Stewart Duncan
Email: sdrd at ufl dot edu
Phone: (352) 273-1808
Office: 330A Griffin-Floyd Hall
Office hours (Spring 2012): Tuesday 3:00-5:00pm, and by appointment
I'm an assistant professor of philosophy at the University of Florida. I got my PhD in philosophy from Rutgers University, and my MA (my undergraduate degree) in philosophy from the University of St Andrews.
My research focuses on modern philosophy, in particular on the history of discussions of materialism. The project began by looking at the materialist philosophy of Thomas Hobbes, and the reactions of other modern philosophers to Hobbes's views. As the project has developed, I've been looking more at Leibniz's criticisms of materialism, and at the work of other early modern materialists, such as John Toland and Margaret Cavendish. The section below describes several of my papers on this topic.
I am currently the philosophy department's undergraduate co-ordinator. If you have any questions, you can contact me at the email address above. If you're looking for information about the major, requirements, etc, you might try the philosophy handbook on the department website. If you have questions about admissions, you probably want to talk to someone in the college advising center.
This semester I'm teaching PHI2010 Introduction to Philosophy and PHH5406 Modern Philosophy 2, a graduate class on the philosophy of David Hume. Information for those enrolled in the classes is on the Sakai pages.
Meanwhile, I am editing a collection of papers, Debates in Modern Philosophy, with Antonia LoLordo. I recently became the editor of two categories on philpapers.org: Thomas Hobbes and 17th/18th Century British Philosophy, Misc. And I'm contributing to The Mod Squad, a group blog on the history of modern philosophy (my posts).
Papers
(All papers on this site are drafts/preprints, not final versions.)
- “Toland, Leibniz, and Active Matter” (pdf), Oxford Studies in Early Modern Philosophy, forthcoming
In the early years of the eighteenth century Leibniz had several interactions with John Toland. These included, from 1702 to 1704, discussions of materialism. Those discussions culminated with the consideration of Toland's 1704 Letters to Serena, where Toland argued that matter is necessarily active. In this paper I argue for two main theses about this exchange and its consequences for our wider understanding. The first is that, despite many claims that Toland was at the time of Letters to Serena a Spinozist, we can make better sense of him as a sort of Hobbesian materialist. The second main point concerns reasons for materialism, and in particular a story Locke tells in the Essay about materialists' motives. Toland defends his materialism by arguing that matter is active, and argues that matter is active by using a conceivability argument. But this is not the crude conceivability argument that Locke suggests motivates materialists. This (together with reflecting on some of Hobbes's arguments) suggests that we might well tell a Lockean story about reasons for early modern materialism, but not Locke's story.
- “Materialism” (pdf), for S.A. Lloyd (ed.), Continuum Companion to Hobbes
This is a short (1,000 word) introduction to Hobbes's materialism, covering (briefly) such issues as what the relevant notion of materialism is, Hobbes's debate with Descartes, and what Hobbes's arguments for materialism were.
- “Leibniz's Mill Arguments against Materialism”, Philosophical Quarterly. Available through the publisher's 'Early View' system. http://dx.doi.org/10.1111%2Fj.1467-9213.2011.00017.x.
Leibniz's mill argument in “Monadology” 17 is a well-known argument against materialism, but there is widespread disagreement about how to understand that passage. I approach the mill argument by considering other places where Leibniz gives similar arguments, using the same example of the machinery of a mill and reaching the same anti-materialist conclusion. In a 1702 letter to Bayle, Leibniz gave a mill argument that moves from his definition of perception (as the expression of a multitude by a simple) to the anti-materialist conclusion. Soon afterwards, in the Preface to the New Essays, Leibniz gave a different mill argument. That argument depends upon there being no arbitrary and inexplicable connections in nature, because God would not create such things. Later, in the “Monadology”, Leibniz again used the mill example in arguing against materialism. That passage too, I argue, uses an argument from inexplicability rather than from Leibniz's definition of perception.
- “Hobbes, Signification, and Insignificant Names” (pdf), Hobbes Studies, 24 (2011) 158-178
The notion of signification is an important part of Hobbes's philosophy of language. It also has broader relevance, as Hobbes argues that key terms used by his opponents are insignificant. However Hobbes's talk about names' signification is puzzling, as he appears to have advocated conflicting views. This paper argues that Hobbes endorsed two different views of names' signification in two different contexts. When stating his theoretical views about signification, Hobbes claimed that names signify ideas. Elsewhere he talked as if words signified the things they named. Seeing this does not just resolve a puzzle about Hobbes's statements about signification. It also helps us to understand how Hobbes's arguments about insignificant speech work. With one important exception, they depend on the view that names signify things, not on Hobbes's stated theory that words signify ideas. The paper concludes by discussing whether arguments about insignificant speech can provide independent support for Hobbes's views about other issues, such as materialism.
