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543The evolution of Henry more's theory of divine absolute spaceJournal of the History of Philosophy 45 (1): 79-102. 2007.: This paper charts the gradual development of a theory of real space, underlying the created world and constituted by the extension of God Himself, in the writings of the Cambridge Platonist, Henry More. It identifies two impediments to More's embracing such a theory in the earlier part of his career, namely his initial commitment to the principles that (a) space was not real and (b) God was not extended, and it shows how he finally came to renounce these principles in order to devise the theor…Read more
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181The spatial presence of spirits among the cartesiansJournal of the History of Philosophy 46 (1): 91-117. 2008.: The Cartesians have often been read as if they denied spatial presence to incorporeal substances, reserving it for extended things alone. This article explores whether this common interpretation is accurate, examining the cases of both created minds and the divine substance of God Himself. Through scrutiny of the relevant texts of both Descartes himself and his followers, it demonstrates that, in the divine case, this common interpretation is incorrect, and that the Cartesians did believe that…Read more
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173ImmaterialismIn Aaron Garrett (ed.), The Routledge Companion to Eighteenth Century Philosophy, Routledge. 2014.
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141The Metaphysics of Jonathan Edwards and David HumeHume Studies 32 (1): 53-82. 2006.This article compares Hume's metaphysical views with those of his contemporary, the American theologian and philosopher, Jonathan Edwards. It shows how, although the two men developed their theories in isolation from one another, their minds were nevertheless following almost identical paths on several of the most central issues in metaphysics (including the natures of body and mind, personal identity, causation, and free will). Their final conclusions were, however, radically different. In shor…Read more
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104Malebranche on intelligible extensionBritish Journal for the History of Philosophy 11 (4). 2003.This paper explores the ontology of Malebranche's notion of "intelligible extension", the archetypal divine idea of matter which he believed to be the immediate object of our own minds in all of our thoughts about corporeal things. Building on this account of its ontology, and through an examination of a form of isomorphism between intelligible extension and the created spatial world, the paper also attempts to explain the manner in which it could fulfill its epistemological role of representing…Read more
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101Natural kind essentialismAustralasian Journal of Philosophy 80 (1). 2002.This article explores the theory of natural kind essentialism, as developed by Putnam and Kripke. It defends the theory against certain criticisms, but also suggests that it should not be treated as universally true. Rather, it comes down to how different people use language, offering reasons why some people's idiolects might behave in an essentialist way while others behave in the contrary way, but explaining how we can all still communicate perfectly well despite this.
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74Henry More on Material and Spiritual ExtensionDialogue 42 (3): 531-. 2003.RÉSUMÉ: Cet article examine les façons dont le platonicien de Cambridge Henry More, au XVIIe siècle, a tenté de défendre une rigoureuse séparation ontologique entre les substances matérielles et les substances spirituelles tout en maintenant que les unes et les autres étaient étendues. Nous élucidons certaines des théories et certains des concepts propres à More, tels que l’indiscerpabilité, la pénétrabilité, la spissitude essentielle et l’hylopathie, qui fournissaient, croyait-il, une base soli…Read more
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72Henry More and Nicolas Malebranche's Critiques of SpinozaEuropean Journal of Philosophy 23 (3): 764-792. 2013.Henry More and Nicolas Malebranche, each in his own way, drew a distinction between two kinds of extension, the one indivisible and the other divisible. Spinoza also drew a comparable distinction, explaining that, insofar as extended substance was conceived intellectually, it would be grasped as indivisible, whereas, when it was instead depicted in the imagination, it would be seen as divisible. But, whereas for Spinoza these were just different views on one and the same extended substance, More…Read more
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72Anne Conway and Her Circle on MonadsJournal of the History of Philosophy 58 (4): 679-704. 2020.The goal of this article is to counter a belief, still widely held in the secondary literature, that Anne Conway espoused a theory of monads. By exploring her views on the divisibility of both bodies and spirits, I argue that monads could not possibly exist in her system. In addition, by offering new evidence about the Latin translation of Conway's Principles and the possible authorship of its annotations, I argue that she never even suggested that there could be such things as monads. Alongside…Read more
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70Jonathan Edwards on Space and GodJournal of the History of Philosophy 41 (3): 385-403. 2003.: This paper examines how Jonathan Edwards (1703-1758) shifted from a broadly Newtonian conception of divine, absolute space to a more Berkeleian or Leibnizian theory of merely relative, ideal space. Setting Edwards' views within a context of contemporary European thought, it elucidates his early position, as expressed in the opening portion of his essay 'Of Being' (c. 1721), and then proceeds to chart the development of his more mature views, showing in particular how the development of his imm…Read more
