Causation and Cognition in Early Modern Philosophy ed. by Dominik Perler and Sebastian Bender (review)

This volume is a welcome addition to early modern scholarship, providing a source of reflection on the connection between cognition theory and causation theory. The collection's great merit is exploiting this cognition-causation connection to provide a new avenue for historical research that is at the same time philosophically significant.

Several of the essays advance our understanding of key figures by using this connection to settle longstanding interpretive disputes. (Besides those detailed in the present paragraph, the excellent pieces by Julia Jorati on Leibniz, Sebastian Bender on Berkeley, and Martine Pécharman on Hobbes also fall under this heading.) For instance, in "Descartes on the Causal Structure of Cognition," Alison Simmons rejects both the concurrentist and the occasionalist readings and argues that Descartes, in fact, does not endorse any view about the metaphysics of causation. Instead, he is more interested in showing the success of mechanism. Mechanistic physics can account for all the bodily interactions that lead up to perception. Thus, philosophers may dispense with the Aristotelian assimilation thesis and its underlying physics. In "Knowing Mind through Knowing Body," Daniel Garber provides an answer to the "Pancreas Problem" in Spinoza scholarship. Awareness is distinguished from mere perception, which may be not conscious. Moreover, awareness results from the body's interaction with an external body, whereas (unconscious) perception does not require such interaction and can be purely internal. This helps explain Spinoza's criticism of Descartes's cogito argument. By extension from the definition of awareness, self-consciousness—that is, the idea of the idea of one's body—depends upon interaction with external bodies. So, one cannot separate self-consciousness from causal relations with the external world. Peter Kail likewise uses the cognition-causation connection to engage a longstanding debate, defending the view that David Hume is not a radical skeptic. He argues that Hume's criticism of causation only precludes one sense in which the mind is a cause of inferences, that is, the sense in which it deductively infers. Hume instead treats reason as a reliable mechanism that leads us to nondeductive inferences.

Other essays use the cognition-causation connection not to wade into perennial scholarly disputes, but rather to open up historical inquiry to lesser-known philosophers. These figures are often taken to be minor on account of their quirky positions. But this collection reveals that an unorthodox position in one domain (causation or cognition) is often the result of a unique thesis defended in the other. For instance, in "Nothing Is Simply One Thing," Julia Borcherding shows that Anne Conway advances her non-unitary theory of mind because she significantly alters Descartes's account of change. Likewise, in "Cartesian Causation and Cognition," Tad Schmaltz argues that Géraud de Cordemoy embraces occasionalism about the mind's perceptions because he reasons that Cartesian metaphysics renders causation between finite substances impossible. Again, Dominik Perler, in "Suárez on Cognition and Causation," illuminates Suárez's unorthodox view of the intellect as a coordinated efficient cause of ideas. He shows that Suárez's view is a last-ditch attempt within Aristotelianism to replace a failed assimilation thesis. The pieces by Sarah Hutton on Cudworth, David Cunning on Cavendish, and Han Thomas Adriaenssen on John Sergeant and Antoine Le Grand fall in the same group of essays that explore lesser-known figures.

The excellent contributions of Martin Lin on Spinoza's causal axiom, Stephan Schmid on Malebranche, and James Van Cleve on Reid form a third group. Not only are they analytically thorough, but they also bring illuminating contemporary analysis to bear on this collection's theme.

The collection is not without its issues. For one thing, the pieces do not fit together as a cohesive whole. This is due to the broad scope of figures (eighteen philosophers, spanning divergent perspectives from about 1600 to about 1750) and the differing interpretive methods. The...