Divine Action and God’s Immutability: A Historical Case Study On How To Resist Occasionalism

Today’s debates present ”occasionalism’ as the position that any satisfying account of divine action must avoid. In this paper I discuss how a leading Cartesian author of the end of the seventeenth century, Pierre-Sylvain Régis, attempted to avoid occasionalism. Régis’s case is illuminating because it stresses both the difficulties connected with the traditional alternatives to occasionalism and also those aspects embedded in the occasionalist position that should be taken into due account. The paper focuses on Régis’s own account of secondary causation in order to show how the challenge of avoiding occasionalism can lead to the development of new accounts of divine action

Spinoza on the Passions and the Self

In the third part of the Ethics, Spinoza provides a naturalistic picture of human psychology. Spinoza's account distinguishes between active and passive affects. This chapter discusses how Spinoza's theory of affects demonstrates that the self with which human individuals identify in daily life is the result of a complex and constantly on-going imaginative construction shaped by desires and causal interactions with other individuals and external causes. The core of the affective field is occupied by desire, which is the expression of the individual's conatus to persevere in its own existence. The whole social world arises as a product of the imaginative desire of the mind. Spinoza's account of the affects shows how both of these ideas originate from the complex interplay of affective conditionings and external causes, structured and shaped in the affective field produced by each individual's desiderative imagination

Modelling the history of early modern natural philosophy:the fate of the art-nature distinction in the Dutch universities

The ‘model approach’ facilitates a quantitative-oriented study of conceptual changes in large corpora. This paper implements the ‘model approach’ to investigate the erosion of the traditional art-nature distinction in early modern natural philosophy. I argue that a condition for this transformation has to be located in the late scholastic conception of final causation. I design a conceptual model to capture the art-nature distinction and formulate a working hypothesis about its early modern fate. I test my hypothesis on a selected corpus of 25 works published in the Dutch academic milieu between 1607 and 1748. I analyse the corpus through a procedure based on concordancing of keywords associated with the model. I argue that the results obtained constitute a successful pilot study for the implementation of the model approach on larger scale research

The Meaning of Existence (<i>bhava</i>) in the Pāli Discourses of the Buddha

This paper seeks to reconstruct the meaning of existence in the Pāli discourses of the Buddha by considering how the notion is used in the most systematic contexts in which it appears, and how it could be best interpreted. The discourses are concerned with how existence is used to support and consolidate a certain attitude of ownership, appropriation, and entitlement over contents of experience, in virtue of which one can claim that this or that is ‘mine’. The problem with this move is that it seems to require a degree of stability that is at odds with the fundamental uncertainty (anicca) of all conditioned realities. Existence is used to somehow cover up uncertainty, and thus allow for a semblance of genuine ownership and possession, while in fact possession and ownership are just deluded views doomed to be contradicted by the structural uncertainty of actual experience. This reading entails that the early discourses do share with later traditions an anti-realist inspiration, which is worth exploring in its own right

Louis de La Forge and the ‘Non-Transfer Argument’ for Occasionalism

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