This chapter contains sections titled: Epigraphs Twice‐Told Tales Darwin to the Rescue? Back to the Subject Contradiction? The Problem of Obsessive Repetition Reading Again—Again The End of the Beginning.

The paper critically evaluates two commonplaces of historiography. One is that Empiricism as a philosophical movement of the seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries was opposed to Rationalism corresponding to an English-Continental division of personnel. The other commonplace is the view that the main accomplishments of eighteenth century science were mainly taxonomic in contrast to the remarkable conceptual innovations of Galileo, Descartes and Newton. I point instead, as characteristic of eighteenth century science, to an energetic (...) blend of hands-on experimentalism, methodological caution about the employment of metaphysical concepts, and imaginative speculation where the powers of ‘matter’ unassisted by God were concerned, with Buffon playing a leading role. Kant’s attempt to confine empirical reasoning and the Newtonian system to the appearances reflects widely held views about the ‘veiling’ of nature behind our ideas in eighteenth century methodological reflection but serves mainly to ground his appeals to the supersensible element in human agency. (shrink)

Freemasonry was the most widespread form of secular association in eighteenth-century England, providing a model for other forms of urban sociability and a stimulus to music and the arts. Many members of the Royal Society and the Society of Antiquaries, for instance, were Freemasons, while historians such as Margaret Jacob have argued that Freemasonry was inspired by Whig Newtonianism and played an important role in European Enlightenment scientific education. This paper illustrates the importance of natural philosophy in Masonic (...) rhetoric and utilizes material from Masonic histories, lodge records and secondary works to demonstrate that scientific lectures were indeed given in some lodges. It contends, however, that there were other sources of inspiration for Freemasonry besides Newtonianism, such as antiquarianism, and that many other factors as well as the prevalence of Masonic lodges determined the geography of English scientific culture. Although the subject of Freemasonry and natural philosophy has great potential, as Jacob has demonstrated so well, much further work, especially in the form of prosopographical studies of provincial lodges, is required before the nature of the relationship between the two can be fully appreciated. (shrink)

This essay explores the use of stringed instruments (and in particular the harpsichord) as models of brain and cognitive function in eighteenth-century French medicine and natural philosophy. These comparisons were founded in part on the anatomical investigations of the latter half of the seventeenth century, which had established both the “fibrous” structure of the white and gray matter of the cerebrum and the vibratory movement the brain underwent in the performance of its functions. Musical instruments—and in particular (...) the harpsichord—helped these philosophers speculate about how the brain worked as the material instrument of sensation and thought: they were machines at once mechanical and affective, grounded in the materiality of their wooden boards and metal strings, yet symbolizing the rational—and immaterial—harmonies of music. (shrink)

In the mid-eighteenth century music underwent a sudden and drastic revolution when composers “discovered” a new dimension to their art. This had immense repercussions on the philosophy of art, for the music created before and after this divide represents two different species of aesthetic experience, which in due course affected our understanding of the meaning and import of the other arts as well. Despite the immense aesthetic repercussions of this Copernican revolution in music, philosophers of art seem not (...) to have taken much notice of it. This essay details the emergence of the relevant musical criteria during the eighteenth century and dwells on their long-term impacts on the philosophy of art. (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)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:Eighteenth-Century Hermeneutics: Philosophy of Interpretation in England from Locke to BurkePaul J. KorshinEighteenth-Century Hermeneutics: Philosophy of Interpretation in England from Locke to Burke, by Joel Weinsheimer; xiii & 275 pp. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1993, $30.00.Hermeneutics has until the present study had little application to eighteenth-century England. The omission is curious for, although there were few advances in biblical scholarship during the (...) Restoration and eighteenth century, modern literary criticism begins in this century with Dryden and Johnson, modern aesthetics with Shaftesbury and the Scottish school of taste, and modern theories of art with Reynolds and writers on the picturesque. Joel Weinsheimer’s treatment of this topic, then, instantly possesses originality, not only from a lack of serious competition but because of its approach to [End Page 365] hermeneutics. He “does not offer a historical narrative” of what happened in hermeneutics in eighteenth-century England (p. xi). Rather, Weinsheimer prefers to see hermeneutics as a series of snapshots of how various writers, of whom only a few are conventional exegetes, deal with matters of interpreting texts. In all, the book treats eight major figures (Swift, Locke, Toland, Bolingbroke, Hume, Reid, Blackstone, and Burke), devoting a chapter to each.The method in each one is approximately the same: Weinsheimer produces a reading not of a single work alone but of all, or almost all that an author writes about interpretation. In the case of Swift, for instance, his principal contribution on exegesis, A Tale of a Tub, is a satire on styles of exegesis Swift considered ridiculous. This chapter adds little to what we know of Swift but, in relation to Weinsheimer’s analysis of Sir William Blackstone, we can see that there is a legal background to parts of the debate among the three brothers on the meaning of Scripture. Locke (pp. 23–45) also dealt with the Bible extensively, but his tendency to prefer the doctrine of “sola scriptura” limits what an author can say about his hermeneutics. John Toland (pp. 46–71), in his Christianity Not Mysterious, proposes radical notions of biblical exegesis, and Weinsheimer gives us a lucid reading of the first English skeptical exegete. All the other figures he studies, however, had little interest in traditional literary exegesis. Weinsheimer sees Bolingbroke (pp. 72–102) as a philosopher of history who tried to generate a theory of decoding the past, but he does not clearly distinguish Bolingbroke’s rules for writing history. Hume (pp. 103–34) wrote extensively on exegetical topics without actually being an exegete; although this is one of Weinsheimer’s more opaque chapters, it does succeed in showing the diversity of Hume and his inability to reason conclusively on matters of interpretation. Hume basically did not think that there is any problem in understanding others, so his theories of exegesis are not coherent. So, too, Thomas Reid (pp. 135–65) considered language, properly used, as lacking in opacity; hence elaborate theories of interpretation have little use for him.However, with Blackstone and Edmund Burke, Weinsheimer contributes his two most interesting chapters. The law, as Blackstone conceived of it, is extremely difficult to understand, so his Commentaries on the Laws of England is an attempt to read legal texts “in the context of general literacy” (p. 168); Bentham would later imitate him. Burke, Weinsheimer argues, started as an aesthetician and ended applying principles of good and bad taste to political behavior, always one of the weaknesses of reactionary politics.In a brief epilogue (pp. 226–33), Weinsheimer speculates on the effort of eighteenth-century hermeneutics to understand historical reason, but he does not comment on the failure of the period to produce a single important hermeneuticist. His own choice to avoid major exegetes such as Samuel Johnson and Joshua Reynolds abridges his results dramatically, but a study based on scholarly snapshots always courts this risk. Hermeneutics is a [End Page 366] recondite concept, yet Weinsheimer renders his topic more difficult than it need be by frequent shifts in its definition and a complex, often unclear, style. Eighteenth-Century Hermeneutics provides a start, if not a definitive treatment, for later students of exegesis in the English Enlightenment.Paul... (shrink)

The essays in this collection have been written for Gerd Buchdahl, by colleagues, students and friends, and are self-standing pieces of original research which have as their main concern the metaphysics and philosophy of science of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. They focus on issues about the development of philosophical and scientific thought which are raised by or in the work of such as Bernoulli, Descartes, Galileo, Kant, Leibniz, Maclaurin, Priestly, Schelling, Vico. Apart from the initial bio-bibliographical piece (...) and those by Robert Butts and Michael Power, they do not discuss Buchdahl or his ideas in any systematic, lengthy, or detailed way. But they are collected under a title which alludes to the book, Metaphysics and the Philosophy of Science: The Classical Origins, Descartes to Kant (1969), which is central in the corpus of his work, and deal with the period and some of the topics with which that book deals. (shrink)

