Journal of the History of Philosophy

Notes and Discussions ARISTOTLE'S "DE MOTU ANIMALIUM" AND THE SEPARABILITY OF THE SCIENCES In contrast to Plato's vision of a unified science of reality and with a pro- found effect on subsequent natural science and philosophy, Aristotle urges in the Posterior Analytics and elsewhere that scientific knowledge is to be pursued in limited, separable domains, each with its own true and necessary first principles for the explanation of a discrete range of phenomena, that is, accepted observations and beliefs, from which its investigations are launched (An. Pr. 46al7ff.; An. Post. 74b25, 76a26-3 o, 84b14-18, 88a31; Cael. 3o6a6ff.; Gen. An. 748a7ff.). In an early introduction to a course of lectures on the natural sciences, Aristotle also indicates the order in which those sciences ought to be presented (Mete. 338a2o-~9, 339a5-9; cf. Cael. 268al- 6, Part. An. 644b~2ff.). The plan is to start with a general discussion of change and motion, then progress to studies of specific natural phenomena, ending with the many species of plants and animals. In the theory of demonstration in Posterior Analytics 1, which is concerned with the organization, justification, and teaching of a finished science, Aris- totle maintains that terms cannot ordinarily cross genera; for example, ge- ometry cannot provide demonstrations of truths of arithmetic or aesthetics. Demonstration of a theorem of some one science by means of another can be accomplished when and only when the sciences are related as "subordi- nate" to "superior" (75b14-17), for example, as harmonics to arithmetic or optics to geometry. A superior science may supply the "reason" for a "fact" known to obtain in the subordinate science (78b34-79a6). Evidently at least part of what he has in mind is the relation between pure and applied sciences.' Aristotle's practice as well as a number of methodological remarks ' See Thomas Aquinas, In Post. An. 50.1,15.131, 50.1.25, as well as J. Barnes's notes on An. Post. 78b34, in Aristotle's Posterior Analytics (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1975). For relevant background see Ian Mueller, "Ascending to Problems: Astronomy and Harmonics in Republic VII," in John Anton, ed., Science and the Sciences in Plato (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1979). [65] 66 HISTORY OF PHILOSOPHY suggest also that the strictures of the Posterior Analytics are not intended to prohibit the heuristic use of material from other disciplines in research (see e.g., Top. 1.14; Part An. 639b17ff., 641a6-14, 642alo-14, 645b15-2o; Ph. 192b8-34, 199a8-21, 199a33-b5). The requirements for science laid down here are very strict, and it is sometimes maintained that Aristotle violates them himself to some degree in other works, but it is not usually believed that he ever denies the separability of the sciences in general. Martha C. Nussbaum has recently presented a lively challenge to this concensus? She argues that Aristotle's late, little known work De Motu Ani- malium represents a radical but "deliberate and fruitful" rejection of his earlier philosophy of science as enunciated in the Organon and not seriously questioned in other, subsequent writings. Her claim is that in his mature thought about the sciences Aristotle arrives at a significantly "less depart- mental and more flexible picture of scientific study" (p. 113) and comes to hold that "no inquiry is genuinely separable from a whole group of inter- locking studies, and no being can be extensively studied without an account of its placement in the whole of nature" (p. 164). Nussbaum's conclusion is probably not intended to be as Platonic as it may appear at first blush, for she seems actually to be speaking only of connections between sciences of different substances. There is no suggestion that the study of beauty or health or geometry, say, is on a par with the sciences of substances. Nor does she suggest that Aristotle wavers in his conviction that there are fundamental cleavages between the practical and theoretical sciences, which will make a full-blown science of ethics-politics look very different from the demonstrative science of meteorology, for ex- ample. Nevertheless, even if limited to the natural sciences of substances, her claim remains an important and interesting...

Teleology, Chance, and Aristotle's Theory of Spontaneous Generation JAMES LENNOX I ARISTOTLE'S THEORY of sexual generation is recognized as an exemplary application of his theory of causality to a specific natural occurence (or alternatively, as the source from which the theory was generated).' Yet Aris- Abbreviations APo. Poste'rior Analytics Cael. De Caelo Cat. Categories De An. De Anima E.E. Eudemian Ethics EN Nicomachean Ethics FR. Aristotle Fragments GA Generation of Animals HA History of Animals 1A Progression of Animals ]VIA Movement of Animals Metaph. Metaphysics Mete. Meteorology PA Parts of Animals Ph. Physics ' There will not be space here to discuss the general issue of the logical and chronological relationships between Aristotle's Physics and his biological works. I shall assume that the Physics is earlier, and I will be arguing that the theories of explanation, teleology, and chance argued for in Physics 2.3-9 are used more or less systematically in Aristotle's study of living things. This view has been defended in a general way in G. E. R. Lloyd, Aristotle: The Growth and Structure of His Thought (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1968); A. Preus, Science and Philosophy in Aristotle's Biological Works (New York: George Olms, 1975); and D. M. Balme, "Development of Biology in Aristotle and Theophrastus: Theory of Spontaneous Generation," Phronesis 7 (1962): 91-1o4 . [2 ~ 9] 9'20 HISTORY OF PHILOSOPHY totle readily admitted that many living things were not sexually generated, but arose "spontaneously"; ~ including all testacea, many insects, certain fish, and (analogously) certain plants. It has been claimed that, unlike his theory of sexual generation, Aristotle's account of spontaneous generation is incon- sistent with his metaphysical doctrines of causation and chance? Briefly, the alleged inconsistency is this. Physics ~. 4-6 presents a theory of things generated by chance (T6 &J-t6 vbX~g ) and spontaneity (z6 +~5 9 cnbzo~ov). Such productions are argued to be nonteleological, contrary to what is both natural and comprehensible to man, unusual, and due to inci- dental causes. Yet in the Generation and History of Animals, Aristotle argues that entire genera are generated Ctr~6 za~)zo~t~ov -- spontaneously. In GA 3. 11, in fact, we are treated to a theoretical, that is, causal, account of such productions. And in Parts of Animals, teleological explanations of the parts of such creatures -- the testacea and insects, for example -- abound. The question to be faced is this: Why does Aristotle call the working-up of creatures out of inanimate materials "spontaneous"? Assuming that the theoretical account of the Physics predates the concept's use in the biological works, 4 it is reasonable to expect its biological use to reflect that theoretical account. I shall argue that for the most part it does. A careful understanding of the interaction among Aristotle's concepts of teleology, chance, and sponta- neity is, however, necessary before a general harmony between theory and practice can be established. I will argue that an observable causal pattern is at the core of Aristotle's doctrine of teleology and that certain kinds of events -- even the nonbiological production of organisms -- might occur quite regularly and yet fail to exemplify that pattern. This paper argues that it is When discussing Aristotle's theory of nonreproductive generation, I shall render ~3"tft.tct~ov "spontaneous." When Aristotle's theoretical account of xa3X~ q "t6 acJx6~tc~xov in Physics 9. 4_6 is discussed, I will use the term "chance" for the general phenomena under discussion. The reader is here forwarned that the same Greek term (cta)x6~tctxov) is used in the one context and under philosophical scrutiny in the other. -~ By Balme, "Spontaneous Generation," pp. 96-97; and David Hull, "The Conflict Between Spontaneous Generation and Aristotle's Metaphysics," Proceedings of the Inter-American Congress of Philosophy, 7 (1967-68), 2:245-5 o. 4 If there is such a thing as an uncontroversial claim with regard to the dating of" various parts of the corpus, this is one. Of course, given the various catalog references to different treatises composed of parts of our Physics, one cannot presume a dating for the Physics per se. For our purposes it is enough to...

Journal of the History of Philosophy 40.2 (2002) 229-253 Situating Kant's philosophical project in relation to the natural sciences of his day has been of concern to several scholars from both the history of science and the history of philosophy. Historians of philosophy have displayed an expanded awareness of, and interest in, the importance of the scientific context of the period in which Kant carried out his "Copernican" revolution. Most commonly among philosophers, this interest has been analyzed in relation to Kant's concerns with the foundations of mechanics, matter theory, and the epistemology of Newtonian science, with the central text of interest being the Metaphysische Anfangsgründe. On the other hand, historians of philosophy and historians of science, interested in the issues of the third Critique and in the several papers of Kant dealing with biological and anthropological issues, have emphasized the unified nature of Kant's inquiries into the natural sciences, and the importance of his continued interest in the life and human sciences alongside his interests in the foundations of the physical sciences. The effort to understand the unity of Kant's project in the sciences from the 1770s through the Opus Posthumum is a project now of interest to several Kant scholars. My concern in this paper is to extend and deepen the understanding of Kant's encounter with the life sciences of his period, and through this to illuminate the importance of this context for understanding the formulation of Kant's mature philosophical program. It is my claim that close attention to the interplay of late eighteenth-century biological thought with Kant's philosophical program as it developed in the 1760s, '70s, and '80s, clarifies several otherwise puzzling dimensions of Kant's thought, and illuminates the issue of the foundation and necessity of the categories and the status of the a priori. I argue that attention to this context supplies a clarification of the much-debated issue surrounding the "nativist" dimensions of Kant's epistemology. It also supplies a novel basis for tracing changes in Kant's mature philosophy, as this underlying theoretical framework seems to have altered in the late 1780s. To situate these issues, I commence with a passage from the first (1781) edition of Kant's Kritik der reinen Vernunft (KrV) that was repeated without alteration in the second edition of the KrV of 1787. This is the passage at A 66 opening the discussion of the Transcendental Analytic explicating the "Analytic of Concepts" (Analytik der Begriffes), where Kant most explicitly addresses the issue of the actual source or foundation of the categories: I highlight two issues in this quotation. The first is that we see Kant asserting that the dissection of the Understanding itself traces the Begriffe to their birthplace (Geburtsorte) within the faculty of the understanding itself, where they are grounded in what he terms "ihren ersten Keimen und Anlagen." Secondly, on the occasion of experience they are developed, freed from their empirical restrictions or limitations, and then displayed in their purity or clarity. Standard commentaries on this passage have not typically known what to do with it if they have attended to it at all. Norman Kemp Smith simply remarks that this passage "fail[s] to do justice to Kant's real teaching. . . and reveal...

