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Spinoza's Substance MonismIn Olli Koistinen & John Ivan Biro (eds.), Spinoza: Metaphysical Themes, Oup Usa. 2002.This essay supports a so-called identification-oriented interpretation of the argument for substance monism. It emphasizes the conceptual barrier between different attributes and the conceptual-independence condition in the definition of substance. It argues that certain features of Spinoza’s notion of attributes enable him to defend his argument for substance monism from a number of challenges: the fact that, for Spinoza, each attribute of a substance, independently of the modes of the substanc…Read more
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Getting his hands dirty: Spinoza's criticism of the rebelIn Yitzhak Y. Melamed & Michael A. Rosenthal (eds.), Spinoza's 'Theological-Political Treatise': A Critical Guide, Cambridge University Press. 2010.
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"If a Body Meets a Body": Descartes on Body-Body CausationIn Rocco J. Gennaro & Charles Huenemann (eds.), New essays on the rationalists, Oxford University Press. 1999.
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3If a Body Meet a BodyIn Rocco J. Gennaro & Charles Huenemann (eds.), New essays on the rationalists, Oxford University Press. 1999.What are Descartes's criteria for substance, and how many material objects meet them? A passage in the Synopsis of the Meditations has led some to portray him as a monist about extended substance and others to say that he does not even use “extended substance” as a count term. After considering Descartes's two criteria for substance, as well as his account of transubstantiation, we see that these answers are mistaken. Descartes countenances an infinity of extended substances. These are quantitie…Read more
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The elusiveness of the one and the many in Spinoza: substance, attribute, and modeIn Jack Stetter & Charles Ramond (eds.), Spinoza in Twenty-First-Century American and French Philosophy: Metaphysics, Philosophy of Mind, Moral and Political Philosophy, Bloomsbury Academic. 2019.
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1652Spinoza's Substance MonismIn Olli Koistinen & John Ivan Biro (eds.), Spinoza: Metaphysical Themes, Oup Usa. 2002.
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122. Explaining Explanation and the Multiplicity of AttributesIn Robert Schnepf & Michael Hampe (eds.), Baruch de Spinoza: Ethik in Geometrischer Ordnung Dargestellt, Akademie Verlag. pp. 17-35. 2006.
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6René DescartesIn Steven M. Nadler (ed.), A Companion to Early Modern Philosophy, Wiley-blackwell. 2002.This chapter contains section titled: The Metaphysics of Matter The Metaphysics of Mind The Metaphysics of God God, Doubt, and Certainty Descartes' Reception.
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9Causation Without Intelligibility and Causation Without God in DescartesIn Janet Broughton & John Carriero (eds.), A Companion to Descartes, Wiley-blackwell. 2007.This chapter contains section titled: Two Revolutionary Humean Steps Occasionalism as an Heir to Aristotelianism Descartes's Causal Principle and Intelligibility Body‐Body Causation Causation Between Minds and Bodies References and Further Reading.
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15Judgment and WillIn Stephen Gaukroger (ed.), The Blackwell Guide to Descartes' Meditations, Wiley-blackwell. 2006.This chapter contains section titled: The Strategy of Meditation IV Believing at Will Freedom Believing as We Should and a Cartesian Circle.
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64Part of Nature: Self-Knowledge In Spinoza’s EthicsPhilosophical Review 105 (1): 116. 1996.Writing to Henry Oldenburg in 1665, Spinoza says that he regards the human body as a part of nature. “But,” he adds significantly, “as far as the human mind is concerned, I think it is a part of nature too.” Genevieve Lloyd’s elegantly written book aims to investigate the meaning, implications and attractions of these characteristic Spinozistic claims.
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Taking the fourth : steps toward a new (old) reading of DescartesIn Peter A. French (ed.), Early Modern Philosophy Reconsidered, Wiley-blackwell. 2011.
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1Determinism and Human FreedomIn Daniel Garber & Michael Ayers (eds.), The Cambridge history of seventeenth-century philosophy, Cambridge University Press. 1998.
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2The elusiveness of the one and the many in Spinoza: substance, attribute, and modeIn Jack Stetter & Charles Ramond (eds.), Spinoza in Twenty-First-Century American and French Philosophy: Metaphysics, Philosophy of Mind, Moral and Political Philosophy, Bloomsbury Academic. 2019.
