This chapter contains sections titled: Descartes Malebranche and Leibniz.

John Norris’s novel and compelling theory on the soul’s immortality is both a central element of his overall philosophical vision and a vital engagement with his contemporaries on the topic. Even so, it has been mostly neglected in the secondary literature. This article aims to fill this lacuna by providing a detailed analysis of how Norris arrives at two seemingly inconsistent theses: the soul is naturally immortal in the sense of being incorruptible but naturally mortal in the sense of (...) being perishable. I focus particularly on how Norris articulates this position in dialogue with a number of Scholastic philosophers whose views he rejects. I conclude by suggesting that Norris’s arguments against these thinkers are less than fully successful. (shrink)

While there has been a resurgence in Malebranche scholarship in the anglophone world over the last twenty years, most of it has focused on Malebranche’s theory of ideas, and little attention has been paid to his philosophy of mind. Schmaltz’s book thus comes as a welcome addition to the Malebranche literature; that he has given us such a well-researched and carefully argued study is even more welcome. The focus of this work is Malebranche’s split with Descartes on the question of (...) our knowledge of the nature of the mind; the book concentrates specifically on Malebranche’s rejection of the claim that we know the nature of the mind better than we know the nature of body. Schmaltz maintains that Malebranche’s arguments for his position are, for the most part, successful against the Cartesians who opposed him, though he claims—and this is perhaps the central claim of the book—that “Malebranche took his negative thesis concerning our knowledge of the soul to involve not so much a rejection of Cartesianism as an internal correction of it”. While acknowledging that Augustine was “the primary inspiration for [Malebranche’s] view of the ideas that are the objects of perception”, Schmaltz’s interpretation of Malebranche’s theory of the soul “presents it as fundamentally Cartesian”. According to Schmaltz, not only is Malebranche closer to Descartes in this regard than is generally thought, he is closer to him than are many other Cartesians. Part 1 of the book examines Malebranche’s position that while we have certain knowledge of the soul’s existence, we have only confused knowledge of its nature. Part 2 focuses on Arnauld’s objection that if in fact we had no clear idea of the soul, we could not, despite Malebranche’s claims to the contrary, know anything of its immortality, spirituality, or freedom. (shrink)

Purpose of the article is to reconstruct the ideological and philosophical context in which Descartes actualizes the phenomenon of man and the task of refuting scepticism. A precondition for its implementation is attention to the explication of the peculiarities of reception by researchers of scepticism and the doctrine of doubt; delineation of the semantic implications of the anthropological intention of philosophizing and the boundaries of doubt. Theoretical basis. I base my view of Descartes’ legacy on the conceptual positions of phenomenology, (...) existentialism and hermeneutics. Originality. Based on the tendency of anthropologization of Descartes’ basic project, I refute the widespread tendency to qualify Descartes’ position as a sceptic, which is based on superficial stereotypes about the impersonality of his philosophy. The modern reception of the thinker’s texts indicates the priority for him of the task of explicating the conditions of man’s realization of his own vocation in the Universe, which is supplemented by the idea of the limits of science and the doubt correlative to it. Accordingly, Descartes’ refutation of scepticism appears in the form of concern for the creation of favourable conditions for human self-development, which implies a restrained attitude to the spheres of morality and religion. Conclusions. The author based on his own interpretation of the philosophical searching of the thinker attempted to rehabilitate Descartes’ position on scepticism. An appeal to the texts of the French philosopher shows that doubt is for him a means of creating conditions for the representation of the human in man. A deeper meaningful clarification of the method chosen by Descartes to refute scepticism involves appeal to the will and practical mastery of a new system of semantic coordinates of life. (shrink)

This is Thomas Reid's greatest work. It covers far more philosophical ground than the earlier, more popular Inquiry. The Intellectual Powers and its companion volume, Essays on the Active Powers of Man, constitute the fullest, most original presentation of the philosophy of Common Sense. In the process, Reid provides acutely critical discussions of an impressive array of thinkers but especially of David Hume. In Reid's eyes, Hume had driven a deep tendency in modern philosophy to its ultimate conclusions by creating (...) a phantom-world of so-called 'ideas' that sprang from objects of observation; the self was a conglomeration of perceived ideas; and the will as the source of action was nothing but the balance of passionate impulses. Reid's Common Sense philosophy answers these problems by suggesting that sceptics, such as Hume, unavoidably affirm what they purport to deny, namely the existence of a stable external world, of other minds, of the continuity of their own minds, and of their own and other people's ability to ascribe and accept responsibility for actions. We can understand all of this by proper empirical observation and philosophical analysis of the activity of the mind. Reid's major positive contribution to philosophy is a detailed account of the various innate powers of the mind. While particularly influential in the first half of the nineteenth century, Reid's work has retained a significant role in philosophy, not least in recent years. At the same time, his role in the Scottish Enlightenment is becoming much better understood. This is the only properly established text. It is accompanied by manuscript lectures on the nature and immortality of the soul, as well as helpful editorial annotation and introduction, making it useful to a wide variety of readers. -/- Key Features: Accurate, reliable and critically established text. The Introduction explains the work's genesis and its place in Reid's system. Annotations provide an understanding of Reid's context. An Appendix contains manuscript material covering an important topic not represented in the hitherto published work. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:Descartes on the Human Soul: Philosophy and the Demands of Christian DoctrineRichard A. WatsonC. F. Fowler. Descartes on the Human Soul: Philosophy and the Demands of Christian Doctrine. International Archives of the History of Ideas, 160. Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic Publishers, 1999. Pp. xiii + 438. Cloth, $168.00.As Defender of the Faith, René Descartes wrote his Meditations to fulfill the request of the Fifth Lateran Council in 1513 "to (...) support with rational demonstrations the Church's teaching on the immortality of the soul" (28). This allowed him to dedicate the Meditations to the Faculty of Theology at the Sorbonne in hopes of obtaining their approbation. The Faculty remained silent, but Descartes could interpret this as consent, although he removed from later editions the notice of approbation. What the Council asked for were demonstrations of the immortality of the soul and of the substantial union of the soul with the body.Mersenne thought the Meditiations were going to provide these demonstrations, so he included in the title of the first edition the promise to demonstrate the immortality of the soul, but in later editions Descartes changed this to a promise to demonstrate the distinction between the human soul and the body, or that the soul is an independent substance that is not destroyed by the death of the body, and so can be immortal. Independent substancehood does not prove that the soul is immortal, however, for Descartes agreed that God can destroy the soul at any time. This conclusion greatly bothered Mersenne and Arnauld. As for the absolute separation of the soul from the body, Descartes was criticized for supporting the Platonic doctrine of their absolute separation, making it impossible to demonstrate that the union between soul and body is substantial and not accidental. And "the central Christian doctrines of the Creation, Incarnation, Redemption, and Resurrection required a union of body and soul much more intimate than that of agent and instrument" (310). But all that Descartes's proof supports is the Platonic model of a sailor piloting a ship. Never mind that Descartes adamantly denies that the soul sits in the body thus—for the soul in union with the body feels the body as the sailor does not feel the ship—his friends and foes alike saw that the absolute difference of soul and body made their substantial union inexplicable. It also goes against the Aristotelian view of the Council of Vienne in 1311-1312 that "defined the rational soul as the forma corporis" (310). It is exactly this view that Descartes opposed by eliminating substantial forms from his philosophy.Arnauld warned Descartes about these problems, while Gassendi, Hobbes, and others attacked him. In response, Descartes expanded his views without altering them, and complained about being misunderstood. The Jesuit Father Bourdin's attacks hurt him most, for as he told Mersenne, this made him think that all the Jesuits (they stick together) were against him. This, Fowler argues, is why Descartes dedicated the Meditations to the Faculty of the Sorbonne, and not to the Jesuits.Fowler carefully presents the entire sweep of Descartes's ideas and arguments concerning the immortality of the soul and its union with the body. Descartes in fact did not manage to demonstrate either one. He did agree that of the three sorts of truths—those known by revelation alone, those known both by revelation and demonstration, and those known only by demonstration—these points about the soul belong in the middle category. But he never mentions immortality in the Meditations, and when Princess Elisabeth faces him with his inability to explain how the soul and body [End Page 120] can interact, he just says that we experience it. Gassendi asked him the same question, but Descartes ignored him. With other critics, he shifted the question into the first category of truths—it is a matter of revelation. This was not satisfactory either to his critics or to Descartes, for it had led Pompanazzi to materialism, and it led Descartes's first disciple Regius to say bluntly that metaphysics, and in particular Descartes's metaphysics, is irrelevant to the third category of truths, those of mechanics, physics, and medicine.Baillet calls... (shrink)

In this paper, I examine the thought of Descartes and Spinoza regarding the immortality of the soul. I conclude that Descartes’s argument(s) for the immortality of the soul—or at least the argument(s) that one can construct based on Descartes’s texts—are disappointing, and that Spinoza’s thought on the soul and its relation to the body leaves little room for the traditional doctrine of personal immortality.

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:Averroes on Intellect: From Aristotelian Origins to Aquinas’s Critique by Stephen R. OgdenLuis Xavier López-FarjeatStephen R. Ogden. Averroes on Intellect: From Aristotelian Origins to Aquinas’s Critique. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2022. Pp. 296. Hardback, $90.00.Stephen Ogden’s book is a remarkable contribution to one of the most controversial topics within the tradition of interpreters of Aristotle’s De anima. As is well known, Aristotle defines the intellect (nous) as “the (...) part of the soul by which it knows and thinks” (DA III.4, 429a9– 10). This doctrine of the intellect becomes rather obscure in DA III.5, where Aristotle states that there is a passive intellect that needs to be actualized through an active intellect. This passage contains, perhaps, the most debated statement in Aristotelian psychology. Aristotle argues that the passive or potential intellect is the part of the soul that, in a sense, becomes all things as it knows them. The intellect, however, has another aspect: in a sense, it makes all things. This is what Aristotle calls the “active” or “agent” intellect. This characterization is fairly ambiguous: it is separable (chôristos), separated (chôristheis), not passive (apathês), unmixed (amigês), and it is essentially an activity (têi ousiai energeia); furthermore, it is immortal (athanaton), eternal (aidion), and always thinking.According to Alexander of Aphrodisias’s interpretation, Aristotle holds that since the human intellect is in potency, its actualization needs the intervention of an intellect that is always thinking, namely, the active intellect. Alexander associates the active or agent intellect (poiêtikos nous) with the divine intellect and divine intellection as it appears in Aristotle’s Metaphysics XII.9, 1074b33–35, another famous passage where Aristotle describes the first mover as thought thinking itself. A long tradition of interpreters and commentators, both ancient and medieval, discussed whether Aristotle held that the actualization of the potential intellect came from an external intellect—be it God (as Alexander thought) or another kind of separate intellect (as was the case for Islamic philosophers such as al-Farabi, Avicenna, and Averroes), or whether Aristotle was referring to two aspects within a single human intellect (as Thomas Aquinas held, for instance).As its title indicates, Ogden’s book focuses on Averroes, a Muslim philosopher who proposed one of the most puzzling interpretations of the Aristotelian doctrine of the intellect. It is puzzling, perhaps false, and even absurd, because it holds that “the intellect that understands intelligible concepts is a single, separate, eternal substance shared by [End Page 659] all humanity”(1). Strange as it may seem, this position—which Ogden calls the “unicity thesis” (1)—was among the most debated in the Jewish and Christian traditions throughout the medieval period and the Renaissance. But beyond detailing the mere reception and historical assimilation of Averroes’s doctrine, Ogden takes on the task of arguing for its philosophical coherence. It is not a simple task. One might think that, rather than helping to clarify Aristotle’s theory, Averroes made it more complicated. If it is already difficult to understand the Aristotelian definition of the active intellect and to decide whether it is a separate intellect or part of the soul, Averroes seems to make things worse by arguing that the active or agent intellect (in Latin, intellectus agens or intelligentia agens; in Arabic, ‘aql al-fa“āl) and the so-called material or possible intellect (intellectus materialis; ‘aql hayūlānī) are both single, separate, and eternal intellects.As is well known, and as Ogden himself explains, Thomas Aquinas criticized the idea of two separate intellects (passive and active) and provided an account that is in principle satisfactory, according to which the two intellects are intellectual powers of each person’s soul. There is an enormous amount of scholarly literature evaluating the merits of Thomas Aquinas’s refutation of Averroes and his followers. But as Ogden notices, few scholars— among them, Richard C. Taylor, Jean-Baptiste Brenet, Deborah Black, and Josep Puig—have pointed out that the two philosophers begin their discussions with different assumptions. In my view, one of the greatest merits of Ogden’s book is that, as far as I... (shrink)