Ideas in the Brain: The Localization of M emory T races in the Eighteenth Century TIMO KAITARO PLATO SUGGESTS IN THE Theaetetus that we imagine a piece of wax in our soul, a gift from the goddess of Memory. We are able to remember things when our perceptions or thoughts imprint a trace upon this piece of wax, in the same manner as a seal is stamped on wax. Plato uses this metaphor to explain the errors which arise when we mistake something for something else: we connect the perception of an object with the trace belonging to another. The metaphor can also be used in explaining differences in people's mnestic capacities: rapid learning and forgetting correspond to soft wax, impure wax results in mud- dled traces, etc.' If we locate the traces in the brain instead of in the soul, Plato's metaphor gains consistency and turns into a testable hypothesis. This move was already made by Quintilian? So, the metaphor of memory as traces in the brain is evidently not a mod- ern invention. This is easy to understand. To frame the hypothesis one needs only to reflect on how we use objects outside our brains for mnemonic pur- poses. We conserve ideas by tracing or printing letters and words on paper. We are also able to conserve images in drawings, paintings and prints. What could be more natural than to think of memory as the formation of traces in the brain? The development of even better information storage techniques in the form of pictures, symbols, and signs provides the metaphor extra plausibil- ity. Plato's seal allows us to imagine the imprint of a person's likeness, but modern techniques of information storage and retrieval make it even easier to imagine memory in general as the formation of material traces. Explaining memory in terms of material traces could, of course, be taken ~Plato, Theaetetus, 19xc-195a. Cited in Mich~le Aquien, Dictionnaire de rhdtorique (n.p.: Livre de Poche, 1996), entry M6moire. [3ol] 302 JOURNAL OF THE HISTORY OF PHILOSOPHY 37:2 APRIL 1999 to mean that the formation of material traces in the brain is merely a neces- sary condition of memory. But one could also take a more reductionistic stance which identifies memory with the formation of material traces. Further- more, one could identify specific mental items (sensations, ideas, memories) with specific physiological events or anatomical entities in the brain. This seems especially plausible if we imagine that the traces in the brain are as discrete and separate as ideas or memories are in our minds. Since the traces we form or print on paper consist of discrete letters and words, the thought that the traces in the brain are equally discrete and separate comes easily. Plato, in fact, made separateness a condition for the memory to work prop- erly: it is not easy to read signs printed on one another.3 Of course, no traces are actually visible in the brain. But they are easy to imagine, as it is to imagine explanations of psychological phenomena, such as association, based on these traces. At the end of the seventeenth century, explanations of mental phenomena referring to material traces in the brain were used by writers, from Platonists to materialists, who supported widely different theories about the nature of the human mind.4 In fact, as I will show later in this paper, the question of the possible identity of mental entities, like ideas or sensations, with material en- tities or traces in the brain is relatively independent of the question of the existence of an immaterial soul. Or rather, if there is a systematic connection between the answers proposed to these two questions in the eighteenth cen- tury, it is not the connection one would expect. Nowadays we often tend to think of a prototypical materialist as someone who makes radical reductionistic claims about the identity of mental phenomena with brain states. We also tend to think of the eighteenth-century French materialists as "mechanistic."5 In view of this reputation, it may come as a surprise to find that some eighteenth- century materialists, notably Denis Diderot, were in fact consistent anti- reductionists...

German Idealism and the Development of Psychology in the Nineteenth Century DAVID E. LEARY THE BIRTH OF MODERN SCIENTIFIC PSYCHOLOGY is generally placed in Germany around 1850. This birth is credited by the standard historiography to the dual parentage of the empirical school of philosophy and the experimental study of sensory physiology. There is also a tradition of giving a nod toward Kant and Herbart as predecessors, for varying reasons, of the rise of scientific psychology. ~ Almost completely overlooked in the lit- erature is the influence of post-Kantian German idealism upon the development of the concepts, subject matter, and methods of psychology. This is somewhat surprising since idealism was the dominant philosophical movement in Germany in the first half of the nineteenth century. The purpose of this article will be to present a general survey of the relationship between German idealism and the development of psychology in the nine- teenth century. The article will be divided into three sections: (1) the idealistic concep- tion of the science of psychology; (2) a survey of idealistic psychology; and (3) the contributions of idealistic psychology. The Idealistic Conception of the Science of Psychology To understand the ideal- istic conception of psychology as a science, it is necessary to review the philosophy of science proposed by the leading German idealists, Johann Gottlieb Fichte, Friedrich Wilhelm von Schelling, and Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel. "Science" meant some- thing quite different for them than it did for Kant in Metaphysische Anfangsgriinde der Naturwissenschaft (Metaphysical foundations of natural science, 1786). 2 From this change in the definition of science there naturally followed a change in what it meant for psychology to be a science and a corresponding change in the attitude toward, and approach to, psychology. One of the most crucial changes in the definition of science resulted from the ideal- ists' abolition of things-in-themselves. Since they no longer considered natural objects as separate from, and prior to, the ego, the central Kantian distinction of a posteriori and a priori lost its significance for them. Knowledge, the idealists now maintained, does not result from the a posteriori experience of things-in-themselves; rather "things" are themselves manifestations of will (Fichte), imagination (Schelling), or reason (Hegel). i See my "Philosophical Development of the Conception of Psychology m Germany, 1780-1850," Journal of the History of the Behavioral Sctences 14 (1978): 113-21, where I argue that Kant and Herbart, as well as Fries and Beneke, deserve more than just a nod 2 Metaphystcal Foundations of Natural Science, trans James Elhngton (Indianapohs: Bobbs-Merrdl, 1970). [2991 300 HISTORY OF PHILOSOPHY There are not two spheres of knowledge, the rational and empirical. Rather all knowl- edge or "science" (Wissenschaft) is one; all knowledge can be reached by the same method; all knowledge can form a system. In fact, since reality is ultimately unitary, according to the idealists, knowledge must form a system if it is to be complete and whole. Only then can "science" be said to be certain. It is not by chance that two of the most common words in the titles of the works of the German idealists were Wissenschaft and System. These words, which became prac- tially synonymous, represented the goal of the idealist philosophers. As Hegel wrote, voicing a conviction common to them all, "the truth is only realized in the form of system. ''3 This system is the fullness of science. Obviously, there has been a change here in the meaning and significance of "science" and its relation to philosophy. With Kant, science -- or as he defined it more narrowly, natural science -- was an autonomous enterprise which philosophy must investigate in order to clarify the presuppositions that make it possible. Philosophy thus provides critical, second-order reflections upon the nature of science. To the idealists, philosophy itself is science, not simply a reflection upon science. It is not merely critical; it actually produces true knowledge. With this change a major intellectual revolution (in the etymological sense of "turn") has taken place. Once again philosophy has been made the ultimate "science," and natural science, which had been struggling for liberation from philosophy since at least the seventeenth century, is once more made subordinate...

Journal of the History of Philosophy 38.1 (2000) 87-101 Collingwood's The Idea of History is often discussed in the context of the issue of the reducibility/non-reducibility of explanations in the social sciences to explanations in the natural sciences. In the 1950s and 60s, following the publication of Hempel's influential article, "The Function of General Laws in History," many looked at Collingwood's defence of the autonomy of history as providing the appropriate conceptual resources to counter Hempel's claim that explanations in history and in the natural sciences share the same logical structure. Collingwood was recruited as an ally in a number of debates in analytical philosophy of history with a view to clarifying the nature of appropriately historical explanations and the proper subject matter of historical science. In this paper, I wish to consider Collingwood's account of historical understanding from a related but distinct perspective, that is, I wish to consider re-enactment from the perspective of Collingwood's (controversial) claim that thought stands outside time, and that it is because thought stands outside time that it is possible to understand the thoughts of other agents, including those of agents who lived in a distant past. Although Collingwood's account of re-enactment is developed in the context of his philosophy of history, it addresses some very general issues within the philosophy of mind. It is with Collingwood's approach to these general issues that the present paper is concerned: First, I explicate Collingwood's account of re-enactment against the background of his philosophy of mind and, second, attempt to show that one important goal of Collingwood's account of re-enactment is to undermine a certain type of scepticism about the possibility of sharing the thoughts of others, rather than provide a straightforward refutation of this sceptical position. While I believe Collingwood's claim that thought stands outside time to have important repercussions on how to understand issues more closely related to the philosophy of history, I will not attempt, for reasons of space, to cash out these implications here. In The Idea of History the concept of re-enactment is expounded largely via an engagement with an imaginary objector. The position that Collingwood attributes to the imaginary objector can be preliminarily summarized as saying that the objector identifies thoughts with token acts of thinking which can be spatio-temporally located, rather than with the propositional content expressed by those token acts. It is because the objector holds thoughts to be token acts which can be spatio-temporally located that s/he denies that two agents can have or share one and the same thought. Collingwood's reply to the imaginary objector relies on a philosophy of mind that is developed elsewhere but whose key elements are presupposed by his discussion of re-enactment in The Idea of History, and essential to an understanding of Collingwood's position. An important aspect of Collingwood's philosophy of mind concerns his understanding of what is meant by an 'object of thought': For the sake of clarity I shall refer to the subjective/objective distinction as used by Collingwood as subjective2 and objective2 and to the subjective/objective distinction against which it is contrasted as subjective1 and objective1. Objective1 means existing in reality. In this sense of the term, a rose is objective in the way in which a unicorn is not. By contrast, objective2 means the object of thought in the sense of what thought is about, independently of whether what...

