Many philosophers today accept that phenomenal truths cannot be explained in terms of ordinary physical truths. Two possible routes to accounting for consciousness have received much attention: the emergentist route is to accept that ordinary experience is inexplicable in physical terms but that microscopic entities as described in physics nonetheless bring about conscious experience. The second route is to argue that microscopic entities have features not described in physics which can fully explain conscious experience. The view associated with panprotopsychism is (...) that microscopic entities have no phenomenal properties. The view associated with panpsychism is that microscopic entities do have phenomenal properties. In this paper it is argued that if consciousness is extended in space only the latter view is possible. According to this argument for micropsychism, if phenomenal truths are not merely structural, all truths about a whole are truths about its parts plus structural relational truths. If there are phenomenal truths about the whole, this must be because there are phenomenal truths about its parts. It wouldn’t follow that panpsychism is true, since it does not follow that consciousness exists outside the wholes we know to be conscious, but it does follow that emergentism and protopanpsychism are false. (shrink)

In many western countries informal care is conceived as the answer to the increasing care demand. Little is known how formal and informal caregivers collaborate in the context of an diverse ageing population. The aim of this study was to gain insight in how professionals’ perspectives regarding the collaboration with informal carers with a migration background are framed and shaped by intersecting aspects of diversity. We used an intersectionality informed qualitative design with informal conversations (N = 12) and semi-structured interviews (...) (N = 17) with healthcare professionals working with clients with Acquired Brain Injury. Two critical friends were involved in the analysis which was substantiated by a participatory analysis with a community of practice. We identified four interrelated themes: (a) ‘The difficult Other’ in which professionals reflected on carers with a migration background causing ‘difficulties’; (b) ‘The dependent Other’ refers to professionals’ realization that ‘difficulties’ are intensified by the context in which care takes place; (c) in ‘The uncomfortable self’ professionals describe how feelings of insecurities evoked by the Other are associated with an inability to act ‘professionally’, and; (d) ‘The reflexive self’ shows how some professionals reflect on their own identities and identify their blind spots in collaboration within a care network. These themes demonstrate the tensions, biases and power imbalances between carers and professionals, which may explain some of the existing health disparities perpetuated through care networks. (shrink)

In her first book, Marleen Rozemond explicates Descartes's aim to provide a metaphysics that would accommodate mechanistic science and supplant scholasticism.

This chapter contains section titled: Descartes's Novel Conception of the Mind Dualism, Substances, and Principal Attributes Thinking Without a Body Principal Attributes and the Nature of Body Conclusion References and Further Reading.

Background: Patient participation in clinical ethics support services has been marked as an important issue. There seems to be a wide variety of practices globally, but extensive theoretical or empirical studies on the matter are missing. Scarce publications indicate that, in Europe, patient participation in CESS varies from region to region, and per type of support. Practices vary from being non-existent, to patients being a full conversation partner. This contrasts with North America, where PP seems more or less standard. While (...) PP seems to be on the rise in Europe, there is no data to confirm this. This study sought a deep understanding of both habits and the attitudes towards PP in the Netherlands, including respondents’ practical and normative perspectives on the matter. Methods and Results: We developed a national survey on PP for Dutch CESS staff. Our survey comprised a total of 25 open and close-ended questions, focused on four topics related to PP goals of CESS, status quo of PP, ideas and ideals concerning PP, and obstacles for PP. Discussion: The four most important findings were that: Patient participation in Dutch CESS is far from standard. Views on patient participation are very much intertwined with the goals of ethics support. Hesitations, fears and perceived obstacles for PP were not on principle and Most respondents see PP as a positive opportunity, yet requiring additional training, practical guidance and experience. Conclusions: Various normative reasons require PP. However, PP seems far from standard and somewhat rare in Dutch CESS settings. Our respondents did not raise many principled objections to PP. Instead, reasons for the lack of PP are intertwined with viewpoints on the goals of CESS, which seemingly focus on supporting health care professionals. Training and practical guidance was thought to be helpful for gaining experience for both CESS staff and HCPs. (shrink)