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233Parmenides' insight and the possibility of logicEuropean Journal of Philosophy 30 (2): 565-577. 2021.European Journal of Philosophy, Volume 30, Issue 2, Page 565-577, June 2022.
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9Spinoza's Metaphysical PsychologyIn Don Garrett (ed.), , Cambridge University Press. pp. 192--266. 1996.This paper analyzes and evaluates Spinoza way of carrying out his naturalistic program in psychology. I begin by examining Spinoza’s general metaphysical doctrine according to which each thing strives to preserve itself. While this doctrine cannot be true in its unqualified form, it does receive some support from Spinoza’s views on the nature of complex individuals. I then explore the problematic way in which Spinoza applies the doctrine of self -preservation to human psychology. The paper goes …Read more
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106SpinozaRoutledge. 2008.Spinoza ' s understanding and understanding Spinoza -- Spinoza ' s understanding -- Understanding Spinoza -- The metaphysics of substance -- Descartes and substance -- Spinoza contra Descartes on substance -- Modes -- Necessitarianism -- The purpose of it all -- The human mind -- Parallelism and representation -- Essence and representation -- Parallelism and mind - body identity -- The idea of the human body -- The pancreas problem, the pan problem, and panpsychism -- Nothing but representation …Read more
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65Taking the Fourth: Steps toward a New (Old) Reading of DescartesMidwest Studies in Philosophy 35 (1): 93-110. 2011.
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20Spinoza and the Metaphysics of ScepticismMind 116 (464): 851-874. 2007.Spinoza's response to a certain radical form of scepticism has deep and surprising roots in his rationalist metaphysics. I argue that Spinoza's commitment to the Principle of Sufficient Reason leads to his naturalistic rejection of certain sharp, inexplicable bifurcations in reality such as the bifurcations that a Cartesian system posits between mind and body and between will and intellect. I show how Spinoza identies and rejects a similar bifurcation between the representational character of id…Read more
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86Spinoza and the Metaphysics of ScepticismMind 116 (464): 851-874. 2007.Spinoza's response to a certain radical form of scepticism has deep and surprising roots in his rationalist metaphysics. I argue that Spinoza's commitment to the Principle of Sufficient Reason leads to his naturalistic rejection of certain sharp, inexplicable bifurcations in reality such as the bifurcations that a Cartesian system posits between mind and body and between will and intellect. I show how Spinoza identies and rejects a similar bifurcation between the representational character of id…Read more
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42The Oxford Handbook of Spinoza (edited book)Oxford University Press. 2013.Until recently, Spinoza's standing in Anglophone studies of philosophy has been relatively low and has only seemed to confirm Friedrich Heinrich Jacobi's assessment of him as "a dead dog." However, an exuberant outburst of excellent scholarship on Spinoza has of late come to dominate work on early modern philosophy. This resurgence is due in no small part to the recent revival of metaphysics in contemporary philosophy and to the increased appreciation of Spinoza's role as an unorthodox, pivotal …Read more
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871PSRPhilosophers' Imprint 10. 2010.This paper presents an argument for the Principle of Sufficient Reason, the PSR, the principle according to which each thing that exists has an explanation. I begin with several widespread and extremely plausible arguments that I call explicability arguments in which a certain situation is rejected precisely because it would be arbitrary. Building on these plausible cases, I construct a series of explicability arguments that culminates in an explicability argument concerning existence itself. Th…Read more
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176Representation and the mind-body problem in SpinozaOxford University Press. 1996.This first extensive study of Spinoza's philosophy of mind concentrates on two problems crucial to the philosopher's thoughts on the matter: the requirements for having a thought about a particular object, and the problem of the mind's relation to the body. Della Rocca contends that Spinoza's positions are systematically connected with each other and with a principle at the heart of his metaphysical system: his denial of causal or explanatory relations between the mental and the physical. In thi…Read more
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441Two spheres, twenty spheres, and the identity of indiscerniblesPacific Philosophical Quarterly 86 (4). 2005.I argue that the standard counterexamples to the identity of indiscernibles fail because they involve a commitment to a certain kind of primitive or brute identity that has certain very unpalatable consequences involving the possibility of objects of the same kind completely overlapping and sharing all the same proper parts. The only way to avoid these consequences is to reject brute identity and thus to accept the identity of indiscernibles. I also show how the rejection of the identity of indi…Read more
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Areas of Interest
Metaphysics |
17th/18th Century Philosophy |