This chapter identifies a subgenre of the essay form – the dream-essay – and charts its trajectory from early modern philosophy, through the Romantic interest in vision and reverie. Arguing that that the dream-essay both arises from and extends the sceptical ethos of Cartesian philosophy, it discusses Montaigne’s position on dreams, René Descartes’s vocational dream, and Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s dream reveries. With this background established, it turns to the Romantic dreamers Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Charles Lamb, Leigh Hunt, and Thomas De Quincey, emphasising how, for these writers, dreaming – and writing about dreaming – elaborates a paradoxical form of consciousness which is also a form of expression. The chapter concludes with brief discussions of the contemporary writers Adam Phillips and W.G. Sebald.

A succinct account of the author’s mature constructive theological investment in a metaphysics of the Infinite. The opening section of this essay indicates a determination to weave metaphysical and soteriological concerns together without any implied separation of these from each other, or, alternatively, any premature collapse of one into the other. Latter parts of the essay then focus on how ‘Infinite Perfection’ came to prominence in Duns Scotus as the principal Christian thought-name for God, to ‘help theologians understand the positive (cataphatic) possibilities for naming God in the Bible and in philosophy as well as the negative (apophatic) limits of our knowledge’. Scotus’s confidence in abstract conceptual analysis and in ‘the power and ability of our finite minds’ helped to lead the Franciscan to crown ‘Infinity’ (above ‘Being’) as the highest name of the divine perfection. In this Scotus is also an ancestor of Descartes’s later modern discovery of the excessive idea of the Infinite within the human mind.

This chapter examines the impact of experimental philosophy in France from the mid-1730s through to the period in which the philosophes were at the forefront of French intellectual life, the period normally called the French Enlightenment. The chapter opens with a discussion of the reception of Bacon’s views about natural history and the acceptance of experimental philosophy more generally in the early Parisian Academy. It then turns to the heyday of experimental philosophy in France which began in the mid-1730s with its promotion by the likes of Voltaire and Comte de Buffon, and the courses in experimental philosophy taught by Abbé Nollet. It is argued that the anti-speculative sentiment so prevalent in Britain manifests itself in the anti-system debate in France. And the chapter goes on to examine the alignment between Buffon’s conception of natural history and that of Bacon, the Baconianism of Denis Diderot, and the influence of experimental philosophy on Jean Le Rond d’Alembert as manifest in his ‘Preliminary Discourse’ to the Encyclopédie. The chapter concludes with an appraisal of the rehabilitation of Descartes, who up to that point had come to be regarded by many as the archetypal speculative philosopher.

In this chapter, Ryan Patrick Hanley surveys some of the best-known Enlightenment sources of Alexis de Tocqueville’s political philosophy. He considers in particular the respective influences of René Descartes, Montesquieu, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, and Blaise Pascal on the arguments and methodology of Democracy in America. Rather than conceiving of Tocqueville as either pro- or anti-Enlightenment, Hanley argues that we should instead understand Tocqueville as an example of a “Moderate Enlightenment” that eschews the rationalism and materialism of the “Radical Enlightenment.” By way of illustration, Hanley identifies specific affinities between Tocqueville and the moderate Scottish Enlightenment thinker Adam Smith.

The Scientific Revolution completely transfigured the European intellectual landscape. Old divisions disappeared, while new fault lines emerged. Ancient philosophical sects had been replaced by new schools, featuring novel masters, disciples, and methodological commitments. However, the new schools still engaged in antagonistic discourse, attacking one another along new fronts—e.g., Cartesians against Gassendists, Newtonians against Leibnizians. This chapter presents the diverse philosophical camps that arose in the later stages of the Scientific Revolution by noting a shift in the use of the term ‘sect’. While it still signified something like an Ancient philosophical school for some, it could also take on a more negative polemical meaning, intended to disparage one’s opponents. Moreover, the individuals associated with the “sects” did not all faithfully subscribe to explicit, coherent, and systematic programs. On the contrary, declaring membership of a sect was as often a signal of opposition as of allegiance to a methodology or theory. Despite calls for conciliatory research programs, sectarian attitudes did not disappear by 1750, but delineated new battle lines between the Cartesians, the Leibnizians, and the Newtonians.