As for Avicenna the human soul is a complete substance which does not inhere in the body nor is imprinted in it, asserting its survival after the death of the body seems easy. Yet, he needs the body to explain its individuation. The paper analyzes Avicenna's arguments in the De anima sections, V, 3 & 4, of the Shifā ' in order to explore the exact causal relation there is between the human soul and its body and confronts these arguments (...) with relevant passages in the Metaphysics. It argues that the causal relation between body and soul remains obscure and that, though Avicenna claims that there is a personal immortality and that the disembodied soul remains individuated, he does not provide a satisfactory ontological account for it. (shrink)

Descartes held that the human mind or soul is indivisible, unlike body. In this paper I argue that his treatment of this feature of the soul is intimately connected to his engagement with Aristotelian scholasticism. I discuss two strands in Descartes. There is a long tradition of arguing for the immortality of the human soul on the basis of this view. Descartes did use this view in defense of dualism, but I argue that he held that the soul’s (...) class='Hi'>immortality should be established rather on the basis of its status as a substance. This line of thought, I contend, is connected to his rejection of (most) Aristotelian substantial forms. Furthermore, the indivisibility of the human soul emerges repeatedly in connection to the union and interaction of mind and body in ways that connect to Aristotelian scholastic treatments of these issues. (shrink)

In this paper, I show that Aristophanes’s speech in Plato’s Symposium is tied into an interesting and hitherto unexplored web of ideas in Plato’s ethics and psychology. The poet’s analysis of erōs as ‘leading us to what “belongs” (the oikeion)’ (193d2) and as ‘restoring us in our “original nature” (archaia phusis)’ (193d4) is not a mere negative contribution that renders him a ‘target for Diotima’s fire’ (Dover). Rather, he unwittingly communicates central ethical and psychological ideas which we find developed in (...) key passages of Plato’s dialogues. What is interesting is that Diotima in a curious passage seems to dismiss his contribution of the oikeion as unrelated to our good (agathon) and irrelevant to the analysis of desire (205d10–206a1). I argue that this interpretation of Diotima’s response to Aristophanes, which would render her position an ethical anomaly in Plato’s dialogues, should be rejected. Instead, it is more plausible to read her response as proposing a revisionary conception of the oikeion, relying on the idea that our agathon is our true oikeion. In addition, I tentatively suggest that the theory of psychic pregnancy may be seen as presenting the agathon of wisdom of virtue produced in the ascent as an oikeion. Just as fascinating as Diotima’s stance on the oikeion is the question how her teachings relate to the concept of an archaia phusis of the soul. The idea that the soul’s self-perfection constitutes a return to a temporally prior condition of excellence, which in two places other than the Symposium (Republic X, Timaeus) is called the ‘archaia phusis’, is pervasive and centrally important to Plato’s psychology. I address the question whether Diotima’s ascent passage constitutes a psychological anomaly in portraying self-perfection as unrelated to the concept of the archaia phusis. I argue that an answer to this depends on the stance we take on the Symposium’s position regarding the immortality of the soul. While a reading that posits a rejection of immortality in the Symposium must indeed deny a role for the concept in Diotima’s speech, I show that a reading allowing for immortality as a theoretical commitment in the background has an interesting interpretative option: along with Timaeus 90d5, it may fruitfully interpret the ascent as an ordering of the soul ‘in accordance with its archaia phusis’. (shrink)

Many Enlightenment freethinkers undermined the immortality of the soul by declaring that it could not be demonstrated by philosophy, and that its origins were inseparable from ancient superstition. Historians have argued that the key masterminds behind this particular historical-critical attack were the deists Charles Blount and John Toland. However, overemphasis on deist critiques has fostered the idea that it was rare to write about the history of the soul in the seventeenth century. In reality, historical accounts of the immortal (...) soul were ubiquitous in this period. These histories included all the elements in deist histories that scholars have since deemed dangerous. I argue that writing a history of pagan belief in the soul was therefore not an intrinsically subversive move. Instead, Blount and Toland’s histories reworked narratives already available in mainstream scholarship on ancient paganism. It has now become common to argue that anticlerical arguments were forged in orthodox erudition. But if deists were not saying anything different to their contemporaries, why did their work raise such an outcry? I contend that their radical characters, the broader context of their respective oeuvres, and the circumstances in which their works circulated played a critical role in their reception. (shrink)

In the preceding pages, Husserl's objections to the content of Descartes'Meditations on First Philosophy have been reconstructed over the line ofargument in that work. The tone of his interpretation moved from ambivalence to outfight rejection. Husserl's ambivalence manifested itself intwo of the three meditations to which he pays significant attention. We sawthe much heralded methodological strategy of the First Meditation, uponclose examination, is not endorsed by Husserl, that he finds reason toprotest against the content of each individual skeptical argument (...) and seesthere in general a subjectivistic doctrine of consciousness already at work.Nevertheless, Husserl clearly wanted to preserve the essential intent of theCartesian method of doubt if not its letter, namely, the move toward callinginto question naive presuppositions about the world, raising the possibilityof its non-existence, thereby resuscitating sheer wonder about the world,and rendering it problematic in its relation to subjectivity. Historically, thisstrategy has precedent in the ancient Greek sophists, who, however unintentionally, Husserl claims were the first to manifest a transcendental im-pulse. Moving into the Second Meditation and the so-called discovery ofthe ego cogito, we found a stronger ambivalence on Husserl's part. Whileapplauding Descartes for uncovering the truth that lay hidden at the basis ofskepticism, the subsequent interpretation of the ego as soul and substantialentity clouds this inchoative insight into pure transcendental subjectivity.By the Third Meditation Husserl's ambivalence moved to out right rejection. There are a number of reasons why: the circularity of Descartes'theological theory of evidence ; the epistemologicalcommitment to a subjectivistic theory of consciousness; hisScheinprobleme along with the assumption of an objectivein-itself forever remote from intuition; the ontological commitment to twofinite substances; and the attempt to deductively redress the cognitiveschism created by these commitments through appeal to the principle ofcausality and the goodness of God. All these gave Husserl decisive occa-sion to take leave of the Cartesian path of meditation.A further reason why Husserl's meditations consistently break off in theThird Meditation is suggested by noticing the textual moment whereHusserl's silence begins. It is that moment where Descartes dips into theScholastic tradition for the concepts of objective and formal reality in orderto prove the existence of God. The problem, I suggest, is that here Des-cartes insufferably compromises his radicalness. More specifically, with theconcepts of objective and formal reality Descartes installs on the metaphysi-cal level the distinction between image and original already operative allalong in the earlier Meditations. Now, through the concepts of objective andformal reality, the image /original distinction is given ex-planatory power and raised to a truth so evident as to be beyond the reach ofmethodic doubt. The fact that this distinction is employed to deduce theexistence of God is not so much the phenomenological offense as themetaphysical naivete of positing a formal reality, an in itself, to account forthe very matters in question. (shrink)

Since the publication of the edition of John Blund's Tractatus de anima by the British Academy in 1970 there has been widespread acceptance of the importance of this text for the history of thought. Blund (ca. 1175-1248) was probably one of the first commentators on the libri naturales at Paris before the prohibition of 1210, and later introduced them to Oxford. Indeed, apart from the prohibitions of 1210 and 1215, the De anima of Blund is the one text which sheds (...) light on the first reception of Aristotle at Paris. The text was probably composed at Paris, before 1204. Blund taught arts at Paris ca. 1200-1205, then at Oxford towards 1207-1209. He returned to study theology at Paris during the interdict (1208-1214) and the contemporaneous suspension of the schools at Oxford (1209-1214). He was regent in theology at Paris for twelve years, and taught theology at Oxford after 1229. With the Tractatus a whole area of philosophical speculation--namely Greek and Arabic psychology--arrived at Oxford, where it would continue to grow and be debated throughout the century. Blund did not know Averroes but he reflects the state of Latin Aristotelianism during the first third of the thirteenth century. Like his contemporaries Blund regarded the De anima of Avicenna as a commentary on Aristotle; indeed they found it clearer than the text of Aristotle and were guided by it. Blund is faithful to Aristotle and to Avicenna, rejecting, for example, the binarium famosissimum drawn from the Fons vitae of Avicebron. In expounding the doctrine of Aristotle and following the plan laid out by Avicenna, he considers the arguments for and against before offering his own reasoned position in the solutio. He defends the role of the philosopher as considering the nature of the soul and as distinct from theological considerations. This new English translation makes available this important text to a wider audience of scholars interested in philosophy, theology, medieval history and the history of science and psychology. Students who are learning medieval Latin will be able to follow the original Latin with the help of the parallel translation and text notes. (shrink)

In On my own opinions, Galen claims to agree with Aristotle that the soul is the form of the body. But should we take this statement at face value? After all, Galen says that the substance of the soul is a bodily mixture, and that the soul is the form of the body in the sense that it is the principle of mixing of the elementary qualities (i.e., hot, cold, wet, and dry). As is well known, Aristotle explicitly rejects this (...) sort of materialist account of the soul. In De Anima, he tells us that the soul cannot be a harmonia of bodily elements, understood either as the proportion according to which the elements are mixed, or as the mixtures themselves (I.4, 407b32-408a2). In this chapter, I argue that Galen rejects a substantive version of hylomorphism, in favor of a view according to which the soul’s substance is nothing other than a bodily mixture. Galen’s position contains a veiled objection to some central Aristotelian views and reveals a general suspicion regarding the Aristotelian notion of form as a genuine metaphysical and explanatory category. (shrink)

