Tammy Nyden

Mothers of children with mental illness are on the frontlines of two global crises. The rates and severity of children’s mental illness have been rapidly growing, increasing the need for services and community supports. At the same time, four decades of privatization and austerity have resulted in what Emma Dowling calls “the care crisis,” including a state of disarray in the children’s mental health service sector. The intersection of the children’s mental health crisis with the care crisis makes it impossible for many children to access hospital beds for mental health emergencies and community-based disability services necessary to keep them alive and in their own homes. Mothers overwhelmingly bear the economic and social burdens of filling in disability service gaps. Furthermore, the very agencies charged to serve children with disabilities depend on the exploited and appropriated unpaid labour of their mothers. This article introduces the concept of “motherblame-stigma,” a social prejudice in the form of social disgrace, blame, and distrust of mothers related to a stigmatized characteristic of their child. After tracing the history of motherblame-stigma for children’s mental illness, I apply an epistemic oppression framing to illustrate how motherblame-stigma functions to prevent mothers from correcting distorted public narratives about child disability service infrastructures (a contributory injustice) and to sew self-doubt within mothers about their own experiences and capabilities (gaslighting). I provide examples of institutional gaslighting in state policy, law, public statements, and narratives to blame mothers for failing to seek and navigate services that do not exist.

This introduction opens a discussion about what we call here “Cartesian Empiricisms.” Under this label we place some of the complex transformations of Descartes’ ideas in the second half of the seventeenth century. Our aim is to highlight the use of experiment within the Cartesian framework, which—with the exception of a few scattered studies on seventeenth-century Cartesians—was largely neglected in the literature. In this introduction, we provide an overview of Cartesian scholarship and the use of the rationalist-empiricist distinction in both the history of philosophy and the history of science; we show that the rationalist-empiricist narrative is in crisis and contend that examining figures who do not neatly fit the dichotomy is a useful approach to a re-evaluation of the period. We end with a summary of the chapters, which cover a number of Cartesians strongly committed to the importance of experimental natural philosophy and further our understanding of how Cartesians in the second half of the seventeenth century understood and utilized knowledge from observation, experience, and experiment.

In this dissertation, I trace the development of Spinoza's philosophy of mind throughout his corpus. I argue that understanding the development of his thought, as well as its historical context, helps us understand how Spinoza's mature system fits together. Owing to the complexity and systematic nature of Spinoza's philosophy, along with the tendency in the literature to study his Ethics in isolation, the importance of such connections for the proper understanding of any particular area of his thought is often overlooked. This project focuses on the connections between Spinoza's philosophy of mind and political philosophy. The goal of my dissertation is to show how, not just that, these two aspects of his system are related. For example, I show how Spinoza's parallelism principle, a development that does not occur until Part II of the Ethics, allows Spinoza to account for the individuation and identity of minds and bodies. This account is foundational for both his mature theory of mind and for his systematization of the doctrines of a political movement in The Netherlands known as "Radical Cartesianism". I see the development of the parallelism principle as a turning point in Spinoza's philosophy and a solution that Spinoza was working towards throughout his philosophical career. ;My methodology is twofold: first, a reconstruction of the development of key epistemological doctrines in Spinoza's corpus; second an examination of the intellectual context of that development. The key doctrines I examine to trace the changes in Spinoza's philosophy of mind are his views on truth, error, and falsity. I begin with the Appendix Containing Metaphysical Thoughts. I argue that this work represents Spinoza's earliest thinking about the mind. Then, through textual comparison, I reconstruct Spinoza's development through his transitional works, the Emendation of the Intellect and Short Treatise, and his mature work, the Ethics. I show how these developments are related to Spinoza's commitments to Radical Cartesian political theory. ;I conclude that while Spinoza is greatly influenced by Descartes, he never accepted Descartes' theory of mind; as Spinoza's theory of mind develops, it looks less and less similar to that of Descartes'; and the development of Spinoza's theory of mind is largely motivated by his commitments to Radical Cartesian Politics. Ironically, Spinoza's attempt to make coherent a political movement based on Descartes' psychology and overall philosophical methodology ends in a rejection of that very psychology and major components of that methodology

Seventeenth-century Holland was a culture divided. Orthodox Calvinists, loyal to both scholastic philosophy and the quasi-monarchical House of Orange, saw their world turned upside down with the sudden death of Prince William II and no heir to take his place. The Republicans seized this opportunity to create a decentralized government favourable to Holland's trading interests and committed to religious and philosophical tolerance. The now ruling regent class, freshly trained in the new philosophy of Descartes, used it as a weapon to fight against monarchical tendencies and theological orthodoxy. And so began a great pamphlet debate about Cartesianism and its political and religious consequences. This book begins by examining key Radical Cartesian pamphlets and Spinoza's role in a Radical Cartesian circle in Amsterdam, two topics rarely discussed in the English literature. Next, it examines Spinoza's political writings and argues that they should not be seen as political innovations so much as systemizations of the Radical Cartesian ideas already circulating in his time. It goes on to reconstruct the development of Spinoza's thinking about the human mind, truth, error, and falsity and to explain how this development, particularly the innovation of parallelism - the lynchpin of his system - allowed Spinoza to provide philosophical foundations for Radical Cartesian political theory. It concludes that, contrary to general opinion, Spinoza's rejection of Cartesian epistemology involves much more than the metaphysical problems of dualism - it involves, ironically, Spinoza's attempt to make coherent a political theory bearing Descartes's name.