This article contributes to the historiography of scientific objectivity as well as to the broader attempt to historicize basic epistemic categories by examining the case of empirical psychology in eighteenth-century Germany. From the time when the philosopher Christian Wolff first presented empirical psychology in the late 1720s until Kantian philosophers elaborated on the topic towards the end of the century, the discourse hinged on discussions of how to obtain scientific knowledge of the soul. Whereas the work of (...) Wolff and his followers reflected established epistemic techniques for accomplishing this, from the early 1770s philosophers highlighted a new category of difficulties connected to the development of a systematic method of psychological self-observations. These difficulties, I argue, both complement and complicate the picture of how the subject became an obstacle to knowledge first in the mid-nineteenth century. (shrink)

This article focuses on Francis Hutcheson'sReflections Upon Laughter, which was originally published in 1725 as a series of three letters toThe Dublin Journalduring his time in the city. Although rarely considered a significant example of Hutcheson's published work,Reflections Upon Laughterhas long been recognised in the philosophy of laughter as a foundational contribution to the ‘incongruity theory’ – one of the ‘big three’ theories of laughter, and that which is still considered the most credible by modern theorists. The article gives an (...) account of Hutcheson's text but, rather than evaluating it solely as an explanation of laughter, the approach taken is an historical one: it emphasises the need to reconnect the theory to the cultural and intellectual contexts in which it was published and to identify the significance of Hutcheson's arguments in time and place. Through this, the article argues that Hutcheson's theory of laughter is indicative of the perceived significance of human risibility in early eighteenth-century Britain and Ireland and, more broadly, that it contributed both to moral philosophical debate and polite conduct guidance. (shrink)

In many eighteenth‐century agricultural texts, peasants were depicted as an impediment to agrarian improvement, superstitious and resistant to novelty. That was the stereotype one often encountered, in any case, in more programmatic writing about agriculture from this period. A closer look at the era's technical literature tells a more complicated story, however. Much as traveling European naturalists relied on local intermediaries in far corners of the globe, elite agricultural improvers back home relied on local rural knowledge as they (...) drafted a new technical literature on farming. This article looks at Jacob Guyer (also known as Kleinjogg), a Swiss farmer who became an enlightened celebrity after the Zurich doctor Hans Caspar Hirzel published a biography of him in 1761. Hirzel called Kleinjogg a “philosophical farmer”; the article explores the implications of this title, and examines the various ways that elite eighteenth‐century authors used contact with rural people and direct experience of farming as a source of authority. (shrink)

While a clear distinction was drawn between “classical learning” and “modern science” at Oxford and Cambridge Universities in the early nineteenth century, we see no such contrast being made in other spaces of knowledge making, such as the Manchester Literary and Philosophical Society. Drawing on Bacon's insistence that his inductive method should apply across all fields of knowledge, early members of the Society interpreted “science” as referring to any systematic inquiry utilising an empirical approach. An investigation of the (...) ways in which classical authors were used within the researches of early members of the Society raises important questions about how we should think about empirical method and scientific research in early nineteenth–century England. Frequently understood as primarily engaged in researching natural knowledge, the members of the Manchester Society concerned themselves with a wide range of subjects across all branches of knowledge. Crucially, classical authors were drawn upon as sources of empirical evidence across all types of inquiry, from investigations into the colours of opaque bodies to the origins of party feeling. It is possible to identify a common approach – “history as empirical method”, which, this article suggests, was developed from Bacon's call for a “just story of learning”. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:Women and Philosophy in Eighteenth-Century Germany ed. by Corey W. DyckJulia BorcherdingCorey W. Dyck, editor. Women and Philosophy in Eighteenth-Century Germany. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2021. Pp. 272. Hardback, $85.00.In more ways than one, this volume constitutes an important contribution to ongoing efforts to reconfigure and enrich our existing philosophical canon and to question the narratives that have led to its current shape. (...) To start, while there is a growing amount of research dedicated to recovering the contributions of women to early modern philosophy, much of this work focuses on the seventeenth century, and geographically centers on England, France, and Italy. By turning the spotlight on eighteenth-century Germany, this volume broadens the scope of these efforts in an important way. Further, with the historiography of this period still shaped by a long-standing dismissive treatment of post-Leibnizian German philosophy and by the long shadow cast by the success of Kant's Critical philosophy, which eclipsed many of the thinkers opposed to it, challenges to its traditional narratives seem especially important. The editor's earlier collection (coedited with Falk Wunderlich) on Kant and his German contemporaries already succeeded in mounting such a challenge by showing that German philosophy throughout the eighteenth century in fact presents us with an extraordinarily rich tableau of intellectual life (Kant and His German Contemporaries. Vol. 1: Logic, Mind, Epistemology, Science and Ethics [Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2018]).The present volume stands as a further valuable contribution to relativizing the still dominant narrative of German philosophy as the story of a select few brilliant minds. It successfully dispenses not only with the idea that those minds were few, but also with the equally persistent one that they were exclusively male. Already in the nineteenth century, we find historians such as Karl Joël explicitly casting the new age of German philosophy inaugurated by Kant as its "masculine epoch"—an image undoubtedly furthered by its main protagonist, who cast philosophical acumen in decidedly male terms when he observed that "[a] woman who has a head full of Greek, like Madame Dacier, or one who engages in debate about the intricacies of mechanics, like the Marquise du Châtelet, might just as well have a beard; for that expresses in a more recognizable form the profundity for which she strives" (Karl Joël, Die Frauen in der Philosophie [Hamburg, 1896], 48; Immanuel Kant, Beobachtungen über das Gefühl des Schönen und Erhabenen [Königsberg, 1764], translation in Londa Schiebinger, The Mind Has No Sex? Women in the Origins of Modern Science [Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1989], 146; both cited in Eileen O'Neill, "Disappearing Ink: Early Modern Women Philosophers and Their Fate in History," in Philosophy in a Feminist [End Page 154] Voice: Critiques and Reconstructions, ed. Janet A. Kourany [Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1997], 17–62). Yet as the contributions to this volume forcefully illustrate, women in the period did—in spite of the numerous severe social, religious, and political obstacles they faced—in fact manage to gain access to its intellectual sphere, and actively shaped its philosophical landscape.While the papers collected here are of high quality throughout, they do vary in their approach. Many chapters, especially in the earlier parts of the volume, investigate female figures as philosophers in their own right, and carve out their self-standing contributions to prominent philosophical movements and debates. Focusing on Sophie of Hanover's correspondence with Leibniz, Christian Leduc's chapter begins by examining her metaphysical views and argues, against standing interpretations, that her main aim is to defend a version of the doctrine of physical influence as an account of mind-body interaction while rejecting metaphysical commitments regarding the nature of the soul in favor of a more agnostic, Lockean empiricist approach. In chapter 3, Stefanie Buchenau shows how women engaging with Wolffian Schulphilosophie began to view themselves as more than teachers and translators and started to claim the title of philosophers. Using the example of Johanna Charlotte Unzer, Buchenau convincingly argues that despite the "feminine," aesthetic garb of her thought, Unzer in fact offers a serious critique and revision of the Wolffian model of... (shrink)

