Sean Winkler

ArgumentThis paper provides an introduction to three translations of articles by Soviet philosopher Boris Hessen: “Mechanical Materialism and Modern Physics,” “On Comrade Timiryazev’s Attitude towards Contemporary Science” and “Marian Smoluchowski (On the Tenth Anniversary of His Death)”. It begins by presenting a central tension in Hessen’s work; namely, how even though he is better known for the externalism of his 1931 Newton paper, much of his work has been considered exemplary of an internalist approach. I then show that for Hessen, the history of modern science was defined by the discovery of the dialectical unity in opposition between dynamic and statistical regularity. This not only sheds important light on Hessen’s understanding of causation, but also reconciles the aforementioned tension by showing his approach to the relationship between individuals and collectives in the study of physical phenomena, along with the relationship between individual scientists and socioeconomic conditions.

Boris Hessen’s ‘The Social and Economic Roots of Newton’s Principia’ (see https://doi.org./10.1163/1569206X-00002041) is considered a pioneering work in the historiography of the natural sciences. For some, it marks the founding moment of the ‘externalist’ approach to this field of study. Previously, Hessen published another paper on Newton entitled ‘Preface to Articles by A. Einstein and J.J. Thomson’, which, some maintain, bears a stronger resemblance to works in the ‘internalist’ camp of the historiography of the natural sciences. For decades, scholars have puzzled over why Hessen chose to argue for, seemingly, diametrically opposed positions. In this paper, however, I argue that Hessen does not advance two different historiographical methods, but a single, dialectical-materialist approach that accounts for the ‘unity in opposition’ of the external and internal dimensions of natural-scientific theory. I draw from Hessen’s two papers on Newton, his previously untranslated writings, as well as selections from the secondary literature.

In my doctoral thesis, I attempt to provide a groundwork account of Spinoza’s concept of the ‘individual’. I begin by showing that Spinoza only provides a definition of individuals in the Ethics and that he most likely wrote this definition in the latter phase of his composition of the work. But because he uses the term in a variety of different contexts---some of which were written during earlier periods of his philosophical development---, it is unclear how the different formulations of this notion all fit together. I contend that Spinoza’s account is consistent if one understands that an individual, whether infinite or finite, cannot be understood independently of the relations that it forms with other individuals and that an individual remains self-identical by perpetually adapting or changing. Thus, I maintain that, for Spinoza, individuals are both relations and processes. I conclude by arguing that one can only have a true and adequate idea of the essence of an individual by transcending one’s own individuality. I present my interpretation over the course of four chapters: 1) a study of the relation between formal essences and individuals, 2) a study of the relation between the ratio of motion and rest and conatus of the body, 3) a study of the self-identity of finite individuals and 4) a study of the possibility of having true and adequate ideas of individuals.

In this paper, I begin by showing that for Spinoza, it is unclear how the human mind can have a true idea of God. I first provide an explanation of Spinoza’s theory of parallelism of the mind and the body, followed by showing how this doctrine seems to undermine the mind’s ability to have an adequate idea of God. From there, I show that the idea of God presents a problem for Spinoza’s theory of the parallelism of the attributes in general. To resolve the tension, I argue that Spinoza’s theory of parallelism does not entail a one-to-one correspondence between the modes of different attributes. From here, I show that the human mind can have an adequate idea of God, because the mind can have an idea of its own formal essences and the idea of a formal essence is itself an idea of God.

In this paper, I address the problem of generation and destruction in Spinoza’s philosophical system. I approach this problem by providing an account of how Spinoza can maintain that contrary finite modes cannot inhere in the same substance, while substance itself does not change. One must distinguish between the formal essence of a mode and the existence of a mode and how these two entities are “in” substance. Formal essences are eternal and are in substance in a Platonic sense, while existent modes are temporal and are in substance insofar as they are parts of the whole of nature, or facies totius universi. Furthermore, the former are modes understood as pure relations, while the latter are modes understood as finite individuals. Formal essences are relations that specify how finite individuals will behave once they come into existence, while existent modes are individuals that express the relations defined by formal essences, as forces that possess a capacity to act and to be acted upon. According to these distinctions, I maintain that it is possible to develop a coherent account of contrariety and, consequently, of generation and destruction in Spinoza’s system.

Ever since Charles Darwin's publishing of the Origin of Species in 1859, the world has, literally, never been the same. The notion that species had not endured since their Creation by God but instead had evolved by means of "natural selection," was a momentous event in history, making Darwin the leader of a, so-called, "scientific revolution." There have been few spheres of thought, whether they be sociological, theological, philosophical, etc., whose fundamental pnnciples have not been thrown into disarray by this tremendous scientific achievement. But in 1962, yet another blow came to science's foundations with the publication of Thomas Kuhn's The Structure of Scientific Revolutions. Earth shattenng as it was, Kuhn demonstrated the dynamic of his theory at play using every major revolution in the history of science; all, that is, except for Charles Darwin's. Despite borrowing Darwin's theoretical dynamic, not once in the "Structure" is the historical development nor revolutionary nature of natural selection ever discussed. This absence did not become problematized until 1981 at the hands of one, John C. Greene in his work Science, Ideology, and World Views: Essays in the History of Evolutionary Ideas. Greene's realization brought forth a shocking possibility, namely, that the absence of Darwin's revolution from the "Structure" was due to its overall inability to fit into the Kuhnian model by virtue of its criteria for "paradigms" and "revolutions." It is my purpose in this essay, then, to prove that the Darwinian revolution, despite its suspicious absence in the "Structure" can be argued to fit into the Kuhnian model and, furthermore, that by virtue of its accordance to this model, stands as a revolution that, despite its social and theological implications, is fundamentally scientific in nature. Kuhns failure to treat Darwin's theory in his work is need simply for an apology, not an overthrow of his or Darwin's theories