About

Jan Cover is a Professor of Philosophy at Purdue University, with a research focus on early modern philosophy, metaphysics, philosophy of science, and philosophy of religion. His academic background includes a B.S. in biochemistry and biophysics from the University of California Davis, followed by a B.A., M.A., and Ph.D. in philosophy from Syracuse University. His earlier work on Leibniz, Spinoza, causation, space and time, and modality has been published in various journals and book chapters. He is also a co-editor of 'Central Themes in Early Modern Philosophy' and 'Leibniz: Nature and Freedom,' and a co-author of several books including 'Theories of Knowledge and Reality,' 'Philosophy of Science: Central Issues,' and 'Leibniz on Substance and Individuation.' Cover's teaching assignments include early modern philosophy, metaphysics, and philosophy of art, with interests extending to philosophy of religion, philosophy of science, and the history and philosophy of art. He is committed to the idea that doing philosophy is an a priori business and is working on projects related to Leibniz's metaphysics and the philosophy of portraiture.

Research topics

• Philosophy
• Epistemology
• Library science
• Humanities
• Classics

Selected publications

• Divine Responsibility Without Divine Freedom

  Faith and Philosophy · 2006-01-01 · 57 citations

  articleOpen access

  Adherents of traditional western Theism have espoused CONJUNCTION:God is essentially perfectly good and God is thankworthy for the good acts he performs.But suppose that (i) God's essential perfect goodness prevents his good acts from being free, and that (ii) God is not thankworthy for an act that wasn't freely performed.Together these entail the denial of CONJUNCTION.The most natural strategy for defenders of CONJUNC-TION is to deny (i).We develop an argument for (i), and then identify two ways for the defender of CONJUNCTION to respond.Next we turn to a considerably different, rather less obvious route toward defending CON-JUNCTION that is compatible with (i)-one which instead denies (ii).Here too we identify two ways for the defender of CONJUNCTION to proceed, yielding a total of four ways for the theist to respond.Because the last of these represents an important and underappreciated alternative for the theist, we devote the second half of the paper to developing and defending it.We argue that divine responsibility is sufficient for divine thankworthiness and consistent with the absence of divine freedom.We do this while insisting on the view that both freedom and responsibility are incompatible with causal determinism.

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• Review: Routledge Philosophy GuideBook to Leibniz and the Monadology

  Mind · 2002-04-01

  article1st authorCorresponding

  Journal Article Review: Routledge Philosophy GuideBook to Leibniz and the Monadology Get access J. A. Cover, Reviewed by J. A. Cover, Reviewed by Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar Mind, Volume 111, Issue 442, April 2002, Pages 478–482, https://doi.org/10.1093/mind/111.442.478 Published: 01 April 2002

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• <i>Leibniz's Science of the Rational</i>. Emily Grosholz , Elhanan Yakira

  Isis · 2001-03-01

  article1st authorCorresponding
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• The Causation Debate in Modern Philosophy: 1637-1739 (review)

  Journal of the history of philosophy · 2000-10-01 · 1 citations

  article1st authorCorresponding

  Reviewed by: The Causation Debate in Modern Philosophy: 1637–1739 J. A. Cover Kenneth Clatterbaugh . The Causation Debate in Modern Philosophy: 1637–1739. New York and London: Routledge, 1999. Pp. xi + 239. Cloth, $75.00. Paper, $21.00. Over the scholastics and earliest moderns, Hume had an advantage of hindsight in declaring that "There is no question, which on account of its importance, as well as difficulty, has caus'd more disputes both among ancients and modern philosophers, than this concerning the efficacy of causes, or that quality which made them be followed by their effects" (Treatise I.iii.14). Between the scholastics and Hume fell (i) Descartes, (ii) classical mechanists such as Hobbes and Gassendi, (iii) the Cartesians Le Grand and Malebranche, (iv) the explanatory rationalists Spinoza and Leibniz, (v) later experimental mechanists such as Boyle, Rohault and Newton, and (vi) the so-called empiricists Locke and Berkeley. This book presents an accessible and admirably broad overview of the modern debate about causation, without sacrificing serious attention to textual details. With two chapters on (i) and one apiece on (ii) - (vi), Clatterbaugh earns for himself and his reader a helpfully synoptic picture of philosophical shifts in the causation debate in the hundred years separating Descartes' Discourse and Hume's Treatise. By the end of the (modern) day, (1) the four-fold causes of Aristotelian-Scholasticism have given way to efficient causation alone; (2) no pre-existing forms in efficient causes are to be found, nor indeed any substantial active powers whatever; (3) there is no deep sense in which causes communicate reality to effects; (4) necessary connection has gone by the board; (5) divine causation has no place in a natural philosophy of causation. No surprises there, but Clatterbaugh's effort reminds us afresh of the varied and torturous routes to such shifts, helping advanced students better (or newly) appreciate them in the comfortable space of 200 pages. Of those pages, a third are devoted to Descartes and the Cartesians. That's not inappropriate, given the importance and difficulty of Descartes's response to Aristotelian-Scholastic accounts of causation, and its influence on occasionalist sentiments on the Continent. The tenor and value of this book may be illustrated by reflecting on the first of these—a rich and frustrating business, both in Descartes's texts and in Clatterbaugh's book. Suppose we grant Descartes the back of his hand to substantial forms and active formal causes as at best "unexplanatory" (counseling Regius): his "at-least-as-much-reality-in-the-cause-as-in-the-effect" principle might be treated as the basis of "an alternative" metaphysical account of causation (19-32). Well, it might be so-treated: but three versions of the principle later, the reader will be excused for judging it little more than a necessary condition for some event-pair x,y counting as a cause-effect pair. If the scholastic appeal to active forms is unexplanatory, then Descartes's [End Page 600] principle—which isn't Descartes's principle at all but a scholastic commonplace—can scarcely fill the explanatory gap. Glossed as a predictable consequence of some strong form of influxus physicus, it is embarrassed by Foucher's objection (that mind bears no likeness to body) and by the weight of texts urging that accidents are individual to their bearers. Having offered us no deep metaphysical story about what in the world answers to 'vis,' Descartes is at best a bungling "interactionist" (here appropriating Clatterbaugh's word for someone whose apparent talk of secondary causes we are asked to respect as expressing a strict and considered philosophical commitment). One can only side with Voetius in reckoning Descartes's replacement of forms by purely quantitative, mechanical principles of motion as expressing a mere "disposition of the movable to move . . . not an activity of an efficient cause, but merely a necessary condition and a causa sine qua non" (my emphasis: Selectarum Disputationum I [1648-59], 873). Descartes has no deep theory about the nature of causation. Is that too harsh? Had this book a different target, one could fairly complain that the author too infrequently steps away from the texts and commentators to offer and defend a...

