Cides and De-cidal Characters in Jhumpa Lahiri’s The Namesake: An Interdisciplinary Approach

This article argues that early modern philosophy should be seen as an integrated enterprise of moral and natural philosophy. Consequently, early modern moral and natural philosophy should be taught as intellectual enterprises that developed hand in hand. Further, the article argues that the unity of these two fields can be best introduced through methodological ideas. It illustrates these theses through a case study on Scottish Newtonianism, starting with visions concerning the unity of philosophy and then turning to a discussion of how methodological ideas figure in those visions. Finally, the article argues that methodological considerations can serve as good starting points to introduce and discuss central topics and canonical figures of the early modern period.

Delving into the intersections between artistic images and philosophical knowledge in Europe from the late sixteenth to the early eighteenth centuries, this book shows that the making and study of visual art functioned as important methods of philosophical thinking and instruction. From frontispieces of books to monumental prints created by philosophers in collaboration with renowned artists, the book examines visual representations of philosophy and overturns prevailing assumptions about the limited function of the visual in European intellectual history. Rather than merely illustrating already existing philosophical concepts, visual images generated new knowledge for both Aristotelian thinkers and anti-Aristotelians, such as Descartes and Hobbes. Printmaking and drawing played a decisive role in discoveries that led to a move away from the authority of Aristotle in the seventeenth century. This book interprets visual art from printed books, student lecture notebooks, alba amicorum (friendship albums), broadsides, and paintings, and examines the work of such artists as Pietro Testa, Léonard Gaultier, Abraham Bosse, Dürer, and Rembrandt. In particular, it focuses on the rise and decline of the ‘plural image’, a genre that was popular among early modern philosophers. Plural images brought multiple images together on the same page, often in order to visualize systems of logic, metaphysics, natural philosophy, or moral philosophy. The book reveals the essential connections between visual commentary and philosophical thought.

This introductory article outlines how this special issue contributes to existing scholarship that calls for a rethinking and re-evaluation of common assumptions about early modern philosophy. One way of challenging existing narratives is by questioning what role systems or systematicity play during this period. Another way of rethinking early modern philosophy is by considering assumptions about the role of philosophy itself and how philosophy can effect change in those who form philosophical beliefs or engage in philosophical argumentation. A further way of advancing early modern scholarship is by examining the tight links between early modern views on metaphysics and epistemology, on the one hand, and moral, social, and political philosophy, on the other hand. Moreover, there are ongoing debates whether and how the traditional distinction between rationalism and empiricism, which has been questioned for several reasons, should be replaced. It has been proposed to replace it with a distinction between experimental and speculative philosophy, but this distinction cannot easily accommodate early modern debates concerning moral, social, and political philosophy. In addition to highlighting several ways how early modern philosophy has and can be rethought, we summarize how the papers in this special issue contribute to these ongoing efforts.

Diet, embodiment, and virtue in the mechanical philosophy

SHAFTESBURY AS MORALIST Anthony Ashley Cooper, Third Earl of Shaftesbury (1671–1713) was, on my account of sentimentalism, its true founder. In order to justify this claim fully I propose to reconsider Shaftesbury's ethical philosophy and re-evaluate its importance in the history of ethics. But first we need to understand what his ethical philosophy is, and that is the aim of the present chapter. Shaftesbury ought to be of interest to both historians of ideas and philosophers of ethics, first because so many writers (past and present) seem so very ambivalent towards him and his achievements, and second because no one seems to have explained clearly what exactly he was saying about ethics. Regarding the first point, nobody denies that his Characteristics was a seminal work in early modern philosophy. But Shaftesbury's reputation as a forward-looking Augustan moralist is overshadowed by his reputation as a moralist, period – as a contributor to the subject of ethics in a spirit of philosophia perennis . On that score he is widely regarded as a second-rate thinker at best, by nearly all leading twentieth-century commentators. (It is too soon to tell about the twenty-first.) The incongruity between the two reputations is very strange; there is nothing like it at work in our judgments of any of the other leading British Moralists.

The view of language is greatly changed from early modern philosophy to later modern philosophy and to postmodern philosophy. The linguistic question in early modern philosophy, which is characterized by rationalism and empiricism, is discussed in this paper. Linguistic phenomena are not at the center of philosophical reflections in early modern philosophy. The subject of consciousness is at the center of the philosophy, which makes language serve purely as an instrument for representing thoughts. Locke, Leibniz and Descartes consider language from a representationalist point of view. To them, language itself is idealized and represents thought as if it were thought representing itself. Like the structural linguist Saussure, the founders of phenomenology and analytical philosophy give much attention to the logical or static structure of language, and stick up for the representationalism of early modern philosophy. However, their successors refuse to accept this attitude, meaning the final collapse of representationalism.

