In Hobbes's Theory of the Will, Jurgen Overhoff reveals the religious, ethical, and political consequences of Thomas Hobbes's doctrine of volition. The author gracefully describes how Hobbes's thought was governed by assumptions based firmly in Galilean natural philosophy and orthodox Protestant theology. Overhoff also demonstrates how his subject used materialist eschatology and an absolutist political theory to resolve the social and ethical predicaments that coincided with these assumptions. Finally, Overhoff provides a chronological study of the numerous philosophical, theological, religious and (...) political aspects of Hobbes's idea of the will and situates Hobbes's doctrine within the context of the most important responses and objections put forward by his critics. (shrink)

The Dappled World: A Study of the Boundaries of Science. nancy cartwright. Plato's Reception of Parmenides. john a. palmer.

The question has long confounded philosophers and scientists, and it is this so-called explanatory gap between biological life and consciousness that Evan ...

Challenging, with several powerful arguments, some of our deepest beliefs about rationality, morality, and personal identity, Parfit claims that we have a false view about our own nature. It is often rational to act against our own best interersts, he argues, and most of us have moral views that are self-defeating. We often act wrongly, although we know there will be no one with serious grounds for complaint, and when we consider future generations it is very hard to avoid conclusions (...) that most of us will find very disturbing. (shrink)

This far-reaching study redraws the intellectual map of the Enlightenment and boldly reassesses the legacy of that highly influential period for us today. Peter Hanns Reill argues that in the middle of the eighteenth century, a major shift occurred in the way Enlightenment thinkers conceived of nature that caused many of them to reject the prevailing doctrine of mechanism and turn to a vitalistic model to account for phenomena in natural history, the life sciences, and chemistry. As he traces the (...) ramifications of this new way of thinking through time and across disciplines, Reill provocatively complicates our understanding of the way key Enlightenment thinkers viewed nature. His sophisticated analysis ultimately questions postmodern narratives that have assumed a monolithic Enlightenment—characterized by the dominance of instrumental reason—that has led to many of the disasters of modern life. (shrink)

The figure of the materialist philosopher as the « laughing philosopher », who mocks the rest of humanity, its fears, superstitions and even values, is a classic one. It has been associated variously with Democritus, Epicurus, Spinoza, Rabelais, La Mettrie and others. Apart from the interest one might have in this figure of the philosopher as someone who is rather far removed from school benches, the present essay seeks to describe or define this conceptual character in order to argue that (...) laughter is the materialist philosopher’s « mode of access » to the human world, the so-called world of « values ». This implies that the equally classic reproach towards materialism – its coldness, its inability to grasp the dynamics of human action, what Flaubert would have called an « anatomist’s cruelty » – fails ; or only successfully targets materialism when it laughs. (shrink)

For more than a century after its appearance on the modern philosophical scene, Spinoza’s philosophy was considered surprising and even scandalous for its assertion of the oneness or singularity of substance. From Bayle’s early Dictionary article to Hegel’s Lectures on the History of Philosophy, the core of Spinoza’s philosophy was said to be its unprecedented gesture of making God the sole res that could be thought through the concept of substance. Substance, according to definition 3 of part I of the (...) Ethics, is “that which is in itself and is conceived through itself.” The enormous emphasis placed on this move by the interpretative tradition almost into the twentieth century managed, however, to obscure every other dimension of Spinoza’s thought, so that Spinoza’s thought was simply a metaphysics of the oneness of substance. It is this coupling of Spinozism and the metaphysics of substance that I want to undo. In line with a series of interpretative developments in France over the last thirty years, I want to dispel this identification by employing a paradoxical formulation. Far from being a metaphysics of substance, I contend that Spinoza’s philosophy is instead an ontology of relation. By emphasizing his negation of the substantiality of what he calls res singulares, we can locate Spinoza’s originality less in having posited the existence of a single substance—Letter 50 in fact suggests that substance can only “improperly” be called “single” or “one”—than in having laid out the foundation for this ontology of relation. (shrink)

