17th- and 18th-century Philosophy

In this article, I outline a logic of design of a system as a specific kind of conceptual logic of the design of the model of a system, that is, the blueprint that provides information about the system to be created. In section two, I introduce the method of levels of abstraction as a modelling tool borrowed from computer science. In section three, I use this method to clarify two main conceptual logics of information (i.e., modelling systems) inherited from modernity: Kant's transcen-dental logic of conditions of possibility of a system, and Hegel's dialectical logic of conditions of in/stability of a system. Both conceptual logics of information analyse structural properties of given systems. Strictly speaking, neither is a conceptual logic of information about (or modelling) the conditions of feasibility of a system, that is, neither is a logic of information as a logic of design. So, in section four, I outline this third conceptual logic of information and then interpret the conceptual logic of design as a logic of requirements, by introducing the relation of " suffici-entisation ". In the conclusion, I argue that the logic of requirements is exactly what we need in order to make sense of, and buttress, a constructionist (poietic) approach to knowledge.

This chapter provides an outline of the main philosophical and interpretative problems involved in Spinoza's key concepts: Substance, Attribute, and Modes. Spinoza's God has infinitely many qualities that constitute, or are adequately conceived as constituting, his essence, while the other qualities of Spinoza's God, though not constituting God's essence, follow necessarily from God's essence. Spinoza calls the former "Attributes [attributa]" and the latter "Modes [modi]." Following a clarification of Spinoza's understanding of Substance [substantia] in the first part of this essay, we will study in the second and third parts Spinoza's conception of attributes and modes, respectively.

Ideas about soul and body – about thinking or remembering, mind and life, brain and self – remain both diverse and controversial in our neurocentric age. The history of these ideas is significant both in its own right and to aid our understanding of the complex sources and nature of our concepts of mind, cognition, and psychology, which are all terms with puzzling, difficult histories. These topics are not the domain of specialists alone, and studies of emotion, perception, or reasoning have never been isolated theoretical endeavours. As Francis Bacon described human philosophy or ‘the knowledge of our selves’, within which he located the study of body, soul, and mind, it ‘deserveth the more accurate handling, by how much it toucheth us more nearly’ (1605/ 2000: 93). The history of ideas in these domains is
particularly challenging given the practical dimensions and implications of theories of mind. Because theories of human nature and debates about body and mind do ‘touch us’ so ‘nearly’,
they attract and can thus reveal, in specific historical contexts, interconnected discourses or associations which may be quite unlike our own. This chapter retains a focus, however, on the history of theories of mind: we address an array of distinctive positi
ons inmetaphysics and psychology which emerged in wider British debate, each with potential religious, moral, and political implications. We proceed by selectively surveying the conceptual inheritance and challenges for British philosophers in the early seventeenth century with regard to both the soul and the humoral temperament of body and mind. We look at some of the eclectic systems developed by British philosophers of the soul in the mid-century period, and at different ways new ideas in both medicine and metaphysics were integrated.

If the greatness of a philosophical work can be measured by the volume and vehemence of the public response, there is little question that Rousseau's Social Contract stands out as a masterpiece. Within a week of its publication in 1762 it was banished from France. Soon thereafter, Rousseau fled to Geneva, where he saw the book burned in public. At the same time, many of his contemporaries, such as Kant, considered Rousseau to be “the Newton of the moral world,” as he was the first philosopher to draw attention to the basic dignity of human nature. The Social Contract has never ceased to be read in the 250 years since it was written. Rousseau's “Social Contract”: An Introduction offers a thorough and systematic tour of this notoriously paradoxical and challenging text. David Lay Williams offers readers a chapter-by-chapter reading of the Social Contract, squarely confronting these interpretive obstacles, leaving no stones unturned. The conclusion connects Rousseau's text both to his important influences and those who took inspiration and sometimes exception to his arguments. The book also features a special extended appendix dedicated to outlining his famous conception of the general will, which has been the object of controversy since the Social Contract's publication.

