Mind-body parallelism is the view that mind and body stand in the same “order and connection,” as Spinoza put it, or that corresponding mental and physical states have corresponding causal explanations in terms of other mental and physical states. This dissertation investigates the nature and role of mind-body parallelism, as well as other forms of parallelism, in Spinoza’s philosophy of mind. In doing so, it also considers how Spinoza’s views relate to current discussions. In present-day philosophy of mind, mind-body parallelism (...) is almost never defended. It is seen as a historical dead-end with insurmountable problems. By contrast, I argue that parallelism powerfully responds to the post-Cartesian mind-body problem (which remains with us today) and that it points a way forward in current debates. The dissertation contains five independent chapters. After an introduction that situates parallelism in relation to both Spinoza’s time and to present discussions, Chapter 1 presents an argument for parallelism aimed at a present-day audience. Chapter 2 discusses Spinoza’s own arguments for parallelism. Both chapters help to clarify what parallelism is, in part by distinguishing between several versions of the view. Chapter 3 discusses what is often considered parallelism’s most problematic feature, its rejection of mind-body interaction. I argue that by distinguishing between the post-Cartesian context in which Spinoza wrote and present-day discussions, we can see that parallelism is compatible with mental causation. Chapters 4 and 5, finally, discuss specific ways in which parallelism is at work in Spinoza’s view of the mind. In Chapter 4, I argue that parallelism is at work in Spinoza’s interesting and distinctive positions on the nature of agency and motivation. In Chapter 5, I show the role of parallelism in his representationalist theory of consciousness. A guiding thread throughout the dissertation is that parallelism presents a distinctive and interesting way to combine realism, non-reductionism and naturalism in relation to those features of human self-understanding that seem difficult to fit into a naturalistic worldview. (shrink)

This chapter looks at the discussion of materialism in John Locke’s Essay concerning Human Understanding, and then at parts of the Anglophone reaction to those discussions. It considers the early criticisms of Locke by Edward Stillingfleet and the anonymous author of three sets of Remarks on Locke’s Essay. It then looks at some other ways in which readers reacted to Locke’s discussions: the views of Anthony Collins and John Toland, which one might be tempted to think of as Lockean materialism; (...) William Carroll’s reading of Locke as a Spinozistic materialist; and the dualistic Lockeanism of William Duncan’s Lockean logic textbook. (shrink)

Despite Spinoza’s reputation as a thoroughgoing critic of teleology, in recent years a number of scholars have argued convincingly that Spinoza does not wish to eliminate teleological explanations altogether. Recent interpretative debates have focused on a more recalcitrant problem: whether Spinoza has the resources to allow for the causal efficacy of representational content. In this paper I present the problem of mental causation for Spinoza and consider two recent attempts to respond to the problem on Spinoza’s behalf. While these interpretations (...) certainly shed some light on Spinoza’s account of cognitive economy, I argue that both fail to point the way out of the problem because they fail to differentiate between two forms of representation, one of which is causally efficacious, one of which is not. I close by suggesting that there is some reason to believe that Spinoza’s account of mind avoids some of the problems typically associated with mental causation. Spinoza gilt zwar als kompromissloser Kritiker der Teleologie, aber in den letzten Jahren haben mehrere Philosophiehistoriker überzeugend dafür argumentiert, dass er keineswegs alle teleologischen Erklärungen verabschieden möchte. Neuere Interpretationsdebatten haben sich auf ein hartnäckigeres Problem konzentriert: Verfügt Spinoza über die Ressourcen, um die kausale Wirksamkeit des repräsentationalen Inhalts zuzulassen? In diesem Aufsatz stelle ich das Problem der geistigen Verursachung bei Spinoza dar und betrachte zwei neuere Versuche, im Sinne Spinozas auf dieses Problem einzugehen. Diese Interpretationen werfen sicherlich Licht auf Spinozas Auffassung von kognitiver Sparsamkeit, aber ich argumentiere, dass beide darin scheitern, einen Ausweg aus diesem Problem aufzuzeigen, da es beide versäumen, zwischen zwei Formen von Repräsentationen zu unterscheiden: einer kausal wirksamen und einer, die nicht wirksam ist. Es gibt Grund zur Überzeugung, so lege ich abschließend nahe, dass Spinozas Auffassung des Geistes einige der Probleme vermeidet, die typischerweise mit geistiger Verursachung verbunden sind. (shrink)