In examining Ennead VI 4[22], we find Plotinus in conflict with modern, i.e., Cartesian or Kantian, assumptions about the relation of soul and body and the identification of the self with the subject. Curiously, his images and exposition are more in tune with Twentieth Century notions such as wave and field. With these as keys, we are in a position to unlock the subtlety of Plotinus' analysis of the way soul and body are present together, with sensation structured through (...) the body and judgment coming from the soul. The problem of the self concerns not only the unity of the self in terms of body and soul, but also how the self is constituted in relation to other selves, both keeping its individuality and sharing its experiences at the same time. (shrink)

The limitation of act by potency, central in the metaphysics of Thom as Aquinas, has its origins in Plotinus. He transforms Aristotle ’s horizontal causality of change into a vertical causality of participation. Potency and infinity are not just un intelligible lack of limit, but productive power. Form determines matter but is limited by recepti on into matter. The experience of unity begins with sensible things, which always have parts, so what is really one is incorporeal, without division and separation. (...) Unity is like the esse of Thomas, since it is the act that makes a thing what it is and has its fullness in God. (shrink)

'Those most capable of being moved by passion are those capable of tasting the most sweetness in this life.'Descartes is most often thought of as introducing a total separation of mind and body. But he also acknowledged the intimate union between them, and in his later writings he concentrated on understanding this aspect of human nature. The Passions of the Soul is his greatest contribution to this debate. It contains a profound discussion of the workings of the emotions and of (...) their place in human life - a subject that increasingly engages the interest of philosophers and intellectual and cultural historians. It also sets out a view of ethics that has been seen as a radical reorientation of moral philosophy.This volume also includes both sides of the correspondence with Princess Elisabeth of Bohemia, one of Descartes's keenest disciples and shrewdest critics, which played a crucial role in the genesis of The Passions, as well as the first part of The Principles of Philosophy, which sets out the key positions of Descartes's philosophical system.ABOUT THE SERIES: For over 100 years Oxford World's Classics has made available the widest range of literature from around the globe. Each affordable volume reflects Oxford's commitment to scholarship, providing the most accurate text plus a wealth of other valuable features, including expert introductions by leading authorities, helpful notes to clarify the text, up-to-date bibliographies for further study, and much more. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:Philosophical Perspectives on Galen of Pergamum. Four Case-Studies on Human Nature and the Relation between Body and Soul by Robert VinkesteijnJulien DevinantVINKESTEIJN, Robert. Philosophical Perspectives on Galen of Pergamum. Four Case-Studies on Human Nature and the Relation between Body and Soul. Leiden: Brill, 2022. viii + 357 pp. Cloth, $155.00Vinkesteijn's book, stemming from his 2020 dissertation at Utrecht University, explores Galen's views on (human) nature and the soul. (...) Opting to sidestep the debate on the unity of Galen's thought, he offers a series of close readings of some of Galen's most philosophical writings, radiating from the short treatise The Capacities of the Soul Follow the Mixtures of the Body (QAM), which encapsulates the questions he investigates throughout the book. Although many of the texts and themes examined have been extensively discussed in previous scholarship, its strength lies in its steadfast and coherent defense of a long-favored interpretation of Galen as "somatizing the soul."Case Study 1 revisits QAM, which has sparked considerable debate in Galenic studies. It defends the idea, recently criticized, that despite Galen's agnostic statements about the substance of the soul elsewhere, he supports here the physicalist and more speculative thesis that the whole soul is indeed identical to the specific mixture of elemental qualities in the homoeomerous parts of the main psychic organs. Vinkesteijn maintains that this thesis aligns with Galen's general physiology, and that Galen's analysis of the soul as a formal aspect in a hylomorphic whole represents not an exegetical stance on Aristotelian positions but his own viewpoint, applicable to both the nonrational and rational parts. The study then rightly emphasizes Galen's conviction that our actions and affections can and should be modified by habituation. It argues that there is no basis for assuming that the identity thesis leads to a radically deterministic ethic. Indeed, it showcases the possibility of a second formation of our bodily mixture, with Galen attributing to the rational part of the soul a godlike potential for change and improvement of the soul's virtues—although it concedes the unlikelihood of such personal enhancement, as it hinges on rare natural predispositions.Case Study 2 focuses on Galen's definition of nature and his elemental theory; it focuses on the first book of Galen's Commentary on Hippocrates's On the Nature of Man (HNH) and examines the notable absence of the soul as an explanatory factor in an account of human nature. It argues that Galen articulates a concept of nature as a primary hylomorphic substance, shared by all beings subject to generation and decay and determining their secondary properties. The study then [End Page 557] examines Galen's use of his allegedly Hippocratic/Platonic method of division to dissect nature into its constantly interacting elemental powers of heating, cooling, moistening, and drying. Vinkesteijn then underscores the complexities in delineating mixtures from nature as an intelligent creator, challenging the dichotomy between a transcendent and an immanent formation of natural beings and pinpointing the difficulty in differentiating between the causality of nature and that of the soul in humans.Case Study 3 explores Galen's engagement with Plato's Timaeus, focusing on the soul–body relationship. It drives home the argument of the first study and aims to show how the fragments of Galen's lost Commentary on the Timaeus offer a somatizing interpretation of the soul. Extensively drawing on the disputed but recently reassessed Larrain fragments, it convincingly argues that they align with passages from Galen's attested works. Vinkesteijn highlights Galen's creative reading of the Timaeus, tailored to mirror his own doctrines. Beyond incorporating Aristotelian notions into his analysis, Galen is depicted as ingeniously reinterpreting the Platonic soul–body distinction. Notably, Vinkesteijn shows how Galen takes the river metaphor literally, as an indication of moisture abundance, and applies it beyond its original context of generation. This approach enables Galen to reinterpret Plato's ideas through the prism of elemental qualities and emphasize the association of the soul with lightlike or dry and hot substances, bridging the gap between the Platonic concept of the soul and Galen's physiological understanding of human nature.Case... (shrink)

