René Descartes’s Natural Philosophy and Particular Bodies
René Descartes’s Natural Philosophy and Particular Bodies

Author: Fabrizio Baldassarri

Publisher: Springer Nature

Published: 2024-01-01

Total Pages: 219

ISBN-13: 3031486633

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This book explores René Descartes’s attempts to describe particular bodies, such as rocks, minerals, metals, plants, and animals, within the mechanistic interpretation of nature of his philosophical program. Despite his early rationalistic epistemology, Descartes’s increasing attention to collections, histories, lists of qualities, and particular bodies results in a puzzling ‘short history of all natural phenomena’ contained in the Principles of philosophy (1644). The present book outlines the role of Descartes's observations and experimentation as he aimed to construct a universal science of nature, ultimately revealing the mechanization of nature in detail, and for curious bodies such as the Bologna Stone or the sensitive herb. What results is a theoretical natural history consistent with the mechanical principles of his philosophy, ultimately shedding new light on his attempt to produce a complete philosophy of nature.

Natural and Artificial Bodies in Early Modern England
Natural and Artificial Bodies in Early Modern England

Author: Alvin Snider

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2024-11-28

Total Pages: 220

ISBN-13: 1317362535

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This book brings contemporary ways of reconceptualizing the human relationship to things into conversation with seventeenth-century writing, exploring how the literature of the period intersected with changing understandings of the conceptual structure of matter and how human beings might reconfigure their place in a web of nonhuman relations. Focusing on texts that cross the frontier between literature and science, Snider recovers the material and body worlds of seventeenth-century culture as treated in poetry, natural philosophy, medical treatises, comedy, and prose fiction. He shows how a range of writers understood and theorized “matter,” “bodies,” and “spirits” as characters in complex and sometimes bizarre scenarios involving human relationships to the phenomenal world. The logic that made matter subject to uniform theorizing facilitated a crossing of boundaries between the human and nonhuman and became a persistent figure of explanation at the time when distinctions between the natural and the artificial were undergoing reformulation.

Descartes and the Ontology of Everyday Life
Descartes and the Ontology of Everyday Life

Author: Deborah Jean Brown

Publisher:

Published: 2019

Total Pages: 266

ISBN-13: 0198836813

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Brown and Normore show how Descartes accounted for the complex and diverse objects of human experience within his metaphysical system. They argue that, far from reducing them all to two basic categories of substance, mind and body, he recognized irreducible composites that resist reduction and require their own distinctive modes of explanation.

Descartes' Natural Philosophy
Descartes' Natural Philosophy

Author: Stephen Gaukroger

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2003-08-27

Total Pages: 780

ISBN-13: 1134600925

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The most comprehensive collection of essays on Descartes' scientific writings ever published, this volume offers a detailed reassessment of Descartes' scientific work and its bearing on his philosophy. The 35 essays, written by some of the world's leading scholars, cover topics as diverse as optics, cosmology and medicine, and will be of vital interest to all historians of philosophy or science.

Representing Space in the Scientific Revolution
Representing Space in the Scientific Revolution

Author: David Marshall Miller

Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Published: 2014-08-07

Total Pages: 251

ISBN-13: 1316061426

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The novel understanding of the physical world that characterized the Scientific Revolution depended on a fundamental shift in the way its protagonists understood and described space. At the beginning of the seventeenth century, spatial phenomena were described in relation to a presupposed central point; by its end, space had become a centerless void in which phenomena could only be described by reference to arbitrary orientations. David Marshall Miller examines both the historical and philosophical aspects of this far-reaching development, including the rejection of the idea of heavenly spheres, the advent of rectilinear inertia, and the theoretical contributions of Copernicus, Gilbert, Kepler, Galileo, Descartes, and Newton. His rich study shows clearly how the centered Aristotelian cosmos became the oriented Newtonian universe, and will be of great interest to students and scholars of the history and philosophy of science.

