Debates in Modern Philosophy

Debates in Modern Philosophy is a clear and accessible volume that engages the core issues in modern philosophy, from Descartes to Kant. Using a novel format, the editors have fashioned a fascinating conversation between scholars by commissioning new papers in response to classic essays on key topics such as Dualism, Personal Identity, Causation, Mechanism and Idealism. This format provides a model of philosophical debate and interpretation in the history of philosophy, and will prove indispensable both to students and scholars currently working in the field.

-Lisa Shabel, Ohio State University

This is a superbly conceived and realized introduction to Modern Philosophy. The debates are sophisticated enough to be useful to advanced students, while the editors' clear introductions also make Debates in Modern Philosophy suitable for introductory courses.

-Alan Nelson, University of North Carolina

There have now been three generations of analytical philosophers who have studied the early modern period from Descartes to Kant. This collection spans all three, exhibiting the excellence of scholarship and philosophy found in this tradition. It also illustrates some of the changes in position, and in approach, that have occurred in the analytical tradition. We also see in this collection how the analytical study of modern philosophy has come to recognize that analytical philosophy itself, earlier in its history, tended to overestimate the extent to which it had made progress over the philosophers of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. There is a lot to be learned from reading this book both about the philosophy of the early modern period and the philosophy of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries.

-Allen Wood, Stanford University

Debates in Modern Philosophy is an extremely useful collection. The exchanges here are accessible and provocative, and show just how philosophically productive debate over the interpretation of historical texts can be. The model of one commentator directly engaging the interpretation of another works well, giving students concrete illustrations of reasoned interpretive disagreement and a sense of what is at stake in the construction and assessment of rival readings of historical texts. The topics are well chosen, providing both a representative sample of key issues in modern epistemology and metaphysics, and a range of texts that are ripe for further analysis and debate in the classroom.

-Tom Holden, University of California Santa Barbara