Contemporary science seems to be caught in a strange predicament. On the one hand, it holds a firm and reasonable commitment to a healthy naturalistic methodology, according to which explanations of natural phenomena should never overstep the limits of the natural itself. On the other hand, contemporary science is also inextricably and now inevitably dependent on ever more complex technologies, especially Information and Communication Technologies, which it exploits as well as fosters. Yet such technologies are increasingly " artificialising " or " denaturalis-ing " the world, human experiences and interactions, as well as what qualifies as real. So the search for the ultimate explanation of the natural seems to rely upon, and promote, the development of the artificial, seen here as an instantiation of the non-natural. In this article, I would like to try and find a way out of this apparently strange predicament. I shall argue that the naturalisation of our knowledge of the world is either philosophically trivial (naturalism as anti-supernaturalism and anti-preternaturalism), or mistaken (naturalism as anti-constructionism). First, I shall distinguish between different kinds of naturalism. Second, I shall remind the reader that the kinds of naturalism that are justified today need to be protected and supported pragmatically, but they are no longer very interesting conceptually. We know how to win the argument. We just have to keep winning it. Whereas the kind of naturalism that is still interesting today is now in need of revision in order to remain acceptable. Such a kind of naturalism may be revised on the basis of a realistic philosophy of information, according to which knowing is a constructive activity, through which we do not merely represent the phenomena we investigate passively, but create more or less correct informational models (semantic artefacts) of them, proactively and interactively. I shall conclude that the natural is in itself artefactual (a semantic construction), and that the information revolution is disclosing a tension not between the natural and the non-natural, but a deeper one between a user's and a producer's interpretation of knowledge. The outcome is a philosophical view of knowledge and science in the information age that may be called constructionist and a revival of philosophy as a classic, foundationalist enterprise.

Keywords Constructionism · Closure · Level of abstraction · Naturalism · Naturalisation · Open question argument · Reasonably reiterable query test

This paper is an attempt to explicate the relationship between Spinozist expressionism and philosophical constructivism in Deleuze's work through the concept of immanent causality. Deleuze finds in Spinoza a philosophy of immanent causality used to solve the problem of the relation between substance, attribute and mode as an expression of substance. But, when he proceeds to take up this notion of immanent causality found in Spinoza in Difference and Repetition, Deleuze instead inverts it into a modal one such that the identity of substance may be said only of the difference of the modes. Complicating this further, Deleuze and Guattari claim in A Thousand Plateaus that substance, attribute, and mode are each, themselves, multiplicities. What is Philosophy? takes up immanent causality once again, this time through a constructivist lens aimed at resolving the question of the relation between philosophical multiplicities: 'plane,' 'persona,' and 'concept.' By following the different formulations of immanent causality in these works this essay hopes to discover the relationship between Spinozist expressionism and philosophical constructivism in Deleuze's work.

We propose to read Francis Bacon's doctrine of the idols of the mind as an investigation firmly entrenched in his mental-medicinal concerns and we argue that an important role therein is played by the imagination. Looking at the ways in which the imagination serves to pinpoint several crucial aspects of the idolic mind permits us to signal the explicit or implicit cross-references between what in Bacon's tree of knowledge appear as distinct branches: the various faculties and their arts; the mind, the body, and their league; natural philosophy, moral philosophy, and the philosophy of man. The consequence of this rich picture of the diagnosis of the mind is an equally rich conception of the cure, which comprises both epistemic and physiological aspects. We extract the features of this integrated view out of Bacon's epistemological and medical natural historical writings, which we propose to read in tandem. We also propose a number of sources for Bacon's views on the imagination, whose variety accounts for the multivalent, sometimes elusive, but surely pervasive role of the imagination in the Baconian diagnosis and cure of the mind.

In this paper I argue that there is an important sense in which we should regard Leibniz as an advocate of mysticism. I make the case for this claim by considering the complex phenomenon of mysticism itself and Leibniz's discussion of what he terms 'false mysticism' (I.e., quietism) and what he refers to as the "true mystical theology" in an article of that name. The principle claim is that Leibniz is a "rational mystic", i.e., one who thinks that we have the capacity to be directly acquainted with God via our innate idea of God.

Jean-Jacques Rousseau: Fundamental Political Writings includes the Social Contract, Discourse on the Sciences and the Arts, Discourse on the Origins of Inequality, and “Preface to Narcissus.” Each text has been newly translated, and includes a full complement of explanatory notes. The editors’ introduction offers students diverse points of entry into some of the distinctive possibilities and challenges of each of these fundamental texts, as well as an introduction to Rousseau’s life and historical situation, from his early years in Geneva to his final years in relative solitude. Each text is accompanied by images from the original editions. The volume also includes annotated appendices that help students to explore the origins and influences of Rousseau’s work, including excerpts from Hobbes, Pascal, Descartes, Mandeville, Diderot, Voltaire, Madame de Staël, Benjamin Constant, Joseph de Maistre, Kant, Hegel, and Engels.

