Immaterial Substance Research Articles

An Exploration of Effective Evaluation Rubrics for Assessing the Writing Skill of Engineering Graduates

The work breaks down the measurements pursued during the evaluation. The educators are liable for leading the appraisal. Consequently, the technique decides the different measures for examining composing strategies. A typical issue isn't finishing all parts of the assignment. Students should ensure they read the errand guidelines cautiously and find out precisely what they are required to do. The directions typically clarify that there are various explicit parts of the general assignment, all of which should be finished. To keep away from breakdowns in association and cognizance, it is prudent to compose a different section to manage every point. There ought to likewise be clear linkage between passages by alluding advances or in reverse in the content utilizing firm methods, for example, proper conjunctions, pronouns, redundancy or substitution of watchwords and expressions, and words, for example, 'this', 'that', 'already', 'next', and so on. Composing ought to be succinct and ought to exclude any superfluous or immaterial substance. Up-and-comers should ensure that they edit that they got done with composing cautiously to maintain a strategic distance from such syntactic blunders as poor sentence structure, off base subject action word understanding, conflicting or wrong utilization of particular and plural, poor word request, base tenses, erroneous utilization of grammatical forms (utilizing a modifier rather than an intensifier, or a thing rather than an action word, for instance) and inaccurate accentuation, just as spelling botches. Banalities, for example, 'enlarging their points of view's or 'accepting brilliant open doors' ought to be maintained a strategic distance from as they are now and again (mis)used and can prompt perplexity. Competitors are encouraged to invest more energy using English writings of the sort depicted in the Reading segment to build their jargon and to rehearse their composition. They ought to likewise be comfortable with the fundamental structure of a reasonable book. The review investigates the different measurements to be pursued when instructors right the test papers.

Problems with the "Problems" with Psychophysical Causation

In this essay, I defend a mind-body dualism, according to which human minds are immaterial substances that exercise non-redundant causal powers over bodies, against the notorious problem of psychophysical causation. I explicate and reply to three formulations of the problem: (i) the claim that, on dualism, psychophysical causation is inconsistent with physical causal closure, (ii) the claim that psychophysical causation on the dualist view is intolerably mysterious, and (iii) Jaegwon Kim’s claim that dualism fails to account for causal pairings. Ultimately, I conclude that these objections fail and that dualist interactionism is no more problematic or mysterious than physical causation.

British Idealism and the Concept of the Self, edited by W. J. Mander and Stamatoula Panagakou

