Please join us this Friday (Nov 12) for this semester's third lunchtime workshop in the history of philosophy!
Each workshop will consist of a presentation by a graduate student or faculty on a project that he/she is working on in the history of philosophy, followed by a period of comments/questions from the other participants. The workshop is designed to give grad students and faculty the opportunity to develop ideas and receive helpful feedback on projects/papers in a friendly and low stakes environment.
Here's the info about this week's meeting:
Who: Sam Newlands
What: "Regis' Surprising and Costly Anti-Spinozism Strategy" (see below for an abstract)
Where: The Maritain library (Geddes hall, room 437)
When: Friday, Nov 12, 12:00-1:00
Please email Dylan MacFarlane (dmacfarl@nd.edu) with any questions. We hope to see you there!
Abstract: There is a worrisome path from Descartes’ (and some medieval) metaphysics of causation to a form of Spinozistic monism. Descartes and others typically try to block this by appealing to notions like eminent containment, appeals that seem to name rather than solve the problems. In the face of such worries and pressures, Pierre-Sylvain Regis —a bold and understudied Cartesian — pursued a very different and more radical anti-Spinozism strategy, one that has steep and far-reaching costs of its own. In this talk, I set up the core problem and proposed solution from Descartes’ metaphysics of causation, present Regis’ alternative strategy, and then explore some of its apparent implications and costs.