Metaphysics and Philosophy of Science in the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries

1. Front Matter

   Pages i-ix

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2. Gerd Buchdahl: Biographical and Bibliographical

   • R. S. Woolhouse

   Pages 1-7

3. Gerd Buchdahl: A Tribute

   • Robert E. Butts

   Pages 9-16

4. Nature and Science in the Renaissance

   • Jürgen Mittelstrass

   Pages 17-43

5. Galileo and the Jesuits

   • Richard S. Westfall

   Pages 45-72

6. Descartes and the Rosicrucian Enlightenment

   • William R. Shea

   Pages 73-99

7. Descartes’ Conception of Inference

   • Stephen W. Gaukroger

   Pages 101-132

8. The Demarcation between Metaphysics and Other Disciplines in the Thought of Leibniz

   • George Macdonald Ross

   Pages 133-163

9. Leibniz and Occasionalism

   • Roger S. Woolhouse

   Pages 165-183

10. Vico’s Heroic Metaphor

    • Mary B. Hesse

    Pages 185-212

11. Dynamics and Intelligibility: Bernoulli and Maclaurin

    • Peter M. Harman

    Pages 213-225

12. Sensible and Intelligible Worlds in Leibniz and Kant

    • Catherine Wilson

    Pages 227-244

13. Transcendental Reasoning and the Indeterminacy of the Human Point of View

    • Oliver N. H. Leaman

    Pages 245-264

14. Buchdahl and Rorty on Kant and the History of Philosophy

    • Michael K. Power

    Pages 265-279

15. The Early Reception of Kant’s Metaphysical Foundations of Natural Science

    • Dwight C. Barnaby

    Pages 281-306

16. The Enlightenment and the Chemical Revolution

    • John G. McEvoy

    Pages 307-325

17. The Significance of Schelling’s “Epoch of a Wholly New Natural History”: An Essay on the Realization of Questions

    • Nicholas Jardine

    Pages 327-350

18. Back Matter

    Pages 351-364

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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.

• Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz
• Immanuel Kant
• metaphysics
• philosophy of science

• Reader in Philosophy, University of York, UK

  R. S. Woolhouse

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