This paper considers a principal concept of metaphysics – the category of substance – as it figures in Kant’s critical program of establishing metaphysics as a science. Like Leibniz, Kant identifies metaphysical concepts through logical reflection on the form of cognitive activity. He thus begins with general logic’s account of categorical judgment as an act of subordinating predicate to subject. This categorical form is then considered in transcendental logic with reference to the possibility of its real use. Transcendental reflection reveals (...) that the categorical form, in its potential for such use, constitutes the category of substance and accident, representing a first real subject and a determination of its existence. But to qualify for objective, scientific employment, metaphysics’ concepts must admit of real definitions, which show their objects to be possible, and such possibility, pace Leibniz, can be established only in relation to possible experience. Thus, relying on his doctrine of the schematism, Kant shows the category to figure constitutively in experience, as the ground of the first law of nature, that in all change substance persists. (shrink)

This paper investigates Locke’s views about materialism, by looking at the discussion in Essay IV.x. There Locke---after giving a cosmological argument for the existence of God---argues that God could not be material, and that matter alone could never produce thought. In discussing the chapter, I pay particular attention to some comparisons between Locke’s position and those of two other seventeenth-century philosophers, René Descartes and Ralph Cudworth. -/- Making use of those comparisons, I argue for two main claims. The first is (...) that the important argument of Essay IV.x.10 is fundamentally an argument about the causation of perfections. Indeed, Locke gives multiple such arguments in the chapter. My second main claim is that my proposed reading of IV.x is not merely consistent with what Locke says elsewhere about superaddition, but also provides reasons to favor a particular understanding of what superaddition is. (shrink)

In response to widespread doubts among professional philosophers (Russell, Horwich, Dietrich, McGinn, Chalmers), Stoljar argues for a ‘reasonable optimism’ about progress in philosophy. He defends the large and surprising claim that ‘there is progress on all or reasonably many of the big questions.’ However, Stoljar’s caveats and admitted avoidance of historical evidence permits overlooking persistent controversies in philosophy of mind and cognitive science that are essentially unchanged since the 17th Century. Stoljar suggests that his claims are commonplace in philosophy departments (...) and, indeed, the evidence I adduce constitutes an indictment of the widely shared view among professional analytic philosophers. (shrink)

ABSTRACT This essay considers the relationship between history of science and philosophy of science from Thomas Kuhn to the present. This relationship, of course, has often been troubled, but there is now new hope for an ongoing productive interaction—due to an increasing awareness, among other things, of the mutual entanglement between the development of modern science and the development of modern philosophy on the part of both professional (historically minded) philosophers and professional historians of science. This idea is illustrated with (...) several examples, including the entanglement of Einstein's theory of relativity with logical empiricism and its precursors and the entanglement of the analytic tradition in philosophy first with mathematical logic and then (through mathematical logic) with the cognitive sciences. Against this background, finally, the essay considers the emergence of contemporary social and cultural history of science from the Kantian and neo‐Kantian philosophical traditions. (shrink)

Early modern debates about the nature of matter interacted with debates about whether matter could think. In particular, some philosophers (e.g., Cudworth and Leibniz) objected to materialism about the human mind on the grounds that matter is passive, thinking things are active, and one cannot make an active thing out of passive material. This paper begins by looking at two seventeenth-century materialist views (Hobbes’s, and one suggested but not endorsed by Locke) before considering that objection (which I call here the (...) Activity Argument). In discussion, I note that several philosophers of the time believed that matter was active. That view opens up a possible response to the Activity Argument. The paper concludes by looking at the views of two materialists of the time who also believed that matter was active, Toland and Cavendish. (shrink)

The paper offers a new account of Spinoza's conception of “substance”, the fundamental building block of reality. It shows that it can be demonstrated apriori within Spinoza's metaphysical framework that (i) contrary to Idealist readings, for Spinoza there can be no substance that is not determined or modified by some other entity produced by substance; and that (ii) there can be no substance (and hence no being) that is not a thinking substance.

