76 research outputs found
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Leibniz and the Puzzle of Incompossibility: The Packing Strategy
Philosoph
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Berkeley, Human Agency and Divine Concurrentism
Berkeley ’s commentators have been highly critical of his account of human agency. In this essay I argue that there is a rather straightforward reading of his view that is historically sensitive, philosophically well-motivated, and fits squarely with his texts. The paper falls into four main sections. The first section briefly revisits three options concerning the relationship between human and divine agency available to theistically minded philosophers in the medieval and early modern eras. The second argues that of those three views only the position of concurrentism is consistent with Berkeley’s texts. The third section explores Berkeley’s reasons for adopting concurrentism, especially as opposed to occasionalism, by highlighting three motivating considerations drawn from his larger philosophical system. Finally the fourth section attempts to flesh out Berkeley’s understanding of human activity by looking at how we might understand his claim that we move our legs ourselves in light of his commitments to idealism and concurrentism.Philosoph
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Leibniz’s Conciliatory Account of Substance
This essay offers an alternative account of Leibniz’s views on substance and fundamental ontology. The proposal is driven by three main ideas. First, that Leibniz’s treatment should be understood against the backdrop of a traditional dispute over the paradigmatic nature substance as well as his own overarching conciliatory ambitions. Second, that Leibniz’s metaphysics is intended to support his conciliatory view that both traditional views of substance are tenable in at least their positive and philosophical respects. Third, that the relationship between immaterial substances, corporeal substances, and ordinary bodies in Leibniz’s metaphysics is best understood as one of “material” constitution. The interpretation as a whole thus suggests that Leibniz needn’t be read as offering either an exclusive defense of corporeal substance realism, nor of immaterial substance idealism, nor as being deeply torn (at a time or over time) between two such views. He may instead be seen as offering a carefully presented, consistent, and sophisticated conciliatory account of substance.Philosoph
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Leibniz on Natural Teleology and the Laws of Optics
This essay examines one of the cornerstones of Leibniz’s defense of teleology within the order of nature, namely, his derivation of the two central laws of geometrical optics from his “Most Determined Path Principle” or “MDPP”. The first section places the MDPP in its historical context, and argues that it allows Leibniz to bring to the fore philosophical issues concerning the legitimacy of teleological explanations by addressing two technical objections raised by Cartesians to non-mechanistic derivations of the laws of optics. The second section argues that, by drawing on laws such as the MDPP, Leibniz is able to introduce a thin notion of teleology that gives him the resources to respond to the most pressing charges of his day by showing how teleology within the order of nature may be stripped of problematic Scholastic commitments, fitted to accepted explanatory structures, and successfully applied to a wide and promising range of natural phenomena. Finally, the third section argues that contemporary philosophers have been overly hasty in their dismissal of Leibniz’s account of natural teleology, and indeed that their own generally thin conceptions of teleology have left them with few well-motivated resources for resisting Leibniz’s elegant position.Philosoph
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Leibniz's Two Realms Revisited
In his attempt to reconcile piety and the new science, teleology and mechanism, final causation and efficient causation, Leibniz often speaks of there being two realms – a “kingdom of power or efficient causes” and “a kingdom of wisdom or final causes.” In this essay, I explore Leibniz’s attempt to apply this doctrine to the natural world. The essay falls into four main parts. The first part looks to Leibniz’s much neglected work in optics for the roots of his view that the world can be seen as being governed by two complete sets of equipotent laws. The second offers an account of how this picture of lawful over-determination is to be reconciled with Leibniz’s mature metaphysics. The third addresses a line of objection proposed by David Hirschmann to the effect that Leibniz’s two realms doctrine as applied to the physical world undermines his stated commitment to an efficient, broadly mechanical, account of the natural world. Finally the fourth part suggests that Leibniz’s thinking about the harmony of final and efficient causes in connection with corporeal nature may help to shed light on his understanding of the teleological unfolding of monads as well.Philosoph
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Leibniz's Optics and Contingency in Nature
In the late 1670's to early 1680's, Leibniz came to hold that the laws of nature are paradigmatically contingent, that they provide the basis for a new argument from design, and that they presuppose the existence of active, goal-directed powers reminiscent of Aristotelian entelechies. In this essay, I argue that the standard view according to which Leibniz forges these signature theses in the domain of physics and opportunistically carries them over to the domain of optics gets things essentially the wrong way around. The crucial nexus of views at the heart of Leibniz's mature philosophical understanding of the laws of nature has its most intelligible roots in his optical derivations, which appear to have paved the way-both historically and conceptually- for the philosophical significance he assigns to his discoveries in the domain of physics. Optics the horse, as it were, physics the cart.Philosoph
Factorial Invariance of the Abbreviated Neighborhood Environment Walkability Scale among Senior Women in the Nurses’ Health Study Cohort
The purpose of this study was to examine the factorial invariance of the Abbreviated Neighborhood Environment Walkability Scale (NEWS-A) across subgroups based on demographic, health-related, behavioral, and environmental characteristics among Nurses’ Health Study participants (N = 2,919; age M = 73.0, SD = 6.9 years) living in California, Massachusetts, and Pennsylvania. A series of multi-group confirmatory factor analyses were conducted to evaluate increasingly restrictive hypotheses of factorial invariance. Factorial invariance was supported across age, walking limitations, and neighborhood walking. Only partial scalar invariance was supported across state residence and neighborhood population density. This evidence provides support for using the NEWS-A with older women of different ages, who have different degrees of walking limitations, and who engage in different amounts of neighborhood walking. Partial scalar invariance suggests that researchers should be cautious when using the NEWS-A to compare older adults living in different states and neighborhoods with different levels of population density
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