Notes on Contributors

Dennis Des Chene is Associate Professor of Philosophy at Emory University. Physiologia, a study of the principles of natural philosophy in Descartes and in some of his predecessors, was published in 1996. Two works on the foundations of the life sciences in early modern philosophy will be published in 2000: Life's form, on the scientia de anima in late Aristotelianism, and Spirits and Clocks, on Descartes' physiology. Des Chene is now contemplating projects on space and spiritual substances from Pereira to Newton, on the physics of derivative qualities in the seventeenth century, and on the philosophy of mathematics.

Helen Hattab is an Assistant Professor of Philosophy at Southern Illnois University, Carbondale. Her current research focusses on late Aristotelian and early mechanistic views of causation, with a view to understanding how the transition to the modern conception of causation was made. Of particular interest to her are the historical origins of the view, found in René Descartes' natural philosophy, that causal relations are governed by laws of nature. Dr. Hattab has worked extensively on Jesuit Aristotelian accounts of efficient causation and their relation to Descartes' views, as well as the pseudo-mechanistic natural philosophy developed by Sebastian Basso. She has published an article entitled "One Cause or Many? Jesuit Influences on Descartes' Division of Causes" and written an encyclopedia article on the Laws of Nature. Her other interests include, Late Medieval and Renaissance Philosophy, and the History of Science from the Medieval to the Early Modern periods.

Christoph Lüthy (Ph.D. Harvard, 1995) is a Research Fellow at the Center for Medieval and Renaissance Natural Philosophy at the University of Nijmegen (The Netherlands) and Associate Editor of Early Science and Medicine. His main areas of expertise are the evolution of matter theories (esp. atomism) and the development of scientific imagery in the early modern period.

Stephen Menn is Associate Professor of Philosophy at McGill University. He received PhD's in mathematics from Johns Hopkins University (1985) and in philosophy from the University of Chicago (1989). He is the author of Plato on God as Nous (published by Southern Illinois University Press for the Journal of the History of Philosophy Monograph Series, 1995), and of escartes and Augustine (Cambridge University Press, 1998), and of articles on ancient, medieval, and early modern philosophy. He has also written a book in draft, entitled Feuerbach's Theorem: an Essay on Euclidean and Algebraic Geometry, and is working on a book called The Aim and the Argument of Aristotle's Metaphysics and, with Calvin Normore, on a book called Nominalism and Realism, from Boethius to Hobbes.

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