Search

This paper resolves some puzzles regarding Spinoza’s appropriations and rejections of various aspects of Bacon’s methodology, and uses these solutions to resolve some long-standing puzzles concerning Spinoza’s modus operandi in the TTP. We argue first that, appearances to contrary, Spinoza takes a consistent line in his assessment of Bacon’s epistemic approach. We argue that Spinoza follows Bacon in grounding his overall epistemic method in a “historiola mentis” (a brief account or history of the mind), and that differences between Spinoza’s and Bacon’s respective historiola mentis can explain Spinoza’s embrace of this inductive method for his interpretation of Scripture in the TTP, as well as his general abandonment of Bacon’s inductive method in the metaphysical investigation of the Ethics. In short, we argue that the “historiola mentis” constructed by Bacon depicts the intellect as an error-prone faculty that needs be continuously restrained by observation and experimentation—a depiction which motivates Bacon’s reformed inductive empiricism. Spinoza accepts this depiction in regard to a subset of the mind’s ideas—the ideas of the imagination, and hence sees the inductive method as suitable for interpreting Scripture. But contra Bacon, Spinoza’s “historiola mentis” also shows that the human mind includes a subset of ideas that yield true, certain knowledge of things “infinite” and sub specie aeternitatis. Spinoza finds these “intellectual” ideas to be quite useful for systematic metaphysics, but of limited use for interpreting historical texts like Scripture.

The category of sympathy marks a number of basic divisions in early modern approaches to action explanations, whether for human agency or for change in the wider natural world. Some authors were critical of using sympathy to explain change. They call such principles “unintelligible” or assume they involve “mysterious” action at a distance. Others, including Margaret Cavendish, Anne Conway, and Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz, appeal to sympathy to capture natural phenomena (yawn contagion, magnetism), or to supply a backbone to their metaphysics. Here I discuss how concerns about sympathetic actions form at least a partial background for differing seventeenth-century conceptions of what it is to explain action. I argue that critics of sympathy generally insist on an “atomistic” approach to action explanation, which makes primitively relational phenomena come out as problematic. Proponents of sympathy, by contrast, allow for a more holistic approach to action explanation, which allows for such basic connections. Hence, divergent attitudes toward sympathetic action in part explain differences in approaches to explanation. I conclude by showing how some of these core concerns fade into the background when in the eighteenth-century sympathy gets psychologised and individualised.

According to the Dutch colonizers in Suriname, leprosy (or Hansen’s disease) was highly contagious and transmitted from human-to-human. A “cordon sanitaire” was constructed around the patients, mainly African slaves and Asian indentured laborers and their descendants. They were tracked down and incarcerated in remote leprosy settlements located in the rainforest. Some patients obeyed the authorities while others resisted and rebelled. Their narratives, revealing conceptual entanglement of the disease with their culture and the Surinamese natural environment, contain important information for understanding their world and their life inside and outside of leprosy settlements. They combined traditional health practices and medicinal plants from their natural habitat with biomedical treatments (practicing medical pluralism). They believed in a diversity of disease explanations, predominantly the taboo concepts treef, tyina, and totem animals associated with their natural habitat (the Surinamese biome). Some of their imaginary explanations (e.g., “leprosy is carried and/or transmitted through soil and certain animals”) show a surprising analogy with recent findings from leprosy scientists. Our research shows that nature contributes to shaping the world of Hansen’s disease patients. An ecological approach can make a valuable contribution to understanding their world. Comparative historical and anthropological research needs to be conducted to map the influence of different biomes on local explanatory models. The now deserted Hansen’s disease settlements and their natural environments are interesting research sites and important places of cultural heritage.

Galen is criticized for combining Plato’s tripartition-cum-trilocation of the soul, in which each part constitutes its own source of motivation, with the demand that the faculty of voluntary motion is limited to the rational part, being the only one located in the brain and having access to the relevant nerves. While scholars have concentrated on small nerves as connective organs, this paper focuses on thepneuma, blood and innate heat. When the latter is increased, the irrational parts can affect the brain’s function to such an extent that the rational part’s volitions are reduced to their own desires.

In the study of the history of biblical scholarship, there has been a tendency among historians to emphasize biblical philology as a force which, together with the new philosophy and the new science of the seventeenth century, caused the erosion of universal scriptural authority from the mid-seventeenth century onwards. A case in point is Jonathan Israel's impressive account of how biblical criticism in the hands of Spinoza paved the way for the Enlightenment. Others who have argued for a post-Spinozist rise of biblical criticism include Frank Manuel, Adam Sutcliffe, and Travis Frampton. These scholars have built upon longer standing interpretations such as those of Hugh Trevor-Roper and Paul Hazard. However, scholars in the past two decades such as Anthony Grafton, Scott Mandelbrote and Jean-Louis Quantin have altered the picture of an exegetical revolution inaugurated by Thomas Hobbes (1588–1679), Spinoza (1632–1677), and Richard Simon (1638–1712). These heterodox philosophers in fact relied on philological research that had been largely developed in the first half of the seventeenth century. Moreover, such research was carried out by scholars who had no subversive agenda. This is to say that the importance attached to a historical and philological approach to the biblical text had a cross-confessional appeal, not just a radical-political one.

