19 found
Order:
  1. Mary Shepherd on Space and Minds.Peter West & Manuel Fasko - forthcoming - Oxford Studies in Early Modern Philosophy.
    In her last known piece of work Lady Mary Shepherd’s Metaphysics (1832), Mary Shepherd writes that “mind, may inhere in definite portions of matter […] or of infinite space” (LMSM 699). Shepherd thus suggests that a mind – a “capacity for sensation in general” (e.g., EPEU 16) – may have a spatial location. This is prima facie surprising given that she is committed to the view that the mind is unextended. In this paper, we argue that Shepherd can consistently honor (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   2 citations  
  2. Margaret Cavendish on conceivability, possibility, and the case of colours.Peter West - 2021 - British Journal for the History of Philosophy 30 (3):456-476.
    Throughout her philosophical writing, Margaret Cavendish is clear in stating that colours are real; they are not mere mind-dependent qualities that exist only in the mind of perceivers. This puts her at odds with other seventeenthcentury thinkers such as Galileo and Descartes who endorsed what would come to be known as the ‘primary-secondary quality distinction’. Cavendish’s argument for this view is premised on two claims. First, that colourless objects are inconceivable. Second, that if an object is inconceivable then it could (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   6 citations  
  3. The philosopher versus the physicist: Susan Stebbing on Eddington and the passage of time.Peter West - 2021 - British Journal for the History of Philosophy 30 (1):130-151.
    In this paper, I provide the first in-depth discussion of Susan Stebbing’s views concerning our experience of the passage of time – a key issue for many metaphysicians writing in the first half of the twentieth century. I focus on Stebbing’s claims about the passage of time in Philosophy and the Physicists and her disagreement with Arthur Eddington over how best to account for that experience. I show that Stebbing’s concern is that any attempt to provide a scientific account of (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   6 citations  
  4. The Irish Context of Berkeley's 'Resemblance Thesis'.Peter West & Manuel Fasko - 2020 - Royal Institute of Philosophy Supplement 88:7-31.
    In this paper, we focus on Berkeley's reasons for accepting the ‘resemblance thesis’ which entails that for one thing to represent another those two things must resemble one another. The resemblance thesis is a crucial premise in Berkeley's argument from the ‘likeness principle’ in §8 of the Principles. Yet, like the ‘likeness principle’, the resemblance thesis remains unargued for and is never explicitly defended. This has led several commentators to provide explanations as to why Berkeley accepts the resemblance thesis and (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   7 citations  
  5. Why Can An Idea Be Like Nothing But Another Idea? A Conceptual Interpretation of Berkeley's Likeness Principle.Peter West - 2021 - Journal of the American Philosophical Association (First View):1-19.
    Berkeley’s likeness principle is the claim that “an idea can be like nothing but an idea”. The likeness principle is intended to undermine representationalism: the view (that Berkeley attributes to thinkers like Descartes and Locke) that all human knowledge is mediated by ideas in the mind which represent material objects. Yet, Berkeley appears to leave the likeness principle unargued for. This has led to several attempts to explain why Berkeley accepts it. In contrast to ‘metaphysical’ and ‘epistemological’ interpretations available in (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   5 citations  
  6. Philosophy Is Not a Science: Margaret Macdonald on the Nature of Philosophical Theories.Peter West - 2024 - Hopos: The Journal of the International Society for the History of Philosophy of Science 14 (2):527-553.
    Margaret Macdonald was at the institutional heart of analytic philosophy in Britain in the mid-twentieth century. However, her views on the nature of philosophical theories diverge quite considerably from those of many of her contemporaries. In this article, I focus on Macdonald’s provocative 1953 paper, “Linguistic Philosophy and Perception,” in which she argues that the value of philosophical theories is more akin to that of poetry or art than science or mathematics. I do so for two reasons. First, it reveals (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark  
  7.  96
    What is 'Western Philosophy'? Lessons from the Case of 'Analytic Philosophy'.Peter West & Matyáš Moravec - forthcoming - Journal for the History of Analytical Philosophy.
    Recent discussions in the history of analytic philosophy have targeted questions about the concept of ‘Analytic Philosophy’ itself. Scholars, such as Glock (2008) and Preston (2004), have argued that ‘Analytic Philosophy’ cannot plausibly be characterised in terms of necessary and sufficient conditions and that other, more pragmatic, approaches must be taken instead. In this paper, we argue that similar questions that have recently emerged about the status of ‘Western Philosophy’ can be informed by these debates in the history of analytic (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark  
  8. Mind‐Body Commerce: Occasional Causation and Mental Representation in Anton Wilhelm Amo.Peter West - 2022 - Philosophy Compass 17 (9):e12872.
    This paper contributes to a growing body of literature focusing on Anton Wilhelm Amo’s account of the mind-body relation. The first aim of this paper is to provide an overview of that literature, bringing together several interpretations of Amo’s account of the mind-body relation and providing a comprehensive overview of where the debate stands so far. Doing so reveals that commentary is split between those who take Amo to adopt a Leibnizian account of pre-established harmony between mind and body (Smith (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   1 citation  
  9. The Philosopher Versus the Physicist: Eddington's Rejoinder to Stebbing.Peter West - forthcoming - British Journal for the History of Philosophy:1-16.