Although we commonly take our thoughts to be about external things that exist independently of ourselves, Spinoza’s notion of intentionality suggests that our ideas are primarily about our own bodies. What are we to make of this somewhat revisionary tenet? Do our thoughts never reach out to the things themselves? This paper attempts to reconstruct Spinoza’s notion of intentionality in two steps. Firstly, I will place his position in the larger context of his metaphysical tenets and discuss how his theory of ideas provides an explanation of inten-tional content. Secondly, I will address the question of how Spinoza accounts for what we customarily take to be thoughts about external things as such. I shall argue that, for Spinoza, intentional content always involves propositional attitudes which are ultimately governed by our striving for self-preservation (conatus). In accentuating the links between his theory of propositional attitudes and his conatus principle, I hope to show how he challenges the traditional view of intentionality as grasping objects in a mind-independent world in favour of the thesis that we represent things as they are beneficial to us.

A critical edition of all of the philosophically important material from the correspondence between the philosopher Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz (1646-1716) and his two royal patronesses, Electress Sophie of Hanover (1630-1714), and her daughter, Queen Sophie Charlotte of Prussia (1668-1705). In this correspondence, Leibniz expounds in a very accessible way his views on topics such as the nature and operation of the mind, innate knowledge, the afterlife, ethics, and human nature. The correspondence also contains the only known philosophical writings by Sophie and Sophie Charlotte, and thus provides a valuable insight into their views and concerns, as well as throwing light on their characters. The texts are accompanied by a substantial introductory essay which sets the context for the correspondence and analyzes its main philosophical themes.

This paper seeks to explore what Herder is actually doing in his Treatise on the Origin of Language and how this fits into his philosophy as a whole. Through the lens of Herder’s critique of Rousseau, the paper demonstrates how he construes the human being, in virtue of the organization of its soul-forces (Seelenkräfte) and the condition of need into which it is born, as compelled to develop itself in two related ways. First, the human being develops its capacity for reason and language from the outset, proceeding through various stages of their development: reflective awareness, inner language, and spoken language. Second, the human being also develops natural affections from the very beginning, which, in turn, ground its natural sociability. Language, reason, and sociability together form the basis of human culture and civilization and their development is governed by a set of natural laws that emerge from Herder’s metaphysics.

The dissertation examines the meaning of the public or common good considered as an end or purpose of government in the public debate over the adoption of the U.S. Constitution. Federalists and Anti-Federalists assert that the purpose of government is to both promote the public good and protect individual rights. What did they mean by the “public good” and related phrases? An extended commentary and textual analysis of the published writings of five Federalists (John Dickinson, Oliver Ellsworth, Noah Webster, Tench Coxe, and James Wilson) and five Anti-Federalists (Agrippa, Centinel, Federal Farmer, Impartial Examiner,and Brutus), the dissertation examines the way in which the notion of the public good played a significant part within the larger themes of federalism, representation, liberty versus licentiousness, and union during the ratification period.

Neither side’s understanding of the protection of individual rights as the purpose of government completely forecloses the notion of the promotion of the public good. The uniquely federal nature of the Constitution obscures the deeper understanding of the public good of Anti-Federalists and Federalists alike, but both sides—especially the Federalists—provide plenty of evidence. The Anti-Federalist view of representation emphasizes that the public good must be truly public without making clear how the public good differs from majority will; the Federalists emphasize the public good must be truly good, the product of sound deliberation. The Federalist argument includes the explicit claim that liberty is not license, but tied to a common notion of virtue, or what is truly good for all. The Federalists argue that there is a public good for all the states combined and thus the federal government must have supreme power over matters relating to commerce—and commerce is spoken of as intrinsically connected to morality and virtue—for the sake of this national public good. Although the Federalist notion of the public good is severely limited in scope, remaining in some way open as to the final purpose of human beings or the ultimate questions about what is truly good, it is nonetheless much more than the notion of an interdependent collection of private goods.

