant by the doctrine and why he included it in the _Ethics_. This chapter presents an account of what exactly Spinoza means by eternity, and what he means when he claims that the mind exists eternally. Understanding what exactly Spinoza is claiming when he claims that the mind has eternal existence, the question as to the role that claim plays in Spinoza's philosophy can be addressed.

For the past 200 years, Kant has acted as a lens--sometimes a distorting lens--between historians of philosophy and early modern intellectual history. Kant's writings about Descartes, Leibniz, Locke, Berkeley, and Hume have been so influential that it has often been difficult to see these predecessors on any terms but Kant's own. In Kant and the Early Moderns, Daniel Garber and Béatrice Longuenesse bring together some of the world's leading historians of philosophy to consider Kant in relation to these earlier thinkers. These original essays are grouped in pairs. A first essay discusses Kant's direct engagement with the philosophical thought of Descartes, Leibniz, Locke, Berkeley, or Hume, while a second essay focuses more on the original ideas of these earlier philosophers, with reflections on Kant's reading from the point of view of a more direct interest in the earlier thinker in question. What emerges is a rich and complex picture of the debates that shaped the "transcendental turn" from early modern epistemology, metaphysics, and philosophy of mind to Kant's critical philosophy. The contributors, in addition to the editors, are Jean-Marie Beyssade, Lisa Downing, Dina Emundts, Don Garrett, Paul Guyer, Anja Jauernig, Wayne Waxman, and Kenneth P. Winkler.

This essay explores the natural history project that Bacon undertakes in the last part of his life. After setting aside the Novum organum and the attempt to set out a method of interpreting nature in detail, Bacon turned to the project of outlining what a natural history should look like. Part of this project involved the composition of some natural histories to serve as models of what a natural history should look like. He published two of six exemplary histories he planned, the Historia vitae et mortis and the Historia ventorum. Both of these are very carefully organized works in learned Latin. However, shortly after his death, William Rawley, his literary executor, published Bacon’s Sylva Sylvarum, presented as “a natural history in ten centuries.” The style of this work is altogether different from the Latin natural histories: it is in English, not Latin, and, as Rawley put it in his letter to the reader, “it may seeme an Indigested Heap of Particulars.” In this essay, I discuss the relations between the formal Latin natural histories and the Sylva. Appealing to the structure of Salomon’s House in the New Atlantis, published in the same volume as the Sylva, I argue that the Sylva Sylvarum represents the very first stages of constructing a natural history, while the Latin natural histories represent later stages in the process, where the observations, experiments, and other materials collected from various sources are arrayed in a more orderly and systematic fashion.

Oxford Studies in Early Modern Philosophy is an annual series, presenting a selection of the best current work in the history of early modern philosophy. It focuses on the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries—the extraordinary period of intellectual flourishing that begins, roughly, with Descartes and his contemporaries and ends with Kant. It also publishes work on thinkers or movements outside of that framework, provided they are important in illuminating early modern thought. The core of the subject matter is philosophy and its history. But the volume’s chapters reflect the fact that philosophy in the early modern period was much broader in its scope than it is currently taken to be and included a great deal of what now belongs to the natural sciences. Furthermore, philosophy in the period was closely connected with other disciplines, such as theology, and with larger questions of social, political, and religious history. Volume 8 includes chapters dedicated to a wide set of topics in the philosophies of Descartes, Hobbes, Spinoza, Locke, Leibniz, Wolff, and Kant.

Though Stephen Gaukroger worked on a large variety of topics, Descartes seems to have been especially important to him. In this brief essay I would like to explore his unique perspective on Descartes’ thought. As I interpret him, Gaukroger’s Descartes is the Descartes of Le monde, the Descartes who put the Copernican world, viewed through the lens of his vortex theory, at the center of his philosophy, the Descartes whose world was shaken to the core by the condemnation of Galileo in 1633, and whose later philosophy can be read as a passionate response to that cataclysmic event in the history of science.

Bernardino Telesio was an important figure in Italian thought at the end of the sixteenth century, and his philosophy was thought to provide a genuine alternative to the Aristotelian natural philosophy then dominant. But by the middle of the seventeenth century, it was quite a different story. This essay examines two stages in the transformation of Telesio’s later reputation. In Francis Bacon’s De principiis et originibus, probably written in the early 1610s, Telesio is taken very seriously. While Bacon disagreed with Telesio in many respects, he was clearly an important interlocutor for Bacon. The essay then turns to an examination of the discussion of Telesio in Charles Sorel’s 1655 essay, “Le sommaire des opinions les plus estranges des Novateurs en Philosophie.” There Telesio appears as one of a long list of novateurs, an exhibition in a forgotten corner of a dusty Wunderkammer. By the middle of the seventeenth century, Telesio’s philosophy is no longer a live option, part of the lively discussion about Aristotelian natural philosophy that dominated the intellectual world at that moment. He was remembered as a pioneer, the first to oppose the dominant Aristotelianism, but his doctrines were largely forgotten.René Descartes is now usually considered the father of modern philosophy. (This is not just my opinion: it can now be substantiated scientifically. Google “father of modern philosophy” and up comes Descartes.) But Descartes’ contemporaries didn’t think so. For them the father of modern philosophy was Bernardino Telesio, a sixteenth-century figure now largely forgotten, except among scholars of Renaissance Italian philosophy. In this essay I would like to explore this curious figure, and how his thought was viewed in the seventeenth century.

Pierre Gassendi (1592-1655) was a major figure in seventeenth-century philosophy and science and his works contributed to shaping Western intellectual identity. Among "new philosophers," he was considered Descartes's main rival, and he belonged to the first rank of those attempting to carve out an alternative to Aristotelian philosophy. In his writings, he promoted a revival of atomism and Epicureanism within a Christian framework, and advocated an empiricist and probabilistic epistemology which was to have a major impact on later thinkers such as Locke and Newton. He is moreover important for his astronomical work, for his defense of Galileo's mechanics and cosmology, and for his activity as a biographer. Given the importance of Gassendi for the history of science and philosophy, it is surprising to see that he has been largely ignored in the Anglophone world. This collection of essays constitutes the first book on Gassendi in the English language that covers his biography, bibliography, and all aspects of his work. The book is divided into three parts. Part I offers a reconstruction of the genesis of Gassendi's Epicurean project, an overview of his biography, and analyses of Gassendi's early attacks on Aristotle, of his advocacy of Epicurean philosophy, and his relation to the skeptical tradition and to Cicero's thought. Part II addresses Gassendi as a participant in seventeenth-century philosophical and scientific debates, focusing especially on his controversies with Descartes and Fludd. Part III explores Gassendi's contributions to logic, theories of space and time, mechanics, astronomy, cosmology, and the study of living beings, and presents the reception of Gassendi's thought in England. This book is an essential resource for scholars and upper-level students of early modern philosophy, intellectual history, and the history of science who want to get acquainted with Pierre Gassendi as a major philosopher and intellectual figure of the early modern period.