For more than a century after its appearance on the modern philosophical scene, Spinoza’s philosophy was considered surprising and even scandalous for its assertion of the oneness or singularity of substance. From Bayle’s early Dictionary article to Hegel’s Lectures on the History of Philosophy, the core of Spinoza’s philosophy was said to be its unprecedented gesture of making God the sole res that could be thought through the concept of substance. Substance, according to definition 3 of part I of the (...) Ethics, is “that which is in itself and is conceived through itself.” The enormous emphasis placed on this move by the interpretative tradition almost into the twentieth century managed, however, to obscure every other dimension of Spinoza’s thought, so that Spinoza’s thought was simply a metaphysics of the oneness of substance. It is this coupling of Spinozism and the metaphysics of substance that I want to undo. In line with a series of interpretative developments in France over the last thirty years, I want to dispel this identification by employing a paradoxical formulation. Far from being a metaphysics of substance, I contend that Spinoza’s philosophy is instead an ontology of relation. By emphasizing his negation of the substantiality of what he calls res singulares, we can locate Spinoza’s originality less in having posited the existence of a single substance—Letter 50 in fact suggests that substance can only “improperly” be called “single” or “one”—than in having laid out the foundation for this ontology of relation. (shrink)

The interpretation of Hegel has been a focal point of philosophical controversy ever since the beginning of the twentieth century, both among Marxists and in the major European philosophical schools. Yet despite wide differences of emphasis most interpretations of Hegel share important similarities. They link his idea of Reason to the revolutionary and rationalist tradition which led to the French Revolution, and they interpret his dialectic as implying a latently atheist and even materialist world outlook. Lucio Colletti directly challenges this (...) picture of Hegel. He argues that Hegel was an essentially Christian philosopher, and that his dialectic was explicitly anti-materialist in both intention and effect. In contrast to earlier views, Colletti maintains that there is no contradiction between Hegel’s method and his system, once it is accepted that his thought is an exercise in Absolute Idealism stemming from a long Christian humanist tradition. He claims, on the contrary, that intellectual inconsistency is rather to be found in the works of Engels, Lenin, Lukás, Kojève and others, who have attempted to adapt Hegel to their own philosophical priorities. Colletti places his argument in the context of a broad re-examination of the whole relationship between Marxism and the Enlightenment, giving novel emphasis to the relationship between Marxism and Kant. He concludes by re-asserting the importance in Marxism of empirical science against the claim of “infinite reason,” while at the same time showing how Marx did transform key ideas in Hegelian thought to construct a consistently materialist dialectic. (shrink)

John Toland est connu pour ses Letters to Serena (1704) dans lesquelles il soutient que la matiere est aussi essentiellement active qu'elle est etendue, mais aussi pour son systeme pantheiste dans laquelle on a pu voir l'effet d'un gauchissement materialiste de la pensee de Spinoza. Ce travail prend pour point de depart les pieces de l'echange entre Leibniz et Toland (1701-1702) sur la religion naturelle, la reflexion, l'immortalite de l'ame, la nature de la substance et la question architectonique, qui constituent (...) l'arriere-plan des Lettres a Serena publiees ensuite et en eclairent largement les attendus. Il s'attache egalement a l'arriere-plan leibnizien du debat qui constitue un moment charniere dans l'elaboration des Nouveaux essais. Contre l'idee d'un simple gauchissement de la doctrine spinoziste, il a fallu prendre la mesure de la fameuse Refutation de Spinoza, en tentant de montrer cette critique de la doctrine de l'attribut et du mode est paradoxalement au fondement du pantheisme de Toland. Tirant la lecon des objections de Leibniz, mais aussi de controverses contemporaines autour du dynamisme newtonien et de la metaphysique de la participation (Henry More, Anne Conway et Georg Wachter), Toland livre au siecle des Lumieres une serie d'arguments et de theses (un neo-spinozisme) qui n'a plus qu'un rapport assez lointain avec le systeme de l'Ethique. (shrink)

In Hobbes's Theory of the Will, Jurgen Overhoff reveals the religious, ethical, and political consequences of Thomas Hobbes's doctrine of volition.

'" -Daniel Cottom, David A. Burr Chair of Letters, University of Oklahoma Cruel Delight: Enlightenment Culture and the Inhuman investigates the fascination with joyful malice in eighteenth-century Europe and how this obsession helped inform ...

