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College of Arts and Letters | Michigan State University

John Grey

john headshot painting.jpg

Visiting Assistant Professor

Phone: (517) 884-7688

Email: greyjohn@msu.edu

Curriculum Vitae

 

Education & Research Interests

John Grey received his Ph.D. from Boston University in 2012. He specializes in the history of modern philosophy, with an emphasis on the rationalists and their metaphysical systems. Most of his research focuses on the rise and fall of early modern conceptions of metaphysical relations such as causation, composition, and dependence. His broader areas of philosophical interest include analytic metaphysics and epistemology, ethical theory, and philosophical logic.


Publications

Spinoza: Moral PhilosophyInternet Encyclopedia of Philosophy, 24 May (2015).

Review of Tad Schmaltz (ed.), Efficient Causation: A HistoryNotre Dame Philosophical Reviews, 4 March (2015).

Composition, Causation, and the Mind's Eternity in SpinozaBritish Journal for the History of Philosophy 22 no. 3 (2014): 446-467.

'Use Them At Our Pleasure': Spinoza on Animal EthicsHistory of Philosophy Quarterly 30 no. 4 (2013): 367-388.


Selected Current Projects

Tracing Reason's Arc: The Principle of Sufficient Reason from Leibniz to Kant (with Elizabeth Robinson). This paper explores Kant's interpretation of Leibniz's principle of sufficient reason, and defends the plausibility of that interpretation. On Kant's view, Leibniz did not hold the principle to be an analytic truth, even though it is known by contemporary scholars that — behind the scenes — Leibniz developed several different arguments for the principle that make it out to be analytic. However, these arguments only appear in texts that were not available to Kant, nor to Leibniz's rationalist successors like Christian Wolff and Alexander Baumgarten. And in those of his works that would have been available to these 18th-century authors, Leibniz offers motivations for the principle that do not render it analytic. (Draft linked)

Simple Souls and Composite Minds in Early Modern Philosophy (in progress). This book manuscript articulates some of the implications of the metaphysics of composition for our understanding of early modern accounts of the mind. Some early modern accounts of the mind have it that the mind is a composite entity—its thoughts and emotions are parts that compose it—and so the mind can be explained compositionally in a manner analogous to mechanical explanation. Other accounts of the mind deny this. Yet the division between those who see the mind as simple and those who see it as composite does not track the traditional rationalist/empiricist divide. This book provides an alternative (but no less systematic) way of understanding this debate, by showing that these authors' differing views about the composition of the mind track their disagreement about the deeper metaphysical claim that persons are substances.