By the turn of the twentieth century, the Dutch colony of the Netherlands Indies dominated the worldwide supply of antifebrifuge (to reduce fever) cinchona bark, the raw material for quinine, an antimalarial medicine. Over the next four decades, the high-quality and laboratory-conditioned cultivation of cinchona became the backbone of a Dutch transoceanic cinchona-quinine enterprise that dominated the international quinine markets. However, in the two decades after the Second World War, the Netherlands Indies’ cinchona bark dominance ended, and the Dutch transoceanic cinchona-quinine production and trade network collapsed. How can we explain this shift? In this study, we argue that this change was part of a process of globalization of cinchona bark production that created new sources and transoceanic production and distribution chains and hence new networks of control that were increasingly less associated with a specific nation than with multinational companies. Colonial networks of control were replaced by new industrial networks of control, and the colonial agro-industrial system was reconfigured into a global agro-industrial system. At the same time, this study also shows that the economic decolonization of Indonesia forced a process of deglobalization that resulted in a translocation of the cinchona-quinine trade networks. As such, this study shows a mix of globalization and deglobalization happening in tandem with Indonesian decolonization and agricultural globalization.

Objective We assessed whether Petrus Donders (died 1887), a Dutch priest who for 27 years cared for people with leprosy in the leprosarium Batavia, Suriname, had evidence of Mycobacterium (M.) leprae infection. A positive finding of M. leprae ancient (a)DNA would contribute to the origin of leprosy in Suriname. Materials Skeletal remains of Father Petrus Donders; two additional skeletons excavated from the Batavia cemetery were used as controls. Methods Archival research, paleopathological evaluation and aDNA-based testing of skeletal remains. Results Neither archives nor inspection of Donders skeletal remains revealed evidence of leprosy, and aDNA-based testing for M. leprae was negative. We detected M. leprae aDNA by RLEP PCR in one control skeleton, which also displayed pathological lesions compatible with leprosy. The M. leprae aDNA was genotyped by Sanger sequencing as SNP type 4; the skeleton displayed mitochondrial haplogroup L3. Conclusion We found no evidence that Donders contracted leprosy despite years of intense leprosy contact, but we successfully isolated an archaeological M. leprae aDNA sample from a control skeleton from South America. Significance We successfully genotyped recovered aDNA to a M. leprae strain that likely originated in West Africa. The detected human mitochondrial haplogroup L3 is also associated with this geographical region. This suggests that slave trade contributed to leprosy in Suriname. Limitations A limited number of skeletons was examined. Suggestions for further research Broader review of skeletal collections is advised to expand on diversity of the M. leprae aDNA database.

Short review of digital humanities aspect of the History Manifesto.

This article examines the immediate Dutch reception of the Tractatus theologico-politicus. Using newfound archival sources it demonstrates that the anti-Spinoza activity of the Cartesians in Utrecht extends far beyond the well-known writings of Lambertus van Velthuysen and Regnerus van Mansveld. Their Cartesian network not only produced the very first public refutation to appear, but also formed a center for coordinating much of the Dutch response to Spinoza. This engagement, it is argued in closing, must be accounted for in Spinoza reception history, and forms the background to the mysterious visit Spinoza paid to Utrecht in the summer of 1673.

The image of Plato captured in Raphael’s School of Athens as the champion of contemplative life has been celebrated for centuries. Such a description of Plato, however, would probably be surprising for most readers who are used to a very different Plato. For many current readers, Plato is a political philosopher. The contrast could not be sharper. The goal of this paper is to reconstruct the origins of the political interpretation of Plato’s thought. Prior to Popper, this interpretation was first developed into a mainstream presentation by some important Hellenists in Germany (such as Wilamowitz and Jaeger) in the first 30 years of the twentieth century, and it quickly became dominant outside the universitiies. One interesting example of the attempts to popularize Plato’s political thought is that of K. Hildebrandt, a member of the George Kreis, who sought to harmonize Plato and Nietzsche in order to derive a new politics of the German state.