Drawing on remarks scattered through his writings, I argue that Leibniz has a highly distinctive and interesting theory of color. The central feature of the theory is the way in which it combines a nuanced subjectivism about color with a reductive approach of a sort usually associated with objectivist theories of color. After reconstructing Leibniz's theory and calling attention to some of its most notable attractions, I turn to the apparent incompatibility of its subjective and reductive components. I argue that (...) this apparent tension vanishes in light of his rejection of a widely accepted doctrine concerning the nature of bodies and their geometrical qualities. (shrink)

Leibniz has almost universally been represented as denying that created substances, including human minds and the souls of animals, can causally interact either with one another or with bodies. Yet he frequently claims that such substances are capable of interacting in the special sense of what he calls 'ideal' interaction. In order to reconcile these claims with their favored interpretation, proponents of the traditional reading often suppose that ideal action is not in fact a genuine form of causation but instead (...) a merely apparent influence which serves to 'save the appearances.' I argue that this traditional reading distorts Leibniz's thought and that he actually considers ideal action a genuine (though non-standard) form of causation. (shrink)

Is Descartes the most misunderstood philosopher in the history of philosophy? To many of us in the business of Descartes scholarship, it certainly seems so. Time and time again, we find ourselves faced with pronouncements about one or another of Descartes's 'errors' — whether the shortcomings of the theater model of consciousness, or the pernicious after-effects of a foundationalism devoted to the transparency of the mental, or the shocking vilification of the body and emotions. Typically these pronouncements are paired with (...) exhortations to overcome the Cartesian X, where 'X' stands for whatever item crucial to enlightenment is currently most misunderstood. That X is some term rarely used and drastically .. (shrink)

Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz (1646–1716) was one of the great thinkers of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries and is known as the last “universal genius”. He made deep and important contributions to the fields of metaphysics, epistemology, logic, philosophy of religion, as well as mathematics, physics, geology, jurisprudence, and history. Even the eighteenth century French atheist and materialist Denis Diderot, whose views could not have stood in greater opposition to those of Leibniz, could not help being awed by his achievement, writing (...) in his Encyclopedia, “Perhaps never has a man read as much, studied as much, meditated more, and written more than Leibniz… What he has composed on the world, God, nature, and the soul is of the most sublime eloquence. If his ideas had been expressed with the flair of Plato, the philosopher of Leipzig would cede nothing to the philosopher of Athens.” (Vol. 9, p. 379) Indeed, Diderot's mood was almost despairing in a remark from another piece, which also has a great deal of truth in it: “When one compares the talents one has with those of a Leibniz, one is tempted to throw away one's books and go die quietly in the dark of some forgotten corner.” More than a century later, Gottlob Frege, who fortunately did not cast his books away in despair, expressed similar admiration, declaring that “in his writings, Leibniz threw out such a profusion of seeds of ideas that in this respect he is virtually in a class of his own.” (“Boole's logical Calculus and the Concept script” in Posthumous Writings , p. 9) The aim of this entry is primarily to introduce Leibniz's life and summarize and explicate his views in the realms of metaphysics, epistemology, philosophical theology, and natural philosophy. (shrink)

George Berkeley, Bishop of Cloyne, was one of the great philosophers of the early modern period. He was a brilliant critic of his predecessors, particularly Descartes, Malebranche, and Locke. He was a talented metaphysician famous for defending idealism, that is, the view that reality consists exclusively of minds and their ideas. Berkeley's system, while it strikes many as counter intuitive, is strong and flexible enough to counter most objections. His most studied works, the Treatise Concerning the Principles of Human Knowledge (...) Principles, for short) and Three Dialogues between Hylas and Philonous Dialogues), are beautifully written and dense with the sort of arguments that delight contemporary philosophers. He was also a wide ranging thinker with interests in religion (which were fundamental to his philosophical motivations), the psychology of vision, mathematics, physics, morals, economics, and medicine. Although many of Berkeley's first readers greeted him with incomprehension, he influenced both Hume and Kant, and is much read (if little followed) in our own day. (shrink)