Any study of the 'Scientific Revolution' and particularly Descartes' role in the debates surrounding the conception of nature (atoms and the void v. plenum theory, the role of mathematics and experiment in natural knowledge, the status and derivation of the laws of nature, the eternality and necessity of eternal truths, etc.) should be placed in the philosophical, scientific, theological, and sociological context of its time. Seventeenth-century debates concerning the nature of the eternal truths such as '2 + 2 = 4' (...) or the law of inertia turn on the question of whether these truths were created along with nature, or were uncreated and subsisting in God's mind. One's answer to that question has direct consequences for conceptions of the necessity/contingency of mathematical and natural knowledge, how knowledge of such truths is accomplished by humans, and what grounds these truths. In this paper, I review the positions of four successors to Descartes' philosophy on the question of the eternal truths to illustrate how in specific ways that question with its theological, metaphysical, modal, and epistemological dimensions concerned the objectivity and certainty of the discoveries of the new science. Author Recommends: Clarke, Desmond. Descartes' Philosophy of Science . University Park, Penn State Press, 1982. This work provides an account of Descartes as a practicing scientist whose rationalism is mitigated by reliance on experiment and experience. Author re-examines Descartes' philosophical and scientific works in this new light. Dear, Peter. Revolutionizing the Sciences: European Knowledge and its Ambitions, 1500–1700 . Princeton, Princeton University Press, 2001. This work provides a useful overview of the issues and thinkers of the Scientific Revolution. Of particular relevance is chapter 8 on Cartesian and Newtonian science. Funkenstein, Amos. Theology and the Scientific Imagination from the Middle Ages to the Seventeenth Century . Princeton, Princeton University Press, 1986. This work is an advanced study of the theological and metaphysical foundations of early modern science. Discussions include questions of God's nature, God's knowledge in relation to human knowledge, providence, the laws of nature, and the truths of mathematics. In particular, chapter 3 discusses Descartes' account of the eternal truths and divine omnipotence. Garber, Daniel. Descartes' Metaphysical Physics . Chicago, University of Chicago Press, 1992. This work examines how Descartes' metaphysical doctrines of God, soul, and body set the groundwork for his physics. It includes a study of God and the grounds for the laws of physics (chapter 9). Henry, John. The Scientific Revolution and the Origins of Modern Science . 3rd ed. New York, Palgrave, Macmillan Press, 2008. This work provides a brief, general, and informative overview of the Scientific Revolution, including the themes of method, magic, religion, and culture. Osler, Margaret J. Divine Will and the Mechanical Philosophy: Gassendi and Descartes on Contingency and Necessity in the Created World . Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1994. This work is an examination and comparison of the mechanical philosophies of Gassendi and Descartes. It offers in-depth discussion of the issue of voluntarism and intellectualism in the period and how that related to conceptions of laws of nature and the eternal truths. Shapin, Steven. The Scientific Revolution . Chicago, University of Chicago Press, 1996. This work provides a critical synthesis of as well as a guide to recent scholarship in the history of science for a general readership. Online Materials Dr. Robert A. Hatch's Scientific Revolution Website: http://web.clas.ufl.edu/users/rhatch/pages/03-Sci-Rev/SCI-REV-Home/ A compendium of resources for the study of Scientific Revolution. Early English Books Online: http://eebo.chadwyck.com/home Early English Books Online (EEBO) contains digital facsimile page images of virtually every work printed in England, Ireland, Scotland, Wales and British North America and works in English printed elsewhere from 1473 to 1700. Early Modern Resources: http://www.earlymodernweb.org.uk/emr/ Early Modern Resources is a gateway for all those interested in finding electronic resources relating to the early modern period in history. Gallica, the Digital Library of the Bibliothèque Nationale de France: http://gallica.bnf.fr/ An ever-growing digital library which includes numerous primary and secondary texts of relevance to Descartes and his role in Scientific Revolution. Hatfield, Gary, 'René Descartes', The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. Spring 2009 ed. Ed. Edward N. Zalta; URL: http://plato.stanford.edu/archives/spr2009/entries/descartes/ Slowik, Edward, 'Descartes' Physics', The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. Winter 2008 ed. Ed. Edward N. Zalta; URL: http://plato.stanford.edu/archives/win2008/entries/descartes-physics/ Syllabus Sample Syllabus: Cartesian Science The following is five weeks covering Cartesian Science in a course on Descartes or the Scientific Revolution, or 17th-century theories of matter, or related themes on early modern truth and method, especially on the continent. This material is best suited to a graduate level audience, but it could be modified to suit an upper-division undergraduate course, as the readings are basically primary texts whose context and background can be explained in lectures. Week 1: Cartesian Revolution in France • Scientific method • Role of mathematics and experiment • Certainty of scientific knowledge Readings: Hatfield, Gary, 'René Descartes', The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. Spring 2009 ed. Ed. Edward N. Zalta; URL: http://plato.stanford.edu/archives/spr2009/entries/descartes/ Descartes, Discourse on Method , Parts 1–3 Descartes, Meditations on First Philosophy , First Meditation. Week 2: Descartes' Scientific Treatises • Mechanization and mathematization of nature • Primary–secondary quality distinction Readings: Discourse on Method, Parts 4–6 Selections from Descartes' Scientific Essays: The World or Treatise on Light (ATXI 3–48); Treatise on Man (ATXI 119–202); Optics (ATVI 82–147). Slowik, Edward, 'Descartes' Physics', The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. Winter 2008 ed. Ed. Edward N. Zalta; URL: http://plato.stanford.edu/archives/win2008/entries/descartes-physics/ Henry, John, 'The Mechanical Philosophy,' chapter 5. The Scientific Revolution and the Origins of Modern Science . 3rd ed. Macmillan, 2008. Week 3: Descartes' Theory of Nature • Descartes' derivation of the law of conservation and the three laws of motion • God's role in the metaphysics and physics of nature Readings: Selections from Principles of Philosophy, Preface (all); Letter to Elizabeth; Part I: 1–8; Part II: 1–45, 55, 64; Part III: 1–4, 15–19, 45–47; Part IV: 187–207. John Henry, 'Religion and Science,' chapter 6. The Scientific Revolution and the Origins of Modern Science . 3rd ed. Macmillan, 2008. Week 4: Post-1650 Cartesian Science: Necessity and Contingency in Nature • Debates on God, Creation, and Causes Readings: Easton, Patricia, 'What is at Stake in the Cartesian Debates on the Eternal Truths?' Philosophy Compass 4.2 (2009): 348–62. Malebranche, Nicolas, 'Elucidation 10', from The Search after Truth (1674). Note: All selections available in Nicolas Malebranche (1992). Philosophical Selections , edited by S. Nadler, Hackett. Gottfried Leibniz (1714) Monadology . Week 5: Causes in Nature and Morals • Theodicy as an explanation of defect and evil in a lawful universe: Malebranche v. Leibniz Readings: Nicolas Malebranche, Elucidation XVI (on occasionalism), and Treatise on Nature and Grace, Discourse One, Part 1. Gottfried Leibniz (1706), Theodicy. Focus Questions Weekly questions can be used to focus the readings. This can be done in a web or e-mail discussion thread, as a weekly assignment, or for in class discussion. I require students to post a short paragraph in response to the question or some posting by a classmate on the question. Students are required to post by 10 a.m. the day before we meet for class on a course website. Week 1: According to Descartes, what role does skepticism play in scientific reasoning? Week 2: Comment on the following: 'But I am supposing this machine to be made by the hands of God, and so I think you may reasonably think it capable of a greater variety of movements than I could possibly imagine in it, and of exhibiting more artistry than I could possibly ascribe to it' [ Treatise on Man ; ATXI 120]. Week 3: What is Descartes' conception of the relation between the metaphysics and physics of nature? Week 4: Critically discuss the positions of Descartes, Malebranche, and Leibniz on what provides the foundation for the certitude of natural knowledge? Week 5: Explain why both Malebranche and Leibniz consider moral sin to be analogous to natural defect? Seminar/Project Idea Hold a debate on the question of the status of the eternal truths. The proposition will be Descartes' position: 'Eternal truths must be both created and necessary if certainty in science is to be possible'. Format: 1. At the beginning of the 5-week module, students will be assigned to one of three roles: Team A, Team B, and judge's panel. Students will be given the debate proposition, but will not be told which team will take the affirmative and which team the negative until the time of the debate. 2. Recommend a variation on the Classic Debate Format to encourage the development of argument: sequence begins with affirmative construction (8 minutes), negative construction (8 minutes), second affirmative construction (8 minutes), second negative construction (8 minutes), first negative rebuttal (4 minutes), first affirmative rebuttal (4 minutes), final negative rebuttal (4 minutes) and final affirmative rebuttal (4 minutes). 3. Judges Panel: will consist of 3–4 judges who will assess the performance of Teams A and B. Judgment should be based on the persuasiveness of the team position. 4. Debate will be held at the end of the fifth week, or semester, whichever makes most sense given the course length and structure. Acknowledgements The author gratefully acknowledges the immensely helpful comments and suggestions by the participants in her graduate seminar on the Scientific Revolution: Benjamin Chicka, Sarah Jacques-Ross, Richard Ross, Marcella Stockstill, and Zohra Wolters. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:The Ever-Moving Soul in Plato's PhaedrusDougal BlythThe proof of the immortality of the soul at Phdr. 245c5-246a2 is unique in the dialogue for its apparent philosophical rigour and technical style, and it is peculiar in its rhetorical and mythical context.1 It is introduced as the first stage of Socrates' palinode, exhorting Phaedrus to give himself to a true lover rather than a non-lover. On this basis the philosopher (...) will then describe the course of true love (erōs) as the attempt of an older man to lead the soul of a younger whom he loves, along with his own soul, up and back to the original immortal condition of the "winged" soul which contemplates true being (246a-257b).As the groundwork upon which this vision is built the proof of the immortality of the soul deserves close study, not only of its argument, but also its rhetorical achievement and relation to the subsequent myth. It might be a parody or imitation of a Pythagorean proof, but the definition of soul and the role that plays in the implied theory appear original to Plato.2 Nevertheless, the importation of a fragment of some more extensive physical theory into a speech on love is surprising, and demands explanation.3 My procedure here involves the recovery of significant features [End Page 185] of the theory, firstly by reference to the myth, secondly by comparison with other dialogues containing related concepts and positions, and finally and most importantly by extended analysis of the physical and cosmological postulates of the argument itself.4 It should then emerge from my attention to the stages of its presentation that, as might be expected in its epideictic context, the statement of the proof involves significant rhetorical finesse. It both establishes the credibility of the subsequent myth, and, with its cosmic sweep, prepares the listener for the profundity of the latter. Moreover the proof is written so as itself to provoke that philosophical erōs for understanding which the myth then describes.I. To begin, we need some idea of what soul the proof is concerned with. The three possible meanings of the ambiguous phrase (245a5) are (i) every individual soul, (ii) one comprehensive world soul, or (iii) some common aspect of all living things, which, despite the mortality of psychophysical individuals, would be immortal in itself.5 The plurality of separate individual souls [i.e., sense (i)] is excluded by the requirements of the proof (see below), that "all soul" be one unique source of cosmic motion. No specific doctrine of a world soul [i.e., sense (ii)] is expressly stated in the Phaedrus; I shall in fact argue that the world soul is signified by the gods' chariots in the following myth, but in that case this cannot be equivalent to "all soul," since immortal souls (or fragments of soul as such) are described as entering into human and animal bodies, whereas the gods do not (248c-249d). This seems sufficient grounds to understand "all soul" as (iii)-one common soul in which we all participate insofar as we are alive; thus Plato writes "all soul cares for what is soulless (i.e., body), and travels round the whole world ('all [End Page 186] heaven', ) coming to be in different forms at different times" (246b6-7).Since the identity of the subject concerned in the proof of the immortality of "all soul" receives its only clarification subsequently in the course of the following myth, before turning to a detailed consideration of the argument I shall first survey the implications of the myth for the cosmological status of immortal soul. It is represented here as a chariot rising up to the sphere of the fixed stars, where each lesser soul follows in the train of its appointed god; and by passing beyond the outermost edge of the visible universe, insofar as it is capable, the soul studies the forms beyond, the truly divine, by proximity to which even gods are divine (249c6). Gods are thus, in this dialogue, paradigms of that divine soul which is said to circumnavigate the cosmos in governing it (246b7-c2, e5-6) and soul has its... (shrink)

This paper presents and discusses Samuel Colliberʼs theory of the soul in its philosophical and theological setting. His reflections on the soul have not been studied methodically, but, as I hope to show, they deserve more attention for at least two reasons. First, Colliber appropriates a set of terms, concepts and views from Lockeʼs Essay, but he modifies them for the sake of his own scheme in historically interesting ways. He provides a closed list of cognitive acts or operations, claiming (...) that they are all modes of sensation or perception proceeding from a single unitary faculty. He contends that some of these operations depend on the body while others, most notably internal sensation, do not. Second, Colliber applies this account to the post-mortal states of the soul in a systematic manner. He argues for the distinction and separability of soul and body and gives a fairly detailed description of the capabilities and operations of the soul in its separate state. At the same time, he distances himself from the Cartesian view that the soul is an immaterial substance whose essence excludes everything corporeal. He holds that the natures of soul and body are different but not completely disparate. (shrink)

Fan Zhen’s 范縝 Shenmielun 神滅論 is a famous Chinese treatise discussing the body-soul problem. This discussion had been advocated by Huan Tan 桓譚 and Wang Chong 王充. However, their views did not receive positive attention: at the beginning of the Eastern Han dynasty, their intellectual weight was far from significant enough to spur the court’s interest in the topic. During the time of Fan Zhen, Emperor Wu of Liang, a keen protector of the thought of dharma, raised the question of (...) the soul and the body to a political level, making it the focus of academic debate. The aim of this article is to give a comprehensive account on the development of the idea of the nonidentity and inseparability of the body and the soul as promulgated by Fan Zhen and his predecessors from the perspective of the history of ideas. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:The Princess and the Philosopher: Letters of Elisabeth of the Palatine to Rene DescartesRichard A. WatsonAndrea Nye. The Princess and the Philosopher: Letters of Elisabeth of the Palatine to Rene Descartes. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 1999. Pp. xiii + 187. Cloth, $57.95. Paper, $18.95.Princess Elisabeth was an acute, persistent critic of Descartes's philosophy. Because he liked her and she was a princess, Descartes did not dismiss (...) her criticisms as he did those of Gassendi and Hobbes. How can an immaterial mind interact with a material body? How can God determine all our actions and yet give us free will? Elisabeth was dissatisfied with Descartes's answer that an all-powerful God can do anything even if we cannot understand how.Andrea Nye analyzes the correspondence between Elisabeth and Descartes to support the thesis that Elisabeth developed and defended a worldly philosophy of life in opposition to the unworldly rules Descartes offered for living a tranquil and happy life. Descartes said she should focus on the separation of the mind from the body to avoid disturbing the intellect with sensory matters. Think positively about such nice things as birds and flowers and not of bad things that happen to one. Descartes told Elisabeth that "there are no events so dreadful, nor so absolutely bad in the judgments of people, that a person of spirit cannot look on them with a bias that makes them appear favorable" (48). If we do our best to find out the right course of action and act accordingly, then even if the results are bad, we have no reason for remorse or recrimination, but can be happy that we have done the best we can. Descartes even says that a person who follows his rules can view everything that happens to him, even the worst, as though these events were taking place in a theatre, for in the end they do not impinge upon the ultimate happiness of one's immortal soul.Elisabeth, earnestly. sardonically, and sometimes with annoyance responds that this is perhaps possible for a single man of independent means with few civil and personal relationships, but for someone engaged in family affairs, royal politics, and social interaction with other human beings, Descartes's philosophy of life is both impossible and wrong. One never knows what is best; even if one did know, it is difficult to carry it out; and finally, if the results are bad, then one is after all responsible. One would be inhuman to deny fault, monstrous to deny moral responsibility. Above all, Elisabeth says, one should not view one's own life as theatre. One must be responsible for oneself and others.Nye casts this as a difference between Descartes's abstract and Elisabeth's particularist approaches to life, but also as a contrast between those who can live a disengaged life and those who cannot. Some of the amusement in Nye's perceptive discussions comes from her showing how Descartes's passions often run away with him, and how Elisabeth gently turns his own rules back onto him. [End Page 277]Nye's analyses of the correspondence are excellent, but she makes some mistakes about the lives of Descartes and Elisabeth. Nye explains Descartes's coolness by his having suffered from a "motherless infancy" (129), even speaking of "the mother's milk denied him as a child" and calling him an "orphan" (156), which he was not. His mother died thirteen months after his birth, but he had a wet nurse. Descartes may never have tasted his own mother's milk, but he was never deprived of nursing. Children were often sent to live with wet nurses for as long as four years, although Descartes is traditionally said to have been raised by his grandmother. In any event, such psychoanalyzing is off the mark.Nye also says that Descartes was asked by Queen Christina to write a ballet. She cites the wrong ballet and attributes a verse from the right ballet incorrectly, but beyond that, there is no evidence either that Descartes wrote verses for a ballet or that Christina asked him to.Then Nye speaks of Descartes's daughter Francine... (shrink)