Reviewed by: British Idealism and the Concept of the Self ed. by W. J. Mander and Stamatoula Panagakou Adela Pinch (bio) British Idealism and the Concept of the Self, edited by W. J. Mander and Stamatoula Panagakou; pp. xii + 335. Basingstoke and New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2016, £89.99, $119.99. It is not often that philosophy books are reviewed in the pages of Victorian Studies. While the authors in this collection of essays, British Idealism and the Concept of the Self, clearly feel they fight an uphill battle in encouraging their colleagues in their own discipline to take seriously what these Victorian writers can contribute to philosophical discussions about the nature of the self, my task is to persuade readers of this journal how relevant this book is to Victorian studies in other fields. Scholars of Victorian cultural history and literature have long pondered what is distinctive about what Victorians thought and felt about being, or having, a self, but recent decades have largely sent us running to empiricist psychology for answers. The work of associationists and physiologists such as Alexander Bain, George Henry Lewes, James Sully, and others has appealed because its principles chime well with our own: the self is located at the intersection of body and experience; it is a bundle of sensations, and hence contingent, fragmented, in flux. British Idealism and the Concept of the Self is a fine gateway drug for readers interested in learning about an alternative, adjacent body of thinking. The outstanding introduction by the editors, W. J. Mander and Stamatoula Panagakou, clearly lays out what is distinctive, intriguing, and challenging about ideas of the self in the major British Idealists treated in the book: James Frederick Ferrier, F. H. Bradley, Edward Caird, T. H. Green, Bernard Bosanquet, R. G. Collingwood, and J. M. E. McTaggart. Mander and Panagakou provide historical background for the flourishing of Idealism in Victorian Britain: it arose not only from the impact of Immanuel Kant and G. W. F. Hegel, but also from dissatisfaction with the shriveled understanding of self implicit in empiricist theories of knowledge, and with the narrowed ethical responsibilities for the self under utilitarianism. In response, the Victorian Idealists crafted concepts of a self that—while immanent in the empirical self—exists fundamentally outside of time and space. By positing a self that is "connected with the spiritual world of values which expands before and beyond their immediate existence," they sought above all to provide a new model for the self's relation to community (158). The sequence of the fourteen essays in British Idealism and the Concept of the Self largely follows chronology, and moves as well from historically focused pieces on individual philosophers to broader essays that address the ways the Victorian and early-twentieth-century [End Page 494] British Idealists speak to enduring philosophical issues. Thus, for example, in the first essay, Jenny Keefe explains how and why the earliest Victorian Idealist, Ferrier, devoted An Introduction to the Philosophy of Consciousness (1838–39) to demolishing the notion of the "mind" that was the object of study in the empiricist psychology of the era, and to replacing it with philosophical reflection on the nature of subjectivity. Thence follow several essays each on the central figures of the 1870s and 1880s—Bradley, Caird, Green, and Bosanquet—focusing in many cases on the relation between these writers' metaphysics of the self and their ethical and political thought. They argued that if there is to be an ethics of free will, personal agency, and responsibility, there must be a continuous, non-contingent self. In the last of the author-focused essays, Gary L. Cesarz considers the ways in which McTaggart's account of the self as immaterial substance (in Some Dogmas of Religion [1906], but I would add "The Further Determination of the Absolute" [1890]) solves some logical problems in both materialist and social-constructionist accounts of the self, both then and now. In my view, the chapter that may be most helpful in clarifying what was at stake in the Victorian Idealists' non-empirical self is Mander's penultimate summary essay, "Idealism and the True Self." If one of the surprises in this book...

Anton Wilhelm Amo's Philosophy of Mind

AbstractOne of Anton Wilhelm Amo's core contributions to philosophy is his study of the human mind. Amo argues that the human mind is a purely active, immaterial substance that always acts spontaneously and cannot itself be acted upon. Amo's account of the mind has far‐reaching consequences for how he views the relation between mind and body, and our cognitive relation to the sensible world around us. This article introduces Amo's strongly representationalist position, and discusses the extent to which he circumvents the problem of epistemic isolation to which his views seem to give rise.

Problems with the “Problems” with Psychophysical Causation

In this essay, I defend a mind-body dualism, according to which human minds are immaterial substances that exercise non-redundant causal powers over bodies, against the notorious problem of psychophysical causation. I explicate and reply to three formulations of the problem: (i) the claim that, on dualism, psychophysical causation is inconsistent with physical causal closure, (ii) the claim that psychophysical causation on the dualist view is intolerably mysterious, and (iii) Jaegwon Kim’s claim that dualism fails to account for causal pairings. Ultimately, I conclude that these objections fail and that dualist interactionism is no more problematic or mysterious than physical causation.