Contents Acknowledgements vii Illustrations ix Preface xi Further Bibliography of A.C. Crombie xiii 1 Designed in the Mind: Western visions of Science, Nature and Humankind 1 2 The Western Experience of Scientific Objectivity 13 3 Historical Perceptions of Medieval Science 31 4 Robert Grosseteste 39 5 Roger Bacon [with J.D. North] 51 6 Infinite Power and the Laws of Nature: A Medieval Speculation 67 7 Experimental Science and the Rational Artist in Early Modern Europe 89 8 Mathematics and Platonism (...) in the Sixteenth-Century Italian Universities and in Jesuit Educational Policy 115 9 Sources of Galileo Galilei’s Early Natural Philosophy 149 10 The Jesuits and Galileo’s Ideas of Science and of Nature [with A. Carugo] 165 11 Galileo and the Art of Rhetoric [with A. Carugo] 231 12 Galileo Galilei: A Philosophical Symbol 257 13 Alexandre Koyré and Great Britain: Galileo and Mersenne 263 14 Marin Mersenne and the Origins of Language 275 15 Le Corps à la Renaissance: Theories of Perceiver and Perceived in Hearing 291 16 Expectation, Modelling and Assent in the History of Optics: i, Alhazen and the Medieval Tradition; ii, Kepler and Descartes 301 17 Contingent Expectation and Uncertain Choice: Historical Contexts of Arguments from Probabilities 357 18 P.-L. Moreau de Maupertuis, F.R.S. : Précurseur du Transformisme 407 19 The Public and Private Faces of Charles Darwin 429 20 The Language of Science 439 21 Some Historical Questions about Disease 443 22 Historians and the Scientific Revolution 451 23 The Origins of Western Science 465 Appendix to Chapter 10: 479 Sources and Dates of Galileos Writings [with A. Carugo] Pietro Redondi, Galileo eretico [with A. Carugo] Mario Biagioli, Galileo, Courtier Corrections to Science, Optics and Music in Medieval and Early Modern Thought 495 Index 497. (shrink)

The empiricism of eighteenth-century experimental science meant that the development of scientific instruments influenced the formulation of new concepts; a two-way process for new theory also affected instrument design. This relationship between concept and instrumentation will be examined by tracing the development of electrical instruments and theory during this period. The different functions fulfilled by these devices will also be discussed. Empiricism was especially important in such a new field of research as electricity, for it gave rise to (...) phenomena that could not have been predicted by theory alone. However, the interpretation of these phenomena, and what the natural philosopher thought he observed, were often unconsciously determined by current ideas and attitudes; the interaction between instrumentally induced phenomena and observation was more complex than was realized at the time. The shortcomings of this empirical approach will be discussed. In the case of electricity this became increasingly apparent during the latter part of the century. The many discoveries had to be placed in a unifying framework before new advances could be made. Instruments, however, continued to play an important role in scientific progress, for they made visible what was hidden in nature. (shrink)

HISTORIANS of psychology are almost unanimously agreed on one point: that psychology is a relatively new science. There may be some disagreement as to when it started--with Weber, or Fechner, or Wundt, or James--but there is almost no dissent from the proposition that psychology as a scientific discipline is less than one and one-half centuries old. Many earlier writers are often discussed in histories of psychology, but invariably they are called speculators, or philosophers, as opposed to scientists. We believe that (...) this is an incorrect appraisal of the career of psychological research. To demonstrate our point, we propose to show how one key psychological idea from Descartes' work has had an extensive and robust scientific history. If it is true that this Cartesian idea has had great influence in science, then many claims concerning the history of psychology will need to be reconsidered. Not everything which happened in psychology prior to the nineteenth century was speculative, nor is everything which happened later scientific. Even more importantly, if Descartes' idea has been of such central concern to several hundred years of research, it must be treated as an important claim about the way the world is, as a law of nature. (shrink)

The ArgumentThe question posed by this paper is why the Russian autocracy failed to pursue successfully Peter the Great's conscious policy of creating a society dominated by technique and competitive with technological levels achieved by Western Europe. The brief answer is that Peter's idea of a cultural revolution that would create new values and institutions hospitable to the introduction of technology clashed with powerful interests within society. The political opposition centered around three groups which were indispensable to the state in (...) fulfilling his vision: the nobility, the clergy, and the scientific establishment. Peter's original intention was to combine theoretical models and technology transfer from the West with educational reforms in Russia to produce new cadres of technical specialists. He attempted to adapt the Leibniz-Wolff cosmology to Russian conditions in order to reconcile ideological conflicts between military service and technical training, science and religion, theory and practice. The embodiment of his ideas in Russian science and religion were Mikhail Lomonosov and Feofan Prokopovich. Under his successors Peter's supporters encountered increased resistance: from the nobility to technical education, from the clergy to the scientific outlook, and from the Academy of Sciences to practical work. All three interest groups were willing to sacrifice real political rights for a recognition by the states of their autonomy to define their social roles. In the end the compromise was effected at the expense of Peter's ideal of the society dominated by technique. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:96 HISTORY OF PHILOSOPHY the other hand, he tried like Ramsay to distinguish the "all being" of God from nature; he emphasized the doctrine of final causes and of God's "excellence" as man's chief end. It is possible that Edwards's enigmatic sermon on the Trinity may have been stimulated by Ramsay's speculation on this subject, though this is a mere guess. In any case, Ramsay must have made (...) Edwards aware of Berkeley, without converting him to the kind of pluralistic metaphysics which both Ramsay and Berkeley represent. Quite apart from the historical questions of influence and contacts among philosophers, Ramsay's work is a significant event in the history of ideas; it brings to direct collision the two extremes of the Enlightenment. It brings to life in the imagination of a reader today the basic philosophical issues of the eighteenth century and it makes them relevant to those aspects of the old problems that are central issues today. HERBERTW. SCHNEIDER Claremont, Cali/ornia THE ORIGINS OF MARXISM Interest in the philosophical origins of Marxism is currently so widespread as to constitute something of an intellectual phenomenon in its own right. That it denotes a shift of attention away from Marx's own emphasis on human prax~ as the cure for useless metaphysical agonies, the authors here under review would not deny. A tendency to see Marxism as an historicalphenomenon--thus applying to it the criterion of judgment inherent in Marx's own critique of his predecessors -is common to them all.Such an approach is proper to a postrevolutionary age, though this description may seem oddly chosen in view of the continuing turmoil that surrounds us. To describe the present age as postrevolutionary is after all to say no more than was implied by those nineteenth-century writers who looked back upon the French Revolution. If our situation today is similar, it does not follow that we are about to enter calmer waters, though for all one knows the East-West antagonism may gradually come to resemble the rather undramatic tension which characterized Anglo-French relations during the earlier part of the Victorian era. The Russian Revolution might then at last appear as a closed chapter, and Marx himself as its Rousseau: the philosopher of one particular historic upheaval whose consequences have now been absorbed. Such an attitude presupposes that one is not unduly concerned with the intellectual claims of Soviet Marxism but treats it as the ideology of a society which has not yet acquired a self-critical understanding of its own myths. This would be quite in tune with Marx's own approach, though hardly with the Leninist belief that the Russian Revolution represents the start of a new epoch: that of consciousness raised to the level of global reconstruction. For to say that the Bolsheviks, like the Jacobins before them, unwittingly prepared the way for a new exploitative society is to say that the enterprise was a failure. At the same time, recognition of this fact validates the Marxian insight into the peculiar NOTES AND DISCUSSIONS 97 mechanism whereby history has hitherto managed to accomplish its real aims. Thus the critical, or "revisionist," Marxist is able to have it both ways. What prevents the writers under review from taking this easy way out is their concern with the philosophical origins of Marxism. If Marx had been content, like Weber and Pareto, to analyze the mechanism whereby society renews itself from time to time, his position would be unassailable, but by the same token he would simply be another scholar. The perennial interest of Marxism springs from that "union of theory and practice" of which Marx himself was the first and greatest exemplar. No one who has felt the spell of the Theses on Feuerbach or the Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts can fail to inquire whether these writings may not outlast the dissolution of the scholastic system constructed by Engels and the epigoni. To say this is not to range oneself on the side of romanticism in its current quasi-anarchist form, which plainly corresponds to a loss of interest in politics. It is simply to acknowledge that thinking people will go on asking... (shrink)

A new genre of treatises on practical seamanship emerged in eighteenth-century Britain. Authored by a group of seamen with decades of experience on the lower deck of merchant and naval vessels, these texts represented the ship as a machine, and seamanship as a form of mechanical experiment which could only be carried out by deep-sea sailors. However, as this article finds, this group of sailor–authors had only a brief moment of authoritative legitimacy before their ideas were repackaged and (...) promoted by land-bound authors and naval officers, and the progenitors of the ‘science of seamanship’ were deemed unfit participants in its ongoing practice. This article explores this brief moment, taking seriously the ideas and influences of the maritime milieu which spawned it, and arguing that the codification and circulation of ‘useful knowledge’ in eighteenth-century Britain often hardened social hierarchies. Examining seamanship forces us to question the progressivist linear trajectory of an increasingly open scientific culture during this period, and to focus instead on a repeating pattern in which the working knowledge of labourers and artisans was appropriated and its original practitioners denigrated. (shrink)