In examining Ennead VI 4[22], we find Plotinus in conflict with modern, i.e., Cartesian or Kantian, assumptions about the relation of soul and body and the identification of the self with the subject. Curiously, his images and exposition are more in tune with Twentieth Century notions such as wave and field. With these as keys, we are in a position to unlock the subtlety of Plotinus' analysis of the way soul and body are present together, with sensation structured through (...) the body and judgment coming from the soul. The problem of the self concerns not only the unity of the self in terms of body and soul, but also how the self is constituted in relation to other selves, both keeping its individuality and sharing its experiences at the same time. (shrink)

In the Critique of Pure Reason, Kant famously criticizes traditional metaphysics and its proofs of immortality, free will and God's existence. What is often overlooked is that Kant also explains why rational beings must ask metaphysical questions about 'unconditioned' objects such as souls, uncaused causes or God, and why answers to these questions will appear rationally compelling to them. In this book, Marcus Willaschek reconstructs and defends Kant's account of the rational sources of metaphysics. After carefully explaining Kant's conceptions (...) of reason and metaphysics, he offers detailed interpretations of the relevant passages from the Critique of Pure Reason in which Kant explains why reason seeks 'the unconditioned'. Willaschek offers a novel interpretation of the Transcendental Dialectic, pointing up its 'positive' side, while at the same time it uncovers a highly original account of metaphysical thinking that will be relevant to contemporary philosophical debates. (shrink)

Peter Lombard’s Sentences, book I, distinction 8 offers the starting point for the late medieval and Renaissance debate on the question of whether the soul is as a whole present in the whole body and in each of its parts. This paper summarizes the prehistory of Lombard’s theory that the soul is everywhere in the entire body, and analyzes the positions of two “Platonic” scholastics, the late-thirteenth-century Dominican John Quidort and the early-sixteenth-century Augustinian Giles of Viterbo.

This article comments on a paper titled ‘Technique et eschatologie: le devenir des objets techniques’ that Gilbert Simondon presented in 1972. For Simondon, eschatology consists of a basic presupposition, which is the duality between the immortal soul and the corruptible body. The eschatology of technical objects can be seen as the object’s becoming against time. Simondon suggests that in the epoch of artisans, the product through its perfection searches for the ‘immortality of his producer’, while in the industrial epoch (...) standardization becomes the key mover, in the sense that different parts of the object can be replaced. This analysis of Simondon on the relation between technics and eschatology allows a speculation on the soul of technical objects by tracing his earlier works. This conception of the soul, as this article tries to show, allows Simondon to address the alienation of technical objects in juxtaposition to a Marxist critique of alienation. (shrink)

HOME . ABOUT US . CONTACT US HELP . PUBLISH WITH US . LIBRARIANS Search in or Explore Browse Publications A-Z Browse Subjects A-Z Advanced Search University of Cambridge SIGN IN Register | Why Register? | Sign Out | Got a Voucher? prev abstract next Two Approaches to Reading the Historical Descartes A Devout Catholic? Knowledge of The Mental Thought and Language Descartes as A Natural Philosopher Substance Dualism Notes Two Approaches to Reading the Historical Descartes Author: Desmond M. Clarke (...) DOI: 10.1080/09608780902986680 Publication Frequency: 5 issues per year Published in: British Journal for the History of Philosophy, Volume 17, Issue 3 June 2009 , pages 601 - 616 John Cottingham: Cartesian Reflections: Essays on Descartes's Philosophy (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008) 40.00 (hb.). ISBN 978-0-19-922697-9 John Cottingham, in a new collection of essays, asks the question: 'what exactly did Descartes himself chiefly take himself to be doing?' (254). 1 While the question is relatively clear, and while it acknowledges implicitly that Descartes was probably doing a range of different things, the answer that is apparently proposed here emerges only on reading the whole collection. Cottingham distinguishes in Chapter 1 - which is a new, synoptic overview of what is discussed in the other chapters, all of which were previously published - between two approaches to reading Descartes. One is to see him as 'a dummy on which to drape various suspect doctrines (such as “Cartesian dualism”)' (3), which contemporary analytic philosophers have shown to be radically mistaken. Another approach is adopted by historians of ideas 'who make it their life's work to pay meticulous scholarly attention to the philosophical works of past ages' (3). Cottingham does not explicitly criticize either of these approaches, but he hints at situating his own as some kind of Aristotelian middle course between the two. Since the two reference points are dangerously close to straw men or what Cottingham calls 'extreme positions', the proposed middle way may simply combine elements of two approaches, each of which is entirely legitimate. I return to this question at the conclusion. In fact, many of these essays were intended to show (rightly!) that Descartes never held the philosophical positions that are often attributed to him. The interpretation of Karol Wojtyla, later Pope John Paul II, provides a good example of how mistaken one can be: The Cogito ergo sum radically changed the way of doing philosophy … After Descartes, philosophy became a science of pure thought: all that is being- the created world, and even the Creator, is situated within the ambit of the Cogito, as contents of human consciousness. Philosophy is concerned with beings as contained in consciousness, and not as existing independently of it. (257) The only way to address such a caricature is to refer back to what Descartes actually wrote. Cottingham does precisely that, often quoting the original Latin or French texts. However, having shown successfully, by a close reading of the texts, that Descartes did not hold many of the views that are attributed to him, it still remains to say what Descartes did hold or teach about various philosophical problems that retain their perennial interest for us. This is how the question arises, intermittently, about what Descartes thought he was 'chiefly' doing, or what was his primary objective, in the course of an intellectual career that spanned three decades. However, the apparently legitimate desire to bring Descartes' intellectual endeavours into sharp focus may be frustrated by the evidence. His life and work manifestly lack the coherence or unity of purpose that one finds, for example, among many of his French or Dutch contemporaries. It is comparatively easy to 'read' the life of Gisbertus Voetius as that of an unwavering Calvinist theologian, to see Antoine Arnauld as a staunch and consistent theological defender of Port Royal, and even to interpret the obviously fragmentary contents of Pascal's unpublished notebooks (subsequently, the Penses) as an extended search for authentic religious faith, in opposition to what he perceived as the corruption of ecclesial structures. In contrast, Descartes' life reveals features that are difficult to integrate into a coherent pattern. He lived and published during a critical juncture in the Scientific Revolution of the seventeenth century. Although baptized into the Catholic Church soon after his birth in the Loire district of France, he chose to live most of his life in the aggressively Calvinist United Provinces, in which other religious practices were officially (though often ineffectively) banned. Descartes may have adopted the motto from Ovid, at least early in his career: 'bene vixit qui bene latuit' (he lives well who conceals himself well), and he seems genuinely to have wished to avoid theological controversies. However, he engaged in very public controversies with so many of his contemporaries - including Hobbes, Gassendi, the French Jesuits (collectively) and Father Dinet (in particular), Voetius and the University of Utrecht, Regius, Fermat, Roberval, Revius and other theologians at Leiden - that one might conclude that his claimed preference for a quiet life was a disingenuous mask. 2 Descartes published four books during his lifetime, and wrote at least one other that he had intended to publish. The latter was his first major composition, Le Monde, which he suppressed when he heard about Galileo's condemnation by Rome in 1633. This was followed, in 1637, by Descartes' first book (also written in French), which he tried to publish anonymously by withholding his name from the title page: the Discours de la methode pour bien conduire sa raison, & chercher la verit dans les sciences. Plus la dioptrique, les meteors, et la geometrie, qui sont des essais de cete methode. Four years later Descartes published the first edition (in Latin) of Meditationes de prima philosophia, in quibus Dei existentia et animae immortalitas demonstrator, which also included six sets of objections and replies. The Principia philosophiae appeared (in Latin) in Amsterdam in 1644, and was followed five years later by Les Passions de l'Ame (in French). 3 In parallel with these publications, Descartes carried on a very extensive correspondence over a thirty-year period (in both Latin and French), and preserved copies or drafts of his letters with a view to future publication. Given the range and variety of his interests, and the sheer volume of writings, published or otherwise, that have survived from his pen, one may be tempted to engage in a comparative evaluation, as Cottingham does, by selecting one of Descartes' books as his primary contribution to philosophy. Cottingham claims that the Meditations was Descartes''masterpiece' (44), 'the definitive statement of Descartes's philosophy' (45) and the 'definitive statement of his metaphysics' (68). He also describes the Meditations more narrowly as 'his metaphysical masterpiece' (259, 303) and, more broadly, as 'his philosophical masterpiece' (289), and he lists it with the Discours as one of Descartes' two 'masterworks' (280). The Principia offers some competition in this comparative judgement when it is described as 'the canonical presentation of his metaphysical views' (114), while 'the construction of a moral system … was the crowning aim of his philosophy' (231). Having pitched repeatedly for the Meditations as Descartes' primary text, Cottingham claims that its author was 'a devout Catholic' (215), that he was 'a devoutly religious philosopher' (256), and that he could not free himself 'from the influence of the long years of theological study he had dutifully completed at La Flche' (62). Accordingly, the Meditations should be read as 'in essence a work of theodicy' (220); 'what has pride of place in the construction of his philosophical system is … an appeal to God … the nature and existence of the Deity is something that lies at the very heart of his entire philosophical system' (255). Without quite saying so, there are hints here that Descartes was a devout Christian whose primary intellectual contribution was to write a work of metaphysics, in which God is central and in the course of which the author alternates between proving God's existence and contemplating God - the latter a seventeenth-century version of Bonaventure's Journey of the Soul to God. 'Descartes's attraction to a contemplative mode of philosophizing' (305) is reflected, in the Meditations, in 'the language of the soul's coming to rest in adoring contemplation of the light' (306). Cottingham also accepts the overwhelming evidence from Descartes' correspondence that he 'devoted most of his career not to metaphysics but to science' (108), although he quibbles elsewhere with those who adopt the shorthand term 'science' to describe part of what was called 'natural philosophy' in the seventeenth century (282). He also refers to the '(notoriously lame) argument for the essential incorporeality of the thinking self' in one of Descartes' masterworks (60), and he describes the 'strange, seemingly isolated world of his metaphysical meditations' (139), with its 'creaking ontology' (147), when read in isolation from the rest of his work as a natural philosopher. How should we read him, then, in the twenty-first century? A Devout Catholic? That Descartes was a devout Catholic is possible, unlikely and undecidable. He seems not to have studied theology at all while at school at La Flche, although he completed the pre-theology college cycle in the company of Jesuit students who then continued their studies in theology. Descartes consistently attempted to avoid public entanglement with religious and theological controversies, and said so frequently. 4 Given the alignments that prevailed at the time, both in France. (shrink)