The Philosophy of Anthony Collins: Free-Thought and Atheism by Jacopo Agnesina

Reviewed by: The Philosophy of Anthony Collins: Free-Thought and Atheism by Jacopo Agnesina Melvyn New Jacopo Agnesina. The Philosophy of Anthony Collins: Free-Thought and Atheism. Paris: Honoré Champion, 2018. Pp. 217. €40. In his conclusion, Mr. Agnesina summarizes his argument: "The philosophical positions sustained by Collins are crystal-clear and … obvious: the denial of God by denial of divine attributes, the denial of his [that is, God's] intelligence and design, the denial of substance duality, with the affirmation of materialistic monism, the affirmation of a mechanicistic [sic] and determined philosophy, etc." He then adds, significantly, that "Collins was more attached to freedom of thought than to his own convictions." As demonstrated in perhaps his best-known work, Discourse Concerning Ridicule and Irony in Writing (1729), Collins would have enjoyed the irony of his convictions being "crystal-clear" to his modern interpreter. Still, Mr. Agnesina does us an extraordinary service, first, in taking Collins seriously as a student and follower of Locke, and second, in demonstrating that the basis of his infamous exchanges with theologians was philosophical. Even his attack on scriptural authority and the priesthood originates in the argument that explanations are either reasonable or contrary to reason, but never above reason. The Boyle lectures make a good starting point, since the attempt to reconcile the new science with Christianity marks the century's fault line in terms of defending belief. Against the argument of James O'Higgins and others that whatever else Collins was, he was not an atheist, Mr. Agnesina posits the combined influence of Bayle, Spinoza, Toland, and Leibniz along with Lockean epistemology to argue he was indeed an atheist, although he resented Toland's blatancy, preferring his own subtleties. The distinction between contrary to reason and above reason was essential to scientist-theologians like Robert Boyle: God's knowledge and human knowledge were on very different planes. Locke understood this problem for religious belief, and hence defined what was above reason as matters of faith. However, faith had to withstand the test of reason, and the validity of testimony (testament) became determinative, exposing an exploitable vulnerability for John Toland and Pierre Bayle. Collins followed them with a series of essays in the Independent Whig (1732), arguing we cannot give rational assent to what we do not understand: "Men who trust in mysteries are of two types: 'learned Parrots and unlearned Parrots: to the first whereof, Absurdity is the peculiar Privilege; and to the latter, Ignorance."' Collins was, a point Mr. Agnesina stresses, a splendid rhetorician. The chapter on Collins's exchanges with Samuel Clarke is the most important in the book. From the early eighteenth century to the present, the issues seem much the same: "the emergence of thought, consciousness and personal identity, materialism." Whether the soul is material or immaterial moved these philosophical issues into the realm of theology, but Mr. Agnesina is astute in showing how Collins built his argument from Lockean premises. For Clarke, it was essential that the soul differ from matter; matter was compound and divisible, the soul, one and entire. Following Locke's argument that the soul is "superadded by God to organized matter," Collins extends the idea to argue that "consciousness is a property that arises from the complex organization of matter into textures, a property that the parts, taken individually, do not possess but that is present in the whole." Clarke rejects this: "the Individual Power of consciousness presupposes an Individual Being [End Page 115] which cannot be matter, because matter is subject to composition, whereas the soul or the consciousness, being individual, cannot be divisible in any way." Put otherwise, for Clarke, identity is in the soul; for Collins, as for Locke, it is in "the flow of consciousness." Underlying this debate is disagreement about materialism. Clarke is certain that in opposition to material substance ("not Self-existent, but Dependent, Finite, Divisible, Passive") there is an immaterial substance, which is "Self-existent, Eternal, Infinite." Collins responds that this requires demonstration, either that matter is not self-existent or that it came from nothing. Since neither is demonstrable, human knowledge must content itself with the "most coherent hypothesis," namely, a denial of dualism...

Immaterial Mechanism in the Mature Leibniz

Leibniz standardly associates “mechanism” with extended material bodies and their aggregates. In this paper, I identify and analyze a further distinct sense of “mechanism” in Leibniz that extends, by analogy, beyond the domain of material bodies and applies to the operations of immaterial substances such as the monads that serve, for Leibniz, as the metaphysical foundations of physical reality. I argue that in this sense, Leibniz understands “mechanism” as an intelligible process that is capable of providing a sufficient reason for a series of changes. I then apply these findings to enrich our understanding of Leibniz’s well-known mill argument in Monadology ¶17: although material machines and mechanisms cannot produce perceptions, the perceptual activity of immaterial monads is to be understood as “mechanical” according to this analogical sense.

On variability & human consciousness

The topic of consciousness remains central across numerous academic fields ranging from philosophy to cognitive neuroscience. Scholars in all of these fields continue to debate the origins of conscious experiences. More recently, scientists have applied advanced imaging techniques to illuminate brain regions that are at least associated with our subjective feelings of conscious experience. Though much disagreement remains, one point that is generally accepted across fields is that consciousness is not the product of an immaterial substance, but rather is produced by functioning across physical substrates in the brain. This point of agreement is enough to suggest that genetically and environmentally underpinned individual variation in brain structure may contribute to individual variation in consciousness. To the extent that this is correct, it may provide insight on a host of important questions across various academic fields. Equally important, understanding sources of variability in consciousness may be a key piece of the puzzle for understanding not only how consciousness evolved but also how selection pressures might continue to act on the human experience of consciousness across subsequent generations.

