bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
Hooker, Richard (1554–1600)
Authors: McGrade A.S.
Published: September 2018

Hooker’s Of the Laws of Ecclesiastical Polity (1593–1662) is the first major work of English prose in the fields of philosophy, theology and political theory. After setting out an entire worldview in terms of the single idea of law, Hooker attempted to justify – and, arguably, to transform – the religious and political institutions of his day. Hooker’s work contributed to later, more narrowly political, political thought (Locke cited ‘the judicious Hooker’ at crucial points in his Second Treatise of Civil Government), but the Laws is chiefly significant for articulating the ideal of a society coherent in and through its religion, a body politic which succeeds in being – not merely having – a church. In Hooker’s England this meant that royal authority in religion was extensive, but derived from the community and limited by law. Modern separations of politics from religion and of philosophy from edification have made him difficult to assimilate. More recent critiques of Enlightenment secularism and purely technical philosophy help make him again intelligible.
Language, Renaissance philosophy of
Authors: Ashworth E.J.
Published: September 2018

Renaissance philosophy of language is in its essentials a continuation of medieval philosophy of language as it developed in the fourteenth century. However, there were three big changes in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. First, humanism led to a much greater interest in the practical study of languages, including Greek, Hebrew and vernacular languages, as well as classical Latin. Literary analysis and eloquent discourse were emphasized. Second, there was a loss of interest in such medieval developments as supposition theory, which meant that there was little discussion in logic texts of how words relate to each other in propositional contexts, and how sense and reference are affected by the presence of such logical terms as ‘all’, ‘none’, ‘only’, ‘except’ and so on. Only in early sixteenth-century Paris were these issues pursued with any enthusiasm. Third, the fourteenth-century insistence that both words and concepts were signs had several effects. There was a new interest in the classification of different sorts of signs, both linguistic and non-linguistic, particularly in the work of some early sixteenth-century Spaniards. Naturally significant mental language was emphasized in a way that diverted the attention of logicians from spoken languages and their imperfections. Finally, concepts themselves came in for more attention, so that many of the topics discussed by logicians overlapped with what would now count as philosophy of mind, as well as with metaphysics. For instance, philosophers in the late scholastic tradition made much use of an early fourteenth-century distinction between the formal concept, which is a representative act of mind, and the so-called objective concept, which is whatever it is that is represented by a formal concept. The discussion of these issues by such writers as Pedro da Fonseca and Francisco Suárez has an obvious bearing on developments in early modern philosophy.
Molinism
Authors: Freddoso Alfred J.
Published: September 2018

Molinism, named after Luis de Molina, is a theological system for reconciling human freedom with God’s grace and providence. Presupposing a strongly libertarian account of freedom, Molinists assert against their rivals that the grace whereby God cooperates with supernaturally salvific acts is not intrinsically efficacious. To preserve divine providence and foreknowledge, they then posit ‘middle knowledge’, through which God knows, prior to his own free decrees, how any possible rational agent would freely act in any possible situation. Beyond this, they differ among themselves regarding the ground for middle knowledge and the doctrines of efficacious grace and predestination.
Patrizi da Cherso, Francesco (1529–97)
Authors: Ashworth E.J.
Published: September 2018

Francesco Patrizi was an Italian humanist and anti-Aristotelian who took up a newly-founded chair of Platonic philosophy at Ferrara in 1578, the first such chair in Europe. Through his various writings he contributed to poetic theory, rhetoric, and historiography, as well as to military history and hydraulics. His two most influential works were his Discussiones Peripateticae (1581) and his Nova de universis philosophia (New Philosophy of Universes) (1591). Patrizi cast doubt on the authenticity of many of the works attributed to Aristotle, and argued that Aristotle’s philosophy was incompatible with Christianity. He believed it should be replaced with his own synthesis of Platonism, Neoplatonism, and Hermeticism (or Hermetism). Patrizi saw light as the basic metaphysical principle, and interpreted the universe in terms of the diffusion of light (lumen) from God, the primary light (prima lux). His most influential doctrine concerned space, which he argued to be infinite, three-dimensional, and distinct from the bodies it contained.
Petrarca, Francesco (1304–74)
Authors: Monfasani John
Published: September 2018

With Dante and Boccaccio, Petrarca (known as Petrarch) made the fourteenth century the most memorable in Italian literature. He was also the first great humanist of the Italian Renaissance. He brilliantly and self-consciously exemplified humanism’s classical, rhetorical, literary, and historical interests; with him the movement came of age. He was a proponent not only of classical Rome (‘What else is history,’ he once asked, ‘than the praise of Rome?’), but also of contemporary Rome, constantly calling for the popes at Avignon to return to their proper See and urging restoration of Rome as the seat of the Empire, even if that meant supporting the visionary Roman revolutionary Cola di Rienzo. He came to see himself also as a moral philosopher. His ethical interests were closely tied to his cultural interests and personal situation as a lay moralist (though technically he was a cleric). His outlook and method differed from that of contemporary Aristotelians, whom he attacked on a broad cultural front, sounding many of the themes that would become common in subsequent conflicts between humanism and scholasticism in the Renaissance.
Pico della Mirandola, Giovanni (1463–94)
Authors: Hankins James
Published: September 2018

