MALEBRANCHE AND LEIBNIZ ON THE BEST OF ALL POSSIBLE WORLDS

In this article I explore Leibniz's claim in the Theodicy that on the essential points Malebranche's theodicy “reduces to” his own view. This judgment may seem to be warranted given that both thinkers emphasize that evils are justified by the fact that they follow from the simple and uniform laws that govern that world which is worthy of divine creation. However, I argue that Leibniz's theodicy differs in several crucial respects from Malebranche's. I begin with a qualified endorsement of Charles Larmore's recent claim that remarks in Malebranche's correspondence with Leibniz indicate that their theodicies rely on incompatible conceptions of the moral rationality of divine action. I also attempt to go beyond Larmore's discussion in highlighting further differences concerning the sort of freedom involved in the divine act of creation. My conclusion is that these differing conceptions of divine morality and divine freedom reveal that in contrast to the case of Leibniz, Malebranche's theodicy not only does not require that God create anything at all, but also is compatible with the result that the world he decides to create is not uniquely the best possible.     

LEIBNIZ ON BODY, MATTER AND EXTENSION

This paper explores Leibniz's conception of body and extension in the 1680s and 1690s. It is argued that one of Leibniz's central aims is to undermine the Cartesian conception of extended substance, and replace it with a conception on which what is basic to body is force. In this way, Leibniz intends to reduce extension to something metaphysically more basic in just the way that the mechanists reduce sensible qualities to size, shape and motion. It is also argued that this move is quite distinct from the reduction of body to monads and their appetitions and perceptions, so prominent in his later writings.     

BOHM AND WHITEHEAD ON WHOLENESS, FREEDOM, CAUSALITY, AND TIME

Abstract. David Bohm's developing postmodern thought (combining precision and wholeness) is seen to contain two tendencies. One is a vision of "underlying wholeness," in which all causation is vertical, and the implicate-explicate relation is ubiquitous. This provides a possible solution to certain problems, but creates many others involving freedom, causation, and time. Second, many of Bohm's statements suggest that his deepest intuitions could be formulated without those problems in terms of the distinctions developed in Alfred North Whitehead's philosophy of "prehensive wholeness," in which the ubiquity of creativity would require a more restricted use of the implicate-explicate relation.     

ON THE BUDDHIST TRUTHS AND THE PARADOXES IN POPULATION ETHICS

Starting point The starting point of this paper is the following citation concerning the state of contemporary population ethics:

Most discussion in population ethics has concentrated on how to evaluate populations in regard to their goodness, that is, how to order populations by the relations ‘is better than’ and ‘is as good as’. This field has been riddled with paradoxes which purport to show that our considered beliefs are inconsistent in cases where the number of people and their welfare varies. (Arrhenius 2004, 201)

Type of problem The best known and most discussed example shattering our intuitions is Parfit's Mere Addition Paradox. This paper explores the potential of the Buddhist Truths to answer the following questions: What is at the source of the Mere Addition Paradox? and Why are paradoxes unavoidable in population ethics?

Results The comparison of classical utilitarian and Buddhist intuitions demonstrates the close tie between intuitions and interests. The perplexing Buddhist intuition about non-existence can be explained (except for metaphysical reasons) by a radically different priority given to survival. The method of measuring the quality of life is not decisive for the existence of paradoxes; the Buddhist axiology changes but does not remove counter-intuitive combinations. If the conflict of interest (quantity versus quality) is described within a two-parameter model, it causes conflicting intuitions; in axiologies that favour quantity (utilitarianism) or quality (perfectionism), the conflicting intuitions inevitably lead to paradoxes. In order to find a compromise, one would have to find a universal interest and a corresponding universal intuition; the obvious candidate to meet this request is sympathy but, since there is no universal consensus on the desirable degree of sympathy, the normative force of such an approach is limited. Breaking out of the two-parameter model and accepting the incommensurability of certain qualities threatens the normative claim of population ethics.     

ETERNAL TRUTHS AND CARTESIAN CIRCULARITY

Bennett has said that ‘Voluntarism casts no useful light on those aspects of the Meditations that have received the most attention: the truth rule, divine veracity, the relation between those, the Cartesian Circle’.¹ In this paper, I shall draw together various strands from recent Descartes scholarship to argue that this is entirely false. When Descartes's voluntarism is understood as central to his epistemological project, not only does it allow us to make more sense of what he says on all these issues, but also it allows us to see what he says as, on certain assumptions, unassailable. The only difficulty that then remains is that these assumptions are widely held to be necessarily false.     

THE EFFECTS OF CONTINGENT AND NONCONTINGENT ATTENTION ON SELF-INJURY AND SELF-RESTRAINT

Self-restraint and self-injurious behavior (SIB) are two responses that can sometimes be members of the same functional response class (i.e., maintained by the same contingency). In such cases, a single treatment should be effective for both responses. In this investigation, we examined the effects of providing attention (the presumed reinforcer) both noncontingently and contingent upon either SIB or self-restraint. Results were consistent with our hypothesis that both responses were maintained by attention and suggested that noncontingent reinforcement was a potentially effective treatment.