Patrick J. Connolly

Isaac Newton’s comments to Richard Bentley on the nature of gravitation and its relationship to matter have been the subject of prolonged interpretative debate. This paper carefully examines the larger context of the epistolary exchange between Bentley and Newton. It shows that Bentley was forwarding a well-worn line of anti-Epicurean argumentation and discusses earlier versions of Bentley’s argument found in the work of authors like Stillingfleet, Boyle, and Charleton. In this argument, what is most important is denying that matter has an essential power of self-motion. The paper argues that Newton was well-positioned to understand Bentley’s sources, motivations, and reasoning. It further argues that his comments on gravity in his letters to Bentley are meant to simply repeat and reinforce, rather than expand on or alter, Bentley’s reasoning. Seen in this light, we have clear reasons to prefer interpretations of Newton’s claims on which he merely denies that gravitation is an essential power of bodies. And we have reason to reject interpretations on which he also denies the possibility of action at a distance or argues that a tertium quid plays an active role in gravitational processes.

Isaac Newton’s comments to Richard Bentley on the nature of gravitation and its relationship to matter have been the subject of prolonged interpretative debate. This paper carefully examines the larger context of the epistolary exchange between Bentley and Newton. It shows that Bentley was forwarding a well-worn line of anti-Epicurean argumentation and discusses earlier versions of Bentley’s argument found in the work of authors like Stillingfleet, Boyle, and Charleton. In this argument, what is most important is denying that matter has an essential power of self-motion. The paper argues that Newton was well-positioned to understand Bentley’s sources, motivations, and reasoning. It further argues that his comments on gravity in his letters to Bentley are meant to simply repeat and reinforce, rather than expand on or alter, Bentley’s reasoning. Seen in this light, we have clear reasons to prefer interpretations of Newton’s claims on which he merely denies that gravitation is an essential power of bodies. And we have reason to reject interpretations on which he also denies the possibility of action at a distance or argues that a tertium quid plays an active role in gravitational processes.

Commentators almost universally agree that Locke denies the possibility of thinking matter in Book IV Chapter 10 of the _Essay_. This article develops an alternative interpretation according to which Locke allows for the possibility that a system of matter could think (even prior to any act of superaddition on God’s part). In addition, it contends that this does not destroy Locke’s argument in the chapter, instead it helps to illuminate the nature of it. The article proceeds in two main stages. First, a distinction between two senses of ‘production’ is made to clarify Locke’s claim that matter cannot produce thought. Second, Locke’s claim that God could not be a system of randomly moving particles is interpreted as a claim about God’s wisdom and knowledge and not as a claim about thinking matter.

John Locke’s influential account of personal identity emphasizes the importance of consciousness. This has led many commentators to argue that Lockean selves just are consciousnesses. Charles Taylor has mounted persuasive critiques of this “punctual” Lockean self; such a conception of the self is too thin and stands divorced from our values and moral agency. This paper shifts the focus from Locke’s views on personal identity to his views on personhood in an effort to show that Locke is sensitive to the kinds of worries raised by Taylor. Lockean persons are more than consciousness. In particular, I focus on Locke’s exploration and analysis of the complex faculty psychology undergirding consciousness and on the ways in which persons can be embodied. This allows for a richer conception of the self. I then argue that this richer conception better aligns with Locke’s own views about the value and importance of the self and with what he says regarding our moral agency and our duty of self-improvement. Finally, I show that understanding Locke’s examination of human cognition as contributing to an analysis of the self allows us to resituate him with respect to some of his predecessors in seventeenth-century England.

This book offers a systematic interpretation of Isaac Newton’s views on the fundamental metaphysics of substance. Drawing on a number of published and unpublished texts, and exploring Newton’s engagement with his philosophical predecessors and contemporaries, it reconstructs his views on God, bodies, minds, and the relationships that obtain between them. The early chapters explore Newton’s arguments for God’s existence and analyze his understanding of the non-univocity of substance. Subsequent chapters explore his innovative approach to bodies, on which they are mere collections of powers, and work through issues relating to divine and natural causation. The final chapters explore Newton’s views on the nature of mind, dualism, and the mind–body problem before examining his infamous claim that space is God’s sensorium. The metaphysical system that emerges from the analysis on offer in the book shows Newton to have developed views that are innovative, perceptive, and—by the standards of the period—compelling.

