This book collects six unpublished and published academic studies on the thought of Francisco Suárez, which is addressed through accurate textual analyses and meticulous contextualization of his doctrines in the Scholastic debate. The present essays aim to portray two complementary aspects coexisting in the work of the Uncommon Doctor: his innovative approach and his adherence to the tradition. To this scope, they focus on some pivotal, but often neglected, topics in Suárez’s metaphysics and psychology – such as his theories of (...) cognition and truth, angelology, continuous quantity – thereby developing an original inquiry into a crucial moment in the development of Western philosophy. (shrink)

Philosophers today have largely given up on the project of categorizing being. Aristotle’s ten categories now strike us as quaint, and no attempt to improve on that effort meets with much interest. Still, no one supposes that reality is smoothly distributed over space. The world at large comes in chunks, and there remains a widespread intuition, even among philosophers, that some of these chunks have a special sort of unity and persistence. These, we tend to suppose, are most truly agents (...) and subjects, and are what exist in the most proper sense of the term. We believe, in other words, in substances. (shrink)

Highlighting early modern medicine's program of explanation and intervention, I claim that there are two distinctive features of the physician's naturalism. These are, first, an explicit recognition that each patient had her own individual and highly particularized nature and, second, a self-conscious use of normative descriptions when characterizing a patient's nature as healthy (ordered) or unhealthy (disordered). I go on to maintain that in spite of the well documented Cartesian rejection of Aristotelian natures in favor of laws of nature, Descartes (...) and his most important medical disciple accepted both features of the physician's naturalism where human medicine was concerned. Thus, in this article I critically engage with standard portraits of Cartesianism and naturalism by integrating the histories of science, medicine and philosophy, but especially medicine and philosophy. (shrink)

My dissertation has two main parts. In the first half, I draw out an underlying presupposition of Descartes' philosophy: what I term "atomism of thought." Descartes employs a radical procedure of doubt in order to show that the first principle of his philosophy, the cogito, is an unshakeable foundation of knowledge. In the dialogue that follows his dissemination of the Meditations, Descartes reveals that a whole set of concepts and rational principles innate in our minds are never doubted. These fundamental (...) units of thought are indivisible, distinct, and isolated, and enable the possibility of any rational demonstration. Atoms of thought are perfectly individuated because God has created them as such. Likewise, our minds have been fashioned such that we necessarily have a clear and distinct perception every time we alight upon these simple notions. In the second part of the dissertation, I take up critiques of Descartes' view given by Nietzsche and Heidegger. In the chapter on Nietzsche, I attempt to fill a lacuna in scholarship about Nietzsche's commentary on Descartes. More specifically, I argue that once the foundation of God is displaced, the basis for accepting atomism of thought dissolves. In the final chapter, I analyze Heidegger's critique of Cartesian atomism. I first look at Heidegger's critique of classical truth as correspondence from Being and Time, and show how it is relevant to a critique of atomism. Then I show how the early Heidegger's holistic philosophical framework can provide an alternative that avoids the pitfalls of atomism. While I limit the scope of my analysis to Descartes' particular formulation, atomism of thought was an influential doctrine throughout modern philosophy. This aspect of Cartesianism has persisted and continues to be a significant theoretical underpinning of many contemporary views. It is my contention that Nietzsche and Heidegger have important contributions to make to this area of thought, and the relative neglect of their work in recent scholarship is a detrimental oversight. (shrink)

Central to Descartes’ philosophy is a view about immutable essences and eternal truths. After mentioning a Platonist account of recollection in Meditation V, Descartes declares that the ideas we have of mathematical notions “are not my invention but have their own true and immutable natures” (AT VII, 64/CSM II, 44).Descartes claims that other important philosophical notions, such as God, mind, body, and human free will (AT VII, 68; AT VIII-2, 348; AT III, 383; AT VII, 433, respectively), also have immutable (...) natures or essences. Although Descartes says a good many things about this view, nowhere does he offer definitive doctrine on the matter, and in fact frequently confuses his reader with apparently inconsistent pronouncements about immutable natures and eternal truths. In this essay, I focus on the immutable natures and propose a solution to two of the main problems associated with Descartes’ position, the metaphysical status of immutable natures and the purported indivisibility of their existence as ideas in the mind. (shrink)