Motion—and, in particular, local motion or change in location—plays a central role in Kenelm Digby’s natural philosophy and in his arguments for the immateriality of the soul. Despite this, Digby’s account of what motion consists in has yet to receive much scholarly attention. In this paper, I advance a novel interpretation of Digby on motion. According to it, Digby holds that for a body to move is for it to divide from and unify with other bodies. This is a view (...) of motion—as change in relations of parthood—that Alison Peterman attributes to Digby’s contemporary and acquaintance, Margaret Cavendish. Having shown that Digby’s presentation of the view predates Cavendish’s by more than a decade, I make a case that Digby’s work influenced Cavendish’s on this topic. In developing and defending my reading, I consider to what extent the Digbean account of motion and the arguments for it accord with the ideals of the mechanical philosophy emerging in the early modern period. (shrink)

Marx is a fallibilist. He holds that no commitment is immune to revision under pressure of rational scrutiny. His criticisms of rival thinkers often turn not just on their getting things wrong, but on their being too little observant of this precept. I examine one such episode: Marx’s critique of Stirner in The German Ideology. Stirner is himself a fallibilist and understands his philosophy as a correction against earlier, less successful attempts to pursue a consistently fallibilistic program in philosophy. Marx (...) argues, however, that Stirner is himself inconsistent in his fallibilism. Stirner treats one concept in particular—his central concept—as indefeasible, ostensibly because it stands in a privileged relationship to non-conceptual reality. Marx understands Stirner’s inconsistency to result from his making covert recourse to a given element in knowledge. Marx holds that there is no given element in knowledge, and that confused appeals to the given serve to cover over assumptions and insulate commitments from scrutiny, all of which falls afoul of thoroughgoing fallibilism. (shrink)