In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Philosophy and Literature 25.2 (2001) 215-232 [Access article in PDF] Eighteenth-Century Print Culture and the "Truth" of Fictional Narrative Lisa Zunshine As a session entitled "Truth" at a recent Modern Language Association of America annual convention has demonstrated, the obsession with the epistemologies of truth is alive and well. Our "familiar ways of thinking and talking about truth," as one of the speakers, Barbara Herrnstein Smith, observed, remain (...) "theoretically elusive, discursively slippery, and hard or perhaps impossible to articulate clearly in relation to other current concepts and ideas" 1 --an irresistible invitation to further thinking and talking on the subject. My essay enters this conversation by attempting to contemplate truth not as a stable attribute but as a ongoing attribution, that is, not as an inherent property but rather as a dynamic process predicated upon functional idiosyncrasies of our evolved cognitive architecture. The broad question posed here is this: What if our never-ending quest for truth is itself cognitively constructed and the various forms that this quest takes manifest the (not necessarily harmonious) interaction between our evolved cognitive capacities and the ever-changing specifics of our cultural environment?Consider just one of the forms of such an interaction, namely, our age-long preoccupation with the "truth" of literary narrative. In many respects, this preoccupation is counterproductive: the most "fantastic" story contains a number of contingently useful "truths" about the world, whereas the most "factual" narrative manipulates facts by virtue of being a narrative or a subjective arrangementof information. Still, we persevere in wanting to put the label "fiction" or "nonfiction" onto any story that comes our way. As I will argue, the bookstore's organization of its sections satisfies this species of "cognitive" craving as well as [End Page 215] reinforces it, making it seem culturally inevitable. Viewed from this perspective, our culture appears to be a multifaceted feedback mechanism engaged in the process of satisfying, reinforcing, struggling with, and manipulating our cognitive predispositions.The cultural manipulation of our cognitive predispositions is the topic of the present essay, which discusses several examples of such manipulation that respond to our desire to assign a certain "truth-value" to a given narrative, i.e., to attach a label to it announcing its "factuality" or "fictionality." "Truth-value" is a loaded term, resisting definition, and liable to lead me into trouble. Imperfect as it is, however, I need it in order to shuffle between two scholarly discourses that do not (yet) have much vocabulary in common: literary criticism and cognitive science. The reason for turning to cognitive science in my discussion of literary narrative is that cognitive anthropologists and psychologists frequently engage the same problems that we do when we ask, What is "Fiction"? How is it different from "History"? How do we decide whether what we are reading is "true?" The key difference between the two approaches is, however, that whereas the literary critic focuses on specific texts produced and read in specific cultural circumstances, the cognitive anthropologist pays attention to the cross-cultural insistence with which people wish to and often claim to distinguish "truth" from "fiction" and inquires into the possible evolutionary history of the cognitive architecture implicated in our never-ending quest for "truth." The latter perspective can thus be useful for literary studies because, by suggesting that our evolved cognitive architecture often "encourages" us to construe the world as a negotiation of "truths" and "nontruths," this perspective begins to account--at least on some level--for the fact that people may approach a complex cultural artifact, such as a novel, with a "truth"/"non-truth" binary in mind that is ultimately not very productive. 2 Evolutionary psychologists and anthropologists frequently point to disjunctions between the tasks that our brain evolved to solve and the tasks that we have to deal with in the modern environment; our vexed insistence on determining the truth-value of the 500-page printed narrative--not an object one would come across in the Pleistocene--can be seen as yet another instance of such a disjunction.Thus, I suggest that, on the... (shrink)

Within eighteenth-century debates on animal cognition we can distinguish at least three main theoretical positions: (i) Buffon’s mechanism, (ii) Reimarus’ theory of instincts, and (iii) the sensationalism of Condillac and Leroy. In this paper, I adopt a philosophical perspective on this debate and argue that in order to fully understand the justification Buffon, Reimarus, Condillac, and Leroy gave for their respective theories, we must pay special attention to the theoretical virtues these naturalists alluded to while justifying their position. These (...) theoretical virtues have received little to no attention in the literature on eighteenth-century animal cognition, but figure prominently in the justification of the mechanist, instinctive, and sensationalist theories of animal behavior. Through my philosophical study of the role of theoretical virtues in eighteenth-century debates on animal cognition, we obtain a deeper understanding of how theoretical virtues were conceptualized in eighteenth-century science and how they influenced the justification of theories of animal cognition. (shrink)

Although artistic activity has been a major social phenomenon in the western world, aesthetics has not always reflected the changes in techniques, processes, themes and uses through which the arts have developed and had their effect. Theory most often comes after the fact, and properly so. Yet aesthetics in its history has not only displayed an unfitting hubris, with thinkers attempting to legislate about style, suitability and materials to the artist; aesthetics has also lagged far behind the living edge of (...) artistic activity and discussed it in anachronistic terms. (shrink)