Sense and Sensibility: Designing a museum exhibit with Visually Impaired People

As a Participatory Action Research project stands at the crossroad between scientific investigation, design, and social change, we argue that to answer when and whatthis kind of project can be considered “successful” we have to reflexively analyze a Participatory Design action as a never ending process. The hypothesis discussed in this paper is, thus, that the result of a Participatory Action Research project is more the journey that led to a design than the “results” of a research or the “products” created by the project (them being of material of immaterial substance). In this paper, we will illustrate our point through the description of SmartArt, an action research project whose aim is to reduce inequalities by allowing access to art and culture to Visually Impaired People.

PEMIKIRAN FILSAFAT MANUSIA IBNU MISKAWAIH: TELAAH KRITIS ATAS KITAB TAHDZIB ALAKHLAQ

This article aims to describe human philosophical thought of Ibn Miskawaih in the book entitled Tahdzib Alakhlaq which is focused on the conception of human being structure; the relation of human material substance (physic) and immaterial substance (soul); the human life ultimate; and the conception of Insan Kamil. Based on the library studies, by using content analysis approach, this study found the historical fact that Ibnu Miskawaih acknowledged; first, the existence of physical essence made human being bound by space, time, and material determination. While the existence of soul made human being be able to build a relationship with God and to create culture and civilization. Second the existence of a structural and functional relationship between physic as a material substance, and soul as an immaterial substance of a human being, and not human immaterial essential relationship. Third, the human life ultimate is to achieve ideal condition, related to their behavior and special characteristic, i.e. faculty of thought. Fourth, the conception of Insan Kamil which is emphasized to the force and magnificence of the faculty of thought that made human left their instincts, syahwiyah and amarah desire toward sharia law and wisdom of thought so that they would be able to achieve to the highest position in the human nature.

Descartes’s Legacy in Kant’s Notions of Physical Influx and Space-Filling: True Estimation and Physical Monadology

Abstract: This paper examines Kant’s pre-Critical distinction between the capacity of an immaterial simple substance to occupy space by having a spatial location and the sphere of its activity, in contrast to the power of material compound bodies to fill space by their extension and solidity. I highlight some important features of Descartes’ metaphysical and physical models of the contingent locality of simple unextended substances and challenge the recently articulated view that Henry More’s model of extended but metaphysically indivisible spirits is an archetype for, or at least a precursor to, Kant’s dynamic monads. I claim that, contra More and the Newtonians, Kant is indebted to Descartes for this idea of how simple substances take up space and can be extended in an ‘analogous’ way by means of the effects of their activity.

La représentation de l’histoire dans la nouvelle en langue française du XIXe siècle éd. par Concepción Palacios et Pedro Méndez