Giovanni Pico della Mirandola, today the best known of Renaissance philosophers, was a child prodigy and gentleman scholar who studied humanities, Aristotelianism and Platonism with the greatest teachers of his day. He claimed to have mastered, by the age of twenty-four, all known theological systems, Christian and non-Christian, from Moses to his own time. He was the first important Christian student of the Jewish mystical theology known as Kabbalah. The purpose of Pico’s philosophical and theological studies was to produce a grand synthesis of religious wisdom which would both deepen understanding of Christian truth and also serve as an apologetic weapon against non-Christians. This was the project outlined in Pico’s most famous work, De dignitate hominis (On the Dignity of Man) (1486), and further illuminated by his Conclusiones (1486) and Apologia (1487). As part of this larger project, Pico planned to write a concord of Plato and Aristotle, of which only a fragment, the treatise De ente et uno (On Being and the One) (1491), was ever finished. Although he proposed to found a new theological school based on an esoteric reading of all theologies past and present, he did not believe that these theologies were the same in substance, differing only in expression. He insisted on the differences between Platonism and Christianity, while holding that every major theological tradition did contain some elements of truth.

In addition to other, non-philosophical works, Pico wrote the Commento (1486), a commentary on a Neoplatonic poem that in effect constituted a critique of Marsilio Ficino’s most famous work, the dialogue De amore (On Love) (1469). He criticized Ficino as too literary and defended the use of precise technical language in philosophy. Pico used Neoplatonic metaphysics to rediscover the ‘secret mysteries’ of pagan theology (though he sometimes criticized the reliability of the Neoplatonists as guides to Plato’s thought) and offered a fresh interpretation of the metaphysics of love based on his own reading of Platonic sources, seeing human erotic love as a psychological process distinct from cosmic love.
Ramus, Petrus (1515–72)
Authors: Mack Peter
Published: September 2018

Petrus Ramus, for many years a professor of philosophy and eloquence at the University of Paris, wrote textbooks and controversial works in grammar, logic, rhetoric, mathematics, physics and philosophy. He was also a university reformer. His followers were prolific with commentaries, Ramist analyses of classical texts and handbooks of their own. His logical works and those of his school exercised a large influence between 1550 and 1650.

His formation was humanist, in that he attacked scholasticism and encouraged the study (and logical analysis) of classical texts, as Agricola, Sturm and Melanchthon had done. But he was far more independent-minded than them, a stern critic of the textbooks of Aristotle and Cicero, as well as an admirer of their style and intellect. His most important innovation was the method, a theory of organization which he used to simplify his textbooks. He emphasized the need for learning to be comprehensible and useful, with a particular stress on the practical aspect of mathematics. His critics would say he oversimplified. He was also a student of Gaulish pseudo-antiquities and an important proponent of the French language. His Dialectique (1555) was the first book on dialectic in French.
Sanches, Francisco (1551–1623)
Authors: Popkin Richard H.
Published: September 2018

Francisco Sanches was a sceptical philosopher and a professor of medicine at the University of Toulouse in southern France in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth century. He was born in Spain to a family of Jewish ancestry that had been forcibly converted to Catholicism, but he was brought up in France. Though he was a distant cousin of the sceptic Michel de Montaigne, he independently advanced what was perhaps the strongest sceptical critique of Aristotelianism and Platonism. In addition he developed a scepticism about mathematical knowledge claims. At the same time, he offered the first form of constructive scepticism, a way of solving intellectual problems without antecedently overcoming the sceptical challenge to traditional kinds of knowledge. He thus presented science as a way of dealing with experience, rather than as a way of gaining knowledge, and in this his views anticipate some twentieth-century philosophies. Sanches was also an important empirical medical practitioner, who presented the newest medical findings in his courses at Toulouse. His sceptical-critical views were influential in the first half of the seventeenth century, and were still being studied in Leibniz’s time.
Soto, Domingo de (1494–1560)
Authors: Doyle John P.
Published: September 2018

The sixteenth-century Spanish Dominican, Domingo de Soto, was a mainstay of the Thomistic revival begun at Salamanca by Vitoria. After study at Paris (where he was taught by the nominalist John Major) and Alcalá, Soto taught both philosophy and theology. He was influential within the Dominican Order and the Catholic Church; he served as Emperor Charles V’s theologian at the Council of Trent and played an active role in the development of the Council of Trent’s teaching on original sin. Besides his theological writings, Soto composed philosophical works chiefly in logic, natural philosophy and juridical theory. In logic, he authored an exposition of the Summulae of Peter of Spain and a commentary, by way of questions, on three of Aristotle’s works. His natural philosophy anticipated later scientific approaches, while in his philosophy of law Soto presented a basically Thomistic doctrine updated to confront sixteenth-century issues.
Silvestri, Francesco (1474–1528)
Authors: Tavuzzi Michael
Published: September 2018