Did Descartes Have a Philosophical Theory of Sense Perception?' RONALD ARBINI IT IS ALL but universally acknowledged among readers of Descartes that he either consciously maintained or was somehow committed to one or another form of perceptual representationalism. The justification for this interpreta- tion almost always involves citing one or another of a host of more or less obscure and often inconsistent references to ideas, their content, causes, resemblances (or the lack of same) to thoughts (obscure), images, pictures, engravings, etc. in the Meditations and related philosophical texts. It is also widely acknowledged by those who cite such references seeking an obvious, coherent or clearly consistent expression of perceptual representationalism in Descartes's philosophical texts that none can be found. ~ In contrast to this interpretation, it will be argued below that the only clear coherent account of sense perception to be found in Descartes is not to ' I wish to express my thanks to my colleague Professor N. W. Gilbert for translating various passages discussed below. His contributions to the cited translations are contained in brackets. Alternate translations are contained in square brackets. Further thanks are due to my Berkeley colleague Professor Janet Broughton f'or her helpful critical comments on an early draft. Finally, thanks are due to Professor Fred Berger of U.C. Davis, and a referee of this journal for valuable criticisms contributing to the clarification and editing of the last draft of this article. See for example: B. Williams, Descartes, The Project of Pure Enquiry (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1979) pp. 985-6 A. J. P. Kenny, Descartes (New York: Random House 1968 ), Pp. lo5ff. M. D. Wilson Descartes (London, Henly and Boston: Routledge and Kegan Pau, 1978) p. 2o 3. It should be noticed that each of the above has expressed some hesitation over attribut- ing to Descartes a clearly consistent or obvious doctrine of the relationship between ideas of sense and what or how they are supposed to represent. In fact Wilson wonders whether any philosophical causal or representational theory can be attributed to Descartes at all because his "meager" conclusions in the Meditations concerning this relationship are "too tenuous, too nearly void of cognitive significance." [3~7] 318 HISTORY OF PHILOSOPHY be found in his philosophical works, but only in his Dioptrics and related "scientific" texts. In this connection it will be argued further, both that Descartes intended this theory to solve the well-known problems impugning "external" sense perception advanced, but never resolved in his philosophi- cal works, and that such a theory cannot be regarded as a form of represen- tationalism. I will first consider the issue of how his "scientific" account of perception can be understood as the only acount of sense perception clearly formulated by Descartes to provide solutions to all of the philosophical puzzles specifically intended to introduce perceptional doubts. Finally, I wilt discuss the question of perceptual representationalism in Descartes and some remaining related issues. I At the time he concluded the sixth Meditation it seems to have escaped Descartes's attention that although he could be taken to have dispatched the evil demon and the dream puzzle, thus ruling out the possibility of universal and systematic deception, this alone fails to account for his puzzles of per- ception which do not depend for their force upon the prospect of such complete and universal deception. That is, the puzzles of "internal" and "external" perception introduced in the Meditations remain unaffected by removing the possibility of systematic universal deception; for it is clear that despite this possibility it remains possible that one will continue to take round towers for square ones, "perceive" the size of the observed sun to be that of a closely held coin or candle flame, mislocate the origin of a pain in a "phantom limb", etc. In this way, the puzzles of perception introduced in the Meditations, and related philosophical texts remain unaffected by the remov- al of doubts eminating from considerations involving demons, deceivers, and dreams. That is, the possibility, introduced in Meditation I, that being de- ceived, after the manner of the above puzzles, is sufficient grounds for not placing complete trust in the senses alone, remains a possibility at the close of...

Soulevant le probleme de l'auto-destruction dans le traitement de la personnalite chez Spinoza, l'A. se propose d'eclairer la conception spinoziste de l'essence humaine comme affirmation de soi et impossibilite de volonte de destruction. Examinant l'analyse du suicide en termes d'opposition de l'environnement exterieur avec la nature de l'agent, l'A. tente de repondre a la faiblesse et a la servitude de la volonte par reference a la theorie des passions, a la conception de l'action libre et de l'immortalite chez Spinoza. L'A. conclut par l'impossibilite d'une distinction entre le suicide et les autres formes de mort

Journal of the History of Philosophy 39.2 (2001) 259-288 For much of Western history, the theory of the four temperaments played a vital part in medicine, anthropology, and moral reflection. The Hippocratic foursome of sanguine, choleric, melancholy, and phlegmatic survives on the margins of modernity, but its role in moral theory and practice has been largely forgotten. Premodern understandings of human diversity based in climate, temperament, and politics collapsed with the Galenic medical tradition with which they harmonized. Yet temperament continued to be a feature of moral philosophies and philosophical anthropologies even into the twentieth century, and arguably has had a symbiotic relationship with the egalitarian aspirations of modern moral and political thought. This essay surveys the development and practical consequences of the theory of the temperaments developed by one of the greatest prophets of modern values, Immanuel Kant. Temperament was a feature in Kant's course in anthropology from the 1760s until the end of his life. Kant's teachings on temperament are by turns creative and conservative, and bespeak a deep understanding of the logic and rationale of humoral characterology in ethics. But as Kant moves from an ethics based in feeling to an ethics based on the possibility of autonomy, his theory of temperament also changes. In 1764's Observations on the Feeling of the Beautiful and the Sublime, Kant eloquently celebrates the melancholy as the temperament capable of "genuine virtue" (Obs2:217-18/60); by the time of Anthropology from a Pragmatic Point of View (1798), he is commending instead "phlegma as strength" (a variant of a temperament he had earlier dismissed), which can serve as a "substitute for wisdom" (Ant7:290/155). Both of these positions are distinctive, especially for an eighteenth-century thinker. As we will see, however, they are not without precedent in the tradition of temperament theory. Whether Kant knew he was developing countertraditions of temperament or not, his arguments in each case creatively exploit tensions in the humoral system which go back to its origins in ancient Greece. The mature Kant defended the classic foursome at a time when it had come under fire from many quarters. The early nineteenth century historian of temperament theories Harro Wilhelm Dircksen thought Kant played a decisive role in saving the classical theory from oblivion. Why did Kant think it worth retrieving? One would expect him to reject a category which eighteenth-century German Popularphilosophie understood as a proto-psychological category bridging the gap between body and mind, nature and freedom. Yet, as I shall argue, the very things which might seem to render a theory of temperament incompatible with his mature ethics of autonomy make it important to Kant. An understanding of human embodiment and diversity like that of the tradition of the temperaments forms part of the background to Kant's practical thought, and ethical formalism makes more rather than less sense if difference is taken seriously. For the same reason, it is important to have the right account of diversity. The complicated view of temperament in the Anthropology furnishes a microcosm of Kant's understanding of the fraught role of empirical considerations in recognizing and promoting freedom in rational agents embodied in human form(s). In this essay I will (1) provide a brief survey of the tradition of temperament theorizing before Kant, and expound Kant's (2) early and (3) mature views of temperament in the context of this tradition, as well as in the context of his emerging practical philosophy. Some well-known parts of Kant's ethics make a new kind of sense when read in the light of the fact that their author thought humanity subdivided into temperaments. 1.1. The history of moralizing about and through the temperaments is complex and—once one moves beyond the melancholy—largely uncharted. Here I will consider only figures and trends which are important to an understanding of Kant's place in this tradition. Because Kant cites no sources for his views, it is difficult to know when he knowingly revived a neglected option in the sprawling logic of temperamental theorizing. As a guide to the tradition of the temperaments...

In this fine study, Hendrik Lorenz revisits Plato's argument for a tripartite soul in Republic IV. He proposes an interpretation that seeks to explain how the Principle of Opposites ("the same thing will not be willing to do or undergo opposites in the same respect in relation to the same thing, and at the same time," Rep. 436b8–9) when supplemented by examples of motivational conflict, can show that reason, spirit, and appetite are basic, non-composite parts of the human soul. The discussion of parts of soul is merely a prelude to Lorenz's discussion of non-rational cognition in Plato and Aristotle in the final two parts of the book. Even readers who wish to quibble with Lorenz's analysis of psychic parts are likely to find his detailed and textually astute analysis of non-rational cognition intrinsically rewarding. Here is how the themes connect: Lorenz holds that in order to prevent the principle of opposites from running amok, yielding a number of psychic subparts, Plato must deny the ability to reason, or even to understand the deliverances of reason, to the non-rational parts of the soul. How, then, can Plato account for the fact that non-rational parts are capable of giving rise to fully formed motivating conditions? Many critics have thought that Plato attributes a capacity for means-ends reasoning to appetite. He calls it the "money-loving" part, because we most of all satisfy the desires for food, drink, and sex through money (Rep. 580d10–81a 1 ). But if appetite can reason about means to ends, then it seems that appetite will be vulnerable to internal subdivision. The oligarchic person could, for instance, be averse to making large-scale public donations, but simultaneously desire it as a means to the achievement of a goal, say cultivating his reputation. Critics have responded to this puzzle by narrowing down the part-revealing conflicts, attributing to Plato the view that only conflicts between first-order and second-order, evaluative desires reveal parts. Lorenz rightly rejects this view, insisting instead that the appetitive part is incapable of using reason. He defends what he calls the "simple picture." The simple picture makes the simultaneous occurrence of a desire and an aversion towards one and the same object sufficient to expose a partitioning of the soul. Means-ends reasoning as well as evaluative reasoning about the good must belong exclusively to the rational part. When the non-rational parts motivate, they do so through perception, memory, and the ability to envision prospects. On Lorenz's reading, the brute within turns out to be a rather sophisticated animal, even if it lacks reason. Lorenz acknowledges that the simple picture risks preserving the integrity of one part of the soul at the expense of another. Let us assume that I have a strong, appetitive desire for cigarettes, and infer that I must walk down to the corner store to buy some. But I am also averse to smoking on the ground that it is bad for my health. In such cases, it may seem like I have a rational desire to pursue a course of action that I have a rational desire to avoid (50). Lorenz responds that despite its dependence on reasoning, the former desire is still appetitive. Importantly, it does not involve the representation of a means-ends relationship on the part of appetite. Reason can cause appropriate representations to arise in the appetitive part without this part itself being capable of understanding or articulating means-ends relationships. The remainder of the book is devoted to fleshing out this proposal by examining such loci classici as the painter and scribe passage in the Philebus, as well as the analysis of perception and belief in the Republic, Theaetetus, and Timaeus. He segues into a discussion of the roles that perception and phantasia play in Aristotle's discussion of animal locomotion in De anima and De motu animalium. The analysis reveals that for Aristotle, as well as for Plato, means-ends reasoning is always an exercise of reason. Despite the originality of the overall project, the positions defended by Lorenz frequently reflect received scholarly opinion. A number of Lorenz's observations...

