This volume collects contributions from leading scholars of early modern philosophy from a wide variety of philosophical and geographic backgrounds. The distinguished contributors offer very different, competing approaches to the history of philosophy.Many chapters articulate new, detailed methods of doing history of philosophy. These present conflicting visions of the history of philosophy as an autonomous sub-discipline of professional philosophy. Several other chapters offer new approaches to integrating history into one's (...) philosophy by re-telling the history of recent philosophy. A number of chapters explore the relationship between history of philosophy and history of science.Among the topics discussed and debated in the volume are: the status of the principle of charity; the nature of reading texts; the role of historiography within the history of philosophy; the nature of establishing proper context. (shrink)

The Renaissance has a peculiar status in philosophical historiography: it tends to disappear from the dominant narrative-as Charles Schmitt famously noticed-but it also resurfaces unexpectedly in marginal reception histories. This book casts light on intellectual constellations or geographical areas, which have traditionally been considered peripheral to the emergence of the Renaissance. The case studies presented in the book explore philosophical historiography as a political practice, showing how, in times of cultural crisis or change, the scholarly rediscovery of the Renaissance often (...) served to develop or legitimise an ideal of social, religious or moral reform. Driven by personal concerns and political choices, historiography is revealed as an act of dissent against mainstream reconstructions. (shrink)

The ‘model approach’ facilitates a quantitative-oriented study of conceptual changes in large corpora. This paper implements the ‘model approach’ to investigate the erosion of the traditional art-nature distinction in early modern natural philosophy. I argue that a condition for this transformation has to be located in the late scholastic conception of final causation. I design a conceptual model to capture the art-nature distinction and formulate a working hypothesis about its early modern fate. I test my (...) hypothesis on a selected corpus of 25 works published in the Dutch academic milieu between 1607 and 1748. I analyse the corpus through a procedure based on concordancing of keywords associated with the model. I argue that the results obtained constitute a successful pilot study for the implementation of the model approach on larger scale research. (shrink)

This Encyclopedia offers a fresh, integrated and creative perspective on the formation and foundations of philosophy and science in European modernity. Combining careful contextual reconstruction with arguments from traditional philosophy, the book examines methodological dimensions, breaks down traditional oppositions such as rationalism vs. empiricism, calls attention to gender issues, to ‘insiders and outsiders’, minor figures in philosophy, and underground movements, among many other topics. In addition, and in line with important recent transformations in the fields of (...) class='Hi'>history of science and early modern philosophy, the volume recognizes the specificity and significance of early modern science and discusses important developments including issues of historiography (such as historical epistemology), the interplay between the material culture and modes of knowledge, expert knowledge and craft knowledge. This book stands at the crossroads of different disciplines and combines their approaches – particularly the history of science, the history of philosophy, contemporary philosophy of science, and intellectual and cultural history. It brings together over 100 philosophers, historians of science, historians of mathematics, and medicine offering a comprehensive view of early modern philosophy and the sciences. It combines and discusses recent results from two very active fields: early modern philosophy and the history of (early modern) science. (shrink)

The History of Western Philosophy of Religion brings together an international team of over 100 leading scholars to provide authoritative exposition of how history's most important philosophical thinkers - from antiquity to the present day - have sought to analyse the concepts and tenets central to Western religious belief, especially Christianity. Divided chronologically into five volumes, The History of Western Philosophy of Religion is designed to be accessible to a wide range of readers, from the (...) scholar looking for original insight and the latest research findings to the student wishing for a masterly encapsulation of a particular philosopher's views. Together these volumes provide an indispensable resource for anyone conducting research or teaching in the philosophy of religion and related fields, such as theology, religious studies, the history of philosophy, and the history of ideas. Volume 3 covers the early modern period which witnessed a revolution in science and natural philosophy that swept away two millennia of Aristotelian certainty in a human-centred universe. Covering some of the most important figures in the history of Western thought - notably Descartes, Locke, Hume and Kant - Early Modern Philosophy of Religion charts the philosophical understanding of religion at a time of intellectual and spiritual revolution. (shrink)

Philosophical texts of the early modern era in which sanctions were imposed on those who entertained deviating views require a particular hermeneutical approach: According to Leo Strauss the interpreter's task is to uncover their esoteric messages. The contributions both address the methodological problems of Strauss's hermeneutics and discuss paradigmatic cases of candidates for a reading between the lines: Hobbes, Spinoza, and Bayle.".

