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Metaphysical Themes 1274–1671

New York: Oxford University Press (2011)

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  1. Elisabeth of Bohemia as a Naturalistic Dualist.Frederique Janssen-Lauret - 2018 - In Emily Thomas (ed.), Early Modern Women on Metaphysics. New York, NY: Cambridge University Press. pp. 171-187.
    Elisabeth was the first of Descartes' interlocutors to press concerns about mind-body union and interaction, and the only one to receive a detailed reply, unsatisfactory though she found it. Descartes took her tentative proposal `to concede matter and extension to the soul' for a confused version of his own view: `that is nothing but to conceive it united to the body. Contemporary commentators take Elisabeth for a materialist or at least a critic of dualism. I read her instead as a (...)
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  • (1 other version)La forma como sujecto: ¿un desliz de Aristóteles? Eidos como sujecto y garante de la identidad.Claudia Patricia Carbonell Fernández - 2013 - Estudios de Filosofía (Universidad de Antioquia) 48:49-72.
    En este texto argumento a favor de la consideración de la forma como sujeto y, por tanto, como responsable de la identidad del objeto a través del movimiento. Se consideran sucesivamente la prioridad de la forma como sustancia, su carácter particular y los distintos sentidos en los que algo puede ser sujeto, para concluir por qué en Z, 3, la forma es el mejor candidato no sólo para ser sustancia, sino para ser sujeto en sentido principal. El objeto del texto (...)
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  • ‘Archetypes without Patterns’: Locke on Relations and Mixed Modes.Walter Ott - 2017 - Archiv für Geschichte der Philosophie 99 (3):300-325.
    John Locke’s claims about relations (such as cause and effect) and mixed modes (such as beauty and murder) have been controversial since the publication of the Essay. His earliest critics read him as a thoroughgoing anti-realist who denies that such things exist. More charitable readers have sought to read Locke’s claims away. Against both, I argue that Locke is making ontological claims, but that his views do not have the absurd consequences his defenders fear. By examining Locke’s texts, as well (...)
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  • Physicalism and the sortalist conception of objects.Jonah Goldwater - 2018 - Synthese 195 (12):5497-5519.
    The central claim of this paper is that the Aristotelian metaphysics of objects is incompatible with physicalism. This includes the contemporary variant of Aristotelianism I call ‘sortalism’. The core reason is that an object’s identity as an instance of a (natural) kind, as well as its consequent persistence conditions, is neither physically fundamental nor determined by what is physically fundamental. The argument for the latter appeals to what is commonly known as ‘the grounding problem’; in particular I argue that the (...)
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  • The Limit Decision Problem and Four-Dimensionalism.Costa Damiano - 2017 - Vivarium 55 (1-3):199-216.
    I argue that medieval solutions to the limit decision problem imply four-dimensionalism, i.e. the view according to which substances that persist through time are extended through time as well as through space, and have different temporal parts at different times.
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  • Divine Temporality, the Trinity, and the Charge of Arianism.R. T. Mullins - 2016 - Journal of Analytic Theology 4:267-290.
    Divine temporality is all the rage in certain theological circles today. Some even suggesting that the doctrine of the Trinity entails divine temporality. While I find this claim a bit strong, I do think that divine temporality can be quite useful for developing a robust model of the Trinity. However, not everyone agrees with this. Paul Helm has offered an objection to the so-called Oxford school of divine temporality based on the Christian doctrine of the Trinity. He has argued that (...)
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  • Responding to N.T. Wright's Rejection of the Soul.Brandon L. Rickabaugh - 2018 - Heythrop Journal 59 (2):201-220.
    At a 2011 meeting of the Society of Christian Philosophers, N. T. Wright offered four reasons for rejecting the existence of soul. This was surprising, as many Christian philosophers had previously taken Wright's defense of a disembodied intermediate state as a defense of a substance dualist view of the soul. In this paper, I offer responses to each of Wright's objections, demonstrating that Wright's arguments fail to undermine substance dualism. In so doing, I expose how popular arguments against dualism fail, (...)
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  • Locke and the Real Problem of Causation.Walter Ott - 2015 - Locke Studies 15:53-77.
    Discussions of John Locke’s theory of causation tend, understandably, to focus on the related notion of power and in particular the dialectic with David Hume. But Locke faces a very different threat, one that is internal to his view. For he argues both that causation is a relation and that relations are not real. The obvious conclusion is intolerable. And yet the premises, I argue, are unassailable. Building on an interpretation of Locke’s treatment of relations I have developed elsewhere, I (...)