Leibniz’s claim that it is possible for us to gain metaphysical knowledge through reflection on the self has intrigued many commentators, but it has also often been criticized as flawed or unintelligible. A similar fate has beset Leibniz’s arguments against materialism. In this paper, I explore one of Leibniz’s lesser-known arguments against materialism from his reply to Bayle’s new note L, and argue that it provides us with an instance of a Leibnizian “argument from reflection”. This argument, I further show, (...) does not constitute a flawed appeal to mere introspection, but is in fact securely grounded in an important corollary of the Principle of Sufficient Reason: Leibniz’s Principle of Intelligibility. (shrink)

This article aims to make further progress in revising the standard account of Wolff’s philosophy as a popularisation and systematisation of Leibniz’s doctrines. It focuses on the topic of the communication among substances and the metaphysics of simples and activity underlying it. It is argued that Wolff does not accept the pre-established harmony in its orthodox Leibnizian version. The article explains Wolff’s departure from Leibniz’s PEH as stemming from his rejection of Leibniz’s construal of the activity of every simple as (...) representational power and of the metaphysics of unity and activity in which that construal is rooted. (shrink)

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)

I argue for three main claims about Leibniz. (1) He views representation as a kind of structural correspondence between the representing thing and its target. (2) The primary sense in which he considers a perception or representation distinct, as opposed to confused, concerns the degree to which its structure is explicit or consciously accessible. (3) This is also the sense in which he takes concepts or ideas to be distinct.

According to a common reading, Spinoza and Leibniz stand on opposite ends of the modal spectrum. At one extreme lies ‘‘Spinoza the necessitarian,’’ for whom the actual world is the only possible world. At the other lies ‘‘Leibniz the anti-necessitarian,’’ for whom the actual world is but one possible world among an infinite array of other possible worlds; the actual world is privileged for existence only in virtue of a free decree of a benevolent God. In this paper, I challenge (...) both of these readings. Spinoza is no necessitarian and Leibniz is no anti-necessitarian – at least as these characterizations are usually understood. Rather, I contend, Spinoza and Leibniz are both anti-essentialists; they believe that the modality of objects can vary relative to how those objects are conceived. This shared commitment to anti-essentialism allows them to consistently affirm both necessitarianism and its denial, relative to different ways of conceiving the world. Their embrace of this modal theory, I further argue, is grounded in their similar views on metaphysical perfection, ontological plentitude, and the principle of sufficient reason. (shrink)

There is an emerging consensus among interpreters that in his Critical writings Kant ascribes unconscious representations to the mind. The nature and extent of this ascription over the course of Kant’s philosophical development is however not well understood. I argue that from his earliest published writings Kant consistently ascribes unconscious representations to the mind; that some of these representations are unconscious in the strong sense that they are not available to introspection; and that Kant extends his commitment to unconscious representations (...) by ascribing to the mind unconscious acts of judging and reasoning. (shrink)

Leibniz believes that if there are corporeal substances, they have substantial forms, believes there are substantial forms, and believes there is a close connection between the first two claims. Why does he believe there is this close connection? This paper answers that question and draws out its bearing on the realism/idealism debate.

In the Ethics,1 Spinoza presents a rigorous naturalistic view of man and nature. Man is a part of nature, a subject of the same domain—not a domain separate from it, nor a domain within that of nature. Man cannot act against nature or in an unnatural way; in comparison with any other part or creature of nature, man is not special, more important or qualitatively different. All general laws of nature apply equally to animals, inanimate objects, humans, God, the mind, (...) and the affects. Nature can be explicated based on necessary causes, and there are no extra-natural factors that affect it or anything in it: no supernatural power or metaphysical principles create or regulate it, and no separate methods of explanation .. (shrink)

ABSTRACTDescartes did not use the terms ‘primary’ and ‘secondary’ qualities, but a similar distinction emerges from his texts: certain qualities of objects are intrinsic pr...