The subject of this article is Herder’s unique conception of the soul-body relationship and its divergence from and dependence on Leibniz. Herder’s theory is premised on a rejection of the windowlessness of monads in two important respects: interaction between material bodies (as gleaned from Crusius and Kant) and interaction between the soul and body. Herder’s theory depends on Leibniz insofar as it agrees with the intimate connection Leibniz posits between the soul and the body, as his epistemology demonstrates, with, however, (...) the significant modification that the connection is real. Herder transforms the Leibnizian rehabilitation and use of substantial forms to develop a double-conception of the human soul as both thinking substance and substantial form: the soul, qua thinking substance, needs a body through whose senses it can interact with, and acquire knowledge of, the external world; the soul, qua substantial form, constructs itself this material body by harnessing the forces of attraction and repulsion. Herder’s theory provides an alternative to other contemporary accounts of the soul-body relationship, especially Kant’s, which start from the problem of relating two distinct substances. His unique and original reconciliation of the modern dichotomy of spirit and matter, via his connecting of Leibniz’s realms of final and efficient causes, is of great significance for the rise of German Idealism. (shrink)

Reshaping the neo-Aristotelian doctrines about the human soul was Descartes’s most spectacular enterprise, which gave birth to some of the sharpest debates in the Republic of Letters. Neverthe- less, it was certainly Descartes’s intention, as already expressed in the Discours de la méthode, to show that his new metaphysics could be supplemented with experimental research in the field of medicine and the conservation of life. It is no surprise then that several natural philosophers and doctors, such as Henricus Regius from (...) Utrecht, who had studied in Padua with William Harvey, rallied in support, in order to gain a more substantial theoretical basis for their research. Taking as his ground some general metaphysical assumptions, such as the existence of God, the immortality of the soul, and perhaps the separability of the pure understanding, Regius intended to secure a new philosophy of man, which was able to reflect his medical interests and complement his account of human nature. This is the story that is now gaining currency, and it is surely accurate, at least in part. Desmond Clarke has recently defended the same view1, based on the remarkable studies of the Utrecht scholars Theo Verbeek and Erik-Jan Bos. Here I would like to challenge some aspects of this view and ask how Regius, who was perceived as the philosopher most closely associated with Descartes, became a betrayer of his mentor. (shrink)

On the Proper Interpretation of Hobbes's Philosophy Edwin Curley's article, " 'I Durst Not Write So Boldly' "presents the strongest case for Hobbes's allegedly irreligious views. That is why I devoted an appendix to it in my book, The Two Gods of Leviathan. Judging from his article in this issue, I think that the distance between our views has narrowed considerably. Virtually everything he says in the first half of his artide is the same as or is compatible with what (...) I maintained in my book. Also, I appreciate his remark that the "great virtue of Martinich's book is that he is very precise about what his thesis entails" . ` Nonetheless, he appears to be ironic or sarcastic in the way he expresses the agreement between us. For example, after saying that adherence to the early Christian creeds is an appropriate criterion of orthodoxy, he discusses Hobbes's positions on materialism, the immortality of the soul, the final disposition of human beings, and the nature of the gospel imperatives, and then points out that Hobbes's nonstandard positions on these issues are compatible with the creeds. Because Curley repeats some variation on the phrase, "the early creeds are silent on the questions," there is a hint that Curley thinks that the criterion of the Page references to Curley's article in this issue of JHP will be given within the text. References to the English edition of Leviathan will be given by chapter and paragraph number. References to the.. (shrink)

In this work I defend, not the content, but, rather, the logical coherence of Descartes’s system by insisting on the ontological priority of substance over attributes in spite of the fact that Descartes seems, on occasion, to suggest otherwise. This, in turn, however, allows us to better grasp the nature of Descartes’ Augustinian conception of the soul, and what it might resemble should it be granted God’s concurrence, and, thus, eternal life. At the same time, I demonstrate, by means of (...) his Thomistic inheritance, the philosophically sound reasons why Descartes leaves these issues somewhat opaque. Finally, these reflections lead us to Nietzsche, and by contrasting the latter’s thoughts on science and freedom to those of Descartes we are led to what, for Nietzsche, would be the ultimate desideratum of such Cartesian longings for the ‘tranquility’ and ‘happiness’ of life-everlasting: a ‘will to nothingness.’. (shrink)

Although Brentano generally regarded himself as at heart a metaphysician, his work then and subsequently has always been dominated by the Psychology. He is rightly celebrated as the person who reintroduced the Aristotelian-Scholastic notion of intentio back into the study of the mind. Brentano's inspiration was Aristotle's theory of perception in De anima, though his terminology of intentional inexistence was medieval. For the history of the work and its position in his output may I refer to my Introduction to (...) the reprinted English translation. Alongside Aristotle the work shows influences of Descartes, Comte and the British empiricists. The theory of intentionality presented in the Psychology is much less modern and less plausible than almost all recent commentary would have it, and was in any case not where Brentano's main interest lay. Intentionality simply served to demarcate mental phenomena from physical, in Book One, but the main aim was a classification of the mental, outlined in Book Two. Books Three to Five were to have dealt in detail with the three main classes of presentations, judgements and feelings, with the final book considering the metaphysics: mind-body and the immortality of the soul. Brentano's shifting views, recently documented in English with Benito Muller's translation of Descriptive Psychology, a work from the transitional 1890s, made the original plan obsolete. The role of an a priori, philosophical or descriptive psychology, methodologically prior to empirical-experimental genetic psychology, foreshadowed and influenced Husserl's notion of phenomenology, and Brentano's Comtean methodological epoche of desisting from controversial metaphysical statements in favour of an examination of the phenomena likewise presaged Husserl's more ponderous phenomenological reductions. Brentano's other work covers most areas of philosophy, notably ethics, where he upheld a form of a priori intuitionism much admired by G. E. Moore, the philosophy of religion, metaphysics, philosophy of language, deductive and inductive logic, and the history of philosophy. I shall mention just two areas. In his logic lectures from 1866 onwards (a compilation published 1956) Brentano rejected the subject-predicate analysis of simple judgements and proposed instead (for which he apparently secured written assent from Mill) that all judgements are logical compounds of positive and negative existential judgements. For example the universal judgement All men are mortal becomes the negative existential There are no immortal men. On this basis Brentano radically simplified the inference rules of deductive logic. While unlike de Morgan, Frege and others he does not go beyond logic's traditional scope by recognising relations, within its bounds his reformed-term logic is simple, elegant and easily teachable. Some of his ideas in logic influenced the young Husserl. Unfortunately Brentano took against mathematical logic, which he wrongly associated exclusively with Hamilton's confused doctrine of the quantification of the predicate. His inductive logic, which takes up by far the greater part of his logic lectures, remains unresearched to this day. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:Aristotle and Neoplatonism in Late Antiquity: Interpretations of the “De Anima.” by H.J. BlumenthalLloyd P. GersonH.J. Blumenthal. Aristotle and Neoplatonism in Late Antiquity: Interpretations of the “De Anima.” Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1996. Pp. x + 244. Cloth, $57.50.The label ‘Neoplatonism’, coined in the eighteenth century to indicate a putative and rather ill-defined development within the Platonic tradition, is to this day applied in sundry ways. Presumably, ‘Neoplatonic’ (...) is supposed to be distinguished from ‘Platonic’, but the problem with this is that most of those ancient philosophers called ‘Neoplatonic’ thought of themselves simply as Platonists, that is, as authentic interpreters and continuators of Plato. Nevertheless, there are several important and relatively clear differentiations to be made among those within this tradition. One such refers to those Platonists who attempted to appropriate Aristotle’s philosophy. This was done principally in two ways. For Plotinus, Aristotelian concepts and distinctions were employed to defend Plato against Peripatetic attacks. For Porphyry and the later Platonic commentators on the works of the Aristotelian corpus, Aristotle was co-opted as an authority on the philosophy of the sensible world, leaving the higher, intelligible world to Plato. The commentaries on Aristotle’s De Anima are particularly revealing in this regard. For one would assume that in matters regarding the soul it would be extremely difficult to see Aristotle and Plato as anything other than irreconcilable. Aristotle’s hylomorphism and explicit denial of the immortality of the soul hardly seem to be compatible with that which can be called, even on the most charitable interpretation, genuinely Platonic. In fact, the reconciliation of Aristotelian and Platonic soul doctrines is one of the central tasks late Platonists set for themselves. As Blumenthal notes: “Whatever the historical truth about the relation of Aristotle’s thought to Plato’s may have been, the Neoplatonist regarded it as propaedeutic to Plato’s as well as aiming at the same goal” (25).H. J. Blumenthal’s long-anticipated monograph explores in minute detail the extant commentaries on Aristotle’s De Anima written by late Platonic or, if one insists, Neoplatonic philosophers. This book builds upon a large body of frequently groundbreaking work by the author on various facets of late Greek philosophy. The main commentaries studied are those of John Philoponus and the unknown authors dubbed ‘Pseudo-Philoponus’ and Pseudo-Simplicius’, though there is also considerable attention paid to Themistius, the last Peripatetic commentator on De Anima and, of course, [End Page 315] Alexander of Aphrodisias, whose commentary on De Anima has not survived but whose own immensely influential Peripatetic treatise on the soul does.This book is divided into two parts: I. Commentaries and Commentators and II. Interpretations of the De Anima. The first part provides the essential background to the second. Anyone approaching the Aristotelian commentators for the first time will find here a most useful guide. Even those who have some familiarity with this material will benefit from the author’s extensive knowledge of detail and judicious examination of some of the difficult issues of dating, authorship, philosophical lineage, and so on.The second section of the book concentrates on the De Anima commentaries. Here the author, following the order of the text of De Anima, systematically surveys the positions of the commentators on some of the central issues taken up in Aristotle’s work. These include the commentators’ efforts to reconcile Aristotle’s definition of the soul with Platonic assumptions about its nature and Plato’s tripartite division of the soul with Aristotle’s not entirely clear divisions. One of the instructive features of this comparative study of the commentaries is to see frequently how the issues that seize the imagination of modern commentators trouble the ancients not at all and vice versa.Most readers will be mainly interested in the chapters on the commentaries on the latter part of Book Two and Book Three of De Anima. From Plotinus onward, some of the most original philosophizing in the Platonic tradition focuses on self-consciousness, memory, imagination, and the integrative operation of the rational and arational powers. The last two chapters are filled with material about these issues as well as the... (shrink)

