Dennis Des Chene
Basic information
Detail from Caus, Raisons des
forces mouvantes (1615)
forces mouvantes (1615)
Email: Dennis Des Chene
Brief CV: pdf · html (the html is more current)
Mailing address:
Department of Philosophy
Washington University
Campus Box 1073
One Brookings Drive
St. Louis, MO 63130-4899
USA
Some papers (pdf)
NB. Unpublished papers are drafts. They are not to be quoted or cited without permission.
‘Animal’ as Concept: Bayle’s “Rorarius”. Draft of a paper for The Problem of Animal Generation in Early Modern Philosophy , ed. Justin Smith (see below).
Review of Richard A. Watson, Cogito ergo sum. For the Journal of the history of philosophy. November 2004.
How the World Became Mathematical. HSS, Cambridge, Mass., November 2003. Organizer: Anne Davenport.
Mechanics of Locomotion. “Artificial Life”, Stanford, October 2003. Organizer: Jessica Riskin. To be published in a volume from Stanford University Press.
Souls: Sensitive & Separated. “Forming the mind”, Uppsala University, September 2002. Organizer: Henrik Lagerlund.
Eternal Truths and the Laws of Nature. “Eternal Truths”, University of Calgary, June 2002. Organizer: Margaret Osler.
Régis and Rohault. A revised version appears in Steven Nadler, ed. Companion to Early Modern Philosophy (2002).
Spirits & Clocks: Introduction. Cornell University Press, 2000.
Life's Form: Chapter 1. Cornell University Press, 2000.
More info
Degrees and positions
B. A., Linguistics, University of Washington, 1980.
Ph.D., Philosophy, Stanford, 1987.
Assistant & Associate Professor, Johns Hopkins, 1988–1999.
Associate Professor, Emory University, 2000–2003.
Professor, Washington University at Saint Louis, 2003–now.
Areas of specialization
Early modern philosophy
History of early modern science
Selected Publications
Physiologia. Cornell Unversity Press, 1996.
Life's Form. Cornell University Press, 2000.
Spirits and Clocks. Cornell University Press, 2001.
“Forms of art in Jesuit Aristotelianism (with a coda on Descartes)”. In: William R. Newman & Berndette Bensaude-Vincent, eds. The artificial and the natural (2007) 135–148.
“Aristotelian natural philosophy: body, cause, nature”. In: John Carriero & Janet Broughton, eds. Blackwell companion to Descartes (2007) 17–32.
“Descartes reduced”. (A review essay on Desmond Clarke’s Descartes’ theory of mind.) In: Oxford Studies in Early Modern Philosophy, 2007.
‘Animal’ as Concept: Bayle’s “Rorarius”. In: Justin Smith, ed., The problem of generation (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006). (Studies in the Philosophy and History of Biology) ISBN: 0521840775
“Mechanisms of life in the seventeenth century”. Studies in the history and philosophy of biology 36 (2005):245–260. (Special issue edited by Carl Craver and Lindley Darden)
“Life after Descartes: Régis on Generation”. Perspectives on Science, 2004.
“Honoré Fabri on Mixtures”. In: Corpuscularian Theories of Matter, ed. Bill Newman and John Murdoch (Brill, 2002).
“Life and Health in Descartes and After”. In Descartes' Natural Philosophy, ed. Stephen Gaukroger, John Schuster, and John Sutton (Routledge, 2000), 723-735.
“L’Immatérialité de l'âme: Suárez et Descartes”. In Descartes et le moyen âge, ed. Joël Biard (Paris: Vrin, 1997), 319-327.
“Cartesiomania”. Perspectives on Science 3(4) (Winter 1995):534-581.
Current projects
mathematical concepts and mathematical practice
practical philosophy: early modern theories of the passions
intellectual virtues in the seventeenth century
derived properties of matter in the seventeenth century
Etc.
Go to Philosophical Fortnights.
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- Not so useful.
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Other items
A page on Autoacronyms.
Maugham Markovized. A work generated using Andrew Plotkin’s Markov program. The program works out, given a corpus, the transition probability that word x will be followed by word y in that corpus. It then generates new text using those probabilities. For “Maugham Markovized” the corpus was the first 5449 words in Somerest Maugham’s novel Of Human Bondage, which is available in pdf form at PlanetPDF.
Some pages of links.
Official PhFn buttons
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Updated 2006.05.10.
DISCLAIMER: I hope you’re not so silly as to think that opinions expressed here by me are anyone’s but mine.