It is often supposed that the spectacular successes of our modern mathematical sciences support a lofty vision of a world completely ordered by one single elegant theory. In this book Nancy Cartwright argues to the contrary. When we draw our image of the world from the way modern science works - as empiricism teaches us we should - we end up with a world where some features are precisely ordered, others are given to rough regularity and still others behave in (...) their own diverse ways. This patchwork makes sense when we realise that laws are very special productions of nature, requiring very special arrangements for their generation. Combining classic and newly written essays on physics and economics, The Dappled World carries important philosophical consequences and offers serious lessons for both the natural and the social sciences. (shrink)

The materialist approach to the body is often, if not always understood in ‘mechanistic’ terms, as the view in which the properties unique to organic, living embodied agents are reduced to or described in terms of properties that characterize matter as a whole, which allow of mechanistic explanation. Indeed, from Hobbes and Descartes in the 17th century to the popularity of automata such as Vaucanson’s in the 18th century, this vision of things would seem to be correct. In this paper (...) I aim to correct this inaccurate vision of materialism. On the contrary, the materialist project on closer consideration reveals itself to be, significantly if not exclusively, (a) a body of theories specifically focused on the contribution that ‘biology’ or rather ‘natural history’ and physiology make to metaphysical debates, (b) much more intimately connected to what we now call ‘vitalism’ (a case in point is the presence of Théophile de Bordeu, a prominent Montpellier physician and theorist of vitalism, as a fictional character and spokesman of materialism, in Diderot’s novel D’Alembert’s Dream), and ultimately (c) an anti-mechanistic doctrine which focuses on the unique properties of organic beings. To establish this revised vision of materialism I examine philosophical texts such as La Mettrie’s Man a Machine and Diderot’s D’Alembert’s Dream; medical entries in the Encyclopédie by physicians such as Ménuret and Fouquet; and clandestine combinations of all such sources (Fontenelle, Gaultier and others). (shrink)

Locke and Leibniz deny that there are any such beings as ‘monsters’ (anomalies, natural curiosities, wonders, and marvels), for two very different reasons. For Locke, monsters are not ‘natural kinds’: the word ‘monster’ does not individuate any specific class of beings ‘out there’ in the natural world. Monsters depend on our subjective viewpoint. For Leibniz, there are no monsters because we are all parts of the Great Chain of Being. Everything that happens, happens for a reason, including a monstrous birth. (...) But what about materialism? Well, beginning with the anatomical interest into ‘monstrous births’ in the French Académie des Sciences in the first three decades of the eighteenth century, there is a shift away from ‘imaginationist’ claims such as those of Malebranche, that if a woman gives birth to a monstrous child it is a consequence of something she imagined. Anatomists such as Lemery and Winslow try to formulate a strictly mechanical explanation for such events, rejecting moral and metaphysical explanations. Picking up on this work, materialist thinkers like Diderot are compelled to reject the very idea of monsters. We are all material beings produced according to the same mechanisms or laws, some of us are more ‘successful’ products than others, i.e. some live longer than others. In his late Eléments de physiologie he says “L’homme est un effet commun, le monstre un effet rare.” Ultimately he arrives at a materialist version of Leibniz’s position: there are no monsters, we are all monsters in each other’s eyes, at one time or another. This conclusion is a pregnant one in light of twentieth century interest in the problem of ‘the normal and the pathological’ (Canguilhem), and the broader question of how materialism relates to the biological world. (shrink)

This far-reaching study redraws the intellectual map of the Enlightenment and boldly reassesses the legacy of that highly influential period for us today. Peter Hanns Reill argues that in the middle of the eighteenth century, a major shift occurred in the way Enlightenment thinkers conceived of nature that caused many of them to reject the prevailing doctrine of mechanism and turn to a vitalistic model to account for phenomena in natural history, the life sciences, and chemistry. As he traces the (...) ramifications of this new way of thinking through time and across disciplines, Reill provocatively complicates our understanding of the way key Enlightenment thinkers viewed nature. His sophisticated analysis ultimately questions postmodern narratives that have assumed a monolithic Enlightenment—characterized by the dominance of instrumental reason—that has led to many of the disasters of modern life. (shrink)