Notes on Contributors

In the early modern period necessity was tied to each of a clutch of interlocking notions: causation, laws of nature, essence, demonstration, logical inference, mathematical proof, etc. So, for example, some argued that if existence is of the essence of God, then God exists necessarily. Again, some argued that if the laws of motion are not known a priori but are discovered by experience, then they are not necessary. There was, however, no attempt to develop a typology of necessities, such as our contemporary distinctions among logical necessity, epistemic necessity, metaphysical necessity and nomic necessity. Indeed, a central concern of current-day interpreters of early modern texts is to disentangle claims about necessity in one domain, say, causation, from those in another, say, logic. Nor was the problem of necessity a desideratum for early modern philosophers to solve. There is a sense then in which it is slightly anachronistic even to speak of the problem of necessity in early modern philosophy. Nevertheless, the modal notion of necessity features prominently in early modern philosophy and it is important that we as modern-day interpreters of early modern texts find ways to understand and explain how it was understood. To that end, it will be helpful to find a general way of framing the problem of necessity in early modern philosophy. What I offer here is a two-stage analysis that aims to capture the broad contours of a cluster of problems that we would now call problems of necessity. As such, it provides a reference point against which different philosophers’ accounts of modal notions can be compared and assessed. The chapter has two sections. Section 1 presents a general heuristic for studying the problem of necessity in the early modern period, including a crucial development in the early modern view of necessary facts about the world. Section 2 applies that heuristic, by way of example, to the philosophy of John Locke. The General Problem of Necessity in Early Modern Philosophy Most early modern philosophers admit that some propositions are true irrespective of the way the world is and would be true even if there were no world.

As previously announced, /r/philosophy is hosting an AMA series this fall semester which kicked off with AMAs by Caspar Hare (MIT), Kevin Scharp, Kenneth Ehrenberg, Geoff Pynn and the Wi-Phi: Wireless Philosophy team. Check out our series announcement post to see all the upcoming AMAs this semester. We continue our series this upcoming Monday with an AMA by Stephen Puryear (NCSU). Hear it from him: Stephen Puryear I am an assistant professor of philosophy and affiliate of the Classical Studies program at NC State. Before arriving in Raleigh in 2008, I earned my Ph.D. in philosophy at the University of Pittsburgh (2006) and spent two years as a postdoctoral fellow at Stanford University. My research interests include early modern philosophy and the German philosophical tradition, especially Leibniz, Kant, and Schopenhauer, as well as historical and contemporary work in metaphysics, ethics, and political philosophy. Much of my published work concerns the philosophy of Leibniz, but I have also written about Berkeley's idealism, Schopenhauer's moral philosophy, Frege's philosophy of language, and the metaphysics of space and time. My main project at present is a book on Leibniz. Besides that, I continue to think about various topics in Schopenhauer's philosophy, especially his ethics; in moral and political philosophy (obligation, consent, rights, normative theories, animal ethics, etc.); and in metaphysics (infinity, continuity, space, time, etc.). Much of my published work concerns the philosophy of Leibniz, but I have also written about Berkeley's idealism, Schopenhauer's moral philosophy, Frege's philosophy of language, and the metaphysics of space and time. My main project at present is a book on Leibniz. Besides that, I continue to think about various topics in Schopenhauer's philosophy, especially his ethics; moral and political philosophy (obligation, consent, rights, normative theories, animal ethics, etc.); and metaphysics (infinity, continuity, space, time, etc.). For more on my published work, see my publications page. Some published papers: "Schopenhauer on the Rights of Animals" "Finitism and the Beginning of the Universe" "Finitism, Divisibility, and the Beginning of the Universe: Replies to Loke and Dumsday" "Leibniz on the Metaphysics of Color" "Frege on Vagueness and Ordinary Language" "Monadic Interaction" AMA Professor Puryear will join us Monday for a couple hours of live Q&A on their research interests on Monday at noon. Please feel free to post questions for him here. He will look at this thread before they start and begin with some questions from here while the initial questions in the new thread come in. Please join me in welcoming Professor Puryear to our community!

This book provides the first reconstruction of intersubjective accounts of the mind in early modern philosophy. Some phenomena are easily recognized as social or interactive: certain dances, forms of work, and rituals require interaction to come into being or count as valid. But what about mental states, such as thoughts, volitions, or emotions? Do our minds also depend on other minds? The idea that our minds are intersubjective or social seems to be a fairly recent one, developed mainly in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries against the individualism of early modern philosophers. By contrast, this book argues that well-known early modern philosophers often even started from the idea that minds are intersubjective. How then does a mind depend on the minds of others?—Early modern philosophers are well known to have developed a number of theories designed to explain how we cognize external objects. What is hardly recognized is that early modern philosophers also addressed the problem of how our cognition is influenced by other minds. This book provides a historical and rational reconstruction of three central but different early modern accounts of the influence that minds exert on one another: Spinoza’s metaphysical model, Locke’s linguistic model, and Hume’s medical model. Showing for each model of mental interaction (1) why it was developed, (2) how it construes mind-mind relations, and (3) what view of the mind it suggests, this book aims at uncovering a crucial part of the unwritten history of intersubjectivity in the philosophy of mind.