Leibniz portrays the most fundamental entities in his mature ontology in at least three different ways. In some places, he describes them as mind-like, immaterial substances that perceive and strive. Elsewhere, he presents them as hylomorphic compounds. In yet other passages, he characterizes them in terms of primitive and derivative forces. Interpreters often assume that the first description is the most accurate. In contrast, I will argue that the third characterization is more accurate than the other two. If that is correct, Leibniz’s monadological metaphysics is even more radical than it initially seems: his ontology is best understood not as a substance-mode ontology but as a force ontology. At the metaphysical ground floor, we do not find substances that possess force; instead, we just find forces. Interpreting Leibniz as a force ontologist has far-reaching consequences. For instance, it requires us to reconsider the status of time in Leibniz’s system and to revise our understanding of appetitions and perceptions.

This book examines the nature and significance of religious enthusiasm in early Enlightenment England. In the early modern period, the term ‘enthusiasm’ was a smear word used to discredit the dissenters of the radical Reformation as dangerous religious fanatics. In England, the term gained prominence from the Civil War period and throughout the eighteenth century. Anglican ministers and the proponents of the Enlightenment used it more widely against Paracelsian chemists, experimental philosophers, religious dissenters and divines, astrologers or anyone claiming superior knowledge. As a result, our understanding of enthusiasm is largely influenced by the hostile discourse of Augustan moralist and early Enlighteners. But who exactly were these enthusiasts? What did they believe in, how did they operate as a community and what impact did they have on their contemporaries? This book aims to answer these questions by concentrating on the notorious case of the French Prophets. It demonstrates how the understanding of enthusiasm evolved around 1700, designating anything from a religious fanaticism to a social epidemic and even a bodily disease. It offers the first comprehensive approach to enthusiasm, looking at this multifarious issue from a successively social, religious, cultural, political and medical perspective. Based on extensive archival research, it sheds new light on the reality of enthusiasm away from the hostility of Enlightenment discourse.

Animal spirits – the messengers of the body, as Mandeville called them – cross domains such as neuroscience, literature, culture, and economics. Additionally, they are not a neutral concept. On the one hand, the history of neuroscience tends to claim that it was the abandonment of animal spirits which allowed experimental neuroscience to emerge. In contrast, more culturally oriented historians of ideas see the spirits as 'freed' from a linear scientific development, as agents of fluidity and dynamism, whether strictly as regards models of the brain and nervous system, or of matter and life overall. Animal spirits then seem to be a key case, or at least a particularly vivid case which calls for 'historical cognitive science' analysis or 'historical neurophilosophy', as some have proposed. For they testify to a tension between two models of the brain, both at the time of Willis et al., and now: a more mechanistic picture of brains (the brain is a mere lump of inert substance and/or a fully mechanistic system) and a more dynamic picture of the brain as self-transforming and malleable (plastic, in current parlance), as I have described elsewhere with reference to Diderot's image of the brain as a 'book which reads itself'. In this paper I seek to reconstruct this dynamism and to show how it related to a dynamic form of materialism.

This chapter is from a volume of papers devoted to providing introductions to many of Leibniz's key philosophical writings. It provides an overview of one of Leibniz's most impenetrable works, the Theodicy. I argue that the Theodicy is best understood against a careful reading of the Preface, in which Leibniz suggests that the primary aim of the book is to provide the means by which natural theology and Leibniz's conception of God as a being deserving of our love may be maintained in the face of objections that stem from considering the nature of freedom and the so-called 'problem of evil'. The chapter contains a detailed presentation of the main discussions in the book, including the Preliminary Dissertation in which Leibniz spells out his conception of the relationship between faith and reason.

Departing from Pierre Bayle's discussion of Spinoza in the entry 'Japan' in his Dictionaire, this article discusses how debates about the Far East functioned as a foil for the polemics generated by the Radical Enlightement. The central point of investigation is a debate between Gerard Vossius and Georg Hornius, integrating three main issues where ideas about the East challenged accepted European authority: sacred history, republicanism, and natural philosophy. The article demonstrates that the onset of radicalism involved a plethora of old, new and exotic ideas, from logic to linguistics and Hermeticism, before crystallizing into the scientific and political notions now associated with modernity.

This is a critical discussion of the literature on Leibniz's Pre-established harmony written in 1997. Whilst primarily a discussion of previous approaches, it contains some original thoughts and I hope it might provide a useful guide to the geography of this topic, albeit a little outdated and with some omissions (e.g., there is nothing on the PEH of the kingdoms of nature and grace).

Here I have uploaded the final draft of my long introduction to the correspondence. Anyone wishing to quote etc., will need to get hold of the book. However, content-wise it is pretty much what appears in the final version and includes my best efforts to provide an account of Leibniz's views on substance and body at that time.

