Stewart Duncan

Photo of Stewart Duncan Email: sdrd at ufl dot edu
Phone: (352) 273-1808
Office: 314 Griffin-Floyd Hall
Office hours (Fall 2009): Wednesdays, 2:00-5:00pm, 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. I work primarily on modern philosophy. My research has focused on the philosophy of Thomas Hobbes, in particular his materialism, and the reactions of other modern philosophers to Hobbes's views.

In Fall 2009 I'm teaching Modern Philosophy (PHH3400).

In Spring 2010 I'll be teaching Introduction to Philosophy (PHI2010) and a class on the Moral Philosophy of the Scottish Enlightenment (PHH4420), in particular the work of David Hume and Adam Smith.

I'm also the department's undergraduate co-ordinator. If you have any questions, you can come to my office hours, or 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.

Papers

These papers are all related — some more closely than others — to the project of examining Hobbes's materialism and the ways in which other modern philosophers reacted to it. (All papers on this site are drafts/preprints, not final versions.)

  1. “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.

  2. “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.

  3. “Hume and a Puzzle about Simplicity” (pdf), History of Philosophy Quarterly 26:2 (2009), 19–57

    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.

  4. “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.

  5. “Leibniz on Hobbes's materialism” (pdf), Studies in History and Philosophy of Science Part A, forthcoming

    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.

  6. “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.

  7. “Hobbes, Signification, and Insignificant Names” (draft)

    Language is an important topic for Hobbes, and the notion of signification is central to his account of it. This paper addresses Hobbes's views about the signification of names. Understanding those views is not just an exercise in understanding his philosophy of language. Hobbes criticizes several opponents for using names that are insignificant, and thus appears to use the notion of signification in defence of his broader philosophical approach. Some passages suggest that Hobbes thought names signified ideas, others that he thought names signified things, and yet others that he thought names signified nothing at all. This becomes less confusing once we see two things. First, Hobbes wrote about signification in one way when stating his theory of it, and in quite another way elsewhere. He usually wrote as if he believed names signified objects, despite repeatedly asserting theories on which names signify ideas. Second, the explicit theory itself evolved over time, from a simple version in the texts of the 1640s to a much more complex one in De Corpore (1655). This paper then uses that understanding of Hobbes's thoughts about the signification of names, to help us better understand Hobbes's arguments that some terms his opponents use are insignificant. The same vacillation in Hobbes's approaches to signification is present here, and noticing it helps make sense of Hobbes's arguments.

Reviews

  1. Review (pdf) of Tom Sorell and Luc Foisneau (ed.), Leviathan after 350 Years (Oxford: Clarendon, 2004), Philosophical Quarterly 56 (2006): 614-6.
  2. 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.
  3. 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.

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