Sensibility, in any of its myriad realms – moral, physical, aesthetic, medical and so on – seems to be a paramount case of a higher-level, intentional property, not a basic property. Diderot famously made the bold and attributive move of postulating that matter itself senses, or that sensibility (perhaps better translated ‘sensitivity’ here) is a general or universal property of matter, even if he at times took a step back from this claim and called it a “supposition.” Crucially, sensibility is (...) here playing the role of a ‘booster’: it enables materialism to provide a full and rich account of the phenomena of conscious, sentient life, contrary to what its opponents hold: for if matter can sense, and sensibility is not a merely mechanical process, then the loftiest cognitive plateaus are accessible to materialist analysis, or at least belong to one and the same world as the rest of matter. This was noted by the astute anti-materialist critic, the Abbé Lelarge de Lignac, who, in his 1751 Lettres à un Amériquain, criticized Buffon for “granting to the body [la machine, a common term for the body at the time] a quality which is essential to minds, namely sensibility.” This view, here attributed to Buffon and definitely held by Diderot, was comparatively rare. If we look for the sources of this concept, the most notable ones are physiological and medical treatises by prominent figures such as Robert Whytt, Albrecht von Haller and the Montpellier vitalist Théophile de Bordeu. We then have, or so I shall try to sketch out, an intellectual landscape in which new – or newly articulated – properties such as irritability and sensibility are presented either as an experimental property of muscle fibers, that can be understood mechanistically (Hallerian irritability, as studied recently by Hubert Steinke and Dominique Boury) or a property of matter itself (whether specifically living matter as in Bordeu and his fellow montpelliérains Ménuret and Fouquet, or matter in general, as in Diderot). I am by no means convinced that it is one and the same ‘sensibility’ that is at issue in debates between these figures (as when Bordeu attacks Haller’s distinction between irritability and sensibility and claims that ‘his own’ property of sensibility is both more correct and more fundamental in organic beings), but I am interested in mapping out a topography of the problem of sensibility as property of matter or as vital force in mid-eighteenth-century debates – not an exhaustive cartography of all possible positions or theories, but an attempt to understand the ‘triangulation’ of three views: a vitalist view in which sensibility is fundamental, matching up with a conception of the organism as the sum of parts conceived as little lives (Bordeu et al.); a mechanist, or ‘enhanced mechanist’ view in which one can work upwards, step by step from the basic property of irritability to the higher-level property of sensibility (Haller); and, more eclectic, a materialist view which seeks to combine the mechanistic, componential rigour and explanatory power of the Hallerian approach, with the monistic and metaphysically explosive potential of the vitalist approach (Diderot). It is my hope that examining Diderot in the context of this triangulated topography of sensibility as property sheds light on his famous proclamation regarding sensibility as a universal property of matter. (shrink)

This is a description and analysis of the intellectual culture of the eighteenth-century Church of England. Challenging conventional perceptions of the Church as an intellectually moribund institution, the study traces the influence of thinkers such as Locke, Newton, Burke, and Gibbon on theological debate in England during this period.

This paper analyzes debates on animal language in eighteenth-century German philosophy and science. Adopting a history of ideas approach, I explain how the study of animal language became tied to the investigation into the origin and development of language towards the end of the eighteenth century. I argue that for large parts of the eighteenth century, the question of the existence of animal languages was studied within the context of the philosophical question of whether animals possess reason. (...) In Germany, the debate concerning animal reason was influenced by Christian Wolff and was taken up by diverse thinkers such as Winkler, Meier, and Reimarus. I argue that in the second half of the eighteenth century the study of animal language became more loosely related to the question of whether animals possess reason: animal language was studied not only in light of the debate on animal reason but also because it sheds light on the nature of animals, on the differences and similarities between animals and humans, and on the origin and development of language. This systematic study of animal language coincided with the rise of linguistics, anthropology, and biology as independent sciences. (shrink)

British writers of the eighteenth century such as Shaftesbury and Hutcheson are widely thought to have used the notion of disinterestedness to distinguish an aesthetic mode of perception from all other kinds. This historical view originates in the work of Jerome Stolnitz. Through a re-examination of the texts cited by Stolnitz, I argue that none of the writers in question possessed the notion of disinterestedness that has been used in later aesthetic theory, but only the ordinary, non-technical concept, and (...) that they did not use this notion to define a specifically aesthetic mode of perception or a specifically aesthetic mode of anything else. The nearest thing that they had to the Stolnitzian conception of “the aesthetic” was their conception of taste, which differs from the former in some essential respects. (shrink)

English interpretations, appropriations, and transpositions of the figure of Don Quixote play a pivotal role in eighteenth-century constructions of so-called English national character. A corpus of quixotic narratives worked to reinforce the centrality of Don Quixote and the practice of quixotism in the national literary landscape. They stressed the man from La Mancha’s eccentricity and melancholy in ways inextricable from English self-constructions of these traits.2 This is why Stuart Tave is able to write that eighteenth-century Britons could “recast” (...) Don Quixote in a fashion that followed “national pride” in the “freedom” of their humors.1 However, Don Quixote’s integral place in patriotic self-constructions was troubled by gender. While national character was construed as masculine by default, quixotism’s association with masculinity was complicated by the potential passive penetrability of quixotism and the proliferation of narratives about female quixotic readers. This essay will analyze these tensions. Henry Fielding’s Joseph Andrews (1742) and Laurence Sterne’s Tristram Shandy (1759–67) are key examples of quixotic texts that respond to the figure of the female quixote by interrogating the relationship between Englishness, masculinity, and quixotism. (shrink)

This paper considers the nature of the changes that took place in logic teaching at the University of Oxford from the beginning of the sixteenth century, when students attended university lectures on Aristotle’s texts as well as studying short works dealing with specifically medieval developments, to the beginning of the eighteenth century when teaching was centred in the colleges, the medieval developments had largely disappeared, and manuals summarizing Aristotelian logic were used. The paper also considers the reasons for these (...) changes, including changes in English society, and the effect of humanism and the more scholarly Aristotelianism that it produced. (shrink)

Psychology considered as a natural science began as Aristotelian "physics" or "natural philosophy" of the soul. C. Wolff placed psychology under metaphysics, coordinate with cosmology. Scottish thinkers placed it within moral philosophy, but distinguished its "physical" laws from properly moral laws (for guiding conduct). Several Germans sought to establish an autonomous empirical psychology as a branch of natural science. British and French visual theorists developed mathematically precise theories of size and distance perception; they created instruments to test these theories and (...) to measure visual phenomena such as the duration of visual impressions. These investigators typically were dualists who included mental phenomena within nature. (shrink)

