There is a growing consensus that Emilie Du Châtelet’s challenging essay “On Freedom” defends compatibilism. I offer an alternative, libertarian reading of the essay. I lay out the prima facie textual evidence for such a reading. I also explain how apparently compatibilist remarks in “On Freedom” can be read as aspects of a sophisticated type of libertarianism that rejects blind or arbitrary choice. To this end, I consider the historical context of Du Châtelet’s essay, and especially the dialectic between various (...) strands of eighteenth-century libertarianism and compatibilism. (shrink)

The Abrahamic traditions regard God as the world’s author. But what kind of author? A novelist? A playwright? Perhaps a composer of classical music? I will argue that it is best to regard God as like an improvisational play director or the leader of a jazz ensemble. Each determines the broad melodic contours or coarse-grained plot beforehand, while allowing their musicians or actors, and chance, to fill in the more fine-grained details. This analogy allows us to regard God as the (...) ultimate author of this world, while allowing us to be, while less than co-authors, more than mere enactors of a pre-written piece. These metaphors are particularly well-suited to illustrate and flesh out an Open Theistic view of things. (shrink)

Collection of papers presented at the 2nd and 3rd Budapest Seminar in Early Modern Philosophy.

Do the senses represent causation? Many commentators read Nicolas Malebranche as anticipating David Hume’s negative answer to this question. I disagree with this assessment. When a yellow billiard ball strikes a red billiard ball, Malebranche holds that we see the yellow ball as causing the red ball to move. Given Malebranche’s occasionalism, he insists that the visual experience of causal interaction is illusory. Nevertheless, Malebranche holds that the senses represent finite things as causally efficacious. This experience of creaturely causality explains (...) why Aristotelian philosophers and others struggle to recognize occasionalism’s truth. (shrink)

The aim of this paper is to revisit the major arguments of the seventeenth century debate concerning laws and powers. Its primary points are two. First, though the dominant conception of nature was such that there was no room for power in bodies, the very idea that laws govern the behaviour of matter in motion brought with it the following issue, which came under sharp focus in the work of Leibniz: how possibly can passive matter, devoid of power, obey laws? (...) Though Leibniz’s answer was to re-introduce powers, two radically different conceptualisations of the relation between laws and powers became available after him. Hume denied powers altogether, whereas Newton thought that to introduce a power is to introduce a law. The second main point will be that though laws were meant to replace powers, the real dilemma ended up being not laws vs powers, but rather necessity vs non-necessity in nature. To exploit, an expression used by Newton, the question was: what is the place of necessity in the frame of nature? (shrink)

This chapter develops Moral Occasionalism, according to which moral facts are grounded in certain natural facts, which are called sub-moral grounds, and these sub-moral grounds influence us in such a way as to induce largely correct moral beliefs. Moral Occasionalism is designed to explain the correlation of moral beliefs with the moral facts—and to do so in a way that is consistent with non-interactionist views, according to which moral facts neither influence nor are influenced by moral beliefs. It is argued (...) that moral non-naturalists and others who are committed to non-interactionist views ought to be in the business of defending Moral Occasionalism. The chapter shows that Moral Occasionalism has major advantages over its chief non-interactionist rival, namely David Enoch’s “godless pre-established harmony” view. The chapter anticipates and responds to several objections. (shrink)

This paper explores the theory of freedom that Emilie du Châtelet advances in her essay “On Freedom.” Using contemporary terminology, we can characterize this theory as a version of agent-causal compatibilism. More specifically, the theory has the following elements: (a) freedom consists in the power to act in accordance with one’s choices, (b) freedom requires the ability to suspend desires and master passions, (c) freedom requires a power of self-motion in the agent, and (d) freedom is compatible with moral necessity (...) but not with physical necessity. While these elements may at first appear disparate, the paper shows that they fit together quite well. The resulting theory is a surprising combination of doctrines that appear to be based on Samuel Clarke’s libertarian account of free will and doctrines that are reminiscent of the compatibilist accounts of John Locke, Anthony Collins, Gottfried Leibniz, and Thomas Hobbes. (shrink)