The paper deals with the "deuteros plous", literally ‘the second voyage’, proverbially ‘the next best way’, discussed in Plato’s "Phaedo", the key passage being Phd. 99e4–100a3. The second voyage refers to what Plato’s Socrates calls his “flight into the logoi”. Elaborating on the subject, the author first (I) provides a non-standard interpretation of the passage in question, and then (II) outlines the philosophical problem that it seems to imply, and, finally, (III) tries to apply this philosophical problem to the "ultimate (...) final proof" of immortality and to draw an analogy with the ontological argument for the existence of God, as proposed by Descartes in his 5th "Meditation". The main points are as follows: (a) the “flight into the logoi” can have two different interpretations, a common one and an astonishing one, and (b) there is a structural analogy between Descartes’s ontological argument for the existence of God in his 5th "Meditation" and the "ultimate final proof" for the immortality of the soul in the "Phaedo". (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:THE ORIGINALITY OF ST. THOMAS'S POSITION ON THE PHILOSOPHERS AND CREATION TIMOTHY B. NOONE The Catholic University ofAmerica Washington, D.C. AS IS WELL KNOWN, Thomas Aquinas stands out from his contemporaries in his apparent willingness to defend the possibility of an eternal but created universe, although, like all orthodox Christian believers, he affirmed that the world had a temporal beginning in the light of Scriptural teaching. That Thomas (...) Aquinas defended the possibility of an eternal creation was amply demonstrated over a decade ago by Fr. John Wippel, who pointed to Aquinas's discussion of creation and endless temporal duration in the De aeternitate mundi, a work written in 12 71 or earlier.1 More recently, Professor Mark Johnson wrote an article in which he concluded that, no matter what doctrine the historical Aristotle may have held, St. Thomas consistently attributes a doctrine of creation to Aristotle.2 Most recent of all have come a pair of important studies by Wilks and Macintosh defending the coherence of Thomas's claim that the 1 John F. Wippel, "Did Thomas Aquinas Defend the Possibility of an Eternally Created World? (The De aeternitate mundi Revisited)," The Journal of the History of Philosophy 19 (1981): 21-37; on the date for Aquinas's De aeternitate mundi, see James A. Weisheipl, "The Date and Context for Aquinas' De aeternitate mundi," in Lloyd P. Gerson, ed., Graceful Reason: Essays in Ancient and Medieval Philosophy Presented to Joseph Owens, C.S.S.R., Papers in Medieval Studies, 4 (Toronto: Pontifical Institute of Mediaeval Studies, 1983), 270. Arguments for an earlier dating can be found in Thomas Bukowski, "An Early Dating for Aquinas' De aeternitate mundi," Gregorianum 51 (1970): 277-303 and more recently, "Understanding St. Thomas on the Eternity of the World: Help from Giles of Rome?" Recherches de theologie ancienne et medievale 58 (1991): 113-25. The main thesis of this paper is unaffected by the dating of the De aeternitate mundi. 2 Mark F. Johnson, "Did St. Thomas Attribute a Doctrine of Creation to Aristotle?" The New Scholasticism 63 (1989): 129-55. 275 276 TIMOTHY B. NOONE world could be both eternal and created, while another pair of studies by Aersten and van Veldhuijsen have begun to explore from a more historical perspective the importance of Aquinas's formulation of the doctrine of creation for understanding his thought and its distinctiveness.3 The present paper is intended not so much to challenge the conclusions of any of these admirable studies as to put their findings into a wider historical framework through which we may hope to discover what is unique in Aquinas's doctrine of creation. In reading the Scriptum super Sententias of Thomas Aquinas, one is immediately struck by the novelty of Aquinas's claim that the philosophers and thus reason itself may reach the conclusion that the world is created. Such a claim seems quite different from the account of the philosophical knowledge of creation given by several of St. Thomas's immediate predecessors and contemporaries. What, then, emboldens Aquinas to make such a claim? Is Aquinas's reading of the philosophers so original and so superior to that of his contemporaries that he is capable of seeing in the philosophers a doctrine of creation that they missed? Or does Aquinas's originality on the philosophical demonstrability of creation have more to do with a reformulation of the doctrine of creation? Or does Aquinas both have an original interpretation of the philosophers and a different understanding of the doctrine of creation? In an attempt to answer these questions, the present paper will survey early and mid-thirteenth century views on the philosophers and the doctrine of creation and compare those views to Aquinas's position in the Scriptum super Sententias. The thirteenth-century authors included in this survey are chosen for their prominence in thirteenth-century thought, not 3 See Ian Wilks, "Aquinas on the Past Possibility of the World's Having Existed Forever," The Review of Metaphysics 48 (1994): 299-329; J. J. Macintosh, "St. Thomas and the Traversal of the Infinite," The American Catholic Philosophical Quarterly 68 (1994): 157-77; J. A. Aertsen, "The Eternity of the World: The Believing... (shrink)

Spiritualism designates a philosophy that lays claim to the separation of mind and body and the ontological and epistemological primacy of the former. In France, it is associated with the names of Victor Cousin and René Descartes, or more precisely with what Cousin made of Descartes as the founding father of a brittle rational psychology, closed off from the positive sciences, and as a critic in respect to the empiricist legacy of the idéologues. Moreover, by considering merely the end result, (...) severed from its polemical genesis, we are prevented from understanding how the category of experience constituted a crucial question for spiritualism itself. Through returning to the origin of these discussions in the 1826 preface to Cousin’s Fragments philosophiques, this essay pursues a threefold path: to show that the public birth of Cousinian spiritualism coincides with the affirmation of applying the experimental method, issuing from Bacon, to the study of facts of consciousness; that Cousin’s later evolution follows a process of radicalization—that is, in this context, of ontologization and of reduction; and that by recovering this genesis, we can distinguish many forms of spiritualisms committed to the experimental method, both in alliance with the early Cousin and against the later Cousin. In this way, we can rediscover the interwoven philosophical links, lost in the process of institutionalization, between metaphysical demands and empiricist concerns, or between “French” philosophy and the legacy of Condillac. (shrink)

Plotinus on the Soul is a study of Plotinus' psychology, which is arguably the most sophisticated Platonist theory of the soul in antiquity. Plotinus offers a Platonist response to Aristotelian and Stoic conceptions of the soul that is at the same time an innovative interpretation of Plato's Timaeus. He considers the notion of the soul to be crucial for explaining the rational order of the world. To this end, he discusses not only different types of individual soul but also an (...) entity that he was the first to introduce into philosophy: the so-called hypostasis Soul. This is the first study to provide a detailed explanation of this entity, but it also discusses the other types of soul, with an emphasis on the human soul, and explains Plotinus' original views on rational thought and its relation to experience. (shrink)

Arabic and English on opposing pages in Kitåab section; introd., commentary, bibliography, and indices in English and romanized Arabic and Greek.

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:POMPONAZZI'S CRITIQUE OF AQUCNAS'S ARGUMENTS FOR THE :IMMORTALITY OF THE SOUL JOHN L. TRELOAR, S.J. Marquette University Milwaukee, Wisconsin I. lntJroWi.wtion IN 'JiHE COURSE of hls discussion on the immortality of the soul, Pietro Pomponazzi systematically critiques the Pfatonic, Avel'IJ'IOist, and Thomistic positions concerning this perennial problem iin the philosophy of human nature. Pomponiazzi's Tractatrus de irnrmortalitate animae 1 is inteirestin!g from three methodological standpoints: (1) the (...) criteria Pomponazzi uses to ev:aluate the various positions, (2) Pomponazzi 's attempt to redefine the probtlem of immortality in fo:gica;l terms, and (8) his analysis of previous positions. In this Renaissance treatise one finds an excellent example of the infliuence of method on the dev:elopment of an idea. This article wiihl eX'amine and ev:aluate Pomponazzi's analy,s:i.s of Thomas A:quiinas's aJ.'gument for the immortality of the soul showing how Pomponazzi''S irefo:rnnula;bion puts the Thomistic argument in a context completely differoort fmm whait Thomas himself intended. Although this ipaper treats a historical pr01blem, its mai:i.n oibject is to show how the fo:tmulation of phifosophical critema and,questions influences how one handles a topic 1 and 1 The standard Latin text of the Tractatus is: Petrus Pomponatus, Tractatus de immortalitate animae, ed. Gianfranco Morra (Bologna: Nanni and Fiammeghi, 1954). The English translations used in this article are from Ernst Cassirer et al., eds. The Renaissance Philosophy of Man (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1948). A complete translation of the Tractatus by William Henry Hay II, revised by John Herman Randall, Jr., and annotated by Paul Oskar Kristeller, appears on pp. 280-381. 458 454 JOHN L. TRELOAR, S.J, what one says about prewous solutions to a problem. This article, then, studies a rphi1osophica1l methodology as much as it arppraises Pomrponazzi and Aquinas.2 Eady in the Tractatus de immortalitate animae Pomponazzi 'es'tia;bJishes the dual cr1iter:ia for judging the adequacy of au p!i.'evious arguments ]or the immortaJl~ty of the,soul. First, "Leaving aside revefaition and miracles, and remaining entirely within natmal limits," 3 what can be said concerrning the immortality of the soul? Second, "what... was Aristotle's opin~on on the same question "?4 These criteria function as the limiting conditions that determine the adequacy of any argument :for immortality; Pomponazzi employs these criteria riJgm~ously to test whether previious a1rguments are adeqU'ate. Pomponazzi's attempt to l'edefine immo:rtality in strictly 1ogicail terms also influences his critique of pl'evious authoi's :and his own generail condusions. He picks u:p Fieino'.s notion that the human being is of an ambiguous nature, that is, part spirit 1and pa:rt oorpore1 al.5 This, of course, is new neither with Ficino nor with Pomponazzi, for the concept of a twofold nature goes hack at least as ia1· as Plwto. Plomponazzi',s use of 1this concept of a twofold nature, however, is unique. He casts the whole 2 In his book Renaissance Thought and Its Sources (New York: Columbia University Press, 1979), Paul Oskar Kristeller says, "Among the many problems and concepts that have occupied the thinkers of the past, and especially those of the Renaissance, the doctrine of immortality seems especially remote from the discussions and concerns of our time" (p. 181). He argues in this essay that, "The problem is still with us, and we may hope that it may yet lead to new answers that are more in accordance with our knowledge and our sensibilities than those transmitted to us by the thinkers of the past, especially those of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries" (p. 196). s "Primum scilicet, quid, revelationibus et miraculis semotis, persistendoque pure infra limites naturales, hac in re sentis." Immortalitate, p. 36 (p. 281). All references to the Traatatus de immortalitate animae will appear in this form. The first page reference is to the Latin text and the page number in parentheses is to the English translation cited above. 4 "Alterum vero, quamnam sententiam Aristotelis in eadem materiam fuisse censes." Imrnortalitate, p. 36 (p. 281). 5 See Marsilius Ficino, " Five Questions Concerning the... (shrink)