The human sciences—including psychology, anthropology, and social theory—are widely held to have been born during the eighteenth century. This first full-length, English-language study of the Enlightenment sciences of humans explores the sources, context, and effects of this major intellectual development. The book argues that the most fundamental inspiration for the Enlightenment was the scientific revolution of the seventeenth century. Natural philosophers from Copernicus to Newton had created a magisterial science of nature based on the realization that the (...) physical world operated according to orderly, discoverable laws. Eighteenth-century thinkers sought to cap this achievement with a science of _human_ nature. Belief in the existence of laws governing human will and emotion; social change; and politics, economics, and medicine suffused the writings of such disparate figures as Hume, Kant, and Adam Smith and formed the basis of the new sciences. A work of remarkable cross-disciplinary scholarship, this volume illuminates the origins of the human sciences and offers a new view of the Enlightenment that highlights the period's subtle social theory, awareness of ambiguity, and sympathy for historical and cultural difference. (shrink)

The long eighteenth century is a crucial period in the history of ethics, when our moral relations to God, ourselves and others were minutely examined and our duties, rights and virtues systematically and powerfully presented. Colin Heydt charts the history of practical morality - what we ought to do and to be - from the 1670s, when practical ethics arising from Protestant natural law gained an institutional foothold in England, to early British responses to the French Revolution around (...) 1790. He examines the conventional philosophical positions concerning the content of morality, and utilizes those conventions to reinterpret the work of key figures including Locke, Hume, and Smith. Situating these positions in their thematic and historical contexts, he shows how studying them challenges our assumptions about the originality, intended audience, and aims of philosophical argument during this period. His rich and readable book will appeal to a range of scholars and students. (shrink)

In this paper, I analyze a momentous change in eighteenth century French life sciences. Whereas in the first half of the century the conception of natural history as the systematic collection of facts had been most successful, at mid-century a new approach emerged. This approach was characterized by an accent on general philosophical themes rather than on observation and experiment. I study the grounds and features of this historical shift through the work of Maupertuis, who (...) published papers in institutional (or Baconian) natural history in his early years, but then adopted a more speculative approach to the life sciences. (shrink)

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)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:In Search of the Sense and the Senses:Aesthetic Education in Germany and the United StatesAlexandra Kertz-Welzel (bio)The dream that art is able to humanize human beings is very old. One person fascinated by this idea claimed:The creative artist educates and perfects through his work the nation's capacity for appreciation, just as conversely the general feeling for art thus developed and sustained creates the fruitful soil which is the condition (...) for the birth, the growth, and the activity of creative forces.1The author asserted that art has educational power and is able to improve appreciation as well as activate creative energy. Art is a way to transform the individual through its aesthetic power.Although these ideas sound similar to some approaches in arts education, this quotation does not represent the ideas of an art educator or a music educator. It is a quotation from one of the most powerful and most dangerous believers in the transforming power of art and music, in particular—Adolf Hitler (1889-1945). His ideology matched perfectly with the ideas of German music education in the 1930s, and therefore music education was a significant part of the school curriculum during the Third Reich. One of the most tempting ideas for music educators is the claim that music is capable of transforming human beings and their society.The idea of the educational power of music starts at least with Plato. Since the 1950s, aesthetic education has emphasized the aesthetic value and educational power of music. The German and the American concepts of aesthetic education are significantly different, but as a result of historical developments, they also share some similarities.The main intent of this paper is to analyze crucial issues of aesthetic education that exist in Germany and the United States. By comparing the two approaches, some core issues of music education will also be revealed in terms of idealistic dreams that are intent on making the world a better place [End Page 102] through music. This leads to some interesting insights concerning the significance but also the ambiguity of art for societies.The Roots: Ancient Greece, Schiller, and Holistic DreamsThe origin of the term aesthetics can be found in the Greek word aisthesis, which means perception through the senses.2 This meaning of aisthesis is originally not related to art. It concerns all kinds of sensations through seeing, hearing, touching, smelling, and tasting. In Greek philosophy, aisthesis as a way of experiencing the world through the senses is opposite to cognition in terms of an intellectual way of realization, the theoria. But given that art is something one can perceive through the various senses, aisthesis also concerns art.Most theories of aesthetic education refer to the ancient Greek idea of music, the musiké, which is a unity of music, dance, and literature. Plato emphasized the educational power of music and its effects on character development: "Musical training is a more potent instrument than any other, because rhythm and harmony find their way into the inward places of the soul.... "3 Since music is so powerful, the correct use and the correct kind of music are important. According to Plato, art is a way to learn about truth and ideas through beauty. But art is also dangerous, because the senses "lie" and art is only an imitation of truth. For Plato, the senses are not as clear as the intellect.Plato's concerns about the ambivalence of sensorial perception are typical for the way aisthesis and aesthetics have been understood throughout the history of philosophy. The tension between a "true" intellectual approach to knowledge and an inferior approach through the senses is one aspect of the well-known mind-body dichotomy.During the eighteenth century, the era of enlightenment, Alexander Baumgarten (1714-62) introduced the term aesthesis into the philosophical discussion.4 In his book Aesthetica (published in 1750), he attempted to justify sensorial perception and emotions as a unique way of understanding the world. Baumgarten was not interested in the arts at all and tried to establish aesthetics as the science of sensuous cognition in order to improve the sensuous capacity for cognition. Immanuel Kant (1724-1804) was the... (shrink)

_A groundbreaking study of the development of form in eighteenth-century aesthetics_ In this original work, Abigail Zitin proposes a new history of the development of form as a concept in and for aesthetics. Her account substitutes women and artisans for the proverbial man of taste, asserting them as central figures in the rise of aesthetics as a field of philosophical inquiry in eighteenth-century Europe. She shows how the idea of formal abstraction so central to conceptions (...) of beauty in this period emerges from the way practitioners think about craft and skill across the domestic, industrial, and so-called high arts. Zitin elegantly maps the complex connections among aesthetics, form, and formalism, drawing out the understated presence of practice in the writings of major eighteenth-century thinkers including Locke, Addison, Burke, and Kant. This new take on an old story ultimately challenges readers to reconsider form and why it matters. (shrink)

More than a century after Guido Adler's appointment to the first chair in musicology at the University of Vienna, Music, Criticism, and the Challenge of History provides a first look at the discipline in this earliest period, and at the ideological dilemmas and methodological anxieties that characterized it upon its institutionalization. Author Kevin Karnes contends that some of the most vital questions surrounding musicology's disciplinary identities today-the relationship between musicology and criticism, the role of the subject in analysis and (...) the narration of history, and the responsibilities of the scholar to the listening public-originate in these conflicted and largely forgotten beginnings. Karnes lays bare the nature of music study in the late nineteenth century through insightful readings of long-overlooked contributions by three of musicology's foremost pioneers-Adler, Eduard Hanslick, and Heinrich Schenker. Shaped as much by the skeptical pronouncements of the likes of Nietzsche and Wagner as it was by progressivist ideologies of scientific positivism, the new discipline comprised an array of oft-contested and intensely personal visions of music study, its value, and its future. Karnes introduces readers to a Hanslick who rejected the call of positivist scholarship and dedicated himself to penning an avowedly subjective history of Viennese musical life. He argues that Schenker's analytical experiments had roots in a Wagner-inspired search for a critical alternative to Adler's style-obsessed scholarship. And he illuminates Adler's determined response to Nietzsche's warnings about the vitality of artistic and cultural life in an increasingly scientific age. Through sophisticated and meticulous presentation, Music, Criticism, and the Challenge of History demonstrates that the new discipline of musicology was inextricably tied in with the cultural discourse of its time. (shrink)

