Alan Nelson

Explanation and Justification in Political Philosophy

This paper is directed toward two goals that turn out to be closely related. The first is a clarification of the extent to which our understanding of problems in political philosophy can be improved by attending to the nature of scientific explanation. The second is to mount a challenge to the historically important position that the best way to learn about the moral properties of states is to derive them from moral theories about individuals. I shall argue that the challenge posed cannot be met by appealing to procedures in scientific explanation that are analogous to procedures sometimes employed in political philosophy, even though some philosophers can be interpreted as having presented interesting arguments for doing so.

Cartesian Actualism in the Leibniz-Arnauld Correspondence

The correspondence between Leibniz and Arnauld was judged by Leibniz himself to be very useful for understanding his philosophy.1 Historians have concurred in this judgment. Leibniz did not find any philosophy of independent interest in the letters Arnauld sent him. Historians have, for the most part, also concurred in this finding. I shall argue that on one set of issues at least modal metaphysics and free will Arnauld accomplished more than facilitating Leibnizian elucidations. He held his own in this dispute. Indeed, were it not for the general sophistication and superior handling of such issues as identity, unity,

Descartes on the limited usefulness of mathematics

Descartes held that practicing mathematics was important for developing the mental faculties necessary for science and a virtuous life. Otherwise, he maintained that the proper uses of mathematics were extremely limited. This article discusses his reasons which include a theory of education, the metaphysics of matter, and a psychologistic theory of deductive reasoning. It is argued that these reasons cohere with his system of philosophy.

How Many Worlds

Grand is an apt word for this book. It is grand in quality, importance and size. Everyone with a scholarly interest in Descartes’s philosophy will be informed and challenged by its detail and penetration. The subtitle of the book is ‘A Reading of Descartes’s Meditations’, and weighing in at just over 500 pages it is a very close reading indeed. Like many other books on Descartes, there are six chapters roughly corresponding to the six Meditations that make up Descartes’s masterpiece. Carriero’s chapters often progress paragraph-by-paragraph through the text, though there is a good deal of foreshadowing and backtracking. Discussion of other texts of Descartes and of the secondary literature is limited (though interesting) and confined to endnotes (this reader would have strongly preferred footnotes). Carriero successfully demonstrates the impressive unity of Descartes’s exposition, and this unity is reflected in the pages of Between Two Worlds. This virtue makes it difficult to extract topics for discussion, so in this essay I shall focus on some general features of Carriero’s distinctive interpretation. Carriero keeps the text of the Meditations front and centre, but there is another character always in the wings, ready to make forays onstage – Thomas Aquinas. Carriero announces that Aquinas is not a member of the cast; he is only to be a crew member in charge of some stage setting:

The Rationalist Impulse

Philosophers are rightly suspicious of the usefulness of broadly conceived labels and “-isms.” They are particularly suspicious when the labels mark dichotomies. Rationalism thus qualifies as suspicious if it is taken to be a neatly delineated set of doctrines. The task assumed by this chapter is not to find such a set, but instead to provide an analysis of what I shall call the impulse to philosophize rationalistically. The analysis therefore does not purport to sharply distinguish a set of maxims or propositions characteristic of rationalism from another set proper to its foil, empiricism. Nor does it attempt to delineate specific doctrines to which all “rationalists” adhere. I shall, however, argue that attention to some overarching themes in rationalist systems of philosophy can be of considerable use in understanding the philosophical accomplishments of the great rationalists. Insufficient attention to these themes has often led to interpretations of rationalists that skew the dialectic with their empiricist antagonists in favor of the latter. I shall draw some examples from Plato, who provides most of the earliest texts clearly articulating rationalist themes. The primary focus will be on the great thinkers from the seventeenth-century heyday of rationalism, but in conclusion some observations will be made about the rationalist impulse in Russell’s logical atomism. This should help bring into relief some respects in which the triumph of empiricist sensibilities among historians of philosophy in the twentieth century and beyond has made the rationalist impulse rather alien. Naturally, this is not conducive to recovering the spirit of rationalist projects.