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In his important and influential book, How Experiments End, Peter Galison (1987) discusses how scientists decide when a given experiment is finished, and when the supposed fact that it purports to establish can be accepted as fact, and... more
In his important and influential book, How Experiments End, Peter Galison (1987) discusses how scientists decide when a given experiment is finished, and when the supposed fact that it purports to establish can be accepted as fact, and not a mistaken reading of the apparatus, not a result of a malfunctioning piece of equipment, not a misinterpretation of a given observation, and so on. This epistemological question, the transition between individual observations, individual runs of a complex experiment, and the experimental fact that they ...
Let us begin with the Meditations. I don't have to remind you about the philosophical interest of the Meditations, the skeptical arguments that begin the journey, the cogito and the idea of beginning the reconstruction of the world... more
Let us begin with the Meditations. I don't have to remind you about the philosophical interest of the Meditations, the skeptical arguments that begin the journey, the cogito and the idea of beginning the reconstruction of the world from the self, the proofs for the existence of God and the validation of reason that is supposed to derive from that (as well as the circularity that threatens to overturn the whole enterprise), the proof of the distinction between mind and body and the proof for the existence of the external world. All of these are standard ...
Daniel Garber LEIBNIZ AND THE FOUNDATIONS OF PHYSICS: THE MIDDLE YEARS* Leibniz must appear as something of a paradox to the reader of the recent literature on his thought (ie, that written after the seminal work of Russell and Couturat).... more
Daniel Garber LEIBNIZ AND THE FOUNDATIONS OF PHYSICS: THE MIDDLE YEARS* Leibniz must appear as something of a paradox to the reader of the recent literature on his thought (ie, that written after the seminal work of Russell and Couturat). The Leibniz who appears ...
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I Garber in Context. A general and simplified overview of the way commentaries2 of Leibniz's metaphysics have evolved over the past twenty years or so can be given by observing that we have moved successively through two different... more
I Garber in Context. A general and simplified overview of the way commentaries2 of Leibniz's metaphysics have evolved over the past twenty years or so can be given by observing that we have moved successively through two different frameworks. The first framework concentrated above all on Leibniz's nominalism and can be traced back to Benson Mates's book published in 1986. The second framework insisted rather on Leibniz's idealism, starting from Robert M. Adams's book which came out in 1994. This is not to ...
The serious Student of Descartes's philosophy must deal with the fact that Descartes's metaphysics is presented in a number of different ways in a number of different works. While the Meditations ought to be regarded äs... more
The serious Student of Descartes's philosophy must deal with the fact that Descartes's metaphysics is presented in a number of different ways in a number of different works. While the Meditations ought to be regarded äs the authoritative text, it is important to account for the sometimes significantly different versions of the philosophy that Descartes presents in the Discourse, the Principles of Philosophy, the Search
THE SUBJECT of this conference is Teaching New Histories of Philosophy. I have been studying the history of philosophy for some years now, trying to push the limits of the older approaches to the subject. I have also been teaching it for... more
THE SUBJECT of this conference is Teaching New Histories of Philosophy. I have been studying the history of philosophy for some years now, trying to push the limits of the older approaches to the subject. I have also been teaching it for quite a while too. It is strange, then, that I have found it difficult to combine the two. In my graduate seminars I have been proselytizing for newer approaches, but I have found it difficult to figure out how to introduce some of these newer approaches into my basic lecture courses. While my own scholarly ...
Motion and Metaphysics in the Young Leibniz Daniel Garber In 1714 Leibniz, then 68 years old, looked back on his philosophical develop-ment and made the following remarks: 1 After finishing the Trivial Schools [that is, having completed... more
Motion and Metaphysics in the Young Leibniz Daniel Garber In 1714 Leibniz, then 68 years old, looked back on his philosophical develop-ment and made the following remarks: 1 After finishing the Trivial Schools [that is, having completed the trivium], I fell upon the moderns, ...