A Thomist philosopher and theologian, Silvestri composed, along with Aristotelian commentaries and polemical works, a vast commentary on Aquinas’ Summa Contra Gentiles which, from the first, has been recognized as its classic exposition. Silvestri imitated the method (expositio formalis) of Cajetan’s commentary on Aquinas’ Summa Theologiae, but disagreed with Cajetan on key points of Thomistic doctrine and proposed interpretations generally closer to the letter of Aquinas. Chief among these are the doctrines of analogy, abstraction and the rational demonstrability of the soul’s immortality.
Telesio, Bernardino (1509–88)
Authors: Kessler Eckhard
Published: September 2018

Bernardino Telesio was a philosopher from southern Italy. He was one of the Renaissance philosophers who developed a new philosophy of nature: his most important book was called De rerum natura iuxta propria principia (On the Nature of Things According to Their Own Principles). Telesio approached natural philosophy empirically, and regarded it as a separate field of study from theology and metaphysics. He believed that all natural beings were animate; and, by arguing that the two general principles of heat and cold affected the whole universe, he resisted the Aristotelian division between the corruptible earth and the eternal heavens. However, despite his apparent anti-Aristotelianism and his sympathy for the Presocratics, Telesio owed much to Aristotle, and tried to transform rather than destroy Aristotle’s work. Telesio became the head of a Calabrian school, and was influential and widely discussed in his own time. Francesco Patrizi criticized him, but with respect; Tommaso Campanella followed him in his early works; and Thomas Hobbes drew inspiration from him.
Valla, Lorenzo (1407–57)
Authors: Monfasani John
Published: September 2018

Unlike most Renaissance humanists, Valla took a special interest in philosophy. However, his most influential writing was a work of grammar, Elegantiae Linguae Latinae (The Fine Points of the Latin Language); he had no comprehensive philosophy, nor did he write mainly on philosophy. Valla considered himself to be a revolutionary overturning received opinions, bragging that through his works he was ‘overturning all the wisdom of the ancients’. His preference for Quintilian over Cicero and criticism of classical authors shocked older humanists, and religious authorities were upset by his views on the Trinity and on papal authority, but Valla never sought the overthrow of classical studies – or the papacy for that matter. He sought rather to destroy the Aristotelianism then reigning in the universities. In De Vero Falsoque Bono (On the True and False Good) (1431), he argued for the superiority of Epicureanism over Stoic and Aristotelian ethics. In De Libero Arbitrio (On Free Will) (1439), he corrected Boethius’ treatment of free will and predestination. In the Dialectica (1438–9) he set out to reform logic and philosophy because he believed Aristotle had corrupted them. Asserting that Aristotle had falsified thought because he had falsified language, Valla was determined to show how logic rightly conformed to the linguistic usage of the classical literary authors; essentially Valla had aggressively revived the ancient competition between the rhetorical and philosophical traditions. The first great humanist, Francesco Petrarca (better known in English as Petrarch), had attempted something similar in the fourteenth century, but Valla’s knowledge of philosophy was greater than Petrarch’s and he had access to more sources. Furthermore, Valla knew Greek and could read texts which the medieval Aristotelians knew only in Latin translation.
Lipsius, Justus (1547–1606)
Authors: Ashworth E.J.
Published: September 2018

Justus Lipsius was a Flemish humanist and classical philologist whose work on Tacitus and Seneca led him to give the first full, formal account of Stoicism as a philosophical system, and also to #develop Neostoicism, an influential political and moral theory. His most popular book was De constantia (On Constancy), an account of how to maintain steadfastness in the face of public evils. He loved gardens and dogs.
Magic
Authors: Kassell Lauren
Published: September 2018

Magic is the art of influencing the workings of nature through occult powers. It can be found in most societies throughout history. It is often defined by contrast with other subjects, such as science, rationality and religion. Practitioners of magic might fashion themselves as necromancers, magi or natural philosophers; and accused practitioners were often labelled as sorcerers, heretics or witches. Concentrated, though at times incoherent, expositions of what we might call the epistemology of magic reached their height in European philosophy in late antiquity in the writings of Plotinus, Porphyry and Proclus; this interest was rekindled in the Renaissance in the writings of Agrippa, Pico, Ficino and others in what is often described as the Hermetic or Occultist tradition. Whether magic worked according to natural, demonic or divine forces was debated, and during the Renaissance demonology shifted from a theological to a natural philosophical pursuit. In the Middle Ages explaining how magic worked was a concern of theologians; in the Renaissance it was a concern of natural philosophers and physicians; and in the modern period it is a concern of anthropologists and historians. Magic has always been associated with trickery and danger, and with knowledge and power.
Bacon, Francis (1561–1626)
Authors: Milton J.R.
Published: September 2018

Along with Descartes, Bacon was the most original and most profound of the intellectual reformers of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. He had little respect for the work of his predecessors, which he saw as having been vitiated by a misplaced reverence for authority, and a consequent neglect of experience. Bacon’s dream was one of power over nature, based on experiment, embodied in appropriate institutions and used for the amelioration of human life; this could be achieved only if the rational speculations of philosophers were united with the craft-skills employed in the practical arts.