A comprehensive study of German materialism in the second half of the nineteenth century is long overdue. Among contemporary historians the mere passing references to Karl Vogt, Jacob Moleschott, and Ludwig Buchner as materialists and popularizers of science are hardly sufficient, for few individuals influenced public opinion in nineteenth-century Germany more than these men. Buchner, for example, revealed his awareness of the historical significance of his Kraft und Stoff in comments made in 1872, just seventeen years after its (...) original appearance. A philosophical book which has undergone twelve big German editions in the short span of seventeen years, which further has been issued in non-German countries and languages about fifteen to sixteen times in the same period, and whose appearance (although its author was entirely unknown up to then) has called forth an almost unprecedented storm in the press,... such a book can be nothing ordinary; the world-calling it enjoys at present must be justified through its wholly special characteristics or by the merits of its form and content. ' Vogt, Moleschott and Buchner explicitly held that their materialism was founded on natural science. But other materialists of the nineteenth century also laid claim to the scientific character of their own thought. It is likely that Marx and Engels would have permitted their brand of materialism to have been called scientific, provided, of course, that 'scientific' was understood in their dialectical meaning of the term. Socialism, Engels maintained, had become a science with Marx. (shrink)

There is proposed the analysis of conceptual foundations in researching of Poles’ national character on materials of Julian Leopold Ochorowicz (1850-1917) scientific heritage connected with philosophical and pedagogical implications of his ideas. Ochorowicz’s contribution to interdisciplinary approach on Poles’ national character is emphasizing. The heuristically potential of this approach is explicated using reconstruction and systemizing of his views, which had played a significant role in determining intentionality in discussions on the matter «What philosophy do Poles need?” for the successful (...) self-statement in their national being. Critically evaluating of this experience there is combined with verifying of his theoretical assumptions that should be actual also in Ukrainian social and cultural contexts. Ochorowicz belongs to the group of outstanding Polish scholars with wide scientific interests and original achievements. This article presents his research on history perceived as a collective psychological process. In Poland, Ochorowicz should be regarded as a precursor of psychohistory. An important role in his conception is played by the theory of the so-called residual symptoms, on the basis of which he developed the concept of Poles’ national character with its educational implications. The question about the rudiments of our national character sharpens in border situations, in which those traits, previously presented in a declarative form, are verified. The strength of a nation is encoded in the irreal sphere, i.e. in the sphere of values around which people group themselves. (shrink)

SUMMARYEighteenth-century scientific translation was not just a linguistic or intellectual affair. It included numerous material aspects requiring a social organization to marshal the indispensable human and non-human actors. Paratexts and actors' correspondences provide a good observatory to get information about aspects such as shipments and routes, processes of translation and language acquisition, texts acquisition and dissemination.The nature of scientific translation changed in France during the second half of the eighteenth century. Beside solitary translators, it also happened to (...) become a collective enterprise, dedicated to providing abridgements or enriching the learned journals with full translations of the most recent foreign texts. That new trend clearly had a decisive influence on the nature of the scientific press itself. A way to set up science as a social activity in the provincial capital of Dijon, translation required a local and international network for acquiring the linguistic and scientific expertise, along with the original texts, as quickly as possible. Laboratory results and mineralogical observations were used to compare material facts with those described in the original text. By providing a double kind of validation – with both the experiments and the translations – the laboratory thus happened to play a major role in translation. (shrink)

ArgumentThis essay explores how and why women involved themselves in the sciences in eighteenth-century Italy. Using the case study of Diamante Medaglia Faini, a poet who attempted to become a mathematician, it argues that the image of the woman natural philosopher was shaped by the visible presence of woman in scientific institutions in the mid-eighteenth century and by the tradition of popular scientific writing, best embodied in the works of Bernard le Bovier de Fontenelle and Francesco (...) Algarotti, that made the woman natural philosopher an important literary protagonist. Becoming a scientist, in other words, was both a reality and a fiction. The tensions between these two different images shaped the terrain in which women pursued science. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:A View on the Future of an International Philosophy of Music Education:A Plea for a Comparative StrategyFrede V. NielsenIn the preface to the revised edition of my book, Almen musikdidaktik (The General Didaktik of Music) published in 1998, I wrote that the bibliography had been supplemented with a great deal of music education literature that had been published since the first edition of the book came out in 1994. (...) I drew attention in particular to, among other things, the journal Philosophy of Music Education Review, which began in 1993. I found that publication of this journal was significant and interesting not least because it continuously supplemented the approach to a theoretical and philosophic music pedagogical reflection with new English language literature. At the same time, it provided an opportunity to ask what sort of concepts and phenomena 'the philosophy of music education' and 'the philosophy of music teaching and learning' really are and what sort of functions they can have in relation to practice-oriented music education, including the education of music teachers. Therefore, the publication of PMER was a great step forward. But, like all such steps, it also revealed interesting issues and raised new questions. [End Page 7]In the Scandinavian countries too the research-based and theory-oriented music education literature has grown considerably since the early 1990s. This is the result of local initiatives in individual countries as well as Nordic cooperation in the form of the Nordic Network for Research in Music Education, which was formalized and institutionalized in 1992. The publication of the network's yearbooks, Nordic Research in Music Education–Yearbook, since 1995 is noteworthy in this context. In our part of the world this was another step forward, but one that also raised some challenging questions. In particular it gave rise to the question: What is the structure of the object of study for music education as a science and how can this object of study be delimited appropriately in relation to other disciplines? I think we have moved further toward giving reflected and well-founded answers to these questions, even though the answers are not unambiguous and may create problems in relation to the institutional affiliations of music pedagogy as a theoretical and scientific discipline.My first encounter with the initiators of the PME symposia took place in 2003 when I attended PME-5 in Lake Forest near Chicago. Even though there were participants from a number of different countries, including the Scandinavian countries (but none, for example, from Germany), it was clear that the event was dominated by North Americans. I contributed with a paper that was based on German and Nordic didactic (didactological) theory, which apparently was quite unfamiliar to most of the conference participants. To me this was a reminder of how important it is that a society that calls itself "international" should strive to embrace and include various traditions from several different points of view if it is to live up to the designation "international."The International Society for the Philosophy of Music Education (ISPME) was formally founded at the symposium in Lake Forest. For the past two years I have enjoyed the honor of being the society's co-chair together with Estelle Jorgensen. As those of you who attended the symposium in 2003 know, I accepted this task only after some hesitation and with some reservations. Since then I have had the opportunity to consider and experience what the task entails.I mentioned that my impression of PME-5 in Lake Forest was that it was dominated by North Americans. This was no wonder, since PME-5 took place in that part of the world. Moreover, the initiative behind the PME symposia originally came from the USA and Canada. Nonetheless, it gave impetus to a broader international orientation when the ISPME was founded two years ago.I come from a Scandinavian country. Scandinavia is a small language area situated in the northernmost region of Europe and has historically been very dependent on external cultural impulses. For centuries these have not least come from continental Europe and this is also true of the fields of education, philosophy, and music culture. The French and... (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Aesthetics and Humean Aesthetic Norms in the Novels of Jane AustenEva M. Dadlez (bio)IntroductionThe eighteenth century, Paul Oskar Kristeller tells us, in addition to crystallizing what we now call the fine arts, is also marked by an increased lay interest both in the arts and in criticism.1 Amateurs as well as philosophers ventured critical commentary on the arts. Talk concerning taste or beauty or the sublime was (...) so much a part of general discourse that even novelists of that era incorporated such subjects in their work. Henry Fielding "was able to construct a novel on the true and false sublime in art," according to Samuel Monk, "and to draw an analogy between the sublime in art and the sublime in character."2 So we shouldn't find it surprising that perspectives on aesthetics are sometimes presented in the novels of Jane Austen.3 This subject matter ranges from descriptions of skill in the execution and sensitivity in the appreciation of particular arts to general observations about beauty and taste and what is requisite for the apprehension of the former and the possession of the latter.Consider the following catalog of arts and beauties. Mansfield Park, Sense and Sensibility, and Northanger Abbey contain many references to the beauties of nature, both cultivated and wild. Taste in music is a topic in Persuasion, Mansfield Park, Pride and Prejudice, and Lady Susan. A taste for poetry and literature is the lot of the heroines of Persuasion, Northanger Abbey, Mansfield Park, and Sense and Sensibility. Taste and talent for drawing is exhibited by characters in Sense and Sensibility, Emma, and Northanger Abbey. Both Sense and Sensibility and Mansfield Park contain discussions of the merits of effective reading, that is, reading well aloud. Mansfield Park even comments on [End Page 46] acting ability, albeit rather disapprovingly. More general reflections on taste and beauty, as well as their connection to morality, are equally typical.It is possible to venture several different arguments about the philosophical perspective into which such observations best fit. Kantian analyses have already been ventured in the literature. Anne Crippen Ruderman calls our attention to the Kantian flavor of the connection Austen draws between a sensitivity to natural beauty and one's moral disposition, for instance, and David Kaufman compares Austen to Kant, though primarily in regard to ethics.4 Nonetheless, in this article I will argue that the strongest correlations and correspondences are in fact between Austen's and Hume's positions on aesthetics. Evidence in support of a Kantian analysis will first be canvassed and later compared with claims in favor of a Humean alternative.I will establish that the positions on taste and beauty and delicacy that are explicitly stated in or can be inferred from Austen's novels fit a Humean model—and fit it with a fair degree of precision. In doing so, I hope to demonstrate a correspondence strong enough to serve as the staging area for the further speculations that constitute the second thesis of this article. A great deal has already been said by philosophers about the capacity of literature to elicit moral reactions from the reader. Fictions can present ethical endorsements and invite us to adopt ethical perspectives by making it true in the world of the work that some course of action is right or some character is laudable. They can do this not by telling us that an act is right or a person meritorious but by showing us the rightness of the action and the commendability of the individual—by asking us to imagine traits that call forth our own approval and commendation. I will contend that aesthetic norms can be treated in much the same way as moral norms. That is, I will claim that the fiction of Jane Austen, in addition to evidencing the conscription of a Humean aesthetic, so engages and educates us that we are led imaginatively to adopt certain aesthetic perspectives in the course of its contemplation: not just by being told what is aesthetically pleasing or commendable, but by being made to feel pleasure and to experience commendation; not just by being told what constitutes discriminating taste, but by being led... (shrink)