Reviews 263 Proust refers to a range of medical procedures affecting the heart, including le pansement , l’incision, and la transplantation. Highlighting la poitrine as a central location of “manifestations confondues avec la vie et l’emotion” (93), Ollivier expands his study to include a wide range of physical activities, such as breathing (an exchange of fluids and gases similar to that taking place in the heart),Albertine’s sleeping (an opportunity for the Proustian narrator to listen as she breathes), and sex. If references to doctors and medications appear more frequently in the Recherche than in the nineteenthcentury novel, Proust conjures up this world in unique ways, often applying medical terminology to non-medical subjects,and in many instances,describing the transmission of immaterial substances as processes of inoculation, contamination, medical seeding (ensemencement), or injection. Ollivier’s study also extends to the cœur mystique, such as the cœur enflammé of Giotto’s Charité fresco, as well as to the sport of cycling, fueled by the heart and lungs. For readers already familiar with the Recherche, this volume, by reinforcing the link between physiological functions and the subjectivity of human emotions, makes an intriguing contribution to scholarship on Proust and medicine. Brandeis University (MA) Hollie Markland Harder Palacios, Concepción, et Pedro Méndez, éd. La représentation de l’histoire dans la nouvelle en langue française du XIXe siècle. Paris: Garnier, 2016. ISBN 978-2-81243623 -9. Pp. 362. The present volume—the third by the two editors—offers a selection of critical essays on récits courts from the genre’s Golden Age. Many of the topics covered in previous volumes are also a part of this latest collaboration, including the reception of the French short story in Spain and the interdependence of French and Spanish literature. Strategically positioned as the opening chapter, René Godenne’s overview of history in the nouvelle historique provides an excellent framework for the subsequent chapters. In their respective essays, Yvon Houssais and Carmen María Pujante Segua undertake a defense of short fiction in general—seemingly a requisite element in studies of the genre—that is supported by Ángeles Sirvent Ramos’s presentation of Stendhal’s nouvelles. By emphasizing Stendhal’s affection for short prose and the inspiration he found in Spanish literature and history, Ramos counters the view that these short texts are mere ébauches for Le rouge et le noir or La chartreuse de Parme. One thread running through the collection’s twenty essays is the notion that the short story is the ideal medium for looking at history “par le petit bout de la lorgnette” (142). Ironically, its limited scope, often mistaken for superficiality, is the strong point of the genre.As Houssais observes,“par la généralisation,l’exemplarité,le système symbolique qui se met en place, la micro-histoire mise en place dans le texte court devient emblématique de la grande histoire” (65). Edurne Jorge Martínez’s examination of Alphonse Daudet’s stories set during the Franco-Prussian war illustrates Houssais’s observation. A participant in the defense of Paris, Daudet wasted no time translating his experiences into the literary texts that comprise the first part of Les contes du lundi. Because the Prussian occupation was still fresh in the readers’minds when the collection was published in 1873, the stories “ont atteint une portée littéraire quasi immédiate” (168). Understandably, perhaps, given that the majority of the volume’s contributors are Spanish academics, la matière d’Espagne is either a primary or secondary focus of many of the studies. To be sure, many nouvellistes—among them Stendhal, Hugo, and Mérimée—drew from Spanish history and culture, the result of, María del Rosario Álvarez Rubio asserts, the Romantic portrayal of Spain as a“terre de sang et de rituels, de passions et de conflits”(231). If the influence of Anglophone writers such as Edgar Allan Poe and Walter Scott on the nineteenth-century French short story has long been established, the inspiration that Spain provided those same authors has yet to be fully explored by scholars on this side of the Atlantic. It...

Pascal's Modernity

ABSTRACTPascal can be readily inserted into familiar characterizations of the emergence of modernity (man’s alienation from the cosmos). He himself theorized the proper relationship between innovation (legitimate in the physical sciences) and traditional authority (legitimate especially in theology). While accepting the mechanistic philosophy and in particular the rigid Cartesian distinction between immaterial and corporeal substance, he registers its divergence from our spontaneous understanding of experience; we find him encountering the view of one of his religious mentors that Cartesian science has deprived the cosmos of its spiritual significance as an image of the creator. His relationship to Latour’s conception of (non-)modernity is considered. Though many of his attitudes are uncongenial to modern secular humanism, his theologically-motivated rejection of the concept of nature as normative has surprising echoes in aspects of twenty-first century thought and culture.

Pascal’s modernity

ABSTRACTPascal can be readily inserted into familiar characterizations of the emergence of modernity (man’s alienation from the cosmos). He himself theorized the proper relationship between innovation (legitimate in the physical sciences) and traditional authority (legitimate especially in theology). While accepting the mechanistic philosophy and in particular the rigid Cartesian distinction between immaterial and corporeal substance, he registers its divergence from our spontaneous understanding of experience; we find him encountering the view of one of his religious mentors that Cartesian science has deprived the cosmos of its spiritual significance as an image of the creator. His relationship to Latour’s conception of (non-)modernity is considered. Though many of his attitudes are uncongenial to modern secular humanism, his theologically-motivated rejection of the concept of nature as normative has surprising echoes in aspects of twenty-first century thought and culture.

John Locke, ‘Hobbist’: of sleeping souls and thinking matter

AbstractIn this paper, I consider Isaac Newton’s fevered accusation that John Locke is a ‘Hobbist.’ I suggest a number of ways in which Locke’s account of the mind–body relation could plausibly be construed as Hobbesian. Whereas Newton conceives of the human mind as an immaterial substance and venerates it as a finite image of the Divine Mind, I argue that Locke utterly deflates the religious, ethical, and metaphysical significance of an immaterial soul. Even stronger, I contend that there is good reason to suspect that Locke is a crypto-materialist, at least with respect to human beings, and in this respect, could reasonably be labeled a ‘Hobbist.’

