James Lawler 
Matter and Spirit 
The Battle of Metaphysics in Modern Western Philosophy before Kant

This narrative shows how the contours of moral and political philosophy in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries were shaped by Kant’s two distinct philosophical responses to the results of modern science.


This history of early modern Western philosophy takes its inspiration from Kant’s claim that the battle between the metaphysics of matter and that of spirit is the principal axis around which modern philosophy up to his time, in all its aspects, has revolved. The empiricist-materialist trend that dominates in England is first examined in the progressively unfolding works of Hobbes, Locke, Berkeley, Hume, and Adam Smith. A contrasting and competing dialectic develops in the rationalist/spiritualist trend in the continental philosophy of Descartes, Leibniz, and Rousseau. Framing this history is the background context of the philosophy and science of Aristotle and the challenges to the traditional paradigm presented by the revolutionary sciences of Copernicus, Galileo, and Newton.


James Lawler is Professor of Philosophy at the State University of New York at Buffalo.

Table of Content

Hobbes on Morality and the Modern Science of Motion

Freedom as the Realization of Desire

Leviathan: The Making of a Mortal God

John Locke: Underlaborer of the New Sciences

Locke on the Freedom of the Human Spirit

From Berkeley to Hume: the Radicalization of Empiricism

Hume’s Science of the Dynamics of the Passions

Adam Smith Deciphers the Invisible Hand of the Market

Contradictions of Economic Life

I Think: Descartes’ Foundation of Modern Science

God and the Good Society

Leibniz’s Discovery of Universal Freedom

The Best of All Possible Worlds

Justifying God’s Ways: Kant’s Progress from Leibniz through Pope to Rousseau

Rousseau’s Reasoning of the Heart