During the Scientific Revolution, philosophers wondered how best to understand space. Many debates revolved around the account advanced in Descartes’s Principles of Philosophy (1644), and this chapter treats it as a focal point. Descartes argued for a return to the Aristotelian view that there is no difference in reality between space and matter, entailing that empty space—space empty of matter—is impossible. Over the next century, all kinds of philosophers attacked this position, and this chapter takes their rejections of Cartesian space as a starting point for exploring alternative views. A varied selection of philosophers who reject Cartesian space are discussed, in chronological order: Henry More, Samuel Clarke, Isaac Newton, Catharine Cockburn, and Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz. The sheer breadth of alternative theories of space they advance demonstrates the metaphysical richness of this era. Nonetheless, there is a deep agreement among their alternatives: all the accounts agree on the features of space. This base agreement set the scene for Kant’s theory of space, advanced after the Scientific Revolution ended.

Characteristic of the early modern period was the idea of a new start for philosophy and the sciences. In the period, those who advocated for such a program were collectively called the novatores or “innovators.” This chapter traces the emergence and the complex posterity of this term. Though now considered positive, it was much contested in the period, and the novatores were involved in numerous polemical disputes. Tracing the origins, history, and use of the term gives us precious insights into the dynamics of the great transformation of philosophy usually designated by another polemical label—the Scientific Revolution.

This chapter looks at the mathematization of the study of nature by focusing on how practical mathematicians from the sixteenth century onward understood mathematics as primarily devoted to solving problems through mathematical construction. This constructive understanding of the nature of mathematics is then related to the double movement of physicalizing mathematics (giving physical interpretations to mathematical constructions) and mathematizing physics (understanding physics as basically involving the solution of problems). The work of seventeenth-century thinkers like Galileo, Descartes, and Mersenne is used to further illustrate these ideas, which led to the establishment of mathematical physics as characterized by its problem-solving nature.

During the seventeenth century, the advent of what were known as the “common” and “new” analyses fundamentally changed the landscape of European mathematics. The widely accepted narrative is that these analyses, analytic geometry and calculus (mostly due to Descartes and Leibniz, respectively), occasioned a transition from geometrical to symbolic methods. In dealing with the science of motion, mathematicians abandoned the language of proportion theory, as found in the works of Galileo, Huygens, and Newton, and began employing the Newtonian and Leibnizian calculi when differential and fluxional equations first appeared in the 1690s. This was the advent of a more abstract way of practicing mathematics, which culminated with the algebraic approach to calculus and mechanics promoted by Euler and Lagrange in the eighteenth century. In this chapter, it is shown that geometrical interpretations and mechanical constructions still played a crucial role in the methods of Descartes, Leibniz, and their immediate followers. This is revealed by the manner in which they handled equations and how they sought their solutions. The passage from proportions to equations did not occur in a single step; it was a process that took a century to reach completion.

In the Scientific Revolution the concept of body evolved along several divergent lines, from conceptions that rely exclusively on extension and motion to more elaborate accounts that include attributes such as solidity and force. A host of complications were disputed, such as atomism versus the infinite divisibility of bodies, the distinction between primary and secondary properties, and the possibility of a vacuum. This chapter explores these and other issues, but with an emphasis on the relationship between body and spatial extension. Descartes's three-part distinction—i.e., whether the relationship between body and extension is conceptually, modally, or really distinct—serves as a framework for investigating the development of early modern theories of material body, a process that laid the basis for the ontology and epistemology of modern science.

This chapter concerns the early modern redefinition of psychology as the science of mind. It examines the way the “invention of mind” was incorporated into Descartes’s metaphysical project. This Cartesian innovation marked a rupture from the traditional science of the soul as a division of natural science or physics. Rejecting the Aristotelian partition of the soul into distinct powers and the Scholastic view of the principle of thought (the intellect) as only the highest psychic power, the new Cartesian psychology required the unity of the soul as the thinking substance. What constituted early modern psychology as a metaphysical science of mind, this chapter argues, was fundamentally Descartes’s “realist” thesis that mind is a thing (res). Together with this Cartesian substantialist view, its critical reception structured the modern science of mind. The early modern alternatives to Descartes’s ontological thesis about mind, the chapter highlights, were based either on the argument that mind is not a thing or on the argument that mind is a non-substantial thing, a mere mode. The chapter illustrates the first argument with Hobbes, the second with Regius and Spinoza.

