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  1. What to do when you encounter Funky Causes in the (historical) Wild.Eric Schliesser - manuscript
    This chapter explains how the rise of the Mechanical philosophy during the seventeenth century contributed to the transformation of the traditional, Aristotelian schema of four causes into the dominance of efficient causation as the paradigmatic cause by the time of David Hume. But the chapter simultaneously shows that the mechanical philosophy also gave rise to a number of problems internal to it, as diagnosed by Newton and Newtonian natural philosophers, that facilitated more careful analysis of the nature of causation.
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  • Universal Gravitation and the (Un)Intelligibility of Natural Philosophy.Matias Slavov - 2019 - Pacific Philosophical Quarterly 101 (1):129-157.
    This article centers on Hume’s position on the intelligibility of natural philosophy. To that end, the controversy surrounding universal gravitation shall be scrutinized. It is very well-known that Hume sides with the Newtonian experimentalist approach rather than with the Leibnizian demand for intelligibility. However, what is not clear is Hume’s overall position on the intelligibility of natural philosophy. It shall be argued that Hume declines Leibniz’s principle of intelligibility. However, Hume does not eschew intelligibility altogether; his concept of causation itself (...)
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  • The Certainty, Modality, and Grounding of Newton’s Laws.Zvi Biener & Eric Schliesser - 2017 - The Monist 100 (3):311-325.
    Newton began his Principia with three Axiomata sive Leges Motus. We offer an interpretation of Newton’s dual label and investigate two tensions inherent in his account of laws. The first arises from the juxtaposition of Newton’s confidence in the certainty of his laws and his commitment to their variability and contingency. The second arises because Newton ascribes fundamental status both to the laws and to the bodies and forces they govern. We argue the first is resolvable, but the second is (...)
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  • (2 other versions)Kant’s epigenesis: specificity and developmental constraints.Boris Demarest - 2016 - History and Philosophy of the Life Sciences 39 (1):3.
    In this paper, I argue that Kant adopted, throughout his career, a position that is much more akin to classical accounts of epigenesis, although he does reject the more radical forms of epigenesis proposed in his own time, and does make use of preformationist sounding terms. I argue that this is because Kant thinks of what is pre-formed as a species, not an individual or a part of an individual; has no qualm with the idea of a specific, teleological principle (...)
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  • Ructions over fluxions: Maclaurin’s draft, The Analyst Controversy and Berkeley’s anti-mathematical philosophy.Clare Marie Moriarty - 2022 - Studies in History and Philosophy of Science Part A 96 (C):77-86.
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  • "The Real 'Letter to Arbuthnot'? a Motive For Hume's Probability Theory in an Early Modern Design Argument".Catherine Kemp - 2014 - British Journal for the History of Philosophy 22 (3):468-491.
    John Arbuthnot's celebrated but flawed paper in the Philosophical Transactions of 1711-12 is a philosophically and historically plausible target of Hume's probability theory. Arbuthnot argues for providential design rather than chance as a cause of the annual birth ratio, and the paper was championed as a successful extension of the new calculations of the value of wagers in games of chance to wagers about natural and social phenomena. Arbuthnot replaces the earlier anti-Epicurean notion of chance with the equiprobability assumption of (...)
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  • Causation and gravitation in George Cheyne's Newtonian natural philosophy.Patrick J. Connolly - 2021 - Studies in History and Philosophy of Science Part A 85 (C):145-154.
    This paper analyzes the metaphysical system developed in Cheyne’s Philosophical Principles of Religion. Cheyne was an early proponent of Newtonianism and tackled several philosophical questions raised by Newton’s work. The most pressing of these concerned the causal origin of gravitational attraction. Cheyne rejected the occasionalist explanations offered by several of his contemporaries in favor of a model on which God delegated special causal powers to bodies. Additionally, he developed an innovative approach to divine conservation. This allowed him to argue that (...)
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  • The methodological dimension of the Newtonian revolution: Review Essay of Steffen Ducheyne: The main business of natural philosophy: Isaac Newton's natural-philosophical methodology.Eric Schliesser - 2013 - Metascience (2):329-333.
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  • Does Berkeley's Immaterialism Support Toland's Spinozism? The Posidonian Argument and the Eleventh Objection.Eric Schliesser - 2020 - Royal Institute of Philosophy Supplement 88:33-71.
    This paper argues that a debate between Toland and Clarke is the intellectual context to help understand the motive behind the critic and the significance of Berkeley's response to the critic in PHK 60-66. These, in turn, are responding to Boyle's adaptation of a neglected design argument by Cicero. The paper shows that there is an intimate connection between these claims of natural science and a once famous design argument. In particular, that in the early modern period the connection between (...)
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  • Newton and Spinoza: On motion and matter (and God, of course).Eric Schliesser - 2012 - Southern Journal of Philosophy 50 (3):436-458.
    This study explores several arguments against Spinoza's philosophy that were developed by Henry More, Samuel Clarke, and Colin Maclaurin. In the arguments on which I focus, More, Clarke, and Maclaurin aim to establish the existence of an immaterial and intelligent God precisely by showing that Spinoza does not have the resources to adequately explain the origin of motion. Attending to these criticisms grants us a deeper appreciation for how the authority derived from the empirical success of Newton's enterprise was used (...)
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  • (2 other versions)Kant’s epigenesis: specificity and developmental constraints.Boris Demarest - 2017 - History and Philosophy of the Life Sciences 39 (1):1-19.
    In this paper, I argue that Kant adopted, throughout his career, a position that is much more akin to classical accounts of epigenesis, although he does reject the more radical forms of epigenesis proposed in his own time, and does make use of preformationist sounding terms. I argue that this is because Kant (1) thinks of what is pre-formed as a species, not an individual or a part of an individual; (2) has no qualm with the idea of a specific, (...)
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  • Diagrammatic carriers and the acceptance of Newton’s optical theory.Gábor Áron Zemplén - 2019 - Synthese 196 (9):3577-3593.
    A permissivist framework is developed to include images in the reconstruction of the evidential base and of the theoretical content. The paper uses Newton’s optical theory as a case study to discuss mathematical idealizations and depictions of experiments, together with textual correlates of diagrams. Instead of assuming some specific type of theoretical content, focus is on novel traits that are delineable when studying the carriers of a theory. The framework is developed to trace elliptic and ambiguous message design, and utilizes (...)
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  • The methodological dimension of the Newtonian revolution: Steffen Ducheyne: The main business of natural philosophy: Isaac Newton’s natural-philosophical methodology. Dordrecht: Springer, 2012, 352pp, €118,99 HB.Eric Schliesser - 2013 - Metascience 22 (2):329-333.
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  • Review of Omri Boehm’s Kant’s Critique of Spinoza. [REVIEW]Eric Schliesser - 2015 - Graduate Faculty Philosophy Journal 36 (2):463-483.
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