The route to success lay in a new method, one based not on deductive logic or mathematics, but on eliminative induction. This method would draw on data extracted from extensive and elaborately constructed natural histories. Unlike the old induction by simple enumeration of the logic textbooks, it would be able to make use of negative as well as positive instances, allowing conclusions to be established with certainty, and thus enabling a firm and lasting structure of knowledge to be built.

Bacon never completed his project, and even the account of the new method in the Novum Organum (1620) remained unfinished. His writings nevertheless had an immense influence on later seventeenth-century thinkers, above all in stimulating the belief that natural philosophy ought to be founded on a systematic programme of experiment. Perhaps his most enduring legacy, however, has been the modern concept of technology – the union of rational theory and empirical practice – and its application to human welfare.
Bentley, Richard (1662–1742)
Authors: Harre Rom
Published: September 2018

A towering figure in the history of textual criticism, Bentley’s importance in the development of English philosophical thought rests on both public and private achievements. His great public contribution was made in the first Boyle lectures of 1692. In private, his correspondence with Newton sought the great man’s blessing on the arguments and opinions advanced in these lectures, persistently questioning him on the possibility of a natural origin for the universe and on the role and nature of gravity in physics in general. Bentley’s influence helped to establish the Newtonian consensus dominant in Europe until the end of the nineteenth century.
Berkeley, George (1685–1753)
Authors: Tipton Ian
Published: September 2018

George Berkeley, who was born in Ireland and who eventually became Bishop of Cloyne, is best known for three works that he published while still very young: An Essay towards a New Theory of Vision (1709), Three Dialogues between Hylas and Philonous (1713), and in particular for A Treatise concerning the Principles of Human Knowledge (1710). In the Principles he argues for the striking claim that there is no external, material world; that houses, trees and the like are simply collections of ‘ideas’; and that it is God who produces ‘ideas’ or ‘sensations’ in our minds. The New Theory of Vision had gone some way towards preparing the ground for this claim (although that work has interest and value in its own right), and the Dialogues represent Berkeley’s second attempt to defend it. Other works were to follow, including De Motu (1721), Alciphron (1732) and Siris (1744), but the three early works established Berkeley as one of the major figures in the history of modern philosophy.

The basic thesis was certainly striking, and from the start many were tempted to dismiss it outright as so outrageous that even Berkeley himself could not have taken it seriously. In fact, however, Berkeley was very serious, and certainly a very able philosopher. Writing at a time when rapid developments in science appeared to be offering the key to understanding the true nature of the material world and its operations, but when scepticism about the very existence of the material world was also on the philosophical agenda, Berkeley believed that ‘immaterialism’ offered the only hope of defeating scepticism and of understanding the status of scientific explanations. Nor would he accept that his denial of ‘matter’ was outrageous. Indeed, he held that, if properly understood, he would be seen as defending the views of ‘the vulgar’ or ‘the Mob’ against other philosophers, including Locke, whose views posed a threat to much that we would ordinarily take to be common sense. His metaphysics cannot be understood unless we see clearly how he could put this interpretation on it; and neither will we do it justice if we simply dismiss the role he gives to God as emerging from the piety of a future bishop. Religion was under threat; Berkeley can probably be judged prescient in seeing how attractive atheism could become, given the scientific revolution of which we are the heirs; and though it could hardly be claimed that his attempts to ward off the challenge were successful, they merit respectful attention. Whether, however, we see him as the proponent of a fascinating metaphysics about which we must make up our own minds, or as representing merely one stage in the philosophical debate that takes us from Descartes to Locke and then to Hume, Kant and beyond, we must recognize Berkeley as a powerful intellect who had an important contribution to make.
Bernier, François (1620–88)
Authors: Lennon Thomas M.
Published: September 2018

Bernier was a minor figure who influenced the history of philosophy out of all proportion to his own strictly philosophical abilities. He was effective as a propagandist in the debates over the analysis of matter, and especially as a popularizer of the views of Pierre Gassendi, whose nominalism he sought to apply with greater consistency.
Bold, Samuel (1649–1737)
Authors: Rogers G.A.J.
Published: September 2018

Samuel Bold (or Bolde) was a Latitudinarian minister who defended John Locke’s Reasonableness of Christianity and his Essay Concerning Human Understanding. Bold published a series of pamphlets and short books which argued a theological position substantially identical to that of Locke. He also mounted a philosophical defence of Locke’s definition of knowledge and his supposition that it was possible that God could, if he so wished, superadd to matter the power of thought. In a book on the theological issue of the resurrection of the same body he defended Locke’s account of personal identity.
Browne, Peter (1666–1735)
Authors: Winkler Kenneth P.
Published: September 2018

