Thesiss

This dissertation concerns two controversial aspects of Descartes’ philosophy. The first is the meaning of the distinction between the material and objective senses of the word “idea.” The second is an alleged tension between the Fifth Meditation ’s claim that the real natures a…

The philosophical and scientific teaching in the universities of 17th century Scotland has frequently been dismissed as Aristotelian and reactionary. However, there must surely have been some development during the century for the universities to have achieved as much as they di…

In the early 1630s, René Descartes developed a speculative treatise on the functional structures of the human body and brain. His work, The Treatise on Man, constituted the first attempt at a complete human physiology, inspiring a generation of scientists and physicians who deve…

Famously, René Descartes argued that nonhuman animals are material automata. Human beings, by contrast, are composites of material automata and immaterial soul. Call this view the doctrine of animal automatism. Descartes’s defense of animal automatism sparked one of the defining…

This dissertation investigates exactly what role the proofs for the existence of God, and rational theology more widely, played in the history of modern philosophy from Descartes up to our own day. If the proofs are poorly suited to the role of religious apologetics, just as lit…

René Descartes and John Locke were some of history’s most outstanding proponents of the idea that deontological concepts are appropriately applied to the domain of belief. Inasmuch as it is allowed that “ought” implies “can,” then, this suggests that both authors held that our b…