The history of the introduction of exotic therapeutic drugs in early modern Europe is usually rife with legend and obscurity and Peruvian bark is a case in point. The famous antimalarial drug entered the European medical market around 1640, yet it took decades before the bark was firmly established in pharmaceutical practice. This article argues that the history of Peruvian bark can only be understood as the interplay of its trajectories in science, commerce, and society. Modern research has mostly focused on the first of these, largely due to the abundance of medico-historical data. While appreciating these findings, this article proposes to integrate the medical trajectory in a richer narrative, by drawing particular attention to the acculturation of the bark in commerce and society. Although the evidence we have for these two trajectories is still sketchy and disproportionate, it can nevertheless help us to make sense of sources that have not yet been an obvious focus of research. Starting from an apparently isolated occurrence of the drug in a letter, this article focuses on Paris as the location where medical and public appreciation of the bark took shape, by exploring several contexts of knowledge circulation and medical practice there. These contexts provide a new window on the early circulation of knowledge of the bark, at a time when its eventual acceptance was by no means certain.

In this study, we will show how a Dutch pharmaceutical consortium of cinchona producers and quinine manufacturers was able to capitalize on one of the first international public health campaigns to fight malaria, thereby promoting the sale of quinine, an antimalarial medicine. During the 1920s and 1930s, the international markets for quinine were controlled by this Dutch consortium, which was a transoceanic cinchona-quinine enterprise centered in the Cinchona Bureau in the Netherlands. We will argue that during the interwar period, the Cinchona Bureau became the decision-making center of this Dutch cinchona-quinine pharmaceutical enterprise and monopolized the production and trade of an essential medicine. In addition, we will argue that capitalizing on the international public health campaign in the fight against malaria by the Dutch cinchona-quinine enterprise via the Cinchona Bureau can be regarded as an early example of corporate colonization of public health by a private pharmaceutical consortium. Furthermore, we will show how commercial interests prevailed over scientific interests within the Dutch cinchona-quinine consortium, thus interfering with and ultimately curtailing the transoceanic circulation of knowledge in the Dutch empire.

This paper analyzes how scientists, private companies and the government in the Netherlands cooperated in the creation of the new field of space research. It examines especially the role of Philips Electronics and Fokker Aircraft, and the consequences of their different structure and corporate identities for their involvement in space projects. It also highlights the importance of management knowledge in addition to scientific and technological skill. Finally, I provide insights into the backgrounds of the new innovation policy of the 1980s and 1990s. The policy was supposed to stimulate new ways of cooperation between science and industry, but at the same time, it meant the end of some older forms of academic-industrial collaboration.

In recent years, mass digitization has opened up voluminous text corpora to human interpretation. Full-text search lets historians now find new sources that can change their understanding of thoroughly studied historical episodes. At the same time, it forces scholars to access historical sources in a new way: through specific words. This article analyses the consequences of this new way of accessing sources and investigates which search technologies are best suited for historical source selection in digital repositories. It argues that to seize the opportunities that digitization offers, historians must refine their search technologies so that they are based on words but are less dependent on exact phraseology.

In this paper, I explain Francis Bacon's use of plants as philosophical instruments in the context of his Historia vitae et mortis. My main claim is that Bacon experimented with plants in order to obtain knowledge about the hidden processes of nature, knowledge that could be transferred to the human case and used for the prolongation of life. Bacon's experiments were based on Giambattista della Porta's reports from the Magia naturalis, but I show how a different metaphysics and research method made Bacon systematically rework, reconceptualise, and put to divergent uses the results of the same experimental reports.

In De Trinitate 10, Augustine offers an argument that seemingly proceeds from certain premises about self-knowledge to the conclusion that the mind is incorporeal. Although the argument has sometimes been compared to later Cartesian arguments, it has received relatively little philosophical attention. In this paper, I offer a detailed analysis and original interpretation of Augustine's argument and argue that it is not vulnerable to some of the main objections which have been raised against it. I go on to argue that while an important part of Augustine's argument does face several hitherto neglected objections, Augustine's ultimate case for the incorporeality of the mind is somewhat different and more successful than one might initially think.

Although natural philosophy underwent dramatic transformations during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, studying its evolution as a whole remains problematic. In this paper, we present a method that integrates traditional reading and computational tools in order to distil from different resources (the four existing Dictionaries of early modern philosophers and WorldCat) a representative corpus (consisting of 2,535 titles published in Latin, French, English, and German) for mapping the evolution of natural philosophy. In particular, we focus on gathering authors and works that were (directly or indirectly) engaged with the teaching of natural philosophy in the early modern academic milieu. We offer a preliminary assessment of the relevance of our corpus by investigating one aspect of this evolution, namely the trends in the acknowledgments of authorities linked with different and competing approaches to natural philosophy (scholastic, Cartesian, and Newtonian). The results not only corroborate existing knowledge, but they also show distinctive features and differences within these trends that were not observed previously, thus illustrating the heuristic potential of our computational method for corpus collection.