Peter Browne, an Irish bishop, was a critic of Locke’s theory of ideas. His chief philosophical concern was to explain how human beings can conceive of God. He proposed that God’s existence and attributes can be understood analogically, by their real – though inevitably partial – resemblance to human things. He distinguished between analogy, which turns on a ‘real resemblance’, and metaphor, which turns on a merely imagined one.
Burthogge, Richard (c.1638–c.1704)
Authors: Ayers Michael
Published: September 2018

Richard Burthogge, perhaps the first but certainly not the least interesting modern idealist, was a minor philosopher who responded to a variety of English and Dutch influences. His epistemology, constructed as an undogmatic framework within which to debate theological and metaphysical issues, contains remarkable resemblances to later, even recent idealism. He argued that, since our faculties help to shape their objects, we never know things as they are in themselves: all the immediate objects of thought are appearances. ‘Metaphysical truth’ is therefore beyond us, but we approach ‘logical truth’ in so far as our notions harmonize or cohere with one another and with experience. In this spirit, Burthogge advocated a tolerant reasonableness in religion, while in metaphysics he postulated a universal mind, united with matter, of which individual minds are local manifestations.
Chillingworth, William (1602–44)
Authors: Milton J.R.
Published: September 2018

Chillingworth was one of the most notable English-speaking contributors to debates between Protestants and Catholics in the seventeenth century. His use of a distinction between metaphysical and moral certainty proved extremely influential, as did his rationalist and fallibilist approach to issues of faith and authority.
Clandestine literature
Authors: McKenna Antony
Published: September 2018

Clandestine philosophical (anti-Christian) literature of the seventeenth century circulated in manuscript form until its publication by the philosophes in the later eighteenth century. Since research began, the list of texts has grown and now includes some 260 titles which cover the classical heritage of the Renaissance, the works of La Peyrère and Cyrano, the influence of Spinoza, the growth of rationalism which accompanied the splintering of Protestant churches and sects, and the development of the deist debate in Britain.
Collier, Arthur (1680–1732)
Authors: Winkler Kenneth P.
Published: September 2018

Arthur Collier was an English parish priest who arrived, independently, at a version of immaterialism strikingly similar to that of Berkeley. In his 1713 work Clavis Universalis (‘universal key’), Collier contends that matter exists ‘in, or in dependence on’ the mind. Like Berkeley, he defends immaterialism as the only alternative to scepticism. He admits that bodies appear to be external, but their apparent or ‘quasi’ externeity is, he argues, merely the effect of God’s will, and not a sign of ‘real’ externeity or mind-independence. In Part I of the Clavis, Collier argues (as Berkeley had in his New Theory of Vision) that the visible world is not external. In Part II he argues (as Berkeley had in both the Principles and the Three Dialogues) that the external world ‘is a being utterly impossible’.
Comenius, John Amos (1592–1670)
Authors: Zumr Josef
Published: September 2018

Comenius (Jan Amos Komensky), a Czech philosopher and theologian, was one of the founders of modern educational theory. As a Protestant minister he had to leave Bohemia during the Counter-Reformation, spending most of his life in various European countries. His greatest work (not published during his lifetime) is De rerum humanarum emendatione consultatio catholica (A General Consultation on the Reform of Human Affairs), whose leading idea is the demand for a harmonious arrangement of human relations on the basis of rational enlightenment, the development of education, and the instruction of all humankind. Comenius builds his philosophy on an idea of human nature understood as grounded in an active creative force perpetually leading to improvement: instruction and education are the tools to fulfil this humanitarian ideal. To lend force to this, Comenius constructs a whole ontological system, in which a harmonious development of the whole of existence leads to human reality as its highest tier.
Conway, Anne (c.1630–79)
Authors: Hutton Sarah
Published: September 2018

Anne Conway (née Finch) was the most important of the few English women who engaged in philosophy in the seventeenth century. Her reputation derives from one work published after her death, Principia philosophiae antiquissimae et recentissimae (1690), which proposes a Neoplatonic system of metaphysics featuring a monistic concept of created substance. The work entails a critique of the dualism of both Descartes and Henry More, as well as of the materialism (as she saw it) of Hobbes and Spinoza. In her concept of the monad and her emphasis on the benevolence of God, Conway’s system has some interesting affinities with that of Leibniz.
Elisabeth of Bohemia (1618–80)
Authors: O'Neill Eileen
Published: September 2018

Elisabeth of Bohemia, Princess Palatine, exerted an influence on seventeenth-century Cartesianism via her correspondence with Descartes. She questioned his accounts of mind–body interaction and free will, and persuasively argued that certain facts of embodiment, the unlucky fate of loved ones, and the demands of the public good, constitute serious challenges to Descartes’ neo-Stoic view of the happy life of the autonomous will.
Fludd, Robert (1574–1637)
Authors: Gaukroger Stephen
Published: September 2018

