5th
Annual
Oxford Seminar in Early Modern Philosopy
Abstracts of papers
(PLEASE NOTE: these abstracts are short versions
of those submitted for consideration)
John
Callanan (King's College, London) 'Concept-Mastery and Space: Interpreting the
Third Paragraph of Kant's Metaphysical Exposition of Space.'
In this paper I examine some of the various interpretations of Kant's
aims and methods in the Transcendental Aesthetic through
an examination of the third argument of the Metaphysical Exposition.
Kant's general strategy in the argument can be best understood,
I argue, as a reflection on the possession-conditions and structure
of the concept of space. In this paper I outline this view and contrast
it with other readings. I conclude with some comments regarding
a reading of the Metaphysical Exposition as a whole.
Gary Hatfield (University
of Pennsylvania) ' Descartes' Rehabilitation
of the Senses.'
In the Sixth Meditation, Descartes rehabilitates the senses,
concluding that God's nondeception offers the "sure hope that I
can attain the truth" with respect to "other aspects of corporeal
things which are either particular (for example that the sun is
of such and such a size or shape), or less clearly understood, such
as light or sound or pain" (7:80). He continues by saying that "everything
I am taught by nature contains some truth." The subsequent discussion
emphasizes that the "teachings of nature" that can be trusted concern
benefits and harms to the mind-body complex; indeed, he says that
"the proper purpose of the sensory perceptions given me by nature
is simply to inform the mind of what is beneficial or harmful for
the composite." Is the role of the senses in Descartes therefore
restricted to presenting what is good or bad for the mind-body complex?
What about the size of the sun (and other instances of scientific
observation)?
Antonia
LoLordo (University of Virginia) 'The Role of Definitions in Spinoza's _Ethics_'.
Spinoza's Ethics starts with definitions and axioms whose
status he does not explain and which scholars have long disputed.
These definitions and axioms serve two functions for Spinoza. First,
they are the premises of a long and complex demonstration. Second,
they are the starting-points from which the reader is supposed to
undertake a process of self-transformation. This dual function requires
that Spinoza give his readers some strong preliminary reasons to
accept the definitions and axioms. In this paper, I provide a new
account of the reasons Spinoza can offer his readers for accepting
the definitions and axioms and explain how those reasons are transformed
as the reader works her way through the Ethics.
Peter
Millican (University of Oxford) "Hume, Causal Realism, and Causal Science."
In the "New Hume" debate over Hume's attitude to
(upper case) Causation, there has been surprising neglect of his
broader purposes. I argue that Hume sees his analysis of "the idea
of necessary connexion" as crucial for drawing important philosophical
conclusions about mental causation and free will. Upper-case Causal
anti-realism thus vindicates, and prepares the ground for, lower-case
causal science. From this perspective, it becomes clear that the
New Hume interpretation is not just wrong in detail: it mistakes
the entire purpose of Hume's "Chief Argument", and presents him
as holding some of the very positions he is arguing most strongly
against.
Eric Schliesser (Leiden
University) 'Without God: Gravity as a Relational Quality
of Matter in Newton.' I
argue that when Newton drafted the first edition of the Principia
in the mid 1680s, he thought that (at least a part of) the cause
of gravity is the disposition inherent in any individual body, but
that the force of gravity is the expression of that disposition;
a necessary condition for the expression of the disposition is the
actual obtaining of a relation between two bodies having the disposition.
The cause of gravity is not essential to matter because God could
have created matter without that disposition. Nevertheless, at least
a part of the cause of gravity inheres in individual bodies and
were there one body in the universe it would inhere in that body.
The force of gravity is neither essential to matter nor inherent
in matter, because (to repeat) it is the expression of a shared
disposition. Seeing this allows us to helpfully distinguish among
a) accepting gravity as causally real; b) the cause(s) (e.g. the
qualities of matter) of the properties of gravity; c) making claims
about the mechanism or medium by which gravity is transmitted. This
will help clarify what Newton could have meant when he insisted
that gravity is a real force.
