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Oxford Studies in Early Modern Philosophy Volume VI

Daniel Garber and Donald Rutherford (eds)

Oxford Studies in Early Modern Philosophy is an annual series, presenting a selection of the best current work in the history of early modern philosophy. It focuses on the seventeenth and eighteenth ... More

Oxford Studies in Early Modern Philosophy is an annual series, presenting a selection of the best current work in the history of early modern philosophy. It focuses on the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries — the extraordinary period of intellectual flourishing that begins, very roughly, with Descartes and his contemporaries and ends with Kant. It also publishes papers on thinkers or movements outside of that framework, provided they are important in illuminating early modern thought. Topics covered include Spinoza's political philosophy, Leibniz, monadic domination, Newton's ontology of omnipresence and infinate space, Hume, and Descarte.Less

Faith in Life: John Dewey's Early Philosophy

Donald J. Morse

This book considers John Dewey's early philosophy on its own terms and aims to explicate its key ideas. It does so through the fullest treatment to date of his youthful masterwork, the Psychology. ... More

This book considers John Dewey's early philosophy on its own terms and aims to explicate its key ideas. It does so through the fullest treatment to date of his youthful masterwork, the Psychology. This fuller treatment reveals that the received view, which sees Dewey's early philosophy as unimportant in its own right, is deeply mistaken. In fact, Dewey's early philosophy amounts to an important new form of idealism. More specifically, Dewey's idealism contains a new logic of rupture, which allows us to achieve four things: a focus on discontinuity that challenges all naturalistic views, including Dewey's own later view; a space of critical resistance to events that is at the same time the source of ideals; a faith in the development of ideals that challenges pessimists like Schopenhauer and Nietzsche; and a non-traditional reading of Hegel that invites comparison with cutting-edge Continental philosophers, such as Adorno, Derrida, and Zizek, and even goes beyond them in its systematic approach. In making these discoveries, the book forges a new link between American and European philosophy, showing how they share similar insights and concerns. It also provides an original assessment of Dewey's relationship to his teacher, George Sylvester Morris, and to other important thinkers of the day, giving us a fresh picture of John Dewey, the man and the philosopher, in the early years of his career. This book discusses a wide range of topics, from Dewey's early reflections on Kant and Hegel to the nature of beauty, courage, sympathy, hatred, love, and even death and despair.Less

Spinoza's Heresy: Immortality and the Jewish Mind

Steven Nadler

This is a study of the reasons behind Spinoza's excommunication from the Portuguese–Jewish community of Amsterdam in 1656. The central question in the book is how and why did the issue of the ... More

This is a study of the reasons behind Spinoza's excommunication from the Portuguese–Jewish community of Amsterdam in 1656. The central question in the book is how and why did the issue of the immortality of the soul play a role in the decision to excommunicate Spinoza. The work begins with a discussion of the nature of cherem or banning within Judaism, and in the Amsterdam community, in particular, as well as of a number of possible explanations for Spinoza's ban. It then turns to the variety of traditions in Jewish religious and philosophical thought on the post‐mortem fate of the soul and the after life. This is followed by an examination of Spinoza's own views on the eternity of the mind in the Ethics and the role that the denial of personal immortality plays in his overall philosophical and political project. Part of the book's argument is that Spinoza's views were not only an outgrowth of his own metaphysical principles, but also a culmination of an intellectualist trend in medieval Jewish rationalism (especially Maimonides and Gersonides).Less

Calling Philosophers Names: On the Origin of a Discipline

Christopher Moore

This book provides a fresh account of the origins of the term philosophos or “philosopher” in ancient Greece. Tracing the evolution of the word's meaning over its first two centuries, the book shows ... More

This book provides a fresh account of the origins of the term philosophos or “philosopher” in ancient Greece. Tracing the evolution of the word's meaning over its first two centuries, the book shows how it first referred to aspiring political sages and advice-givers, then to avid conversationalists about virtue, and finally to investigators who focused on the scope and conditions of those conversations. Questioning the familiar view that philosophers from the beginning “loved wisdom” or merely “cultivated their intellect,” the book shows that they were instead mocked as laughably unrealistic for thinking that their incessant talking and study would earn them social status or political and moral authority. Taking a new approach to the history of early Greek philosophy, the book seeks to understand who were called philosophoi or “philosophers” and why, and how the use of and reflections on the word contributed to the rise of a discipline. The book demonstrates that a word that began in part as a wry reference to a far-flung political bloc came, hardly a century later, to mean a life of determined self-improvement based on research, reflection, and deliberation. Early philosophy dedicated itself to justifying its own dubious-seeming enterprise. And this original impulse to seek legitimacy holds novel implications for understanding the history of the discipline and its influence.Less

Emotion and Cognitive Life in Medieval and Early Modern Philosophy

Martin Pickavé and Lisa Shapiro (eds)

This volume has three aims. First, historians of philosophy have typically focused on the discussions of the moral relevance of emotions, and with the exception of scholars of ancient philosophy, ... More