Daniel Garber (Princeton University, USA), in Monads on my Mind shows that monads were very much on Leibniz’s mind in the late 1690s. In these crucial years between about 1695 and 1700, Leibniz was beginning to work out the details of the... more
Daniel Garber (Princeton University, USA), in Monads on my Mind shows that monads were very much on Leibniz’s mind in the late 1690s. In these crucial years between about 1695 and 1700, Leibniz was beginning to work out the details of the monadology, what monads are, and how they are to function as the ultimate building-blocks of his metaphysics. In this essay, Daniel Garber looks carefully at the development of the argument in those years, as Leibniz’s view was undergoing what has to be regarded as a major shift. He begins by reviewing what he takes to be Leibniz’s position in what he has called his middle years, the years between the late 1670s and the mid-1690s, before monads, when Leibniz’s view of the world was grounded in corporeal substances. He then traces at least one of the paths by which monads came into Leibniz’s world during those important years of transition.
Preface.- List of Contributors.- Introduction Daniel Garber and Sophie Roux.- 1. The Construction of Historical Categories Remarks on the Pre-History of the Mechanical Philosophy Daniel Garber.- How Bacon Became Baconian Guido Giglioni.-... more
Preface.- List of Contributors.- Introduction Daniel Garber and Sophie Roux.- 1. The Construction of Historical Categories Remarks on the Pre-History of the Mechanical Philosophy Daniel Garber.- How Bacon Became Baconian Guido Giglioni.- An Empire Divided: French Natural Philosophy (1670-1690) Sophie Roux.- 2. Matter, Motion, Physics and Mathematics Matter and Form in Sixteenth-Century Spain: Some Case Studies Victor Navarro Brotons.- The Isomorphism of Space, Time and Matter in Seventeenth-Century Natural Philosophy Carla Rita Palmerino.- Beeckman, Descartes and Physico-mathematics Frederic de Buzon.- Between Mathematics and Experimental Philosophy: Hydrostatics in Scotland about 1700 Antoni Malet.- 3. Mechanical Philosophy Applied From a Metaphysical to a Scientific Object: Mechanizing Light in Galilean Science Susana Gomez.- Causation in Descartes' Les Meteores and Late Renaissance Aristotelian Meteorology Craig Martin.- Descartes' Healthy Machines and the Human Exception Gideon Manning.- Mechanism and Surgery: Dionis' Anatomy (1690) Jacques Lambert.- Du Clos and the Mechanization of Chemical Philosophy Remi Franckowiak.- Bibliography.- Author Index.
For the past 200 years, Kant has acted as a lens--sometimes a distorting lens--between historians of philosophy and early modern intellectual history. Kant's writings about Descartes, Leibniz, Locke, Berkeley, and Hume have been so... more
For the past 200 years, Kant has acted as a lens--sometimes a distorting lens--between historians of philosophy and early modern intellectual history. Kant's writings about Descartes, Leibniz, Locke, Berkeley, and Hume have been so influential that it has often been difficult to see these predecessors on any terms but Kant's own. In Kant and the Early Moderns, Daniel Garber and Béatrice Longuenesse bring together some of the world's leading historians of philosophy to consider Kant in relation to these earlier thinkers. ...
The mechanical (or corpuscular philosophy) has been well-established as a historiographical category for some years now. While it certainly began as an actor's category, it has slipped into being something else, a kind of broad... more
The mechanical (or corpuscular philosophy) has been well-established as a historiographical category for some years now. While it certainly began as an actor's category, it has slipped into being something else, a kind of broad catch-all category that is taken to include most of those who opposed the Aristotelian philosophy of the schools throughout the entire seventeenth century, part of a broad master narrative about the demise of the scholastic Aristotelian philosophy of the schools and the rise of modern ...
Something very important happened in our knowledge of the physical world in the seventeenth century. A number of very smart people made discoveries about the natural world that fundamentally changed our way of looking at things. But as... more
Something very important happened in our knowledge of the physical world in the seventeenth century. A number of very smart people made discoveries about the natural world that fundamentally changed our way of looking at things. But as important as the individual accomplishments of individual seventeenth-century scientists were, an important part of the story lies in the disciplinary and institutional history of that important century. What was new and important was not only Copernicus and Kepler, Descartes and Galileo, ...