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67Descartes and the Individuation of BodiesArchiv für Geschichte der Philosophie 96 (1): 38-70. 2014.Descartes has standardly been read as holding that bodies achieve actual physical individuality through motion. He seems to say as much in Principles of Philosophy II, §25: “By ‘one body’ or ‘one piece of matter’ I mean whatever is transferred at a given time”. I contend, however, that this interpretation is quite wrong. Such a view would lead to an utterly untenable – and un-Cartesian – position whereby nothing could ever move, but nothing could be at rest either. Having noted this, I the…Read more
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50Descartes’s Indefinitely Extended UniverseDialogue 58 (2): 341-369. 2019.Descartes croyait que le monde étendu ne se terminait pas par une borne, mais pourquoi? Après avoir expliqué la position de Descartes au §1, en suggérant que sa conception de l’étendue indéfinie de l’univers devrait être entendue comme actuelle, mais syncatégorématique, nous nous penchons sur son argument dans le §2 : toute postulation d’une surface extérieure au monde sera autodestructrice, parce que la simple contemplation d’une telle borne nous conduira à reconnaître l’existence d’une étendue…Read more
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38The Common Consent Argument from Herbert to HumeJournal of the History of Philosophy 53 (3): 401-433. 2015.various arguments for the existence of God have risen and fallen over the centuries, but the one that has perhaps fallen furthest is the argument from the universal consent of mankind. Put simply, the argument went as follows: near enough everyone, in near enough every nation, in near enough every historical era, has believed in God; therefore, God must exist. Or, as it was summarized in the strikingly Lincolnesque terms of Diderot’s Encyclopédie: “You can fool some of the people, or fool all of…Read more
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33Thomas Daniel: an unknown philosopher of the mid-eighteenth centuryHistory of European Ideas 27 (3): 257-272. 2001.This article identifies the author of an anonymous 1751 pamphlet and a group of associated letters to The Gentleman's Magazine as one Thomas Daniel, a customs officer at Sunderland and amateur philosopher. It explores the form of immaterialism Daniel presented, in relation to the views of Malebranche, Newton, Berkeley, Arthur Collier, and Jonathan Edwards.
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33The Metaphysics of Henry MoreSpringer. 2012.The book surveys the key metaphysical contributions of the Cambridge Platonist, Henry More (1614–1687).
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31Faith, Fluxions and Impossible Numbers in Berkeley’s Writings of the Early 1730sModern Schoolman 80 (1): 1-22. 2002.This article explores George Berkeley's philosophy of mathematics, in comparison with his philosophy of religion, with particular attention to his book, The Analyst, and other contemporaneous texts. Through this comparison, it sheds light on his real attitude to the calculus, as well as other mathematical impossibilities such as negative or imaginary numbers. In both mathematics and religion, Berkeley rejected "barren speculation," but he found value in both from their practical benefits in life…Read more
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17Review of Robert Crocker, Henry More, 1614-1687: A Biography of the Cambridge Platonist (review)Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews 2004 (9). 2004.
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15The Trinitarian Metaphysics of Jonathan Edwards and Nicolas MalebrancheHeythrop Journal 43 (2): 152-169. 2002.This paper explores both the striking similarities and also the differences between Jonathan Edwards and Nicolas Malebranche’s philosophical views on the Holy Trinity and, in particular, the ways in which they both gave important roles to specific Persons of the Trinity in the various different branches of their respective metaphysical systems—ontological, epistemological and ethical. It is shown that Edwards and Malebranche were in very close agreement on ontological questions pertaining to the…Read more
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1Sergeant, John (1623–1707)In S. J. Savonius-Wroth Paul Schuurman & Jonathen Walmsley (eds.), The Continuum Companion to Locke, Continuum. 2010.
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The Cambridge Platonists: material and immaterial substanceIn Rebecca Copenhaver (ed.), History of the Philosophy of Mind, Vol. 4: Philosophy of Mind in the Early Modern and Modern Ages, Routledge. 2018.
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Henry More, supporter and opponent of CartesianismIn Steven Nadler, Tad M. Schmaltz & Delphine Antoine-Mahut (eds.), The Oxford Handbook of Descartes and Cartesianism, Oxford University Press. 2019.
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The Cambridge Platonists: material and immaterial substanceIn Rebecca Copenhaver (ed.), History of the Philosophy of Mind, Vol. 4: Philosophy of Mind in the Early Modern and Modern Ages, Routledge. 2018.
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Early Eighteenth Century Immaterialism in its Philosophical ContextDissertation, Princeton University. 2000.In the first quarter of the eighteenth century, four philosophers independently proposed immaterialist theories. Ontologies of this kind had been absent from the philosophical stage for several centuries, and their sudden and widespread revival suggests that there was something about the intellectual milieu at the turn of the seventeenth to the eighteenth century that made a move to immaterialism a natural step to take. This dissertation examines some of the factors which contributed to its revi…Read more
Areas of Interest
17th/18th Century Philosophy |