The Argumentative Structure of Kant's Metaphysical Foundations of Natural Science ERIC WATKINS ONE OF KANT'S most fundamental aims is to justify Newtonian science. How- ever, providing a detailed explanation of even the main structure of his argu- ment (not to mention the specific arguments that fill out this structure) is not a trivial enterprise. While it is clear that Kant's Critique of Pure Reason (1781 ), his Metaphysical Foundations of Natural Science (1786), and his unpublished (and in- complete) Opus postumum should in some way constitute the core of this justifi- cation, it is less clear how each of these works does so in detail. In this paper I shall first argue that the standard view of the relationship between the Critique of Pure Reason and the MetaphysicalFoundations of Natural Science (hereafter simply Metaphysical Foundations) is mistaken. I shall then present my own interpreta- tion of how the MetaphysicalFoundations contributes to the justification of New- tonian science. Finally, I shall conclude by considering an important interpreta- tion of the argument of the Metaphysical Foundations developed by Michael Friedman. However, it is first necessary to present briefly Kant's conception of science (in particular what conditions a body of knowledge must satisfy for Kant in order to be considered science proper) as well as Kant's own under- standing of the relevant differences between his projects in the first Critique, the Metaphysical Foundations, and the Opus postumum. Kant's conception of science is rather strict if measured by contemporary standards. For in the preface to the Metaphysical Foundations Kant establishes three substantive conditions that a body of knowledge must satisfy in order to be considered science proper. 1 (1) It must not consist in empirical principles, Kant does suggest further criteria. For example, he argues (4:47 o) that mathematics is a crucial component of natural science proper. All references to the Metaphysical Foundations will indicate the volume and page number of Kant's" Gesammelte Schriflen ed. K6niglich Preussische [567] 568 JOURNAL OF THE HISTORY OF PHILOSOPHY 36:4 OCTOBER ~998 but rather must be obtained solely from pure, a priori principles; ~ (2) It must be apodictically certain;3 (3)4 It must be a systematically ordered whole (which means that its various propositions must be related as, for example, anteced- ents and consequents).5 After stating these conditions, Kant then argues that all natural science proper requires a pure part upon which its apodictic cer- tainty is based. In other words, satisfaction of the first condition immediately implies satisfaction of the second condition as well. 6 Accordingly, these three conditions (and the first one in particular) imply that natural science proper requires (or rather presupposes) a justification by something distinct from it that Kant calls a metaphysics of nature.7 But what exactly does a metaphysics of nature encompass? Kant distinguishes two different parts of the metaphys- ics of nature: a transcendental part and a special part. A metaphysics of nature Akademie der Wissenschaften, Berlin. Walferde Grugen, 19o2- , Volumes 1-29. All translations are the author's. 24:468: "Die Naturwissenschaft wfirde nun wiederum entweder eigentlich, oder uneigentlich so genannte Naturwissenschaft sein, wovon die erstere ihren Gegenstand gfinzlich nach Principien a priori, die zweite nach Erfahrungsgesetzen behandelt" and 4:468-469 "so sieht man leicht, warum Naturwissenschaft die Rechtm~iBigkeit dieser Bennenung nur von einem reinen Theil derselben, der nfimlich die Principien a priori aller fibrigen Naturerkl~rungen enth~ilt, ableiten mfisse und nur kraft dieses reinen Theils eigentliche Wissenschaft sei." ~4:468: "Eigentliche Wissenschaft kann nur diejenige genannt werden, deren GewiBheit apodiktisch ist." 44:468: "Dasjenige Ganze der Erkenntnis, was systematisch ist, kann schon darum Wissenschafl heiBen und, wenn die Verknupfung der Erkennmis in diesem System ein Zusammenhang von Grfinden und Folgen ist, sogar rationale Wissenschaft." In the following I shall not explicitly discuss this third requirement, since it does not distinguish between any of the views under discussion. 54:469: "Alle eigentliche Naturwissenschaft bedarf also einen reinen Theil, auf dem sich die apodiktische Gewigheit, die die Vernunft in ihr sucht, grunden konne." 64:469: "Eigentlich so zu nennende Naturwissenschaft setzt zuerst Metaphysik der Natur voraus; denn Gesetze, d.i. Principien der Nothwendigkeit dessen, was zum Dasein...

I distinguish two senses in which organisms are mechanically inexplicable for Kant. Mechanical inexplicability in the first sense is shared with artefacts, and consists in their exhibiting regularities irreducible to the regularities of matter. Mechanical inexplicability in the second sense is peculiar to organisms, consisting in the reciprocal causal dependence of an organism's parts. This distinction corresponds to two strands of thought in Aristotle, one supporting a teleological conception of organisms, the other supporting a conception of organisms as natural. Recognizing this distinction helps us to see how a teleological conception of organisms is compatible with recent advances in biology.

The Conative Character of Reason in Kant's Philosophy PAULINE KLEINGELD FROM THE FIRST SENTWNCE of the Critique of Pure Reason through the writings of the late 179os, Kant describes human reason as striving for the unconditioned and as having needs and interests. ~ I refer to this as Kant's characterization of reason as "conative." Although several authors have aptly described this char- acterization of reason, 9 few have reflected on the problems it raises. These ' References to the Critique of Pure Reason are to the pages of the first (A) and second (B) editions. All other page references are to Kants C, esammelte Schriften, edited under the auspices of the K6nigliche Preussische Akademie der Wissenschaften, Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 19o2- All translations are my own. Abbreviations used: ApH = Anthropologie in pragmatischer Hinsicht [Anthropology] GMS = Grundlegung zur Metaphysik der Sitten [Groundwork] KrV = Kritik der reinen Vernunft [Critique of Pure Reason] KpV = Kritik der praktischen Vernunft [Critique of Practical Reason] KU = Kritik der Urteilskraft [Critique of Judgment] Logik = Immanuel Kants Logik. Ein Handbuch zu Vorlesungen [Logic] MdS = Metaphysik der Sitten lMetaphysics of Morals] Prol = Prolegomena zu einer jeden kiinftigen Metaphysik, die als Wissenschaft wird auftreten kb'nnen [Prolegomena] Rel -- Religion innerhalb der Grenzen der bloflen Vernunft [Religion] RezHer = "Rezensionen von Johann Gottfried Herders Ideen zur Philosophie der Geschichte der Menschheit" [Herder Reviews] TPP = "l]ber den Gebrauch teleologischer Prinzipien in der Philosophie" [~On the Use of Teleological Principles in Philosophy"] VvT = "Von einem neuerdings erhobenen vornehmen Ton in der Philosophie" ["On a Dignified Tone Recently Adopted in Philosophy"] WhDo = "Was heiBt: Sich im Denken orientieren?" ["What Is Orientation in Thinking?"] ZeF = "Zum ewigen Frieden. Ein philosophischer Entwurf" ["Perpetual Peace"] "Daniel Breazeale, "Kant, Fichte, and the 'Interests of Reason'," Daimon 9 (1994): 81-98; Amihud Gilead, "Restless and Impelling Reason: On the Architectonic of Human Reason accord- ing to Kant," Idealistic Studies 15 (1985): x37-5o; Jfirgen Habermas, Erkenntnis und Interesse (Frankfurt/M: Suhrkamp, 1973), 235-62; Susan Neiman, The Unity of Reason: Rereading Kant (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1994); Heinrich M. Schmidinger, Das Problem des Interesses und [77] 78 JOURNAL OF THE HISTORY OF PHILOSOPHY 36: i JANUARY 1998 problems are more complicated than is generally assumed. Given the oddity of personifying reason as having needs and interests, one might be inclined to read these notions as merely decorative metaphors, and indeed this is how they are usually taken. But metaphors for what exactly? Here Kant seems to get into difficulties. If he intends these notions to play a merely ornamental role,3 he cannot be justi- fied in using them -- as he does -- to defend assumptions of pure reason, such as the practical postulates, Alternatively, if by "needs of reason" he means no more than "needs of humans, "4 he cannot legitimately claim -- as he does -- that such needs apply to all finite rational beings. Although the conative terms play a crucial role in several of Kant's arguments, he nowhere explains this usage. In this essay, I examine the problems raised by Kant's characterization of reason as conative and propose an interpretative solution. The structure of this article is as follows. I first introduce Kant's talk of the needs and interests of reason and give two examples of arguments in which it plays a decisive role. I then discuss four different interpretations. Having identified a number of problems with literal interpretations of the conative characterization of reason, I further examine whether a metaphorical read- ing, suggested by several authors, can solve these problems. I argue that it is impossible to regard the conative terms in which Kant describes reason as merely decorative metaphors, but that they are better understood as cases of "symbolic exhibition" in Kant's own sense. 1. REASON AND THE "RIGHT OF NEED" Kant assumes the meaning of the term 'need' (Bed~irfnis) to be familiar and uses it in the ordinary sense of a deficiency of something necessary or desired. If the subject of the need is conscious of the deficiency, it is thought to desire whatever is expected to fulfill the need, and to aim at this fulfillment. If this striving is successful, a feeling of satisfaction on the part of the...

