In this third edition of "John Locke", the text is divided into three parts. The first is biographical, giving an account of the development of Locke's mind. The second expounds the teaching of the "Essay", and relates this to its background; while the third deals with Locke's teaching in political theory, moral philosophy, education, and religion. -- From publisher's description.

This book deals with a neglected episode in the history of logic and theories of cognition: the way in which conceptions of inference changed during the seventeenth century. The author focuses on the work of Descartes, contrasting his construal of inference as an instantaneous grasp in accord with the natural light of reason, with the Aristotelian view of inference as a discursive process. Gaukroger offers a new interpretation of Descartes`s contribution to the question, revealing it to be a significant advance (...) over humanist and late Scholastic conceptions. He argues that Descartes's account played a pivotal role in the development of our understanding of the nature of inference. (shrink)

Stephen Gaukroger traces the development of Descartes's thought in the social, religious, and intellectual context of seventeenth‐century Europe. Gaukroger describes Descartes's upbringing and his education at the Jesuit La Flèche collège, and shows the role these played in the development of his ground‐breaking work in philosophy and science. The book details the effects of his relationships with others on his work, both through collaboration and through conflict. It discusses the history of the composition of his major works and details their (...) structure and content. It documents the correspondence, which played a major part in the development of his thinking, both before and after publication. The book concludes, as it begins, with his correspondence with Princess Elizabeth of Bohemia on the subject of the passions. (shrink)

This chapter argues that the standard conception of Spinoza as a fellow-travelling mechanical philosopher and proto-scientific naturalist is misleading. It argues, first, that Spinoza’s account of the proper method for the study of nature presented in the Theological-Political Treatise (TTP) points away from the one commonly associated with the mechanical philosophy. Moreover, throughout his works Spinoza’s views on the very possibility of knowledge of nature are decidedly sceptical (as specified below). Third, in the seventeenth-century debates over proper methods in the (...) sciences, Spinoza sided with those that criticized the aspirations of those (the physico-mathematicians, Galileo, Huygens, Wallis, Wren, etc) who thought the application of mathematics to nature was the way to make progress. In particular, he offers grounds for doubting their confidence in the significance of measurement as well as their piece-meal methodology (see section 2). Along the way, this chapter offers a new interpretation of common notions in the context of treating Spinoza’s account of motion (see section 3). (shrink)

The Cartesian method, construed as a way of organizing domains of knowledge according to the "order of reasons," was a powerful reductive tool. Descartes made significant strides in mathematics, physics, and metaphysics by relating certain complex items and problems back to more simple elements that served as starting points for his inquiries. But his reductive method also impoverished these domains in important ways, for it tended to restrict geometry to the study of straight line segments, physics to the study of (...) ambiguously constituted bits of matter in motion, and metaphysics to the study of the isolated, incorporeal knower. This book examines in detail the negative and positive impact of Descartes's method on his scientific and philosophical enterprises, exemplified by the Geometry, the Principles, the Treatise of Man, and the Meditations. (shrink)

The Ethics of Geometry is a study of the relationship between philosophy and mathematics. Essential differences in the ethos of mathematics, for example, the customary ways of undertaking and understanding mathematical procedures and their objects, provide insight into the fundamental issues in the quarrel of moderns with ancients. Two signal features of the modern ethos are the priority of problem-solving over theorem-proving, and the claim that constructability by human minds or instruments establishes the existence of relevant entities. These figures are (...) combined in the emblematic statement of Salomon Maimon, "In mathematical construction we are, as it were, gods." Construction is the mark of modernity. The disciplines of classical philology, literary interpretation and the history of philosophy and of mathematics are woven together in this volume. (shrink)

Newton's philosophical views are unique and uniquely difficult to categorise. In the course of a long career from the early 1670s until his death in 1727, he articulated profound responses to Cartesian natural philosophy and to the prevailing mechanical philosophy of his day. Newton as Philosopher presents Newton as an original and sophisticated contributor to natural philosophy, one who engaged with the principal ideas of his most important predecessor, René Descartes, and of his most influential critic, G. W. Leibniz. Unlike (...) Descartes and Leibniz, Newton was systematic and philosophical without presenting a philosophical system, but over the course of his life, he developed a novel picture of nature, our place within it, and its relation to the creator. This rich treatment of his philosophical ideas will be of wide interest to historians of philosophy, science, and ideas. (shrink)

