The correspondence between Descartes and More covers a diversity of each author’s fundamental philosophical views. Their polemics range over not only general aspects of physics, but also extend to cosmology and theology. On the one hand, we have God as infinite and His creation as indefinite for Descartes; on the other hand, God as extant, ubiquitous and omnipresent, and His creation as limited for Henry More. It is this last problem that constitutes the focus of my essay, strictly speaking – the problem of the universe as infinite.

The controversy over teleology raged in the early modern period with particular intensity. In this paper, I will show that Guillaume Lamy represents a “radical” current of antifinalism, devoid of weakness, and far from compromise with his adversaries. This antifinalism makes of Lamy not so much a sincere supporter of the unknowability of God’s ends, as scholars have maintained — in other words, a proto–fideist — but rather a radical Lucretian materialist, whose aim is to openly distance himself equally from the partial Cartesian rejection of final causes and from the sugar–coated Epicureanism of the Gassendists.

Here, we examine the narrativity of Cartesian discourse in an hermeneutic exercise. Highlighting some features of Cartesian narratives will show that, far from being a simple literary device, Cartesian narratives serve as a “shifter” in conceptualization and argumentation. Cartesian narrativity follows Descartes’s ontological distinction between thought and extension, subjectivity and the material world, and involves a double mimèsis that is retrospective in the metaphysical texts and prospective in the scientific texts. These two directions of mimesis fulfill different epistemological functions.

This paper assesses the influence of Descartes’s thought on Julien Offray de La Mettrie and Baron D’Holbach, two prominent materialist philosophers of the 18th century. While both agree on the aberrant and unintelligible character of the soul’s spirituality, their interpretation of the consequences of Cartesianism differ. To lay the ground for his own materialism, La Mettrie disingenuously describes Descartes as a crypto-materialist. D’Holbach, on the other hand, takes the mistake of dualism as the product of an overly imaginative metaphysics.

In this paper, I argue a position that has almost never been held: that Leibniz was a materialist. At the conclusion of my article, I consider whether the difficulty of reconciling Leibniz’s materialism with other texts where he appears to be an idealist is best explained by Glenn Hartz’s idea of “theory pluralism,” concluding that there is instead a Leibnizian idea of “theory reconciliation” which does a better job.

Since Hume, some philosophers deny that conscious thinking requires the existence of a thinking subject. This claim is well illustrated by Lichtenberg’s remark according to which Descartes could not pretend to have established the certainty of “I think” but only that of “Thinking is going on” (Es denkt). Bernard Williams has argued that the claim that there can be thinking without a thinking subject is incoherent. My purpose, in this paper, is to suggest an interpretation of that claim which overcomes the problem raised by Williams.

A common argument for relativism invokes the appearance of faultless disagreement. I contend that the appearance is possible only under conditions that disqualify it as evidence: gross ignorance or irrationality, or else a prior commitment to an especially crude and implausible form of relativism.

Edmund Husserl strongly emphasized the importance of reduction to his phenomenology. For his followers, however, it has proved a formidable task to specify exactly how this intricate accomplishment that opens up the possibility for phenomenological research is to be performed. In this article, we study different approaches to gaining access to reduction and conclude by suggesting that we should read Husserliana itself as a set of accomplished reductions. In other words, our task is to pinpoint chapters where the movement of reduction takes place. As an example of such a reading, I will point out events that come about in Husserl’s Idea of Phenomenology.