Animals – both tame and wild, as metaphors and as real presences – populate many of More’s works. In this essay, I show that, from the early Psychodia Platonica to the Divine Dialogues, animals are at the core of key metaphysical issues that reverberate on the levels of psychology and ethics. In particular I discuss three main aspects: the role of animals in More’s critique of atheism, both as safeguard for the body–soul interaction and as proofs of divine providence in (...) nature; the problem of evil in the universe, and how to justify the existence of ‘evil’ animals in particular; the differentiation between animals and humans, especially on the basis of their respective possibility of attaining happiness. In all three cases, I argue that More attempts to ‘tame’ the nature of animals, and yet that he is aware that ‘animality’ remains partly untamed. (shrink)

In the First of the Three Dialogues, Berkeley’s Hylas, responding to Philonous’s question whether extension and motion are separable from secondary qualities, says: What! Is it not an easy matter, to consider extension and motion by themselves,... Pray how do the mathematicians treat of them?

ABSTRACTWe seem to have a direct experience of our freedom when we act. Many philosophers take this feeling of freedom as evidence that we possess libertarian free will. Spinoza denies that we have free will of any sort, although he admits that we nonetheless feel free. Commentators often attribute to him what I call the ‘Negative Account’ of the feeling: it results from the fact that we are conscious of our actions but ignorant of their causes. I argue that the (...) Negative Account is flawed. The feeling of freedom also depends on a vacillation of the mind. When the mind forms too many incompatible associations, it vacillates between them. When we act, the mind vacillates back and forth between the kinds of actions that we associate with our present mental state. We then mistake this subjective vacillation for an objective feature of ourselves—namely, the power to do otherwise. (shrink)

Name der Zeitschrift: Deutsche Zeitschrift für Philosophie Jahrgang: 63 Heft: 3 Seiten: 476-496.

What surfaces first when one examines the philosophy of mind of Sartre and Spinoza are the differences between them. For Spinoza a human mind is a mode of the divine mind. That view is a far cry from Sartre’s view of human consciousness as a desire never achieved: the desire to be god, to be the foundation of one’s own existence. How could two philosophers, one a determinist and the other who grounds human freedom in the nature of consciousness itself, (...) be seen as having any commonalities worth exploring? How could the noted user of the deductive method and one of the most important phenomenologists of the twentieth century share any philosophical ground at all? I will argue in this paper that despite the very real differences between their two philosophies, there are striking similarities between Sartre’s view of consciousness and Spinoza’s view of the mind. They become apparent when one examines each one’s analysis of the nature of mind and its relationship to itself, the body, and the world. Both are heir to a kind of Aristotelian naturalism. This commonality between them derives from their mutual rejection of Descartes’ substance dualism. I first explore the consequences of that rejection on how each one conceives of the relationship between the mind and its objects. Next I examine their view of the mind’s relation to itself and finally I look at how each one understood the mind’s relationship to the body and the world. The examination of their two views reveals how much they anticipate and support theories of mind defended by contemporary analytic philosophers of mind. (shrink)

Ideas play at least two roles in Locke's theory of the understanding. They are constituents of ‘propositions,’ and some of them ‘represent’ the qualities and sorts of surrounding bodies. I argue that each role involves a distinct kind of intentional directedness. The same idea will in general be an ‘idea of’ two different objects, in different senses of the expression. Identifying Locke's scheme of twofold ‘ofness’ reveals a common structure to his accounts of simple ideas and complex ideas of substances. (...) A consequence is a distinction among substance sorts parallel to one of his distinctions between primary and secondary qualities. (shrink)