This volume collects contributions from leading scholars of early modern philosophy from a wide variety of philosophical and geographic backgrounds. The distinguished contributors offer very different, competing approaches to the history of philosophy.

Oxford Studies in Early Modern Philosophy is an annual series, presenting a selection of the best current work in the history of early modern philosophy. It focuses on the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries--the extraordinary period of intellectual flourishing that begins, very roughly, with Descartes and his contemporaries and ends with Kant. It also publishes papers on thinkers or movements outside of that framework, provided they are important in illuminating early modern thought. (...) The articles in OSEMP will be of importance to specialists within the discipline, but the editors also intend that they should appeal to a larger audience of philosophers, intellectual historians, and others who are interested in the development of modern thought. (shrink)

Oxford Studies in Early Modern Philosophy presents a selection of the best current work in the history of early modern philosophy. It focuses on the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries--the extraordinary period of intellectual flourishing that begins, very roughly, with Descartes and his contemporaries and ends with Kant.

while no one was looking, contextualism replaced rational reconstructionism as the dominant methodology among English-speaking early modern historians of philosophy. In this paper, I expose the contours of this silent revolution, show that rational reconstructionism is a thing of the past among early modern historians, and examine the current state of early modern scholarship.1 As the contextualist revolution has increasingly widened our perspective and revealed the period’s philosophical diversity, it has encouraged early (...) modernists to develop new skills and expertise. I propose here that current early modern historians are devoted to maximize... (shrink)

Oxford Studies in Early Modern Philosophy is an annual series, presenting a selection of the best current work in the history of early modern philosophy. It focuses on the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries—the extraordinary period of intellectual flourishing that begins, roughly, with Descartes and his contemporaries and ends with Kant. It also publishes work on thinkers or movements outside of that framework, provided they are important in illuminating early modern thought. The (...) core of the subject matter is philosophy and its history. But the volume’s chapters reflect the fact that philosophy in the early modern period was much broader in scope than it is currently taken to be and included a great deal of what now belongs to the natural sciences. Furthermore, philosophy in the period was closely connected with other disciplines, such as theology, law, and medicine, and with larger questions of social, political, and religious history. Volume XI includes chapters dedicated to a wide set of topics in the philosophies of René Descartes, Johann Clauberg, Louis de La Forge, Benedict Spinoza, Margaret Cavendish, Henry More, Ralph Cudworth, Mary Astell, and Damaris Masham. (shrink)

After a spate of monographs on Pierre Gassendi in the mid-1990s, the scholarly discussion of this most difficult French philosopher has largely been confined to the pages of scholarly journals. Except for Sylie Taussig's fine translation of Gassendi's Latin letters into French, and an issue of Dix-septième siècle devoted to the thinker, no major book-length study has appeared. Antonia LoLordo fills this gap in Pierre Gassendi and the Birth of Early Modern Philosophy. Her aim is "defamiliarizing the (...) early modern philosophic landscape" by introducing Gassendi as a major player in a diverse topography of thought. In her analysis, LoLordo articulates and critiques the philosophic content of Gassendi's various works, as well as challenging the interpretations of some of his modern exegetes, most notably, O. R. Bloch and Margaret J. Osler.LoLordo focuses on Gassendi's natural philosophy, epistemology, and ontology. Her contention that Gassendi "was a central figure in seventeenth-century philosophy" will come as no surprise to those familiar with the course of early modern philosophy. LoLordo systematically treats Gassendi's major and minor works, especially his early anti. (shrink)

Oxford Studies in Early Modern Philosophy presents a selection of the best current work in the history of early modern philosophy. It focuses on the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries -- the extraordinary period of intellectual flourishing that begins, very roughly, with Descartes and his contemporaries and ends with Kant.

