Sine Qua Non Causation

Kant’s New Elucidation (1755) is an important source for understanding how early modern debates managed to import and adapt the notion of sine qua non causation in the domain of natural philosophy. In order to clarify Kant’s position, the chapter focuses on two preliminary historical moments: the marginalization of sine qua non causation in Suárez’s account of efficient causation and the forceful revival of sine qua non causation in Malebranche’s occasionalism. In the New Elucidation Kant adopts an understanding of causation similar to that of Malebranche, while also clarifying the way in which God’s involvement in nature has to be understood. In so doing, Kant takes issue with some of the ambiguities of Malebranche’s own account that were hotly debated by his contemporaries.

Our Body Is the Measure

Malebranche holds that sensory experience represents the world from the body’s point of view. The chapter argues that Malebranche gives a systematic analysis of this bodily perspective in terms of the claim that the five external senses and bodily awareness represent nothing but relations to the body. The external senses represent relations between external objects and the perceiver’s body. Bodily awareness represents relations between parts of the perceiver’s body and her body as a whole, and the way she is related to her body. The senses thus represent the perceiver’s body as standing in two very different sets of relations. The external senses relate the body to a world of external objects, while bodily awareness relates this same body to the perceiver herself. The perceiver’s body, for Malebranche, is the center of the system of relations that make up her sensory world, bridging the gap between self and external objects.

Unperceived Existence and Hume’s Theory of Ideas

Hume seems committed to an inconsistent triad: (i) we believe certain things to exist unperceived; (ii) if we believe a certain thing to exist unperceived, then we have (at our disposal) an idea that represents it as existing unperceived; and (iii) we do not have (at our disposal) an idea that represents anything as existing unperceived. This chapter aims to acquit him of this seeming inconsistency by arguing that, contrary to what others have claimed, Hume does not explicitly argue for (iii); his theory of mental representation does not implicitly commit him to (iii); and, moreover, this theory allows him to explain our having ideas that represent things as existing unperceived, contrary to (iii). To this end, the chapter offers Hume an account of negation modeled on his accounts of abstract ideas and ideas of substances and modes.

Locke on Enthusiasm and the Association of Ideas

Locke added two new chapters to the fourth edition of his Essay concerning Human Understanding (1700): ‘Of the Association of Ideas’, and ‘Of Enthusiasm’. When examined together, these chapters reveal that Locke was increasingly attentive to—and troubled by—the potential of mad ideas and pathological principles to thwart the reasonableness at the heart of his political and theological projects. While Locke saw religious zealotry as a vice, he attributed its ultimate causes not to a sinfulness of the will but to a disease of the understanding. Unlike later theorists who would treat the association of ideas as a general mechanism of cognition, Locke saw it as a pathological force that could explain the failures of otherwise rational people to respond to evidence. This technical account of madness is a linchpin not only for Locke’s theory of enthusiasm, but also for his mature views on toleration.

Loving the Body, Loving the Soul

This chapter examines Anne Conway’s ‘argument from love’ in her Principles of the Most Ancient and Modern Philosophy. This argument, supported by a further argument, the ‘argument from pain’, undermines the dualist dichotomy between mind and matter by appealing to a vitalist similarity principle. The goal is two-fold: first, to contribute to a close systematic reconstruction and analysis of Conway’s arguments, which so far is largely lacking in the literature; second, to establish that these arguments are richer and more compelling than commentators have thought. The chapter shows that Conway’s case against the dualist poses a considerable challenge to the dualisms of Henry More and Descartes.

Thinking Matter in Locke’s Proof of God’s Existence

Commentators almost universally agree that Locke denies the possibility of thinking matter in Book IV Chapter 10 of the Essay. This article develops an alternative interpretation according to which Locke allows for the possibility that a system of matter could think (even prior to any act of superaddition on God’s part). In addition, it contends that this does not destroy Locke’s argument in the chapter, instead it helps to illuminate the nature of it. The article proceeds in two main stages. First, a distinction between two senses of ‘production’ is made to clarify Locke’s claim that matter cannot produce thought. Second, Locke’s claim that God could not be a system of randomly moving particles is interpreted as a claim about God’s wisdom and knowledge and not as a claim about thinking matter.

Form, Figure, and Two Types of Extended Being

The chapter examines the system that can be gleaned from the young Leibniz’s philosophical papers from the late 1660s, and in particular its relation to Averroism, a doctrine that the mature Leibniz strongly opposed. It aims to gain a better understanding of some unexplored features of the young Leibniz’s so-called philosophia reformata, a combination of modern mechanist philosophy and restored Aristotelianism. It is argued that the reformed account of matter, form, and figure that Leibniz develops in his 1668–9 correspondence with his mentor Jacob Thomasius must be understood in the context of the theory of bodies, substantial forms, and divine ideas that he elaborates in the contemporary De transsubstantiatione from 1668. The chapter concludes that Averroism and the Paduan Aristotelian tradition, and Giacomo Zabarella in particular, stand centrally in the natural philosophy elaborated by Leibniz in those texts.