Quantity, Integral Parts, and Boundaries

2019 ◽  
pp. 64-100
Author(s):  
Tad M. Schmaltz
Keyword(s):  
Early Modern ◽  
Distinctive Feature ◽  
Ontological Status ◽  
Special Relation ◽  
Continuous Quantity ◽  
Modern Thought

This chapter focuses on an aspect of Suárez’s metaphysics that is especially relevant to the non-scholastic identification of matter with extension in early modern thought, namely, his account of the nature of the Aristotelian accident of “continuous quantity.” The chapter begins with Suárez’s contribution to a debate within medieval scholasticism between “realist” and “nominalist” views of quantity. One distinctive feature of this contribution is Suárez’s insistence that this accident bears a special relation to impenetrability. There is then a consideration of Suárez’s contribution to a scholastic debate over the mereological relation between wholes and their “integral parts” that pits anti-reductionists against reductionists. The chapter ends with an examination of Suárez’s contribution to scholastic debates over the ontological status of the “indivisible” boundaries of parts, namely, points, lines, and surfaces. Suárez adopts a “moderate realism” that takes boundaries to be really distinct from the parts they limit.

The Metaphysics of the Material World

2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
Tad M. Schmaltz
Keyword(s):  
Early Modern ◽  
Historical Narrative ◽  
Material World ◽  
Continuous Quantity ◽  
Modern Thought ◽  
Modal Distinction ◽  
Special Concern ◽  
Pierre Bayle ◽  
Monistic Conception ◽  
Aristotle's Metaphysics

This book traces a particular development of the metaphysics of the material world in early modern thought. The route it follows derives from a critique of Spinoza in the work of Pierre Bayle. Bayle charged in particular that Spinoza’s monistic conception of the material world founders on the account of extension and its “modes” and parts that he inherited from Descartes, and that Descartes in turn inherited from late scholasticism, and ultimately from Aristotle. After an initial discussion of Bayle’s critique of Spinoza and its relation to Aristotle’s distinction between substance and accident, this study starts with the original re-conceptualization of Aristotle’s metaphysics of the material world that we find in the work of the early modern scholastic Suárez. What receives particular attention is Suárez’s introduction of the “modal distinction” and his distinctive account of the Aristotelian accident of “continuous quantity.” This examination of Suárez is followed by a treatment of the connections of his particular version of the scholastic conception of the material world to the very different conception that Descartes offered. Especially important is Descartes’s view of the relation of extended substance both to its modes and to the parts that compose it. Finally, there is a consideration of what these developments in Suárez and Descartes have to teach us about Spinoza’s monistic conception of the material world. Of special concern here is to draw on this historical narrative to provide a re-assessment of Bayle’s critique of Spinoza.

The Folly of the Cross

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Richard Viladesau
Keyword(s):  
Early Modern ◽  
Early Modern Period ◽  
Theology Of The Cross ◽  
The Enlightenment ◽  
Modern Period ◽  
The Arts ◽  
Modern Thought ◽  
Fourth Volume ◽  
The Cross ◽  
Satisfaction Model

This work surveys the ways in which theologians, artists, and composers of the early modern period dealt with the passion and death of Christ. The fourth volume in a series, it locates the theology of the cross in the context of modern thought, beginning with the Enlightenment, which challenged traditional Christian notions of salvation and of Christ himself. It shows how new models of salvation were proposed by liberal theology, replacing the older “satisfaction” model with theories of Christ as bringer of God’s spirit and as social revolutionary. It shows how the arts during this period both preserved the classical tradition and responded to innovations in theology and in style.

Conclusion

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Emily Thomas
Keyword(s):  
Early Modern ◽  
First Century ◽  
Philosophical Theology ◽  
Time And Space ◽  
Modern Thought ◽  
Metaphysics Of Time ◽  
Twenty First Century ◽  
The Impact

This Conclusion draws the study to a close, and recounts its developmental theses. The first thesis is that the complexity of positions on time (and space) defended in early modern thought is hugely under-appreciated. An enormous variety of positions were defended during this period, going far beyond the well-known absolutism–relationism debate. The second thesis is that during this period three distinct kinds of absolutism can be found in British philosophy: Morean, Gassendist, and Newtonian. The chapter concludes with a few notes on the impact of absolutism within and beyond philosophy: on twenty-first-century metaphysics of time; and on art, geology, and philosophical theology.