The modern theory of probability is usually dated from the second half of the 17 th century. The famous PASCAL-FERMAT correspondence of 1654 began a rapid advance in the subject, and by the completion of JACOB BERNOULLI'S Ars... more
The modern theory of probability is usually dated from the second half of the 17 th century. The famous PASCAL-FERMAT correspondence of 1654 began a rapid advance in the subject, and by the completion of JACOB BERNOULLI'S Ars Conjectandi (published posthumously in 1713, but written and discussed long before) one can say that the subject has more or less fully emerged. This of course raises an important historical question: what factors are responsible for the sudden growth of the theory of probability? Why did it ...
Se présente comme une sorte de manuel de physique cartésienne, une introduction à sa philosophie mécaniste, telle que lui-même, ou un homme de son époque, bienveillant, mais non dénué de réserves critiques, l'aurait présentée. Daniel... more
Se présente comme une sorte de manuel de physique cartésienne, une introduction à sa philosophie mécaniste, telle que lui-même, ou un homme de son époque, bienveillant, mais non dénué de réserves critiques, l'aurait présentée. Daniel Garber expose les termes du débat et les nombreuses controverses auquelles les options métaphysiques de Descartes ont donné lieu.. Public motivé
It is part of the lore of Descartes's philosophy that he subscribed to what might be termed the'Dustbin Theory of Mind'. According to this traditional picture, Descartes's conception of the mental was determined by his... more
It is part of the lore of Descartes's philosophy that he subscribed to what might be termed the'Dustbin Theory of Mind'. According to this traditional picture, Descartes's conception of the mental was determined by his prior conception of matter as pure extension, shorn of the various sensible qualities familiar from our ordinary experience of the physical world. Having banished these qualities from nature, and f1nding no other place to locate them, Descartes swept them into the dustbin of the mind. The mind thus became a repository of ...
DANIEL GARBER ne of the central doctrines of Descartes's metaphysics was his division of the created world into two kinds of stuff: mental substance whose essence is thought and material substance whose essence is extension. And one... more
DANIEL GARBER ne of the central doctrines of Descartes's metaphysics was his division of the created world into two kinds of stuff: mental substance whose essence is thought and material substance whose essence is extension. And one of the central problems that later philosophers had with Descartes's doctrine was understanding how these two domains, the mental and the material, relate to one another. Descartes's solution was to claim that these two domains can causally interact with one another, that bodily states can cause ideas, ...
In a recent note (1978) Hartry Field has proposed what he calls a reparameterization of Richard Jeffrey's scheme for changing one's degrees of belief in circumstances in which one learns no new certainty from experience (see... more
In a recent note (1978) Hartry Field has proposed what he calls a reparameterization of Richard Jeffrey's scheme for changing one's degrees of belief in circumstances in which one learns no new certainty from experience (see Jeffrey 1965 and 1968). I shall argue that Field's proposed revision of Jeffrey's formula is neither correct nor necessary. Simple conditionalization is generally accepted in situations in which we acquire a certain belief in some observation sentence (say," this ball is blue") on the basis of some experience (say, ...
For the past 200 years, Kant has acted as a lens--sometimes a distorting lens--between historians of philosophy and early modern intellectual history. Kant's writings about Descartes, Leibniz, Locke, Berkeley, and Hume have been so... more
For the past 200 years, Kant has acted as a lens--sometimes a distorting lens--between historians of philosophy and early modern intellectual history. Kant's writings about Descartes, Leibniz, Locke, Berkeley, and Hume have been so influential that it has often been difficult to see these predecessors on any terms but Kant's own. In Kant and the Early Moderns, Daniel Garber and Béatrice Longuenesse bring together some of the world's leading historians of philosophy to consider Kant in relation to these earlier thinkers. ...
Here is a traditional view. The conception of knowledge as an infallible cognitive act was a distinctively seventeenth-century manifestation and consequence of a new obsession with doubt and its resolution. Whereas earlier epistemology,... more
Here is a traditional view. The conception of knowledge as an infallible cognitive act was a distinctively seventeenth-century manifestation and consequence of a new obsession with doubt and its resolution. Whereas earlier epistemology, following Plato and Aristotle, had focussed on the move from particular beliefs to general science ('the Problem of Universals'), Cartesian and post-Cartesian epistemology was very differently shaped by a scepticism which extended even to the existence of material objects ('the Problem of Perception').
