Blockchain Papers

Rolf Carlson

No abstract is available for this record.

Lisa Downing

In Materialism from Hobbes to Locke, Stewart Duncan provides a lucid and judicious investigation of some central episodes in the history of materialism in seventeenth-century Britain. The book begins with an examination of Thomas Hobbes’s defense of materialism. Duncan then considers three significant critics of Hobbes’s materialism: Henry More, Ralph Cudworth, and Margaret Cavendish. Last, he turns to a four-chapter treatment of issues surrounding materialism in John Locke. A brief epilogue considers Locke’s influence on Toland and Collins.In chapters 1 and 2, Duncan displays his expertise concerning Hobbes on language and ontology. Chapter 1 focuses on Hobbes contra Descartes in the Objections and Replies to the Meditations. This is a helpful context for understanding Hobbes’s materialism, as well as providing critical background for any discussion of ontology in the early modern period. In addition to the obvious topic of the nature of finite minds, a critical topic of disagreement is what we can and cannot have ideas of, and why. Here Duncan highlights the perhaps surprising connection drawn between imagism about ideas and materialism (vs. dualism) in the period. Chapter 2 digs into Hobbes’ defenses of materialism in the Elements of Law, De Corpore, and the Leviathan, critically evaluating both Hobbes’s arguments for materialism and his prospects for providing a materialist account of mind.In chapters 3 and 4, Duncan considers several less canonical figures who articulate important positions in the debate over materialism. Cudworth, More, and Cavendish all criticize Hobbes and find his materialist ontology lacking, while, further, agreeing that Descartes’s dualist and mechanist view is inadequate to explain the physical world. Of course, their positive views are quite different: Ralph Cudworth and Henry More endorse a dualism of immaterial spirits and material bodies, and they posit one (More’s spirit of nature) or many (Cudworth’s plastic natures) nonrational spirit(s) to order the physical world—whereas Margaret Cavendish endorses a vitalist or panpsychist materialism, one that posits three degrees of matter (inanimate, sensitive, and rational), with all three degrees intermingled in all actual matter. Duncan does a fine job introducing these figures and zeroing in on their relation to Hobbes’s materialism, though the reader may sometimes wish for more detail. (For example, what is animadversion? How is More’s critique of Hobbes on gravity supposed to work, and how does it relate to standard criticisms of Descartes on gravity?) Nevertheless, what Duncan does intriguingly investigate may prompt readers to pursue these topics further: for example, the different groundings of Cudworth and More’s arguments for the inadequacy of mechanism, the tensions in Cavendish’s views about a place for immaterial substances in her system.All this is a terrific context to bring to bear on Locke, whose Essay is strongly influenced by Hobbes throughout, as well as being even more obviously influenced by the strongest influence on Hobbes, namely, Descartes. And, by the standards of his time, Locke comes perilously close to endorsing the plausibility of Hobbesian materialism, while nevertheless doing his very best to critically distinguish himself from Hobbes.To consider Locke’s views about dualism versus materialism, one needs to consider his understanding of mind, of matter, and of their relation. On all three topics, Locke criticizes and rejects or revises Descartes. Or, as Duncan puts it, the version of dualism that Locke thinks might be true is not Descartes’s dualism. In chapter 5, Duncan provides an insightful tour of Locke’s anti-Cartesian responses to two questions: Is the idea of God innate? Is the soul always thinking? In considering the first question, he illuminates further the rather subtle connections between denying innate ideas and affirming materialism in the period. In considering the second, he clarifies the way in which Locke’s thinking thing is definitely not Descartes’s.In chapter 6, Duncan begins by considering the rather tortured question of Locke’s views about substance qua substratum, and our ideas thereof. Here Duncan argues, surprisingly briefly and quite persuasively, that Locke is addressing a psychological question of how we think about substance, and he gives a “bare substratum” account of that. While there is surely more to say about the extent to which some of Locke’s claims have metaphysical implications, Duncan’s core contentions here seem correct and exceedingly helpful. Duncan proceeds to demonstrate how useful it is to consider Locke’s discussion of substance in 2.23 in the light of Henry More, and, further, Duncan shows that there are strong indications that Locke was influenced by More’s The Immortality of the Soul. One upshot is the observation that both More and Locke are interested in rejecting Hobbes’s view that the notion of spirit