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History of Philosophy Research Group Talk (Sarah Tropper, Toronto)

Wednesday April 9, 2025, 3:30 pm - 5:30 pm

The History of Modern Philosophy Group is pleased to welcome as its guest speaker Sarah Tropper, a postdoctoral fellow in the Department of Philosophy at the University of Toronto. Dr. Tropper specializes in the intersection of late medieval scholastic philosophy and early modern rationalist theories of matter, distinction, and composition. She earned her PhD at King’s College London with a dissertation on Leibniz.

Talk Title

Many, One, None? Why and How to Save Bodies in Early Modern Rationalist Theories

Talk Abstract

Early modern rationalist metaphysics in their most prominent forms lend themselves to be interpreted as contrary to how we ordinarily think about the world, especially insofar as they tend to do away with individual bodies as genuine material entities. But such an understanding of these philosophies not only runs the risk of failing to account for the world we experience, but it also – and more importantly – seems to run counter to the explicit commitments of rationalist thinkers. I argue in this paper that there is a variety of different (ethical, physical, epistemological, but also metaphysical) reasons as to why we should take Descartes’s, Spinoza’s, and even Leibniz’s talk about genuine material entities or bodies in a robust sense seriously and how, from their various remarks, different conceptions of what makes a unified material object emerge.

One of six departmental Research Interest Groups, the History of Philosophy Group explores topics in ancient and/or medieval philosophy, the period from Descartes to Kant, and Jewish philosophy from the medieval period to the 20th century.

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Details

Date:
Wednesday April 9, 2025
Time:
3:30 pm - 5:30 pm
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Organizer

History of Philosophy Research Interest Group
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Venue

Jackman Humanities Building, Room 418
170 St. George Street
Toronto, Ontario M5R 2M8 Canada
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Phone
416-978-3311
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