Skip to main content Accessibility help

We use cookies to distinguish you from other users and to provide you with a better experience on our websites. Close this message to accept cookies or find out how to manage your cookie settings.

Close cookie message
×
  1. Home
  2. Search

Refine search

Refine search

Access:
Content type:
Publication date:
Apply   From and To filters
Subject: Show more
Journals Show more
Publishers: Show more
Societies Show more
Series: Show more
Collections: Show more

Actions for selected content:

Select all | Deselect all
  • View selected items
  • Export citations
  • Download PDF (zip)
  • Save to Kindle
  • Save to Dropbox
  • Save to Google Drive

Save Search

You can save your searches here and later view and run them again in "My saved searches".

Please provide a title, maximum of 40 characters.
Cancel
×

24 results

Page 1 of 2

  • Chapter Seven - Cavendish’s Philosophical Genres in Philosophical and Physical Opinions and the Question of Hierarchy

  • from Part II - Philosophy
  • Edited by Lisa Walters, University of Queensland, Brandie R. Siegfried, Brigham Young University, Utah
  • Book:
    Margaret Cavendish
    Published online:
    28 April 2022
    Print publication:
    12 May 2022, pp 112-126

  • Summary

    The Physical and Philosophical Opinionsilluminates our understanding of Cavendish's position on the intellectual equality or otherwise of women and men. Cavendish's basic ontology permits two interpretations – that women and men are intellectual equals, or that they are not (usually with the claim that men are intellectually superior). However, the book, which includes significant autobiographical musings, helps explain why Cavendish finds the questions so difficult. For, because women's knowledge claims are routinely rejected as carrying value, evidence that women can bring to the question is frequently lost. Moreover, that women sometimes internalize these dismissive treatments of them as epistemic authorities means that women discount their own capacity as knowers. With so much loss of epistemic points of view and the knowledge that comes with them, it is unclear that the question at hand is yet one that Cavendish and others at her time have sufficient evidence to answer. Turning to the wide range of genres in Cavendish's oeuvre, rather than works that we currently deem 'philosophical', is crucial for a full understanding of her approach to philosophical questions.

  • 7 - The Rise of a Public Science? Women and Natural Philosophy in the Early Modern Period

  • from Part I - The Disciplines
  • Edited by David Marshall Miller, Iowa State University, Dana Jalobeanu
  • Book:
    The Cambridge History of Philosophy of the Scientific Revolution
    Published online:
    14 January 2022
    Print publication:
    06 January 2022, pp 128-146

  • Summary

    An essential feature of the Scientific Revolution was the institutionalization and professionalization of the new science, especially in national societies like the Royal Society of London and the French Académie des Sciences, but also in less formal institutional structures, such as correspondence networks, journals, salons, and private spaces. On the one hand, this provided new spaces and new demographics of knowledge production, especially an increased participation by women. On another, it raised a variety of issues related to socially-embedded epistemology, such the proper means of reporting observations and results, and the grounds for witnessing and testimony. This is an area of research that has rapidly expanded in recent years, as this chapter discusses by focusing on the cases of Johanna Stephens and Émilie Du Châtelet.

Descartes' Meditations
  • A Critical Guide
  • Edited by Karen Detlefsen
  • Published online:
    05 February 2013
    Print publication:
    25 March 2012
  • Descartes' Meditations, one of the most influential works in western philosophy, continues to provoke discussion and debate. This volume of original essays by leading established and emerging early modern scholars ranges over all six of the Meditations and explores issues such as scepticism, judgement, causation, the nature of meditation and the meditator's relation to God, the nature of personhood, Descartes' theory of sense perception and his ideas on the nature of substance. The contributors bring new insights to both central and less-studied topics in the Meditations, and connect the work with the rich historical and intellectual context in which Descartes forged his thought. The resulting volume will appeal to a wide range of scholars of early modern thought.

  • Chapter 8 - Teleology and natures in Descartes’ Sixth Meditation

  • from Part IV - The human being
  • Edited by Karen Detlefsen, University of Pennsylvania
  • Book:
    Descartes' Meditations
    Published online:
    05 February 2013
    Print publication:
    25 March 2012, pp 153-175

  • Summary

    This chapter examines Descartes' non-Aristotelian account of the constitution of substance in light of criticisms on the part of some of his prominent contemporaries. The Meditations deploys a general method of inquiry about substances. Descartes explains that in order to know the nature of a mind, it is not necessary to have a complete enumeration of the modes that belong to a mind. The method is grounded on epistemic and metaphysical doctrines to the effect that the ideas to judge that there is an accident of such-and-such a sort are entirely accurate and complete representations of the dependence relations comprised in a substance. A functional-causal view of the nature of substance is proposed by other seventeenth-century philosophers, such as Locke. Malebranche is not alone in ascribing the model to Descartes. All fully determinate acts, or modes, of a thinking substance are unified by being determined in regard to the object.

  • Bibliography

  • Edited by Karen Detlefsen, University of Pennsylvania
  • Book:
    Descartes' Meditations
    Published online:
    05 February 2013
    Print publication:
    25 March 2012, pp 243-254

  • Summary

    This chapter considers Descartes' systematic doctrines on the nature of the mind and its ideas. It combines Descartes' statements on sensation and perception for hints about how to apply such principles. Outside the Meditations and Principles, Descartes discusses the anatomy, physiology, and mental operation of the senses in the Dioptrics and Passions. Descartes further develops the notion of ideas as images by explaining that differences in the objective reality of ideas amount to differences in what those ideas represent. The author favors an interpretation in which, for Descartes, all sensory ideas represent by resemblance, different kinds of sensory ideas vary in cognitive value, externalization arises through spatial localization, and, with sensory ideas of color and the like, as materially false they do not intrinsically misrepresent but afford occasion for false judgments, which arise as merely apparent, and so not actually legitimate, teachings of nature.

Page 1 of 2