Life and Death in Early Modern Philosophy (London, April 14-16)

Image from: Giovanni Aldini, Essai théorique et expérimental sur le galvanisme (Paris, 1804)

The conference program for Life and Death in Early Modern Philosophy, to be held in London on April 14–16 this year, has been announced. And it’s looking good.

 

Thursday 14th April 2016

The Great Hall, King’s College London, Strand, London WC2R 2LS

2.30–4.00	Tea and Registration in the Foyer of the Great Hall
4.00–4.30	Susan James, Welcome and Introduction
4.30–6.00	Michael Moriarty, The thought of death changes all our ideas and condemns our plans

 

Friday 15th April 2016

Birkbeck College, Clore Management Centre, Torrington Square, London WC1E 7JL

9.30–11.00

Ursula Renz, Our Consciousness of Being Alive as a Source of Knowledge

11.15–12.45	Session 1	Session 2	Session 3
	Meghan Robison But a Movement of Limbs: On the Movement of life in Hobbes’ Leviathan	Steph Marston Affects and Effects: Spinoza on Life	John Callanan The Historical Context of Kant’s Opposition to Suicide
	Barnaby Hutchins Descartes’s ‘Vitalism’	Julie Klein Life and Death in Spinoza: Power and Reconfiguration	Jonas Jervell Indregard Kant on Beauty and the Promotion of Life

12.45–2.00	Lunch, coinciding with meeting of agreed and likely contributors to research network
2.00–3.30	Martine Pécharman, The Moral Import of Afterlife Arguments in Pascal and Locke

3.45–5.15	Session 1	Session 2	Session 3
	Hannah Laurens An Eternal Part of the Body? Spinoza on Human Existence Beyond Life and Death	Andreas Scheib Johannes Clauberg and the Development of Anthropology after Descartes	Sarah Tropper When the Manner of Death Disagrees with the Status of Life. The Intricate Question of Suicide in Early Modern Philosophy
	Filip Buyse Spinoza on conatus, inertia and the impossibility of self-destruction	Andrea Strazzoni Particles, Medicaments and Method. The Medical Cartesianism of Henricius Regius	Teresa Tato Lima Suicide and Hume’s Perspective about Human Life

5.30–7.00

Mariafranca Spallanzani, ‘Tota philosophorum vita commentatio mortis est’. Death of philosophers

 

Saturday 16th April 2016

Birkbeck College, Clore Management Centre, Torrington Square, London WC1E 7JL

9.30–11.00	Session 1	Session 2	Session 3
	Kate Abramson Living well, well-being and ethical normativity in Hume’s ethics	Dolores Iorizzo Francis Bacon’s Natural and Experimental History of Life and Death (1623): A Lacuna in Accounts of the Scientific Revolution	Oliver Istvan Toth Do we really need to die? Spinoza on the Necessity of Death in the Ethics
	Giuliana di Biase Human’s life as a “state of mediocrity” in John Locke’s Essay and in his other works	Gianni Paganini Life, Mind and Body. Campanella and Descartes’ Connections	Piet Steenbakkers Living Well, Dying Well: Life and Death in Spinoza’s Philosophy and Biography

11.15–12.45	Charles Wolfe, How I learned to love Vitalism
12.45–2.00	Lunch

2.00–3.30	Session 1	Session 2	Session 3
	Sean Winkler The Persistence of Identity in Spinoza’s Account of Individuals	Piero Schiavo Controlling Death. Democritus and the myth of a death en philosophe	Matteo Favaretti Camposampiero, The Ban of Death: Leibniz’s Scandalous Immortalism
	Mogens Laerke The Living God. On Spinoza’s Hebrew Grammar and Cogitata Metaphysica II,6	Michael Jaworzyn Clauberg, Geulincx, and philosophy as meditatio mortis after Descartes	Audrey Borowski, Leibniz’s natural Mechanism. Life and Death Revisited

3.45–4.15	Meetings of learned societies
4.15–5.45	Lisa Shapiro, Learning to Live a Fully Human Life
5.45–6.00	Conclusion and Farewell

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Whatever happened to the theory of supposition?

Reading Arash Abizadeh’s recent “The Absence of Reference in Hobbes’s Philosophy of Language” reminds me of something that puzzles me about early modern philosophy of language. Whatever happened to the theory of supposition?