This volume as whole contains a new critical edition of the correspondence between Leibniz and Burcher de Volder (based on manuscript sources), a translation of the correspondence into English, and an 80 page introductory essay which advances a number of novel theses regarding Leibniz's metaphysics. Also included is a selection of letters from the intermediary correspondence between Leibniz and Johann Bernoulli. Many of the letters by Leibniz (and all those by De Volder) are translated into English for the first time.

Although its origins stem from theological debates, the general will would ultimately become one of the most celebrated and denigrated concepts emerging from early modern political thought.  Jean-Jacques Rousseau would make it the central element of his political theory, and it would take on a life of its own during the French Revolution before being subjected to generations of embrace or opprobrium.  James Farr and David Lay Williams have collected for the first time a set of essays that track the evolving history of the general will from its origins to recent times.  These essays include attention to the general will’s theological, political, formal, and substantive dimensions with a careful eye to the concept’s virtues and limitations as understood by its expositors and critics, among them Pascal, Malebranche, Locke, Spinoza, Montesquieu, Constant, Tocqueville, Adam Smith, and John Rawls.

I argue that Isaac Newton's _De Gravitatione_ should not be considered an authoritative expression of his thought about the metaphysics of space and its relation to physical inquiry. I establish the following narrative: In _De Gravitatione_ (circa 1668--1684), Newton claimed he had direct experimental evidence for the work's central thesis: that space had ``its own manner of existing'' as an affection or emanative effect. In the 1710s, however, through the prodding of both Roger Cotes and G. W. Leibniz, he came to see that this evidence relied on assumptions that his own _Principia_ rendered unjustifiable. Consequently, he (i) revised the conclusions he explicitly drew from the experimental evidence, (ii) rejected the idea that his spatial metaphysics was grounded in experimental evidence, and (iii) reassessed the epistemic status of key concepts in his metaphysics and natural philosophy. The narrative I explore shows not only that _De Gravitatione_ did not constitute the metaphysical backdrop of the _Principia_ as Newton ultimately understood it, but that it was the _Principia_ itself that ultimately lead to the demise of key elements of _De Gravitatione_. I explore the implications of this narrative for Andrew Janiak's and Howards Stein's interpretations of Newton's metaphysics.

This paper proposes an interpretative framework for some developments of the philosophy of nature after Kant. I emphasize the critique of the economy of nature in the Critique of judgement. I argue that it resulted in a split of a previous structure of knowledge; such a structure articulated natural theology and natural philosophy on the basis of the consideration of the order displayed by living beings, both in their internal organisation and their ecological distribution. The possibility of a philosophical discourse on nature that is neither mathematical nor theological stemmed from this shift. I call "hermeneutics of nature" such a program, since it aims at unpacking an immanent meaning in nature that is not explicated by the sciences of nature, which are dealing with the laws of nature. The Naturphilosophie, undertaken by Schelling, as well as the philosophies of nature of Hegel and Schopenhauer, are several realizations of this program. I highlight the structural traits that they share, such as a pregnant sense of conflicts in nature, an emphasis on the riddles of gender, and above all a prominent status given to organisms as a clue to the meaning of nature. Finally, I try to sketch the ramifications of this hermeneutics of nature in contemporary philosophy, especially phenomenology, and argue that the coming philosophy of nature, as shown by the attempts of syntheses between phenomenology and ecology, seems to depart from this hermeneutical program.

This is an introductory essay to a critical edition of Hale's MS treatise on natural law (British Library, MSS Add. 18235, Harley 7159, and Hargrave 485). Chapters 1-5 were published along with this introduction. An edition of the entire treatise (chapters 1-13) is now available in the Sources in Early Modern Economics, Ethics, and Law series published by CLP Academic (2015).

This paper contains an investigation of Leibniz’s ontology of time. Standard debates on Leibniz’s theory of time hinge upon the question whether the nature of time is relative or absolute and focus mainly on the Leibniz-Clarke correspondence. Focusing instead on Theodicy and referring to the contemporary frame and debate, I address some different questions: whether Leibniz is an A-theorist or a B-theorist, or an advocate of a hybrid form of an A/B-theory; and whether he is a presentist (who think that only present things and states of affairs exist) or an eternalist (who claims that past, present and future things and states of affairs are equally real). After careful analysis of several passages that seemingly support a presentist interpretation, I conclude that under the most charitable interpretation Leibniz should be considered as an eternalist, and precisely as a dynamical one. I further argue that Leibniz’s peculiar view on modality mirror this hybrid theory of time.

