The Philosophy of Matter from Descartes to Hume

The volume containing the papers presented at the first Bucharest colloquium in Early Modern Philosophy, June 2008 is to be published by Routledge in 2010.

The Philosophy of Matter from Descartes to Hume

Edited by

Dana Jalobeanu and Peter Anstey

CONTENTS

Introduction

I Cartesian Matter

1. The Vanishing Nature of Body in Descartes’s Natural Philosophy

Mihea Dobre

2. The New Matter Theory and Its Epistemology: Descartes (and Late Scholastics) on Hypotheses and Moral Certainty

Roger Ariew

3. Descartes on subsisting forms and metaphysical hylomorphism

Lucian Petrescu

II Matter mid-century: Cartesianism, Corpuscularianism & Atomism

4. But was there a mechanical philosophy besides Descartes’?

Christoph Lüthy

5. The matter of medicine: new medical matter theories in mid-seventeenth-century England

Peter Anstey

6. Vlad Alexandrescu

III Matter vanishing: Newton

7. On composite systems: Descartes, Newton, and the law-constitutive approach

Katherine Brading

8. Huygens, Wren, Wallis, and Newton on Rules of Impact and Reflection

William Harper

9. Without God: Gravity as a relational quality of matter in Newton’s Treatise

Eric Schliesser

IV Matter gone: Leibniz and Beyond

10. Leibniz, body and monads

Daniel Garber

11. Leibniz on void and matter

Sorin Costreie

12. Hume on the distinction between primary and secondary qualities

Jani Hakkarainen

Index