I consider a somewhat obscure but important feature of Descartes’s physics that concerns the notion of the “force of rest.” Contrary to a prominent occasionalist interpretation of Descartes’s physics, I argue that Descartes himself attributes real forces to resting bodies. I also take his account of rest to conflict with the view that God conserves the world by “re-creating” it anew at each moment. I turn next to the role of rest in Malebranche. Malebranche takes Descartes to endorse his own (...) occasionalist version of physics. However, he nonetheless rejects Descartes’s account of rest by appealing to the fact that whereas God’s production of motion requires a power beyond the mere power to create, his production of rest requires only the latter power. It turns out that this argument in Malebranche is incompatible with the sort of “re-creationist” account of divine conservation that he is widely thought to have inherited from Descartes. (shrink)

Fidelity to the Cartesian philosophy requires a defense of dualism as well as mind-body union and interaction, all the while keeping to some form of the causal likeness principle. Each of these positions are ones that Descartes maintained throughout his writings. Yet, successors and scholars alike have noted the inconsistencies that arise from defending these views conjointly and have argued that one or more of them should be abandoned. Even the first generation of Cartesian successors whose fidelity to the Cartesian (...) principles was especially steadfast, such as Louis de la Forge, have been interpreted and characterized as giving up causal interactionism and wittingly or unwittingly embracing occasionalism. In my dissertation project, I have made mind-body not body-body cases the starting point of the inquiry into cartesian causal interactionism and from there developed a general model of interaction. This goes against the scholarly norm of focusing on the body-body cases to develop a model that then cannot explain how the mind-body cases work. This is not a minor change in point of view, but rather, requires a paradigm shift in cartesian studies, particularly with respect to understanding mind-body union and interaction. Further supporting the needed paradigm shift in our reading of La Forge is that in his account of union criteria we discover that mind-body union is the true union and that body-body unions are considered such only by extension. As such the case of mind-body union should be taken as the exemplar case and not body-body. According to La Forge, mind and body are linked via the relative attribute of will and share a relationship of mutual and reciprocal dependence. Union is not based on a spatial relation. The union is a hybrid mode – a way of being of the two substances if and when they stand in such a relation to one another. While, the union provides the commonality needed to bridge the gap of what two distinct substances have in common it does not provide the explanation of how mind and body interact. Operationalizing the union in terms of mutual and reciprocal dependence requires further explanation. La Forge explains that mind and body are secondary causes. The causal model of interaction of mind and body is one in which these particular causes and their relation of mutual and reciprocal dependence allows for the action of the one to bring about the effect in the other. The body’s movements stimulate thoughts in the mind and the mind’s thoughts direct movements in the body. There is a bi-directional causal interaction. Furthermore, by coupling La Forge’s account of union and interaction with that of Nadler’s proposed occasional causation model we find that mind and body both have causal agency in the weaker secondary sense. Both substances have the power to determine and direct motion, albeit neither mind nor body create motion per se. La Forge establishes a key distinction between universal and particular causes, which then grounds his subsequent attribution of secondary causal power to wills – to direct the movements of bodies, and to bodies in virtue of their modes of configuration – to direct the movement of other bodies. While, God is the universal and efficient cause that creates minds, bodies, and motion, He has minimal involvement in the particular determinations of volitions and movements. He imparts power to His creatures to determine motion. God conserves the world and the laws set by Him in the form of three laws of motion and seven laws of union. However, finite substances such as mind and body also have force, albeit not in the same sense as God does as the universal and total cause, but rather as particular secondary causes that have autonomy and can determine the direction and local quantity of motion. Thus, La Forge explains how both mind-body and body-body interactions are genuine causes, i.e., non-occasionalistic. Accordingly, in keeping with Cartesian philosophy La Forge maintains dualism, and provides an account of union and an account of interaction that is not occasionalistic. Both mind-body and body-body interaction is based on equivocal causation – the effect does not strictly resemble the cause – but both operate through the likenesses of relations of union, mutual dependence and proximity respectively. Thus, La Forge’s causal model that has minds and bodies interacting based on their relation of mutual and reciprocal dependence, and bodies interacting based on their shared mutual proximity and dependence, provides a weaker account of the causal likeness principle. Nonetheless, there is nothing inconsistent with his defense of a weaker notion of likeness that does not demand resemblance. My examination of La Forge’s Treatise on the Human Mind has demonstrated that we can maintain fidelity in our interpretation of Descartes and the Cartesian philosophy that maintains its adherence to dualism while giving an account of union and causal interaction. (shrink)