This dynamical interpretation of the continuum is based on a threefold perspective. First, detailed differentiation of all standard realms of Leibnizian Weltanschauung – (R real), (P phenomenal), (I ideal). Second, analysis of the scope of the Law of Continuity famously formulated by Leibniz and mapping it onto this (RPI) structure. Third, finding the precise place of dynamics and force in this (RPI) continuum.
These perspectives (taxonomical, legislative and junctional) if put together lead to a new understanding of monads’ role; and they are not taken anymore as a discreet part of Leibnizian philosophy (as opposed to the ideal space and time), but as dynamical continuum incorporating in itself both contiguity and continuity. And in such a way they are both neutralizing and preserving the syncategorematic phenomenal infinity. The main point is that force can be applied both to perception and appetition of monads and by this we give the shortest Leibnizian answer to the Zeno’s Dichotomy paradox – “force”. But what is more important, such dynamical interpretation gives good schematic and systematic view of Leibnizian mature philosophy. And it appears (as expected) that the thread out of the Labyrinth of the Continuum is not only geometrical and physical, but metaphysical too.

In this paper, I aim to disentangle and explicate the phenomena pertaining to Cudworth’s concept of consciousness and aim to show that as Cudworth insists on degrees within conscious mentality in general, he ultimately draws an interesting and specific distinction between two different types of consciousness dependent on the intensity of a subject’s awareness of herself as the subject of action. A further distinction is drawn between reflection as a voluntary consideration of one’s thoughts and actions and consciousness in general. Here an important distinguishing factor, besides the voluntariness of reflection, is the different kinds of reflexive structures pertaining to reflection and consciousness.

The capability of deliberation and self-determination requires self-consciousness, understood as lucid undistorted awareness of oneself as subject. Elementary consciousness, as a subjective experience, does not provide a lucid enough experience of one’s subjecthood to qualify as a basis for such higher-level activity. As one type of consciousness features the fairly specific role of being closely involved in morally responsible agency, we are also led to ask about the characteristics of the more elementary consciousness. Reflexivity, phenomenality, and content of thought in addition to subjecthood turn out to be features embraced by Cudworth’s pioneering conception of consciousness.

Spinoza's notion of freedom confronts us with a paradoxical idea: on the one hand, freedom requires us to act with rational insight into the causally determined order of the natural world. On the other hand, grasping this order seems to leave us with the insight that there is nothing that could be justly termed a human person. As I see it, the key to resolving this tension is to be sought within a special reading of Spinoza's theory of the striving for self-preservation (conatus): I shall argue that Spinoza's conatus doctrine entails an appropriation thesis: according to Spinoza's account, we ought to re-describe our personal histories in terms of a gradual appropriation of the natural order and take supposedly external causes as our own reasons for action. The present paper tries to set out this solution and its difficulties against the background of the contemporary debate on freedom.

This paper examines a widely accepted reading of monads as the most fundamental elements of reality. Garber (2009) argues that simple monads — seen as mind-like atoms without parts and extension — replace the corporeal substance of Leibniz’s middle period. Phemister (2005) argues that monads figure also at the top as complete corporeal substances. Building on Fichant (2004), I argue that monads figure not only at the bottom, not only at the top but also in all the range in between them. I argue that, for Leibniz, monads function not only as building blocks at the bottom level of composition (for aggregates) but also at the top, as grounding the unity and hence the being of complete substances and organic unities. Since organic unities or living beings are seen by Leibniz as natural machines with a nested structure, and since monads are likened to living beings, this would imply that the use of the concept ‘monad’ holds not only at the bottom, and not only at the top, but all over the range between them. This reading thus provides a gloss on what Fichant has called the ‘universalization of monads’.

In a number of writings Leibniz argued that it follows from the Cartesian account of motion as change of relative position that individual bodies cannot be said to move at all. I In this paper, I shall be concerned with some additional consequences that Leibniz drew from this argument that shed important light on the relationship between physics and metaphysics within his philosophy. I begin with an account of Leibniz's "argument from relativity" that differs from those previously offered in the literature. But I am also concerned with the way in which Leibniz uses the argument as a platform from which he can offer his own view of what it is for individual bodies to move. Leibniz provides three such accounts during his career and I shall discuss all three below. However, the llrst one that I shall discuss is far less significant since it appears only once, relatively early in Leibniz's life. Commentators have suggested that the remaining two discussions provide competing accounts of what is required for a body to move, the presence of which indicates a significant change in Leibniz's thinking about the issues over time. I argue instead that they are complementary components of a unified
account of bodily motion that Leibniz adopted throughout his mature writings.

