Thinking as a way of coping with the situations in which we find ourselves. Internal dialogue and gestures. Situations calling for thought. Thinking and rational deliberation. Actions and plans for actions as having entirely different ontological status. In the seventeenth century the mechanical worldview separated bodies from minds, and thinking thereby became a disembodied process. The body was instead equated with “the passions.” As a result, movements such as the ballet came to be regarded only as aesthetic objects. Eighteenth-century theories of the origin of language buttressed this claim. The ridiculousness of ballets d’action. Ballet dancers now became sex workers, and the theater became a location where rational, disembodied, human beings keep their emotions.

Two parallel trends prepared scholars for the investigation of the mind–body relationship so that a model of psychological inquiry could evolve. The first trend was methodological, characterized by the triumph of empiricism. Scientific innovations by Francis Bacon and Newton were firmly based on careful observations and quantification of observables. Using inductive methods, moving from observed particulars to cautious generalization, empiricism stood in contrast to the deductive methods of the Scholastic philosophers. The second trend occurred in the attempt to develop conceptions on the nature of humanity and was more a philosophical enterprise. Spinoza taught that mind and body are manifestations of the same unity of the person. Human activity, although unique because of humanity’s higher intellectual powers, is determined by the laws of nature. Descartes stated that the first principle of life is self-awareness of the idea, and all else that we know proceeds from self-reflection. His dualism of the interaction between mind and body distinguishes psychology from physiology. Descartes’ views were developed in the French and British philosophical traditions; Spinoza influenced the German efforts to develop a model of psychology.

Dante must travel through Hell because there is that of Hell in himself. But his journey through Hell is not for him infernal, for Hell exists only for those eternally condemned there, and he, with Virgil, is but passing through. But it is still a transforming journey for Dante, and necessarily so. For him, the journey is purgatorial, not infernal, ascetical, not punitive. Is Dante’s journey possible? If Aquinas is right then no: For Hell’s condemnation is eternal and irreversible, and what you can make a fixed-time journey through cannot be Hell.

Since the emergence of modern science in the West (roughly the 17th century), there has been tension between classical theism (there is a God, as envisioned in the Abrahamic faiths of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam) and different forms of naturalism (the denial of theism and the affirmation of a natural world with no souls, no afterlife, no supernatural, and so on). It is argued that the case for recognizing that some nonhuman animals have thoughts and feelings, and are thus morally significant, is stronger from a theistic perspective rather than from the standpoint of naturalism. Special attention is given to upholding a humane, Christian animal ethic.

Chapter 1 examines the relationship between Old and New Mechanism and uses it to illuminate the relations between metaphysical and methodological conceptions of mechanism. This historical examination will directly motivate our new deflationary account of mechanism developed in the subsequent chapters. We start by focusing on the role of mechanistic explanation in seventeenth-century scientific practice, by discussing the views of René Descartes, Christiaan Huygens, Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz and Robert Boyle, and the attempted mechanical explanations of gravity by Descartes and Ηuygens. We thereby illustrate how the metaphysics of Old Mechanism constrained scientific explanation. We then turn our attention to Isaac Newton’s critique of mechanism. The key point is that Newton introduced a new methodology that freed scientific explanation from the metaphysical constraints of the older mechanical philosophy. Last, we draw analogies between Newton’s critique of Old Mechanism and our critique of New Mechanism. The main point is that causal explanation in the sciences is legitimate even if we bracket the issue of the metaphysics of mechanisms.

This chapter provides one of the first accounts of Cavendish’s theory of the passions in her later works of natural philosophy, mainly the Philosophical and Physical Opinions (1663) and her Grounds of Natural Philosophy (1668). We argue that reading Cavendish’s philosophy in light of a Stoic-inspired model of causation highlights what is most original and distinctive about her theory of the passions. We analyze Cavendish’s ideas against the backdrop of her theories of occasional and principal causes, and highlight significant differences between Cavendish’s philosophy and the then-popular Cartesian account of the passions. We also examine how her philosophical ideas are put into practice in her dramatic work, “The Unnatural Tragedy” (1662). We maintain that the dramatic genre enables Cavendish to demonstrate how sociable passions might be communicated through sympathy, and unsociable passions discouraged through antipathy. In light of both the theoretical and practical aspects of her philosophy, we conclude that Cavendish stands as a significant innovator among theorists of the passions in the mid-seventeenth century.

In the history of philosophy, two lines can be distinguished, one represented by Plato, Augustine, and Descartes, emphasizing the centralizing movements in the self, another one embodied by Montaigne, Nietzsche, and Freud, proposing decentralizing movements in the self. As an example of present-day centralizing tendencies, the rise of meritocracy is discussed. An example of a contemporary decentralizing trend is the global–local nexus that implies a decentralizing multiplicity of self and identity. Whereas the centralizing movement in the self is focused on the realization of just one main form of positioning (personal excellence or superiority), the decentralizing movement results in the development of a wide variety of positions (full self-expression). Given this bidirectionality, the self is located in a field of tension resulting in an experience of uncertainty, or even stress, which challenges the dialogical self to liberate itself from imprisonment by alternating between centralization and decentralization.