If you look at medieval scholastic theories of language, you find repeated mention of signification and supposition, two semantic features of terms. When you look at famous early modern discussions of language, you find discussions of signification, but seem to find no mention at all of supposition.

Thus Hobbes talks at length in the Elements of Law, Leviathan, and De Corpore about signification, but not at all about supposition. Locke, to give just one other example, develops a theory of signification, not of supposition, in Book III of his Essay concerning Human Understanding. (He does occasionally use the words ‘supposition’ and ‘supposing’, but meaning something else by those terms.)

Abizadeh argues that the absence of a theory of supposition is telling about Hobbes’s views:

he conspicuously abandoned the theory of “supposition,” which was the intellectual apparatus used in theories of language prevalent before him to express what corresponds to our contemporary notion of reference, i.e., the notion of an analytically irreducible semantic relation between words and things (objects) (Abidazeh 2015, p2).

That is, Abidazeh takes Hobbes’s abandonment of supposition to be evidence of his abandonment of reference. I wonder, however, how much the rejection (or ignoring) of supposition shows about Hobbes in particular. After all, that rejection seems to have been pretty widespread. Clearly the theory of supposition went away. But when did it go away?

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“Nor is there any such thing as … simply good”

In a previous post, I pointed to Hobbes’s theorizing about moral language at the end of chapter 4 of Leviathan. I argued that Hobbes thinks moral terms have a double signification: they signify something in the world, and also something about the nature of the speaker — something about them that contributed to their applying that word to this thing.

The notion that some moral or political terms have a double signification is also visible in the earlier Elements of Law. Thus ‘aristocracy’ and ‘oligarchy’ “signify the same thing, together with the divers passion of those that use them; for when the men that be in that office please, they are called an aristocracy, otherwise an oligarchy” (EL 20.3). Both ‘aristocracy’ and ‘oligarchy’ have two significations. Each signifies some group of men. Each also signifies the attitude of the speaker towards that group, be it positive or negative.

Understanding Hobbes’s view about the double signification of moral terms can also help us to understand his discussions of ‘good’ and ‘evil’. One of those occurs earlier in the Elements of Law:

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“For one man calleth Wisdome, what another calleth feare”

Discussions of Hobbes’s views about language seem to proceed on two separate paths. (Neither of these paths is terribly busy, I’ll grant you, but they both seem to be there.) On the one hand there are discussions of Hobbes’s general philosophy of language — signification, nominalism, and the like. On the other hand there are discussions of what Hobbes says about language in his moral and political philosophy — on what he says about ‘good’ and ‘evil’, for example. But it seems to me that these two discussions should be more closely tied together.

One interesting text for starting to think about the link between the two is the final paragraph of chapter 4 of Leviathan. There Hobbes discusses moral language, including the names of virtues and vices. This discussion contributes to the moral and political projects of the book, while also being part of a general account of the workings of language. It uses the terminology of that general account, in particular its notion of signification.

The names of virtue and vices, and others like them, are, Hobbes says, of “inconstant signification”. Moreover, they are words,

which besides the signification of what we imagine of their nature, have a signification also of the nature, disposition, and interest of the speaker; such as are the names of Vertues, and Vices; For one man calleth Wisdome, what another calleth feare; and one cruelty, what another justice; one prodigality, what another magnanimity; and one gravity, what another stupidity, &c. And therefore such names can never be true grounds of any ratiocination. No more can Metaphors, and Tropes of speech: but these are less dangerous, because they profess their inconstancy; which the other do not.

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Parts of Hobbesian ideas

A couple of recent papers (one by Marcus Adams, the other by Arash Abizadeh) have me thinking about Hobbes’s views about ideas, about ideas as images, and about what the parts of ideas are.

Sometimes Hobbesian ideas have what we might call conceptual parts. One example is the discussion of resolution in De Corpore 6.4. The idea square is said to have parts including line and angle, and the idea gold is said to have parts including solid and heavy.

At other times, though, the parts of ideas seem more like the spatial parts of images. One example of this occurs when Hobbes talks of remembering, and the ways memories are less detailed than experiences, in Elements of Law 3.7. This he describes as involving a “missing of parts” and a lack of “distinction of parts”. So on the one hand you look at a city and see the buildings clearly distinguished, on the other you remember it as “a mass of building only”. But here the parts that are missing, or can’t be distinguished, are spatial parts of the image.