This paper examines the significance and originality of Hobbes’s use of ‘mind’, rather than ‘soul’, in his writings on human nature. To this end, his terminology in the discussion of the ‘faculties of the mind’ in The Elements of Law, Natural and Politic (1640) is considered in the context of English-language accounts of the ‘faculties of the soul’ in three widely-read works from the first half of the seventeenth century: Thomas Wright’s The Passions of the Minde in Generall (1604), Robert Burton’s The Anatomy of Melancholy (1621), and Edward Reynolds’s A Treatise of the Passions and Faculties of the Soule of Man (1640). For Hobbes’s contemporaries, man’s soul conveyed God-like powers to human beings; for Hobbes this is a dangerous idea. Accordingly, he establishes a sharp divide between ‘soul’ and ‘mind’, understanding the two terms to be concerned with two very different things: one with soteriology, the other with mental abilities. Like his contemporaries, Hobbes thought that understanding the faculties reveals the way to live a good life. But unlike them, his moral and political philosophy relies on citizens accepting that they are not like God, rather than looking to restore the ‘divine’ within themselves.

The now infamous rewilding experiment in the Dutch Oostvaardersplassen was terminated in 2018 as a consequence of repeated public outcries against the massive crashes of the reserve’s herbivore populations during severe winters, particularly the winter of 2017–2018. This essay discusses the background and aims of the experiment and analyzes the causes of its failure. It argues that one of the main causes was the general public’s conception of nature as a self-regulating whole that strives for equilibrium, a notion with deep historical roots. The experts involved in the project not only paid insufficient attention to this expectation; they even strengthened it at times, inadvertently or not. If the management regime of the reserve had been better attuned to the public’s anxieties about the wildly fluctuating herbivore populations, the 2018 fiasco might have been prevented.

Frege’s definition of the real numbers, as envisaged in the second volume of Grundgesetze der Arithmetik, is fatally flawed by the inconsistency of Frege’s ill-fated Basic Law V. We restate Frege’s definition in a consistent logical framework and investigate whether it can provide a logical foundation of real analysis. Our conclusion will deem it doubtful that such a foundation along the lines of Frege’s own indications is possible at all.

This special issue brings to the attention of the scholarly community some of the common features and some of the subtle, but important, differences between Francis Bacon's and Giovan Battista Della Porta's ways of dealing with the reading, selecting, enacting, and recording of recipes. Focusing on questions of genre, intellectual and material context, strategies of research, and strategies of performing recipes, the four papers of this special issue address two major issues. First, they shed new light on the relationship between Della Porta'sMagia naturalisand Francis Bacon'sSylva sylvarum. Second, they show that in the recording of their experimental practices, Bacon and Della Porta depart from the traditional "recipe format" and discover new avenues of experimental research.

ArgumentThis paper argues that Samuel Clarke's account of agent causation (i) provides a philosophical basis for moderate voluntarism, and (ii) both leads to and benefits from the acceptance of partial occasionalism as a model of causation for material beings. Clarke's account of agent causation entails that for an agent to be properly called an agent (i.e. causally efficacious), it is essential that the agent is free to choose whether to act or not. This freedom is compatible with the existence of conceptually necessary connections. Hence, Clarke can harmonize God's freedom of choosing with the existence of eternal and necessary relations among things. Moreover, in Clarke's account, only intelligent entities can be properly understood as efficacious causes. Beings deprived of intelligence are not agents or efficacious causes at all and their effects are thus the result of the immediate action of some intelligent being operating upon them.

In defending the view that justice is the advantage of the stronger, Thrasymachus puzzlingly claims that rulers never err and that any practitioner of a skill or expertise (τέχνη) is infallible. In what follows, Socrates offers a number of arguments directed against Thrasymachus’ views concerning the nature of skill, ruling, and justice. Commentators typically take a dim view of both Thrasymachus’ claims about skill (which are dismissed as an ungrounded and purely ad hoc response to Socrates’ initial criticisms) and Socrates’ latter arguments (which are deemed extremely weak). In this paper, I clarify Thrasymachus’ views (and those of several other ancients) concerning qua locutions and the nature of skill and ability and I reconstruct Socrates’ arguments against Thrasymachus’ views concerning skill and justice. I argue that Thrasymachus’ views are not ungrounded or ad hoc and that Socrates’ arguments are rather different (and significantly stronger) than often supposed.

This paper studies Antoine Le Grand's account of organic identity over time in human bodies. In response to Aristotelian critics who argued that the Cartesian rejection of the Aristotelian ontology of matter and form had put in jeopardy the diachronic identity of material substances in general and of living bodies in particular, Le Grand argued that the identity over time of the human body could be accounted for without the traditional notions of matter and form. The paper shows how he drew on both the Cartesian metaphysics of mind and body and contemporary views on human anatomy and organic generation to develop a unique account of bodily identity over time in human animals.

