Order:
  1. Ideas and Reality in Descartes.Peter Myrdal & Arto Repo - 2019 - In Frans Svensson & Martina Reuter (eds.), Mind, Body, and Morality: New Perspectives on Descartes and Spinoza. New York: Routledge. pp. 77-95.
    This chapter explores some key issues within Descartes’s theory of cognition. The starting-point is a recent interpretation, according to which Descartes is part of a tradition of theorizing about human cognition, beginning from the idea that we are in principle capable of articulating or grasping the basic order of reality. Earlier readings often take Descartes to question whether we have any cognitive access to reality at all. On the new reading, Descartes instead defends a robust conception of our cognitive relation (...)
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  2. Leibniz on Possibilia, Creation, and the Reality of Essences.Peter Myrdal, Arto Repo & Valtteri Viljanen - 2023 - Philosophers' Imprint 23 (17).
    This paper reconsiders Leibniz’s conception of the nature of possible things and offers a novel interpretation of the actualization of possible substances. This requires analyzing a largely neglected notion, the reality of individual essences. Thus far scholars have tended to construe essences as representational items in God’s intellect. We acknowledge that finite essences have being in the divine intellect but insist that they are also grounded in the infinite essence of God, as limitations of it. Indeed, we show that it (...)
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  3. Leibniz on Primitive Concepts and Conceiving Reality.Peter Myrdal & Arto Repo - 2016 - In Hemmo Laiho & Arto Repo (eds.), DE NATURA RERUM - Scripta in honorem professoris Olli Koistinen sexagesimum annum complentis. Turku: University of Turku. pp. 148-166.
    In this paper, we consider what is commonly referred to as Leibniz’s argument for primitive concepts. After presenting and criticizing (in sections 1 and 2) one recent rather straightforward way of interpreting this argument, by Paul Lodge and Stephen Puryear, which takes the argument to be merely about the structure of concepts, we offer an alternative way of looking at the argument. We think it is best seen as being fundamentally about the relation between thought and reality. In order to (...)
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  4. Force, Motion, and Leibniz’s Argument from Successiveness.Peter Myrdal - 2021 - Archiv für Geschichte der Philosophie 103 (4):704-729.
    This essay proposes a new interpretation of a central, and yet overlooked, argument Leibniz offers against Descartes’s power-free ontology of the corporeal world. Appealing to considerations about the successiveness of motion, Leibniz attempts to show that the reality of motion requires force. It is often assumed that the argument is driven by concerns inspired by Zeno. Against such a reading, this essay contends that Leibniz’s argument is instead best understood against the background of an Aristotelian view of the priority of (...)
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