One prominent criticism of Newtonianism held that gravitational attraction is an occult quality. The charge, pressed most forcefully by Leibniz, claims that Newton had abandoned the intelligibility of mechanism and allowed for an unexplained and inexplicable force in nature. This paper focuses on one of Newton’s replies to this accusation: his claim that gravitation is no more mysterious than phenomena like inertia and impenetrability. I argue that we can understand and motivate this Newtonian position by looking at the account of material substance developed in Newton’s early manuscript essay De gravitatione. This account makes clear Newton’s sensitivity to the explanatory limits of mechanism. Newton was perceptive in noting that while the mechanical philosophy sought to provide explanations in terms of matter and motion, it failed to explain matter and motion themselves. This sheds light on the motivations behind the theory of bodies in De gravitatione. And it helps to explain why he was so unmoved by what many saw as a serious challenge to his theory of gravity.

In the history of Western philosophy, dialetheism – the view that some sentences are both true and false – has been unpopular. This paper recovers a previously overlooked episode in the history of dialetheism. Specifically, it reconstructs a section of Robert Greville's The Nature of Truth (1640) in order to show that he was a dialetheist. Greville's consideration of the view that evil is a privation led him to endorse the claim that sinful acts are contradictory; they are the subjects of both being and non‐being. The paper also explores responses to Greville from John Wallis and Nathaniel Culverwell.

An unpublished manuscript on eucharistic metaphysics by Thomas White (1593–1676) supplies new information about his contributions to philosophy and theology—especially his irenic efforts to find middle ground between traditional Aristotelian views and challenges from the new mechanical philosophy. The work by White studied here, “A Discourse Concerning the Eucharist,” sheds light on his other writings and is illuminated by them. Substance, quantity, place, and accident were the main philosophical issues at stake in White's attempt to give a reasoned account of controversial religious and theological issues, especially transubstantiation and the real presence.

This paper provides the first systematic interpretation of the moral theory developed in Newcome’s Enquiry Into the Evidence of the Christian Religion (1728, revised 1732). More importantly, it shows that Newcome’s views constitute a valuable but overlooked contribution to the development of utilitarianism. Indeed, she is arguably the first utilitarian. Her ethical views are considered in two stages. The paper first explores her hedonist approach to the good and then turns to her consequentialist account of right action. The paper then situates Newcome’s work within the context of the pre-Bentham utilitarian movement. Strikingly, Newcome lived and worked in close proximity to other prominent early utilitarians and was well-positioned to have exerted an influence on the development of their views. Newcome has never been discussed in connection with the history of ethics. This paper constitutes an argument for her inclusion in our narratives about the development of a major moral theory.

This paper analyzes the metaphysical system developed in Cheyne’s Philosophical Principles of Religion. Cheyne was an early proponent of Newtonianism and tackled several philosophical questions raised by Newton’s work. The most pressing of these concerned the causal origin of gravitational attraction. Cheyne rejected the occasionalist explanations offered by several of his contemporaries in favor of a model on which God delegated special causal powers to bodies. Additionally, he developed an innovative approach to divine conservation. This allowed him to argue that Newton’s findings provided evidence for God’s existence and providence without the need for continuous divine intervention in the universe.

This paper explores Locke’s thinking specifically about syllogisms and more generally about logic and proper logical method. Locke’s texts display a mixed attitude toward syllogisms. On the one hand, he was highly critical of syllogisms and their central role in Scholastic disputation. On the other hand, he sometimes allowed that syllogisms could effectively capture valid forms of inference and could be useful in certain contexts. This paper seeks to explain Locke’s mixed attitude by showing that he believed syllogisms were useful in the context of explanation but not in the context of discovery. Syllogisms could help to formalize and evaluate arguments already constructed using informal psychologistic methods, but they would not help to generate new arguments or to make new discoveries. The second part of the paper examines substantial changes to the fourth edition of the Essay in which Locke expands his critical remarks on syllogisms and related topics. Evidence is presented that strongly suggests Locke made these changes to the Essay in response to works published by John Sergeant. This discovery is important because it indicates Locke’s willingness to consider the views of his adversaries and reformulate his own views accordingly.