In recent years more and more scholars of early modern philosophy have come to acknowledge that our understanding of Descartes’s thought benefits greatly from consideration of his intellectual background. Research in this direction has taken off, but much work remains to be done. Dennis Des Chene offers a major contribution to this enterprise. This erudite book is the result of a very impressive body of research into a number of late Aristotelian scholastics, some fairly well known, such as Suárez, others (...) quite obscure. Two thirds of the book is devoted to the Aristotelians, with occasional references to Descartes; the last third focuses on Descartes, although there still much Aristotelian ground is covered. Des Chene indicates three major themes for his book: natural change and agency, the structure of material substance, and finality. (shrink)

The goal of this paper is to introduce the false hope harms (FHH) argument, as a new concept in healthcare. The FHH argument embodies a conglomerate of specific harms that have not convinced providers to stop endorsing false hope. In this paper, it is submitted that the healthcare profession has an obligation to avoid collaborating or participating in, propagating or augmenting false hope in medicine. Although hope serves important functions—it can be ‘therapeutic’ and important for patients’ ‘self-identity as active agents’— (...) the presentation of false hope along the hope continuum entails a misconstrued balancing act. By not speaking up against unrealistic patient and family requests—including some requests for rights to try, resuscitative efforts in terminally ill patients, or other demands for non-beneficial treatments—healthcare providers precipitate harms, i.e., the FHH. These harms arise on both individual and communal levels and cannot be ignored. The goal of this paper is not to offer a definition of false hope, because the phenomenon of false hope is too complex for any simple definition. Instead, this paper seeks to make four points while outlining the FHH argument: consumer medicine and false hope are connected; providers and patients are very vulnerable in the system of consumer medicine; providers have a responsibility to stand up against false hope; and how the FHH argument could perhaps offer a footing to resist giving in to false hope. (shrink)

Family values are argued to enable ethical family business conduct. However, how these arise, evolve, and how family leaders articulate them is less understood. Using an ‘identity work’ approach, this paper finds that the values underpinning identity work: arise from multiple sources, evolve in tandem with the context; and, that their articulation is relational and aspirational, rather than merely historical. Prior research mostly understood family values as rooted in the past and relatively stable, but our rhetorical analysis unlocks a more (...) dynamic and promising research direction advancing family business ethics. (shrink)

I argue that Descartes treated the action of body on mind differently from the action of mind on body, as was common in the period. Descartes explicitly denied that there is a problem for interaction but his descriptions of interaction seem to suggest that he thought there was a problem. I argue that these descriptions are motivated by a different issue, the seemingly arbitrary connections between particular physical states and the particular mental states they produce. Within scholasticism there was already (...) a (yet different) problem concerning action of body on mind. I offer a comparison between Descartes and the scholastics. (shrink)

In the Monadology Leibniz has us imagine a thinking machine the size of a mill in order to show that matter can’t think. The argument is often thought to rely on the unity of consciousness and the notion of simplicity. Leibniz himself did not see matters this way. For him the argument relies on the view that the qualities of a substance must be intimately connected to its nature by being modifications, limitations of its nature. Leibniz thinks perception is not (...) a modification of matter because it is active and matter is passive. At the same time, there are traces in Leibniz of a different argument that relies on the notion of internal action, which may involve the notion of simplicity. Critics have sometimes charged that the Mill Argument is an argument from ignorance, but Leibniz was aware of this problem and made clear that he did not make that mistake. (shrink)

In this paper I analyze Descartes's puzzling claim that the mind is whole in the whole body and whole in its parts, what Henry More called "holenmerism". I explain its historical background, in particular in scholasticism. I argue that like his predecessors, Descartes uses the idea for two purposes, for mind-body interaction and for the union of body and mind.

IN this paper I explain how Descartes's conception of the mind was novel in relation to Aristotelian scholasticism. I also argue against the standard view that Descartes believed in transparency of the mental, the view that one cannot make mistakes about one's own mental states.