This chapter presents a historical study of how science has developed and of how philosophical theories of many sorts – philosophy of science, theory of the understanding, and philosophical theology – both enable and constrain certain lines of development in scientific practice. Its topic is change in the legitimacy or acceptability of scientific explanation that invokes purposes, or ends; specifically in the argument from design, in the natural science field of physico-theology, around the start of the eighteenth century. ... (...) The context that produced physico-theology was clearly religious and political. It is unsurprising that a large body of Protestant intellectuals well-placed in a relatively peaceful society with a strong tradition of open speech, would develop links between science and critical discussion of both divinity and the Bible. There were also bounds to the discussion, as Newton, who chose to sit on the sidelines, knew well. Many others on Europe’s continent lived much more intimately with religious division as well as the reminder, in 1633, of Galileo’s failure to arrange a peaceable arrangement between science and religion. These aspects of the rise of physico-theology have not been the focus of this chapter, which has surveyed the philosophical and social origins found in the English context. Science, philosophy of science and other English philosophical currents – most particularly the theory of ideas and understanding that we are familiar with in its later development by John Locke – were formative for a field that might alternatively have been called ‘empirical natural theology.’ Prior shifts in religious sensibility that emptied the Book of Nature of much of its content also prepared the ground. Other philosophical and theological currents not discussed here – most notably theories of divine agency and predestination – and other philosophical trends – the rise of Spinoza’s challenge to such natural theology on the continent – also had both shaping and limiting influences upon the field. Finally, philosophers, including natural philosophers, did much more to promote physico-theology than just write about it: Boyle in particular provided a very important launch pad for the further development of an already healthy tradition of natural theology with his named lectureship, which drew the interest of others in the Royal Society, most notably Isaac Newton, and which spawned two of the most influential physico-theological tracts shortly before and shortly after the turn of the eighteenth century. (shrink)

When attempting to capture the concept of enlightenment that underlies and motivates philosophical (and political and scientific) developments in the 18th century, historians of philosophy frequently rely upon a needlessly but intentionally exclusive account. This, namely, is the conception of enlightenment first proposed by Kant in his famous essay of 1784, which takes enlightenment to consist in the “emergence from the self-imposed state of minority” and which is only possible for a “public” to attain as a result of the public (...) use of reason, a privilege enjoyed by citizens and exemplified in the activity of the scholar. That women, among other groups, did not hold the status of citizens and did not enjoy access to the institutions or training that might gain them recognition as scholars is apparently not a concern for Kant, as he notes that the enlightened condition is likely out of reach anyway for “by far the greatest part of humankind (including the entire fair sex)” (AA 8:35). This naturally leads one to wonder what a history of this period could look like when considered from the perspective of a different, more inclusive conception of enlightenment, and in this chapter I propose to conduct an experiment of sorts just along these lines. As opposed to Kant’s exclusionary conception, I will instead take that proposed by his distinguished contemporary, Moses Mendelssohn, as my starting point. In addition to offering a conception of enlightenment distinctive both for its wide scope and progressive character, Mendelssohn’s has the advantage, or so I will show, of bringing the manifold intellectual contributions of a diverse set of women into focus, though it does more than this in that it also reveals these women to actively and critically engage with key aspects of Mendelssohn’s and others’ philosophical views. (shrink)

Newton’s impact on Enlightenment natural philosophy has been studied at great length, in its experimental, methodological and ideological ramifications. One aspect that has received fairly little attention is the role Newtonian “analogies” played in the formulation of new conceptual schemes in physiology, medicine, and life science as a whole. So-called ‘medical Newtonians’ like Pitcairne and Keill have been studied; but they were engaged in a more literal project of directly transposing, or seeking to transpose, Newtonian laws into quantitative models of (...) the body. I am interested here in something different: neither the metaphysical reading of Newton, nor direct empirical transpositions, but rather, a more heuristic, empiricist construction of Newtonian analogies. Figures such as Haller, Barthez, and Blumenbach constructed analogies between the method of celestial mechanics and the method of physiology. In celestial mechanics, they held, an unknown entity such as gravity is posited and used to mathematically link sets of determinate physical phenomena (e.g., the phases of the moon and tides). This process allows one to remain agnostic about the ontological status of the unknown entity, as long as the two linked sets of phenomena are represented adequately. Haller et. al. held that the Newtonian physician and physiologist can similarly posit an unknown called ‘life’ and use it to link various other phenomena, from digestion to sensation and the functioning of the glands. These phenomena consequently appear as interconnected, goal-oriented processes which do not exist either in an inanimate mechanism or in a corpse. In keeping with the empiricist roots of the analogy, however, no ontological claims are made about the nature of this vital principle, and no attempts are made to directly causally connect such a principle and observable phenomena. The role of the “Newtonian analogy” thus brings together diverse schools of thought, and cuts across a surprising variety of programs, models and practices in natural philosophy. (shrink)

The study of the “first wave” of reactions to the Critique of Pure Reason in Germany from the second half of the 1780s until the beginning of the nineteenth century reveals the paradoxical status of the Kantian transcendental subject. While the existence of the transcendental subject, whatever the term means, is not open to question since it arises from the very essence of critical philosophy, the fundamental status of the subject is sometimes questioned in this period. Although the meaning of (...) the concept of transcendental subject seems obvious today (the subject of cognition, bearer of transcendental conditions of experience) it lends itself to various interpretations in the late eighteenth century. To achieve my goal I have undertaken a textological analysis of the works of the earliest opponents and followers of the Kantian critique and a reconstruction of the conceptual field in the midst of which the transcendental subject has been planted. Among others I draw on the works of J. S. Beck, J. A. Eberhard, J. G. Hamann, F. H. Jacobi, S. Maimon, K. L. Reinhold, G. E. Schulze and A. Weishaupt. The authors of the period are grouped depending on the common themes and questions that prompted them to turn to the concept of the transcendental subject, even though the results of their reflections did not always coincide. These authors think of the transcendental subject in its relationship to the transcendental object, or as “something = х”, and in terms of the relationship of representation to the object. It is characterised sometimes as something absolutely hollow, and sometimes as the fullness of true reality. The status ascribed to the transcendental subject is sometimes that of a thing-in-itself and sometimes that of a “mere” idea. Finally, Kant’s transcendental subject was sometimes seen as something to be overcome and sometimes as an infinite challenge to understanding. (shrink)