as incorporeal substance is incoherent and unusable. More remarkable, though, is the way Duncan uses More to counter prominent interpretive claims1 that Locke is not considering a bare substratum view, and moreover, that such a view was not one that Locke’s relevant near predecessors or contemporaries would have taken seriously. Here Duncan argues that More is relevant context and that More seems to clearly articulate a bare substratum notion of substance. This is a very effective argument, and one that should attract discussion. It is worth emphasizing here, perhaps even more than Duncan does, that Locke is giving us his account of the idea of substance as substratum, which does not commit him to positing any bare particulars, and is also compatible with the (arguably Lockean) thought that this is a problematic idea that we use for want of a better. Last, Duncan sets up the next chapter by examining Locke’s 2.23 account of how we construct an idea of God.In chapter 7, Duncan adroitly defends a consistent and integrated set of positions on highly debated territory via a succinct discussion of 4.10, Locke’s defense of our knowledge of God’s existence. As part of this account, Locke argues that God must be immaterial. Many commentators (myself included) have thought that Locke’s argumentation here is in interesting tension with his position that human minds might, for all we know, be material; for in 4.10, Locke seems to raise deep objections to supposing that mere matter could ever think. Duncan discusses the full proof but attends most closely to the sections that argue, first, that the eternal being and first cause must be a cogitative being and, second, that that cogitative being cannot be material. Duncan warns us that Locke should not, by his own standards, be relying on an assumption that inconceivability implies impossibility, and he suggests that what is doing the real argumentative work is a principle of perfection: the more perfect cannot be caused by the less perfect.2 The principle of perfection, which Duncan shows can be traced to Cudworth, straightforwardly explains 4.10.10: an incogitative being cannot produce a cogitative one. For the principle to justify 4.10.16, Duncan seems to imply, Locke would have to be eliding a possible distinction between efficient causation and a synchronic grounding relation. (It appears that a criticism of Locke is implicit here, which one might wish had been made explicitly.). But if the principle of perfection implies that matter can never produce thought, this seems to require a strong reading of the “superaddition” in Locke’s famous remark that God might “superadd” thought to matter. That is to say, Duncan holds that the tension must be resolved by interpreting Locke as holding that if matter thinks, God must be the cause of that thought, in keeping with the principle of perfection. Here Duncan makes an extremely helpful distinction between “voluntarist” and “naturalist” interpretations of superaddition, based on whether or not thought is supposed to flow from the essence of body. Duncan nicely points out that the naturalist has a problem accommodating the principle of perfection. He argues that this rules out mechanist naturalism and complicates the prospects for a not-merely-mechanist naturalism (such as my own; see Downing 2007).3 The chapter is a genuine tour de force, in that along with defending a particular account of how the arguments of 4.10 are supposed to work, Duncan argues effectively for a particular account of what kind of materialism about human beings Locke thought might (for all we know) be true.Chapter 8 takes up another question about Locke’s relation to materialism: Did he think dualism or materialism more likely, or should we see him as neutral, affirming only that we cannot rule out either position with certainty? Duncan argues cogently for the neutral interpretation, despite the fact that Locke claims at one point that dualism is more probable, and despite the fact that many interpreters from Locke’s time on have seen Locke as unofficially inclined toward materialism.4 Interestingly, Duncan concludes by emphasizing how much Locke does in the Essay by way of defending philosophical views about the mind that are consistent with materialism and indeed make manifest its possibility.From the point of view of Locke scholarship, the book as a whole does a terrific job of succinctly supplying an illuminating context for considering Locke’s connections to materialism and, via judicious distinctions and arguments, motivating a specific and original set of interpretive claims. More broadly, it is a book that carefully investigates some varieties of materialism and responses to it in seventeenth-century Britain, while also indicating the rich tangle of issues connected to materialism (physical, metaphysical, epistemological, and religious issues, among others) that propelled arguments for and against. It’s a book that anyone interested in Locke or early modern materialism will want to read.

