Marleen Rozemond

In recent years more and more scholars of early modern philosophy have come to acknowledge that our understanding of Descartes’s thought benefits greatly from consideration of his intellectual background. Research in this direction has taken off, but much work remains to be done. Dennis Des Chene offers a major contribution to this enterprise. This erudite book is the result of a very impressive body of research into a number of late Aristotelian scholastics, some fairly well known, such as Suárez, others quite obscure. Two thirds of the book is devoted to the Aristotelians, with occasional references to Descartes; the last third focuses on Descartes, although there still much Aristotelian ground is covered. Des Chene indicates three major themes for his book: natural change and agency, the structure of material substance, and finality.

A prominent argument for the immateriality of the soul is the so-called "Achilles Argument", which relies on the claim that the soul is simple or indivisible. It was not widely used in the Aristotelian tradition, however. But a version of the argument played a crucial role in Suárez’s contention that a human being contains only one unitary soul. On an alternative view that was widespread at the time, living substances may contain several souls, such as a sensitive and a rational soul in the case of human beings. Suárez holds that the powers of the soul are really distinct from each other and from the soul itself. At the same time, the actions of the different powers of the soul influence each other, as when a loud noise distracts me from doing philosophy or when my intellect relies on my imagination for mental images. Suárez argues that this interaction between powers requires that they are all are "rooted" [radicatae] in one single soul.

In the Monadology Leibniz has us imagine a thinking machine the size of a mill in order to show that matter can’t think, or, in his terms, cannot have perceptions: his well-known Mill Argument. The argument is often thought to rely on the unity of consciousness and the notion of simplicity. Leibniz himself did not see matters this way. For him the argument relies on the Cartesian “Mode-Nature View”, and the idea that perception is not a modification of matter because perception is active and matter is passive. At the same time, there are traces in Leibniz of a different argument that relies on the idea that perception is an “internal” action, an action of a thing on itself as opposed to an “external” action, where a thing acts on a different thing.

In Descartes's Method of Doubt Janet Broughton examines in depth Descartes's well-known use of the method of doubt in the Meditations. This is a very stimulating book. The book is rich in subtle, interesting ideas, and the writing is engaging in perhaps the best sense for philosophy. It is not only extremely lucid, but in addition one senses Broughton think the issues through on the page in a way that strongly draws the reader in. Broughton pursues the historian's aim of offering an interpretation of Descartes's method of doubt that accounts for the texts. She does so while pursuing the issues with philosophical intensity and depth and connecting her interpretation to contemporary investigations in skepticism. Her evaluation of Descartes's use of the method is mixed: she thinks his ambitions in using it are ‘splendid but doomed, and highly instructive’. After describing the contents of the chapters of the book, I will focus on two issues: Broughton's interpretation of Descartes's anti-skeptical strategy and her treatment of transparency of the mental.

Donald Rutherford and Jan Cover have put together an excellent volume of essays on Leibniz. Cover and Rutherford begin the volume with a clear and informative introduction, that should serve the less initiated extremely well. They explain the developments of Leibniz scholarship over the course of the twentieth century: the early twentieth century saw a focus on logic, truth and closely connected issues sparked by Russell and Couturat. In the second half of the century the scholarship changed course: issues central to metaphysics and theology became prominent in Leibniz scholarship. Furthermore, in the last 30 years or so, Leibniz scholarship has exemplified a more historical turn in history of philosophy in the English-speaking world. Scholars started to look at the historical background of Leibniz’s thought, and take an interest in the development of Leibniz’s thought over time, and in his very early work, where his thought seems to be quite different from the later, more familiar writings. The present volume exemplifies these newer tendencies.

Suárez held that the vital faculties of the soul are really distinct from the soul itself and each other and that they cannot causally interact. This means that he needed to account for the connections between the activities of the faculties: they both interfere with and contribute to each other’s activities. Suárez does so by giving the soul a direct causal role in these activities. This role requires the unity of the soul of a living being and Suárez used it to argue against the view that a living being, in particular a human being, has more than one soul. This line of thought displays some affinity with arguments for the simplicity of the soul from the unity of consciousness. One important difference is that Suárez was talking not just about mental activities but about all vital activities.