Resumen Este trabajo consiste en un análisis histórico de textos que proceden de un expediente archivístico de Cartagena de Indias entre 1715 y 1717. Los autos son textos administrativos que poseen diversas funciones en las relaciones institucionales entre metrópoli y colonias, tal como la de “emitir opinión”. En la tipología textual indiana, esta función se denomina consulta o parecer, y se caracteriza por el uso de un predicado de tipo doxástico. Para el análisis hemos adoptado las perspectivas teóricas del análisis (...) histórico del discurso y de la sociopragmática histórica. El estudio se completa con un análisis cuantitativo que permite resaltar cuáles son los rasgos lingüísticos a los que se vincula la intensificación y la atenuación en el subtipo debate dentro del registro legal en el español de la Cartagena del siglo XVIII. La conclusión sugiere que los recursos lingüísticos encontrados aumenta la intención persuasiva de la argumentación característica de los autos cartagineses. (shrink)

What is the scientist’s work? Philosophers may turn to theory and to its relation to observation; historians are more inclined to turn to the scientists themselves and the situation the scientists find themselves in. Why do scientists work as they do, and what effect does the world they inhabit have on their productivity and their product? Those are more the historians’ questions. They might appear to converge with the philosophers’ own in this: What does it take to be a successful (...) scientist? Yet the question of success also invites answers from a sociological perspective. The essay collection Scholars in Action supports a richly historical sociological foray into identifying and explaining the conditions for success at a particular moment and locus of Enlightenment thinking. (shrink)

This paper analyzes the historical context and systematic importance of Kant's hypothetical use of reason. It does so by investigating the role of hypotheses in Kant's philosophy of science. We first situate Kant’s account of hypotheses in the context of eighteenth-century German philosophy of science, focusing on the works of Wolff, Meier, and Crusius. We contrast different conceptions of hypotheses of these authors and elucidate the different theories of probability informing them. We then adopt a more systematic perspective to (...) discuss Kant's idea that scientific hypotheses must articulate real possibilities. We argue that Kant's views on the intelligibility of scientific hypotheses constitute a valuable perspective on scientific understanding and the constraints it imposes on scientific rationality. (shrink)

In July 1759 the French philosopher Andre´ Pierre Le Guay de Prémontval (1716-1764) published in Berlin a diatribe against the excessive and incorrect use of French in the Prussian capital. Far from being a mere guide to linguistic style, the Préservatif contre la corruption de la langue françoise generated a heated debate, attested by an official threat to ban its publication. The personal animosity between Prémontval and the perpetual secretary of the Berlin Academy, Jean Henri Samuel Formey (1711-1797) was amply (...) demonstrated over the pages of the Préservatif, offering a rare insight into the complex web of social and intellectual tensions in mid eighteenth-century Berlin and its Academy of Sciences. At stake were the social status and the philosophical outlook of local Huguenots, compared to that of French philosophers who were granted asylum in Prussia by Frederick II. The debate also concerned the issues of academic freedom in an absolutist regime, the material production and distribution of texts, conduct and etiquette in the Republic of Letters and the formation of group identities in eighteenth-century Germany. Drawing on manuscripts preserved in Berlin, Göttingen and Krakow, this article traces the development of the controversy and the reception of Prémontval’s work by both French- and German- writing authors at the Berlin Academy and beyond its confines. (shrink)

Catharine Trotter Cockburn challenges voluntarist views held by British moral philosophers during the first half of the eighteenth century. After introducing her metaphysics of morality, namely, her account of human nature, and her account of moral motivation, which for her is a matter concerning the practice of morality, I analyze her arguments against theological voluntarism. I examine, first, how Cockburn rejects the view that God can by an arbitrary act of will change what is good or evil; second, how (...) she challenges views that understand the initial creation of the world solely in terms of divine will and draws attention to the role that the divine understanding plays in God’s creation; and third, how she argues that moral obligation does not require a superior lawmaker. I conclude by highlighting how Cockburn’s arguments not only challenge voluntarist views, but also offer support for her moral fitness theory. (shrink)

Beauty is evil, a surreptitious diversion of earthly delights planted by the devil, according to the third century theologian-philosopher Tertullian. Beauty is a manifestation of the divine on earth, according to another third century philosopher, Plotinus. Could these two really be talking about the same thing? That beauty evokes an experience of pleasure is probably the only point on which all participants in the continuing debate on beauty agree. But what kinds of pleasure one considers relevant to an experience of (...) beauty, is the crux of the problem of beauty. In ancient, medieval and eighteenth century philosophy, the problem of beauty was framed by the larger concern of what constituted a good life. The question regarding the nature of beauty was answered with a view to its role in achieving the good life for those who cultivated its apprehension. In the twentieth century, philosophers framed the problem of beauty as a problem for conceptual analysis. The questions asked were: Is beauty subjective or objective? Are there properties in the object that count towards beauty in all cases; that are sufficient or necessary for an object to be judged beautiful? What kind of pleasure is the pleasure we experience of beauty? I will examine how these questions can be seen to have been answered by earlier philosophical traditions and then I will use these questions as a guide to developing an explanatory theory of beauty based on contemporary theories of perception. (shrink)

Some of the most forceful objections to William Wollaston's moral theory come from his early critics, namely, Thomas Bott (1688-1754), Francis Hutcheson (1694-1746), and John Clarke of Hull (1687-1734). These objections are little known, while the inferior objections of Hume, Bentham, and later prominent critics are familiar. This fact is regrettable. For instance, it impedes a robust understanding of eighteenth-century British ethics; also, it fosters a questionable view as to why Wollaston's theory, although at first well received, soon faded (...) in esteem among philosophers. This paper gives Wollaston's early critics some of the attention they deserve. It reconstructs some of their objections to Wollaston's philosophy, addresses replies to those objections, and shows that despite some minor flaws, the objections succeed. A fact that becomes clear is that Wollaston's philosophy had suffered devastating criticism years before Hume wrote anything against it. (shrink)