Plausibly, agents act freely iff their actions are responses to reasons. But what sort of relationship between reason and action is required for the action to count as a response? The overwhelmingly dominant answer to this question is modalist. It holds that responses are actions that share a modally robust or secure relationship with the relevant reasons. This thesis offers a new alternative answer. It argues that responses are actions that can be explained by reasons in the right way. This (...) explanationist answer comes apart from the modalist answer. For it holds that actions are responses to reasons if they are explained by those reasons even if they don’t share a modally robust relationship. Explanationism thus offers a novel way of vindicating the intuition that alternative possibilities don’t matter to responding to reasons and (consequently) free agency. The key dialectical position the thesis develops is that both modalism and explanationism constitute attempts to capture he core type of relationship encoded by the notion of a response. Responses to reasons, at core, involve a non-accidental relationship between reason and action. We can either understand non-accidentality as a modal phenomenon – as a modally robust tracking between two facts. Or we can understand non-accidentality as an explanatory phenomenon – as a special explanatory relationship between two facts. According to my rival explanationist proposal, two facts share a non-accidental relationship iff we can give a unified explanation of why both obtain. Unified explanations are explanations of why [p&q] that cannot be decomposed into two (or more) separate independent explanations of p and of q. Consequently, according to explanationism about responding to reasons, actions are responses to reasons iff those reasons offer a rational explanation of the action that cannot be decomposed into separate independent components. (shrink)

Malebranche’s so-called conservation is continuous creation (CCC) argument has been celebrated as a powerful and persuasive argument for Occasionalism—the claim that only God has and exercises causal powers. In this paper I want to examine the CCC argument for Occasionalism by comparing it to Jaegwon Kim’s so-called Supervenience argument against non-reductive physicalism. Because the arguments have deep similarities it is interesting and fruitful to consider them in tandem. First I argue that both the CCC argument and the Supervenience argument turn (...) on the same general principle, what Kim calls Edward’s Dictum. It is doubtful that Malebranche or Kim succeed in grounding Edward’s Dictum, though Malebranche, I think, has more resources at his disposal to make his case. Even if this worry is waived, however, I argue that the completion of Stage 1 of the Supervenience argument can be used to raise a further worry for the CCC argument that cannot easily be resolved. (shrink)

Jaegwon Kim’s (2005) most recent formulation of the so-called Supervenience Argument against Non-Reductive Physicalism is discussed. The two stages of Kim’s argument can be seen as instances of, what I will call, the Generalized Exclusion Argument.

What is early modern philosophy? Two interpretative trends have predominated in the related literature. One, with roots in the work of Hegel and Heidegger, sees early modern thinking either as the outcome of a process of gradual rationalization (leading to the principle of sufficient reason, and to "ontology" as distinct from metaphysics), or as a reflection of an inherent subjectivity or representational semantics. The other sees it as reformulations of medieval versions of substance and cause, suggested by, or leading to, (...) early modern scientific developments. -/- This book proposes a rather different kind of explanation. It suggests that the concept of relation, specifically that of dyadic, anti-symmetrical relations, can throw light on a wide variety of developments in early modern thought, such as those concerning causality, sense perception, temporality, and the mereological approach to substance. The book argues that these relations are grounded in an interpretation of causal influence, and not in semantic theories or subjectivity. -/- Furthermore, if it is correct that the problem of unity was, for most of classical antiquity, what the problems of motion, causality and perception were for early modern thinkers, then early modern thought is much closer to the thought of Aristotle than is commonly supposed. The genesis of early modern thought might instead be taken to have occurred in opposition to one aspect of the thought of Duns Scotus (an aspect that lives on in contemporary Neo-Aristotelianism), and that can be explained once the relational perspective examined here is taken into account. (shrink)