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The Direction of Motion: Occasionalism and Causal Closure from Descartes to Leibniz
No full textLeibniz ascribed to Descartes a version of what is now termed the change-of-direction account of voluntary motions, according to which the soul can only determine the body’s motions by changing their directions. In spite of some recent discoveries, the history of this doctrine remains largely unknown. Sections 1 through 5 reconstruct the development of the change-of-direction account among early Cartesians (Regius, Clerselier, Clauberg, La Forge, and Cordemoy) and conclude that the different versions of this account advanced by these authors reveal their different degrees of commitment to occasionalism. Section 6 discusses Garber’s and McLaughlin’s interpretations, concluding that the change-of-direction account prevents the occasionalist world from being causally closed – which indeed constitutes the major divide between occasionalism and Leibnizian harmonism. In section 7, Christian Wolff’s attempt to revise occasionalism by reinforcing the change-of-direction account suggests a reassessment of its real import and implications
Introduction: Philosophical and Medical Galenisms
No full textThe persistence of remnants of Galenism in spite of the gradual obsolescence of its overall theoretical framework is currently a lively topic in the history of medicine. Galen’s influence, however, was not limited to the medical field. So far, most studies on Galen’s early modern legacy have mainly focused on the specifically medical side of post-medieval and Renaissance Galenism. However, this privileged focus on sixteenth-century medicine may easily result in overlooking the long-term effect of Galen’s rediscovery as well as the specifically philosophical import of early modern Galenism. Even after becoming largely obsolete as a scientific and medical system, Galenism was still able to inspire philosophical debates and inform philosophical theories. Moreover, far from surviving as a single and unequivocally identifiable school of thought, post-Renaissance Galenism spread its influence across different or even competing schools like mechanism and vitalism. The present collection of studies aims to explore the interactions between medical and philosophical Galenisms that took place from the sixteenth to the eighteenth century
Preface
No full textLeibniz’s investigations into the structures of both natural and artificial languages, and into the impact of language use on human cognition, are widely acknowledged to have achieved real breakthroughs with respect to the standard early modern assumptions about these topics. Leibniz linked his linguistic interests with his views on mental activity by expounding the idea that language plays a fundamental role not only in communication but also in human cognition, insofar as words and signs in general serve as the indispensable thread for human thought. He used this insight into the linguistic component of thought to approach semantic phenomena such as metaphorical speech and ‘empty’ words or phrases, as well as psychological phenomena such as cognitive errors and the weakness of the will. Furthermore, his views on psycho-physical parallelism led him to explore the hypothesis that even abstract, conceptual representations have a physical counterpart in the human brain insofar as they are necessarily verbalized in a language or expressed in any other system of perceptible symbols
Christian Wolff’s Mechanization of Galen
No full textDespite his overall negative assessment of ancient, pre-mechanistic science, Christian Wolff held Galen in high esteem and was in several respects influenced by both ancient and modern Galenism. This influence concerns less medicine as such than its philosophical foundations. First, Wolff explicitly linked his teleological account of living bodies to Galen’s doctrine of the use of parts. Both the contents and method of Wolff’s Rational Thoughts on the Use of Parts in Humans, Animals, and Plants (1725) appear to be largely inspired by Galen’s holistic account of physiological functions. Second, Wolff’s later philosophical analysis of the fundamental concepts of medicine features extensive and thought-provoking discussions of Galen’s characterizations of health and disease, which were familiar to him mainly through the works of Daniel Sennert. In this case, too, what is crucial to Wolff’s theory is his basically Galenic account of the relation between organic structures and functions. Third, this Galenic approach to physiological functions also informs Wolff’s analysis of two fundamental concepts of biology, the concepts of life and death. These multiple references to Galen shed light on the real aim and significance of the Wolffian revival of Galenic finalism. Wolff intended the doctrine of the use of parts to play a prominent role in his attempted foundation of the life sciences
Aspetti filosofici della traduzione in Leibniz
No full textThis paper investigates some semantic and pragmatic issues in Leibniz’s theory of translation. Section 1 considers the relation between translation and paraphrase and the role of periphrasis as a substitute for verbatim translation. Section 2 ascribes to Leibniz an embryonic distinction between the propositional content of a sentence (what every language has the means to translate) and its expressive force or emphasis (what gets lost in translation). Section 3 reconstructs Leibniz’s reflection on non-compositional structures like idioms and argues that translatability also depends on compositionality. Finally, Section 4 explores Leibniz’s way of distinguishing between what the text says and what its author means to say
Sciences Without a Name: Teleology, Perfection, and Harmony in the Leibniz-Wolff Debate
No full textWith regard to Christian Wolff's invention of a new science of final causes that he called "teleology" this article examines the relationship between teleology and the science of perfection. On the one hand, it shows how an epistolary debate between Leibniz and Wolff in 1715 sheds light on the inherent teleological nature of the Leibnizian notions of perfection and harmony. On the other hand, it analyzes how Wolff eventually inverted priority relations between structure and function as a consequence of his doctrinal revision of the modal status of essences - a revision that was provoked by Leibniz
La scienza degli spiriti: Prospettive sull'anima separata da Leibniz a Kant
No full textKant sometimes characterizes spirit as a thinking being that is able to exist even without a body, and he claims that this concept sustains the ambition of rational psychology to develop into a science of spirits or pneumatology, understood as the doctrine that investigates the otherwordly state of separated souls. Who were the upoholders of this spiritualist view of the mind? Though dismissed by some as expression of a generic Leibniz-Wolffian philosophy, the claim that disembodied spirits exist is, in fact, the very issue on which not only Crusius but also Wolff himself radically parted ways with Leibniz and moved back to Cartesian positions
Significato della borsa del semimembranoso-gastrocnenio nello sviluppo delle cisti poplitee. Aspetti artrografici ed ecotomografico
No full textConsiderazoni di tecnica e metodologia radiologiche nello studio routinario dello stomaco a doppio contrasto
No full textMereology and Mathematics: Christian Wolff’s Foundational Programme
No full textHow did the traditional doctrine of parts and wholes evolve into contemporary formal mereology? This paper argues that a crucial missing link may lie in the early modern and especially Wolffian transformation of mereology into a systematic sub-discipline of ontology devoted to quantity. After some remarks on the traditional scholastic approach to parts and wholes (Sect. 1), Wolff's mature mereology is reconstructed as an attempt to provide an ontological foundation for mathematics (Sects. 2–3). On the basis of Wolff's earlier mereologies (Sect. 4), the origin of this foundational project is traced back to one of Wolff's private conversations with Leibniz (Sect. 5) and especially to the former's appropriation of the latter's notion of similarity as a means to define quantity (Sect. 6). Despite some hesitancy concerning the ultimate characterization of quantity (Sect. 7), Wolff's contribution was historically significant and influential. By developing a quantitative, extensional account of mereological relations, Wolff departed from the received doctrine and paved the way for the later revival of mereology at the intersection of ontology and mathematics
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