Fludd is a marginal figure in the mainstream development of philosophy in seventeenth-century England, but of some importance in the development of an esoteric and mystical philosophy which took the form of an ‘underground’ movement, Rosicrucianism. Rejecting the various types of scholastic philosophy that were still dominant in his day, Fludd drew on Neoplatonist and Renaissance sources in an effort to redirect learning in what he took to be a Christian direction. His writings centre around a search for hidden connections between a purely intelligible realm and the realm of sensation.
Foucher, Simon (1644–96)
Authors: Nadler Steven
Published: September 2018

Simon Foucher, Canon of Dijon, was a sceptical thinker, active in intellectual circles in Paris. His main philosophical project was the revival of Academic scepticism, and he emerged as an important and influential critic of Cartesian philosophy, questioning the consistency of the Cartesians’ commitment both to mind–body dualism and to the claims that ideas in the mind represent and make known external bodies, and that mind and body interact. He was generally concerned to undermine the Cartesian pretension to know the real essences of mind and body. Foucher was also an early constructive critic of Leibniz’s system of pre-established harmony.
Gassendi, Pierre (1592–1655)
Authors: Osler Margaret J.
Published: September 2018

Pierre Gassendi, a French Catholic priest, introduced the philosophy of the ancient atomist Epicurus into the mainstream of European thought. Like many of his contemporaries in the first half of the seventeenth century, he sought to articulate a new philosophy of nature to replace the Aristotelianism that had traditionally provided foundations for natural philosophy. Before European intellectuals could accept the philosophy of Epicurus, it had to be purged of various heterodox notions. Accordingly, Gassendi modified the philosophy of his ancient model to make it conform to the demands of Christian theology.

Like Epicurus, Gassendi claimed that the physical world consists of indivisible atoms moving in void space. Unlike the ancient atomist, Gassendi argued that there exists only a finite, though very large number of atoms, that these atoms were created by God, and that the resulting world is ruled by divine providence rather than blind chance. In contrast to Epicurus’ materialism, Gassendi enriched his atomism by arguing for the existence of an immaterial, immortal soul. He also believed in the existence of angels and demons. His theology was voluntarist, emphasizing God’s freedom to impose his will on the Creation.

Gassendi’s empiricist theory of knowledge was an outgrowth of his response to scepticism. Accepting the sceptical critique of sensory knowledge, he denied that we can have certain knowledge of the real essences of things. Rather than falling into sceptical despair, however, he argued that we can acquire knowledge of the way things appear to us. This ‘science of appearances’ is based on sensory experience and can only attain probability. It can, none the less, provide knowledge useful for living in the world. Gassendi denied the existence of essences in either the Platonic or Aristotelian sense and numbered himself among the nominalists.

Adopting the hedonistic ethics of Epicurus, which sought to maximize pleasure and minimize pain, Gassendi reinterpreted the concept of pleasure in a distinctly Christian way. He believed that God endowed humans with free will and an innate desire for pleasure. Thus, by utilizing the calculus of pleasure and pain and by exercising their ability to make free choices, they participate in God’s providential plans for the Creation. The greatest pleasure humans can attain is the beatific vision of God after death. Based on his hedonistic ethics, Gassendi’s political philosophy was a theory of social contract, a view which influenced the writings of Hobbes and Locke.

Gassendi was an active participant in the philosophical and natural philosophical communities of his day. He corresponded with Hobbes and Descartes, and conducted experiments on various topics, wrote about astronomy, corresponded with important natural philosophers, and wrote a treatise defending Galileo’s new science of motion. His philosophy was very influential, particularly on the development of British empiricism and liberalism.
Geulincx, Arnold (1624–69)
Authors: Verbeek Theo
Published: September 2018

Rediscovered in the middle of the nineteenth century, for a long time it was only because of his relation with other more conspicuous philosophers, such as Spinoza, Leibniz and Kant, that interest in Geulincx arose. It has since become clear that he was an original thinker in his own right, who proposed an intriguing metaphysics and made interesting contributions to logic.
Herbert, Edward (Baron Herbert of Cherbury) (c.1583–1648)
Authors: Pailin David A.
Published: September 2018

Responding, on the one hand, to religious conflicts over the question of the locus and interpretation of authority for deciding what constitutes authentic belief and, on the other hand, to general philosophical scepticism, Herbert of Cherbury wrote De Veritate (On Truth) in an attempt to determine the character and circumstances of true understanding. In this work, first published in 1624, he sought to enable people to decide for themselves, by the use of their reason, what they ought to hold. According to his thesis the touchstone for such decisions is provided by certain fundamental truths, the ‘common notions’, which all people recognize to be true once they have become aware of them. In two later works, De Religione Gentilium (On the Religion of the Heathens) (1663) and A Dialogue between a Tutor and his Pupil (1768), both published after his death, Herbert attempted to show that his position is not falsified by the evidence of wide differences among religions. His other writings include an important history of Henry VIII based on research into state papers, an autobiography that tells the story of his life up to 1624, and some poems. While this courtier, adventurer and diplomat was something of a failure as a public figure, and while he is commonly held to have essayed views about innate notions that were to be refuted by Locke’s Essay, his writings provide pioneering studies in England in the genres of metaphysics, comparative religion and autobiography. Religiously he has been persistently maligned as ‘the father of English deism’ although closer consideration suggests that this reputation is not justified. He is, rather, to be considered an independent thinker who wanted to identify a form of religious belief that was rationally warranted and universally perceivable.
Johnson, Samuel (1696–1772)
Authors: McCracken Charles J.
Published: September 2018