The Language of Nature
The Language of Nature

Author: Geoffrey Gorham

Publisher: U of Minnesota Press

Published: 2016-06-15

Total Pages: 333

ISBN-13: 1452951853

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Galileo’s dictum that the book of nature “is written in the language of mathematics” is emblematic of the accepted view that the scientific revolution hinged on the conceptual and methodological integration of mathematics and natural philosophy. Although the mathematization of nature is a distinctive and crucial feature of the emergence of modern science in the seventeenth century, this volume shows that it was a far more complex, contested, and context-dependent phenomenon than the received historiography has indicated, and that philosophical controversies about the implications of mathematization cannot be understood in isolation from broader social developments related to the status and practice of mathematics in various commercial, political, and academic institutions. Contributors: Roger Ariew, U of South Florida; Richard T. W. Arthur, McMaster U; Lesley B. Cormack, U of Alberta; Daniel Garber, Princeton U; Ursula Goldenbaum, Emory U; Dana Jalobeanu, U of Bucharest; Douglas Jesseph, U of South Florida; Carla Rita Palmerino, Radboud U, Nijmegen and Open U of the Netherlands; Eileen Reeves, Princeton U; Christopher Smeenk, Western U; Justin E. H. Smith, U of Paris 7; Kurt Smith, Bloomsburg U of Pennsylvania.

Descartes' System of Natural Philosophy
Descartes' System of Natural Philosophy

Author: Stephen Gaukroger

Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Published: 2002-03-18

Total Pages: 270

ISBN-13: 9780521005258

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Towards the end of his life, Descartes published the first four parts of a projected six-part work, The Principles of Philosophy. This was intended to be the definitive statement of his complete system of philosophy. Gaukroger examines the whole system, and reconstructs the last two parts from Descartes' other writings.

A Companion to Descartes
A Companion to Descartes

Author: Janet Broughton

Publisher: John Wiley & Sons

Published: 2010-11-08

Total Pages: 562

ISBN-13: 144433784X

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A collection of more than 30 specially commissioned essays, this volume surveys the work of the 17th-century philosopher-scientist commonly regarded as the founder of modern philosophy, while integrating unique essays detailing the context and impact of his work. Covers the full range of historical and philosophical perspectives on the work of Descartes Discusses his seminal contributions to our understanding of skepticism, mind-body dualism, self-knowledge, innate ideas, substance, causality, God, and the nature of animals Explores the philosophical significance of his contributions to mathematics and science Concludes with a section on the impact of Descartes's work on subsequent philosophers

The Spiritual Automaton
The Spiritual Automaton

Author: Eugene Marshall

Publisher: OUP Oxford

Published: 2014-01-02

Total Pages: 258

ISBN-13: 0191663018

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Eugene Marshall presents an original, systematic account of Spinoza's philosophy of mind, in which the mind is presented as an affective mechanism, one that, when rational, behaves as a spiritual automaton. The central feature of the account is a novel concept of consciousness, one that identifies consciousness with affectivity, a property of an idea paradigmatically but not exhaustively instantiated by those modes of thought Spinoza calls affects. Inadequate and adequate ideas come to consciousness, and thus impact our well-being and establish or disturb our happiness, only insofar as they become affects and, thus, conscious. And ideas become affects by entering into appropriate causal relations with the other ideas that constitute a mind. Furthermore, the topic of consciousness in Spinoza provides an eminently well-placed point of entry into his system, because it flows directly out of his central metaphysical, epistemological, and psychological commitments—and it does so in a way that allows us to see Spinoza's philosophy as a systematic whole. Further, doing so provides a thoroughly consistent yet novel way of thinking about central themes in his thought. Marshall's reading provides a novel understanding of adequacy, innateness, power, activity and passivity, the affects, the conatus, bondage, freedom, the illusion of free will, akrasia, blessedness, salvation, and the eternity of the soul. In short, by explaining the affective mechanisms of consciousness in Spinoza, The Spiritual Automaton illuminates Spinoza's systematic philosophical and ethical project as a whole, as well as in its details, in a striking new way.