I consider Kant's criticism of rational psychology in the Paralogisms of Pure Reason in light of his German predecessors. I first present Wolff's foundational account of metaphysical psychology with the result that Wolff's rational psychology is not comfortably characterized as a naïvely rationalist psychology. I then turn to the reception of Wolff's account among later German metaphysicians, and show that the same claim of a dependence of rational upon empirical psychology is found in the publications and lectures of Kant's pre-Critical period. Considering the Paralogisms in this context reveals Kant's conception of rational psychology to be distinctly novel and has important consequences in shifting the argumentative focus of the chapter.

This paper offers a distinctive interpretation of Hegel's Doppelsatz from the Preface to the Philosophy of Right: 'What is rational is actual; and what is actual is rational'. This has usually been interpreted either conservatively (as claiming that everything that is, is right or good) or progressively (that if the world were actual, it would be right or good, but that there is a distinction that can be drawn between existence and actuality). My aim in this paper is to argue against both interpretations, so that the position I offer is neutral between the two. My claim is that when Hegel identifies what is actual with what is rational in the Doppelsatz, his intention is not to offer a normative assessment of what is actual; rather, it is to suggest that genuine philosophy must be committed to reason in its methods of inquiry, if it is to properly undertake an investigation into the "spiritual universe" as well as the "natural" one. The Doppelsatz is thus a defence of philosophical rationalism, rather than a normative claim about "was ist wirklich".

Kant's dismissive reference in the Critique of Judgment to landscape gardening as "nothing but the ornamentation of the ground" (CJ § 51) is puzzling since, as an art that seems like a product of nature, the garden should be a paradigm case of fine art. Additionally, it runs counter to a growing academic interest in garden theory in the late 1700s, as Michael Lee documents in this often overwrought but useful volume. After Kant, German academic philosophy was bedevilled by irresolvable oppositions between reason and sensibility, and art and nature, that demanded mediation. This was paralleled by the efforts of German garden theorists to find a Mittelweg ("middle-path") between the formal French-style and the irregular English garden. After a historical (and sociological) consideration of the rise of garden theory in the German academies in chapter 2, Lee explores the neglected philosophical importance of the garden, especially for K. H. Heydenreich and F. C. S. Schiller (chapters 3–5), and then considers Kant's critical philosophy in light of these analyses (chapters 6–7). Lee's treatment of Heydenreich's and Schiller's garden theories is well-executed and informative. The perspective of the "moving stroller" provides the focus of Heydenreich's account of aesthetic response: though a given view in a garden might be compared to a landscape painting, the experience of strolling through a garden can be compared to viewing a succession of scenes, complete with panoramic vistas and controlled transitions. The resulting combination of these successive views through the Phantasie of the observer is accompanied by a unified feeling or mood. Kant's Third Critique is evidently an important influence on Heydenreich's account, yet his focus on the unique spatial (panoramas) and temporal (successive scenes) aspects of that experience extend Kant's sparse account in suggestive ways. Lee concedes, however, that Heydenreich's designation as a Mittelweg theorist is problematic, given that Heydenreich rejects the very opposition between regular and irregular styles of design on which such a theory is based. Nonetheless, Lee finds that Heydenreich is unable to escape the "framework of binary opposition and mediation," claiming that his account of artistic creation is "an exercise in mediation at every turn" (135). Drawing on Kant's account of genial creation and aesthetic ideas, Lee claims that the Totalbild in the mind of the genius constitutes a mediation between concept and intuition, and between the mechanism of nature and moral agency (since it tokens the presence of discursive understanding without being fully exponible within it). Lee also considers Schiller's garden theory as presented in a brief review, "Über den Gartenkalendar auf das Jahr 1795." Relying on the contemporaneous Aesthetic Letters, Lee casts Schiller's Mittelweg garden as a synthesis of the merely agricultural garden and the highly formalized French garden, just as the play drive mediates between the sense and form drives. Lee denies that this implies that Schiller simply favors the English garden, and here he relies on Schiller's account of the phases of history, in which a version of the last, mediating phase is glimpsed earlier in the process. This provides an appropriate context for Schiller's piece; however, it hardly justifies Lee's claim that "Schiller's garden theory is substantial in its own right" (6). In addition to documenting the growing German philosophical interest in the garden, Lee draws a methodological point from these expositions. Rather than being an architechtonic unity—a rigid, top-down, hierarchical arrangement of elements in accordance with a concept—the unity of the garden is founded on the ineffable Totalbild and allows for wandering horizontal as well as vertical relations among elements. Lee uses this to gain perspective on Kant's critical philosophy in chapters 6 and 7. Kant's dismissive treatment of the garden is made understandable given what Lee (misleadingly) labels his "object-centered aesthetics" (193), that is, his prioritizing of discretely-conceived objects over backgrounds, like gardens, that elude delineation. This particular minimizing strategy is taken as evidence of Kant's awareness of deeper instabilities in the critical system itself, of the inability of architechtonic reason to grasp that background against which its objects are thrown into relief or the ground...

Introduction: This paper has two, interrelated aims. The first is to clarify Sartre's theory of intersubjectivity. Sartre's discussion of the Other has a puzzling way of going in and out of focus, seeming at one moment to provide a remarkably original solution to the problem of other minds and at the next to wholly miss the point of the skeptical challenge. The nature of his argument is equally uncertain: at some points it looks like an attempt to mount a transcendental argument, a kind of Refutation of Idealism regarding the existence of others, at others, to be a defence of direct realism; yet again, it can seem to propose a dissolution of the problem closely analogous to Wittgenstein. I will argue (Section 1) that none of these provides quite the right model for understanding Sartre, which requires one to take seriously his method of resolving epistemological issues into matters of ontology. I argue further (Section 2) that Sartre's theory becomes fully coherent only if we make explicit its implicit presupposition of a conception of intersubjectivity articulated by Fichte. My second aim is to pursue the connection opened up of Sartre with German idealism. To the extent that commentators attempt to relate Sartre systematically to German idealism, it is almost always Hegel who provides the other term of comparison.1 What I try to show (Section 3) is that the usual comparison of Sartre with Hegel, which is largely negative, is distracting, and that Sartre's closer philosophical [End Page 325] relations are to Fichte and Schelling.2 This supplies, I argue, an important correction to the tendency of anglophone discussion of Sartre to isolate his claims from historical considerations, or to restrict Sartre's historical frame of reference to Hegel, Husserl and Heidegger: Sartre's philosophy, I suggest, is viewed fruitfully in the context of philosophical debates pursued in early German idealism. Sartre's ethics, I argue (Section 4), provide supporting evidence for this view. I propose tentatively in conclusion (Section 5) a corresponding view of existential phenomenology as a whole.

BOOK REVIEWS 301 against Bulkeley's and Collins' determinism, Leibniz' notion of freedom as moral necessity, Reid's conception of moral agency, and finally Kant's transcendental freedom. This section is regretfully shorter than the preceding but far superior. Capizzi has been able to keep the debate between liberterians and determinists at the level of a conceptual dialogue without losing sight of the historical perspective. Some of these chapters (e.g., Ch. V, Part 2) read just like the contemporary controversy between Campbell and Iqowell Smith. In his defense against Hobbes, Bramhall is represented as oscillating between a form of extreme voluntarism (the will determines the motivation) and a form of "intellectual" determinism (the motivation determines the will). These are the dangers of Bramhall's "vicious circle" and none of the attempts succeeded in finding a solution between chance and fate. The first position, Capizzi argues, leads in fact to Clarke's freedom of indifference which issues in chance and the second position to Leibniz' which issues in fatalism. It is a pity that Capizzi has not dedicated more space to Jonathan Edwards. Unlike many de- terminists Edwards escapes the ghost of fatalism in a more satisfactory fashion than Leibniz with whom, according to Ramsey, he has so much in common (see P. Ramsey, The Works o] Jonathan Edwards, I, 117). Whereas Clarke's position reduces moral freedom to capric e and hence annihilates the notion of responsibility, it is debatable that Reid's "compromise between Leibniz and Clarke is not a satisfactory way out of Bramhall's vicious circle" (p. 220). Reid's free choice, Capizzi claims, is as arbitrary, capricious, and fortuitous as Clarke's and thus bereft of moral value. But the gist of Reid's theory is to prove that our choices can be free in the indeterministic fashion and yet substantially predictable. Reid repeats over and over again that to have free will does not imply that any choice we might make is as probable as any other. To have free will is to have a power over the determinations of the will. And we have this moral power in various degrees: "In different men the power of self government is different, and in the same man at different times" (see S. A. Grave, The Scot- tish Philosophy o] Common Sense, p. 218, and T. Reid, Works, II, 534, 619-620). The no- tion of moral agency and of power determining one's choices is metaphysically loaded. But the fact remains that for Reid it offers a solution for the dilemma of chance and necessity which in this section Capizzi was concerned to demonstrate insoluble. In the final chapter, Capizzi confesses his incapacity to appreciate Kant's solution of the conflict between causal necessity and moral freedom. "For Kant the two notions (noumenon and phenomenon) constitute the terms of a choice proposed to man by his immutable structure, and for Kant the first is better than the second. We do not believe in immu- table structure and the problem of which of the two is better has meaning to us if and only if reducible to the problem which of the two corresponds to the spirit of our time" (p. 248- 249). Just as Socinus has solved the theological problem by rejecting Christianity, our con- temporaries have solved the problem of reconciling science and morality by ignoring moral- ity. L. M. PAL~R University o] Delaware Newark The Will to Power. By Friedrich W. Nietzsche. Trans. and eds. Walter Kaufmann and R. J. Hollingdale. (New York: Random House, 1967. Pp. xxiii + 576. $10) Walter Kaufmann prudently suggests a middle course between regarding The Will to Power as Nietzsehe's magnum opus and discounting it as worthless (pp. xiii-xvi, 551-552, 557). He notes that much of its fragmentary material was later incorporated into Neitzsche's more systematic works. Even aphorisms not utilized in this way reveal insight of a high order. For a thoughtful man, a good book is one providing the occasion for deeper under- standing of the most important problems. Surely The Will to Power is among the few works 302 HISTORY OF PHILOSOPHY of this nature, although it may seem unworthy...

