In this reassessment of Descartes' debt to his mentor Isaac Beeckman, I argue that they share the same basic conception of motion: the force of a body's motion—understood as the force of persisting in that motion, shorn of any connotations of internal cause—is conserved through God's direct action, is proportional to the speed and magnitude of the body, and is gained or lost only through collisions. I contend that this constitutes a fully coherent ontology of motion, original with Beeckman and (...) consistent with his atomism, which, notwithstanding Descartes' own profoundly original contributions to the theory of motion, is basic to all Descartes' further work in natural philosophy. (shrink)

SummaryThe Enlightened theory of civilisation was expressed through the formula of ‘doux commerce’, a form of commerce which acknowledged the need for the European conquest of non-European lands and nations, and the opportunity to bring European civilisation to other peoples without violence. Montesquieu was the first to express this idea, condemning the Spanish conquest and empire. In the Histoire des deux Indes, this idea was dramatically discussed: Raynal wanted to defend it; Diderot dismantled this project showing that civilisation was but (...) the mask of violent conquest. In this way the latter offered an extraordinary refutation of both Enlightened ideology and its strategy of civilisation. (shrink)

This essay explores seventeenth- and early eighteenth-century programs of natural inquiry where conjecture—an uncertain category of knowledge—played a vital role in the advancement of the sciences. It shows how early modern investigators used conjectures as a bridge between knowledge and ignorance and the process of conjecturing as a way to expand the mental state of inquiry. In publishing their conjectures, they were heeding Francis Bacon’s call to inspire hope and urge fellow experimenters to continue researching complex natural phenomena. Fellow investigators (...) could help to test, verify, revise, invalidate, or propose new inferences in a dialectical, collaborative process. The author argues that, by the eighteenth century, public conjecturing marked a particular kind of broad-minded experimental philosopher. This essay situates conjectures within agnotology—the study of culturally produced ignorance—and Baconian communication of knowledge and ignorance. It explores the philosophical and moral tensions investigators navigated when specifying nature’s unknowns. (shrink)

(2000). Receptiveness to an Idea: A Search for Relatively Positive Representations of the Jew in Enlightenment France. The European Legacy: Vol. 5, No. 1, pp. 7-27.

Between 1765 and 1767 Quesnay published Droit naturel and Despotisme de la Chine. I show that these texts are strongly related. I study their various versions and editions, some of which were previously poorly known, and attempt to evaluate their readership. I uncover a lost manuscript and neglected sources of Despotisme de la Chine which help to clarify various points about the text. It is shown that it was finished most probably well before the end of 1766. Its economic contents (...) are briefly described, whether they are similar to other writings of Quesnay or seem to alter his doctrine. It is suggested that Despotisme de la Chine was read by Adam Smith and that he took from it many lines on China found in Wealth of Nations. The paper ends with a proposal of a new edition of Droit naturel and Despotisme de la Chine. (shrink)

In 1842, the Parisian editor Louis-Antoine Pagnerre published the Dictionnaire politique. This large volume was the manifesto of the French Republicans in opposition to the conservative governments of King Louis-Philippe under the July Monarchy. One of the most original aspects of the Dictionnaire resides in the attempt to link the doctrine of republicanism to political economy. It is the purpose of this paper to analyse the republican political economy presented in Pagnerre's dictionary. First, we detail the historical context in which (...) it appeared, stressing on Pagnerre's biography and on the composition of the group of young republicans who wrote the main economic entries of the book. Second, we focus on the economic ideas about the political regulation of industrial phenomena and the solutions these Republicans imagined to solve the social question. Third, we conclude by attempting to summarize the main characteristics of this republican political economy and to appreciate its originality. (shrink)

SummarySince first appearance, reviews and accounts of The Fresh-Water Fishes of Great Britain (1828–1838) have been surprisingly few. All agree that this rare work is remarkable for its illustrations. Its importance as a whole in the history of ichthyology, however, is largely unknown, or ignored. This article therefore constitutes the first study of the textual and contextual significance of The Fresh-Water Fishes of Great Britain. By examining in chronological order where, and by whom, the work was first reviewed and referenced (...) until the 1860s, the extraordinary contributions that its author, Sarah Bowdich, made to ichthyology at the forefront of the field in the late 1820s can better be appreciated. Indeed, this multiple evidence demonstrates Sarah Bowdich's merits as an ichthyologist of the first order, and as the first woman ichthyologist. But establishing the significance of The Fresh-Water Fishes of Great Britain for the history of ichthyology then raises a further question. Why has it and its author been so ignored or forgotten? By returning for answers to the fields of ichthyology already considered, the article proposes that Sarah Bowdich's different angles on fish offer lines of investigation that are still important for the field today. (shrink)

Summary This essay explores the place of natural philosophy among the patronage projects of Louis XIV, focusing on the Mémoires pour servir à l'histoire naturelle des animaux (or Histoire des animaux) of the 1670s, one of a number of works of natural philosophy to issue from Louis XIV's printing house. Questions particular to the Histoire des animaux include the interaction between text and image, the credibility and authority of images of exotic animals, and the relationship between comparative anatomy and natural (...) history, and between human and animal anatomy. At the same time that the Histoire des animaux contributed to Jean-Baptiste Colbert's management of patronage and of Louis's image, it was a work of natural philosophy, representing the collaborative efforts of the new Paris Academy of Sciences. It examined natural history and comparative anatomy in new ways, and its illustrations broke new ground in their depiction of animals in a natural setting. However, the lavishly formatted books were presentation volumes and did not gain wide circulation until their republication in 1733. Sources consulted include Colbert's manuscript memoires on the royal printers and engravers. (shrink)

ABSTRACT This article draws attention to the reception that François Fénelon's Télémaque (1699) received in England in the first half of the eighteenth century. It overturns the historiographical assumption that the Jacobites were the leading disseminators of this continental bestseller on the other side of the Channel. Even though in the English intellectual context Télémaque's framework was unorthodox, many staunch supporters of the Glorious Revolution were fascinated by the book's portrayal of a virtuous king who respects laws, rights and liberties, (...) and sacrifices himself to improve the wellbeing of his subjects. Moderate Whigs - who included several Huguenot refugees - capitalised on the poem's esprit du roi in order both to celebrate the English kings and to construct the ‘Myth of Louis XIV' as an example of how a sovereign should not rule. The study of the book's reception thus presents a somewhat emblematic case study from which to view the genesis of ‘Englishness', that of an ideological discourse largely based on a process of overturning. In addition, the Télémaque responded to the thirst for ‘useful Knowledge' that distinguished the advocates of ‘politeness' and, not least, its mild pedagogical approach rendered it a precious resource for the ‘moderation’ of the youth. (shrink)

The writings by the ‘state philosophers’ of nineteenth-century France are often seen, either as entirely driven by political or ideological concerns, or reduced to mere history of philosophy. Hence...