v. 1. The history of philosophy and science from ancient times to the present day -- v. 2. The origin of the mental capacities and dispositions of man and their normal, abnormal and supernormal manifestations.

These essays were originally presented at the first of an annual series of seminars in the humanities at John Hopkins. To avoid imposing an artificial unity on the subject, the contributors were deliberately left unguided in their choice of subject and method. The result of this policy is a rich and stimulating collection ranging from gardens to musicology. Reproductions of paintings and copious printings of musical scores show that no expense was spared to make the book as useful as possible. (...) Of greatest interest to philosophers are George Boas's witty demolition of "the age of reason" as a description for the period, J. A. Passmore on "the malleability of man," Isaiah Berlin's long reconsideration of Herder, Alfred Cobban on "the Enlightenment and the French Revolution," and Henry Guerlac on Newton's place in intellectual history.—W. B. K. (shrink)

The contributors to this new philosophi­cal and historical examination of Vico, Herder, Schiller, and Goethe are Karl J. Fink, James W. Marchand, Harry Ritter, K. Michael Seibt, and David R. Ste­venson. Their essays and commentary address the question why this generation represent­ed by its great minds suddenly discov­ered science—a question posed previ­ously but only tentatively explored. Taken together, the essayists reveal significant new insights into the roles of language, imagination, intuition, em­pathy, modes of perception, and indiv­idualism in scientific creativity and (...) pro­vide important new contributions to the history of arts and sciences. (shrink)

The Enlightenment regarded language as one of the most significant achievements of man. Consequently inquiries into the origin and development of language play a central role in eighteenth-century moral philosophy. This new science of man consciously adopts the method of analysis and synthesis used in the natural sciences of the time. In moral philosophy, analysis corresponds to the search for the basic principles of human nature. Synthesis is identified with the attempt to interpret all artificial achievements of (...) man (arts, sciences and institutions) as the effect of these principles and of man's physical and social environment - an attempt known as theoretical history. The type of explanation envisaged by theoretical historians is based on the principle of causality. It consists in a genetic reconstruction of the social phenomenon under investigation. Inquiries into the origin of language follow this pattern of explanation. They form part of theoretical history and thus represent a major aspect of the eighteenth-century scientific study of man. (shrink)

This volume contains two major manuscript notebooks of Jonathan Edwards—"Natural Philosophy" and "The Mind"—as well as a number of shorter manuscript writings connected with his scientific interests and philosophical development. Several of the shorter papers have not previously been published, notably Edwards’ letter on the "flying" spider, an essay on light rays, and a brief but important set of philosophical notes written near the end of his life. Wherever possible the works have been newly transcribed from manuscript originals. (...) Wallace Anderson has collected, edited, and presented them here in a thoroughly authentic and readable text. Each of the major works in this volume and each group of related writings are preceded by detailed discussion of manuscript sources and dates. In his introduction Anderson makes these the basis for a revised account of the chronology of Edwards’ early writings and a deeper investigation of their biographical and historical context. Also included in the introduction are a new appraisal of Edwards’ efforts and achievements in science and an analysis of the developmental of his philosophical views. Anderson concludes from his research that Edwards was an enthusiastic, though untrained, investigator in the Newtonian tradition and that he grappled with the major metaphysical problems raised by this tradition. The papers reveal with special clarity the fertile and inquiring mind of our leading eighteenth-century philosopher-theologian. _Wallace E. Anderson_ is associate professor of philosophy at Ohio State University. (shrink)

The structural abstract discusses the features of modern post-non-classical scientific discourse, according to which all kinds of scientific and religious knowledge are simplified mental construction of a complex objective reality. All accumulated religious knowledge is a combination of various theoretical models of divine reality, the performance of which was checked by centuries of experience of mystical connection with the Lord. According to the requirements of scientific and religious discourse on incompleteness of knowledge, all religious texts of the Bible, the Koran, (...) the Torah, etc. are not carriers of absolutely probable knowledge. The sacred reality they describe is far more complex. The structural abstract reveals the originality of the subject and object of religious narration and the special nature of the mystical fact. The empirical basis of Christian knowledge is the books of the Old and New Testaments, which set the initial basis of Christian knowledge. The array of interpretations of sacred knowledge, accumulated over two thousand years of the Christianity development, it constitutes the main volume in the system of Christian knowledge. Christian theology provides a comprehensive understanding of Christian doctrine and its historical development. A special role is played by mystical knowledge-management-experiencing, the knowledge of God in the structure of Christian knowledge. The peculiarity of knowledgemanagement-experiencing determines that it comes directly from God. Theology can be achieved in the course of many years of practical work of an ascetic. The mystical side of knowledge-management is the experience of a direct connection with the Lord, which is difficult to convey in words. Secret knowledge-management exists only in real time in the existential reality of sacred experience. The structural abstract distinguishes two types of metaphysical knowledge – Western and Eastern metaphysics. Western metaphysics is considered to be the universal, most developed type of philosophical rational knowledge, the main goal of which is to develop a theoretical model of the fundamental reality, what is the God. It is reasonable to call Eastern metaphysics the metaphysics of the Path originating in the middle of the first millennium BC in India (Brahmanism, Buddhism, Jainism, etc.) and China (Taoism). Orthodoxy is the Christian version of the metaphysics of the Path, while Sufism is in Islam. Everything is subordinated to the liberation of the ascetic from worldly desires and the achievement of a mystical connection with God in Eastern metaphysics. The metaphysics of the Path includes three components – theoretical construction of the God, difficult practical actions (the Path) and the secret knowledge-management of the God, which are considered in inseparable unity. The Orthodox version of the metaphysics of the Path is one of the most developed in Eastern metaphysics.The texts of Western and Eastern metaphysics differ considerably. The works of Western metaphysicians appeal to the human mind and are predominantly speculative. The writings of Eastern metaphysicians try to reproduce the mental reality of the Path of merit of Enlightenment to a large extent. If rational knowledge of the fundamental foundations of the universe prevails in Western metaphysics, then Orthodox metaphysics is guided by the desire to enter the mystical space of divine reality. (shrink)