- “Leibniz on Hobbes's Materialism” (pdf), Studies in History and Philosophy of Science 41 (2010), 11–8
I consider Leibniz's thoughts about Hobbes's materialism, focusing on his less-discussed later thoughts about the topic. Leibniz understood Hobbes to have argued for his materialism from his imagistic theory of ideas. Leibniz offered several criticisms of this argument and the resulting materialism itself. Several of these criticisms occur in texts in which Leibniz was engaging with the generation of British philosophers after Hobbes. Of particular interest is Leibniz's correspondence with Damaris Masham. Leibniz may have been trying to communicate with Locke, but ended up discussing Masham's version of the argument for materialism that Leibniz attributed to Hobbes.
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“Thomas Hobbes”, Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, first published 11 March 2009
This looks at Hobbes's life, and his work outside social and political philosophy. Topics discussed include Hobbes's views on mind and language (sense and imagination, signification, nominalism, reasoning as computation), his materialism, his method (philosophy of science), and his views in the philosophy of religion.
- “Hume and a Worry about Simplicity” (pdf), History of Philosophy Quarterly 26:2 (2009), 139–57
I discuss Hume's views about whether simplicity and generality are positive features of explanations. In criticizing Hobbes and others who base their systems of morality on self interest, Hume diagnoses their errors as resulting from a "love of simplicity". These worries about whether simplicity is a positive feature of explanations emerge in Hume's thinking over time. But Hume does not completely reject the idea that it's good to seek simple explanations. What Hume thinks we need is good judgment about when we are going too far in our search for simple explanations. These worries about simplicity are not unique to Hume. We can see versions of them in the work of Hutcheson, Smith, and Reid.
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“Hobbes's Materialism in the Early 1640s” (pdf), British Journal for the History of Philosophy 13:3 (2005), 437–48
I argue that Hobbes isn't really a materialist in the early 1640s (in, e.g., the Third Objections to Descartes's Meditations). That is, he doesn't assert that bodies are the only substances. However, he does think that bodies are the only substances we can think about using imagistic ideas.
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“Knowledge of God in Leviathan” (pdf), History of Philosophy Quarterly 22:1 (2005), 31–48
Hobbes denies in Leviathan that we have an idea of God. He does think, though, that God exists, and does not even deny that we can think about God, even though he says we have no idea of God. There is, Hobbes thinks, another cognitive mechanism by means of which we can think about God. That mechanism allows us only to think a few things about God though. This constrains what Hobbes can say about our knowledge of God, and grounds his belief in a fairly strong version of the thesis that God is incomprehensible.
Reviews
- Review of Perez Zagorin, Hobbes and the Law of Nature (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2010), Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews, May 2010. Available at NDPR.
- Review (pdf) of James R. Martel, Subverting the Leviathan: Reading Thomas Hobbes as a Radical Democrat (New York: Columbia University Press, 2007), Restoration: Studies in English Literary Culture, 1660-1700 33 (2009) 57-9.
- Review of Samantha Frost, Lessons from a Materialist Thinker: Hobbesian Reflections on Ethics and Politics (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2008), Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews, August 2008. Available at NDPR.
- Review (pdf) of Tom Sorell and Luc Foisneau (ed.), Leviathan after 350 Years (Oxford: Clarendon, 2004), Philosophical Quarterly 56 (2006): 614-6.
Work in progress
- “Debating Materialism: Cavendish, Hobbes, and More” (pdf)
This paper discusses the materialist views of Margaret Cavendish, focusing on the relationships between her views and those of two of her contemporaries, Thomas Hobbes and Henry More. It argues for two main claims. First, Cavendish's views sit, often rather neatly, between those of Hobbes and More. She agreed with Hobbes on some issues and More on others, while carving out a distinctive alternative view. Secondly, the exchange between Hobbes, More, and Cavendish illustrates a more general puzzle about just what divided materialists from their opponents. Seemingly straightforward disagreements about whether incorporeal substances exist turn out to be more complex ones in which the nature of those things is disputed at the same time as their existence.