The Clarke-Collins correspondence was widely read and frequently printed during the 18th century. Its central topic is the question whether matter can think. Samuel Clarke defends the immateriality of the human soul against Anthony Collins’ materialism. Clarke argues that consciousness must belong to an indivisible entity, and matter is divisible. Collins contends that consciousness could belong to a composite subject by emerging from material qualities that belong to its parts. While many early modern thinkers assumed that this is not possible, (...) this correspondence offers an unusually detailed discussion of this issue. Clarke rejects emergentism because real qualities of a composite must be homogeneous with the qualities of the parts. This rejection is based on considerations about the nature of causation. In addition, the disagreement derives in part from a disagreement between Clarke and Collins about the limits of our knowledge. (shrink)

The Clarke-Collins correspondence was widely read and frequently printed during the 18th century. Its central topic is the question whether matter can think, or be conscious. Samuel Clarke defends the immateriality of the subject of the mental against Anthony Collins’ materialism. This paper examines important assumptions about the nature of body that play a role in their debate. Clarke argued that consciousness requires an “individual being”, an entity with some sort of significant unity as its subject. They agree that body (...) does not have this type of unity, because it consists of actually distinct parts. (shrink)

Descartes held that the human mind or soul is indivisible, unlike body. In this paper I argue that his treatment of this feature of the soul is intimately connected to his engagement with Aristotelian scholasticism. I discuss two strands in Descartes. There is a long tradition of arguing for the immortality of the human soul on the basis of this view. Descartes did use this view in defense of dualism, but I argue that he held that the soul’s immortality should (...) be established rather on the basis of its status as a substance. This line of thought, I contend, is connected to his rejection of (most) Aristotelian substantial forms. Furthermore, the indivisibility of the human soul emerges repeatedly in connection to the union and interaction of mind and body in ways that connect to Aristotelian scholastic treatments of these issues. (shrink)

Locke claimed that God superadded various powers to matter, including motion, the perfections of peach trees and elephants, gravity, and that he could superadd thought. Various interpreters have discussed the question whether Locke's claims about superaddition are in tension with his commitment to mechanistic explanation. This literature assumes that for Locke mechanistic explanation involves deducibility. We argue that this is an inaccurate interpretation and that mechanistic explanation involves a different type of intelligibility for Locke.

Descartes argued that the eternal truths, most prominently the truths of mathematics, are created by God. He was not explicit, however, about the ontological status of these truths. Interpreters have proposed interpretations ranging from Platonism and conceptualism. I argue for an intermediate interpretation: Descartes held they have objective being in God’s mind. In this regard his view was line with a prominent view in Aristotelian scholasticism. I defend this interpretation against objections based on divine simplicity and concerns about causation. I (...) raise questions about the philosophical merit of these objections, but in addition I argue that there is good reason to think that Descartes himself did not think they were problems for the view. Seemingly conceptualist passages in the Principles, I argue, in fact address issues different from the ontological status of the eternal truths. (shrink)

In this paper I explain several ways in which Descartes denied that the human soul or mind is composite and the role this idea played in his thought. The mind is whole in the whole and whole in the parts of the body because it has no parts. Unlike body, the mind is indivisible, and this is a different idea from the thought that mind and body are incorruptible. Descartes connects the immortality of the soul with its status as a (...) substance and as incorruptible rather than with its indivisibility. (shrink)

Early modern philosophers rejected various important aspects of Aristotelianism. Current scholarship debates the question to what extent the early moderns rejected final causation. Leibniz explicitly endorsed it. I argue that his notion of final causation should be understood in connection with his resurrection of substantial forms and his seeing such forms on the model of the soul. I relate Leibniz’ conception of final causation to the Aristotelian background as well as Descartes’s treatment of teleology. I argue that he agreed with (...) a view found in Aristotelianism that genuine efficiently causal powers require immanent teleology and with Descartes that immanent teleology presupposes cognition in the agent. (shrink)

Suárez held that the vital faculties of the soul are really distinct from the soul itself and each other and that they cannot causally interact. This means that he needed to account for the connections between the activities of the faculties: they both interfere with and contribute to each other’s activities. Suárez does so by giving the soul a direct causal role in these activities. This role requires the unity of the soul of a living being and Suárez used it (...) to argue against the view that a living being, in particular a human being, has more than one soul. This line of thought displays some affinity with arguments for the simplicity of the soul from the unity of consciousness. One important difference is that Suárez was talking not just about mental activities but about all vital activities. (shrink)

