What Does History Matter to the History of Philosophy?

2011 ◽  
Vol 5 (3) ◽  
pp. 406-424
Author(s):  
Stephen Gaukroger

Abstract Contrary to most modern interpretations, in the early modern period, history was an indispensable resource for many philosophers. The different uses of history by Bacon, Gassendi, Locke, and Hume are explored to establish the role of history as a resource in early-modern philosophy.


Oxford Studies in Early Modern Philosophy is an annual series, presenting a selection of the best current work in the history of early modern philosophy. It focuses on the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries—the extraordinary period of intellectual flourishing that begins, roughly, with Descartes and his contemporaries and ends with Kant. It also publishes work on thinkers or movements outside of that framework, provided they are important in illuminating early modern thought. The core of the subject matter is philosophy and its history. But the volume’s chapters reflect the fact that philosophy in the early modern period was much broader in its scope than it is currently taken to be and included a great deal of what now belongs to the natural sciences. Furthermore, philosophy in the period was closely connected with other disciplines, such as theology, law and medicine, and with larger questions of social, political, and religious history. Volume 10 includes chapters dedicated to a wide set of topics in the philosophies of Thomas White, Spinoza, Locke, Leibniz, and Hume.



Oxford Studies in Early Modern Philosophy is an annual series, presenting a selection of the best current work in the history of early modern philosophy. It focuses on the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries—the extraordinary period of intellectual flourishing that begins, roughly, with Descartes and his contemporaries and ends with Kant. It also publishes work on thinkers or movements outside of that framework, provided they are important in illuminating early modern thought. The core of the subject matter is philosophy and its history. But the volume’s chapters reflect the fact that philosophy in the early modern period was much broader in its scope than it is currently taken to be and included a great deal of what now belongs to the natural sciences. Furthermore, philosophy in the period was closely connected with other disciplines, such as theology, and with larger questions of social, political, and religious history. Volume 8 includes chapters dedicated to a wide set of topics in the philosophies of Descartes, Hobbes, Spinoza, Locke, Leibniz, Wolff, and Kant.



Oxford Studies in Early Modern Philosophy is an annual series, presenting a selection of the best current work in the history of early modern philosophy. It focuses on the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries—the extraordinary period of intellectual flourishing that begins, roughly, with Descartes and his contemporaries and ends with Kant. It also publishes work on thinkers or movements outside of that framework, provided they are important in illuminating early modern thought. The core of the subject matter is philosophy and its history. But the volume’s chapters reflect the fact that philosophy in the early modern period was much broader in its scope than it is currently taken to be and included a great deal of what now belongs to the natural sciences. Furthermore, philosophy in the period was closely connected with other disciplines, such as theology, law, and medicine, and with larger questions of social, political, and religious history. Volume 9 includes chapters dedicated to a wide set of topics in the philosophies of Descartes, Malebranche, Locke, Leibniz, Hume, and Kant.



2018 ◽  
Vol 4 (2) ◽  
pp. 157-160
Author(s):  
Jorge Ledo

The aim of this volume is not to offer a comprehensive overview of the multifarious aspects of fiction and its implications for early modern philosophy, but to be an invitation, from the standpoint of the history of philosophy, to survey some of the fundamental problems of the field, using six case-studies written by some of the finest international scholars in their respective areas of Renaissance studies. Although perhaps not evident at a first reading, these six studies are linked by common concerns such as the theoretical relationship between (literary) history, rhetoric, poetics, and philosophy; the tensions between res, verba, and imago; and the concept of enargeia. They have been arranged according to the chronology of the corpus each one considers.





Author(s):  
Stefano Di Bella ◽  
Tad M. Schmaltz

The different problems related to the topic of universals were central to the philosophical agenda from antiquity and especially during the medieval era, but they lost this centrality and seemed virtually to disappear during the early modern period. During this period, for instance, there was widespread hostility toward the essentialist hylomorphic framework in terms of which the issue of universals had been debated in the scholastic literature. Nonetheless, what occurred in the early modern period was more a transformation than a disappearance of this issue. This chapter introduces the history of the concept of universals and outlines the contents of the chapters in this volume.





Dialogue ◽  
2011 ◽  
Vol 50 (3) ◽  
pp. 577-602 ◽  
Author(s):  
Thomas M. Lennon

ABSTRACT: Indifference is a term often used to describe the sort of freedom had by the will according to the libertarian, or Molinist account. It is thought to be a univocal term. In fact, however, it is used in at least seven different ways, in a variety of domains during the early modern period. All of them have plausible roots in Descartes, but he himself uses the term in only one sense, and failure to notice this consistent use by him has bedeviled interpretations of his account of the will.



Author(s):  
Deborah Boyle

This chapter offers an account of the history and central issues in feminist philosophical engagements with early modern philosophy. The chapter describes a “first wave” of feminist scholarship on early modern philosophy, beginning around the 1990s, that involved examining the work of canonical male philosophers from a feminist perspective, as well as a “second wave” that focuses on the early modern women philosophers themselves. Projects involved in this second wave include (1) explaining why and how these works dropped out of view in the first place; (2) finding, editing, translating (when necessary), and publishing neglected or lost writings; (3) contextualizing, analyzing, and critiquing these works; and (4) theorizing about and experimenting with ways to integrate these works into narratives of the history of philosophy. The chapter ends with discussion of an emerging “third wave” of opportunities for publishing, presenting at conferences, and teaching about these women philosophers.



Mind ◽  
2018 ◽  
Vol 128 (512) ◽  
pp. 1117-1147
Author(s):  
Anat Schechtman

Abstract Many historical and philosophical studies treat infinity as an exclusively quantitative notion, whose proper domain of application is mathematics and physics. The main aim of this paper is to disentangle, by critically examining, three notions of infinity in the early modern period, and to argue that one—but only one—of them is quantitative. One of these non-quantitative notions concerns being or reality, while the other concerns a particular iterative property of an aggregate. These three notions will emerge through examination of three central figures in the period: Locke (for quantitative infinity), Descartes (ontic infinity), and Leibniz (iterative infinity).



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