Johnson was the first important philosopher in colonial America and author of the first philosophy textbook published there. He derived his views largely from others, combining in one system elements from diverse sources. He followed the empiricists in holding that knowledge begins with sensations but held the Augustinian view that knowledge of necessary truths comes only from the mind’s illumination by divine light. With Berkeley, he denied matter’s existence, viewing bodies as collections of ideas. He held that these ideas are ‘faint copies’ of God’s archetypal ideas, which he thought of in much the same way as had Malebranche and John Norris. His ethical views, influenced by William Wollaston, take happiness to be the supreme good, stressing that human beings should seek a happiness consonant with their nature as rational, immortal and social beings.
La Forge, Louis de (1632–66)
Authors: Nadler Steven
Published: September 2018

Louis de la Forge, a medical doctor by profession, was an important champion of Cartesian philosophy in mid-seventeenth century France. Through his work on the first published edition of Descartes’ Traité de l’homme, as well as in his own Traité de l’esprit de l’homme, La Forge sought to complete Descartes’ project of giving a full and detailed account of the human being as a union of two essentially distinct substances: mind and body. His analysis of causation introduced occasionalist elements into his otherwise orthodox Cartesian system, and he is credited with being one of the originators of occasionalism.
Le Clerc, Jean (1657–1737)
Authors: Verbeek Theo
Published: September 2018

Le Clerc was not a particularly original philosopher – his position was somewhat eclectic – but his journals and textbooks make him an important historical figure. He acted as an intermediary between English and Continental traditions. In religion he advocated an attitude of toleration.
Malebranche, Nicolas (1638–1715)
Authors: Nadler Steven
Published: September 2018

Nicolas Malebranche, a French Catholic theologian, was the most important Cartesian philosopher of the second half of the seventeenth century. His philosophical system was a grand synthesis of the thought of his two intellectual mentors: Augustine and Descartes. His most important work, De la recherche de la vérité (The Search After Truth), is a wide-ranging opus that covers various topics in metaphysics, epistemology, ethics, physics, the physiology of cognition, and philosophical theology. It was both admired and criticized by many of the most celebrated thinkers of the period (including Leibniz, Arnauld and Locke), and was the focus of several fierce and time-consuming public debates. Malebranche’s philosophical reputation rests mainly on three doctrines. Occasionalism – of which he is the most systematic and famous exponent – is a theory of causation according to which God is the only genuine causal agent in the universe; all physical and mental events in nature are merely ‘occasions’ for God to exercise his necessarily efficacious power. In the doctrine known as ‘vision in God’, Malebranche argues that the representational ideas that function in human knowledge and perception are, in fact, the ideas in God’s understanding, the eternal archetypes or essences of things. And in his theodicy, Malebranche justifies God’s ways and explains the existence of evil and sin in the world by appealing to the simplicity and universality of the laws of nature and grace that God has established and is compelled to follow. In all three doctrines, Malebranche’s overwhelming concern is to demonstrate the essential and active role of God in every aspect – material, cognitive and moral – of the universe.
Norris, John (1657–1711)
Authors: Hutton Sarah
Published: September 2018

John Norris was a philosopher in the Platonic tradition of the seventeenth century. His philosophy combines elements from both the French and English aspects of that tradition: he was an admirer of Henry More and was the leading English disciple of Malebranche, whose philosophy he did much to popularize in England. A churchman by profession, much of his writing is concerned with the practical application of divinity. Central to Norris’ thought is his theory that the proper and immediate object of both human knowledge and human love is God, who is identified with truth. Thus necessary truths are known directly in God and, conversely, to know eternal and necessary truth is to know God.
Port-Royal
Authors: Pearce Kenneth L.
Published: September 2018

Port-Royal-des-Champes was an abbey in France, initially located near Versailles, but later moved to Paris. Its importance to the history of philosophy is due primarily to a group of Augustinian-Cartesian thinkers who developed an influential theory of mental and linguistic representation. This theory is found in the 1660 Port-Royal Grammaire générale et raisonnée (General and Rational Grammar) by Antoine Arnauld and Claude Lancelot, and the 1662 Port-Royal La logique ou l’art de penserLogic (Logic or the Art of Thinking) by Antoine Arnauld and Pierre Nicole.

The aim of the Grammar is to identify the universal structures of thought underlying all languages, and thereby explain the similarities and differences among languages. The aim of the Logic is to understand the natural operations of the human mind in order that we might learn to employ our faculties better. A fundamental presupposition of both works is that words are signs used to indicate to others what is taking place in the speaker's mind. This leads the Port-Royalists to regard the structure of language as reflective of the structure of thought, and vice versa.