The Spanish philosopher Sebastián Izquierdo was a luminary of seventeenth-century scholasticism. In his main philosophical work,Pharus scientiarum, Izquierdo claims to be the first to provide a systematic analysis of the notion of priority. Izquierdo is not the first to attempt an analysis of priority, but his treatment is original and rigorous. Izquierdo distinguishes between accidental and essential priority. This distinction crosscuts his distinction between relative and absolute priority. Izquierdo also recognizes four types of absolute priority: priority of duration, priority of origin, priority of nonmutual connection, and priority of worth. In this article I explain Izquierdo's various priority relations, their formal properties, and how they all cohere in a general theory of priority.

Descartes argues that the mind and body are really distinct substances. He also insists that minds and bodies compose human beings. But how are mind and body united to compose a human? This question is crucial to understanding the place of human beings in Descartes's ontology. Many scholars argue that Descartes has no solution to the unity problem, and they call into question the ontological status of mind-body composites. On some views, Cartesian humans are mere aggregates, like stacks of pancakes; on other views, Descartes is not entitled to the view that humans exist at all. I argue that Descartes has a solution to the unity problem, and that he appropriates this solution from contemporaneous Jesuit discussions of soul-body unity-discussions that remain mostly unknown to contemporary scholars. The upshot is that Descartes has the metaphysical machinery to account for mind-body unity and doesn't have to say that a human being is like a stack of pancakes.

Objectives A multi‐isotope study was conducted on individuals buried at Skriðuklaustur monastery (AD 1493–1554) to investigate their geographic origins and dietary composition. Comparative material from individuals excavated from Skeljastaðir, an inland farm site was also analyzed. Materials and methods Bone collagen was extracted from 50 humans (Skriðuklaustur and Skeljastaðir) and 25 animals (Skriðuklaustur) and analyzed for δ13C, δ15N, and δ34S. Dental enamel samples from 31 individuals (Skriðuklaustur) were also analyzed for 87Sr/86Sr, δ18O, δ13C, and trace elements (Pb, Sr, Zn, Ba). Results The mean value determined from individuals from Skriðuklaustur (n = 36) was δ13C = −18.7 ± 0.8‰, δ15N = 12.8 ± 1.1‰, and δ34S = 9.0 ± 1.6‰, whereas at Skeljastaðir (n = 14), it was δ13C = −20.5 ± 0.8‰, δ15N = 7.8 ± 0.9‰, and δ34S = 9.4 ± 1.6‰. At Skriðuklaustur, human dental enamel samples (n = 31) provided a 87Sr/86Sr range of 0.7060–0.7088, δ18Ophosphate from 13.9 to 16.1‰ and δ13Ccarbonate from −16.6 to −12.9‰. Inferred drinking water (δ18Odw) values range from −12.3 to −8.9‰. Sr concentrations range from 25.8 to 156.7 ppm, Ba from 0.11 to 0.81 ppm, Zn from 43.8 to 145.8 ppm, and Pb from 0.13 to 9.40 ppm. Discussion A combination of results indicates that the people from Skriðuklaustur were born in Iceland, but some lived inland during childhood while others lived closer to the coast. Since Skriðuklaustur was a hospital, these individuals may have sought medical treatment at the monastery. The δ13C and δ15N values determined from bone collagen indicate that the people residing at Skriðuklaustur consumed a diet high in marine protein, while those residing at Skeljastaðir exhibit values more consistent with terrestrial resources., This research was financed by Fornminjasjóður (the Archaeology Fund), Háskólasjóður Eimskipafélags Íslands (the Eimskip University Fund), and the Stable Isotope Biogeochemistry Laboratory (SIBL).

In the final book of Logical Investigations from 1901, Husserl develops a theory of knowledge based on the intentional structure of consciousness. While there is some textual evidence that Husserl considered this to entail a critique of Kantian philosophy, he did not elaborate substantially on this. This paper reconstructs the covert critique of Kant’s theory of knowledge which LI contains. With respect to Kant, I discuss three core aspects of his theory of knowledge which, as Husserl’s reflections on Kant indicate, Husserl was familiar with. These are (i) the cooperation of two faculties for the justification of beliefs; (ii) the concept of a priori structures of knowledge Kant operated with; and (iii) the delivered transcendental proof of these structures. Regarding Logical Investigations, I first briefly outline the intentional structure of consciousness as presented in the fifth book and then turn to the theory of knowledge in the sixth book. I then clarify, partially on the basis of manuscripts and lecture notes, the covert critique of the three core aspects of Kant’s theory which the sixth book contains.

Augustine famously claims every word is a name. Some readers take Augustine to thereby maintain a purely referentialist semantic account according to which every word is a referential expression whose meaning is its extension. Other readers think that Augustine is no referentialist and is merely claiming that every word has some meaning. In this paper, I clarify Augustine’s arguments to the effect that every word is a name and argue that ‘every word is a name’ amounts to the claim that for any word, there exist tokens of that word which are autonymous nouns. Augustine takes this to be the result of universal lexical ambiguity or equivocity (that is, the fact that every word has more than one literal meaning) and I clarify how Augustine’s account of metalinguistic discourse, which is one of the most detailed to have survived from antiquity, differs from some ancient and modern theories.