On Analogies in Leibniz’s Philosophy

This paper analyzes Leibniz's use of analogies in both natural philosophical and metaphysical contexts. Through an examination of Leibniz's notes on scientific methodology, I show that Leibniz explicitly recognizes the utility of analogies as heuristic tools that aid us in conceiving unfamiliar theoretical domains. I further argue that Leibniz uses the notion of a self-moving machine or automaton to help capture the activities of the immaterial soul. My account helps resist the conventional image of Leibniz as an arch-rationalist unconcerned with methods of empirical discovery and contributes to ongoing discussions on the nature of immaterial substance and mind in Leibniz.

Significato, falsità ed errore in Thomas Hobbes

In chapter I, V of De Corpore, Hobbes states the difference between erring (erratio), (falsitas), and captions (captiones). What is decisive for him is that solely occurs in a context and this is the reason why only men can fall into falsities, whereas animals can only err. After reconstructing the differences between, on the one hand, Hobbes’s theory of error and falsity and, on the other, those of Descartes, Gassendi, and the early modern sceptics, the Author focuses on the two types of semantic falsities or absurdities listed in De Corpore. He then explores the philosophy of language and in particular the first philosophy, which are in the background of Hobbes’s analysis. A lessknown work of Hobbes, De motu, loco et tempore, is examined, where Hobbes developed his own particular conception of philosophy as nomenclature, in close connection with the ontology implicit in Galilean physics. This work explicitly raises the question of statements that are typical of religious discourse, regarding the existence of immaterial substances. Whereas in De motu Hobbes still adopts a linguistic compromise that allows him to describe these statements as being neither true nor false and depending on the assumption of incomprehensible meanings, in subsequent works (Leviathan and De Corpore), he presents these propositions as the chief examples of or absurdity.

Dualists needn’t be anti-criterialists (nor should they be)

Sometimes in philosophy one view engenders another. If you hold the first, chances are you hold the second. But it’s not always because the first entails the second. Sometimes the tie is less clear, less clean. One such tie is between substance dualism and anti-criterialism. Substance dualism is the view that people are, at least in part, immaterial mental substances. Anti-criterialism is the view that there is no criterion of personal identity through time. Most philosophers who hold the first view also hold the second. In fact, many philosophers just assume that substance dualists ought to, or perhaps even have to, accept anti-criterialism. But I aim to show that this assumption is baseless. Substance dualism doesn’t entail, suggest, support, or in any way motivate anti-criterialism, and anti-criterialism confers no benefit on dualism. Substance dualists have no special reason—and, indeed, no good reason at all—to accept anti-criterialism. Or so I shall argue. My aim isn’t to defend substance dualism, nor is it to attack anti-criterialism. My aim is to show that, contrary to a long-standing trend, dualists needn’t be anti-criterialists. Nor, as it will turn out, should they be.