Snyder’s book ‘Exploiting hope’ is as relevant as ever. His book is about the hope of desperate individuals seeking treatments that cannot be found in conventional medicine. The book engages with hope in the setting of phase I cancer trials, stem cell interventions, right-to-try laws and crowd funding, offering a new language to explain our discomfort with some of these quests. At the same time the book seems particularly relevant given current events. While despair and quests for novel interventions touched (...) only a few patients with specific conditions up to a year ago, they are now familiar to us all. Early on in the COVID-19 pandemic all of us probably experienced hope for interventions that could save us... (shrink)

ABSTRACTThe most prominent early modern argument against materialism is to be found in Descartes. Previously I had argued that this argument relies crucially on a robust conception of substance, according to which it has a single principal attribute of which all its other intrinsic qualities are modes. In the present paper I return to this claim. In Section 2, I address a question that is often raised about that conception of substance: its commitment to the idea that a substance has (...) a single such principal attribute. Gonzalo Rodriguez-Pereyra and Daniel Garber have argued that this claim relies on Descartes's identification of substance with attribute. But I argue that it relies on his view that a substance has a single, unitary nature. In Section 3, I examine the role of this conception of substance in arguments found in Malebranche and Leibniz and compare these arguments with Descartes's. (shrink)

Descartes, an acknowledged founder of modern philosophy, is identified particularly with mind-body dualism--the view that the mind is an incorporeal entity. But this view was not entirely original with Descartes, and in fact to a significant extent it was widely accepted by the Aristotelian scholastics who preceded him, although they entertained a different conception of the nature of mind, body, and the relationship between them. In her first book, Marleen Rozemond explicates Descartes's aim to provide a metaphysics that would (...) accommodate mechanistic science and supplant scholasticism. Her approach includes discussion of central differences from and similarities to the scholastics and how these discriminations affected Descartes's defense of the incorporeity of the mind and the mechanistic conception of body. Confronting the question of how, in his view, mind and body are united, she examines his defense of this union on the basis of sensation. In the course of her argument, she focuses on a few of the scholastics to whom Descartes referred in his own writings: Thomas Aquinas, Francisco Suarez, Eustachius of St. Paul, and the Jesuits of Coimbra. This new systematic account of Descartes's dualism amply demonstrates why he still deserves serious study and respect for his extraordinary philosophical achievements. (shrink)

Leibniz took pride in the Pre-established Harmony as an account of mind-body union. On the other hand, he sometimes claimed that he did not have a good account of such a union. I explain the tension by distinguishing between two importantly different issues that concern the union: body-soul interaction and the per se unity of the composite. Leibniz's positive evaluation concerns the issue of interaction rather than per se unity, R.M. Adams proposed that Leibniz did have the philosophical resources to (...) account for a per se unity of the body-soul composite, in the form of Aristotelian scholastic solutions to that problem. I argue, by contrast, that Leibniz's notions of body and soul were too far removed from their scholastic predecessors for him to be able to deploy those resources in a compelling way. (shrink)

One question that has created controversy among interpreters is just how much is in doubt at the end of the Dream Argument in Meditation I. I argue that there is doubt about the existence of composite bodies not yet about the existence of a physical world. I also caution against using later parts of the Meditations to interpret the First Meditation on account of the order of reasons in this work. I connect the Omnipotent God argument to Descartes's views about (...) innate ideas and analyze the First Meditation in relation to Descartes's anti-aristotelian purposes. (shrink)

In the Monadology Leibniz has us imagine a thinking machine the size of a mill in order to show that matter can’t think, or, in his terms, cannot have perceptions: his well-known Mill Argument. The argument is often thought to rely on the unity of consciousness and the notion of simplicity. Leibniz himself did not see matters this way. For him the argument relies on the Cartesian “Mode-Nature View”, and the idea that perception is not a modification of matter because (...) perception is active and matter is passive. At the same time, there are traces in Leibniz of a different argument that relies on the idea that perception is an “internal” action, an action of a thing on itself as opposed to an “external” action, where a thing acts on a different thing. (shrink)

I argue that Descartes's best known argument for dualism relies on claims about intellectual activity and not on claims about mental states generally to establish dualism. I explain that this must be so give his historical context, where arguments for the immateriality of the mind on the basis of the intellect were common. But sensation and other non-intellectual states were regarded as pertaining to the body-soul composite.