Werner Sombart’s classic text "Luxury and Capitalism" is revisited in the light of recent economic historians’ works that have analyzed luxury’s role in the development of capitalism. Most of these works, as well as Sombart’s book itself, are focused on the eighteenth century, since it was then that the proliferation—and availability—of luxury manifested itself for the first time most conspicuously. By employing secondary texts by economic historians and primary sources from the debates on luxury in the eighteenth century—some (...) of which overlooked by a number of historians—the essay attempts a renewed outlook on a text that was controversial when written over a century ago and remains a prominent argument in the eternal discussion and dispute on the cause(s) of the rise of capitalism. (shrink)

The eighteenth‑century English writer Matthew Gregory Lewis wrote one of the most dramatic Gothic novels, The Monk; over 200 years later, a film of the same name appeared, based on the novel and directed by Dominik Moll. The film, a free adaptation of the book, presenting the story of the moral downfall of the monk Ambrosio, has inspired us to philosophical reflections on sexuality, sensuality, and physical desire. We have attempted to analyze and interpret this cinematic work of art (...) in the context of these issues. The method we have adopted is based on a thorough discussion of the topics developed in the film and related issues. This method, while not pretending to be scientific objective, enables us to outline an interesting field of research as well as to identify a number of theoretical problems and questions that remain open. The formula we have adopted is to quote lines from the film The Monk which permits the analysis of selected issues related to sexuality, sensuality, and physical desire. Moreover, these quotes serve to order the text and enable the precise identification of interpretive trains of thought. (shrink)

The eighteenth century was the century of self-organization, but also that of materialism, inasmuch as it was then that certain thinkers proclaimed themselves to be materialists (rather than just being labelled as such by enemies of various sorts). If one seeks to read these two features – one hesitates to call them ‘facts’ or ‘events’ – together, one arrives rather quickly at an influential metaphor, the beeswarm. But a metaphor of or for what? Irreducible organic unity, most broadly – (...) spelled out in the vocabulary of the period in terms of synergy, sympathy and sensibility, but also of cohesion, consensus and conspiration: individual bees have their characteristics, their intentions, and their own purposes, but they also ‘conspire’, ‘cohere’ and ‘consent’ in the name of a larger living unity, the swarm, although this leaves open further questions such as the exact nature of the order or organization yielded or enacted by the swarm (bottom-up? top-down? emergent? etc.). The fascination with the beeswarm is a fascination with organic unity and in some cases (notably Diderot), with the organic or organismic features of living matter itself. This is the story we wish to tell. (shrink)

The eighteenth century philosopher David Hume was much influenced by Greek philosophy and literature. His favourite writer was the satirist Lucian. What is David Hume’s thanatotherapy (therapy of the fear of death)? Is he an Epicurean or Pyrrhonian thanatotherapist? I argue that, while he is in part an Epicurean who is sceptical about his Epicureanism, he is primarily a Lucianic thanatotherapist. A Lucianic thanatotherapist uses self and other deprecating irony as a form of therapy. He also ruthlessly satirises religious (...) consolations. I use Hume’s deathbed allusions to Lucian’s Kataplous (floating downwards) and the Dialogues of the Dead to explain my view. (shrink)

Logic diagrams have been increasingly studied and applied for a few decades, not only in logic, but also in many other fields of science. The history of logic diagrams is an important subject, as many current systems and applications of logic diagrams are based on historical predecessors. While traditional histories of logic diagrams cite pioneers such as Leibniz, Euler, Venn, and Peirce, it is not widely known that Kant and the early Kantians in Germany and England played a crucial role (...) in popularising Euler(-type) diagrams. In this paper, the role of the Kantians in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries will be analysed in more detail. It shows that diagrams (or intuition in general) were a highly contentious topic that depend on the philosophical attitude and went beyond logic to touch on issues of physics, metaphysics, linguistics and, above all, mathematics. (shrink)

Eighteenth-century art historian Johann Joachim Winckelmann (1717-1768) shared with Hegel a profound admiration for the art and culture of ancient Greece. Both viewed ancient Greece as, in some sense, an ideal to which the modern world might aspire—a pinnacle of spiritual perfection and originality that contemporary civilization might, through an understanding of ancient Greek culture, one day equal or surpass. This rather competitive form of nostalgia suggests a paradoxical demand to produce an original and higher state of culture through (...) the imitation of another. In Hegel’s writings, this paradox goes beyond the relation of the modern world to the ancient world—he exposes the same paradox in ancient Greece’s relation to its own predecessors. The solution to the latter paradox—the possibility of the realization of ancient Greece as an original and self-contained civilization despite its cultural debts—would also, then, be the key to repeating the success of the ancient world in the modern, the overcoming of modern Europe’s cultural debt to the ancient world. The present essay examines how this paradox is revealed and resolved in the writings of Winckelmann and Hegel, and shows how this strategy of culture production—as imputed to the ancient world and aspired to in the modern—simultaneously attempts to justify and conceal a self-deceptive practice of cultural and political conquest. My focus will be on the two writers’ interpretations of ancient Greek art since, as I will suggest, their solution to the paradox of culture production turns out to be modeled upon the role of ancient Greek art in the invention and actualization of a cultural ideal of beauty, unity, and self-containment. (shrink)

