Author Archives: Stewart Duncan

Map resources

Some interesting links from this edition of the Pasts Imperfect newsletter. ORBIS: The Stanford Geospatial Network Model of the Roman World Pleiades, “a community-built gazetteer and graph of ancient places” al-Ṯurayyā Project, a “gazetteer … and a geospatial model of the early Islamic world” Recogito, offering “Semantic Annotation without the pointy brackets”

Margaret Cavendish’s Philosophical Letters

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 …

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Puzzling about Spinoza on expression (part 2)

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 …

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Puzzling about Spinoza on expression (part 1)

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 …

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