The sheer variety of both cognitive and non-cognitive contributions to the emergence of a scientific culture in the West and the complex relations to pre-modern developments that scholars have brought to light over the past decades have put into question both the Enlightenment and Kuhnian accounts of the scientific revolution. Gaukroger’s work performs the ambitious but indispensable task of beginning to formulate an alternative way of understanding this momentous transition, one based on recent scholarship. Gaukroger treats science as both “a particular kind of cognitive product, and as a particular kind of cultural product” (3). His overarching goal is to show that examining the interrelations between the two can teach us something about modernity that focusing on one, to the exclusion of the other, cannot. He argues that the enduring success of Western science was not due to its advances (there were previous advances in other cultures), but due to its ability to consolidate. Successful consolidation promotes the cognitive claims of science and builds a scientific culture to legitimate them. Hence, throughout this book, Gaukroger explores how particular advances (e.g., in astronomy and natural philosophy) were legitimated by their ability to reinforce revelation, unify different disciplines, and exemplify the scientific persona. Since these means of consolidation, unlike methods of scientific discovery, rely on both cultural forces and intellectual advances, Gaukroger makes good on his promise to teach us something that intellectual and cultural histories taken separately cannot. Gaukroger characterizes Western modernity in terms of the eventual assimilation of all cognitive values to scientific ones. He targets the Enlightenment view which, as a result of this assimilation, reinterprets the success of scientific practices over others in ahistorical terms. On this view, the longstanding success of science results solely from cognitive advances, such as the commitment to objectivity (science was assumed to have dissociated itself from religion), the employment of adversarial, non-dogmatic arguments, and the development of quantitative and empirical methods. Gaukroger shows instead that: (1) early modern Epicurean and mechanist natural philosophies forged a closer connection to religious doctrine in response to the ultimate failure to maintain the Thomist reconciliation of theology with Aristotelian natural philosophy; (2) the threat posed by the naturalism of Renaissance philosophers like Pomponazzi led to a privileging of systematization over innovation in late Scholasticism, as well as a renewed interest in natural history, which later spawned the enterprise of physico-theology; (3) the adversarial character of ancient means of cultivating wisdom was rejected in favor of gentlemanly cooperation. This went hand-in-hand with a gradual reassignment of the aims of enquiry from the attainment of a transcendent truth to a productive truth, and the corresponding construction, by Bacon and others, of the scientific persona, which embodied the cognitive virtue of objectivity rather than the ethical virtue of ancient and medieval wisdom. Finally, (4) Beeckman and Descartes failed to achieve the quantification of natural philosophy they aimed for, in large part due to their conflicting commitment to corpuscularian matter theory. The successful replacement of Aristotelian causal explanations in natural philosophy by mechanistic explanations lay in mechanism’s ability to unify all causal explanation, rather than its ability to offer quantitative explanations of various natural phenomena. Similarly, the experimental methods of Gilbert and Boyle were at first hotly contested, the eventual success of non-foundationalist, empirical approaches owing more to the unifying role played by the experiments of Gilbert, Boyle, and Newton. Although Boyle’s experimental philosophy included a mechanistic matter theory, unlike strict mechanists, experimentalists used experiments to focus and unify heterogeneous phenomena rather than grounding explanations in matter theory. Gaukroger presents the relevant cultural developments and theoretical advances with an impressive degree of detail and accuracy. Readers will gain insights about everything from the differences between early medieval Augustinianism and late medieval Aristotelianism, to Spinozism versus its late seventeenth-century alternatives. Scholars with expertise in specific areas will no doubt take issue with individual claims: e.g., this reviewer disagrees with the characterization of Averroes’ view, the claim that the late Scholastic drive towards greater systematization led to a comparative lack of innovation, and the assessment that Descartes failed to realize his aim. However, one cannot expect a work of...

This article explores Ulrich of Strasburg’s teaching on divine univocal causality and finds therein both a point of continuity and discontinuity with the Dominican philosophico-theological tradition he inherited from his master, Albert the Great. Albert also makes reference to divine univocal causality, but develops his own account within the larger framework of his doctrine of the analogia entis. In contrast, Ulrich retools the Aristotelian notions of ‘univocal’ and ‘equivocal,’ in order to accommodate the pseudo-Dionysian metaphysical scheme of divine transcendence. Here, unlike his predecessor, Albert, and his confrère, Thomas Aquinas, Ulrich’s metaphysical vision of creation focuses on the nothingness from which creatures have been drawn and the means whereby they are able to enter into a metaphysical community with God.

This book, a revision of the author’s doctoral dissertation, traces the history of several disputes concerning Aristotle’s De anima in the late thirteenth and early fourteenth centuries. The stated aim of the work is to demonstrate that the philosophical study of soul “transformed” during this period, with Scholastic philosophers becoming increasingly pessimistic of the possibility of establishing the nature of the human intellective soul by natural reason alone. This pessimism took hold despite a continuing consensus that the nature of non-human vegetative and sensitive souls could be understood by reason alone, thus resulting in a deep division between the study of human souls and that of non-human souls. De Boer’s study is distinguished from much of the existing secondary literature in two ways. The work’s first distinctive feature is its focus on disputes concerning the Aristotelian conception of soul in general, rather than of the intellective soul in particular; consideration of vegetative and sensitive souls is featured more here than in some other studies. The disputes covered center on two sets of questions. In the lengthy third chapter, De Boer discusses a number of questions concerning the methodology of the science of the soul, including (i) whether this science belongs to metaphysics or natural philosophy, (ii) whether the subject of this science is the soul itself or the animated body, and (iii) how the apparent difficulty of this science impacts the epistemic status of its conclusions. Then, in chapters 4 and 5, De Boer covers disputes about the adequacy of Aristotle’s definition of soul and about the distinction between souls and their powers. One of the issues scrutinized here is the question of how Aristotle’s definition of soul (as “the first actuality of a natural body which has life potentially”) can be harmonized with the rejection of a plurality of substantial forms, a position that became increasingly common during this period. On a view such as Aquinas’s, for instance, the soul is the only substantial form of a living substance, and thus all of a living substance’s actuality derives from its soul. But given this, it is difficult to see how the soul can be the actuality of “a natural body which has life potentially.” A body that has life only potentially would be a body without a soul (for a body with a soul is one that has life actually, not merely potentially); but to hold that all a living substance’s actuality derives from its soul is to deny that there could be such a thing as an organic body without a soul. The second distinctive feature of De Boer’s study is that he focuses solely on commentaries on the De anima, setting aside discussions of soul that take place in other texts (for example, in commentaries on Peter Lombard’s Sentences). This results in a somewhat unorthodox assortment of figures being studied. Indeed, with only two or three exceptions, the philosophers studied here will be unfamiliar even to many specialists: Thomas Aquinas, Radulphus Brito, John of Jandun, John Buridan, Nicholas Oresme, and the authors of five anonymous De anima commentaries. De Boer’s choice to focus on these commentaries is somewhat curious. He admits that his selection was guided by the availability of these particular works in either a renaissance or modern edition (10n22); overlooking the many De anima commentaries available only in manuscript is understandable though regrettable. Yet there are still a number of edited commentaries from the period that are largely or entirely ignored, including those of Siger of Brabant, Giles of Rome, John Duns Scotus, Walter Burley, and Albert of Saxony. Scotus’s short quaestio commentary is set aside for not discussing the methodological issues De Boer focuses on (11), but no reason is given for the exclusion of these other commentaries. (Burley is an especially curious case. In chapter 1, De Boer includes Burley’s commentary on the list of commentaries he will discuss; but apart from one paragraph in the main text on pages 105–6, Burley is only discussed in the footnotes, and there only rarely.) That said, the material De Boer does survey is presented in a clear and...