Daniel M. Gross

Reviews 209 Jamie Dow, Passions & Persuasion in Aristotle's Rhetoric (Oxford University Press) Oxford & New York, 2015. 248 pp. ISBN9780198716266 Aristotle s Rhetoric has long posed problems of fit, which makes its uptake particularly revealing of the preoccupations that define a historical moment. Where should the Rhetoric be situated in the Corpus Aristotelicuml Is it primarily a practical work in the handbook tradition, or is it supposed to offer a full-blown theory of rhetoric? Should it be approached as a kind of philosophy, or something else entirely, especially since it devotes so much attention to style and passion? Is it even a coherent text to begin with? In his ambitious book, Passions & Persuasion in Aristotle's Rhetoric, Jamie Dow begins with these basic questions in mind, and he defends a set of interlocking answers that point to the Rhetoric as a serious, philosophical work along the following lines. Aristotle's Rhetoric is primarily a work on argumentation as understood by medieval Arab commentators along with some of our contemporaries including Bumyeat and Allen; it offers a full­ blown theory of rhetoric opposed to the handbook tradition of Gorgias and Thrasymachus; it is coherent in general and in detail, and it legitimates on philosophical grounds the use of passion in rhetoric. Thus, Dow's project also speaks to our historical moment—broadly postwar—when passions in political life became suspect for good reasons. Few will agree with all of the key claims as laid out by Dow or with each of the demonstrations offered. But it is an outstanding virtue of the book that Dow defends each claim with such care that even objections can be sharpened productively. In what follows, I outline the main arguments and what appears to be at stake. The first page offers the basic argument and a sense of the imperatives that make Dow's book bracing. "The principal claim defended in this book is that, for Aristotle in the Rhetoric, arousing the passions of others can amount to giving them proper grounds for conviction, and hence a skill in doing so is properly part of an expertise in rhetoric. This claim rests on two principal foundations. First, it involves defending the attribution to Aristotle of a norma­ tive view of rhetoric, centered around its role in the state, in which rhetoric is a skill producing proper grounds for conviction. If the arousal of the passions is part of rhetoric, thus understood, Aristotle must hold, second, a particular view of the passions: he must think they are representational states, in which the subject takes things to be the way they are represented" (p. 1). First Foundation I: this normative view, according to Dow, contrasts sharply with the merely practical understanding of rhetoric held by his pre­ decessors in the handbook tradition, and it diverges from the Platonic expectation that the orator needs to know the truth about the subject matter. Instead, according to Dow, Aristotle's orator should skillfully grasp plausi­ ble starting points for the listener's deliberations in the form of reputable opinions" (endoxa) related to the subject at hand (pp- 34—5). So how exactly is the rhetor obligated, and why isn't this obligation arbitrary? Here Dow is careful not to invoke some higher ethical principle. The obligation of the 210 RHETORICA rhetor remains immanent to the skill itself, as it becomes manifest in the context of the state organized along participatory lines. That is to say, rhetoric is by virtue of the world in which it appears as such—originally in the lawcourts and in the political assembly (p. 9). Understood at the most basic level, a rhetor should exercise skill precisely where the subject at hand speaks to the commonplaces and reputable opinions anchored in the state thus consti­ tuted. This is an important point that Dow wishes to extend beyond Aristotle per se: rhetorical skill has wide value and it must be measured as such (p. 76). Hence Dow gives us an ethos-proof like this: "they believe the things Pericles has said, because they believe Pericles—he himself is what is pistos" (p. 98). And then more formally this example of a pathos-proof: "1.1 register evidence...

Jean-Luc Marion, Christina M. Gschwandtner

It is often thought that the Sixth Meditation serves to prove the distinction of soul from body and the existence of material things, but the matter is actually more complicated. The “material things” do not necessarily include the human body, but “my body” has a special and ambiguous status. My mind is so closely joined to my body that they form a unity. Kant misunderstands Descartes by accusing him of the scandalous attempt to prove the existence of his body, assuming that this is subsumed under the proof for the existence of material things. Yet such a proof suffers from several weaknesses. Although most of Descartes’ successors assume that this is what is at stake in the Sixth Meditation, Descartes actually separates external sensation from the ego’s experience. The existence of material things need not be demonstrated to refute skepticism, because the existence of body and mind and their union are assured. Descartes’ commentators and critics are asking the wrong question.