This article shows how and why John Toland’s Pantheisticon presents a version of Stoicism that locates Stoic ethics in terms of its ‘original’, naturalistic, foundation and devoid of any reconciliation with Christianity. As the article demonstrates, Toland’s account – based on Cicero’s Academica – stands opposed to the Christianized version of Stoicism that had dominated so much seventeenth-century discourse: in effect, Toland restores the materialism that was incompatible with neo-Stoicism. Furthermore, the article also suggests that this ‘restoration’ can be taken (...) as a Spinozistic statement: Toland’s ‘application’ of Cicero celebrates what the first critics of neo-Stoicism had deemed dangerously close to Spinozism and so a threat to established piety. (shrink)

The philosophical debate on miracles in Enlightenment England shows the composite and evolutionary character of the English Enlightenment and, more generally, of the Enlightenment’s relation to religion. In fact, that debate saw the confrontation of divergent positions within the Protestant field and led several deists and freethinkers to resolutely deny the possibility of “things above reason” (i.e. things that, according to such Protestant philosophers as Robert Boyle and John Locke, human reason can neither comprehend nor refute, and that humanity must (...) thus receive as supernatural). In their attacks on miracles, the deists adopted various strategies, which can be classified in two main groups. On the one hand, Charles Blount, John Toland, Anthony Collins, Thomas Woolston, and Peter Annet, although employing different concepts of reason and having different views of God and nature, rejected miracles on the basis that God is unable to contravene the eternal, immutable, and mechanical laws of nature. On the other, William Wollaston, Matthew Tindal, Thomas Chubb, and Thomas Morgan, whose theories on natural religion presented striking similarities, saw God as unwilling to interpose in human or natural affairs. They shunned the possibility of miraculous events while simultaneously acknowledging the presence and efficacy of divine providence in the government of the universe. In other words, they considered God as the active governor of the universe, rather than a distant and inert clockmaker removed from his Creation, but they held that God would not suspend the laws of nature, in which his impartial wisdom, forethought, and goodness found perfect expression. (shrink)

Scholarship on Emerson to date has not considered Spinoza’s influence upon his thought. Indeed, from his lifetime until the twentieth century, Emerson’s friends and disciples engaged in a concerted cover-up because of Spinoza’s hated name. However, Emerson mentioned his respect and admiration of Spinoza in his journals, letters, lectures, and essays, and Emerson’s thought clearly shows an importation of ideas central to Spinoza’s system of metaphysics, ethics, and biblical hermeneutics. In this essay, I undertake a biographical and philosophical study in (...) order to show the extent of Spinoza’s influence on Emerson and how this changes the traditional understanding of Emerson’s thought. (shrink)

Hume's Treatise of Human Nature was published in the form of three separate books. The first two, "Of the Understanding" and "Of the Pas- sions," were published in London in January 1739 by John Noon. The third, "Of Morals," was published independently in London by Thomas Longman in November 1740.2 The title and subtitles on all three books are the same: A Treatise of Human Nature: Being An Attempt to introduce the experimental Method of Reasoning into Moral Subjects. On the (...) title page of the first two books Hume employs an epigram from Tacitus: Rara temporumfelicitas, ubi sentire, quae velis; & quae sentias, dicere licet. ["Seldom are men blessed with times in which they may think what they like and say what they think."] On the title page of the third book this epigram is replaced by an epigram taken from the ninth book of Lucan's Pharsalia: Durae semper virtutis amator, Quaere quid est virtus, et posce exemplar honesti. ["Thou that to virtue ever wer't inclined, learn what it is, how certainly defin'd, and leave some perfect Rule to guide Mankind."] Given the context and the prominence of these epigrams, it is a curious fact that they have attracted little or no attention or comment from Hume scholars. -/- In this paper I argue that Hume's use of the epigram from Lucan is directly relevant to his use of the epigram from Tacitus. The epigrams flag very clearly the anti-Christian nature of Hume's intentions in the Treatise and his affiliations with and allegiance to an anti-Christian tradition of thought that stretches from Hobbes and Spinoza in the late seventeenth century to a circle of anti-Newtonian radical freethinkers that appeared in Britain in the first part of the eighteenth century. In more general terms these epigrams are a notable and illuminating example of esoteric communication in this context, and they indicate that the Treatise has an important place in the literature of the radical enlightenment. (shrink)