Philosophical thought in the Islamic World and its influence on thirteenth-century Latin Scholasticism has received increasing attention over recent decades. This small collection of ten essays, which originated at a conference on Philosophical Psychology in Arabic and Latin Aristotelianism in Mexico City in 2008, is a welcome addition to this trend. The volume includes essays covering five themes related to psychology: method, ontology, science, perception, and intellection. But it does so without an identifiable chronological or thematic order. Alexander Fidora offers fascinating insights on Gundissalinus’s pivotal role for the method of psychology. Fidora shows how Gundissalinus’s translation of Avicenna’s Liber De Anima and his own Tractatus de anima contributed to the rationalisation of some theological doctrines not only in Christian, but also in Jewish thought (17–39). One of the volume’s highlights is Carlos Bazán’s essay, which critically engages with Aquinas’s conception of the human body’s ontology and its functionality in service to the human soul. Bazán lucidly traces the general principles of natural Aristotelian philosophy guiding Aquinas’s arguments, while also uncovering his theological concerns regarding the corruption and resurrection of the body (243–77). Thérèse-Anne Druart’s essay on the theme of science traces Duns Scotus’s indebtedness to Avicenna’s Metaphysics for his conception of universal notions, the first object of the human intellect, and his famous theory on the univocity of being. Druart adds to recent scholarship showcasing Scotus’s selective borrowings and modifications of standard Avicennian teachings (185–204). Besides method, ontology, and science, the volume features four essays engaging with the theme of perception. Deborah Black surveys the cogitative faculty’s role in Avicenna’s Liber De Anima, showing that its hybrid imaginative and intellectual character successfully bridges Avicenna’s dualist ontology. Her essay challenges Gutas’s interpretation on two types of thought in the late Avicenna with a more economic explanation of the cogitative power’s functionality (59–81). Luis López-Farjeat provides a study on musical perception in Avicenna, reasoning that only humans, as opposed to animals, can derive pleasure from music thanks to the interrelated workings of their cogitation and intellect. He thereby makes an interesting case that Avicenna’s perception theory goes beyond the physical realm (83–110). Jörg Alejandro Tellkamp discusses Albert the Great’s theory of perceptual intentionality and its indebtedness to Avicenna. In an engaging textual survey, Tellkamp shows how Albert’s theory offers a rapprochement between animal and human perceptual intentionality of the world by assigning sense perception a veridical status in the practical sense (205–21). Jeremiah Hackett confirms Tellkamp’s findings, here for Roger Bacon, showing how he grounds perception and science in a theory of vision common to animals and humans. Hackett shows that for Bacon common sense and science are but different sides of the same coin: knowledge per experientiam (223–41). The theme of intellection is covered in three essays. Jon McGinnis adds to the Gutas Hasse abstraction debate on Avicenna, reading the Agent Intellect’s role for human cognition vis-à-vis Avicenna’s physical light theory. McGinnis demonstrates the superiority of Avicenna’s explanations of the Agent Intellect’s functions for human knowing compared to Aristotle (41–57). Leaving Avicenna behind, we find Jean-Baptiste Brenet (writing in French) contending that Averroes’s notions of intellect acquisition and attribution in his Long Commentary on the De Anima ought be read in light of his theological conception of act acquisition in his Kitāb al-Kašf‘an manāhiğ al-adilla. Last but not least, in his rich essay Richard Taylor examines how the young Aquinas built his first philosophical account of the human intellectual soul’s status and functions in his In 2 Sent d. 17 q. 2 a. 1. Taylor traces Aquinas’s sources to their original setting in Avicenna and Averroes and shows in detail Aquinas’s adoptions and modifications thereof (141–83). Taylor’s fine translation of the same text concludes the volume. It follows closely the Latin original of the Leonine Commission’s provisional text and references variants of the Mandonnet edition in footnotes. This translation and essay together will...

Journal of the History of Philosophy 43.4 (2005) 488-489 The Paracelsian and Danish royal physician Petrus Severinus complained, "If we can make more potent [drugs], extracted from metals and minerals, . . . I ask, what age except this one will oppose our efforts?" (115). Indeed, early modern attempts to prepare and prescribe drugs forged in the alchemical laboratory often faced vehement opposition by the university-trained physicians who were weaned on the humoral theory and herbal materia medica of Galen. The orthodox Galenists disdained not only the "chemical poisons" of the Paracelsians, but also their theoretical speculations. After all, the Paracelsians dismissed the belief that disease was the result of humoral imbalances, and promoted both the analogy of microcosm (the human) and macrocosm (the natural world, including the stars), and the idea that diseases were essences or actual beings. Severinus was prescient in his prediction that chemical medicine would become popular, but—as Jole Shackelford notes in the introduction to his A Philosophical Path for Paracelsian Medicine—the concepts of Paracelsus and his followers continue to remain peripheral to the grand narratives of early modern intellectual history. This remains the case despite the illuminating studies of such scholars as the late-Enlightenment medical historian Kurt Polycarp Sprengel, Walter Pagel, and Allen Debus. Thus, Shackelford sheds much needed light on this significant strand of sixteenth- and seventeenth-century science and medicine. Via text-oriented study, particularly of Severinus's Idea medicinæ philosophicæ (Ideal of Philosophical Medicine), Shackelford provides a long-awaited and meticulous biographical account of Severinus and explains with refreshing clarity the sources and speculative theory behind his brand of chemical medicine. Like such recent scholars as Michael Walton and Charles Gunnoe, Shackelford presents Paracelsianism as an ideology, duly noting that the ideas of Severinus, reflecting the reception of Paracelsus in general, were frequently accepted or rejected on religious grounds. To begin, Shackelford establishes Severinus's importance, noting that the medical author and Wittenberg professor Daniel Sennert wrote in 1619 that most iatrochemists followed in the steps of Severinus, who had molded Paracelsus's ideas into a coherent philosophy. Shackelford then traces the story of how Severinus—after studying at such universities as Padua and Paris—joined his friend Pratensis (a recognized Paracelsian) and Tycho Brahe in bringing an increasingly eclectic Denmark up to continental cultural and intellectual standards. Unfortunately, Severinus's appointment as physician to the king distracted him from completing most of his research projects, but he had already left for posterity his Idea medicinæ, published in 1571. As Shackelford writes, the Idea medicinæ promoted Severinus's belief that Paracelsian medicine was not only an alternative to humoral medicine, but also promised to cope better with "new" fevers. Also, Severinus invested Paracelsianism with authority by emphasizing its ancient forebears and by arguing that Paracelsus was the latest in the line of prisca theologia—one of the few to "ascend to the inner chambers of the Mosaic mysteries" (57). In his amalgamation of Neoplatonism, the Hippocratic tradition, and Paracelsus, Severinus's featured doctrine was efficient causation, or "semina theory." Unlike Robert Boyle's inertial, material corpuscles and their active principles, Severinus's semina were "intrinsically formal and immaterial, and were logically and ontologically prior to matter" (17). The characteristics of these "loci," which accounted for all change in the subvisible world, could be observed through chemical analysis, and they were uniquely attractive to Christians, who were drawn to Severinus's Paracelsian interpretation of Genesis and his idea that when the predestinations contained in the semina are completed, the world will reach its end. Shackelford engages the reader with such fascinating topics as why Tycho—who was not just an astronomer, but also a student of alchemy—departed Denmark, and how Paracelsians were involved in the effort to improve the Danish Bible by "cleansing" it of non-Lutheran elements. Very welcome too is Shackelford's discussion of the neglected topic of Paracelsian therapeutics, especially his evaluation of William Davidson's application of Severinus's semina theory to the treatment of...

The debate on (predicamental) universals is, generally speaking, a well-known subject in the history of philosophy, but views on universals from the end of the sixteenth to the mid-seventeenth century—the object of Heider’s welcome contribution—are quite neglected. Such views are extremely sophisticated, drawing on the established traditions of Thomism and Scotism, in particular, but bringing them to a new level of technicality. Heider investigates three major positions: those of Francisco Suárez, João Poinsot (Ioannes a S. Thoma), and the joint position of Bartolomeo Mastri and Bonaventura Belluto (who co-author most of their all-embracing Cursus philosophicus ad mentem Scoti). The three views are chosen to represent Jesuit philosophy, Thomism, and Scotism respectively, and are forms of “moderate realism.” Nominalism and conceptualism (rejecting the universal in being), Platonism (endorsing separate universals), and ultra-realism or—as Heider also calls it—“immanent Platonism” (95, the view “assuming the immanent existence of the universale in actu in extramental things”) are contrasted with moderate realism. Moderate realism claims that a nature exists in extramental things; it is particularized there but retains an aptitude to being in many or being common to many (although not everyone accepts this characterization, particularly not Poinsot), and is therefore universal in potency. Consequently, nature in re, also called universale physicum, is the foundation for the abstraction process leading first to the abstracted (absolute) nature, or universale metaphysicum, and finally to the logical fully fledged (relational) universal, universale logicum or universal in act. Universality, properly speaking, pertains to the realm of logic, but has a remote foundation in re and a proximate foundation in the universale metaphysicum. In general terms, Heider considers the compatibility of universality (understood as commonality) and singularity in a thing to be the common trait of moderate realism (301–2). In more detail, however, he considers endorsing praecisio objectiva as the “litmus paper” for distinguishing it from, especially, conceptualism. Objective precision is “the intellectual separation of two predicates in the way that one predicate (rational), or rather its counterpart in re can be cognized without the formal and immediate cognition of the other (animal)” (16). By following this particular feature, Heider distinguishes Suárez’s moderate realism from the conceptualism of Pedro Hurtado de Mendoza, to whom he dedicates an interesting excursus (87–94). The structure of the book is clear, with an introduction (chapter 1) followed by one section per author, in chronological order, from Suárez (chapter 2) to Poinsot (chapter 3) to Mastri/Belluto (chapter 4). However, Suárez’s view is influenced by Thomism and Scotism, presented in purer forms in the two following chapters, as well as incorporating elements of nominalism. The narrative is therefore far from linear. Heider’s clever investigation comprises, roughly, two components. The first (quantitatively making up most of the book) is a detailed analysis of the relevant texts, which follows their arguments, developments, and extremely elaborate terminology very closely. For each author, the analysis is structured around the degrees of actualization of the universal, from physics, to metaphysics, and finally to logic. The second component (found especially in the conclusions to individual chapters and in the general concluding remarks, chapter 5) is a comparison of the three authors. It adopts an “accumulative method” (17), whereby the analysis is progressively enriched by reference to previously considered doctrines. A number of points are raised in Heider’s highly technical analysis, but four, to my eyes, stand out. First, there is the issue of the formal unity and community of nature in re. From this perspective, Heider seems willing to rank the strength of each author’s realism (e.g. 217 n. 704, 296), from the strongest form of Mastri/Belluto (nature in re is common, and community—understood specifically as disjunctive community per indifferentiam—is to be understood as a real and positive feature); to Suárez (nature in re is not common—not even negatively common—but retains a remote aptitude to being in many); to the weakest form of Poinsot (nature in re is deprived of either community or aptitude to being in many; nature’s formal unity is utterly particularized and “absorbed” by the individual unity, so...