This paper discusses Husserl’s theory of intentionality and compares it to contemporary debates about intentionalism. I first show to what extent such a comparison could be meaningful. I then outline the structure of intentionality as found inIdeas I. My main claims are that – in contrast with intentionalism – intentionality for Husserl (i) covers just a region of conscious contents; that it is (ii) essentially a relation between act-processes and presented content; and that (iii) the side of act-processes contains non-representational contents. In the third part, I show that Husserl also (iv) offers resources against intentionalism’s exclusive concern with propositional content.

Although several of Descartes's disciples established occasionalism as the natural outcome of Cartesianism, Pierre-Sylvain Regis forcefully resisted this conclusion by developing an account of secondary causes in which God does not immediately intervene in the natural world. In order to understand this view, it has been argued that Regis melds Aquinas's concurrentism with the new, mechanist natural philosophy defended in Cartesian physics. In this paper, I contend that such a reading of Regis's position is misleading for our understanding of both his account of secondary causality and the relationship between medieval debates and seventeenth century natural philosophy. I show that Regis's account of secondary causality denies two fundamental features at the core of the account proposed by Aquinas, namely that God acts immediately in nature and that secondary causes are per se causes. I contend that Regis's view more closely resembles a specific account of artificial instrumental causality developed by Duns Scotus. The comparison with Scotus shows that Regis is still dealing with conceptual tools that can be traced back to the scholastic tradition. Yet, Regis implements these tools to establish an account of causation that is fundamentally irreconcilable with scholastic natural philosophy. (C) 2016 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

This paper aims to identify the polemical target of Spinoza’s critique of final causes in the Appendix to the first part of the Ethics. I assess Spinoza’s arguments on the background of a comparison between Aristotle’s own account of unthoughtful teleology and Adriaan Heereboord’s account of final causes proposed in his Meletemata Philosophica (1654). Although Heereboord explicitly presents himself as an Aristotelian and an anti-scholastic, his view on final causes is at odds with that of Aristotle and can be rather traced back to Suárez. The paper proves that Spinoza’s arguments are effective against Heereboord’s view, but not against Aristotle’s.

Recent years have seen the rise of “post-secularism,” a new perspective that criticizes the dominant secularization narrative according to which “modernity” and “religion” are fundamentally antagonistic concepts. Jurgen Habermas, Charles Taylor, and Gianni Vattimo are the most prominent defenders of such a post-secularist account. But though post-secularism presents itself as a necessary rectification of the secularization story, it has not been able to come up with a credible and generally accepted alternative account. In this article I will explain why, arguing that the use of “essentially contested concepts” such as “Christianity” and “modernity” rest on normative standpoints of the narrators that are incompatible with one another. To show this I will analyze the position of three older voices in the debate, namely those of Hans Blumenberg, Peter Berger, and Marcel Gauchet. These authors seem to agree in understanding the modern disenchanted worldview in relation to Christian transcendence, but I will show that beneath their similar narratives lie incompatible normative beliefs on which their use of the concepts of “Christianity” and “modernity” is founded. After having laid bare the roots of the contemporary debate by exploring these three fundamental positions, I will finally argue that we should not take their accounts as objective, historical descriptions but as what Richard Rorty has called “Geistesgeschichte“: a speculative history that is aimed at conveying a moral, in which essentially contested concepts play a constitutive role. Each author draws his own moral, and consequently each author will construct his own corresponding history. This lesson can then be applied to the contemporary debate on secularization. The value of the debate does not lie in its historical claims but in the visions of the protagonists; at the end of this article I will explain how we can capitalize on this value.

The ‘model approach’ facilitates a quantitative-oriented study of conceptual changes in large corpora. This paper implements the ‘model approach’ to investigate the erosion of the traditional art-nature distinction in early modern natural philosophy. I argue that a condition for this transformation has to be located in the late scholastic conception of final causation. I design a conceptual model to capture the art-nature distinction and formulate a working hypothesis about its early modern fate. I test my hypothesis on a selected corpus of 25 works published in the Dutch academic milieu between 1607 and 1748. I analyse the corpus through a procedure based on concordancing of keywords associated with the model. I argue that the results obtained constitute a successful pilot study for the implementation of the model approach on larger scale research.

This article argues that for Francis Bacon there is only one type of spiritual matter, which acquires different qualities and performs different functions within bodies depending on the structure it has. In order to prove this hypothesis, the paper takes as a case study the process of spontaneous generation, where there is no pre-existent spirit, as contrary to the case of the generation out of seed. For Bacon, tangible matter is prepared to produce certain species, leaving to the spirits the function of shaping what lies in matter in potency.