Over the last few decades, historians of early-modern philosophy have tried to relate the main figures in the canon to contemporary developments in the sciences. Chief among these scientific developments has been the rise of the... more
Over the last few decades, historians of early-modern philosophy have tried to relate the main figures in the canon to contemporary developments in the sciences. Chief among these scientific developments has been the rise of the mechanical/corpuscular philosophy. On that view, everything in the physical world can be explained in terms of the size, shape, and motion of the tiny corpuscles that make up the gross bodies of everyday experience.
SUMMARY: Given his excellence in mathematics and his interest in questions of physics, it is very surprising that Descartes never was the mathematical physicist one would have expected him to be and that he wished to be. Since the... more
SUMMARY: Given his excellence in mathematics and his interest in questions of physics, it is very surprising that Descartes never was the mathematical physicist one would have expected him to be and that he wished to be. Since the question is too vast for a brief account, we will confine ourselves here to Descartes's reaction to just one program in the field of mathematical physics, namely Galileo's, to see why it was impossible for Descartes not only to accept it, but also to find an alternative solution to it.
Mucho me honra el privilegio de que se me haya pedido hablar acerca de Margaret Wilson. Ella, más que cualquier otra personalidad en Estados Unidos, en los últimos treinta años, convirtió la historia de la temprana filosofía moderna en... more
Mucho me honra el privilegio de que se me haya pedido hablar acerca de Margaret Wilson. Ella, más que cualquier otra personalidad en Estados Unidos, en los últimos treinta años, convirtió la historia de la temprana filosofía moderna en una vibrante área de investigación que exige los patrones más elevados de conocimiento y de lucidez filosóficos.
Daniel Garber, professore di filosofia alla Princeton University, esperto di metafisica, epistemologia e storia della scienza nel XVII secolo, è tra i principali attori del dibattito sul pensiero leibniziano.
This volume collects some of the seminal essays on Descartes by Daniel Garber, one of the preeminent scholars of early-modern philosophy. A central theme unifying the volume is the interconnection between Descartes's philosophical and... more
This volume collects some of the seminal essays on Descartes by Daniel Garber, one of the preeminent scholars of early-modern philosophy. A central theme unifying the volume is the interconnection between Descartes's philosophical and scientific interests, and the extent to which these two sides of the Cartesian program illuminate each other, a question rarely treated in the existing literature.
Abstract This essay is an exploration of how to conceptualize the so-called scientific revolution. A central figure in this discussion is Thomas Kuhn, whose Structure of Scientific Revolutions has shaped much recent discussion of... more
Abstract This essay is an exploration of how to conceptualize the so-called scientific revolution. A central figure in this discussion is Thomas Kuhn, whose Structure of Scientific Revolutions has shaped much recent discussion of scientific change in the sixteenth through the eighteenth centuries.
A central goal of the history of philosophy is to explain to us why smart people held views that we now find so strange and uncongenial, to try to understand what the philosophical world looked like to our philosophical ancestors. In this... more
A central goal of the history of philosophy is to explain to us why smart people held views that we now find so strange and uncongenial, to try to understand what the philosophical world looked like to our philosophical ancestors. In this paper I would like to explore an issue in seventeenth-century philosophy that we now find relatively unproblematic: the question of the freedom to philosophize, the freedom to formulate, hold, and express the philosophical views that we think are correct.
In his first Anniversary, Donne famously lamented that the “new philosophy calls all in doubt”. This course takes a closer look at exactly what early modern natural philosophy (roughly speaking, “science”) was, and at where it stands in... more
In his first Anniversary, Donne famously lamented that the “new philosophy calls all in doubt”. This course takes a closer look at exactly what early modern natural philosophy (roughly speaking, “science”) was, and at where it stands in relation to the literary canon. We will explore the relatively unfamiliar terrain of how the early moderns viewed, and conceptualised, the natural world and their place within it.
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Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of JSTOR's Terms and Conditions of Use, available at http://www. jstor. org/page/info/about/policies/terms. jsp. JSTOR's Terms and Conditions of Use provides, in part, that unless you have obtained prior permission, you may not download an entire issue of a journal or multiple copies of articles, and you may use content in the JSTOR archive only for your personal, non-commercial use.
