Michael Ayers (ed.)
- Published in print:
- 2007
- Published Online:
- January 2012
- ISBN:
- 9780197264201
- eISBN:
- 9780191734670
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- British Academy
- DOI:
- 10.5871/bacad/9780197264201.001.0001
- Subject:
- Philosophy, History of Philosophy
This book comprises three main chapters on Descartes, Spinoza and Leibniz, with extensive responses. It explores the common ground of the great early-modern rationalist theories, and provides an ...
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This book comprises three main chapters on Descartes, Spinoza and Leibniz, with extensive responses. It explores the common ground of the great early-modern rationalist theories, and provides an examination of the ways in which the mainstream Platonic tradition permeates these theories. One chapter identifies characteristically Platonic themes in Descartes’s cosmology and metaphysics, finding them associated with two distinct, even opposed attitudes to nature and the human condition, one ancient and ‘contemplative’, the other modern and ‘controlling’. It finds the same tension in Descartes’s moral theory, and believes that it remains unresolved in present-day ethics. Was Spinoza a Neoplatonist theist, critical Cartesian, or naturalistic materialist? The second chapter argues that he was all of these. Analysis of his system reveals how Spinoza employed Neoplatonist monism against Descartes’s Platonist pluralism. Yet the terminology — like the physics — is Cartesian. And within this Platonic-Cartesian shell Spinoza developed a rigorously naturalistic metaphysics and even, Ayers claims, an effectually empiricist epistemology. The final chapter focuses on the Rationalists’ arguments for the Platonist, anti-Empiricist principle of ‘the priority of the perfect’, i.e. the principle that finite attributes are to be understood through corresponding perfections of God, rather than the reverse. It finds the given arguments unsatisfactory but stimulating, and offers a development of one of Leibniz’s for consideration. These chapters receive informed and constructive criticism and development at the hands of, respectively, Douglas Hedley, Sarah Hutton and Maria Rosa Antognazza.Less
This book comprises three main chapters on Descartes, Spinoza and Leibniz, with extensive responses. It explores the common ground of the great early-modern rationalist theories, and provides an examination of the ways in which the mainstream Platonic tradition permeates these theories. One chapter identifies characteristically Platonic themes in Descartes’s cosmology and metaphysics, finding them associated with two distinct, even opposed attitudes to nature and the human condition, one ancient and ‘contemplative’, the other modern and ‘controlling’. It finds the same tension in Descartes’s moral theory, and believes that it remains unresolved in present-day ethics. Was Spinoza a Neoplatonist theist, critical Cartesian, or naturalistic materialist? The second chapter argues that he was all of these. Analysis of his system reveals how Spinoza employed Neoplatonist monism against Descartes’s Platonist pluralism. Yet the terminology — like the physics — is Cartesian. And within this Platonic-Cartesian shell Spinoza developed a rigorously naturalistic metaphysics and even, Ayers claims, an effectually empiricist epistemology. The final chapter focuses on the Rationalists’ arguments for the Platonist, anti-Empiricist principle of ‘the priority of the perfect’, i.e. the principle that finite attributes are to be understood through corresponding perfections of God, rather than the reverse. It finds the given arguments unsatisfactory but stimulating, and offers a development of one of Leibniz’s for consideration. These chapters receive informed and constructive criticism and development at the hands of, respectively, Douglas Hedley, Sarah Hutton and Maria Rosa Antognazza.
SARAH HUTTON
- Published in print:
- 2007
- Published Online:
- January 2012
- ISBN:
- 9780197264201
- eISBN:
- 9780191734670
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- British Academy
- DOI:
- 10.5871/bacad/9780197264201.003.0005
- Subject:
- Philosophy, History of Philosophy
This chapter comments on Michael Ayers’ chapter on the strands of Platonism and naturalism in philosopher Baruch Spinoza’s metaphysics. It explains the sources of Spinoza’s Platonism and his ...
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This chapter comments on Michael Ayers’ chapter on the strands of Platonism and naturalism in philosopher Baruch Spinoza’s metaphysics. It explains the sources of Spinoza’s Platonism and his departure from Platonism and suggests that Spinoza’s epistemology is deeply subversive of Platonism. It argues that a case can be made for Spinoza’s having a stronger debt to Platonism, even in the area which in which Ayers identified as the least Platonic aspect of his philosophy.Less
This chapter comments on Michael Ayers’ chapter on the strands of Platonism and naturalism in philosopher Baruch Spinoza’s metaphysics. It explains the sources of Spinoza’s Platonism and his departure from Platonism and suggests that Spinoza’s epistemology is deeply subversive of Platonism. It argues that a case can be made for Spinoza’s having a stronger debt to Platonism, even in the area which in which Ayers identified as the least Platonic aspect of his philosophy.
Barry Stroud
- Published in print:
- 2011
- Published Online:
- September 2011
- ISBN:
- 9780199608591
- eISBN:
- 9780191729621
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199608591.003.0004
- Subject:
- Philosophy, History of Philosophy, Metaphysics/Epistemology
In his masterly book on Locke, Michael Ayers criticizes Locke's conception of colour-words as primarily naming simple ideas of colour while ‘secondarily’ naming whatever it is in objects that causes ...
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In his masterly book on Locke, Michael Ayers criticizes Locke's conception of colour-words as primarily naming simple ideas of colour while ‘secondarily’ naming whatever it is in objects that causes those ideas. That view leaves open the possibility of different perceivers getting ideas of a different colour from the same object while each ‘secondarily’ applying the same colour-word to that object. Ayers thinks something like this possibility, although not Locke's way of accounting for it, must be preserved. He thinks we must be able to describe the effects of coloured objects on perceivers by applying colour-terms not directly to objects but to those ‘sensory effects’ themselves in order to capture ‘the phenomenal quality’ of our ‘sensory experience’. This chapter argues that we can describe those effects by using colour-words as true only of the objects we see, with no need for a distinctive application of them to something called ‘sensations’ or ‘impressions’. No case has been made for colour-words as standing only for the powers objects have to produce certain kinds of ‘sensations’ or ‘sensory effects’ in perceivers. The chapter goes on to sketch some of the wider implications of this for the understanding of psychological states and attitudes generally.Less
In his masterly book on Locke, Michael Ayers criticizes Locke's conception of colour-words as primarily naming simple ideas of colour while ‘secondarily’ naming whatever it is in objects that causes those ideas. That view leaves open the possibility of different perceivers getting ideas of a different colour from the same object while each ‘secondarily’ applying the same colour-word to that object. Ayers thinks something like this possibility, although not Locke's way of accounting for it, must be preserved. He thinks we must be able to describe the effects of coloured objects on perceivers by applying colour-terms not directly to objects but to those ‘sensory effects’ themselves in order to capture ‘the phenomenal quality’ of our ‘sensory experience’. This chapter argues that we can describe those effects by using colour-words as true only of the objects we see, with no need for a distinctive application of them to something called ‘sensations’ or ‘impressions’. No case has been made for colour-words as standing only for the powers objects have to produce certain kinds of ‘sensations’ or ‘sensory effects’ in perceivers. The chapter goes on to sketch some of the wider implications of this for the understanding of psychological states and attitudes generally.