In his critique of the language and thought of the Scholastics, Lorenzo Valla contrasts classical Latin as a natural, common language to the so-called artificial, technical, and unnatural language of his opponents. He famously champions Quintilian’s view that one should follow common linguistic usage. Scholars, however, have disagreed about the precise interpretation of these qualifications of Latin. This article argues that, depending on the historical, rhetorical, and argumentative contexts, Valla uses notions such as common and natural in different ways to suit different purposes. Such a contextualized reading has repercussions for an evaluation of the coherence of Valla’s humanist program.

In Plato's Euthydemus, Socrates claims that the possession of epistēmē (usually construed as knowledge or understanding) suffices for practical success. Several recent treatments suggest that we may make sense of this claim and render it plausible by drawing a distinction between so-called “outcome-success” and “internal-success” and supposing that epistēmē only guarantees internal-success. In this paper, I raise several objections to such treatments and suggest that the relevant cognitive state should be construed along less than purely intellectual lines: as a cognitive state constituted at least in part by ability. I argue that we may better explain Socrates' claims that epistēmē suffices for successful action by attending to the nature of abilities, what it is that we attempt to do when acting, and what successful action amounts to in the relevant contexts. These considerations suggest that, contrary to several recent treatments, the success in question is not always internal-success.

10 pages; International audience; This paper discusses the "non-reception" of Darwin's works and concepts in French palaeontology and palaeoanthropology between 1859 and 1914. Indeed, this integration was difficult, biased and belated, for ideological, intellectual and epistemological reasons: Clémence Royer's biased 1862 translation of Darwin's Origin of Species pulled its ideas toward "social darwinism", making them less attractive to the natural sciences. - French nationalism and the authority of religion, which imposed Cuvier's thinking until late into the century - the dominance of Lamarckian and neo-Lamarckian transformism in France, both in biology and in paleontology, which proposed the notion of orthogenetic laws and environmental determinations, and refused darwinian evolutionary mechanisms - obstacles inherent to the application of Darwin's concepts to palaeontology, namely the impossibility to identify evolutionary mechanisms through the fossil record, which was stressed by Darwin himself and underlined in turn by 19th century French palaeontologists. However, as I argue, in the course of the examined period, French palaeontology grew from refusal to a better understanding and evaluation of Darwin's thinking. The quest for intermediary forms, the construction of branching evolutionary trees and the attempts to reconstruct human biological and cultural evolution were important efforts toward an integration of some aspects of Darwinian views and practices into French palaeontology and plaeoanthropology. The 1947 Paris conference which brought together American Neo-darwinists and French paleontologists made Darwinian concepts better understood and triggered a revival of French palaeontology from the 1960s.

Icelandic settlement (Landnám) period farmsteads offer opportunities to explore the nature and timing of anthropogenic activities and environmental impacts of the first Holocene farming communities. We employ Bayesian statistical modelling of archaeological, paleoenvironmental and documentary datasets to present a framework for improving chronological robustness of archaeological events. Specifically, we discuss events relevant to the farm Hrísbrú, an initial and complex settlement site in southwest Iceland. We demonstrate that tephra layers are key in constraining reliable chronologies, especially when combined with related datasets and treated in a Bayesian framework. The work presented here confirms earlier interpretations of the chronology of the site while providing increased confidence in the robustness of the chronology. Most importantly, integrated modelling of AMS radiocarbon dates on Hordeum vulgare grains, palynological data, documented evidence from textual records and typologically diagnostic artefacts yield increased dating reliability. The analysis has also shown that AMS radiocarbon dates on bone collagen need further scrutiny. Specifically for the Hrísbrú farm, first anthropogenic footprint palynomorph taxa are estimated to around AD 830–881 (at 95.4% confidence level), most likely before the tephra fall out of AD 877 ± 1 (the Landnám tephra layer), demonstrating the use of arable fields before the first known structures were built at Hrísbrú (AD 874–951) and prior to the conventionally accepted date of the settlement of Iceland. Finally, we highlight the importance of considering multidisciplinary factors for other archaeological and paleoecological studies of early farming communities of previously uninhabited island areas., M.M.E.S. acknowledges support from the Icelandic Centre for Research (Rannís) through grant 121153-0061 and from the Watanabe Trust fund. C.B. thanks the British Academy for the support of a Mid-Career Fellowship (MD120020). D.Z. and J.B. thank the Leverhulme Trust, Vikingaminjar ehf., the city of Mosfellsbær and the Institute for Viking and North Atlantic Studies. E.E. thanks the Leverhulme Trust.

