Locke and Cartesian Philosophy

2018 ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Modern Philosophy ◽  
Early Modern ◽  
Philosophy Of Mind ◽  
Natural Philosophy ◽  
Theory Of Knowledge ◽  
Complex Relationship ◽  
Family Resemblances ◽  
The World ◽  
Anglo American ◽  
Epistemological Debate

This book is a collection of twelve critical essays, by leading French and Anglo-American scholars on Locke’s relation to Descartes and to Cartesian Philosophers, such as Malebranche, Clauberg, Arnauld, and Nicole. The essays, preceded by a substantial introduction, cover a large variety of topics from natural philosophy (cosmology) to religion, philosophy of mind, metaphysics, and epistemology. The volume underlines Locke’s complex relationship to Descartes and Cartesianism, where stark opposition and subtle family resemblances are tightly intertwined. Since the turn of the twentieth century, the theory of knowledge has been the main locus for the comparison of the two authors. According to an influential historiographical conception, Descartes and Locke form together the spearhead in the ‘epistemological turn’ of early modern philosophy. In bringing together the contributions to this volume, the editors advocate for a shift of emphasis. A precise comparison of Locke’s and Descartes’s positions should cover not only their theory of knowledge, but also their views on natural philosophy, metaphysics, and religion. Their conflicting claims on issues such as cosmic organization, the qualities and nature of bodies, the substance of the soul, God’s government of the world, are relevant not only in their own right to take the full measure of Locke’s intricate relation to Descartes, but also as they allow a better understanding of the epistemological debate that is still running between their heirs.

The World Soul in Early Modern Philosophy

2021 ◽  
pp. 186-222
Author(s):  
Alison Peterman
Keyword(s):  
Modern Philosophy ◽  
Early Modern ◽  
Alternative Model ◽  
Natural Philosophy ◽  
Laws Of Nature ◽  
Early Modern Period ◽  
Early Modern Philosophy ◽  
Modern Period ◽  
Modern Natural ◽  
The World

The world soul was often a target of attack in early modern natural philosophy, on grounds of impiety and explanatory vacuity. But it also played an important role in debates about two of the most important questions in natural philosophy: How does nature depend on God, and what explains nature’s organization? As an answer to those questions, it lived on through the early modern period, sustained especially by philosophers who argued that individuals in nature cannot be understood in isolation from the whole. In this chapter it is argued that in this guise, it served as an alternative model of explanation in a context that increasingly emphasized explanation in terms of laws of nature, and that this reflects the fact that these two models represent two fundamentally competing approaches to natural philosophical explanation.

The Baroque and Philosophy

2018 ◽  
pp. 601-622
Author(s):  
Michael Moriarty
Keyword(s):  
Modern Philosophy ◽  
Early Modern ◽  
Visual Arts ◽  
Common Sense ◽  
The Self ◽  
Early Modern Philosophy ◽  
The World ◽  
Baroque Art ◽  
Art And Architecture

Although the concept “baroque” is less obviously applicable to philosophy than to the visual arts and music, early modern philosophy can be shown to have connections with baroque culture. Baroque style and rhetoric are employed or denounced in philosophical controversies, to license or discredit a certain style of philosophizing. Philosophers engage with themes current in baroque literature (the mad world, the world as a stage, the quest for the self) and occasionally transform these into philosophical problems, especially of an epistemological kind (are the senses reliable? how far is our access to reality limited by our perspective?) Finally, the philosophies of Malebranche and Berkeley, with their radical challenges to so-called common sense, and their explanation of conventional understandings of the world as based on illusion, have something of the disturbing quality of baroque art and architecture.

Bacon’s Novum organum

2021 ◽  
Vol 58 (3) ◽  
pp. 38-46
Author(s):  
Elodie Cassan ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Early Modern ◽  
Scientific Reasoning ◽  
Natural Philosophy ◽  
Early Modern Period ◽  
Direct Access ◽  
Modern Period ◽  
The World ◽  
Two Sides ◽  
The Way

Dan Garber’s paper provides materials permitting to reply to an objection frequently made to the idea that the Novum Organum is a book of logic, as the allusion to Aristotle’s Organon included in the very title of this book shows it is. How can Bacon actually build a logic, considering his repeated claims that he desires to base natural philosophy directly on observation and experiment? Garber shows that in the Novum Organum access to experience is always mediated by particular questions and settings. If there is no direct access to observation and experience, then there is no point in equating Bacon’s focus on experience in the Novum Organum with a rejection of discursive issues. On the contrary, these are two sides of the same coin. Bacon’s articulation of rules for the building of scientific reasoning in connection with the way the world is, illustrates his massive concern with the relation between reality, thinking and language. This concern is essential in the field of logic as it is constructed in the Early Modern period.