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  • Substance and Independence in Descartes.Anat Schechtman - 2016 - Philosophical Review 125 (2):155-204.
    Descartes notoriously characterizes substance in two ways: first, as an ultimate subject of properties ; second, as an independent entity. The characterizations have appeared to many to diverge on the definition as well as the scope of the notion of substance. For it is often thought that the ultimate subject of properties need not—and, in some cases, cannot—be independent. Drawing on a suite of historical, textual, and philosophical considerations, this essay argues for an interpretation that reconciles Descartes's two characterizations. It (...)
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  • Leibniz and the Foundations of Physics: The Later Years.Jeffrey K. McDonough - 2016 - Philosophical Review 125 (1):1-34.
    This essay offers an account of the relationship between extended Leibnizian bodies and unextended Leibnizian monads, an account that shows why Leibniz was right to see intimate, explanatory connections between his studies in physics and his mature metaphysics. The first section sets the stage by introducing a case study from Leibniz's technical work on the strength of extended, rigid beams. The second section draws on that case study to introduce a model for understanding Leibniz's views on the relationship between derivative (...)
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  • Christologically Inspired, Empirically Motivated Hylomorphism.Timothy Pawl & Mark K. Spencer - 2016 - Res Philosophica 93 (1):137-160.
    In this paper we present the standard Thomistic view concerning substances and their parts. We then note some objections to that view. Afterwards, we present Aquinas’s Christology, then draw an analogy between the relation that holds between the Second Person and the assumed human nature, on the one hand, and the relation that holds between a substance whole and its substance parts, on the other. We then show how the analogy, which St. Thomas himself drew at points, is useful for (...)
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  • The Difficulty with Demarcating Panentheism.R. T. Mullins - 2016 - Sophia 55 (3):325-346.
    In certain theological circles today, panentheism is all the rage. One of the most notorious difficulties with panentheism lies in figuring out what panentheism actually is. There have been several attempts in recent literature to demarcate panentheism from classical theism, neo-classical theism, open theism, and pantheism. I shall argue that these attempts to demarcate panentheism from these other positions fail. Then I shall offer my own demarcation.
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  • Leibniz’s Metaphysics and Adoption of Substantial Forms: Between Continuity and Transformation.Adrian Nita (ed.) - 2015 - Dordrecht: Springer.
    This anthology is about the signal change in Leibniz’s metaphysics with his explicit adoption of substantial forms in 1678-79. This change can either be seen as a moment of discontinuity with his metaphysics of maturity or as a moment of continuity, such as a passage to the metaphysics from his last years. Between the end of his sejour at Paris and the first part of the Hanover period, Leibniz reformed his dynamics and began to use the theory of corporeal substance. (...)
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  • Atoms vs. Extended Simples: Towards a Dispositionalist Reconciliation.Travis Dumsday - 2015 - Philosophia 43 (4):1023-1033.
    There are four main theories concerning the ultimate constitution of matter: atomism version 1, atomism version 2, the theory of gunk, and the theory of extended simples. These four theories are usually seen as diametrically opposed. Here I take a stab at ecumenism, and argue that atomism version 1 and the theory of extended simples can be reconciled and rendered compatible by reference to the reality of dispositions.
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  • John Duns Scotus and the Ontology of Mixture.Lucian Petrescu - 2014 - Res Philosophica 91 (3):315-337.
    This paper presents Duns Scotus’s theory of mixture in the context of medieval discussions over Aristotle’s theory of mixed bodies. It revisits the accounts of mixture given by Avicenna, Averroes, and Thomas Aquinas, before presenting Scotus’s account as a reaction to Averroes. It argues that Duns Scotus rejected the Aristotelian theory of mixture altogether and that his account went contrary to the entire Latin tradition. Scotus denies that mixts arise out of the four classical elements and he maintains that both (...)
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  • (1 other version)Omnipresence and the Location of the Immaterial.Ross Inman - 2010 - In Jonathan L. Kvanvig (ed.), Oxford Studies in Philosophy of Religion Volume. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
    I first offer a broad taxonomy of models of divine omnipresence in the Christian tradition, both past and present. I then examine the recent model proposed by Hud Hudson (2009, 2014) and Alexander Pruss (2013)—ubiquitous entension—and flag a worry with their account that stems from predominant analyses of the concept of ‘material object’. I then attempt to show that ubiquitous entension has a rich Latin medieval precedent in the work of Augusine and Anselm. I argue that the model of omnipresence (...)
