 | Causation and Cognition in Early Modern Philosophy This book re-examines the roles of causation and cognition in early modern philosophy. The standard historical narrative suggests that early modern thinkers abandoned Aristotelian models of formal causation in favor of doctrines that appealed to relations of efficient causation between material objects and cognizers. This narrative has been criticized in recent scholarship from at least two directions. Scholars have emphasized that we should not think of the Aristotelian tradition in such monolithic terms, and that many early modern thinkers did not unequivocally reduce all causation to efficient causation. The essays explore how fifteen early modern thinkers answered these questions: Francisco Suárez, René Descartes, Louis de la Forge, Géraud de Cordemoy, Nicolas Malebranche, Thomas Hobbes, Baruch de Spinoza, Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz, Ralph Cudworth, Margaret Cavendish, John Locke, John Sergeant, George Berkeley, David Hume, and Thomas Reid. The volume is unique in that it explores both well-known and understudied historical figures, and in that it emphasizes the intimate relationship between causation and cognition to open up new perspectives on early modern philosophy of mind and metaphysics. Dominik Perler is Professor of Philosophy at Humboldt-Universität, Berlin, and Member of the Berlin-Brandenburg Academy of Arts and Science. His books include Partitioning the Soul: Debates from Plato Leibniz (ed., 2014), The Faculties: A History (ed., 2015), Feelings Transformed: Philosophical Theories of the Emotions, 1270-1670 (2018). Sebastian Bender is Lecturer at the philosophy department at Humboldt-Universität, Berlin. His research focuses primarily on early modern philosophy, in particular on the metaphysics and philosophy of mind of this era. In 2016, he published his first book, Leibniz' Metaphysik der Modalität . |