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• Infinite Analysis and the Problem of the Lucky Proof

  Studia Leibnitiana · 2000-01-01 · 11 citations

  articleSenior author

  Etude du probleme de l'application de l'analyse infinie a la categorie des predicats contingents chez Leibniz. Examinant la connexion entre la verite contingente et les concepts possibles, entre les dispositions et l'action, entre l'incommensurabilite et l'analyse infinie, l'A. se propose de resoudre le probleme de l'incapacite cognitive par la fonction combinoatoire de l'analyse linguistique.

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• Leibnizian Modality Again: Reply to Murray

  ˜The œLeibniz review · 2000-01-01

  articleOpen access1st authorCorresponding
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• Essentialism

  Cambridge University Press eBooks · 1999-09-09

  book-chapter1st authorCorresponding

  How are individual substances related to their qualities, and ultimately to the qualitative manifold? Anticipating the transition from Leibniz's early discussion in the Disputatio to his mature account of simple individual substances, we noted at the close of chapter 1 that it is in connection with Leibniz's answer to these questions that his metaphysic becomes maximally difficult. The issue of relational properties (chapter 2), perplexing enough in its own right, is just one – albeit crucial – thread in a larger web that is Leibniz's answer. At the center of Leibniz's answer is the complete concept doctrine, from which emerge various modal strands intersecting other parts of the Leibnizian metaphysic. The greatest tension is focused at their intersection with our workaday modal claims about individuals, and with the dominant themes in Leibniz's account of individuation – the requirement of separability or independence for individual substances, and the requirement that whatever individuates a substance must be wholly internal to it. Suppose that individual concepts are indeed complete in their specification of the properties enjoyed by each substance; and suppose, as Leibniz seems clearly to hold, that no substance could have a complete concept different from the one it in fact has – complete concepts in some sense “defining” possible substances. The resulting de re modal constraints on the relation between any substance and its qualitative clothing would look to imply that no substance could have properties other than those it in fact has.

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• Substance and Individuation in Leibniz

  Cambridge University Press eBooks · 1999-09-09 · 270 citations

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  This book offers a sustained re-evaluation of the most central and perplexing themes of Leibniz's metaphysics. In contrast to traditional assessments that view the metaphysics in terms of its place among post-Cartesian theories of the world, Jan Cover and John O'Leary-Hawthorne examine the question of how the scholastic themes which were Leibniz's inheritance figure - and are refigured - in his mature account of substance and individuation. From this emerges a sometimes surprising assessment of Leibniz's views on modality, the Identity of Indiscernibles, form as an internal law, and the complete-concept doctrine. As a rigorous philosophical treatment of a still-influential mediary between scholastic and modern metaphysics, this study will be of interest to historians of philosophy and contemporary metaphysicians alike.

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• Law-of-the-series, identity, and change

  Cambridge University Press eBooks · 1999-09-09

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  As noted at the end of chapter 1, a theme of the mature Leibniz's metaphysic conspicuously absent from the Disputatio is the identity of persisting individual substances over time. We develop that theme in the current chapter, indicating how its treatment in the hands of Leibniz is distinctive in comparison with both scholastic and contemporary approaches. In this context we can deliver on some promissory notes of previous chapters about the nature of individual substances themselves.

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• Haecceitism and anti-haecceitism

  Cambridge University Press eBooks · 1999-09-09 · 1 citations

  book-chapter1st authorCorresponding

  Chapter 3 explored at some length the first of two problems of modal individuation, namely Leibniz's essentialism. The central question there concerned what does and does not go into the complete concept that defines an individual in the required, modally robust way. In this chapter, we explore as promised a second and deeper problem of modal individuation. The question here is how a complete concept – thick or thin – could serve to “define” an individual at all. In order to present this problem with due clarity and focus, we begin with some careful scenesetting.

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Frequent coauthors

• John O'Leary‐Hawthorne

  13 shared

• John Hawthorne

  University of Southern California

  4 shared

• Glenn A. Hartz

  The Ohio State University at Mansfield

  3 shared

• Martin Curd

  2 shared

• Michael Bergmann

  1 shared

• S. Paul Kashap

  1 shared

• Benson Mates

  University of California, Berkeley

  1 shared

• Jonathan Francis Bennett

  1 shared