In this first book-length treatment of Descartes' important and influential natural philosophy, Daniel Garber is principally concerned with Descartes' accounts of matter and motion—the joint... more
In this first book-length treatment of Descartes' important and influential natural philosophy, Daniel Garber is principally concerned with Descartes' accounts of matter and motion—the joint between Descartes' philosophical and scientific interests. These accounts constitute the point at which the metaphysical doctrines on God, the soul, and body, developed in writings like the Meditations, give rise to physical conclusions regarding atoms, vacua, and the laws that matter in motion must obey. Garber achieves a philosophically rigorous reading of ...

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Benítez Grobet, Laura y Luis Ramos-Alarcón Marcín (coords.), El concepto de sustancia de Spinoza a Hegel. México: FFyL-UNAM, 2018, 480 pp. ISBN: ISBN 978-607-30-1005-4. El libro contiene 16 capítulos: 1) Luis Ramos-Alarcón (UACM),... more
Benítez Grobet, Laura y Luis Ramos-Alarcón Marcín (coords.), El concepto de sustancia de Spinoza a Hegel. México: FFyL-UNAM, 2018, 480 pp. ISBN: ISBN 978-607-30-1005-4.
El libro contiene 16 capítulos:
1) Luis Ramos-Alarcón (UACM), "Sustancia, inmanencia e individualidad en la Ética de Spinoza"
2) Luciano Espinosa (U. Salamanca, España), "Sustancia y orden en Spinoza: la praxis perspectivista de la razón"
3) María Luisa de la Cámara (U. Castilla-La Mancha, España), "Los corresponsales de Spinoza y el problema de la sustancia (1661-1665)"
4) Diana Cohen (UBA, Argentina), "La sustancia spinozista: ¿el marco de un programa ético?"
5) Carmen Silva (UNAM), "Sobre la idea de sustancia en John Locke"
6) Daniel Garber (U. Princeton), "Leibniz y el debate sobre la sustancia"
7) Leonardo Ruiz (U. Panamericana), "Leibniz: sustancia, expresión y fenómeno"
8) Luis Antonio Velasco (UNAM), "La sustancia individual en Leibniz"
9) Alberto Luis (UNAM), "Berkeley y la sustancia espiritual"
10) Sébastien Charles (Université du Québec à Trois-Rivières, Canadá), "Actividad y pasividad del espíritu en Berkeley"
11) Hazel Castro Chavarria (UNAM), "La idea de una ‘mente singular’ en Hume: el ‘qué o quién’ ejecuta las actividades propias de una vida mental"
12) Mario Chávez Tortolero (UNAM), "Sobre la existencia de las percepciones en el pensamiento de Hume"
13) Leiser Madanes (CIF, Buenos Aires), "Un salvavidas de plomo. La pesada herencia sustancialista en la filosofía moderna"
14) Julián Carvajal (U. Castilla-La Mancha, España), "La sustancia en la ontología crítica de Kant"
15) Maximiliano Hernández Marcos (U. Salamanca), "DE NOBIS IPSIS SILEMUS". El desencantamiento kantiano del alma: de sustancia a sujeto moral"
16) Sergio Pérez-Cortés (UAM-I), "G.W.F. Hegel, la categoría de sustancia"-
El libro incluye un índice de conceptos relevantes tratados en el libro; un índice de autores tratados; así como bibliografía especializada sobre el concepto de sustancia.
Compartan el vínculo, descarguen el libro gratuitamente, léanlo y ¡a discutirlo! Encontrarán los correos electrónicos de las autoras y autores al inicio de cada capítulo.
Cabe decir que el concepto de sustancia va a ser objeto de buenas discusiones en la historia de la filosofía, pues unos lo proponen como el fundamento metafísico que da homogeneidad a cuanto existe y a cuanto pensamos; mientras que otros lo rechazan como un estorbo para el desarrollo de la ciencia. Hagan sus apuestas, pues filosofar no sólo es comprender la postura de un autor sobre un problema netamente humano, sino seguir sus similitudes y diferencias con las posturas de otros autores. En el caso de este libro, el problema es aclarar qué es lo que permanece a pesar de los cambios. Se trata de un problema que tratamos desde diversas preocupaciones filosóficas como individualidad, identidad personal, cambio, regularidad, etcétera.
En este libro nos centramos en: Spinoza, Locke, Leibniz, Berkeley, Hume, Kant y Hegel.