Geoffrey Gorham

Macalester College · Department of Philosophy

Descartes Intinity Space vs. Time

Leibniz on Time and Duration

In two rarely discussed passages – from unpublished notes on the Principles of Philosophy and a 1647 letter to Chanut – Descartes argues that the question of the infinite (or indefinite) extension of space is importantly different from the infinity of time. In both passages, he is anxious to block the application of his well-known argument for the...

17th-century natural philosophy placed God directly at the foundations of both the Cartesian and the Newtonian programs in physics. But Hobbes's somewhat neglected “corporeal deity”-derived from the ancient Stoics-offered at least as compelling a conception of God's immanent relation to the world as Descartes or Newton. While undeniably heterodox,...

Galileo’s dictum that the book of nature ‘is written in the language of mathematics” is emblematic of the accepted view that the scientific revolution hinged on the conceptual and methodological integration of mathematics and natural philosophy. Although the mathematization of nature is a distinctive and crucial feature of the emergence of modern s...

The Cambridge Descartes Lexicon is the definitive reference source on René Descartes, 'the father of modern philosophy' and arguably among the most important philosophers of all time. Examining the full range of Descartes' achievements and legacy, it includes 256 in-depth entries that explain key concepts relating to his thought. Cumulatively they...

The Cambridge Descartes Lexicon is the definitive reference source on René Descartes, 'the father of modern philosophy' and arguably among the most important philosophers of all time. Examining the full range of Descartes' achievements and legacy, it includes 256 in-depth entries that explain key concepts relating to his thought. Cumulatively they...

Hobbes insists that motion, which plays numerous important roles in his natural philosophy, presupposes time. But he seems to advance a reductionist, even idealist, conception of time itself. For example, he denies that time itself can measure motion; rather motion measures time. Indeed, time is ‘imaginary’ and only the present is strictly real. In...

The pantheon of seventeenth-century European philosophy includes some remarkably heterodox deities, perhaps most famously Spinoza’s deus-sive-natura. As in ethics and natural philosophy, early modern philosophical theology drew inspiration from classical sources outside the mainstream of Christianized Aristotelianism, such as the highly immanentist...

When McTaggart puts Spinoza on his short list of philosophers who considered time unreal, he is falling in line with a reading of Spinoza's philosophy of time advanced by contemporaneous British Idealists and by Hegel. The idealists understood that there is much at stake concerning the ontological status of Spinozistic time. If time is essential to...

Seventeenth-century authors frequently infer the attributes of time by analogy from already established features of space. The rationale for this can be traced back to Aristotle's analysis of time as ‘the number of movement’, where movement requires a prior understanding of spatial magnitude. Although these authors are anti-Aristotelian, they were...

In 1668, the octogenarian Hobbes finally affirmed openly a doctrine that was unavoidable given his longstanding embrace of both theism and materialism: God is corporeal. However, this doctrine has generally been downplayed or dismissed by scholars, who have alleged that Hobbes's corporeal theism is irreconcilable with his more orthodox theological...

In the seventeenth century God was increasingly employed in the foundations of scientific programs, as the continuous source of motion and the frame of absolute space and time. But this forces the question whether this more immanent God is himself an object of empirical science, open to sense, measurement, and the imagination? This chapter shows ho...

Beginning with Berkeley and Leibniz, philosophers have been puzzled by the close yet ambivalent association in Newton's ontology between God and absolute space and time. The 1962 publication of Newton's highly philosophical manuscript De Gravitatione has enriched our understanding of his subtle, sometimes cryptic, remarks on the divine underpinning...

This chapter discusses the “real distinction” between the mind and the body and a demonstration of the immortality of the soul as demonstrated in Descartes’s Meditations. Early readers of Descartes’s work like Arnauld and Mersenne rejected the idea on the grounds that “it does not seem to follow from the fact that the mind is distinct from the body...

Descartes on CausationSchmaltzTad M.Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008, xii + 237 pp. - Volume 48 Issue 4 - Geoffrey Gorham

The employment by seventeenth-century natural philosophers of stock theological notions like creation, immensity, and eternity in the articulation and justification of emerging physical programs disrupted a delicate but longstanding balance between transcendent and immanent conceptions of God. By playing a prominent (if not always leading) role in...

If we view the aim of feminist science as truthlikeness, instead of either absolute or relative truth, then we can explain the sense in which the feminist sciences bring an objective advance in knowledge without implicating One True Theory. I argue that a certain non-linguistic theory of truthlikeness is especially well-suited to this purpose and c...

God and time play crucial, intricately related roles in Descartes' project of grounding mathematical physics on metaphysical first principles. This naturally raises the perennial theological question of God's precise relation to time. I argue, against the strong current of recent commentary, that Descartes' God is fully temporal. This means that Go...

Descartes' account of the material world relies heavily on time. Most importantly, time is a component of speed, which figures in his fundamental conservation principle and laws. However, in his most systematic discussion of the concept, time is treated as some-how reducible both to thought and to motion. Such reductionistic views, while common amo...

The strategies to protect information about a product, which can be more valuable than the product itself, are discussed. The key to protecting the trade secrets is to be sure that the employees are educated about the importance of the trade secrets, which if revealed will involve risks both for the company and the employee involved in disclosing i...

This paper presents a detailed account of Descartes’ derivation of his second law of nature—the law of rectilinear motion—from a priori metaphysical principles. Unlike the other laws the proof of the second depends essentially on a metaphysical assumption about the temporal immediacy of God’s operation. Recent commentators (e.g., Des Chene and Garb...

Descartes provides an original and puzzling argument for the traditional theological doctrine that the world is continuously created by God. His key premise is that the parts of the duration of anything are "completely independent" of one another. I argue that Descartes derives this temporal independence thesis simply from the principle that causes...

Résumé Dans sa présentation récente de la «dialectique de la création» dans la philosophie du XVII e siècle, Thomas Lennon suggère que les hypothèses de Descartes concernant la causalité conduisent à un dilemme : Descartes doit accepter soit une certaine sorte d'émanationnisme panthéiste, soit l'émergence de la réalité ex. nihilo. Dans cet article,...

This anthology presents recent writings on Descartes, Spinoza, and Leibniz. All of the essays were written especially for this volume, and many of them grew out of a 1995 NEH summer seminar on the Rationalists hosted by Jonathan Bennett at Syracuse University. The collection is divided into three parts: “Matter and Substance,” “Freedom and Necessit...

Though Descartes is traditionally associated with the moderately nativist doctrine that our ideas of God, of eternal truths, and of true and immutable natures are innate, on two occasions he explicitly argued that all of our ideas, even sensory ideas, are innate in the mind (AT 8B 358, AT 3 418; CSM 1 304, CSMK 187). One reason it is surprising to...

In line with the semantic conception of scientific theories, I develop an account of the intertheory relation of comparative structural similarity. I argue that this relation is useful in explaining the concept of verisimilitude and I support this contention with a concrete historical example. Finally. I defend this relation against the familiar ch...

As a result of the rapid changes taking place in health care, nurse leaders are more challenged than ever to assume a new and different kind of leadership. Under the current paradigm, leaders are responsible for the performance of their people. Leaders do things TO the organization and the people in it. That paradigm of leader responsibility for ot...

In a series of influential articles, the anti-realist Arthur Fine has repeatedly charged that a certain very popular argument for scientific realism, that only realism can explain the instrumental success of science, begs the question. I argue that on no plausible reading ofthe fallacy does the realist argument beg the question. In fact, Fine is hi...

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Minnesota, 1994. Includes bibliographical references.