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  • Restricting Spinoza's Causal Axiom.John Morrison - 2015 - Philosophical Quarterly 65 (258):40-63.
    Spinoza's causal axiom is at the foundation of the Ethics. I motivate, develop and defend a new interpretation that I call the ‘causally restricted interpretation’. This interpretation solves several longstanding puzzles and helps us better understand Spinoza's arguments for some of his most famous doctrines, including his parallelism doctrine and his theory of sense perception. It also undermines a widespread view about the relationship between the three fundamental, undefined notions in Spinoza's metaphysics: causation, conception and inherence.
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  • Thomas Aquinas.Ralph McInerny & John O'Callaghan - forthcoming - Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy.
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  • Anne Conway: Bodies in the Spiritual World.Marcy P. Lascano - 2013 - Philosophy Compass 8 (4):327-336.
    Anne Conway argues that all substances are spiritual. Yet, she also claims that all created substance has some type of body. Peter Loptson has argued that Conway didn’t carefully consider her view that all created beings have bodies for it seems God could have created only disembodied spirits. There are several reasons to think Loptson is right. First, Conway holds that God is all‐good and will do the best for his creation. She also holds that spirit is better than body. (...)
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  • Location and Mereology.Cody Gilmore, Claudio Calosi & Damiano Costa - 2013 - Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy.
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  • Critical Realism and the Process Account of Emergence.Stephen Pratten - 2013 - Journal for the Theory of Social Behaviour 43 (3):251-279.
    For advocates of critical realism emergence is a central theme. Critical realists typically ground their defence of the relative disciplinary autonomy of various sciences by arguing that emergent phenomena exist in a robust non-ontologically, non-causally reductionist sense. Despite the importance they attach to it critical realists have only recently begun to elaborate on emergence at length and systematically compare their own account with those developed by others. This paper clarifies what is distinctive about the critical realist account of emergence by (...)
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  • (1 other version)Undetached Parts and Disconnected Wholes.Achille C. Varzi - 2013 - In Christer Svennerlind, Almäng Jan & Rögnvaldur Ingthorsson (eds.), Johanssonian Investigations: Essays in Honour of Ingvar Johansson on His Seventieth Birthday. Ontos Verlag. pp. 696–708.
    I offer a diagnosis of the parallelism between the Doctrine of Potential Parts and the Doctrine of Potential Wholes and briefly examine its bearing on Johansson’s account of the Tibbles-Tib Problem.
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  • Saint Thomas Aquinas.Ralph McInerny - 2008 - Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy.
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  • Modern.Anat Schechtman - 2024 - In Kathrin Koslicki & Michael J. Raven (eds.), The Routledge Handbook of Essence in Philosophy. New York, NY: Routledge. pp. 41-52.
    My aim in this chapter is to survey some of the most important developments in thinking about essence in the early modern period, highlighting ways in which thinkers in the period gradually depart from the medieval Aristotelian tradition. In this tradition, essence is thought of as selective, explanatory, and kind-determining. Whereas in the beginning of the early modern period some figures (such as René Descartes, Thomas Hobbes, Margaret Cavendish, and Anne Conway) still adhere to this traditional view, later figures (including (...)
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  • "Platonic Dualism Reconsidered".Suzanne Obdrzalek - 2024 - Phronesis 69 (1):31-62.
    I argue that in the Phaedo, Plato maintains that the soul is located in space and is capable of locomotion and of interacting with the body through contact. Numerous interpreters have dismissed these claims as merely metaphorical, since they assume that as an incorporeal substance, the soul cannot possess spatial attributes. But careful examination of how Plato conceives of the body throughout his corpus reveals that he does not distinguish it from the soul in terms of spatiality. Furthermore, assigning spatial (...)
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  • Whence the Form?Graham Renz - forthcoming - Australasian Journal of Philosophy.
    Hylomorphists claim that substances—human beings, oak trees, chemical compounds—are compounds of matter and form. If a house is a substance, then its matter would be some bricks and timbers and its form the structure those bricks and timbers take on. While hylomorphism is traditionally presented as a theory of change, it only treats the coming-to-be and passing-away of matter-form compounds. But many hylomorphists understand forms to be entities in their own right, as parts or constituents of substances. So, a neglected (...)