Kepler is mainly known among historians of science for his astronomical theories and his approaches to problems having to do with philosophy of science and ontology. This paper attempts to contribute to Kepler studies by providing a discussion of a topic not frequently considered, namely Kepler’s theory of the soul, a general theory of knowledge whose central problem is what makes knowledge possible, rather than what makes knowledge true, as happens in the case of Descartes’s and Bacon’s epistemologies. Kepler’s theory (...) consists of four issues: the theory of the different sorts of soul—that is, the human soul, the animal soul, the vegetable soul, and the Earth soul—concerning their faculties, the differences and the resemblances emerging among them, the relation they maintain with their own bodies and the world, and the distinction soul–world. The paper discusses these issues from a historical perspective, that is, it reconstructs the way they appear in three periods of Kepler’s career: the period prior to the publication of the Mysterium cosmographicum, the period from 1596 to 1611, and the period of the Harmonices mundi libri V. Finally, Kepler’s epistemology is briefly contrasted with Descartes’s and Bacon’s in order to suggest that Kepler’s could be seen as a third way to understand the philosophical origins of Modernity.Keywords: Johannes Kepler; René Descartes; Francis Bacon; Anima; Force; Animism. (shrink)

The immortality of the soul is one of the oldest tropes in the history of philosophy and one that gained significant momentum in 16th-century Europe. But what came before Pietro Pomponazzi and his contemporaries? Through examination of four neglected but central figures, Joanna Papiernik uncovers the rich and varied nature of the afterlife debate in 15th-century Italy. By engaging with old prints, manuscripts and other archival material, this book reveals just how much interest there was in the question of (...) immortality before the 16th-century boom in Aristotelian translations. In particular, Papiernik sheds light on the treatises of Agostino Dati, Leonardo Nogarola, Antonio degli Agli and Giovanni Canali, all of which have until now been overlooked in modern scholarship. From Dati's critiques of ancient and existing positions to Agli's study of immortality and its relation to the metaphysics of light, this volume investigates not only how wide-ranging the debate was but also the important impact it had on later philosophical thinking. Deftly combining close reading with a broad intellectual survey, and including two editions of unpublished primary texts, Philosophies of the Afterlife in the Early Italian Renaissance provides a crucial insight into the development of early Renaissance Platonism and philosophy of religion. (shrink)

in a january 1642 letter, rené descartes advises his correspondent—his then-follower, the Utrecht medical professor Henricus Regius—to consistently endorse the view that the human mind is related to its body by means of a "substantial union": Whenever the occasion arises, as much privately as publicly, you ought to profess that you believe a human to be a true ens per se and not per accidens and the mind to be really and substantially united to the body not through position (...) or disposition [situm aut dispositionem], as you say in your last written text, but through a true mode of union [verum modum unionis], as everyone... (shrink)

The view that the soul can exist separately from the body is commonly associated with dualism. Since Plato’s Phaedo (Phd.) argues that the soul is immortal and survives the death of the body, there seems to be reason to call Plato, in that dialogue at least, a ‘dualist’. Yet, as we know, there are many kinds of dualism, so we have thereby not said very much. Let me therefore start with some distinctions. First of all, we can distinguish between two (...) kinds of dualism which say that the soul is a different kind of substance from the body. On one version, call it ‘strong’ substance dualism, no properties of mind can also be properties of body. Mind is defined as a kind of thing that uniquely has a certain property or set of properties, say consciousness, just as body is defined by its unique properties, say spatial extension. This would seem to be Descartes’ view. On another version, call it ‘weak’ substance dualism, no essential or defining properties of mind are also properties of body. This leaves it open whether the mind and body may share some accidental or non-defining properties. Finally, there is an even weaker kind of dualism which we may call property dualism. According to this view, there are mental properties which are distinct from and irreducible to bodily properties.4 However, these mental properties may or not be properties of an underlying substance that also has bodily properties. In other words, the same thing may have both mental and bodily properties, so having mental properties is not enough to make something a different kind of substance. (shrink)

The complexities of Henry More's eclectic Neoplatonism and his recklessly energetic poetic style have hitherto deterred scholars from undertaking a complete study of his long philosophical poem, A Platonick Song of the Soul . The aim of my dissertation is to study the Platonick Song in its entirety. I attempt to unravel the different strands of thought that it is woven of and reveal the consistency of thought and architectonic scheme of the work. ;The major themes of the Platonick Song (...) are the immateriality of the soul, its immortality, and its unfailing consciousness. I begin my study with an appraisal of More's work as an answer to Lucretius's De Rerum Natura, which had proclaimed the corporeality and mortality of the soul. The first poem of the Platonick Soul, "Psychozoia" is studied as an allegorical prelude to the work, and the Plotinian and Chaldean origins of More's systems are examined. The five poems after "Psychozoia" are divided into three sections dealing with the immortality of the soul , the macrocosmic manifestation of the soul and the alert soul "Antipsychophannychia," "The Praeexistency of the Soul" and "Antimonopsychia"). In the course of these three chapters, I have occasion to demonstrate More's reliance on the arguments of Ficino and Galileo. In the final chapter of my study, I reveal the importance of the Platonick Song for an understanding of the metaphysics, psychology and ethics of More's mature philosophy. In addition, I analyze the ways in which More's concepts of spirit, matter, space and the Deity resembled and differed from those of his Cambridge friend, Isaac Newton. (shrink)

In the course of the eighteenth century, understanding human cognitive life came to be construed as something to be explored in terms of the physiology of the sensory organs, the nerves, and the brain: a form of naturalization that effectively moved cognition out of the realm of philosophy as it had traditionally been understood. Bonnet's Analytical Essay on the Faculties of the Soul was at the forefront of these developments, and this is its first English translation. Drawing on his earlier (...) work in natural history -- he was the leading entomologist of his era -- he approaches problems of the nature of the mind via the physiology and anatomy of the brain and sensory systems. His approach is one of 'reverse engineering', starting from an organic statue without faculties, and investigating how it would need to be modified to produce a human being. Bonnet takes up a position that cuts across the standard understanding of the period as a clash between materialism and dualism. While his approach was rigorously naturalistic and physiological, this did not lead him to reject the notion of a soul. Instead, he argues that, in order to make sense of their sensory abilities, we need to attribute a soul to animals as well as human beings. At the same time, he argues that if personal immortality is to be possible, it can be conceived along the lines of insect metamorphosis, which shows how different biological forms can harbour a single identity.--dust jacket. (shrink)

This dissertation presents a new interpretation of Rene Descartes' views on body/body causation by examining them within their historical context. Although Descartes gives the impression that his views constitute a complete break with those of his predecessors, he draws on both Scholastic Aristotelian concepts of the efficient cause and existing anti-Aristotelian views. ;The combination of Aristotelian and anti-Aristotelian elements in Descartes' theory of causation creates a tension in his claims about the relationship between the first cause, God, and the secondary (...) causes, created things. To make sense of Descartes' position on secondary causation I study the 16th and 17th century debates on secondary causation, God's concurrence, and the action of efficient causes. I examine the Aristotelian commentaries of the Jesuit philosophers Francisco Suarez, Francisco Toledo, Antonio Rubio and the Coimbran Commentators. I also analyze the anti-Aristotelian views on nature and causation found in Sebastian Basson's textbook on natural philosophy. ;The Jesuit philosophers, like Descartes, deny that the extendedness and impenetrability of matter requires the existence of occult forces to penetrate the matter and exercise causality. Rather they argue that causality is exercised by a thing's form and that causal interaction requires only contiguity not penetration. They also downplay the importance of the final cause, making the efficient cause prior in the study of nature. While Descartes rejects their hylomorphism, he agrees with the Jesuits that there are secondary efficient causes which determine God's action, causing a specific kind of effect. However, for Descartes the secondary causes are the laws of nature, not individual substances. ;Descartes' reduction of all natural change to the local motion of material particles is reminiscent of Basson's anti-Aristotelian natural philosophy. Basson reacts against the Jesuit view of secondary causation, arguing that it commits them to attributing cognition to physical causes. His own account of natural causation contains both mechanistic elements, which we find in a more developed form in Descartes' philosophy, and Neoplatonic and Stoic elements which Descartes rejects. (shrink)

In the second century of our era the Athenian Platonist, Atticus, claimed that it was clear not only to philosophers but perhaps even to ordinary people that the heritage left by Plato was the immortality of the soul. Plato had expounded the doctrine in various and manifold ways and this was about the only thing holding together the Platonic school. Atticus is but one witness to the prominence accorded the soul in discussions and debates among later Platonists. But while (...) questions concerning the origin, constitution, and destiny of the human soul are relatively well attested for Middle Platonism, not to mention Neoplatonism, we know much less about these topics among Plato's immediate successors in the Academy, Speusippus of Athens and Xenocrates of Chalcedon . Both wrote treatises on the soul , but these have been lost along with their other, numerous writings. Because the least that can be said is that Speusippus and Xenocrates upheld the immortality of the soul , any snippet of information that might tell us more deserves close consideration. (shrink)

Conventional wisdom has long maintained that Descartes considered animals to be unfeeling machines with no capacity for perceptual states like pain, and that Descartes's mechanistic view of animals was the basis for his claim that we owe animals no moral obligations. Several recent commentators have sought to repudiate this conventional wisdom, either by denying that Descartes had a purely mechanistic conception of animal perception or by attempting to argue that Descartes allowed for the possibility that animals have souls. An (...) examination of Descartes's writings in the light of his Greek and Christian philosophical precursors shows that he did indeed consider animals to be pure mechanisms without immortal souls; it was not this belief, however, but rather the Stoic principle of community that was the basis of his views on the moral status of animals. (shrink)