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.

For details of previous years' programmes see:
Oxford Seminar 2004
Oxford Seminar 2005
Oxford Seminar 2006
Oxford Seminar 2007

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Please note: there will be no accommodation arranged for the conference.

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The seminar is made possible by the generous support of the
Faculty of Philosophy, University of Oxford.