    A number of recent papers or monographs have examined Susan Stebbing’s criticisms of Arthur Eddington’s scientific-philosophical writing. These papers focus on Stebbing’s critique of Eddington’s attempt to infer philosophical conclusions from developments in modern physics, his view that there is a discrepancy between the world of science and the world of common sense (best encapsulated by his famous ‘two tables’ metaphor), and his use of “inexact language” to try and convey modern scientific insights to his readers. On November 10th, 1938, (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark  
  10. The Depth of Margaret Cavendish's Ecology.Peter West & Manuel Fasko - forthcoming - Ergo.
    This paper examines Margaret Cavendish’s ecological views and argues that, in the Appendix to her final published work, Grounds of Natural Philosophy (1668), Cavendish is defending a normative account of the way that humans ought to interact with their environment. On this basis, we argue that Cavendish is committed to a form of what, for the purposes of this paper, we will call ‘deep ecology,’ where that is understood as the view that humans ought to treat the rest of nature (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark  
  11. In Praise of Co-Authoring.Peter West & Matyas Moravec - 2021 - The Philosopher 109 (3):105-109.
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   1 citation  
  12. Seeing Life Steadily: Dorothy Emmet's philosophy of perception and the crisis in metaphysics.Peter West - forthcoming - British Journal for the History of Philosophy:1-25.
    The aim of this paper is to outline Dorothy Emmet’s (1904-2000) account of perception in The Nature of Metaphysical Thinking (published in 1945). Emmet’s account of perception is part of a wider attempt to rehabilitate metaphysics in the face of logical positivism and verificationism (of the kind espoused most famously by A. J. Ayer). It is thus part of an attempt to stem the tide of anti-metaphysical thought that had become widespread in British philosophy by the middle of the twentieth (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark  
  13. Getting Beyond 'The Curtain of the Fancy': Anti-Representationalism in Berkeley and Sergeant.Peter West - 2023 - Berkeley Studies 30:3-21.
    This paper argues for a re-evaluation of the relationship between Berkeley and his predecessor, the neo-Aristotelian thinker John Sergeant. In the literature to date, the relationship between these two thinkers has received attention for two reasons. First, because some commentators have attempted to establish a causal connection between them – specifically, by focusing on the fact that both thinkers develop a theory of ‘notions’. Second, because both Berkeley and Sergeant develop ‘anti-representationalist’ arguments against Locke’s epistemology. The first issue has received (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark  
  14.  69
    The Unorthodox Margaret Cavendish.Peter West & Tom Stoneham - 2023 - In Karen Detlefsen & Lisa Shapiro (eds.), The Routledge Handbook of Women and Early Modern European Philosophy. Routledge.
    We argue that, while Cavendish did express orthodox piety, she is likely to have been read by her contemporaries as heterodox and deistic at best, atheistic at worst. Furthermore, they would have been right: it is seemingly impossible to reconcile her metaphysical and epistemological views with particular providence, miracles, the incarnation and revelation. We proceed by outlining her general metaphysical position (section 1) before looking in some detail at her discussion of immaterial beings (section 2). We then consider the implications (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark  
  15. Molyneux's Question: The Irish Debates.Peter West & Manuel Fasko - 2020 - In Brian Glenney Gabriele Ferretti (ed.), Molyneux’s Question and the History of Philosophy. New York, NY: Routledge. pp. 122-135.
    William Molyneux was born in Dublin, studied in Trinity College Dublin, and was a founding member of the Dublin Philosophical Society (DPS), Ireland’s counterpart to the Royal Society in London. He was a central figure in the Irish intellectual milieu during the Early Modern period and – along with George Berkeley and Edmund Burke – is one of the best-known thinkers to have come out of that context and out of Irish thought more generally. In 1688, when Molyneux wrote the (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   1 citation  
  16. A Democratic Approach to Public Philosophy.Jonathon Hawkins & Peter West - 2023 - The Philosopher 111 (2):10-16.
    There is a strong appetite in ‘the wild’ (i.e., beyond the academy) for public philosophy. There are myriad forums available, from magazines and online publications to podcasts and YouTube videos, for those who wish to engage in philosophy in a non-academic context. For academic philosophers, this has raised methodological and metaphilosophical questions like: ‘what is the best way to engage in public philosophy?’ and ‘what are our aims when we engage in public philosophy?’ But what do ‘the public’ want? If (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark  
  17. Teaching and Learning Guide for: Mind‐Body Commerce: Occasional Causation and Mental Representation in Anton Wilhelm Amo.Peter West - 2023 - Philosophy Compass.
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark  
  18. Knowing Me, Knowing You: Berkeley on Self-Knowledge and Other Minds.Peter West - 2020 - The Self and Self-Knowledge in Early Modern Philosophy.
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark  
  19. Reid and Berkeley on Scepticism, Representationalism, and Ideas.Peter West - 2019 - Journal of Scottish Philosophy 17 (3):191-210.
    Both Reid and Berkeley reject ‘representationalism’, an epistemological position whereby we (mediately) perceive things in the world indirectly via ideas in our mind, on the grounds of anti-scepticism and common sense. My aim in this paper is to draw out the similarities between Reid and Berkeley's ‘anti-representationalist’ arguments, whilst also identifying the root of their disagreements on certain fundamental metaphysical issues. Reid famously rejects Berkeley's idealism, in which all that exists are ideas and minds, because it undermines the dictates of (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark