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”
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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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Henry More on substance, body, and spirit
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.
Teaching early modern philosophy
A short interview on the APA blog, about teaching early modern philosophy.
Philosophical Letters, 1.1-29
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 …
Links to some online texts for teaching
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
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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Hobbes and Thucydides
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 …
Cavendish and causal models
[Cross posted from http://philosophymodsquad.wordpress.com/2014/05/19/cavendish-and-causal-models/.%5D I want to say a little bit about the way Margaret Cavendish thinks about causation.[1] A key aspect of that is an inversion, or set of inversions, of what other modern philosophers were up to. One prominent trend in modern philosophy was what is called mechanism. The central mechanist idea is …
Stewart Duncan 