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"Hattab, Helen"
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Hobbes’s and Zabarella’s Methods: A Missing Link
A common point of departure for interpreting Hobbes’ philosophical/scientific method is Jacopo Zabarella’s regressus which lies squarely in the Aristotelian Posterior Analytics tradition developed at the University of Padua, in the sixteenth century. Whereas parallels between Hobbes’ philosophical method and the geometrical methods of analysis and synthesis also receive attention, the differences in Hobbes’ presentation of each are significant: hence the Paduan reading that ties Hobbes’ philosophical method to Zabarella’s regressus retains its currency. In this paper, I argue that the Paduan reading of Hobbes relies on an overly narrow understanding of Zabarella’s method, and tends to identify his scientific method with one small component, the regressus . Zabarella’s writings on method, broadly speaking, influence subsequent philosophers, most notably Protestant logicians relevant to Hobbes’ context, who take up and develop Zabarella’s discussion of method as order. I show that interpreting Hobbes’ method within this fuller context has three distinct advantages over the Paduan reading. Firstly, it saves Hobbes from the charge of being inconsistent to his stated method in his particular explanations of natural and political phenomena. Secondly, it advances our understanding of the sense in which his method would have been regarded as ‘mathematical’ although it remains non-quantitative. Thirdly, my approach illuminates Hobbes’ odd combination of Aristotelian and geometrical elements within his philosophical system.
Journal Article
Descartes on the Eternal Truths and Essences of Mathematics: An Alternative Reading
René Descartes is neither a Conceptualist nor a Platonist when it comes to the ontological status of the eternal truths and essences of mathematics but articulates a view derived from Proclus. There are several advantages to interpreting Descartes' texts in light of Proclus' view of universals and philosophy of mathematics. Key passages that, on standard readings, are in conflict are reconciled if we read Descartes as appropriating Proclus' threefold distinction among universals. Specifically, passages that appear to commit Descartes to a Platonist view of mathematical objects and the truths that follow from them are no longer in tension with the Conceptualist view of universals implied by his treatment of the eternal truths in the Principles of Philosophy. This interpretation also fits the historical evidence and explains why Descartes ends up with seemingly inconsistent commitments to divine simplicity and God's efficient creation of truths that are not merely conceptually distinct from the divine essence.
Journal Article
Concurrence or Divergence? Reconciling Descartes's Physics with his Metaphysics
This paper interprets Descartes's use of the Scholastic doctrine of divine concurrence in light of contemporaneous sources, and argues against two prevailing occasionalist interpretations. On the first occasionalist reading God's concurrence or cooperation with natural causes is always mediate (i.e., concurrence reduces to God's continual recreation of substances). The second reading restricts God's immediate concurrence to his co-action with minds. This paper shows that Descartes's metaphysical commitments do not necessitate either form of occasionalism, and that he is more plausibly and charitably read as appropriating elements of Scholastic views on concurrence to bridge the gap between his metaphysics and physics.
Journal Article
CREATION AND SUBSISTENCE
In this paper, I will examine three early modern Jesuit commentaries on St. Thomas Aquinas’ treatment of the question: “Whether to be created is proper to composite and subsisting things?”.¹ My focus will be on how these commentaries develop different ways of understanding the existence and creation of prime matter. I will show that there is a gradual progression in these three treatments away from the Thomist view of prime matter as a pure potentiality that receives its existence from form. I then connect this development to a parallel set of arguments found in a contemporaneous Jesuit commentary on Aristotle’s
Book Chapter
Early Modern Philosophers and the Renaissance Legacy ed. by Cecilia Muratori, and Gianni Paganini (review)
Muratori and Pagannini attribute the second misconception largely to \"the identification of philosophy … with epistemology and theory of knowledge (closely related to scientific method) which was, retrospectively, responsible for the reinterpretation of what philosophy's aims are, and ultimately, of what philosophy proper is\" (3).Whereas Emanuela Scribbano shows that La Forge reinforces the line by arguing against a contemporary vitalist physiology that drew on Campanella, Cecilia Muratori examines how the anonymous author of Theophrastus redivivus (1659) subversively uses parts of Cardano's and Vanini's treatments of the happy life, not only to erase the line, but to argue that animals are better equipped for happiness than humans.[...]in part 4, Gianni Paganinini makes a compelling argument that the Renaissance neo-Epicurean tradition, as represented by Lorenzo Valla, is the source of Hobbes's criticism of the Aristotelian doctrine of the mean.
Journal Article