My topic is the materialist appropriation of empiricism – as conveyed in the ‘minimal credo’ nihil est in intellectu quod non fuerit in sensu (which interestingly is not just a phrase repeated from Hobbes and Locke to Diderot, but is also a medical phrase, used by Harvey, Mandeville and others). That is, canonical empiricists like Locke go out of their way to state that their project to investigate and articulate the ‘logic of ideas’ is not a scientific project: “I shall (...) not at present meddle with the Physical consideration of the Mind” (Essay, I.i.2, in Locke 1975; which Kant gets exactly wrong in his reading of Locke, in the Preface to the A edition of the first Critique). Indeed, I have suggested elsewhere, contrary to a prevalent reading of Locke, that the Essay is not the extension to the study of the mind of the methods of natural philosophy; that he is actually not the “underlabourer” of Newton and Boyle he claims politely to be in the Epistle to the Reader (Wolfe and Salter 2009, Wolfe 2010). Rather, Locke says quite directly if we pay heed to such passages, “Our Business here is not to know all things, but those which concern our Conduct” (Essay, I.i.6). There would be more to say here about what this implies for our understanding of empiricism (see Norton 1981 and Gaukroger 2005), but instead I shall focus on a different aspect of this episode: how a non-naturalistic claim which falls under what we now call epistemology (a claim about the senses as the source of knowledge) becomes an ontology – materialism. That is, how an empiricist claim could shift from being about the sources of knowledge to being about the nature of reality (and/or the mind, in which case it needs, as David Hartley saw and Denis Diderot proclaimed more overtly, an account of the relation between mental processes and the brain). (David Armstrong, for one, denied that there could be an identification between empiricism and materialism on this point: eighteenth-century history of science seems to prove him wrong: see Armstrong 1968 and 1978.) Put differently, I want to examine the shift from the logic of ideas in the seventeenth century (Locke) to an eighteenth-century focus on what kind of ‘world’ the senses give us (Condillac), to an assertion that there is only one substance in the universe (Diderot, giving a materialist cast to Spinozism), and that we need an account of the material substrate of mental life. This is neither a ‘scientific empiricism’ nor a linear developmental process from philosophical empiricism to natural science, but something else again: the unpredictable emergence of an ontology on empiricist grounds. (shrink)

Feminism and Tradition in Aesthetics takes a fresh look at the history of aesthetics and at current debates within the philosophy of art by exploring the ways in which gender informs notions of art and creativity, evaluation and interpretation, and concepts of aesthetic value. Multiple intellectual traditions have formed this field, and the discussions herein range from consideration of eighteenth century legacies of ideas about taste, beauty, and sublimity to debates about the relevance of postmodern analyses for feminist aesthetics. (...) Forward by Arthur C. Danto, 20 authors include Paul Mattick, Jr., Caroline Korsmeyer, Timothy Gould, Christine Battersby, Mary Devereaux, bell hooks, REnee Lorraine, Trinh T. Minh-ha, Elizabeth Ann Dobie, Adrian Piper, Anita Silvers, Susan Feagin, Mary D. Garrard, Ellen Handler Spitz, Noel Carroll, Joanne Waugh, Joseph Margolis, Rita Felski, and Hilde Hein, as well as Peg Brand's essay, "Revising the Aesthetic-Nonaesthetic Distinction: The Aesthetic Value of Activist Art.". (shrink)

What might Adam Smith have learned from Jane Austen and other novelists of his moment? This paper finds and examines a serious problem at the center of Adam Smith’s moral psychology, stemming from an unacknowledged tension between the effort of the spectator to sympathize with the feelings of the agent and that of the agent to moderate her feelings. The agent’s efforts will result in her opacity to spectators, blocking their attempts to read her emotions. I argue that we can (...) resolve this tension by looking to developments in eighteenth-century literature, as perfected in the hands of Jane Austen. I focus on two techniques, focalization and free indirect style, and I show that the problems for spectatorship diminish when we see that good Smithian spectators are savvy readers. (shrink)

From the early eighteenth century onward, primacy for the invention of binary numeration and arithmetic was almost universally credited to the German polymath Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz (1646–1716). Then, in 1922, Frank Vigor Morley (1899–1980) noted that an unpublished manuscript of the English mathematician, astronomer, and alchemist Thomas Harriot (1560–1621) contained the numbers 1 to 8 in binary. Morley’s only comment was that this foray into binary was “certainly prior to the usual dates given for binary numeration”. Almost thirty years (...) later, John William Shirley (1908–1988) published reproductions of two of Harriot’s undated manuscript pages, which, he claimed, showed that Harriot had invented binary numeration “nearly a century before Leibniz’s time”. But while Shirley correctly asserted that Harriot had invented binary numeration, he made no attempt to explain how or when Harriot had done so. Curiously, few since Shirley’s time have attempted to answer these questions, despite their obvious importance. After all, Harriot was, as far as we know, the first to invent binary. Accordingly, answering the how and when questions about Harriot’s invention of binary is the aim of this short paper. (shrink)

By reconstructing the eighteenth-century movement of the Italian Enlightenment, I show that Italy’s political fragmentation notwithstanding, there was a constant circulation of ideas, whether on philosophical, ethical, political, religious, social, economic or scientific questions—among different groups in various states. This exchange was made possible by the shared language of its leading illuministi— Cesare Beccaria, Ludovico Antonio Muratori, Francesco Maria Zanotti, Antonio Genovesi, Mario Pagano, Pietro Verri, Marco Antonio Vogli, and Giammaria Ortes—and resulted in four common traits. First, the absence (...) of a radical trend, such as the French materialist-atheist trend and British Deism, or religious reformation. Second, the rejection of inhumane laws and institutions, capital punishment, torture, war and slavery. Third, the idea of public happiness as the goal of good government and legislation. And fourth, the conception of the economy as a constellation where social capital, consisting of education, morality, and civility, plays a decisive role. I conclude that the Italian Enlightenment, not unlike the Scottish Enlightenment, was both cosmopolitan and local, which allowed its leading writers to develop a keen awareness of the complexity of society alongside a degree of prudence regarding the possibility and desirability of its modernization. (shrink)