This chapter revisits three key disagreements between Locke and Berkeley. The disagreements relate to abstraction, the idea of substance, and the status of the primary/secondary quality distinction. The goal of the chapter is to show that these disagreements are rooted in a more fundamental disagreement over the nature of ideas. For Berkeley, ideas are tied very closely to perceptual content. Locke adopts a less restrictive account of the nature of ideas. On his view, ideas are responsible for both perceptual content and non-perceptual mental content. Recognizing this allows for the following analysis of their disputes. Berkeley often appeals to introspection to suggest that we do not have some particular idea. But Locke’s arguments that we have a particular idea often appeal to the functional role the idea has in our cognitive economy rather than to facts about our immediate phenomenology.

Despite its philosophical interest, Susanna Newcome’s Enquiry Into the Evidence of the Christian Religion (1728, revised 1732) has received little attention from commentators. This paper seeks to redress this oversight by offering a reconstruction of Newcome’s innovative argument for God’s existence. Newcome employs a cosmological argument that differs from Thomist and kalām version of the argument. Specifically, Newcome challenges that idea that the causal chains observed in nature can exist independently. She does this through an appeal to findings from Newtonian natural philosophy that suggest that the universe has entropic tendencies. This suggests that the continued operations of nature are dependent on a cause external to the universe. Newcome identifies this external cause with God. Various strengths and weaknesses of Newcome’s argument are discussed and an attempt is made to situate the argument within her broader epistemic framework and the larger context of Newtonian physico-theology. The paper also explores what is known of Newcome’s biography and intellectual milieu.

This article explores a previously neglected manuscript essay in which Thomas White offers an account of the metaphysics underpinning transubstantiation. White’s views are of particular interest because his explanation employs a broadly mechanist framework, rather than the hylomorphism traditionally associated with Roman Catholic discussions of the Eucharist. The manuscript helps to shed light on a number of topics of importance to early modern philosophy including the reception of Descartes’ views, the relationship between theology and natural philosophy, and mechanist accounts of identity and individuation.

Locke famously claimed that morality was capable of demonstration. But he also refused to provide a system of demonstrative morality. This paper addresses the mismatch between Locke’s stated views and his actual philosophical practice. While Locke’s claims about demonstrative morality have received a lot of attention it is rare to see them discussed in the context of his general theory of demonstration and his specific discussions of particular demonstrations. This paper explores Locke’s general remarks about demonstration as well as his claims about demonstration in natural philosophy, mathematics, and morality. Careful attention to these detailed discussions motivates a reevaluation of Locke’s views on demonstrative knowledge of morality. Specifically, while Locke did believe that some demonstrative moral knowledge might be in-principle available to us he also believed that facts about the difficulty of demonstration meant that this knowledge would in-practice be largely unattainable.

Commentators almost universally agree that Locke denies the possibility of thinking matter in Book IV Chapter 10 of the Essay. This article develops an alternative interpretation according to which Locke allows for the possibility that a system of matter could think (even prior to any act of superaddition on God’s part). In addition, it contends that this does not destroy Locke’s argument in the chapter, instead it helps to illuminate the nature of it. The article proceeds in two main stages. First, a distinction between two senses of ‘production’ is made to clarify Locke’s claim that matter cannot produce thought. Second, Locke’s claim that God could not be a system of randomly moving particles is interpreted as a claim about God’s wisdom and knowledge and not as a claim about thinking matter.

This short essay analyzes an unusual typographical feature in the Epistle to the Reader that precedes Locke’s Essay. Specifically, it asks why there is a line prior to Christiaan Huygens’ name in the famous Underlaborer Passage. The paper provides a thorough look at the line’s longevity through early editions of the Essay and considers a number of possible explanations for the line’s presence. It is argued that the line may well have held some meaning for early readers; contemporary scholars should be motivated to investigate the issue further.

In this paper I offer a new approach to Henry of Ghent's argument for divine illumination. Normally, Henry is criticized for adhering to a theory of divine illumination and failing to accept rediscovered Aristotelian approaches to cognition and epistemology. I argue that these critiques are mistaken. On my view, Henry was a proponent of Aristotelianism. But Henry discovered a tension between Aristotle's views on teleology and the nature of knowledge, on the one hand, and various components of the Christian worldview, on the other. I argue that Henry's adherence to a theory of divine illumination was an attempt to preserve various components of the Aristotelian system, not an attempt to reject Aristotelianism.