Epistemology is in many ways important for Spinoza’s philosophy. It underlies his metaphysics, as well as his ethics and his political theory, and it also connected in many interesting ways with his psychological views on the mental life of human subjects. It is against this background that the present chapter discusses several key concepts and doctrines that Spinoza establishes in his epistemology, such as his views on truth and adequacy, the definition of idea and the denial of the notion of innate ideas, the famous distinction of the three kinds or rather “genera” of knowledge, the cognitive psychology underlying the discussion of the process of the imagination, humanity’s capacity for rationality, and finally the idea of our being blessed by intuitive knowledge. Moreover, regarding Spinoza’s denial of skepticism as the basic motivation driving his epistemology, the chapter also shows how his epistemological views develop over time. Altogether, it is argued that Spinoza manages to establish an epistemology that is both quite consistent on its own terms and successful in providing a stable foundation for his metaphysical, ethical and political views.

This chapter focuses on the philosopher René Descartes. While Descartes is often seen as the initiator of modern habits of thinking – especially of the idea that the mind and body are distinct – here we view him as an outgrowth of Italian humanism. Descartes was educated by the Jesuits, at the time a new but influential religious order. From them, he imbibed Italian humanism’s respect for antiquity, its deep commitment to classical Latin, and most importantly its sometimes unarticulated through-line: that, to look at the world clearly, one needs to imagine oneself outside of it. But the Jesuits added something to Italian humanism: a deep respect for medieval Catholic theology, something that Descartes also took on board. His humanist education left him dissatisfied, however, laden with a feeling that it was not enough to establish a sure foundation on which could build a new way of looking at the natural world. Accordingly, he jettisoned the world of books, texts, and philology, grounding his perceptions of truth in the only thing about which he could be absolutely certain: that he existed. It is with Descartes that we can locate the beginnings of the modern separation of disciplines, as “natural philosophy” evolved into our modern natural sciences and separated itself from “philosophy” broadly conceived.

Francis Gentleman recorded that David Garrick’s performance of Thomas Otway's Jaffeir ‘beggars description, by an amazing variety of transitions, tones and picturesque attitudes’. I use Gentleman's commentary to introduce here the concept of transition with respect to three things: theatrical practice, theories of the passions, and the eighteenth-century understanding of the mind in wonder. My argument throughout is that the identification of transitions leads to simultaneous recognition of the iconic and dynamic qualities of an object.

Chapter 6 examines a different kind of bodily anomaly which informed some of the early modern period’s most influential thinking on cognition and nociception – phantom limb syndrome. This curious phenomenon is clearly described in texts by Ambroise Paré. It comes to the fore, however, in the work of René Descartes, who found in this bodily anomaly a fascinating test case for his theory of ‘non-resemblance’ in the senses. As I explore, the nature of phantom limbs seemed to Descartes to confirm his idea that pain sensations occurred in the mind rather than in the body, thus reaffirming his notion of the body as object. In this capacity, phantom limbs occur in other contemporary texts, including in the first known autobiographical description of phantom limb syndrome. Looking closely at Descartes’ published works and correspondence, however, we can see how the strangeness of phantom limbs challenged this philosopher to re-examine his own thinking about perception and the ‘hard problem’ of consciousness.

In the 1630s, two different men proposed new and potentially powerful ways of understanding the natural world. Pierre Gassendi (1592-655) and René Descartes (1596-650) each devised a system that sought to explain all natural phenomena as the result of the movement of matter. Historians now call these the mechanical philosophies of nature, and they represent an important shift in early modern ideas about the world. Gassendi revived the ancient atomism of Epicurus (341–270 BCE) while Descartes envisioned a cosmos filled with swirling vortices of tiny particles, but despite the many differences between their philosophies, both struggled to answer the same question: How can we explain God, the human soul, and life itself in a mechanical universe? This was not a small problem, as many in the seventeenth century worried that reducing all things to the movement of matter could lead to doubt, skepticism, and even outright atheism. Both Gassendi and Descartes found ingenious ways to establish proofs for the presence of God in their philosophies, and also reconciled the very essence of what it means to be human — to them, the immortal soul — with a purely material universe.

This chapter retraces the genealogical development of deduction in the Latin and Arabic medieval traditions and in the early modern period, and finally the emergence of mathematical logic in the nineteenth century. It is shown that dialogical conceptions of logic remained pervasive in the Latin medieval tradition, but that they coexisted with other, non-dialogical conceptualizations, in part because of the influence of Arabic logic. In the modern period, however, mentalistic conceptions of logic and deduction became increasingly prominent. The chapter thus explains why we (i.e. twenty-first-century philosophers) have by and large forgotten the dialogical roots of deduction.