In this book, Martin Lenz provides the first reconstruction of intersubjective accounts of the mind in early modern philosophy. Some phenomena are easily recognised as social or interactive: certain dances, forms of work and rituals require interaction to come into being or count as valid. But what about mental states, such as thoughts, volitions, or emotions? Do our minds also depend on other minds? The idea that our minds are intersubjective or social seems to be a recent (...) one, developed mainly in the 19th and 20th centuries against the individualism of early modern philosophers. By contrast, this book argues that well-known early modern philosophers often started from the idea that minds are intersubjective. How then does a mind depend on the minds of others? Early modern philosophers are well known to have developed a number of theories designed to explain how we cognize external objects. What is hardly recognized is that early modern philosophers also addressed the problem of how our cognition is influenced by other minds. This book provides a historical and rational reconstruction of three central, but different, early modern accounts of the influence that minds exert on one another: Spinoza's metaphysical model, Locke's linguistic model, and Hume's medical model. Showing for each model of mental interaction (1) why it was developed, (2) how it construes mind-mind relations, and (3) what view of the mind it suggests, this book aims at uncovering a crucial part of the unwritten history of intersubjectivity in the philosophy of mind. (shrink)

Oxford Studies in Early Modern Philosophy presents selection of the best current work in the history of early modern philosophy. It focuses on the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries—the extraordinary period of intellectual flourishing that begins, very roughly, with Descartes and his contemporaries and ends with Kant.

This book explores how far some leading philosophers, from Montaigne to Hume, used Academic Scepticism to build their own brand of scepticism or took it as its main sceptical target. The book offers a detailed view of the main modern key figures, including Sanches, Charron, La Mothe Le Vayer, Bacon, Gassendi, Descartes, Malebranche, Pascal, Foucher, Huet, and Bayle. In addition, it provides a comprehensive assessment of the role of Academic Scepticism in Early Modern philosophy and a (...) complete survey of the period. As a whole, the book offers a basis for a new, balanced assessment of the role played by scepticism in both its forms. Since Richard Popkin's works, there has been considerable interest in the role played by Pyrrhonian Scepticism in Early Modern Philosophy. Comparatively, Academic Scepticism was much neglected by scholars, despite some scattered important contributions. Furthermore, a general assessment of the presence of Academic Scepticism in Early Modern Philosophy is lacking. This book fills the void. (shrink)

The long-accepted interpretation of the history of modern philosophy is that, beginning with Descartes, philosophers explicitly took the data of consciousness as their epistemic foundation. Descartes supposedly held that the mind always thinks and that consciousness is an necessary to thought. Unsatisfied with this doctrine, Leibniz and Locke modified this view of the conscious nature of thought. The former introduced the concept of unconscious thought with petites perceptions, the latter argued that while thought is conscious, the mind (...) does not always think. The mind-body distinction Descartes is to have introduced, with which later seventeenth- and eighteenth-century philosophers allegedly struggled, is between what is conscious and what is not conscious. The various conceptions of consciousness integral to this history are assumed not to differ from one another to any interesting extent. ;A purpose of this study is to question this understanding of modern views of consciousness. I contend that there is evidence that conventional reading of the history of the concept of consciousness in modern philosophy is unacceptable. Its simplicity obscures the richness and complexity of the various conceptions of consciousness and their roles in modern philosophy. ;The standard view provides no analysis of the early modern concept of consciousness. The present study comprises primarily an analysis of a work which was supposed by its author to be the first effort at an account of consciousness in Western philosophy. Thus this study is the beginning of an attempt to place the development of modern views of consciousness in its historical context. Though its results are schematic and incomplete, they do include grounds for taking the possibility that a 1728 author's claim to present the first systematic treatment of consciousness to be a reasonable possibility. (shrink)

Alan Stewart - Francis Bacon and the Transformation of Early-Modern Philosophy - Journal of the History of Philosophy 40:4 Journal of the History of Philosophy 40.4 542-543 Book Review Francis Bacon and the Transformation of Early-Modern Philosophy Stephen Gaukroger. Francis Bacon and the Transformation of Early-Modern Philosophy. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2001. Pp. xii + 249. Cloth, $59.95. Paper, $21.95. In Stephen Gaukroger's new study, Francis Bacon (...) is lauded all too familiarly as the inaugurator of "the transformation of philosophy into science, and philosophers into scientists" . But it's far from the old story: Gaukroger sees Bacon not as progenitor of the Scientific Revolution or revered Father of Modern Science, but as launching "the first systematic, comprehensive attempt to transform the early-modern.. (shrink)

