Michael Richard Ayers

Minds, Ideas and Objects is a collection of conference papers on the topic of seventeenth- and eighteenth-century theories of ideas or “sensory experience, thought, knowledge and their objects.” At least half the twenty-three papers are by well-known historians of philosophy who seldom disappoint, and there is some equally thought-provoking work among the rest. Some papers say little that is surprising, and some, including good ones, fail to convince, but few are weak. It is perhaps to be expected that coverage of the period is uneven, but chance has played some odd tricks, giving us one paper each on Leibniz and Hume and none on Spinoza, whereas Berkeley excites the attention of six contributors, one more even than Kant. Most philosophers discussed are narrowly canonical, with just a page on Cudworth and only four even on Reid, but there are a couple of welcome articles on the vastly rewarding, until recently seldom studied Arnauld-Malebranche debate. Günter Zöller’s “The Austrian Way of Ideas,” summarizing the views on intentionality of Brentano and his pupils, Twardowski, Meinong, and Husserl, reminds us of the close continuities between early-modern and twentieth-century concerns.

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 skepticism. It will be especially useful in courses devoted to the history of modern philosophy.

This essential historical introduction to the main themes of the book starts with a close, sympathetic, and significantly novel analysis of a famous argument in Plato’s Republic in which Plato draws a distinction of kind between knowledge and belief, and between their objects. It is then demonstrated that the distinction, broadly so understood, remained a dominant force, in one form or another, in all non-sceptical branches of the European philosophical tradition, including empiricism, until the eighteenth century. It is argued that there is much to learn from this history, and specific features of the traditional distinction are identified as deserving the further, sympathetic consideration given, in effect, in later chapters.

The Cambridge History of Seventeenth-Century Philosophy offers a uniquely comprehensive and authoritative overview of early-modern philosophy written by an international team of specialists. As with previous Cambridge Histories of Philosophy the subject is treated by topic and theme, and since history does not come packaged in neat bundles, the subject is also treated with great temporal flexibility, incorporating frequent reference to medieval and Renaissance ideas. The basic structure of the volumes corresponds to the way an educated seventeenth-century European might have organised the domain of philosophy. Thus, the history of science, religious doctrine, and politics feature very prominently.

Anthony Quinton's The Nature of Things covers competently a good deal of philosophical ground in hopeful pursuit of a coherent ontology de-scribable as ‘a version of materialism’. He seems to discern two major difficulties for the enterprise: first, that of giving an acceptable account of ontology, and, secondly, that of reconciling his naturalism with his empiricist principles. ‘Naturalism’ is the view that man and his doings constitute a part of nature on the same ontological level as other natural things, and materialism is a naturalist philosophy. Of the second difficulty Quinton writes:…a naturalistic view of the world has had to find its chief philosophical expression through doctrines of a sceptical and subjectivist kind, such as Hume's, which have a tendency to undermine the naturalistic presumptions which inspired them. In this book I have tried to equip materialism with solid philosophical credentials.