The seventeenth century saw dramatic advances in mathematical theory and practice. With the recovery of many of the classical Greek mathematical texts, new techniques were introduced, and within 100 years, the rules of analytic geometry, geometry of indivisibles, arithmatic of infinites, and calculus were developed. Although many technical studies have been devoted to these innovations, Mancosu provides the first comprehensive account of the relationship between mathematical advances of the seventeenth century and the philosophy of mathematics of the period. Starting with (...) the Renaissance debates on the certainty of mathematics, Mancosu leads the reader through the foundational issues raised by the emergence of these new mathematical techniques, including the influence of the Aristotelian conception of science in Cavalieri and Guldin, the foundational relevance of Descartes' Geometrie, the relation between geometrical and epistemological theories of the infinite, and the Leibnizian calculus and the opposition to infinitesimalist procedures. In the process Mancosu draws a sophisticated picture of the subtle dependencies between technical development and philosophical reflection in seventeenth century mathematics. (shrink)

" Il est à remarquer en tout ce que j'écris que je ne suis pas l'ordre des matières mais seulement celui des raisons, c'est-à-dire que je n'entreprends point de dire en un même lieu tout ce qui appartient à une matière, à cause qu'il me serait impossible de la bien prouver y ayant des raisons qui doivent être tirées de bien plus loin les unes que les autres, mais en raisonnant par ordre, a facilioribus ad difficiliora, j'en déduis ce que (...) je puis, tantôt pour une matière, tantôt pour une autre, ce qui est à mon avis le vrai chemin pour bien trouver et expliquer la vérité. " (Descartes à Mersenne, 24 décembre 1640). " Si l'ordre analytique est le seul à procurer la démonstration valable de la philosophie, si les Méditations qui se développent rigoureusement selon cet ordre, permettent seules de comprendre à coup sûr l'ensemble de la doctrine, il n'y a pas d'autre méthode pour comprendre les Méditations elles-mêmes que de mettre en évidence cet ordre par lequel seul elles démontrent leur vérité. " (Martial Gueroult). (shrink)

"A work of major importance for the interpretation of Descartes's development and for the understanding of the function of the imagination in Descartes's early works. Descartes's Imagination will be a must in Descartes and imagination studies. It is long overdue."--Eva T. H. Brann, author of The World of Imagination: Sum and Substance "A significant contribution to our understanding of the development of Descartes's philosophy."--William R. Shea, author of The Magic of Numbers and Motion: The Scientific Career of Rene Descartes.

How we understand Descartes’s physics rests on how we interpret his ontological commitment to individual bodies, and in particular on how we account for their individuation. However, Descartes’s contemporaries as well as contemporary philosophers have seen Descartes’s account of the individuation of bodies as deeply flawed. In the first part of this paper, I discuss how the various problems and puzzles involved in Descartes’s account of the individuation of bodies arise, and the relevance of these problems for his physics. With (...) an eye toward resolving these puzzles, I argue for an interpretation of the Cartesian ontology in which bodies are not individuated by motion but, instead, are mind-dependent. As part of this reading, I demonstrate the sense in which we can clearly and distinctly perceive bodies, and also the senses in which the real, conceptual, and modal distinctions apply to them. I conclude by explaining how this account of the mind-dependent individuation of bodies is consistent with Descartes’s definition of ‘motion’ and ‘a body’ in Principles, Part II, section 25—the very passage that prima facie entails the most troubling of the individuation puzzles. Finally, I show that this account is consistent with Descartes’s general goal in constructing his physics. (shrink)

: Given Descartes's conception of extension, space and body, there are deep problems about how there can be any real motion. The argument here is that in fact Descartes takes motion to be only phenomenal. The paper sets out the problems generated by taking motion to be real, the solution to them found in the Cartesian texts, and an explanation of those texts in which Descartes appears on the contrary to regard motion as real.

In several of his writings from the 1680s, Leibniz presents an argument for the claim that there are no determinate or precise shapes in things, and states that shape contains something imaginary a...