The most important aspect of this structure is the manner in which ideas are put together into propositions and words are put together into sentences. According to the Port-Royalists, a proposition is constructed by a special mental operation, which they call judging. It is this operation that gives rise to truth and falsity. Affirmation, or taking two ideas to belong together, is one species of judging; denial, or taking two ideas not to belong together, is another. These acts of judging are signified by verbs, while nouns signify ideas.

The Port-Royal theory had an enormous influence on Locke's approach to mind and language. It was also regarded by Chomsky as a predecessor to his own linguistic theories.
Sergeant, John (1623–1704)
Authors: Southgate Beverley
Published: September 2018

John Sergeant was the last of the Blackloists – the faction of English Catholics who followed the thought of Thomas White in the middle decades of the seventeenth century. As such his major philosophical concern was with a refutation of scepticism, and to that end he adopted a synthesis of Aristotelianism and aspects of the new philosophy. Sergeant is now best remembered as the main Catholic protagonist in the theological ‘rule of faith’ debates, when he engaged with such eminent Anglicans as Tillotson and Stillingfleet to argue the cause of religious certainty, attainable only through Catholic tradition. Turning later to the need for certainty in philosophy and science, he formulated his own ‘solid philosophy’: within an essentially Aristotelian framework, he incorporated aspects of the new thought that had been earlier adopted by Thomas White and Kenelm Digby.
Socinianism
Authors: Marshall John
Published: September 2018

Socinianism was both the name for a sixteenth- and seventeenth-century theological movement which was a forerunner of modern unitarianism, and, much less precisely, a polemic term of abuse suggesting positions in common with that ‘heretical’ movement. Socinianism was explicitly undogmatic but centred on disbelief in the Trinity, original sin, the satisfaction, and the natural immortality of the soul. Some Socinians were materialists. Socinians focused on moralism and Christ’s prophetic role; the elevation of reason in interpreting Scripture against creeds, traditions and church authority; and support for religious toleration. The term was used polemically against many theorists, including Hugo Grotius, William Chillingworth, the Latitudinarians, and John Locke, who emphasized free will, moralism, the role and capacity of reason, and that Christianity included only a very few fundamental doctrines necessary for salvation.
Tschirnhaus, Ehrenfried Walther von (1651–1708)
Authors: Schonfeld Martin
Published: September 2018

The natural philosopher E.W. von Tschirnhaus emphasized bodily and mental health, was a friend of Spinoza and correspondent of Leibniz. He perfected the construction of concave mirrors (used to generate extremely high temperatures) and was probably the first European to produce porcelain. Hoping to make scientific progress more predictable, Tschirnhaus devised a method of inquiry orientated to mathematics and experimentation.
Universal language
Authors: Rutherford Donald
Published: September 2018

Most often associated with attempts to establish an international language such as Esperanto, the idea of a universal language is rooted in the biblical claim of an original language common to all human beings. The idea received its most thorough investigation during the seventeenth century. Drawing on the example of Chinese characters, early schemes involved a system of written signs that would allow communication between speakers of different languages. Later thinkers argued for the importance of an ideal ‘philosophical language’ in which the structure of signs exactly mirrored the structure of reality. While such projects fell short of their authors’ expectations, their influence can be discerned in the formalisms of modern logic and science.
Aristotelianism in the 17th century
Authors: Ariew Roger
Published: September 2018

Aristotelians in the seventeenth century comprised a group of mostly anonymous textbook writers whose chief claim to fame is that their philosophy was opposed by such early moderns as Descartes and Galileo. In line with the characterization of them by their opponents, their philosophy has generally been depicted as conservative, monolithic and moribund. However, it is difficult to ratify such judgments. As Aristotelians, these philosophers do not seem particularly conservative; they appear to have assimilated many of the scientific developments of the seventeenth century, and the diversity and range of their views is quite broad. Some of the doctrines peculiar to them, or their particular developments of older views, can be seen as the background against which modern philosophy developed.
Monad
Authors: McDonough Jeffrey K. , Nguyen Tran (Jen)
Published: September 2018

Monads serve as the metaphysical foundations of Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz’s mature metaphysics. In doing so they play a metaphysical role similar to the metaphysical role of atoms in traditional atomist theories. Like traditional atoms, monads are true unities, naturally indestructible, and persist through changes in ordinary bodies. Unlike traditional atoms, monads are unextended, metaphysically prior to space, and immaterial.

Monads have perceptions, appetites and points of view. Leibniz distinguishes three kinds of monads on the basis of their representational capacities. The lowest kind of monad – ‘bare’ monads or ‘vegetative’ souls – only have perceptions so faint and confused that they are unable to enjoy distinct, conscious representations. Leibniz likens them to our minds when we are in a deep sleep or in a daze. The intermediate level of monad – sensitive monads or animal souls – have perceptions that allow them to enjoy conscious representations of distinct entities. The highest level of monad – minds or human souls – enjoy higher-order thoughts. In virtue of such higher-order thoughts, minds are able to think about their perceptions, themselves and necessary truths.