The Ontological Status of Causal Powers

2021 ◽  
pp. 121-148
Author(s):  
Benjamin Hill
Keyword(s):  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
Early Modern ◽  
Physical Object ◽  
Causal Powers ◽  
Ontological Status ◽  
The Core ◽  
Efficient Cause ◽  
Popular View

Benjamin Hill seeks to initiate deeper contemporary discussion of the ontological challenges that drove early modern philosophers (namely, several early Cartesians, Berkeley, and Hume) to accept the negative thesis of occasionalism, that no physical object can truly be an efficient cause. He argues that we should be looking past Hume and his empiricist’s approach to secondary causation to bring the core metaphysical, issues he believes are still lingering, into sharper focus. Hill walks us backwards from Hume’s empirical critiques of powers in the Enquiry and Treatise to Locke’s presentation of the ‘popular’ view that experience lead us to postulate powers as a response to occasionalism. This, he suggests, reveals that the early modern debate about causal powers tracked not the divide between scholastics and mechanical philosophers but the divide between realists and occasionalists and revolved around a confusion between them regarding what was the underlying question of the debate. For the occasionalists, it was not really about whether or not causal powers did exist, but about explaining how they could exist. This leads Hill to explore the metaphysical worries animating seventeenth-century occasionalists.

scholarly journals THE NORMATIVITY OF NATURE IN PUFENDORF AND LOCKE

2019 ◽  
Vol 63 (3) ◽  
pp. 528-558 ◽  
Author(s):  
HANNAH DAWSON
Keyword(s):  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
Early Modern ◽  
John Locke ◽  
Moral Sentiment ◽  
Political Agency ◽  
Alternative Account ◽  
Moral Agents ◽  
Modern Thought ◽  
Push And Pull

abstractAt the beginning of De jure naturae et gentium (1672), Samuel von Pufendorf proposed a radical dichotomy between nature and morality. He was followed down this arid path by his great admirer John Locke. This article begins by exploring their descriptions of this dichotomy, examining the ways in which human animals were supposed to haul themselves out of the push and pull of the mechanistic world in order to become free moral agents. The article then argues that bubbling up from within this principal account of morality is an alternative account according to which virtue seems to infuse nature, thereby blurring the lines between obligation and motivation, and refiguring the character of moral and political agency. In uncovering this refiguration, I highlight the importance of Aristotelianism and Stoicism for Pufendorf and Locke, suggest continuities rather than breaks between the natural lawyers of the seventeenth century and the theorists of moral sentiment of the next, and gesture towards a hitherto underappreciated discourse in early modern thought: the normativity of nature.

Skepticism and the Philosophy of Language in Early Modern Thought

1998 ◽  
pp. 109-115
Author(s):  
Danilo Marcondes de Souza Filho
Keyword(s):  
Early Modern ◽  
Philosophy Of Language ◽  
Natural Light ◽  
Knowledge Argument ◽  
Modern Thought

This paper discusses the importance of skeptical arguments for the philosophy of language in early modern thought. It contrasts the rationalist conception of language and knowledge with that of philosophers who adopt some sort of skeptical position, maintaining that these philosophers end up by giving language a greater importance than rationalists. The criticism of the rationalists' appeal to natural light is examined, as well as skeptical arguments limiting knowledge such as the so-called 'maker's knowledge' argument. This argument is then seen as capital for favoring a positive interpretation of the importance of language for knowledge.

Conversional Thinking and the London Stage

2021 ◽  
pp. 87-109
Author(s):  
Stephen Wittek
Keyword(s):  
Early Modern ◽  
Critical Examination ◽  
Media Environment ◽  
Specific Focus ◽  
Theatrical Performance ◽  
Modern Thought ◽  
Early Modern London ◽  
Theatrical Culture ◽  
London Stage

This chapter begins to build a framework for understanding the relation between conversion and a key structure of early modern thought: theatrical performance. Taking early modern London as a specific focus, the analysis considers the embeddedness of conversional thinking within the city’s concentration of media resources, placing particular emphasis on the ability of theatrical affordances to facilitate creative experimentation and critical examination around received categories of identity. The central text under consideration is Dekker and Middleton’s The Honest Whore, but the analysis is also generally applicable to the theatrical culture and broader media environment of early modern London.

The Problem of Universals in Early Modern Philosophy

2017 ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Modern Philosophy ◽  
Early Modern ◽  
Ontological Status ◽  
Nicolas Malebranche ◽  
Early Modern Philosophy ◽  
Modern Period ◽  
Pierre Gassendi ◽  
Ralph Cudworth ◽  
Henry More ◽  
Scholastic Philosophy

The ancient topic of universals was central to scholastic philosophy, which raised the question of whether universals exist as Platonic forms, as instantiated Aristotelian forms, as concepts abstracted from singular things, or as words that have universal signification. It might be thought that this question lost its importance after the decline of scholasticism in the modern period. However, the fourteen contributions to this volume indicate that the issue of universals retained its vitality in modern philosophy. Modern philosophers in fact were interested in three sets of issues concerning universals: (1) issues concerning the ontological status of universals, (2) issues concerning the psychology of the formation of universal concepts or terms, and (3) issues concerning the value and use of universal concepts or terms in the acquisition of knowledge. Chapters in this volume consider the various forms of “Platonism,” “conceptualism,” and “nominalism” (and distinctive combinations thereof) that emerged from the consideration of such issues in the work of modern philosophers. The volume covers not only the canonical modern figures, namely, Descartes, Spinoza, Leibniz, Locke, Berkeley, Hume, and Kant, but also more neglected figures such as Pierre Gassendi, Pierre-Sylvain Regis, Nicolas Malebranche, Henry More, Ralph Cudworth, and John Norris.

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