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164"Creative Translation in Emerson's Idealism"In Thomas Nolden (ed.), In the Face of Adversity: Translating Difference and Dissent, Ucl Press. pp. 237-253. 2023.I consider Ralph Waldo Emerson’s creative appropriation of a philosophical doctrine that helps to make sense of an attitude towards life, its gifts and its burdens, that is often expressed in Puritan diaries. The doctrine, now known as the doctrine of continuous creation, holds that in conserving the world, God re-creates it at every moment, making the same creative effort at each ever-advancing now that God made at the very beginning. Continuous creation was explicitly endorsed by at least one …Read more
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144Berkeley on Abstract IdeasArchiv für Geschichte der Philosophie 65 (1): 63-80. 1983.There are three propositions that this author demonstrates in his argument: the contention that berkeley 's attack on abstract ideas is not made wholly compatible with his atomic sensationalism, that berkeley does not provide or employ a single definition or criterion for determining the limit of abstraction and that the doctrine of abstract ideas furnishes no real support to berkeley 's argument against the existence of material substance independent of perception.
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117P.j.E. Kail's projection and realism in Hume's philosophy (review)Philosophical Books 51 (3): 144-159. 2010.
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103Signification, intention, projectionPhilosophia 37 (3): 477-501. 2009.Locke is what present-day aestheticians, critics, and historians call an intentionalist. He believes that when we interpret speech and writing, we aim—in large part and perhaps even for the most part—to recover the intentions, or intended meanings, of the speaker or writer. Berkeley and Hume shared Locke’s commitment to intentionalism, but it is a theme that recent philosophical interpreters of all three writers have left largely unexplored. In this paper I discuss the bearing of intentionalism …Read more
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89Berkeley, Newton and the starsStudies in History and Philosophy of Science Part A 17 (1): 23-42. 1986.
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88“All Is Revolution in Us”: Personal Identity in Shaftesbury and HumeHume Studies 26 (1): 3-40. 2000.Even philosophers who believe there is a single “problem of personal identity” conceive of that problem in different ways. They differ not only in their ways of stating the problem, but in the parts of philosophy to which they assign it, and in the resources they feel entitled to call upon in their attempts to deal with it. My topic in this paper is an eighteenth-century uncertainty about the place within philosophy of the problem of personal identity. Is it a problem in metaphysics, or a proble…Read more
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67Berkeley: An InterpretationOxford University Press UK. 1989.David Hume wrote that Berkeley's arguments `admit of no answer but produce no conviction'. This book aims at the kind of understanding of Berkeley's philosophy that comes from seeing how we ourselves might be brought to embrace it. Berkeley held that matter does not exist, and that the sensations we take to be caused by an indifferent and independent world are instead caused directly by God. Nature becomes a text, with no existence apart from the spirits who transmit and receive it. Kenneth P. W…Read more
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67The Cambridge Companion to Berkeley (edited book)Cambridge University Press. 2005.George Berkeley is one of the greatest and most influential modern philosophers. In defending the immaterialism for which he is most famous, he redirected modern thinking about the nature of objectivity and the mind's capacity to come to terms with it. Along the way, he made striking and influential proposals concerning the psychology of the senses, the workings of language, the aims of science, and the scope of mathematics. In this Companion volume a team of distinguished authors not only exami…Read more
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58British Philosophy in the Seventeenth Century by Sarah HuttonJournal of the History of Philosophy 54 (4): 677-678. 2016.Most of our histories of philosophy, in our books and especially in our courses, are what William James called “appreciative chronicle[s] of human master-strokes”. They resemble tours of grand and isolated monuments. Sarah Hutton’s magnificent British Philosophy in the Seventeenth Century is a different kind of history, in which masterpieces are placed in conversation with books that are now neglected or all but forgotten. By means of this “conversation model,” Hutton provides what she justly te…Read more
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56Berkeley, Pyrrhonism, and the TheaetetusIn Walter Sinnott-Armstrong (ed.), Pyrrhonian Skepticism, Oxford University Press. pp. 48--54. 2004.This essay reinterprets Berkeley’s idealism as partially motivated by a need to overcome the Agrippan mode of relativity pressed by Pyrrhonists. It compares Berkeley’s solution to that of Protagoras as presented in Plato’s Theaetetus, and argues that Berkeley needed to depend on reason — intuition or demonstration — to avoid skepticism. In this interpretation, Berkeley is closer to the rationalist tradition than usually recognized.
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55Early Modern Intentionalism: Replies to LoLordo’s CommentsPhilosophia 37 (3): 507-509. 2009.I clarify Locke’s intentionalism and explain what we might gain by paying more attention to the role of linguistic intentions in the work of the British empiricists.
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52Colin Turbayne, ed., "Berkeley: Critical and Interpretive Essays" (review)Journal of the History of Philosophy 22 (3): 372. 1984.
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48Berkeley's Idealism: A Critical Examination (review)Philosophical Review 123 (4): 541-544. 2014.
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46Grades of cartesian innatenessBritish Journal for the History of Philosophy 1 (2). 1993.No abstract
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46An Essay Concerning Human Understanding: Abridged and Edited, with an Introduction and Notes (edited book)Hackett Publishing Company. 1996.Includes generous selections from the Essay, topically arranged passages from the replies to Stillingfleet, a chronology, a bibliography, a glossary, and an index based on the entries that Locke himself devised.
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43The Principles of the Most Ancient and Modern PhilosophyPhilosophical Review 108 (4): 585. 1999.Anne Conway’s Principles of the Most Ancient and Modern Philosophy, first published in 1690, is probably the most ambitious contribution to early modern metaphysics by a woman writing in the English language. This beautifully prepared edition makes Conway’s treatise available to twentieth-century readers in an accessible English translation of the 1690 Latin text—itself a translation of an original English manuscript that has long been lost.
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32The Empiricists: Critical Essays on Locke, Berkeley, and HumeRowman & Littlefield Publishers. 1998.This collection of essays on themes in the work of John Locke , George Berkeley , and David Hume , provides a deepened understanding of major issues raised in the Empiricist tradition. In exploring their shared belief in the experiential nature of mental constructs, The Empiricists illuminates the different methodologies of these great Enlightenment philosophers and introduces students to important metaphysical and epistemological issues including the theory of ideas, personal identity, and skep…Read more
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32Van Cleve and Reid on Conceptions and QualitiesPhilosophy and Phenomenological Research 93 (1): 225-231. 2016.
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31Berkeley (review)Idealistic Studies 22 (3): 300-301. 1992.Emerson said that idealism sees the world in God: not as “painfully accumulated, atom after atom, act after act, in a aged creeping Past,” but as “a vast picture” painted by God “on the instant eternity.” Emerson’s portrait fits A.C. Grayling’s Berkeley, who sees the world in an infinite spirit whose power is unfailing and ubiquitous. Berkeley’s arguments, Grayling suggests, move at three levels, and at the metaphysical level, God’s activity accounts for what occurs at the level of sensory exper…Read more
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26Hume's System: An Examination of the First Book of His Treatise (review)Philosophical Review 103 (4): 755-762. 1994.
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17th/18th Century Philosophy |
Metaphysics and Epistemology |
19th Century American Philosophy |