The Metaphysics of Henry More by Jasper Reid

Reviewed by: The Metaphysics of Henry More by Jasper Reid Guido Giglioni Jasper Reid. The Metaphysics of Henry More. International Archives of the History of Ideas, 207. Dordrecht: Springer, 2012. Pp. vii + 412. Cloth, $179.00. As Jasper Reid argues in his book, there are plenty of reasons for taking More’s philosophy seriously, both as an example of early modern metaphysics and a speculative effort in its own terms. More’s metaphysics was experimental, fictional, and theological at once, for it deliberately and passionately engages with the study of nature, stories of preternatural apparitions and the mysteries of revealed religion (creation, Trinity, the Incarnation, transubstantiation, redemption). More’s philosophical inquiry feeds on experiments, stories, and visions, and these become an organic part of his metaphysical equipment. This, of course, was a hazardous and edgy undertaking, which no doubt contributed to the bad reputation associated with the style of More’s philosophizing. Perhaps due to his poetic vein (the question of its aesthetic value is not relevant here), More was prone to linguistic exuberance. A quick look at the Oxford English Dictionary reveals that the name of More is not rarely associated with neologisms and all sorts of verbal creations. Unsurprisingly, his metaphysics is dotted with technical terms of his own invention: ‘indiscerpibility,’ ‘spissitude,’ ‘holenmerianism,’ ‘hylarchic,’ and ‘biusianic’ (to give a few examples). Reid is at his best when he shows the reader the extent to which More’s mind was keen to explore the farthest frontiers of the human mind and able to test the limits of intelligible reality. This, however, never happened to the detriment of sensible experience or by circumventing the boundaries of ordinary language. Indeed, there is a sense of intuitive immediacy, of almost a literal kind, in the way in which More handled the most abstract ideas in his philosophical arguments (God, space, the journey of the individual soul from and to God). In this, More’s boldest piece of metaphysical prowess consists in an unconventional theory of spiritual extension, understood as an indivisible, penetrable, and active substratum. The notion of spiritual extension, on which Reid published a groundbreaking article (“Henry More on Material and Spiritual Extension,” Dialogue 42 [2003]: 531–58), can be taken as the signature of More’s metaphysics. The universe is a plenum, a seamless continuum of spatial energy, where each single soul is always in a state of vital union with a corresponding unit of congealed (“inspissated”) matter (described as the “fluid possibility” of divine creation), be that matter an earthly, aerial, or ethereal vehicle. In this universe, nature is imagination at its primordial level, sheer productivity detached from a perceiving and thinking subject and yet informed by purposeful guidelines, almost automatic in its modus operandi (“as if you should conceive an Artificers’ imagination separate from the artificer, and left alone to work by it self without animadversion” [323, quoting from More’s philosophical Poems]). This notion of nature is what More came to call the “hylarchic spirit,” one of the most controversial items of his metaphysics, but the one through [End Page 502] which he especially demonstrates his willingness to provide an up-to-date consideration of the material world, using the results of both experimentalism and mechanism. More was a philosopher abreast with the latest trends in science, philosophy, and religion. He was one of the first in England to react to Galileo, Descartes, and Spinoza. In many contemporary endeavors in the field of philosophy, More detected a clear tendency toward materialism. In a way, his philosophy can be seen as a lifetime attempt to address the great challenge launched by Hobbes’s contention that an immaterial substance is a self-contradictory notion. Given the many contacts that More established with a large number of contemporaries (famous and less famous) and the profusion of references that each of his treatises contains, his works are like conceptual pop-up books, in which almost every page develops a set of contextual and historical information that encapsulates the intellectual climate of the time. And yet, more than for any historical, antiquarian, doxographic, and exegetic reasons, More deserves to be studied as a philosopher in his own right. Reid’s book is...

Blake’s Beastly ‘Spectre’

Every Thing has its Vermin O Spectre of the Sleeping Dead! Jerusalem (pl. 1) William Blake’s complex allegory referencing the ‘Spectre’ implements expansive and contrary contexts, and therefore this study investigates aspects of Blake’s allusive word-play as it relates to this mercurial beast.1 Blake’s dissolute masculine Spectre, symbolizing Reason, is not only an immaterial ghostly spirit but also a corporeal newborn creature. Early on, Blake’s sorrowing Theotormon (theology-tormented) rhetorically inquires in Visions of the Daughters of Albion (3:23, E 47), 1793: ‘Tell me what is a thought, & of what substance is it made?’ (my emphasis). Theotormon’s speculation has valid relevance to John Locke’s comment in An Essay Concerning Human Understanding (Nidditch edition), a work annotated by Blake, in which there is no contradiction to view ‘Thinking … separate and independent from Solidity’ (substance) any more than ‘that Solidity should exist, separate, and independent from Thinking.’ Locke concluded: ‘I know not, why we may not as well allow a thinking thing without Solidity … as [well as] a solid thing without Thinking … especially since it is no harder to conceive how Thinking should exist without Matter, than how Matter should think’ (Essay II.23.32, p. 31, my emphasis). Locke in his Essay (IV.III.6, pp. 540–1) ultimately pronounced that ‘thinking’ as an ‘immaterial Substance’ has been ‘fixed to Matter’, for ‘GOD can, if he pleases, superadd to Matter a Faculty of Thinking’.