John Sellars (University of
the West of England) 'Is God a Mindless Vegetable?
Cudworth on Stoic Theology.'
In the 16th century the Stoics were
deemed friends of Humanist Christians; by the 18th century they
were attacked as atheists. What happened in the intervening period?
In the middle of this period falls Ralph Cudworth's True Intellectual
System of the Universe (1678), which contains a sustained analysis
of Stoic theology. In Cudworth's complex taxonomy Stoicism appears
twice, both as a form of atheism and an example of imperfect theism.
Whether the Stoics are theists or atheists hinges on whether their
God is conscious and intelligent or alive but unconscious like a
plant or vegetable. Is God sentient or is he a mindless vegetable?
Frans Svensson
and Lilli Alanen (Universities of Arizona and Uppsala) ' A Design for Life: Descartes on Happiness and the Pursuit
of Virtue.'
Our aim in the paper is to answer three closely related
questions: How does Descartes conceive the relationship between
virtue and happiness? What does Descartes mean by happiness? What
characterizes, on Descartes's view, a life of virtue? In answering
them, we will emphasize a tension that runs through the whole of
Descartes's ethics. Descartes devotes a lot of effort to defending
a view he shares with the Stoics, viz. that virtue is sufficient
to make one happy. At the same time, however, he wants to concede
that the greatest happiness also requires the possession of other
goods in addition to virtue.
Thomas Vinci (Dalhousie
University) 'Kant and Descartes on Intentionality.' Descartes is a rationalist and a realist: he thinks that there
are things that exist independently of human representational capacities
- these are substances - and that the proper exercise of reason
will reveal what properties they have in themselves. The most concise
statement of how this is to be achieved in Descartes comes in Principles
I, 52: If one perceives a property there is a substance that contains
the property either formally or eminently. This principle also allows
Descartes to derive an inferential version of the "cogito" with
the conclusion that I am a thinking substance, a res cogitans. Kant,
at least in some of his moods, is an anti-realist, a transcendental
idealist and, although in the Paralogisms he allows for some
forms of the cogito inference, he there links the success of his
anti-realism to a rejection of the res-cogitans version of the cogito
inference. In the paper I elaborate these opposed tendencies in
Descartes and Kant and go on to argue that these opposed metaphysical
tendencies are generated by an underlying opposition between their
theories of representation.
John Whipple (University
of Illinois - Chicago) ' Leibniz on Divine Concurrence.' The
theory of divine concurrence was traditionally supposed to provide
a via media between the causal theories of occasionalism
and mere conservationism. Leibniz has traditionally been interpreted
as being a concurrence theorist, but many commentators have found
it difficult to understand the precise structure of his causal theory.
In this paper I argue that the key to understanding Leibniz's theory
lies in the recognition that he subtly rejects certain features
of the ontological framework within which the traditional debate
between occasionalists, mere conservationists, and concurrentists
was framed. More specifically, Leibniz rejects the idea that finite
substances are spatially and temporally conditioned at the deepest
level of reality.
Kenneth Winkler (Yale
University) 'Causal Realism and Hume's Revisions of the _Enquiry_.' This paper
makes a modest contribution to a continuing debate concerning Hume's
understanding of causation. Did Hume affirm the existence of objective
necessary connections-of powers in objects that come to more than
regularities? I've long been of the opinion that a short footnote,
added by Hume to the second edition of the Enquiry, undercuts
a good deal of the textual evidence that commentators have brought
forward in support of a positive answer. My aim in the paper is
to place the footnote in a context that has been largely neglected
by those commentators and their critics: the careful, continuing,
and interlocking revisions Hume made to the Enquiry over
its early lifetime. Commentators who take Hume to be a causal realist
commonly claim that in the Enquiry, Hume moved beyond the
formulations, characteristic of his earlier Treatise, that
too readily suggest he held a less-than-decidedly realist point
of view. I believe Hume's revisions of the Enquiry indicate
that as the book matured, its author moved deliberately closer to
non-realist formulations, rather than farther away from them.