We propose a new method for the history of ideas that has none of the shortcomings so often ascribed to this approach. We call this method the model approach to the history of ideas. We argue that any adequately developed and implementable method to trace (dis)continuities in the history of human thought, or concept drift, will require that historians use explicit interpretive conceptual frameworks. We call these frameworks models. We argue that models enhance the comprehensibility of historical texts, and provide historians of ideas with a method that, unlike existing approaches, is susceptible neither to common holistic criticisms nor to Skinner's objections that the history of ideas yields arbitrary and biased reconstructions. To illustrate our proposal, we discuss the so-called Classical Model of Science and draw upon work in computer science and cognitive psychology.

Recent philosophy of mind has seen an increase of interest in theories of intentionality in offering a functional account of mental states. The standard intentionalist view holds that mental states can be exhaustively accounted for in terms of their representational contents. An alternative view proposed by Tim Crane, called impure intentionalism, specifies mental states in terms of intentional content, mode, and object. This view is also suggested to hold for states of sensory awareness. This paper primarily develops an alternative to the impure intentionalist account of states of sensory awareness. On the basis of Husserl’s phenomenological work, I argue that a focus on intentionality at the level of sensory awareness is phenomenologically implausible. The final part offers an alternative functional account of sensory awareness based on what Husserl called ‘immanent association’.

Kant is well known for his restrictive conception of proper science. In the present paper I will try to explain why Kant adopted this conception. I will identify three core conditions which Kant thinks a proper science must satisfy: systematicity, objective grounding, and apodictic certainty. These conditions conform to conditions codified in the Classical Model of Science. Kant's infamous claim that any proper natural science must be mathematical should be understood on the basis of these conditions. In order to substantiate this reading, I will show that only in this way it can be explained why Kant thought (1) that mathematics has a particular foundational function with respect to the natural sciences and (2) as such secures their scientific status. © 2009 The Author(s).

The aim of this paper is to challenge the notion of subjectivism involved in Udo Thiel’s and in other reconstructions of Locke’s account of personal identity. Although subjectivism is often taken to be the hallmark of Locke’s position, it is not entirely clear how we should understand this characterization. Thus, I will first address some general worries about this label. In a second step, I will discuss possible ways of construing Locke’s account as subjectivist and show how they rely on objective and intersubjective features. I shall conclude with a plea to drop this label with regard to Locke altogether.

I cannot but approve your purpose in signifying your willingness to elucidate and moderate those passages in the Tractatus Theologico-Politicus which have proved a stumbling block to readers. (Olde...

Scholars recognize Spinoza’s conatus doctrine as one of the most important features of the Ethics. In this paper, I investigate two rather neglected aspects of this doctrine, namely, the notion of “transition of perfection” and its moral consequences. I argue that both aspects originate from significant changes in Spinoza’s thought from the positions held in his early writings. To support this claim, I focus on how Spinoza discusses these points in his correspondence with Willem van Blijenbergh (1664–1665). In his letters, Spinoza denies the reality of transitions of perfection, while such transitions will become a key feature of his later account of affects. Moreover, Spinoza subscribes to a kind of ethical intellectualism that he later rejects in his mature version of the Ethics. I conclude that the first draft of the Ethics mentioned in 1665 to van Blijenbergh must have been rather different from its definitive version.

This article studies some key moments in the long tradition of the critiqueof scholastic language, voiced by humanists and early-modern philosophers alike. It aims at showing how the humanist idiom of “linguistic usage,” “convention,” “custom,” “common” and “natural” language, and “everyday speech” was repeated and put to new use by early-modern philosophers in their own critique of scholastic language. Focusing on Valla, Vives, Sanches, Gassendi, Hobbes, and Leibniz, the article shows that all these thinkers shared a conviction that scholastic language, at least in its more baroque forms, was artificial, unnatural, uninformative, ungrammatical, and quasi-precise. The scholastics were accused of having introduced a terminology that was a far cry from the common language people spoke, wrote, and read. But what was meant by “common language” and such notions? They were not so easy to define. For the humanists, it meant the Latin of the great classical authors, but this position, as the article suggests, had its tensions. In the later period it became even more difficult to give positive substance to these notions, as the world became, linguistically speaking, increasingly more pluralistic. Yet the attack on scholasticlanguage continued to be conducted in these terms. The article concludes that the long road of what we may call the democratization of philosophical language, so dear to early-modern philosophers, had its roots – ironically perhaps – in the humanist return to classical Latin as the common language.

This paper analyzes Immanuel Kant's views on mechanical explanation on the basis of Christian Wolff's idea of scientific demonstration. Kant takes mechanical explanations to explain properties of wholes in terms of their parts. I reconstruct the nature of such explanations by showing how part-whole conceptualizations in Wolff's logic and metaphysics shape the ideal of a proper and explanatory scientific demonstration. This logico-philosophical background elucidates why Kant construes mechanical explanations as ideal explanations of nature. © De Gruyter 2013.