Metaphysics and Philosophy of Science in the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries : Essays in Honour of Gerd Buchdahl

The essays in this collection have been written for Gerd Buchdahl, by colleagues, students and friends, and are self-standing pieces of original research which have as their main concern the metaphysics and philosophy of science of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. They focus on issues about the development of philosophical and scientific thought which are raised by or in the work of such as Bernoulli, Descartes, Galileo, Kant, Leibniz, Maclaurin, Priestly, Schelling, Vico. Apart from the initial bio-bibliographical piece and those by Robert Butts and Michael Power, they do not discuss Buchdahl or his ideas in any systematic, lengthy, or detailed way. But they are collected under a title which alludes to the book, Metaphysics and the Philosophy of Science: The Classical Origins, Descartes to Kant (1969), which is central in the corpus of his work, and deal with the period and some of the topics with which that book deals. Front Matter....Pages i-ix Gerd Buchdahl: Biographical and Bibliographical....Pages 1-7 Gerd Buchdahl: A Tribute....Pages 9-16 Nature and Science in the Renaissance....Pages 17-43 Galileo and the Jesuits....Pages 45-72 Descartes and the Rosicrucian Enlightenment....Pages 73-99 Descartes’ Conception of Inference....Pages 101-132 The Demarcation between Metaphysics and Other Disciplines in the Thought of Leibniz....Pages 133-163 Leibniz and Occasionalism....Pages 165-183 Vico’s Heroic Metaphor....Pages 185-212 Dynamics and Intelligibility: Bernoulli and Maclaurin....Pages 213-225 Sensible and Intelligible Worlds in Leibniz and Kant....Pages 227-244 Transcendental Reasoning and the Indeterminacy of the Human Point of View....Pages 245-264 Buchdahl and Rorty on Kant and the History of Philosophy....Pages 265-279 The Early Reception of Kant’s Metaphysical Foundations of Natural Science....Pages 281-306 The Enlightenment and the Chemical Revolution....Pages 307-325 The Significance of Schelling’s “Epoch of a Wholly New Natural History”: An Essay on the Realization of Questions....Pages 327-350 Back Matter....Pages 351-364