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  • Hobbes on Powers, Accidents, and Motions.Stewart D. Duncan - 2024 - In Sebastian Bender & Dominik Perler (eds.), Powers and Abilities in Early Modern Philosophy. New York, NY: Routledge. pp. 126–145.
    Thomas Hobbes often includes powers and abilities in his descriptions of the world. Meanwhile, Hobbes’s philosophical picture of the world appears quite reductive, and he seems sometimes to say that nothing exists but bodies in motion. In more extreme versions of such a picture, there would be no room for powers. Hobbes is not an eliminativist about powers, but his view does tend toward ontological minimalism. It would be good to have an account of what Hobbes thinks powers are, and (...)
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  • Buridan Wycliffised? The Nature of the Intellect in Late Medieval Prague University Disputations.Lukáš Lička - 2022 - In Marek Gensler, Monika Mansfeld & Monika Michałowska (eds.), The Embodied Soul Aristotelian Psychology and Physiology in Medieval Europe between 1200 and 1420. Springer. pp. 277–310.
    The paper delves into manuscript sources connected with various disputations held at Prague University from around 1390 to 1420 and singles out a set of hitherto unknown quaestiones dealing with the nature of the human intellect and its relation to the body. Prague disputations from around 1400 arguably offer a unique vantage point on late medieval anthropological issues, since they encompass an entanglement of numerous doctrinal influences from Buridanian De anima commentaries to John Wyclif’s theories. The paper delineates several conceptual (...)
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  • Modalité et changement: δύναμις et cinétique aristotélicienne.Marion Florian - 2023 - Dissertation, Université Catholique de Louvain
    The present PhD dissertation aims to examine the relation between modality and change in Aristotle’s metaphysics. -/- On the one hand, Aristotle supports his modal realism (i.e., worldly objects have modal properties - potentialities and essences - that ground the ascriptions of possibility and necessity) by arguing that the rejection of modal realism makes change inexplicable, or, worse, banishes it from the realm of reality. On the other hand, the Stagirite analyses processes by means of modal notions (‘change is the (...)
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  • (1 other version)Ockhamism and Philosophy of Time.Alessio Santelli (ed.) - 2022 - Springer Cham.
    This book discusses fundamental topics on contemporary Ockhamism. The collected essays show how contemporary Ockhamism can impact areas of research such as semantics, metaphysics and also the philosophy of science. In addition, the volume hosts one historian of Medieval philosophy who investigates the way in which William of Ockham “in flesh and bone” construed time and, more generally, future contingency. The essays explore the different meanings of this theory. They cover three main topics, in particular. The first examines the thesis (...)
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  • Galileusz i rozróżnienie między jakościami pierwotnymi a wtórnymi (II). Problem statusu ontologicznego wrażeń.Bartosz Żukowski - 2022 - Ruch Filozoficzny 78 (2):33-54.
    "Galileo on the Distinction between Primary and Secondary Qualities (II). The Problem of the Ontological Status of Sensations" The article is a continuation of the paper in which a theoretical analysis of Galileo’s principal argument for the distinction between primary and secondary qualities was provided. It focuses on the problem of the ontological status of secondary qualities/sensations. I discuss three main interpretative approaches to the issue, considered in light of the findings obtained in the first paper. In the first part (...)
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  • Descartes on Numerical Identity and Time.John Morrison - 2022 - Australasian Journal of Philosophy 100 (2):230-246.
    According to most contemporary philosophers, the Indiscernibility of Identicals is obviously true. We might therefore expect earlier philosophers to endorse it. But I will use a puzzle about identity over time to argue that Descartes would reject it.
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  • Zabarella on Prime Matter and Extension.Berman Chan - 2022 - Philosophia 50 (5):2405-2422.
    The 16th and 17th centuries witnessed a philosophical shift that would help pave the way for modern science, a shift from metaphysical theories of material objects to other views embracing only the empirically-accessible parts of material things. One much-debated topic in the course of this shift was regarding prime matter. The late scholastic Jacobus Zabarella (1533-1589) arrived upon his views about prime matter via his version of the regressus method, a program for a sort of scientific reasoning. In his De (...)
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  • Seek the Joints! Avoid the Gruesome! Fidelity as an Epistemic Value.Peter Finocchiaro - 2023 - Episteme 20 (2):393-409.
    A belief is valuable when it “gets it right”. This “getting it right” is often understood solely as a matter of truth. But there is a second sense of “getting it right” worth exploring. According to this second sense, a belief “gets it right” when its concepts accurately match the way the world is objectively organized – that is, when its concepts are joint-carving, or have fidelity. In this paper, I explore the relationship between fidelity and epistemic value. While many (...)