Reading Books in Natural Philosophy: How Conrad Gessner‘s Commentary on De Anima (1563) was Annotated and Interpreted

2017 ◽  
Vol 93 (2) ◽  
pp. 69-89
Author(s):  
Anja-Silvia Goeing
Keyword(s):  
Early Modern ◽  
Natural Philosophy ◽  
Human Soul ◽  
De Anima ◽  
Preventive Healthcare ◽  
Modern Natural ◽  
The World ◽  
The One ◽  
Object Of Study

Conrad Gessner (1516–65) was town physician and lecturer at the Zwinglian reformed lectorium in Zurich. His approach towards the world and mankind was centred on his preoccupation with the human soul, an object of study that had challenged classical writers such as Aristotle and Galen, and which remained as important in post-Reformation debate. Writing commentaries on Aristotles De Anima (On the Soul) was part of early-modern natural philosophy education at university and formed the preparatory step for studying medicine. This article uses the case study of Gessners commentary on De Anima (1563) to explore how Gessners readers prioritised De Animas information. Gessners intention was to provide the students of philosophy and medicine with the most current and comprehensive thinking. His readers responses raise questions about evolving discussions in natural philosophy and medicine that concerned the foundations of preventive healthcare on the one hand, and of anatomically specified pathological medicine on the other, and Gessners part in helping these develop.

Early Modern Philosophy, 1600-1750

Philosophy ◽  
2016 ◽  
Author(s):  
Antonia LoLordo
Keyword(s):  
Modern Philosophy ◽  
Early Modern ◽  
21St Century ◽  
Western Europe ◽  
18Th Century ◽  
Natural Philosophy ◽  
The Other ◽  
Early Modern Philosophy ◽  
The United Kingdom ◽  
Academic Philosophy

In 21st century academic philosophy, “early modern philosophy” refers to the study of texts written in a specific time and place, and understood as works of philosophy in that context. The time is, roughly, the 17th century and the first half of the 18th century. This article is limited to philosophers who published or wrote most of their major works between 1600 and 1750, thus including Hume and Condillac but omitting near-contemporaries like Rousseau. The place is often described as Western Europe, but this is a bit misleading: with very few exceptions, the philosophers discussed here were from France, Holland, or what is now the United Kingdom. The traditional canon of Early Modern philosophers was very small: Locke, Berkeley, and Hume on one side of the English Channel; Descartes, Leibniz, and Spinoza on the other. In the last decades of the 20th century and first decades of the 21st century, the canon was expanded significantly. Two main factors drove the expansion of the canon. One was increased attention to works of what was then called natural philosophy, like Newton’s Philosophiae Naturalis Principia Mathematica. The other was increased attention to the work of women. This bibliography aims to capture some of this expansion, but still, hundreds of other works could have been included—and more will be as time goes on.

The heavens of the sky and the heavens of the heart: the Ottoman cultural context for the introduction of post-Copernican astronomy

2004 ◽  
Vol 37 (1) ◽  
pp. 1-28 ◽  
Author(s):  
AVNER BEN-ZAKEN
Keyword(s):  
Early Modern ◽  
Cultural Context ◽  
Natural Philosophy ◽  
Arabic Text ◽  
Copernican System ◽  
The World ◽  
History Of ◽  
Intellectual Context ◽  
Modern Arabic

In 1637 a Frenchman named Noël Duret (Durret) published a book in Paris that referred to the heliocentric Copernican system. In 1660 an Ottoman scholar named Ibrāhīm Efendi al-Zigetvari Tezkireci translated the book into Arabic. For more than three centuries this manuscript was buried in an Ottoman archive in Istanbul until it resurfaced at the beginning of the 1990s. The discovery of the Arabic text has necessitated a re-evaluation of the history of early modern Arabic natural philosophy, one that takes into account the intellectual context of Ibrāhīm Efendi and the overarching trends in the world of Sufi mysticism. These trends were reflected in art, literature, philosophy and natural philosophy. Using philological and cultural clues, as well as Ibrāhīm Efendi's own words, we can attempt deductions about why, how and for what purposes Ibrāhīm Efendi chose Duret's book for his project.

Science Influences Philosophy

2021 ◽  
pp. 64-79
Author(s):  
Steven L. Goldman
Keyword(s):  
Experimental Philosophy ◽  
Natural Philosophy ◽  
Theory Of Knowledge ◽  
Probabilistic Theory ◽  
New Science ◽  
The World ◽  
Invented Instruments ◽  
Natural Philosophers ◽  
The Mind

The claims of the new natural philosophers that their methodical reasoning and newly invented instruments produced knowledge of reality had a profound effect on contemporary mainstream philosophers. Hobbes allied himself with the rationalist pursuers of certainty but rejected the ability of experimental philosophy to reveal certain truths about nature. Gassendi defended a probabilistic theory of knowledge, while Locke’s theory of knowledge accepted “moral,” or near, certainty as a limit to knowledge of reality. Berkeley reinterpreted the materialistic ontology underlying the new science, arguing the metaphysical character played in it by the concept matter. Hume formulated an openly skeptical theory of knowledge of the world, arguing the metaphysical character of the roles played by causality and induction in the new natural philosophy. Kant responded by creating a philosophy that restored certainty to knowledge, but its object was now experience, not a reality independent of the mind.

Sign in / Sign up

Export Citation Format

Share Document