One of the features of John Locke’s moral philosophy is the idea that morality is based on our beliefs concerning the future good. In An Essay Concerning Human Understanding II, xxi, §70, Locke argues that we have to decide between the probability of afterlife and our present temptations. In itself, this kind of decision model is not rare in Early Modern philosophy. Blaise Pascal’s Wager is a famous example of a similar idea of balancing between available options which Marcelo Dascal has discussed in his important 2005 article “The Balance of Reason”.Leibniz, however, was not always satisfied with this kind of simple balancing. In his commentary to Locke’s Essay, Nouveaux essais sur l’entendement humain, II, xxi, §66, he presented an alternative model which is based on an idea of plural, mutually conflicting inclinations. This kind of model, called as vectorial theory of rational decision by Simo Knuuttila, fits well with Leibniz’s theory of the soul where volitions are formed as a kind of compromise between different inclinations to different goods.I will present these two models and show how they illustrate the practical rationality of Locke and Leibniz and how their moral philosophies differ, although being similar in certain respects. The topics include Leibniz’s criticism of Lockean hedonism and the discussion of akratic behaviour in II, xxi of Essay and Nouveaux essais.KeywordsLockeLeibnizDecision-makingDecision modelsMoral psychology

The recovery of Epicurus' natural and moral philosophy in the Renaissance and its dissemination in the early modern period had a significant effect on the evolution of philosophy. The theses of the plurality of worlds, their self-formation, the non-existence of any god or gods concerned with the affairs of men and women, and the centrality and validity of the hedonic motive in human life, came under extended scrutiny in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Although it was once customary to regard Epicureanism as a fringe movement represented in the seventeenth century almost uniquely by the enigmatic Pierre Gassendi, it is now increasingly recognized that Epicurus' letters and sayings, and his follower Lucretius' Latin poem, On the nature of things , contributed to the formation of a rival image of nature - the corpuscularian, mechanical philosophy - that replaced the scholastic synthesis of Aristotelianism and Christian doctrine, and that found special favour in the new scientific academies of Europe.

In the Early Modern time (the sixteenth to seventeenth centuries), moral philosophy underwent substantial changes. The most important among them were growing opposition to the theonomous understanding of morality and emerging of new attitudes toward normative force of moral ideas, conditions of morality, an ability of an individual to think morally, and the criterion for moral differences. Moral philosophy shifted its subject matter, and morality as such was problematized in a different way. Meanwhile, the development of content associated with the sphere of morality was not always directly related to elaboration of the concept of “morality” itself. The generalized concept of morality integrates content developed in various theoretical contexts and on various material. In the overall process by which the generalized concept of “morality” took shape, Early Modern philosophy shifted its focus from virtues and duties to morality (which includes both virtues and duties but also other related phenomena).

This chapter offers an account of the history and central issues in feminist philosophical engagements with early modern philosophy. The chapter describes a “first wave” of feminist scholarship on early modern philosophy, beginning around the 1990s, that involved examining the work of canonical male philosophers from a feminist perspective, as well as a “second wave” that focuses on the early modern women philosophers themselves. Projects involved in this second wave include (1) explaining why and how these works dropped out of view in the first place; (2) finding, editing, translating (when necessary), and publishing neglected or lost writings; (3) contextualizing, analyzing, and critiquing these works; and (4) theorizing about and experimenting with ways to integrate these works into narratives of the history of philosophy. The chapter ends with discussion of an emerging “third wave” of opportunities for publishing, presenting at conferences, and teaching about these women philosophers.

Guido Reni’s early critics described him as a painter of “celestial ideas,” and his artistic process has been characterized as one rooted in the fantasia and the Idea. From the seventeenth-century on, Reni’s figures were praised for the “airs of the heads,” a notion with astrological and medical connotations, while the papal physician and art critic Giulio Mancini described Reni’s manner as “spirited,” a term suggestive of the airy movement Reni so powerfully represented in his Aurora. The concept of “spirit” or “spirits” also retained important connotations in early modern medicine and natural philosophy. A reconsideration of Reni’s Aurora in the context of medical and natural philosophical investigations of generation, artistic creation and the nature of and relationship between celestial and terrestrial regions demonstrates the connections between early modern artistic reception, medicine and natural philosophy.