Recent literature on Spinoza has emphasized his commitment to universal intelligibility, understood as the claim that there are no brute facts. We draw attention to an important but overlooked element of Spinoza's commitment to intelligibility, and thereby question its most prominent interpretation, on which this commitment results in the priority of conceptual relations. We argue that such readings are both incomplete in their account of Spinozistic intelligibility and mistaken in their identification of the most fundamental relation. We argue that Spinoza (...) is one of the first moderns to address the problem of conditions of intelligibility, and show that, in his metaphysics, expressive relations are best understood as relations of dependence for intelligibility: what a thing ‘expresses’ is its condition of intelligibility, that which determines how, through what concepts, it can be conceived. (shrink)

The primary aim of this paper is to provide a new account of Descartes’s positive philosophical view on sensory perception, and to do so in a way that will establish a hitherto unnoticed continuity between his thought and that of his scholastic Aristotelian predecessors on the topic of sensory perception. I will argue that the basic framework of the scholastic Aristotelian view on sensory perception (as traditionally understood) is operative within Descartes's own view, and then reveal some insights on the (...) issue of whether Descartes was a representationalist about sensory perception by critically examining one kind of representationalist reading of Descartes under the lens of my account. I will conclude by examining the implications that my view has for the proposed distinction between Descartes and the scholastics based on attributing representationalism to the former and direct-realism to the latter. (shrink)

It is generally assumed that Descartes invokes “objective being in the intellect” in order to explain or describe an idea’s status as being “of something.” I argue that this assumption is mistaken. As emerges in his discussion of “materially false ideas” in the Fourth Replies, Descartes recognizes two senses of ‘idea of’. One, a theoretical sense, is itself introduced in terms of objective being. Hence Descartes can’t be introducing objective being to explain or describe “ofness” understood in this sense. Descartes (...) also appeals to a pretheoretical sense of ‘idea of’. I will argue that the notion of objective being can’t serve to explain or describe this “ofness” either. I conclude by proposing an alternative explanation of the role of objective being, according to which Descartes introduces this notion to explain the mind’s ability to attain clear and distinct ideas. (shrink)

Stuart Glennan, and the team of Peter Machamer, Lindley Darden, and Carl Craver have recently provided two accounts of the concept of a mechanism. The main difference between these two versions rests on how the behavior of the parts of the mechanism is conceptualized. Glennan considers mechanisms to be an interaction of parts, where the interaction between parts can be characterized by direct, invariant, change-relating generalizations. Machamer, Darden, and Craver criticize traditional conceptualizations of mechanisms which are based solely on parts (...) interacting and introduce a new conceptactivity. This essay is an attempt at carving out a relationship between these two philosophical interpretations of a mechanism. I will claim that, rather than being in conflict, Glennan's concept of interaction and Machamer, Darden, and Craver's notion of activity actually complement one another, each emphasizing a missing element of the other. (shrink)

Commentators usually agree that Locke's discussion of thinking matter is intended to undermine the plausibility of the belief in the existence of the soul. In this paper I argue that, instead of trying to reveal the implausibility of this belief, Locke seeks to rid the concept of the soul of its traditional cognitive and moral functions in order to render references to the soul redundant in philosophical explanations of the nature of human beings and their place in the world. On (...) this reading, the driving force behind Locke's discussion is not a sceptical problem posed by the impossibility of proving the existence of the soul, but the wish to maximize the ability of limited creatures such as ourselves to engage positively with their lives in the here and now. Locke's experience-focused philosophy will here present itself as a position with significant moral implications. (shrink)

The article reevaluates the reception of Mendelism in France, and more generally considers the complex relationship between Mendelism and plant breeding in the first half on the 20th century. It shows on the one side that agricultural research and higher education institutions have played a key role in the development and institutionalization of genetics in France, whereas university biologists remained reluctant to accept this approach on heredity. But on the other side, plant breeders, and agricultural researchers, despite an interest in (...) Mendelism, never came to see it as the breeders' panacea, and regarded it instead as of only limited value for plant breeding. I account for this judgment in showing that the plant breeders and Mendelism designed two contrasting kinds of experimental systems and inhabited distinct experimental cultures. While Mendelian geneticists designed experimental systems that allowed the production of definite ratios of different forms that varied in relation to a few characters, plant breeders' experimental systems produced a wide range of variation, featuring combinations between hundreds of traits. Rather than breaking this multiple variation down into simple elements, breeders designed and monitored a genetic lottery. The gene was a unit in a Mendelian experimental culture, an "epistemic thing" as Rheinberger put it, that could be grasped by means of statistical regularities, but it remained of secondary importance for French plant breeders, for whom the strain or the variety -- not the gene -- was the fundamental unit of analysis and manipulation. (shrink)

