Thanks to a very helpful email from Jonathan Shaheen, I just updated The Letters in the Philosophical Letters, my page that tries to say what each of the many letters is about. PL 4.23 refers, I learn, to Constantijn Huygens. As the page now says: Number: 4.23Topic: On assorted further questionsReference: Includes a reference to a Mr …
Continue reading “Margaret Cavendish’s Philosophical Letters”
Henry More, The Immortality of the Soul, book 1, chapters 2-4. With slight changes in formatting, but not in spelling, capitalization, or use of italics. Based on the EEBO-TCP version.
A short interview on the APA blog, about teaching early modern philosophy.
I have added a new file to my Cavendish page: Philosophical Letters, 1.1-29 (pdf). This is a modernized version of the early part of Margaret Cavendish’s 1664 Philosophical Letters: the front matter, and the first 29 letters in part 1. Most of those letters (4-29) discuss the work of Thomas Hobbes. The text has been modernized in …
Leibniz-Clarke correspondence http://www.newtonproject.sussex.ac.uk/catalogue/viewcat.php?id=THEM00224 Hume’s Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding http://davidhume.org/texts/ehu.html Shepherd’s An Essay upon the Relation of Cause and Effect https://archive.org/details/essayuponrelatio00shepialahttps://archive.org/details/essayuponrelatio00shepiala
My previous post asked some questions about Spinoza’s notion of expression. I’m particularly interested in – puzzled by, really – the expression done by attributes and modes. In that post, I asked whether it helped to think of Spinoza’s talk of expression using the model provided by Leibniz’s claim that “every effect expresses its cause” (Discourse on …
Continue reading “Puzzling about Spinoza on expression (part 2)”
Writing about Leibniz on expression got me thinking about other early modern talk about expression, and in particular about Spinoza, who talks several times in his Ethics about things expressing others. Some of this expressing involves language, but other cases seem not to. Thus both attributes and modes are said to express things. For example, 1p6 talks of the infinite attributes of …
Continue reading “Puzzling about Spinoza on expression (part 1)”
Reading Arash Abizadeh’s recent “The Absence of Reference in Hobbes’s Philosophy of Language” reminds me of something that puzzles me about early modern philosophy of language. Whatever happened to the theory of supposition? If you look at medieval scholastic theories of language, you find repeated mention of signification and supposition, two semantic features of terms. …
Continue reading “Whatever happened to the theory of supposition?”
Leibniz sometimes describes thought as an internal action (see this earlier Modsquad discussion). Moreover, in a couple of places he says that we can know this by experience. Indeed, he suggests we can know enough in this area by experience to establish some substantive philosophical truths about the mind. Thus, in “On Nature Itself” (1698): Indeed, …
Hobbes on the state of nature: In such condition, there is no place for industry; because the fruit thereof is uncertain: and consequently no culture of the earth; no navigation, nor use of the commodities that may be imported by sea; no commodious building; no instruments of moving, and removing such things as require much …