I don’t know what to make of this. But I think Hobbes is not alone, among philosophers with a more or less imagistic theory of ideas, in having these two sorts of parts in mind. So Hume usually thinks of ideas as having conceptual parts. But in Treatise 1.2, in the discussion of space, the coloured points into which our visual impressions and ideas are resolved are spatial rather than conceptual parts.

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Cavendish and causal models

I want to say a little bit about the way Margaret Cavendish thinks about causation.[1] A key aspect of that is an inversion, or set of inversions, of what other modern philosophers were up to. One prominent trend in modern philosophy was what is called mechanism. The central mechanist idea is that many natural phenomena are to be explained as the results of mechanical interactions. The shapes, sizes, and motions of the small parts of things explain, the mechanists argued, more than one might otherwise think. The mechanism of a clock provided a useful example: its apparently non-mechanical ability to tell the time is explained by the shapes, sizes, and motions of the parts inside. The mechanist project, so to speak, was to explain more and more of nature in this sort of way. Descartes provides an obvious example of someone taking this sort of approach. Hobbes provides an even better one, thinking that this sort of mechanical explanation applies to human cognition too.

That Hobbes and Descartes were wrong about things in this general area is one of the themes of the first part of Cavendish’s Philosophical Letters [PL].

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CFP: International Hobbes Association

The International Hobbes Association will be sponsoring two sessions at the APA Eastern Division meetings, December 27-30, 2014, Marriott Philadelphia Downtown Baltimore, MD – Marriott Waterfront. You are invited to submit an abstract for a paper presentation or to volunteer to serve as a critic/commentator. Papers selected for presentation will also be strongly considered for publication in Hobbes Studies.

By May 30, 2014, please electronically submit your abstract (400 word maximum) or, for commentators, your CV, to, IHA Sovereign (Presiding Officer), Rosamond Rhodes.

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Cudworth and basic obligations

In my previous post, I looked at Cudworth’s argument that good and evil (and other moral features) cannot arise from decision alone, for something good cannot simply be made good by decision, without being also given the underlying nature of a good thing. Of course, his opponents have some possible responses open to them. Not all obligations, they might well argue, arise from the natures of the things we’re obliged to do. For instance, if I promise to do X, there may be nothing in X considered alone that makes it obligatory. But it nevertheless is obligatory, just because I promised to do it.

Cudworth does respond to that argument. He concedes something to the objection, but thinks that enough remains of his argument to show that Hobbes et al are mistaken.

For though it will be objected here, that when God, or civil powers command a thing to be done, that was not before obligatory or unlawful … the thing willed or commanded doth forthwith become obligatory … And therefore if all good and evil, just and unjust be not the creatures of mere will (as many assert) yet at least positive things must needs owe all their morality, their good and evil, to mere will without nature (TEIM 18).

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Cudworth, tautologies, and natures

Prompted by Lewis’s mention of Cudworth, a post or two on Cudworth’s most famous argument.

Book 1 of Cudworth’s Treatise Concerning Eternal and Immutable Morality [TEIM] contains a relatively short, and apparently free-standing, argument that morality cannot arise merely from decisions, either human or divine. Hobbes is among Cudworth’s targets, but so are Descartes and others. But some commentators have thought the the crucial passage in Cudworth’s text fails to do what he thinks it does, because it is merely tautological. Thus Zagorin (1992, 131-2): “As John Tulloch pointed out in his classic study of the Cambridge Platonists, Cudworth failed to realize that he was guilty of a tautology” (cf. Passmore 1990, 41-2).

The central passage in Cudworth’s argument is the following:

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Hobbes’s arguments for nominalism in De Corpore

(Following up on my earlier post on an argument for nominalism in the Elements of Law.)

In chapter 2 of De Corpore Hobbes offers two further arguments for the view that names are the only universals.

(1) The first involves the way in which common names denote.

However a common name, as it is the name of several things taken one by one, but not however of all the things together at the same time (as ‘man’ is not the name of human kind but of Peter, John, and the other men separately) is called for that reason universal. So the name ‘universal’ is not the name of some thing existing in rerum natura, and not the name of an idea, or some phantasm formed in the soul, but is always the name of some vox or name (DeCo 2.9).

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