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  • The Contours of Locke’s General Substance Dualism.Graham Clay - 2022 - Journal of Modern Philosophy 4 (1):1-20.
    In this paper, I will argue that Locke is a substance dualist in the general sense, in that he holds that there are, independent of our classificatory schema, two distinct kinds of substances: wholly material ones and wholly immaterial ones. On Locke’s view, the difference between the two lies in whether they are solid or not, thereby differentiating him from Descartes. My way of establishing Locke as a general substance dualist is to be as minimally committal as possible at the (...)
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  • Spinoza on Activity and Passivity: The Problematic Definition Revisited.Valtteri Viljanen - 2019 - In Frans Svensson & Martina Reuter (eds.), Mind, Body, and Morality: New Perspectives on Descartes and Spinoza. New York: Routledge. pp. 157-174.
    This chapter takes a fresh look at 3d2 of Spinoza’s Ethics, an absolutely pivotal definition for the ethical theory that ensues. According to it, “we act when something happens, in us or outside us, of which we are the adequate cause,” whereas we are passive “when something happens in us, or something follows from our nature, of which we are only a partial cause.” The definition of activity has puzzled scholars: how can we be an adequate, i.e. complete, cause of (...)
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  • Spinoza and the Inevitable Perfection of Being.Sanja Särman - 2019 - Dissertation, The University of Hong Kong
    Metaphysics and ethics are two distinct fields in academic philosophy. The object of metaphysics is what is, while the object of ethics is what ought to be. Necessitarianism is a modal doctrine that appears to obliterate this neat distinction. For it is commonly assumed that ought (at least under normal circumstances) implies can. But if necessitarianism is true then I can only do what I actually do. Hence what I ought to do becomes limited to what I in fact do. (...)
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  • Conception, Connotation, and Essential Predication: Peter Auriol’s Conceptualism to the Test in II Sententiarum, d. 9, q. 2, art. 1.Giacomo Fornasieri - 2021 - Analiza I Egzystencja 1 (54):81-126.
    This paper comprises two parts. The first part is an introduction to Auriol’s moderate conceptualism, as it is presented in his Commentary on Book II of the Sentences, distinction 9, question 2, article 1. The second part is an edition of the text. In the introduction, I focus on Auriol’s use of the noetic tool of connotation. My thesis, in particular, is that connotation is a necessary prerequisite to his moderate conceptu- alism. To this purpose, the first part of this (...)
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  • Efficient Cause as Paradigm? From Suárez to Clauberg.Nabeel Hamid - 2021 - Journal of Modern Philosophy 3 (7):1-22.
    This paper critiques a narrative concerning causality in later scholasticism due to, among others, Des Chene, Carraud, Schmaltz, Schmid, and Pasnau. On this account, internal developments in the scholastic tradition culminating in Suárez lead to the efficient cause being regarded as the paradigmatic kind of cause, anticipating a view explicitly held by the Cartesians. Focusing on Suárez and his scholastic reception, I defend the following claims: a) Suárez’s definition of cause does not privilege efficient causation; b) Suárez’s readers, from Timpler (...)
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  • Retrieving Divine Immensity and Omnipresence.Ross Inman - 2020 - In James Arcadi & James T. Turner (eds.), The T&T Clark Handbook of Analytic Theology. New York: T&T Clark/Bloomsbury.
    The divine attributes of immensity and omnipresence have been integral to classical Christian confession regarding the nature of the triune God. Divine immensity and omnipresence are affirmed in doctrinal standards such as the Athanasian Creed (c. 500), the Fourth Lateran Council (1215), the Council of Basel (1431–49), the Second Helvetic Confession (1566), the Westminster Confession of Faith (1647), the Second London Baptist Confession (1689), and the First Vatican Council (1869–70). In the first section of this chapter, I offer a brief (...)
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  • Anne Conway's Atemporal Account of Agency.Hope Sample - 2022 - Ergo 9:47-69.
    This paper aims to resolve an unremarked-upon tension between Anne Conway’s commitment to the moral responsibility of created beings, or creatures, and her commitment to emanative, constant creation. Emanation causation has an atemporal aspect according to which God’s act of will coexists with its effect. There is no before or after, or past or future in God’s causal contribution. Additionally, Conway’s constant creation picture has it that all times are determined via divine emanation. Creaturely agency, by contrast, is fundamentally temporal, (...)