Book synopsis: Passion and Action explores the place of the emotions in seventeenth-century understandings of the body and mind, and the role they were held to play in reasoning and action. Interest in the passions pervaded all areas of philosophical enquiry, and was central to the theories of many major figures, including Hobbes, Descartes, Malebranche, Spinoza, Pascal, and Locke. Yet little attention has been paid to this topic in studies of early modern thought. Susan James surveys the inheritance of ancient (...) and medieval doctrines about the passions, showing how these were incorporated into new philosophical theories in the course of the seventeenth century. She examines the relation of the emotions to will, knowledge, understanding, desire, and power, offering fresh analyses and interpretations of a broad range of texts by little-known writers as well as canonical figures, and establishing that a full understanding of these authors must take account of their discussions of our affective life. Passion and Action also addresses current debates, particularly those within feminist philosophy, about the embodied character of thinking and the relation between emotion and knowledge. This ground-breaking study throws new light upon the shaping of our ideas about the mind, and provides a historical context for burgeoning contemporary investigations of the emotions. (shrink)

A prominent argument for the immateriality of the soul is the so-called "Achilles Argument", which relies on the claim that the soul is simple or indivisible. It was not widely used in the Aristotelian tradition, however. But a version of the argument played a crucial role in Suárez’s contention that a human being contains only one unitary soul. On an alternative view that was widespread at the time, living substances may contain several souls, such as a sensitive and a rational (...) soul in the case of human beings. Suárez holds that the powers of the soul are really distinct from each other and from the soul itself. At the same time, the actions of the different powers of the soul influence each other, as when a loud noise distracts me from doing philosophy or when my intellect relies on my imagination for mental images. Suárez argues that this interaction between powers requires that they are all are "rooted" [radicatae] in one single soul. (shrink)

In Descartes's Method of Doubt Janet Broughton examines in depth Descartes's well-known use of the method of doubt in the Meditations. This is a very stimulating book. The book is rich in subtle, interesting ideas, and the writing is engaging in perhaps the best sense for philosophy. It is not only extremely lucid, but in addition one senses Broughton think the issues through on the page in a way that strongly draws the reader in. Broughton pursues the historian's aim of (...) offering an interpretation of Descartes's method of doubt that accounts for the texts. She does so while pursuing the issues with philosophical intensity and depth and connecting her interpretation to contemporary investigations in skepticism. Her evaluation of Descartes's use of the method is mixed: she thinks his ambitions in using it are ‘splendid but doomed, and highly instructive’. After describing the contents of the chapters of the book, I will focus on two issues: Broughton's interpretation of Descartes's anti-skeptical strategy and her treatment of transparency of the mental. (shrink)

Descartes's dualism, and his argument for it, are often understood in terms of the modal notion of separability. I argue that the central notions, substance and real distinction, should not be understood this way. Descartes's well-known argument for dualism relies implicitly on views he spells out in the Principles of Philosophy, where he explains that a substance has a nature that consists in a single attribute, and all its qualities are modes of that nature. The argument relies ultimately on a (...) deeply rationalistic view of substance. (shrink)

Descartes was a dualist: human mental states cannot be explained in terms of matter and belong to an immaterial mind. But, in other ways, his ontology of the natural world was quite austere—or so w...

Lyman Tower Sargent has had a personal and professional impact upon me. I cannot separate the effects of reading his work from engaging with him as a mentor—and more. Hence, this piece will focus on personal and professional texts and their contexts. I revisit Sargent's “An Ambiguous Legacy: The Role and Position of Women in the English Eutopia,” an essay he contributed to my Future Females: A Critical Anthology. I include passages from my novels Oy Pioneer! and Oy Feminist Planets: (...) A Fake Memoir which describe protagonist Sondra Lear's relationship with Thurston Howell III, interactions stemming from my longstanding association with Sargent. I describe a prominent male scholar's positive—almost utopian—influence on what I am here calling a retrospective autobiographical portrait of the professor as a young woman. This piece emphasizes that a festschrift contribution is about reciprocity between author and honoree. (shrink)