This work has been selected by scholars as being culturally important, and is part of the knowledge base of civilization as we know it. This work was reproduced from the original artifact, and remains as true to the original work as possible. Therefore, you will see the original copyright references, library stamps (as most of these works have been housed in our most important libraries around the world), and other notations in the work.This work is in the public domain in (...) the United States of America, and possibly other nations. Within the United States, you may freely copy and distribute this work, as no entity (individual or corporate) has a copyright on the body of the work.As a reproduction of a historical artifact, this work may contain missing or blurred pages, poor pictures, errant marks, etc. Scholars believe, and we concur, that this work is important enough to be preserved, reproduced, and made generally available to the public. We appreciate your support of the preservation process, and thank you for being an important part of keeping this knowledge alive and relevant. (shrink)

In eighteenth-century France, scientific progress and its spreading met a growing interest among public, an enthusiasm that was to be reflected in literature. Fictional works including scientific knowledge in their narrative made their appearance, paving the ground for a genre promised to a growing success in the following centuries—science fiction. The article presents three eighteenth-century French literary works, each one centered on a different domain of science: Voltaire’s Micromégas, Charles-François Tiphaigne’s Amilec, or the Seeds of Mankind (...) and François-Félix Nogaret’s The Mirror of Current Events, or Beauty to the Highest Bidder. The first one, an iconic Enlightenment work that promotes critical thinking, relies on discoveries made in astronomy and optics. Tiphaigne de la Roche is far from sharing the fame of Voltaire, but his odd Amilec is noteworthy as it is possibly the very first science-fiction work in which biology is central. Written in the unique atmosphere of the French revolution, Nogaret’s work The Mirror of Current Events depicts androids-like interacting with humans. Our purpose is to show that these works were a precursor of the science fiction genre in literature, to describe how and what science or technology was depicted in them, and how they influenced the view of Man in eighteenth-century France. (shrink)

ArgumentThis article addresses the doctrinal controversy over the various characterizations of irritability and sensibility. In the middle of the eighteenth century, this scientific debate involved some encyclopaedist physicians, Albrecht von Haller (1709–1777), Jean-Jacques Ménuret de Chambaud (1733–1815), and Théophile de Bordeu (1722–1776). The doctor from Bern described irritability as an experimental property of the muscle fibers and made it the basis of a neo-mechanism in which organic reactions are related to the degree of irritation of the fibers. The (...) practitioners from Montpellier considered sensibility, a property of living matter, to be a spontaneous activity of the organ and developed around this notion an original conception of the organism as the sum of the specific lives of each part. Beyond conceptual divergences, two ways of thinking whose philosophical presuppositions (conception of living matter, mechanism, and organicism), were in opposition, while their epistemological principles (experience versus observation) and their medical practices (active medicine and expectant medicine) went on to evolve in different directions. The privileged place granted to experimentation and assessment enabled physiology to be articulated as an autonomous scientific discipline; the pre-eminence of observation and attention to the radical specificity of the living being constituted the bases of clinical medicine. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Journal of the History of Ideas 63.2 (2002) 207-224 [Access article in PDF] Atomism, Atheism, and the Spontaneous Generation of Human Beings: The Debate over a Natural Origin of the First Humans in Seventeenth-Century Britain Matthew R. Goodrum The problem of human origins, of how and when the first humans appeared in the world, has been addressed in a variety of ways in western thought. In the (...) seventeenth century the predominant explanation for the origin of the world and the beings that inhabit it, especially human beings, was based on the biblical account of creation. It was almost universally accepted that humans had been created by a supernatural agent using supernatural means. But alternative explanations for the production of the first humans did exist, according to which the first humans were produced by nature through some form of spontaneous generation. Seventeenth-century proponents of this view differed in their conceptions of how spontaneous generation worked, but all relied heavily upon mechanisms first proposed in antiquity. Some followed the example of Aristotle and other early Greek philosophers, who had described how matter, when subjected to the correct conditions, could produce living beings. 1 Others were influenced by the modifications made to these ideas by medieval Islamic philosophers. 2 [End Page 207] A quite different conception of spontaneous generation was derived from the classical atomists, in part from certain notions attributed to Democritus of Abdera but mainly from the philosophical system of Epicurus.While any suggestion that humans might have originated naturally by some kind of spontaneous generation was widely and vigorously rejected by natural philosophers and theologians alike, the most vehement attacks were often directed against the atomists' accounts of the origin of the first humans. The reasons for this were both scientific and religious. Atomism had long been criticized for its materialism, its reliance on chance, and its atheistic tendencies. Thus, the efforts of a small number of natural philosophers to formulate and support a naturalistic explanation of human origins based upon its principles was bound to raise profound theological, philosophical, and scientific difficulties. To these natural philosophers, however, atomism seemed to offer a viable mechanism to explain spontaneous generation. Yet while atomism solved some problems, it raised others; and even if these scientific objections could be overcome, there remained religious objections to both the notion of a natural origin of humans and the atomists' account of the process that had to be addressed. Complicating matters further is the fact that these scientific and religious objections were sometimes intimately connected.This paper investigates the mechanisms proposed by atomists to explain the spontaneous generation of human beings and the kinds of criticisms their hypotheses received in seventeenth-century Britain. This will illuminate a number of interconnected issues relating to the acceptance of atomism as a philosophy of nature and its application to the biological sciences. By analyzing the ways scientific and religious factors interacted in the debate over the spontaneous generation of the first humans we will not only make a contribution to the history of seventeenth-century atomism but also link problems and ideas in the physical sciences with those in the biological and anthropological sciences. At the same time this study illustrates the ways in which scientific ideas were shaped by, or needed to respond to, ideas and concerns that had their roots in religion. Atomism and the Generation of the First Humans The most complete account of the atomic philosophy and the mechanisms it proposed to account for the origin of human beings to survive from antiquity was Lucretius's De rerum natura. Several editions of the text were available during the seventeenth century, including one published at Cambridge in 1675 and an English translation by Thomas Creech that went through four editions [End Page 208] between 1682 and 1699. 3 But Lucretius was not the only source describing the atomists' ideas about the spontaneous generation of the first humans. A more contemporary and perhaps more influential proponent of the atomic... (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:The Cult of Nothingness: The Philosophers and the BuddhaA. J. NicholsonRoger-Pol Droit. The Cult of Nothingness: The Philosophers and the Buddha. Translated by David Streight and Pamela Vohnson. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2003. Pp. xii + 263.Roger-Pol Droit's recently translated study, The Cult of Nothingness: The Philosophers and the Buddha, is not a book about Buddhism per se. Rather, it is a rich and theoretically (...) sophisticated overview of the reception of Buddhism in Europe that deserves shelf space alongside Wilhelm Halbfass' India and Europe and Raymond Schwab's The Oriental Renaissance. But while some of the figures Droit covers may be familiar from these other studies in the history of orientalism, Droit's book has its own unique narrative thread. Specifically, Droit wishes to examine the once widespread notion that Buddhism is a nihilistic religion, a religion that worships nothingness. His central thesis is that this conception of a nihilistic religion really wasn't about Buddhism at all, but "that Europe... was speaking only of herself." Droit sees in the cult of nothingness the subconscious expression of a crisis of foundations among nineteenth-century European intellectuals, as well as a "hidden laboratory for the theoretical development of European nihilism."Along the way to illustrating this thesis, Droit leads a masterful and extremely entertaining tour of the opinions of early Buddhologists and Eastward-looking philosophers, some of whom have seldom been documented elsewhere. He also provides an enormous bibliography of European writings on Buddhism from 1638 to 1890. In the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, the Buddha was often identified as one of many gods belonging to an inchoate and primitive world of mythical concordances. Thus, George Stanley Farber wrote in 1816 that "the primeval Buddha... is the same as Vishnu, or Shiva, or Osiris." Writers in this genre were especially fond of identifying the Buddha with the god Mercury. The sole reason, it seems, was simple linguistic confusion-the word for the planet Mercury in Sanskrit is budha, one letter short of buddha. Furthermore, the preeminent Indologist Sir William Jones posited the identity of the Norse god Woden and Buddha; this was later taken up by A. W. Schlegel in his Indische Bibliothek, and eventually influenced the publication of such unforgettable titles as Holmboe's Traces du Buddhisme en Norvège avant l'introduction du Christianisme. Jones elsewhere hinted that the Buddha might have been of Ethiopian, rather than Indian origin, and this set off another wave of speculation. To reconcile theories of a primordial god named Buddha with new evidence that the Buddha had been a man who had lived at a relatively recent date, for a short time a theory of two Buddhas emerged, first suggested by Antione Augustin Giorgi, and later taken up by Jones himself.Droit sees Hegel as the single figure most responsible for establishing the link between Buddhism and nothingness that endured in the nineteenth-century philosophical imagination. Droit painstakingly charts Hegel's changing attitudes toward Buddhism over the course of his lectures from 1822 to 1831. In spite of, or perhaps because of, Hegel's familiarity with all of the most recent secondary works on Buddhism, he had great difficulty in integrating Buddhism into his philosophical grand [End Page 577] narrative. But his most enduring interpretation of Buddhism came in 1827, when he asserted that for Buddhism, "Saintliness consists in man uniting himself with God, with nothingness, with the absolute in this destruction, in this silence.... Man must make himself nothing." Hegel did not get this idea from his contemporaries, but from an earlier stratum of writing on Buddhism, that of seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Jesuit missionaries. After this portrayal of Buddhism became prevalent in European philosophical circles, an extraordinary debate developed. The notion of a religion that worships nothingness was so contrary to common sense that it threatened the Enlightenment conviction that there existed a single, universal human nature. Jules Barthélmy Saint-Hilaire summed it up quite clearly: "In the presence of a phenomenon so curious and so deplorable... one might ask... if, in those climates where life is so horrific and nothingness is worshiped instead of God, human nature is... (shrink)