In the last thirty years, both the belief that the mechanical philosophy is an adequate historical category and the conviction that it made a positive contribution to the sciences were deconstructed. Hence the question addressed in this chapter: What to do with the mechanical philosophy? The chapter begins with a terminological enquiry about ‘mechanical philosophy’ as an emic category, and compares the use of the term on the Continent and across the Channel. It is then suggested that we examine controversies in which mechanical philosophers, having defined themselves in opposition to other natural philosophers, made explicit their expectations with regard to physical explanations. Three such controversies are discussed: one about the motion of the heart (Descartes versus Plempius); one about the elasticity of the air (Boyle versus More); and one about the universal attraction of bodies (Huygens and Leibniz versus Newton). Finally, to counter negative evaluations of the mechanical philosophy, the chapter points out the cognitive advantages of structural explanations, to which the mechanical explanations belonged.

William Harvey’s demonstration of the circulation of the blood is one of the Scientific Revolution’s most influential and lasting achievements. But in spite of Harvey’s innovation, and paradoxically given the extent to which he came to be represented as a founder of modern science, he tied himself to ancient authorities and sought to insulate natural philosophy and the art of medicine from the new mechanical-corpuscular and chemical philosophies of the period. The reception of Harvey’s work, both in physiology and later in embryology, shows that Harvey’s research program won numerous early converts, who used his program for their own ends, including support for the new philosophies, in the cases of René Descartes and Robert Boyle. Untethered from his preferred Scholastic framework, Harvey’s conceptual foundations, techniques, and conclusions led to new discoveries, and unresolved questions in Harvey’s account about the movement of the heart, nature of the blood, and respiration would motivate intense inquiry. The circulation of the blood and later physiology therefore provide an essential perspective for the examination of early modern disputes about experimentation and its limits, the rhetoric of novelty, the unity of nature, and the very notion of life.

The discovery and implementation of telescopy and microscopy extended the power of the senses, with often surprising results. The discoveries made with these instruments challenged existing theories of nature, while simultaneously demanding new theories to account for their operation, especially of vision. Moreover, early modern epistemology had to accommodate experiential evidence made by these “artificial” means. The chapter also address advances in the literature since the twenty-year-old classic, The Invisible World by Catherine Wilson.

The discoveries of the new science of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries offered unique challenges to philosophers concerned with answering scepticism or with defending common-sense beliefs. This chapter focuses on how Descartes, Locke, and Berkeley took up those challenges. Descartes’s philosophical project brought to the forefront the tensions embedded in the confrontation between common sense, science, and scepticism. His insistence on raising the strongest sceptical doubts and on answering them with absolute certainty often left common-sense beliefs behind. Confronted with this result, and perhaps also with Descartes’s own failure to answer the sceptic, Locke weakened both the force of his own scepticism and the degree of certainty he demanded in his philosophical views. Moreover, he was often willing to privilege common-sense beliefs over arguments conflicting with them. In these ways, he provided a system which reconciled common sense, science, and scepticism more adequately than Descartes. Berkeley, convinced that his predecessors’ work left the sceptic unscathed, developed views which, he claimed, completed this reconciliation project. But the chapter shows that his views fall short of this goal. The work of these philosophers put in place the foundations upon which later thinkers would tackle this reconciliation challenge.

A crucial methodological recourse in matters of deliberation and inquiry, common sense has a dual bearing. On the positive side, there is a strong pro-presumption that any answers we give to questions of policy and procedure shall incorporate and stand in confirmation with our common-sense beliefs on the matter. On the negative side, there is a strong con-presumption against any rejection or abandonment of common-sense beliefs, and a cogent justification should be provided for any step in this direction. Methodologically, the common-sense approach exerts a strong constraint on our procedures of explanation and validation. This chapter explores how we should think of methodology in common-sense philosophy. Common sense is neither a cognitive faculty nor a way of producing beliefs. A common-sense belief is not produced in a certain way but rather a particular sort of belief, that is, one that is available to people in general on account of its triteness, its palpable obviousness. A common-sense belief is pervasive among the members of a community on the basis of their shared experiences in managing everyday affairs. Common-sense beliefs address matters of everyday run-of-the-mill; they relate to what transpires within the sphere of the ordinary course of things in everyday life.

Far from a mere technique of three-dimensional spatial representation, perspective has become a dominant metaphor for objectivity, rationalism, mastery, and domination. Conversely, to lack perspective, as in Islamic art, suggests an absence or ineptitude in these qualities often Chapter 10 examines the roots of European perspectivalism from the Italian Renaissance in its relationship with knowledge from Islamic discourses; interaction with European religious doctrines; and the rise and normalization of colonialism. It argues that, far from presaging a modern, secular, and supposedly objective way of looking, discussions of perspective in the seventeenth century were deeply engaged with proofs of the existence of God. This limited the potential of multi-perspectivalism to enable