Leibniz took pride in the Pre-established Harmony as an account of mind-body union. On the other hand, he sometimes claimed that he did not have a good account of such a union. I explain the tension by distinguishing between two importantly different issues that concern the union: body-soul interaction and the per se unity of the composite. Leibniz's positive evaluation concerns the issue of interaction rather than per se unity, R.M. Adams proposed that Leibniz did have the philosophical resources to account for a per se unity of the body-soul composite, in the form of Aristotelian scholastic solutions to that problem. I argue, by contrast, that Leibniz's notions of body and soul were too far removed from their scholastic predecessors for him to be able to deploy those resources in a compelling way.

In this paper I explain several ways in which Descartes denied that the human soul or mind is composite and the role this idea played in his thought. The mind is whole in the whole and whole in the parts of the body because it has no parts. Unlike body, the mind is indivisible, and this is a different idea from the thought that mind and body are incorruptible. Descartes connects the immortality of the soul with its status as a substance and as incorruptible rather than with its indivisibility.

I argue that Descartes treated the action of body on mind differently from the action of mind on body, as was common in the period. Descartes explicitly denied that there is a problem for interaction but his descriptions of interaction seem to suggest that he thought there was a problem. I argue that these descriptions are motivated by a different issue, the seemingly arbitrary connections between particular physical states and the particular mental states they produce. Within scholasticism there was already a (yet different) problem concerning action of body on mind. I offer a comparison between Descartes and the scholastics.

Descartes argued that the eternal truths, most prominently the truths of mathematics, are created by God. He was not explicit, however, about the ontological status of these truths. Interpreters have proposed interpretations ranging from Platonism and conceptualism. I argue for an intermediate interpretation: Descartes held they have objective being in God’s mind. In this regard his view was line with a prominent view in Aristotelian scholasticism. I defend this interpretation against objections based on divine simplicity and concerns about causation. I raise questions about the philosophical merit of these objections, but in addition I argue that there is good reason to think that Descartes himself did not think they were problems for the view. Seemingly conceptualist passages in the Principles, I argue, in fact address issues different from the ontological status of the eternal truths.

Donald Rutherford and Jan Cover have put together an excellent volume of essays on Leibniz. Cover and Rutherford begin the volume with a clear and informative introduction, that should serve the less initiated extremely well. They explain the developments of Leibniz scholarship over the course of the twentieth century: the early twentieth century saw a focus on logic, truth and closely connected issues sparked by Russell and Couturat. In the second half of the century the scholarship changed course: issues central to metaphysics and theology became prominent in Leibniz scholarship. Furthermore, in the last 30 years or so, Leibniz scholarship has exemplified a more historical turn in history of philosophy in the English-speaking world. Scholars started to look at the historical background of Leibniz’s thought, and take an interest in the development of Leibniz’s thought over time, and in his very early work, where his thought seems to be quite different from the later, more familiar writings. The present volume exemplifies these newer tendencies.

ABSTRACTThe most prominent early modern argument against materialism is to be found in Descartes. Previously I had argued that this argument relies crucially on a robust conception of substance, according to which it has a single principal attribute of which all its other intrinsic qualities are modes. In the present paper I return to this claim. In Section 2, I address a question that is often raised about that conception of substance: its commitment to the idea that a substance has a single such principal attribute. Gonzalo Rodriguez-Pereyra and Daniel Garber have argued that this claim relies on Descartes's identification of substance with attribute. But I argue that it relies on his view that a substance has a single, unitary nature. In Section 3, I examine the role of this conception of substance in arguments found in Malebranche and Leibniz and compare these arguments with Descartes's.

Locke claimed that God superadded various powers to matter, including motion, the perfections of peach trees and elephants, gravity, and that he could superadd thought. Various interpreters have discussed the question whether Locke's claims about superaddition are in tension with his commitment to mechanistic explanation. This literature assumes that for Locke mechanistic explanation involves deducibility. We argue that this is an inaccurate interpretation and that mechanistic explanation involves a different type of intelligibility for Locke.

The Clarke-Collins correspondence was widely read and frequently printed during the 18th century. Its central topic is the question whether matter can think. Samuel Clarke defends the immateriality of the human soul against Anthony Collins’ materialism. Clarke argues that consciousness must belong to an indivisible entity, and matter is divisible. Collins contends that consciousness could belong to a composite subject by emerging from material qualities that belong to its parts. While many early modern thinkers assumed that this is not possible, this correspondence offers an unusually detailed discussion of this issue. Clarke rejects emergentism because real qualities of a composite must be homogeneous with the qualities of the parts. This rejection is based on considerations about the nature of causation. In addition, the disagreement derives in part from a disagreement between Clarke and Collins about the limits of our knowledge.