In 1675, Burchard de Volder (1643–1709) was the first professor to introduce the demonstration of experiment into a university physics course and built the Leiden Physics Theatre to accommodate this new pedagogy. When he requested the funds from the university to build the facility, he claimed that the performance of experiments would demonstrate the “truth and certainty” of the postulates of theoretical physics. Such a claim is interesting given de Volder’s lifelong commitment to Cartesian scientia. This chapter will examine de Volder’s views on experiment and show that they are not Newtonian or inductivist, as is sometimes claimed. While de Volder thinks we need deductive reasoning from first principles to provide evidence of the certainty of the content of our physical theories, he also contends that we need experiment to provide evidence of the certainty of the existence of the particular bodies those theories discuss. This approach to experiment is based on a distinction between rational certainty and the certainty of material bodies in the actual world. While this account is deeply influenced by Descartes, it is importantly different than Descartes’ distinction between absolute and moral certainty. De Volder’s “Cartesian Empiricism” is best understood as a continuation and further development of a long tradition of teaching through observation at Leiden.

This paper will examine the work of two physics professors at the University of Leiden: Burchard de Volder (1643-1709) and his successor, Willem J ‘s Gravesande (1668-1742). Both men are responsible for innovations in pedagogy that emphasize the demonstration of experiment: de Volder was the first university physics professor to demonstrate experiments in his classroom and created the Leiden Physics Theatre for that purpose; one generation later, ‘s Gravesande taught in that same theatre and provided students with the first comprehensive textbook in experimental physics. While both men emphasize experiment in their pedagogy, they differ in their epistemological commitments. De Volder, a Cartesian, demonstrates experiments to inspire his young students, still greatly affected by sensory perception, to take on the daunting task of true science, which for him involves deduction from first principles. In contrast, ‘s Gravesande, a Newtonian, teaches his students how to use experiments in order to gain reliable information about the world. This paper studies their respective positions in the ongoing vis viva controversy as a means of understanding the influence Locke’s epistemology had on early eighteenth-century physics, particularly on the Dutch reception of Newton.

Baruch Spinoza, the seventeenth century Dutch rationalist, has always been seen as a bit of an anomaly within the Western tradition. His monism, unique conception of God as Nature, and ethical focus on human freedom or liberation has occasioned some comparisons with Asian philosophies. Unfortunately, almost all of these comparisons take the form of vague passing remarks within the context of a work or discussion with another philosophical focus. The reader is often left to wonder what the particular commonalties are and may even get the impression that such comparisons result from frustrations in placing certain Spinozistic views within the European tradition, rather than concrete affinities with various Asian traditions. This is unfortunate, as it would be beneficial to see how a Western philosopher might approach the fundamentally ‘Eastern’ philosophical problem of human liberation and the nature of the self. In the following, I will argue that Spinoza provides a decidedly Western answer to this problem and that his answer may be viewed as a middle ground between Sankara's Advaita Vedantic approach and Santaraksita's Vajrayana Buddhist approach.

In 1675, Burchard de Volder became the first university physics professor to introduce the demonstration of experiments into his lectures and to create a special university classroom, The Leiden Physics Theatre, for this specific purpose. This is surprising for two reasons: first, early pre-Newtonian experiment is commonly associated with Italy and England, and second, de Volder is committed to Cartesian philosophy, including the view that knowledge gathered through the senses is subject to doubt, while that deducted from first principles is certain. On the surface, it is curious that such a man would bring experiments to university physics. After all, in demonstrating experiments to his students, he was teaching them through their senses, not reason. However, if we consider the institutional context of de Volder’s teaching, we come to see de Volder’s Cartesian experimentalism as representative of a certain form of pre-Newtonian Dutch Cartesian science, as well as part of a larger tradition of teaching through observation at the University of Leiden. Considering de Volder’s institutional context will help us see that de Volder’s experimentalism was not in spite of his Cartesianism, but motivated by it. This paper will describe de Volder’s physics curriculum, the Theatre in which it was taught and how his work predates similar efforts in other European Universities. The second part will consider three aspects of the culture at the University of Leiden: a tradition of teaching through observation, a particular reception of Cartesianism, and an eclectic approach to the New Philosophy. The concluding portion shows how de Volder would have understood his enterprise in Cartesian terms.

Spinoza's political writings are not merely a theoretical exercise or a philosophical conclusion of his system. They are part of a very practical political discussion in seventeenth-century Holland. Spinoza was influenced by and played a role in a political movement known as "Radical Cartesianism", which combined ideas from Descartes and Hobbes in order to argue against the reinstatement of a stadholder. This movement provided arguments for religious and philosophical freedom and against monarchy based on a fundamental drive of self-preservation and a particular understanding of the passions. This paper provides a general introduction to Radical Cartesianism by explaining its historical context and discussing two Radical Cartesian voices: Lambertus van Velthuysen and the brothers De la Court. The final section discusses Spinoza's political philosophy as a systemization of their Radical Cartesian ideas.