Denis Diderot’s natural philosophy is deeply and centrally ‘biologistic’: as it emerges between the 1740s and 1780s, thus right before the appearance of the term ‘biology’ as a way of designating a unified science of life (McLaughlin), his project is motivated by the desire both to understand the laws governing organic beings and to emphasize, more ‘philosophically’, the uniqueness of organic beings within the physical world as a whole. This is apparent both in the metaphysics of vital matter he puts (...) forth in works such as D’Alembert’s Dream (1769) and the more empirical concern with the mechanics of life in his manuscript Elements of Physiology, on which he worked during the last twenty years of his life. This ‘biologism’ obviously presents the interpreter of Diderot with some difficulties, notably as regards his materialism, given that contemporary forms of materialism have on the contrary strongly rejected notions of emergence, vitalism, teleology and any concepts appealing to unique, irreducible features of organisms. In response, some have described him as a ‘holist’ (Kaitaro) while others have emphasized his materialist, naturalist project (Bourdin, Wolfe). In what follows I examine a little-known aspect of Diderot’s articulation of his biological project: his statement in favour of epigenesis within the short but suggestive Encyclopédie article “Spinosiste.” Diderot was, of course, a partisan of epigenesis (the developmental-biological theory opposed to preformation, according to which beings develop by successive adjunction of layers of matter), but why include a statement in favour of a particular biological (or developmental) theory within an entry dealing with a philosopher, Spinoza, who does not seem to have been concerned at all with the specific properties of living beings, how they grow from embryonic to developed states, and so on? By trying to answer this question I also try and locate Diderot’s biological project in relation to what will become, in the years after his death, the project for a science called ‘biology’, with figures such as Treviranus and Lamarck. For it is not clear that the two can be easily correlated or causally linked: Diderot’s ‘epigenetic Spinozism’ is a different conceptual entity from what we find in histories of biology. (shrink)

The philosophy of Samuel Clarke is of central importance to Hume’s Treatise. Hume’s overall attitude to Clarke’s philosophy may be characterized as one of systematic scepticism. The general significance of this is that it sheds considerable light on Hume’s fundamental “atheistic” or anti-Christian intentions in the Treatise. These are all claims that I have argued for elsewhere.’ In this paper I am concerned to focus on a narrower aspect of this relationship between the philosophies of Clarke and Hume. Specifically, I (...) will consider Hume’s views on the subjects of materialism and necessity in relation to Clarke’s enormously influential debate with Anthony Collins on these topics. I begin by describing the nature and context of this controversy; I then examine how Hume‘s positions on questions of materialism and necessity stand in relation to the positions and arguments taken up by Clarke and Collins; and finally I explain the deeper significance of these specific issues for Hume’s wider “atheistic” or anti-Christian objectives in the Treatise. Hume’s views on the closely related subjects of materialism and necessity, I maintain, constitute core elements of his “atheistic” project in the Treatise, and they manifest his basic antipathy to the theistic metaphysics of the Christian religion in general,and to the Newtonian cosmology of Clarke in particular. (shrink)

This study explores several arguments against Spinoza's philosophy that were developed by Henry More, Samuel Clarke, and Colin Maclaurin. In the arguments on which I focus, More, Clarke, and Maclaurin aim to establish the existence of an immaterial and intelligent God precisely by showing that Spinoza does not have the resources to adequately explain the origin of motion. Attending to these criticisms grants us a deeper appreciation for how the authority derived from the empirical success of Newton's enterprise was used (...) to settle debates within philosophy. What I emphasize is that in the progression from More to Clarke to Maclaurin, key Newtonian concepts from the Principia (1687), such as motion, atomism, and the vacuum, are introduced and exploited in order to challenge the account of matter and motion that is presented in Spinoza's Ethics (1677). Building on this treatment, I use the arguments from More and Clarke especially to help discern the anti-Spinozism that can be detected in Newton's General Scholium (1713). Ultimately, the Newtonian criticisms that I detail offer us a more nuanced view of the problems that plague Spinoza's philosophy, and they also challenge the idea that Spinoza seamlessly fits into a progressive narrative about the scientific revolution. (shrink)

Anthony Collins is known mostly as an eighteenth-century freethinker who contributed to ideas of rational religion and religious toleration, as a close friend of John Locke, and as a necessitarian and materialist who held a significant correspondence with Samuel Clarke. Yet, his political philosophy has rarely received serious attention, and he remains a neglected figure in the history of political thought. This article attempts to recover Collins as a philosopher who developed a complex political theory, by focusing on his conceptions (...) of liberty and authority. It shows that he conceptualised liberty, and liberty of thought in particular, both as non-interference and non-domination, namely, an absence of censorship as well as an absence of continuous tyranny over the minds of humankind. Then, it shows that Collins also developed a thorough idea of civil authority, according to which even religious liberties may depend in some cases on the discretion of the civil sovereign. Finally, this article suggests that Collins’s multi-layered theory continued to develop after his lifetime, and that he therefore had a prominent place in eighteenth-century debates of liberty and authority. (shrink)

The last‐half of seventeenth‐century England witnessed an increasing number of works published questioning the traditional notions of God's work of creation and providence. Ascribing agency to matter, motion, chance, and fortune, thinkers ranging from Hobbes, Spinoza, modern‐Epicureans, and other presented a challenge to the Anglican defenders of social and ecclesiastical order. By examining the genesis of the Boyle Lectures that began in 1692 with a bequest from Robert Boyle, we can see that while the Lecturers—three of whom will be examined (...) in detail (Richard Bentley, John Harris, and William Whiston)—assiduously defended classical notions of the God–world relationship, they did so without a great sense of panic or pessimism. This transitional period in the mode of conflict or concord between religion and science sheds interesting lights on matters such as argument from design, biogenesis without purposive, personal agents, and scriptural exegesis and scientific inquiries. (shrink)