History of Philosophy Workshop

History of Philosophy Workshop - 18 December

Programme

09:00:-10:15 Marleen Rozemond (University of Toronto). Conceptions of matter and modes in the 17th century thinking matter debate

10:30-11:45 Emily Thomas (Durham University). Victorian Concepts of Time . . . and Sexism

11:45-12:45 Lunch

13:00-14:30 Laura Georgecu. Cavendish on Place (pre-read). 

18:00 Dinner

Abstracts

Conceptions of matter and modes in the 17th century thinking matter debate.

Descartes developed perhaps the best-known argument for dualism. On my interpretation, this argument relies on the idea that the properties of a substance are modes that presuppose the nature of that substance (Rozemond, Descartes’s Dualism, ch. 1). Thus, as he explains in his late “Comments on a Certain Broadsheet”, thinking does not presuppose matter, and so it cannot be a mode of body: for we can doubt that bodies exist while being certain that we exist and think. Versions of this type of argument, the “Mode-Nature Argument”, were also used by later thinkers including Ralph Cudworth and G.W. Leibniz to argue against thinking matter. Margaret Cavendish and Anne Conway, by contrast, endorsed a “vitalist monism”: there is only one type of being, matter, and it is alive and it does think! How should we understand the relationship between their conception of the “onely matter” (to use Cavendish’s phrase) and the Cartesian “Mode-Nature Argument”? An important part of the story is their rejection of mechanistic matter, but that leaves various questions about their conception of matter unanswered. In this talk I aim to make some progress on these thoughts.

Victorian Concepts of Time… and Sexism

It’s difficult to imagine how a metaphysic of time can be sexist. Yet I’ll be arguing that the “default” Victorian concept about of time was just that: the concept didn’t just concern the nature of reality; it was also deeply political, with sexist (and racist) undertones. Further, I argue that one reason Henri Bergson’s alternative philosophy of time proved so attractive to women is that it upended the particularly problematic elements of Victorian time - rendering it anti-patriarchal. I’ll make this case through the work of two philosophers of time: Karin Costelloe-Stephen, and Hilda Oakeley. 

Information: h.t.adriaenssen rug.nl