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5Catherine Macaulay as a Systematic Moral Philosopher: The Significance of GenreRevue de Métaphysique et de Morale 122 (3): 355-373. 2024.Résumé. – Catherine Macaulay a recours à un toute une gamme de genres littéraires en vue de développer une philosophie systématique fondée sur la liberté humaine et de défendre une philosophie politique républicaine. Les différents points du système sont articulés selon des genres littéraires particuliers cohérents avec les points eux-mêmes. Son système tient en trois principes centraux : (a) le primat de la liberté humaine ; (b) la promotion de la liberté publique comme mesure de la vertu ; enf…Read more
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How to change a philosophical canonIn Sandra Lapointe & Erich Reck (eds.), Historiography and the Formation of Philosophical Canons, Routledge. 2023.
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14Descartes's EthicsIn Janet Broughton & John Carriero (eds.), A Companion to Descartes, Wiley-blackwell. 2007.This chapter contains section titled: Cartesian Philosophy and the Conduct of Life Putting the Pieces of Descartes's Ethical Writings Together: Cartesian Virtue Ethics Key Texts The “Perfect Moral System” and the Morale Par Provision Cartesian Virtue Descartes's Virtue Ethics and His Metaphysics and Epistemology, Revisited Conclusion Notes References and Further Reading.
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52The Routledge Handbook of Women and Early Modern European Philosophy (edited book)Routledge. 2023.An outstanding reference source for the wide range of philosophical contributions made by women writing in Europe from about 1560 to 1780. It shows the range of genres and methods used by women writing in these centuries in Europe, thus encouraging an expanded understanding of our historical canon.
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198Descartes’s Moral TheoryPhilosophical Review 110 (2): 270-272. 2001.John Marshall aims, in Descartes’s Moral Theory, to “introduce Descartes’s moral thought to an anglophone audience”. He provides such an introduction not only in that he surveys Descartes’s writings on ethics from the Discourse, through his correspondence, to The Passions of the Soul, but also in that he presents a sustained argument for a reading of how these writings all fit together.
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Descartes's pineal gland reconsideredIn Peter A. French (ed.), Early Modern Philosophy Reconsidered, Wiley-blackwell. 2011.
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13On the inseparability of reasoning and virtue: Madame de Maintenon's Maison royale de Saint‐LouisMetaphilosophy 54 (2-3): 254-267. 2023.This paper engages with the curriculum at Madame de Maintenon's school for girls at Saint‐Cyr to raise and address a set of questions: What is it to teach someone to reason? The curricular materials of Saint‐Cyr suggest that learning to reason is a matter of practice. How is one to distinguish autonomous reason giving from habituation or automatic trained responses? How can practices in reason giving informed by social mores have objective validity? Moreover, if we think of the role of a philoso…Read more
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1Princess Elisabeth of Bohemia as a CartesianIn Steven Nadler, Tad M. Schmaltz & Delphine Antoine-Mahut (eds.), The Oxford Handbook of Descartes and Cartesianism, Oxford University Press. 2019.
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21Princess Elisabeth and the Challenges of PhilosophizingIn Sabrina Ebbersmeyer & Sarah Hutton (eds.), Elisabeth of Bohemia (1618–1680): A Philosopher in Her Historical Context, Springer Verlag. pp. 127-141. 2021.This paper explores Elisabeth’s remark that ruling and studying each demands an entire person, with the aim of understanding why she might think ruling and intellectual pursuits like philosophy are incompatible with one another. While Elisabeth identifies several barriers to philosophizing, she does not suggest that time constraints are an impediment to both philosophizing and ruling. Situating Elisabeth with respect to Plato, Machiavelli, and Aristotle suggests that she holds there are many sim…Read more
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127Early Modern Philosophy: An Anthology (edited book)Broadview Press. 2021.This new anthology of early modern philosophy enriches the possibilities for teaching this period by highlighting not only metaphysics and epistemology, but also new themes such as virtue, equality and difference, education, the passions, and love. It contains the works of forty-three philosophers, including traditionally taught figures such as Descartes, Spinoza, Leibniz, Locke, Berkeley, Hume, and Kant, as well as less familiar writers such as Lord Shaftesbury, Anton Amo, Julien Offray de La M…Read more
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60Descartes and Spinoza on the Primitive PassionsIn Noa Naaman Zauderer (ed.), Freedom Action and Motivation in Spinoza's Ethics, Routledge Press. pp. 62-81. 2019.Motivating my discussion is a puzzle in Spinoza’s account of the primary affects – his shift away from adopting Descartes’s list of six primitive passions in the Short Treatise to the three primary affects in the Ethics. I lay out this puzzle in Section 1. In Section 2, I approach this puzzle by considering the taxonomy offered by Descartes of the basic or primitive passions. In considering Descartes, I will also briefly consider Aquinas’s view since Descartes positions himself as rejecting the …Read more
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19L’Amour, L’Ambition and L’Amitié: Marie Thiroux D’Arconville on Passion, Agency and VirtueIn Eileen O’Neill & Marcy P. Lascano (eds.), Feminist History of Philosophy: The Recovery and Evaluation of Women’s Philosophical Thought, Springer. pp. 175-191. 2019.In this paper, I examine Marie Thiroux D’Arconville’s moral psychology as presented in two of her works: Des Passions [On the Passions] and De L’Amitié [On Friendship]. This moral psychology is somewhat unique as it centers human action on three principal sentiments: l’amour, which is best understood as lust or a physical love; l’ambition, the principal human vice; and l’amitié, a characteristic friendship proper to the truly virtuous. I aim to show that these three passions tell a story of mora…Read more
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49The Outward and Inward Beauty of Early Modern WomenRevue Philosophique de la France Et de l'Etranger 138 (3): 327-346. 2013.I explore some early modern philosophical thought about the relation of beauty and wisdom, a theme first expressed in Plato's Symposium. The thinkers I consider most centrally are two women, Lucrezia Marinella and Mary Astell, though I also consider the writers Aphra Behn and Sarah Scott. While women in particular might have a special interest in appropriating the Platonic image of the ladder of desire, this ought not to be conceived as a 'women's issue'. Rather, I suggest, this strand of though…Read more
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61Descartes’s EthicsIn Janet Broughton & John Carriero (eds.), A Companion to Descartes, Wiley-blackwell. pp. 445-463. 2007.I begin my discussion by considering how to relate Descartes’s more general concern with the conduct of life to the metaphysics and epistemology in the foreground of his philosophical project. I then turn to the texts in which Descartes offers his developed ethical thought and present the case for Descartes as a virtue ethicist. My argument emerges from seeing that Descartes’s conception of virtue and the good owes much to Stoic ethics, a school of thought which saw a significant revival in the …Read more
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What do the Expressions of the Passions tell Us?In Daniel Garber & Steven M. Nadler (eds.), Oxford Studies in Early Modern Philosophy Volume 1, Oxford University Press. 2003.