This volume has three aims. First, historians of philosophy have typically focused on the discussions of the moral relevance of emotions, and with the exception of scholars of ancient philosophy, neglected the place of emotions in cognitive life. This collection of articles refocuses the discussion of emotion in the medieval and early modern periods to their role in cognition. Second, though many have aimed to clarify relationship between the later thinkers and their predecessors with regard to issues in metaphysics and epistemology, there has been very little effort at tracing similar lines of thought about emotion. As a whole, the contributions to this volume serve to begin a discussion about the continuities between medieval and early modern thinking about the emotions. In this regard, there is also a discussion of the emotions of cognitive life of the Renaissance. Though we get only a snapshot of a period of philosophical work often passed over, even this snapshot invites questions about how to weave an intellectual history about accounts of our emotions in our cognitive lives. Finally, attention to the concerns that engage philosophers of the medieval, renaissance and early modern periods can inform the contemporary debate regarding the relationship between emotions, cognition, and reason. The thirteen contributions explore this from the point of view of four key themes: the situation of emotions within the human mind; the intentionality of emotions and their role in cognition; emotions and action; the role of emotion in self-understanding and the social situation of individuals.Less

Aristotle's Metaphysics Alpha: Symposium Aristotelicum

Oliver Primavesi

Carlos Steel (ed.)

he volumes of the “Symposium Aristotelicum” have become in the last fifty years the obligatory reference works for all studies on Aristotle. In this 18th volume a distinguished group of scholars ... More

he volumes of the “Symposium Aristotelicum” have become in the last fifty years the obligatory reference works for all studies on Aristotle. In this 18th volume a distinguished group of scholars offers a chapter-by-chapter study of the first book of Aristotle's Metaphysics. Aristotle presents here his philosophical project as a search for wisdom, which is found in the knowledge of the first principles allowing us to explain whatever exists. As he shows, the earlier philosophers all had been seeking such a wisdom, though they had divergent views on what these first principles were. Before Aristotle sets out his own views, he offers a critical examination of his predecessors' views, ending up with a lengthy discussion of Plato's doctrine of the Forms. Book Alpha is not just a fundamental text for reconstructing the early history of Greek philosophy, it sets itself the agenda for Aristotle's own project of wisdom after what he had learned from his predecessors. Besides eleven chapters, each dealing with a different section of the text, the volume also offers a new edition of the Greek text of Metaphysics Alpha by Oliver Primavesi, based on an exhaustive examination of the complex manuscript and indirect tradition. The introduction to the edition offers new insights into the question which has haunted editors of the Metaphysics since Bekker, namely the relation between the two divergent traditions of the text.Less

Philosophy and Its History: Aims and Methods in the Study of Early Modern Philosophy

Mogens Laerke, Justin E. H. Smith, and Eric Schliesser (eds)

Almost all philosophers agree that one cannot be properly trained in current philosophy without knowing something of the historical development of the discipline. Beyond acknowledging this ... More

Almost all philosophers agree that one cannot be properly trained in current philosophy without knowing something of the historical development of the discipline. Beyond acknowledging this requirement, however, there is very little agreement as to what kind of methodology to follow when approaching past philosophical texts and what relationship, exactly, the study of the history of philosophy should have to contemporary philosophy, to the history and philosophy of science, or to intellectual history. This volume takes a measure of the current range of views on this complicated issue. The contributors have been chosen among specialists working in the area of early modern philosophy. It is with the early modern philosophers that basic questions of how to approach them – as colleagues with whom you discuss philosophy in the hallway, or as historical aliens speaking a different philosophical tongue – come up with the greatest urgency. The volume will however be of interest to a wide variety of specialists, teachers, and reflective students of other periods as well. The collection reflects the rapid internationalization of research that has opened up the field to a wide range of approaches within the last decades. The contributors include both specialists in the history of philosophy, as well as philosophers who work primarily on current problems in systematic philosophy but who have a pronounced interest in history.Less

Politics, Ontology and Knowledge in Spinoza

Alexandre Matheron

Filippo Del Lucchese, David Maruzzella, and Gil Morejón (eds)

Alexandre Matheron (1926–2020) worked and wrote substantially on the 17th century philosopher Benedict de Spinoza beginning with the publication of his influential 1969 masterpiece Individu et ... More

Alexandre Matheron (1926–2020) worked and wrote substantially on the 17th century philosopher Benedict de Spinoza beginning with the publication of his influential 1969 masterpiece Individu et communauté chez Spinoza. Widely considered one of the most important and original interpreters of Spinoza’s philosophy in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, but whose work was rarely translated into English, the 20 essays gathered here span the entirety of Matheron’s prolific career and present to the Anglophone the first collection of its kind outside of France. From texts on Spinoza’s epistemology and metaphysics to his signature interpretation of Spinoza’s political philosophy, Matheron’s work touches on every imaginable theme in the Spinozist corpus from Spinoza’s views on sexuality to his relationship to his predecessors, contemporaries, and inheritors such as Aquinas, Hobbes, Machiavelli, and Rousseau to Spinoza’s latent communism and importance for the development of Spinozist Marxism in France. Complete with a substantial interview conducted by two of Matheron’s best known students, Laurent Bove and Pierre-François Moreau, and a comprehensive bibliography of Matheron’s publications, this is a crucial collection for anyone seeking to understand 20th-century continental Spinozism. Whether it be the established scholar looking for translations of difficult to find essays or the advanced undergraduate or graduate student in search of reliable secondary literature on Spinoza, this volume is the perfect introduction to Matheron’s rigorous, masterful, and original interpretation of Spinoza’s philosophy.Less