In the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, philosophers including Kant and Hegel draw a sharp distinction between the human and the animal. The human is self-conscious, the animal is not; the human has moral worth, the animal does not. By the mid to late nineteenth century, these claims are widely rejected. As scientific and philosophical work on the cognitive and motivational capacities of animals increases in sophistication, many philosophers become suspicious of the idea that there is any divide (...) between human beings and other animals. This paper traces the transitions in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century thought about animals. My focal point is the notion of drive or instinct (Trieb, Instinkt). Although in sporadic usage during earlier times, the drive concept explodes in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. It begins playing central roles in three distinct areas: embryology, ethology, and metaphysics. In embryology, drive describes a force, inaccessible in itself but whose results are visible and susceptible to scientific and philosophical study, governing organic development. In ethology, drives are the sources of seemingly deliberate, highly articulated, yet non-conscious activities, which are directed at ends of which the animal is ignorant. In metaphysics, drive describes the human essence. I focus on the way in which the emergence of the drive concept in each of these three domains undermines the idea that there is any sharp distinction between the human and the animal. I conclude by considering how, in light the collapse of the human/animal divide, ethical theories are reshaped. (shrink)

The book "Unnoticed Revolution. Richard Burthogge's Constructivist Idealism" focuses on the theory of cognition developed by Richard Burthogge, the seventeenth-century English philosopher and author, among other works, of the "Organum Vetus & Novum" (1678) and "An Essay upon Reason and the Nature of Spirits" (1694). Burthogge’s ideas had a minimal impact on the philosophy of his time and have hitherto not been the subject of a detailed study. Nevertheless, his writings contain a highly original concept of constructivist idealism, which, when (...) seen from a historical perspective, turns out to have anticipated the crucial points of that proposed a century later by Kant. It is because at the core of Burthogge’s epistemological position lies the claim that the external object of cognition is never presented to the mind directly, but always under the 'modus concipiendi', a particular form of conceptualisation of the external reality, performed in the manner and with the means determined by the structural and functional properties of the human cognitive powers. As a result, Burthogge clearly anticipates Kant in claiming that the external world is unknowable in itself, being accessible to the human mind only through the ‘phenomena’ that the mind itself co-produces. The need for deeper analysis of the works by the ‘forgotten’ philosophers of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries has been recognised for at least ninety years. The discussed book tries to meet these expectations. Its direct aim is to increase our knowledge of early modern British philosophy. At the same time, the restoration of the memory of the idealist doctrine, anticipating by almost a century that of Kant, should enable us to draw some new conclusions about the internal logic and immanent dynamic of the development of the whole post-Cartesian thought. (shrink)

In the early eighteenth century context there was an intimate connection between problems concerning the existence of the material world and problems of natural religion. Two issues are of particular importance for understanding Hume’s irreligious intentions in the Treatise. First, if we are unable to establish that we know that the material world exists, then all arguments for the existence of God that presuppose knowledge of the material world (i.e. its beauty, order, design, etc.) are placed in doubt. Second, (...) if we are naturally disposed to believe in the existence of body, but this belief is false, then it seems to follow that God must be a deceiver -- or does not exist. Hume’s arguments in 1.4.2, I maintain, are finely crafted to present both these (irreligious) challenges to the orthodox view. (shrink)

The chapter reconstructs the eighteenth-century discussion on commerce and virtue in the light of Hirschman's, Pocock's, Polanyi's, and Viner's interpretations of that discussion. The claims put forth are: the history of the emerging of modern market society has been heavily conditioned by a teleological and deterministic interpretation of history; the eighteenth-century discussion cannot be read neither in terms of ideologies nor in terms of the history of economic analysis; a 'strategic' reading is fruitful in so far as it (...) allows two-ways interactions between discourse and social facts. (shrink)

This paper attempts to rethink the philosophy of Muhammad Iqbal (1877–1938) and challenge the still prevailing tendency in Iqbal scholarship to view it merely as an outcome of the influence of the ideas of various Western/European philosophers. I present Iqbal’s arguments in their particular historical and intellectual context to show that they developed in response to a specific philosophical problem and that Iqbal looked for a solution to that problem in Islamic tradition. I suggest that Iqbal’s philosophy is best understood (...) in the context of, and as a response to, the problem of nihilism as it was debated in modern German philosophy during ‘the pantheism controversy’ in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. To demonstrate this, I analyse Iqbal’s article on ʿAbd al-Karīm al-Jīlī to show his concern with the problem of nihilism, and his solution to it based on al-Jīlī’s Sufism. (shrink)

Darshana, in the sense of true philosophical knowledge, Darshana is first quoted in the Vaiśesika Sūtra (first century CE) to mean the perfect vision of everything. Etymologically, Darshana evolves from the Sanskr̥ti term Drś, that is, vision. The contemporary use of the term Darshana finds its new dimension in the writings of Haribhardra (eighteenth century CE), who considers different philosophical schools in the cord of Darshana in his text Ṣad-darśana-samuccaya. Later, eminent Vedāntin Mādhava in fourteenth century CE popularized and (...) expatiated the meaning of Darshana in Sarvadarśana Saṅgraha. The purport of the term Darshana is embedded in the notion of Indianness that caters to an influential uniqueness in Hinduism, Jainism (Samyak Darshana or liberation consists in right vision) and Mahayana Buddhism (Nagarjuna’s dictum tattva-darśana, i.e., the true reality, and Vasubandhu’s use of Darshana marga, i.e., the conduit of seeing). -/- The conception of the word guru in Indian cultures goes back to the Upanishadic era, especially in the Mundakopanishad, where Brahma (the creator of the world) taught the Brahma Vidya (the foundation of all knowledge or the speculative discussion about ultimate reality) to his eldest son, Atharvan. Later, Artharvan transmitted the Brahma Vidya to Angiras, who shared the absolute knowledge with Satyavaha, a successor of Sage Bharadwaja. Satyavaha narrated to Bharadwaja, who finally imparted the knowledge (both the higher and lower levels) to Angiras. One could find a significance herein using the Upanishadic term paraparam (Mundakopanishad, 1.2). The term not only indicates that the foundation of all knowledge has two different folds – para (transcendent) and apar (mundane) – but also that the term paraparam tinges on the transmission progression of the knowledge from guru (enlightened master) to his shisya (dedicated disciple). The proper way of learning Brahma Vidya depends on the gurupasadana; the only guru can condescend to expose wisdom to the devoted disciples. (shrink)