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91Revisiting the Early Modern Philosophical CanonJournal of the American Philosophical Association 2 (3): 365-383. 2016.ABSTRACT:I reflect critically on the early modern philosophical canon in light of the entrenchment and homogeneity of the lineup of seven core figures: Descartes, Spinoza, Leibniz, Locke, Berkeley, Hume, and Kant. After distinguishing three elements of a philosophical canon—a causal story, a set of core philosophical questions, and a set of distinctively philosophical works—I argue that recent efforts contextualizing the history of philosophy within the history of science subtly shift the centra…Read more
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34Revisiting the Early Modern Philosophical Canon—ADDENDUMJournal of the American Philosophical Association 3 (1): 127-127. 2017.
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44XIV—Assuming Epistemic Authority, or Becoming a Thinking ThingProceedings of the Aristotelian Society. forthcoming.
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34Descartes on human nature and the human goodIn Smith Justin & Fraenkel Carlos (eds.), The Rationalists, Springer/synthese. pp. 13--26. 2011.
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4The Union of Soul and Body: Descartes' Conception of a Human BeingDissertation, University of Pittsburgh. 1997.Interpreters of Descartes have understood the mind-body union to consist just in the naturally instituted associations through which these two are joined. This reading cannot accommodate Descartes' claim that the soul is united to the whole body, and forms a unit with it. I provide an account of the union of mind and body which respects both aspects of Descartes' account of a human being by considering a part of his work which has long been neglected: The Passions of the Soul. I argue that soul …Read more
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2The structure of The Passions of the Soul and the soul-body unionIn Byron Williston & André Gombay (eds.), Passion and virtue in Descartes, Humanity Books. pp. 31--79. 2003.
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What Do the Expressions of the Passions Tell us?Oxford Studies in Early Modern Philosophy 1 45-66. 2004.
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68Memory in the MeditationsRes Philosophica 92 (1): 41-60. 2015.This paper considers just how memory works throughout the Meditations to adduce Descartes’s conception of memory. Examining the meditator’s memory at work raises some questions about the nature of Cartesian memory and its epistemic role. What is the distinction between remembering and repeating a thought? If remembering is not simply repeating a thought, then what is involved in properly remembering? Can we remember properly while adding or shifting content, say, in virtue of articulating relati…Read more
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577Instrumental or Immersed Experience: Pleasure, Pain and Object Perception in LockeIn Charles T. Wolfe & Ofer Gal (eds.), The Body as Object and Instrument of Knowledge: Embodied Empiricism in Early Modern Science, Springer. pp. 265--285. 2010.
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73Spinoza on Imagination and the AffectsIn Sabrina Ebbersmeyer (ed.), Emotional Minds: The Passions and the Limits of Pure Inquiry in Early Modern Philosophy, De Gruyter. pp. 89. 2012.
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266Descartes passions of the soul and the union of mind and bodyArchiv für Geschichte der Philosophie 85 (3): 211-248. 2003.I here address Descartes' account of human nature as a union of mind and body by appealing to The Passions of the Soul. I first show that Descartes takes us to be able to reform the naturally instituted associations between bodily and mental states. I go on to argue that Descartes offers a teleological explanation of body-mind associations (those instituted both by nature and by artifice). This explanation sheds light on the ontological status of the union. I suggest that it affords a way of und…Read more
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29Pleasure: A History (edited book)Oxford University Press, Usa. 2018.For many, the word 'pleasure' conjures associations with hedonism, indulgence, and escape from the life of the mind. However little we talk about it, though, pleasure also plays an integral role in cognitive life, in both our sensory perception of the world and our intellectual understanding. This previously important but now neglected philosophical understanding of pleasure is the focus of the essays in this volume, which challenges received views that pleasure is principally motivating of acti…Read more
Areas of Specialization
17th/18th Century Philosophy |
Philosophical Traditions |
History of Western Philosophy |