Pierre Bayle's Dictionnaire Historique et Critique, a landmark in intellectual history, is a curious text. Originally intended as a collection of all errors, it became an encyclopedia of everything, enfolding rampantly growing footnotes that commented on every imaginable topic. Instead of looking at Bayle's theoretical statements in the Dictionnaire, I explore Bayle's writing practice, his critical method and his practice of forming judgments. A close study of the textual, paratextual and contextual characteristics of the first entry of the Dictionnaire (the entry "Abaris") allows me to find out how Bayle made up his mind at every stage during a contemporaneous controversy on divination. In this way, we are able to see Bayle's mind in action while he is judging the contradictory information he receives and the to-and-fro movement of changing opinions he is confronted with. Th is examination yields new insights to Bayle's practical attitudes towards key issues in his oeuvre, including scepticism, rationalism, superstition and tolerance. At the same time, the article clarifies how Bayle was involved in the Republic of Letters and how he related to his local context in Rotterdam.

Locke endorses a distinction between passive reflection and voluntary attentive reflection, which he occasionally labels contemplation. Failure to recognize this distinction properly has had an effect on interpretations of Locke’s theory of reflection, and caused puzzlement about the relation between reflection and consciousness. In particular, the function of reflection as a passive internal sense that produces simple ideas of mental operations has been downplayed in favour of the view that reflection in one manner or another involves attention and/or presupposes consciousness of mental operations. This has led a number of scholars to maintain, implicitly or explicitly, that Locke in fact abandons either his doctrine of sensation and reflection as the two exclusive sources of ideas or his doctrine of ideas as the only immediate objects of experience.

With the help of a distinction between reflection as a source of ideas and reflection as an operation about ideas I aim to show how Locke can hold to his empiricist maxim about the two sources of ideas and also endorse ideas as the only immediate objects of experience. A proper understanding of Locke’s theory of reflection requires that reflection and consciousness be delineated with respect to one another. I will show how Locke’s notion of consciousness differs from both types of reflection.

David Hume’s views on topics such as causation, free will, personal identity, scepticism and morals are without doubt all significant contributions to philosophy. However, his account of the origin and nature of our ideas of space and time has never been influential (Rosenberg 1993, 82). In fact, the account of space and time is generally thought to be the least satisfactory part of his empiricist system of philosophy (Kemp Smith, 1941: 287, Noxon 1973, 115 and Flew 1986, 38). The main reason is internal in that the account is judged to be inconsistent with Hume’s fundamental principle for the relationship between senses and cognition, the copy principle. This paper defends Hume against the inconsistency objection by offering a new systematic interpretation of Hume on space and time and illuminating more generally the role of the copy principle in his philosophy.

Spinoza famously holds that we standardly believe whatever it is that is perceived or goes through our mind, unless we hold stronger beliefs to the contrary. So if you see a winged horse on your lawn, you will also believe that there is a winged horse on the lawn, unless you have strong beliefs excluding the existence of winged horses. Let's call this the principle of the priority of belief. Couched in the terminology of the 17 th century, Spinoza holds that we cannot merely contemplate ideas, but that every idea involves at least an affirmation. Countering Cartesian as well as scholastic positions, he claims that ideas are not merely considered and then affirmed or denied in virtue of the will. In this sense, ideas are what we now call beliefs, and believing is, as it were, the default mode of thinking. Spinoza's principle has been well acknowledged in the literature: Edwin Curley, Jonathan Bennett, Michael Della Rocca and Ursula Renz, for instance, present extensive discussions of Spinoza's doxastic involuntarism, and some of the contemporary psychological literature even credits Spinoza with inventing a promising account of thinking as believing. 1 However, it is rarely considered how this principle is coupled with what could be called the principle of exclusion: we believe something unless a certain thought is excluded by beliefs we already hold. But if we tend to embrace what coheres with previous beliefs, we don't just believe anything. Rather we might say that our minds are governed by what could be called a constant confirmation bias, i.e. a tendency to confirm existing beliefs. This raises the question of what governs this bias. Why don't we believe in winged horses? In other words, what is the foundation of including certain beliefs and excluding others? To answer this question we need to consider Spinoza's understanding of ideas and the exclusion principle. A promising answer is of course that ideas must ultimately be explained in virtue of the conatus, i.e. the self-preservation drive. But although the conatus doctrine has been readily cited to explain the power of ideas, 2 it remains underdetermined so long as we do not account for the mechanisms that govern the exclusion and inclusion of ideas. These mechanisms, I