The interpretation of Parmenides’ Περί Φύσεως is a fascinating topic to which philosophers, historians of philosophy and scientists have dedicated many studies along the history of Western thought. The aim of this paper is to present the reading of Parmenides’s work offered by Federigo Enriques. It is based on several original theses: (1) Parmenides was the discoverer of abstract geometry; (2) his critics was addressed against the Pythagoreans rather than against Heraclitus; (3) Parmenides discovered and applied the contradiction and the (...) third excluded principles in the context of his research on foundation of geometry; (4) Parmenides’s metaphysical and physical conceptions have their bases in his speculation on geometry; (5) Parmenides used the principle of sufficient reason. Enriques’s reading is worth being expounded and discussed within the historical, philosophical and scientific context in which it is inserted. Since Enriques’s ideas are not widely known and discussed, my research has the purpose to fill this gap. The article also aims to provide elements to illustrate the discussion on Parmenides in the first half of the last century. (shrink)

This is an abridged, paperback edition of Peter le Huray and James Day's invaluable anthology of writings concerned with the role of music in eighteenth- and early-nineteenth-century aesthetics. This volume retains all the most important and significant items from the original hardcover edition. Over fifty writers are represented here, including such major figures as Rousseau, Kant, Schlegel, Schopenhauer and Hegel, and the useful introductions and biographical details of the original are also retained. The aesthetic literature of the period (...) is profuse but this carefully edited volume offers a balanced selection which illuminates the ways people experienced music and how they came to an understanding in particular of the new music of their day. (shrink)

The selections in this anthology provide original sources for an understanding of the development of American thought and society. The central theme of the book deals with the impact of modern science and scientific method upon thinkers from the time of Edwards to that of Dewey. Some philosophers responded by trying to limit the scope of science in order to protect their threatened moral and religious beliefs. Others tried to use science and scientific method to restructure common sense, theology, metaphysics, (...) morals, and even society itself. This volume presents the many diverse reactions, including the transcendentalism of Emerson, the pragmatism of Charles Peirce and William James, and the naturalism of Santayana and Dewey. Because the philosophers of this period felt that contemporary cultural issues were as much the province of philosophy as abstract theoretical questions, several selections reflect the impact of science on other areas of civilization, including religion, morals, law, education, and politics.Although the anthology focuses on leading American philosophers from the eighteenth century to the mid-twentieth century, selections from Locke, Coleridge, and Spencer are also included because American thinkers have been profoundly influenced by their European masters and contemporaries. Professor White has provided a general preface and concise introductions on each of the philosophers represented. The anthology may be read independently or in conjunction with the editor’s SCIENCE AND SENTIMENT IN AMERICA: Philosophical Thought from Jonathan Edwards to John Dewey – Publisher. (shrink)

Philosophy is cosmopolitan and immune to the influence of the idea of nation; it does not depend on some specific linguistic heritage, and, anyway, tends to be in contrast to the various nationalisms. Nevertheless, in front of the crisis of the very idea of national identity, not only the Ueberweg dedicates an entire volume to the Italian philosophy of the Eighteenth century, but also he reconstructs it on a regional level, following the catchment areas of the single universities, (...) academies and scientific societies as a unit of measurement. The volume shows the usefulness of joining the approach of the philosophical history of philosophy, the traditional history of philosophy, together with the historical history of philosophy, according to the interdisciplinary method of survey developed by the history of ideas yesterday and by the intellectual history today. (shrink)

Science and the History of the Sciences. Conceptual Innovations Through Historicizing Science in the Eighteenth Century. The historical reconstruction of science is linked to philosophical discussions of the eighteenth century in many ways. The historiography of philosophy and the historiography of science share the conceptual problem to assemble the multitude of scientific and philosophical practices under general concepts. The historical analysis of scientific progress offers a clue by problematizing definitions of “science” and “sciences” as (...) well as the system of sciences as a whole. By analyzing these conceptual problems and the typology of historical enterprises of the eighteenth century, this paper will discuss the close interrelations which existed between philosophical and historical discourses of eighteenth‐century reflection on science. (shrink)

Available from UMI in association with The British Library. ;This study of David Hume suggests that the unity of his thought is to be found more in an attitude of mind than in a precise body of epistemological statements. His 'mitigated scepticism' was the original combination of an experimental approach with a searching mind and a rather disenchanted attitude towards the attainment of perfection in knowledge and in the practical world. But my thesis addresses these questions only implicitly. The general (...) picture of the Humean approach to things political and philosophical is depicted against the background of a close examination of two other themes: Hume's development towards a more 'popular' philosophy and the philosophical import of his moral and political theory. The first subject is studied through an analysis of the formal qualities of Hume's philosophical writings; the second, through a discussion of Hume's position on the origin of justice and government and one's obligation to them. The conclusion that my thesis tentatively advances is that both in metaphysics and politics Hume's approach is based upon the attainment of a state of equilibrium between theoretical and practical considerations, and between sceptical and naturalistic tendencies. Hume's desire for balance can only be understood within the intellectual context of eighteenth century thought. This is the reason for the considerable attention that the thesis devotes to the reconstruction of the historical setting within which Hume's thought developed. However, when correctly interpreted, Hume's ideas clearly have a contribution to make to an understanding of a world which is very different from his own. (shrink)