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  • Thomas Hobbes and Thomas White on Identity and Discontinuous Existence.Han Thomas Adriaenssen & Sam Alma - 2021 - Pacific Philosophical Quarterly 102 (3):429-454.
    Is it possible for an individual that has gone out of being to come back into being again? The English Aristotelian, Thomas White, argued that it is not. Thomas Hobbes disagreed, and used the case of the Ship of Theseus to argue that individuals that have gone out of being may come back into being again. This paper provides the first systematic account of their arguments. It is doubtful that Hobbes has a consistent case against White. Still his criticism may (...)
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  • Secondary Qualities as Dispositions.Nathan Rockwood - 2020 - Locke Studies 20.
    In this paper I will defend the view that, according to Locke, secondary qualities are dispositions to produce sensations in us. Although this view is widely attributed to Locke, this interpretation needs defending for two reasons. First, commentators often assume that secondary qualities are dispositional properties because Locke calls them “powers” to produce sensations. However, primary qualities are also powers, so the powers locution is insufficient grounds for justifying the dispositionalist interpretation. Second, if secondary qualities are dispositional properties then objects (...)
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  • The Priority of Natural Laws in Kant’s Early Philosophy.Aaron Wells - 2021 - Res Philosophica 98 (3):469-497.
    It is widely held that, in his pre-Critical works, Kant endorsed a necessitation account of laws of nature, where laws are grounded in essences or causal powers. Against this, I argue that the early Kant endorsed the priority of laws in explaining and unifying the natural world, as well as their irreducible role in in grounding natural necessity. Laws are a key constituent of Kant’s explanatory naturalism, rather than undermining it. By laying out neglected distinctions Kant draws among types of (...)
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  • 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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  • The conscious mind unified.Brandon Rickabaugh - 2020 - Dissertation, Baylor University
    Co-Directors: Alexander Pruss & Tim O’Connor Committee: C. Stephen Evan’s, Todd Buras, -/- The current state of consciousness research is at an impasse. Neuroscience faces a variety of recalcitrant problems regarding the neurobiological binding together of states of consciousness. Philosophy faces the combination problem, that of holistically unifying phenomenal consciousness. In response, I argue that these problems all result from a naturalistic assumption that subjects of consciousness are built up out of distinct physical parts. I begin by developing a Husserlian (...)
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  • (1 other version)New powers for Dispositionalism.Giacomo Giannini - 2021 - Synthese 199:2671-2700.
    Establishing Dispositionalism as a viable theory of modality requires the successful fulfilment of two tasks: showing that all modal truths can be derived from truths about actual powers, and offering a suitable metaphysics of powers. These two tasks are intertwined: difficulties in one can affect the chances of success in the other. In this paper, I generalise an objection to Dispositionalism by Jessica Leech and argue that the theory in its present form is ill-suited to account for de re truths (...)
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  • “I Am the Original of All Objects”: Apperception and the Substantial Subject.Colin McLear - 2020 - Philosophers' Imprint 20 (26):1-38.
    Kant’s conception of the centrality of intellectual self-consciousness, or “pure apperception”, for scientific knowledge of nature is well known, if still obscure. Here I argue that, for Kant, at least one central role for such self-consciousness lies in the acquisition of the content of concepts central to metaphysical theorizing. I focus on one important concept, that of <substance>. I argue that, for Kant, the representational content of the concept <substance> depends not just on the capacity for apperception, but on the (...)
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  • Whole-Parts Relations in Early Modern Philosophy.Emanuele Costa - 2021 - Encyclopedia of Early Modern Philosophy and the Sciences.
    The approach adopted by Early Modern authors to the notions of ‘whole’ and ‘part’ (what is called, in contemporary metaphysics, “mereology”, from the Ancient Greek word μερος: ‘part’) constitutes a central feature of their respective systems. The issue of what constituted a whole became all the more crucial as the new, revolutionary approaches to matter and extension – which mark the unavoidably fuzzy beginning of what we define as “modernity” – demanded a novel (and in some cases, radical) approach to (...)
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  • Sketch for a Theory of the History of Philosophy.Uriah Kriegel - manuscript
    My aims in this essay are two. First (§§1-4), I want to get clear on the very idea of a theory of the history of philosophy, the idea of an overarching account of the evolution of philosophical reflection since the inception of written philosophy. And secondly (§§5-8), I want to actually sketch such a global theory of the history of philosophy, which I call the two-streams theory.
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