By examining the representation of popular and inquisitorial forms of punishment in the works of Cervantes, this essay seeks to recover shame as an emotional register of lived experience in the early modern Mediterranean, an affect which has hitherto remained overshadowed by the abundance of critical literature on honor as well as by large-scale Mediterraneanizing studies.  The identification of an inquisitorial discourse of shaming in the episodes of Don Quijote’s encagement suggests the need, on the one hand, to reevaluate what twentieth-century anthropology denominated the “values” of Mediterranean society and, on the other, to rehabilitate local (hi)stories that are all marked by blood: the blood of shame’s blush; that which was shed through violent conflicts; and that which governed the politics of blood purity.

The subject of this article is Herder’s unique conception of the soul-body relationship and its divergence from and dependence on Leibniz. Herder’s theory is premised on a rejection of the windowlessness of monads in two important respects: interaction between material bodies (as gleaned from Crusius and Kant) and interaction between the soul and body. Herder’s theory depends on Leibniz insofar as it agrees with the intimate connection Leibniz posits between the soul and the body, as his epistemology demonstrates, with, however, the significant modification that the connection is real. Herder transforms the Leibnizian rehabilitation and use of substantial forms to develop a double-conception of the human soul as both thinking substance and substantial form: the soul, qua thinking substance, needs a body through whose senses it can interact with, and acquire knowledge of, the external world; the soul, qua substantial form, constructs itself this material body by harnessing the forces of attraction and repulsion. Herder’s theory provides an alternative to other contemporary accounts of the soul-body relationship, especially Kant’s, which start from the problem of relating two distinct substances. His unique and original reconciliation of the modern dichotomy of spirit and matter, via his connecting of Leibniz’s realms of final and efficient causes, is of great significance for the rise of German Idealism.

It has been suggested in the literature that, although Willem Jacob 's Gravesande occasionally treated Newton's doctrines in a selective manner, he was nevertheless an unremitting follower of Newton's methodology. As part of a reassessment of 's Gravesande's Newtonianism, I argue that, although 's Gravesande took over key terms of Newton's methodological canon, his methodological ideas are upon close scrutiny quite different from and occasionally even incongruent with Newton's views on the matter.

Монография составлена из ранее опубликованных автором статей и материалов по истории и методологии исследования российского дворянства конца XVIII — начала XIX века. В книгу вошли результаты более чем двадцати лет работы. Предлагается постановка различных проблем изучения дворянства, case studies из жизни влиятельного клана Воронцовых, сделана попытка соединить государственное служение, личную жизнь и метафизику одного из ярчайших представителей российской аристократии — М.С. Воронцова.

The monograph is composed by the author from already published papers and studies in history and methodology of the Russian nobility at the end of the 18th and the beginning of the 19th century. The book presents the results of more than twenty years of the author’s research. He suggests interpretations of various problems in nobility studies, of some cases from powerful Vorontsov clan’s life, and attempts to put together outstanding aristocrat M. Vorontsov’s public service, private life and metaphysics.

This book contains the first complete interpretation of all aspects of Hobbes’s philosophy which treat religious convictions and practices. Not only his philosophy of religion and his philosophical theology, but also his biblical theology are treated in extense. The main thesis is that, according to Hobbes, neither philosophy nor politics in any way need a religious fundament; but since religions establish institutions and thus accumulate means of power, they are necessarily an object of politics. It is for this reason that religious convictions and practices are a – for a long time neglected – main topic of Hobbes’s philosophy.

This article investigates the opposing solutions provided by Descartes and Hobbes on the issue of human individuality. Both solutions need to be understood through the physical and metaphysical problem that both Descartes and Hobbes share: that is the problem of ‘individual bodies’. Being confronted with this issue, the two thinkers face similar difficulties. The hypothesis maintained here is that the removal of the theoretical obstacles arising from the issue of the uniqueness of the extended substance – and the consequent impossibility of conceiving the existence of individual bodies – allows Descartes, and no less Hobbes, to elaborate a conception of the human being as a separate field that is distinguished from the rest of nature.