Commentators standardly ascribe to Spinoza a belief in an exceptionless conceptual closure of mental and physical realms: no intention can allow us to understand a bodily movement, no bodily injury can make intelligible a sensation of pain. This counterintuitive doctrine, most often now referred to as Spinoza's 'attribute barrier', has weighty repercussions for his views on intelligibility, nature of the mind, identity, and causality. I argue against the standard reading of the doctrine, by showing that it produces an inconsistent epistemological (...) picture, contradicting Spinoza's theory of mind and his commitment to universal intelligibility. The alternative account I propose is also philosophically more compelling and plausible as an account of thought in its essential intentionality. (shrink)

Philosophers after Leibniz used a technical idiom to classify and explain the nature of mental content. Substantive philosophical claims were formulated in terms of this vocabulary, including claims about the nature of mental representations, concepts, unconscious mental content, and consciousness. Despite its importance, the origin and development of this vocabulary is insufficiently well understood. More specifically, interpreters have failed to recognize the existence of two distinct and influential versions of the post-Leibnizian idiom. These competing formulations used the same technical terms (...) and taxonomic relations but assigned different connotations to those terms and employed different criteria for their application. This paper explains the two most influential versions of the post-Leibnizian idiom. (shrink)

Sewall Wright first encountered the complex systems characteristic of gene combinations while a graduate student at Harvard's Bussey Institute from 1912 to 1915. In Mendelian breeding experiments, Wright observed a hierarchical dependence of the organism's phenotype on dynamic networks of genetic interaction and organization. An animal's physical traits, and thus its autonomy from surrounding environmental constraints, depended greatly on how genes behaved in certain combinations. Wright recognized that while genes are the material determinants of the animal phenotype, operating with great (...) regularity, the special nature of genetic systems contributes to the animal phenotype a degree of spontaneity and novelty, creating unpredictable trait variations by virtue of gene interactions. As a result of his experimentation, as well as his keen interest in the philosophical literature of his day, Wright was inspired to see genetic systems as conscious, living organisms in their own right. Moreover, he decided that since genetic systems maintain ordered stability and cause unpredictable novelty in their organic wholes, it would be necessary for biologists to integrate techniques for studying causally ordered phenomena and chance phenomena. From 1914 to 1921 Wright developed his "method of path coefficient", a new procedure drawing from both laboratory experimentation and statistical correlation in order to analyze the relative influence of specific genetic interactions on phenotype variation. In this paper I aim to show how Wright's philosophy for understanding complex genetic systems logically motivated his 1914-1921 design of path analysis. (shrink)

Hegel has been widely, though erroneously, supposed to have rejected epistemology in favor of unbridled metaphysical speculation. Reputation notwithstanding, Hegel was a very sophisticated epistemologist, whose views have gone unrecognized because they are so innovative, indeed prescient. Hence I shall boldly state: Hegel's epistemology is of great contemporary importance. In part, this is because many problems now current in epistemology are problems Hegel addressed. In part, this is because of the unexpected effectiveness of Russell's 1922 exhortation, “I should take ‘back (...) to the 18th century’ as a battle-cry, if I could entertain any hope that others would rally to it.” I shall elaborate on these thematic connections between Hegel's views and our problems below (§3), after summarizing the main features of Hegel's epistemology (§2). Thereafter I consider Hegel's views in relation to 20th-century empiricism (§4), Dretske's information theory (§5), and the on-going debate between realists and historicist relativists (§6). Sections 2–4 will be summary in character, for I have discussed these issues in detail elsewhere. Sections 5 and 6 shall consider more closely some important social aspects of Hegel's epistemology. Two themes of my remarks are that Hegel anticipated by 150 years the recent rejections in epistemology of concept-empiricism and of individualism, and more importantly, Hegel showed how rejecting these positions does not require rejecting commonsense realism about the objects of empirical knowledge. In part, this is because Hegel rejected “internalism” about mental content. The recent wave of anti-Cartesianism in epistemology and philosophy of mind has much to learn from Hegel. Benefiting from Hegel' insights and analyses, however, requires understanding just what were Hegel's aims, methods, and arguments in epistemology. These, however, have eluded most commentators, whether critical or sympathetic. So I begin by reviewing the main points of Hegel's epistemology. (shrink)

