Faculty Research Fellow
Marleen Rozemond (Ph.D. 1989, University of California-Los Angeles) has held positions at Kansas State University and Stanford University and visiting appointments at the École normale supérieure in Paris, the University of Groningen, and the University of California at Berkeley. Her research centres on early modern discussions of the question whether there is nothing beyond matter or whether there are immaterial beings such as souls or minds. Her publications include her book Descartes’s Dualism (Harvard University Press, 1998) and a number of articles on Descartes and other early modern philosophers.
Fellowship Research Project: Beyond Mechanistic Matter: Activity and Immateriality in Early Modern Philosophy
Is there only matter or are there also immaterial beings in the world? When we think of this question, Descartes’s dualism tends to come to mind: for him only human intelligence and consciousness call for an immaterial entity, the human mind. But many early moderns thought that vastly more, or perhaps all, natural phenomena require immaterial entities. They often invoked an “Activity Argument”: for them matter was passive, and they saw a need for active beings, which consequently had to be immaterial. My project investigates this important but neglected episode in the perpetual debate about immaterial entities.