The Epicurean account of the origin of language appealed to eighteenth-century thinkers who tried to reconcile a natural history of language with

the biblical account of Adamic name-giving. As a third way between Aristotelian linguistic conventionality and what was perceived as a Platonic supernatural congruence between words and things, Epicurus’

theory allowed for a measure of contingency to emerge in the evolution of initially natural signs. This hypothesis was taken up by authors as different from one another as Leibniz, Vico, Condillac (...) and Mendelssohn. By integrating the Epicurean account of language into their own theories, however, these authors also revived the tensions inherent in the ancient thesis and had to confront the ensuing difficulties in innovative ways. (shrink)

Philosophy in Africa has for more than a decade now been dominated by the discussion of one compound question, namely, is there an African philosophy, and if there is, what is it? The first part of the question has generally been unhesitatingly answered in the affirmative. Dispute has been primarily over the second part of the question as various specimens of African philosophy presented do not seem to pass muster. Those of us who refuse to accept certain specimens as philosophy (...) have generally been rather illogically said also to deny an affirmative answer to the first part of the question. In a paper presented at the International Symposium in Memory of Dr William Amo, the Ghanaian philosopher who taught in German universities in the early part of the eighteenth century, Professor Odera Oruka identified four trends, perhaps more appropriately approaches, in current African philosophy. (shrink)

Corey W. Dyck presents a new account of Kant's criticism of the rational investigation of the soul in his monumental Critique of Pure Reason, in light of its eighteenth-century German context. When characterizing the rational psychology that is Kant's target in the Paralogisms of Pure Reason chapter of the Critique commentators typically only refer to an approach to, and an account of, the soul found principally in the thought of Descartes and Leibniz. But Dyck argues that to do so (...) is to overlook the distinctive rational psychology developed by Christian Wolff, which emphasized the empirical foundation of any rational cognition of the soul, and which was widely influential among eighteenth-century German philosophers, including Kant. In this book, Dyck reveals how the received conception of the aim and results of Kant's Paralogisms must be revised in light of a proper understanding of the rational psychology that is the most proximate target of Kant's attack. In particular, he contends that Kant's criticism hinges upon exposing the illusory basis of the rational psychologist's claims inasmuch as he falls prey to the appearance of the soul as being given in inner experience. Moreover, Dyck demonstrates that significant light can be shed on Kant's discussion of the soul's substantiality, simplicity, personality, and existence by considering the Paralogisms in this historical context.Readership: Scholars and advanced students in history of philosophy, especially those working on Kant. (shrink)

In the mid-seventeenth century a movement of self-styled experimental philosophers emerged in Britain. Originating in the discipline of natural philosophy amongst Fellows of the fledgling Royal Society of London, it soon spread to medicine and by the eighteenth century had impacted moral and political philosophy and even aesthetics. Early modern experimental philosophers gave epistemic priority to observation and experiment over theorising and speculation. They decried the use of hypotheses and system-building without recourse to experiment and, in some quarters, developed (...) a philosophy of experiment. The movement spread to the Netherlands and France in the early eighteenth century and later impacted Germany. Its important role in early modern philosophy was subsequently eclipsed by the widespread adoption of the Kantian historiography of modern philosophy, which emphasised the distinction between rationalism and empiricism and had no place for the historical phenomenon of early modern experimental philosophy. The re-emergence of interest in early modern experimental philosophy roughly coincided with the development of contemporary x-phi and there are some important similarities between the two. (shrink)

Kant’s Organicism: Epigenesis and the Development of Critical Philosophy, traces the decisive role played by eighteenth century embryological research for Immanuel Kant’s theories of mind and cognition. I begin this book by following the course of life science debates regarding organic generation in England and France between 1650 and 1750 before turning to a description of their influence in Germany in the second half of the eighteenth century. Once this background has been established, the remainder of Kant’s Organicism (...) moves to the influential role played by models of embryological development for Kant’s approach to understanding the cognitive processes responsible for the generation of knowledge, with special attention paid to Kant’s Precritical writings in the 1760s and 1770s. The book closes with a reinterpretation of Kant’s transcendental deduction in the Critique of Pure Reason. (shrink)

In a number of papers and in his recent book, Is Water H₂O? Evidence, Realism, Pluralism (2012), Hasok Chang has argued that the correct interpretation of the Chemical Revolution provides a strong case for the view that progress in science is served by maintaining several incommensurable “systems of practice” in the same discipline, and concerning the same region of nature. This paper is a critical discussion of Chang's reading of the Chemical Revolution. It seeks to establish, first, that Chang's assessment (...) of Lavoisier's and Priestley's work and character follows the phlogistonists' “actors' sociology”; second, that Chang simplifies late-eighteenth-century chemical debates by reducing them to an alleged conflict between two systems of practice; third, that Chang's evidence for a slow transition from phlogistonist theory to oxygen theory is not strong; and fourth, that he is wrong to assume that chemists at the time did not have overwhelming good reasons to favour Lavoisier's over the phlogistonists' views. (shrink)

Shaftesbury’s major work Characteristicks of Men, Manners, Opinions, Times was one of the most influential English works in the eighteenth century. This paper focuses on his contributions to debates about persons and personal identity and shows that Shaftesbury regards metaphysical questions of personal identity as closely connected with normative questions of character development. I argue that he is willing to accept that persons are substances and that he takes their continued existence for granted. He sees the need to supplement (...) metaphysical debates of personal identity and believes that we have to turn to the character that is realized by a substance if we want to understand who we are. For Shaftesbury persons have a particular character, can act, and govern themselves. I propose that Shaftesbury’s approach to persons has a developmental dimension, which is meant to encourage personal development and improvement of character. The developmental dimension can be understood as an intellectual journey that invites us to search for our true self, to develop our character, and to seek happiness, which ultimately involves understanding our place as persons in the order of the universe. I show that my developmental interpretation is preferable to other existing interpretations. (shrink)