In this essay I argue that one of the things that matters most to Descartes' account of mind is that we use our minds actively. This is because for him only an active mind is able to re-organize its passionate experiences in such a way that a genuinely human, self-governed life of virtue and true contentment becomes possible. To bring out this connection, I will read the Meditations against the backdrop of Descartes' correspondence with Elisabeth. This will reveal that in (...) Descartes' writings there is a crucial connection between the conception of ourselves as dreamers and the idea that we fail to realize our true potential as self-determined, active agents. Dreams, as Descartes conceives them, are passively received mental states that inhibit our freedom to use reason at will. To awaken here takes the form of activating our thoughts, which holds the key to freeing ourselves from the stimulus-response patterns that Descartes takes to be at work in animal conduct. Applied to the Meditations, these insights suggest that this work engages in questions far beyond the epistemological agenda. By activating the mind, the Meditations teach us how to realize our true human potential as virtuous thinkers and passionate agents. (shrink)

Postpositivists have lately joined post‐Husserlians in arguing that the deepest problem with Descartes' legacy is that it fosters the objectivist illusion that philosophers might actually come to think “from Nowhere,” or at least that they can self‐consciously choose whatever presuppositions they do accept. Yet this argument is easier to express than to incorporate into one's own thinking. It is perfectly possible to oppose the View from Nowhere, and even to criticize others for failing to understand its impossibility, and still do (...) so … as if from Nowhere. This article is concerned with such compromised opposition—that is, with critics who reject, in ahistorical terms and from an ahistorical standpoint, an ahistorical conception of philosophy. It focuses on two figures from the empiricist‐positivist side of the Cartesian legacy, Rorty and Taylor, but their story is in important ways typical. Though their criticisms are certainly more radical and considerably more successful than those of many of their analytic colleagues, each retains in his own thinking more of the ahistorical or standpointless ideal than he realizes. (shrink)

Descartes maintained that sensations of color and the like misrepresent the material world in normal circumstances. Some prominent scholars have argued that, to explain this Cartesian view, we must attribute to Descartes a causal account of sensory representation. I contend that neither the arguments motivating this reading nor the textual evidence offered in its support is sufficient to justify such attribution. Both textual and theoretical reasons point in the direction of an (at least partial) internalist account of Descartes' views on (...) sensory representation. (shrink)

La finalidad de este artículo es elucidar el sentido de la doctrina leibniziana de la exigencia de existencia y el combate de los posibles, situándola dentro del conjunto de la metafísica de Leibniz y mostrando su absoluta compatibilidad con la afirmación de la creación libre y voluntaria por parte de Dios. Se intentará explicar qué elementos de la afirmación de la ‘exigencia de existencia’ y el ‘combate de los posibles’ reflejan tesis estric- tamente metafísicas, y cuáles pueden considerarse recursos metafóricos. (...) En este contexto, se explicará qué papel que juega la voluntad divina antecedente en la fundamentación de la tendencia de los posibles a la existencia, y se intentará focalizar el papel específico de la ‘sabiduría’, como atributo divino, en la determinación y elección del mejor mundo posible. Finalmente, se extraerán algunas consecuencias del análisis anterior, en relación con la libertad divina en el acto creador. (shrink)