Journal of the History of Philosophy 43.4 (2005) 489-490 The reputation of Pierre Gassendi (1592–1655), the French natural philosopher responsible for recovering Epicurean atomism and hedonism and modifying it to be compatible with Christian theology, has suffered neglect in part because of the difficult Latin in which his works were written. Hence, the publication of translations of large chunks of his work into a modern language is, prima facie, a welcome addition to scholarship in the history of philosophy. Accordingly, the appearance of Sylvie Taussig's translation of Gassendi's Latin correspondence, published in the posthumous Opera omnia (1658), seemed, at first blush, to make an important body of Gassendi's writings accessible to more modern scholars. The three books under review consist of a French translation of Volume 6 of Gassendi's Opera omnia (the Latin letters to which the title refers); a volume of notes on the letters; and a book about Gassendi's life, based closely on the Latin letters. Pierre Gassendi (1592–1655): Introduction à la vie savante summarizes various aspects of Gassendi's life and career from 1621–1655, the years covered by the published correspondence. Basically summarizing the letters, this book has sections on Gassendi's biography for these years, the nature of the correspondence, Gassendi's science, his Epicurean project, his interactions with various notables, and his role in the history of his time. In fact, the book is little more than a topical analysis of the letters. Despite the inclusion of an extensive—but incomplete—bibliography of scholarship on Gassendi, the notes to Taussig's text refer to the letters but to almost no secondary sources. The same problem characterizes her notes to the letters. Containing 7491 footnotes and filling a volume of 609 pages, the second volume of the Lettres latines contains virtually no mention of the contributions of other scholars. These notes range from the explication of Classical references to political events in Gassendi's lifetime, from scientific and philosophical controversies to the issues of Church governance in Digne where Gassendi was a canon in the cathedral. The devil is in the details, and here the details undermine one's confidence in the project. There are many errors in the notes to the letters. For example, in note 1087, the inventor of logarithms is named 'Brigg' rather than 'Briggs.' There are numerous gaffes in the bibliography in Pierre Gassendi (1592–1655): Introduction à la vie savante. For example, the entry for Steven J. Dick, is 'Dick, St. J.'. The entry for Lynn Sumida Joy is 'Lynn, S. J.'. And the entry for Susanna Åkerman is a mess, obviously because the typesetter was unable to deal with the diacritical mark. Although these points seem trivial, their frequency points to a lack of precision and lack of good proofreading. Unfortunately, these three volumes will not provide a reliable new source for scholars seeking access to Gassendi's writings. The French translation of the letters will provide a shortcut, but they will not eliminate the need to consult the original Latin version.

In this rich and detailed study, Hanns-Peter Neumann traces the development of the concept of monad from Pythagorean thought as interpreted by philosophers and scholars from the early part of the seventeenth century through the writings of Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz and Christian Wolff and concludes with a discussion of late eighteenth-century interpretations of various “monadologies.” To contemporary students of the history of philosophy, of course, monads are most closely associated with the thought of Leibniz. And for obvious reasons: monads are the fundamental beings of the universe in the mature expression of his philosophy; his Monadology has become a canonical text in the history of philosophy; and most subsequent philosophers who engaged with the philosophy of Leibniz have focused on the doctrine of monads. But the story of monads—that is, the history of the concept monad—did not begin with Leibniz, nor did it end with him. ‘Monas’ or ‘monad’ was, in fact, a relatively common philosophical term throughout the early modern period, which is not to say, however, that it had a consistent connotation for all in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Above all, the notion of a simple metaphysical atom that somehow grounds all being was considered part and parcel of the thought of the most mysterious pre-Socratic figure, Pythagoras. And in eighteenth-century German philosophy especially, monads, as the ultimate metaphysical units of being, were on display in the most influential textbooks in the philosophical curriculum, that is, principally in the writings of Wolff and Alexander Baumgarten. While these philosophers have traditionally been thought to be followers of Leibniz, there are many crucial distinctions between them, especially concerning the nature of monads. As readers of this journal know, there was a great diversity of philosophical views among philosophers and thinkers in the early modern period, far greater than might be gleaned from the crude presentation of the history of philosophy as being a contest between “rationalists” and “empiricists.” While there were many attempts to reject features of Scholastic thought, there were also attempts to recover various ancient traditions. The Platonist and Neo-Platonist inspirations of the Renaissance did not end there but continued into the early modern period as well. And, as Neumann shows in the first part of his monograph, Pythagoras was also seen as a powerful source of philosophical inspiration, as he was thought to have unified metaphysics, mathematics, physics, cosmology, theology, and ethics in a system. Given that no texts of Pythagoras are extant, this meant that the ideal was known, the details, less so. But it was thought that Pythagoras advocated some kind of system of simple beings, monads, that grounded reality; he was a kind of “religious atomist,” as opposed to the “atheist atomist,” Democritus; such is the view advanced by the (now) best-known sympathizer of Pythagoras, Ralph Cudworth. Neumann’s presentation of the early modern uses of Pythagoras and Pythagoreanism by Cudworth and others (Johann Christoph Heilbronner, Colin Maclaurin, Gottfried Plouquet) is interesting and extremely helpful. Perhaps more worthy of praise, however, is his analysis in the weighty second part of the book of the nuances inherent in the systems of Leibniz and Wolff and his presentation of the important differences between the two thinkers. While both made monads, simple substances, fundamental in their metaphysical systems, their conceptions of these monads were quite different. This fact was not always obvious at the time, and present-day historians of philosophy often oversimplify the relation between Leibniz and Wolff by repeating the old saw that Wolff merely systematized Leibniz’s thought. For Leibniz, obviously, all monads were essentially mind-like insofar as they were individuated by their representative states. For Wolff, monads were not essentially representative; they were essentially active forces. Now, for Leibniz, the representational activity and forces of simple substances amounted to the same thing, and it is for this reason that his thought is closer to the idealized version of Pythagoras. Even a so-called Wolffian, Andreas Clavius, calls Leibniz “the German Pythagoras redivivus.” This second part of the work concludes with two interesting, shorter chapters: one dealing with eighteenth-century interpretations of Leibniz’s Monadology by Michael Gottlieb Hansch, Johann Jakob Brucker, and Louis...

Descartes and the Eclipse of Imagination, 618- 630 DENNIS L. SEPPER IS IMAGINATION OF FUNDAMENTAL IMPORTANCE to the philosophy of Descartes? If this question seems to have anything more than rhetorical force it is because imagination figured large in the early, never-completed Regulae ad directionem ingenii (Rules for the Direction of the Mind). But one is far more likely to think of the much-reduced stature imagination has in later works. Recall the piece of wax example in the second meditation: it is not by the senses or the imagina- tion that we perceive the piece of wax or anything else, but by mental scrutiny, inspectio mentis (AT, 7: 3o-32; CSM, 2: 2o-22).' The sixth meditation even more decisively puts imagination in its place: I can understand a thousand- sided figure as well as a triangle, but when I try to imagine it the image is not different from that of any other figure with very many sides (AT, 7: 72; CSM, 2:5o ). Moreover, imagination is not part of my essence; without it, I would still be the same thing I now am (AT, 7: 73, cf. 78-79; CSM, 2:51, cf. 54-55). Imagination is weak and inessential, an aspect of mind due to the mind's being joined to a body; though it is one of those things that fall under the generic appellation "thinking," it has no central or paradigmatic role for understand- ing what thought is. Indeed, if we recall how, in the first meditation, imagin- I wish to thank the National Endowment for the Humanities for supporting my research on Descartes in a summer seminar in 1986 and the University of Dallas for the 1987 King/Haggar summer study grant that supported me in writing the first draft of this paper. I would also like to thank Marjorie Grene and the members of her 1986 NEH summer seminar on Descartes for providing a context and stimulus for this work. References to Descartes's works will cite, by volume and page, the Adam and Tannery edition (AT), Oeuvres de Descartes, eds. C. Adam and P. Tannery, new ed., 11 vols. (Paris: J. Vrin, 1964-74), and, where there is a corresponding translation, the recent English version of Cottingham et al. (CSM), The Philosophical Writings of Descartes, trans. J. Cottingham, R. Stoothoff, and Dugald Murdoch, ~ vols. (Cambridge, U.K.: Cambridge University Press, 1984-85). I have, however, often emended the English renderings of the latter in accordance with the original texts. I err on the side of excessive literalness where looser translation might gloss over connections and relations that are more striking in the original. [379] 380 JOURNAL OF THE HISTORY OF PHILOSOPHY 97:3 JULY 1989 ings can be used to cast a shadow of doubt over all our presumed knowledge, we recognize that imagination tends to lead us away from truth and therefore must be surpassed, or suppressed, if we are to know anything surely. Thus, at best, imagination in the later Descartes is an aspect of mental life subordinated to understanding, at worst it is in essence the power of the evil genius that devotes all of its efforts to deceiving us. Even this brief review makes clear, however, that after losing the high status it enjoyed in the Regulae imagination still continued to play an intrigu- ing, and even revealing, role in Descartes's thought. F6ti, for example, has recently emphasized the discontinuities in Descartes's treatment of imagina- tion and noted that they are valuable for interpreting the overall development of his thought, in particular for understanding the relationship of the Regulae to the later works. ~ In the present essay I wish to explore further the diagnos- tic and revelatory power of imagination in the early Descartes (1618-1630), especially with regard to the Regulae, in the course of which I hope to show that there is no really striking discontinuity before ca. 1630 , but that at about this time there occurred a decisive break with the early conception of imagina- tion, a break that ushered in the mature Cartesian conception of human psycho-physiology that nevertheless must be understood in terms of the unre- solved problems...