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23Descartes on Immortality and AnimalsThe European Legacy 29 (2): 184-198. 2023.For Descartes, our minds are not natural causes because they are not themselves objects; rather, they are the activities that identify objects. In short, they are our challenges to the natural order of things, both in how we adapt to novel situations (as exhibited in what has been called the “rational action test”) and in how we respond in unexpected yet appropriate ways to linguistic cues (in the “language test”). Because these tests reveal ways in which our minds (as “pure,” creative, willful,…Read more
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17George Berkeley and Early Modern PhilosophyOxford University Press. 2021.This book is a study of the philosophy of the early 18th century Irish philosopher George Berkeley in the intellectual context of his times, with a particular focus on how, for Berkeley, mind is related to its ideas. It does not assume that thinkers like Descartes, Malebranche, or Locke define for Berkeley the context in which he develops his own thought. Instead, he indicates how Berkeley draws on a tradition that informed his early training and that challenges much of the early modern thought …Read more
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61Berkeley on GodIn Samuel C. Rickless (ed.), The Oxford Handbook of Berkeley, Oxford University Press. pp. 177-93. 2022.Berkeley’s appeal to a posteriori arguments for God’s existence supports belief only in a God who is finite. But by appealing to an a priori argument for God’s existence, Berkeley emphasizes God’s infinity. In this latter argument, God is not the efficient cause of particular finite things in the world, for such an explanation does not provide a justification or rationale for why the totality of finite things would exist in the first place. Instead, God is understood as the creator of the total …Read more
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7M. Hobbes and America: Exploring the Constitutional Foundations (review)Review of Metaphysics 36 (3): 698-699. 1983.Though some of the critical reviews of Frank M. Coleman's Hobbes and America have alluded to the affinities of his work to that of Strauss, Macpherson, Laslett, and Oakeshott, most have ignored Coleman's specifically philosophic treatment of Hobbes as the foundational thinker most responsive to political realities which emerge in the seventeenth century and still characterize American politics. Coleman's purpose is to demonstrate how the operative American constitutional philosophy can be recogn…Read more
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34Substance and Person: Berkeley on Descartes and LockeRuch Filozoficzny 74 (4): 7. 2018.In his post-1720 works, Berkeley focuses his comments about Descartes on mechanism and about Locke on general abstract ideas. He warns against using metaphysical principles to explain observed regularities, and he extends his account to include spiritual substances (including God). Indeed, by calling a substance a spirit, he emphasizes how a person is simply the will that ideas be differentiated and associated in a certain way, not some <i>thing</i> that engages in differentiation. In this sense…Read more
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52Berkeley's Non-Cartesian Notion of Spiritual SubstanceJournal of the History of Philosophy 56 (4): 659-682. 2018.As central as the notion of mind is for Berkeley, it is not surprising that what he means by mind stirs debate. At issue are questions about not only what kind of thing a mind is but also how we can know it. This convergence of ontological and epistemological interests in discussing mind has led some commentators to argue that Berkeley's appeal to the Cartesian vocabulary of 'spiritual substance' signals his appropriation of elements of Descartes's theory of mind. But in his account of spiritual…Read more
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777Berkeley on God's Knowledge of PainIn Stefan Storrie (ed.), Berkeley's Three Dialogues: New Essays, Oxford University Press. pp. 136-145. 2018.Since nothing about God is passive, and the perception of pain is inherently passive, then it seems that God does not know what it is like to experience pain. Nor would he be able to cause us to experience pain, for his experience would then be a sensation (which would require God to have senses, which he does not). My suggestion is that Berkeley avoids this situation by describing how God knows about pain “among other things” (i.e. as something whose identity is intelligible in terms of the int…Read more
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G.W. Erickson, "Negative dialectics and the end of philosophy" (review)Man and World 26 (2): 219. 1993.
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13The Ramist Context of Berkeley's PhilosophyBritish Journal for the History of Philosophy 9 (3): 487-505. 2001.
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22Berkeley: Philosophical Writings, ed. Desmond M. Clarke (review)Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews 2009 (7). 2009.
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66Civility and sociability: Hobbes on man and citizenJournal of the History of Philosophy 18 (2): 209-215. 1980.
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552Berkeley's Doctrine of Mind and the “Black List Hypothesis”: A DialogueSouthern Journal of Philosophy 51 (1): 24-41. 2013.Clues about what Berkeley was planning to say about mind in his now-lost second volume of the Principles seem to abound in his Notebooks. However, commentators have been reluctant to use his unpublished entries to explicate his remarks about spiritual substances in the Principles and Dialogues for three reasons. First, it has proven difficult to reconcile the seemingly Humean bundle theory of the self in the Notebooks with Berkeley's published characterization of spirits as “active beings or pri…Read more
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Ramist Dialectic in Leibniz's Early ThoughtIn Mark Kulstad, Mogens Laerke & David Snyder (eds.), The philosophy of the young Leibniz, Steiner. pp. 59-66. 2009.
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14Myth and modern philosophyTemple University Press. 1990.A study of the historiographic significance and use of mythic or fabular thinking in Bacon, Descartes, Mandeville, Vico, Herder, and others.
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24The Philosophy of Jonathan Edwards: A Study in Divine SemioticsIndiana University Press. 1994.An examination of Edwards’ ontology and his ideas on creation, God, sin, freedom, virtue, and beauty.
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19Seventeenth-Century Scholastic Treatments of TimeJournal of the History of Ideas 42 (4): 587-606. 1981.
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558Berkeley, Suárez, and the Esse-Existere DistinctionAmerican Catholic Philosophical Quarterly 74 (4): 621-636. 2000.For Berkeley, a thing's existence 'esse' is nothing more than its being perceived 'as that thing'. It makes no sense to ask (with Samuel Johnson) about the 'esse' of the mind or the specific act of perception, for that would be like asking what it means for existence to exist. Berkeley's "existere is percipi or percipere" (NB 429) thus carefully adopts the scholastic distinction between 'esse' and 'existere' ignored by Locke and others committed to a substantialist notion of mind. Following the …Read more
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51Berkeley's 'Alciphron': English Text and Essays in Interpretation (review)British Journal for the History of Philosophy 19 (3). 2011.
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74Metaphor in the Historiography of PhilosophyClio: A Journal of Literature, History, and the Philosophy of History 15 (2): 191-210. 1986.
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63Vico's historicism and the ontology of argumentsJournal of the History of Philosophy 33 (3): 431-446. 1995.Vico's historicist claims (1) that different ages are intelligible only in their own terms and (2) that the certainty and authority of history depend on its narrative formulation seem at odds with his doctrines of ideal eternal history and divine providence. He resolves these issues, however, in his treatment of ideal eternal history by using the distinction between the certain and the true to show how rhetorical expression generates meaning in and as history. Specifically, by appealing to an on…Read more
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623Edwards' OccasionalismIn Don Schweitzer (ed.), Jonathan Edwards as Contemporary, Peter Lang. pp. 1-14. 2010.Instead of focusing on the Malebranche-Edwards connection regarding occasionalism as if minds are distinct from the ideas they have, I focus on how finite minds are particular expressions of God's will that there be the distinctions by which ideas are identified and differentiated. This avoids problems, created in the accounts of Fiering, Lee, and especially Crisp, about the inherently idealist character of Edwards' occasionalism.
College Station, Texas, United States of America
Areas of Specialization
17th/18th Century Philosophy |
Areas of Interest
17th/18th Century Philosophy |
History of Western Philosophy |