The purpose of this paper is to elucidate two interesting parallels between views discussed in John Wilkins’ Of the Principles and Duties of Natural Religion and positions developed by John Locke in his Essay Concerning Human Understanding. The first parallel pertains to a faculty of inner sense. Both authors carve out a central role for this introspective perceptual modality. The second parallel pertains to volition and free will. Both authors employ an investigative methodology which privileges first-personal experiences of choosing and willing. I also discuss the relationship between these two parallels and speculate about their significance.

My goal in this paper is to elucidate a problematic feature of Newton's metaphysics of absolute space. Specifically, I argue that Newton's theory has the untenable consequence that God depends on space for His existence and is therefore not an independent entity. I argue for this conclusion in stages. First, I show that Newton believed that space was an entity and that God and space were ontologically distinct entities. Part of this involves arguing that Newton denies that space is a divine attribute. I then show that Newton endorsed a principle according to which the existence of space is a necessary condition for the existence of any other entity. Following this, I discuss the ways in which this makes God depend on space for His existence and the reasons why this is unacceptable for traditional conceptions of God. Specifically, I show that it is incompatible with the orthodox position that God be entirely independent and self-determining. Finally, I offer two considerations which, I hope, make the problem seem less serious than it first appears. The first consideration has to do with Newton's polemical context and the second has to do with the nature of his theological thought.

In a recent article Fred Ablondi compares the different approaches to occasionalism put forward by two eighteenth-century Newtonians, Colin Maclaurin and Andrew Baxter. The goal of this short essay is to respond to Ablondi by clarifying some key features of Maclaurin's views on occasionalism and the cause of gravitational attraction. In particular, I explore Maclaurin's matter theory, his views on the explanatory limits of mechanism, and his appeals to the authority of Newton. This leads to a clearer picture of the way in which Maclaurin understood gravitational attraction and the workings of nature.

Many commentators have argued that Locke understood laws of nature as causally efficacious. On this view the laws are causally responsible for the production of natural phenomena. This paper argues that this interpretation faces serious difficulties. First, I argue that it will be very difficult to specify the ontological status of these laws. Proponents of the view suggest that these laws are divine volitions. But I argue that this will be difficult or impossible to square with Locke’s nominalism. Second, I argue that it will be difficult to specify the manner in which these laws operate. The view runs the risk of collapsing into occasionalism and Locke has measured critiques of the occasionalist position. The only way to maintain that laws are causally efficacious divine volitions while avoiding occasionalism is to have God engage in what I call ‘brute fact-making’. But brute fact-making is difficult to square with Locke’s remarks on God’s action in the world and with his standards for explanation in natural philosophy.

Locke had a lifelong love of travel literature. He was also a proponent of the construction of natural histories. Many commentators have noted that there is a close link between these two interests. They suggest that data gleaned from travel literature was used in the construction of natural histories. This paper uses Locke’s reading of François Pyrard’s Voyage to argue that the relationship between the two genres was closer than has been realized. Specifically, it is argued that Pyrard’s discussion of the coconut displays characteristic features of a natural history. It pays careful attention to first-hand experience. It emphasizes empirical observation and eschews theory and speculation. It focuses on the practical utility of the coconut. And it records a number of specific measurements. These features allowed Locke to read this portion of a piece of travel literature as a piece of natural history. This allows us to recognize that the genres of natural history and travel literature were not distinct for early modern thinkers. They overlapped in significant ways.

This paper examines the way in which Locke's deep and longstanding interest in the non-European world contributed to his views on species and their classification. The evidence for Locke's curiosity about the non-European world, especially his fascination with seventeenth-century travel literature, is presented and evaluated. I claim that this personal interest of Locke's almost certainly influenced the metaphysical and epistemological positions he develops in the Essay. I look to Locke's theory of species taxonomy for proof of this. I argue that Locke uses evidence gathered from the non-European world to (1) show that in taxonomizing objects we rely on their sensible qualities rather than their real essences and to (2) undermine Scholastic Aristotelian views about a mind-independent species/genera structure to the world.