This paper argues that early modern experimental philosophy emerged as the dominant member of a pair of methods in natural philosophy, the speculative versus the experimental, and that this pairing derives from an overarching distinction between speculative and operative philosophy that can be ultimately traced back to Aristotle. The paper examines the traditional classification of natural philosophy as a speculative discipline from the Stagirite to the seventeenth century; medieval and early modern attempts (...) to articulate a scientia experimentalis; and the tensions in the classification of natural magic and mechanics that led to the introduction of an operative part of natural philosophy in the writings of Francis Bacon and John Johnston. The paper concludes with a summary of the salient discontinuities between the experimental/speculative distinction of the mid-seventeenth century and its predecessors and a statement of the developments that led to the ascendance of experimental philosophy from the 1660s. (shrink)

This volume contains essays that examine infinity in early modern philosophy. The essays not only consider the ways that key figures viewed the concept. They also detail how these different beliefs about infinity influenced major philosophical systems throughout the era. These domains include mathematics, metaphysics, epistemology, ethics, science, and theology. Coverage begins with an introduction that outlines the overall importance of infinity to early modern philosophy. It then moves from a general background of infinity (...) up through Kant. Readers will learn about the place of infinity in the writings of key early modern thinkers. The contributors profile the work of Descartes, Spinoza, Leibniz, and Kant. Debates over infinity significantly influenced philosophical discussion regarding the human condition and the extent and limits of human knowledge. Questions about the infinity of space, for instance, helped lead to the introduction of a heliocentric solar system as well as the discovery of calculus. This volume offers readers an insightful look into all this and more. It provides a broad perspective that will help advance the present state of knowledge on this important but often overlooked topic. (shrink)

Margaret J. Osler - Early Modern Philosophy: Mind, Matter, and Metaphysics - Journal of the History of Philosophy 44:3 Journal of the History of Philosophy 44.3 478-479 Christia Mercer and Eileen O'Neill, editors. Early Modern Philosophy: Mind, Matter, and Metaphysics. New York: Oxford University Press, 2005. Pp. xxi + 298. Cloth, $55.00. The editors of this collection of essays by the late Margaret Wilson's former students and colleagues present this book (...) "as a snapshot of state-of-the-art history of early modern philosophy" . Many of the usual suspects make an appearance in these pages: Descartes, Spinoza, Locke, Berkeley, Malebranche, and Kant. A couple of new faces also come on stage: Damaris Cudworth , best known as Locke's companion but presented here as a philosopher in her own right, and the Cartesian Bernard le Bouvier de.. (shrink)

Oxford Studies in Early Modern Philosophy presents a selection of the best current work in the history of early modern philosophy. It focuses on the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries—the extraordinary period of intellectual flourishing that begins, very roughly, with Descartes and his contemporaries and ends with Kant.

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:Socializing Minds: Intersubjectivity in Early Modern Philosophy by Martin LenzBenjamin HillMartin Lenz. Socializing Minds: Intersubjectivity in Early Modern Philosophy. New York: Oxford University Press, 2022. Pp. 272. Hardback, $80.00.What Lenz proposes in this book is nothing short of revolutionary: rejecting the hegemony of individualistic interpretations of early modern philosophies of mind and replacing (some of) them with intersubjectivist interpretations. It (...) is a brash but intriguing thesis.According to Lenz, the hegemonic character of early modern individualism results from a “Rylean” historiography, namely, interpretative approaches assuming that “mentalism” (that mind is characterized in opposition to physical behavior) entails individualism (that minds develop independently of other minds). To counteract this, Lenz aims to show how three canonical figures—Spinoza, Locke, and Hume—held strong intersubjective accounts of the mind despite being mentalists. They came to recognize, argues Lenz, that there was a “contact problem” (3) between mentalistic minds, and they used intersubjective principles [End Page 665] to resolve this contact problem. Thus, because of the intersubjectivist ways they addressed the contact problem, they should be interpreted as intersubjectivists about the mind (3–6).Lenz identifies all three philosophers as intersubjectivists. But because each resolved the contact problem in different ways, each offered a different model of intersubjectivity. Spinoza offered a “metaphysical model” (9) that sees interactions between minds arising from their contrary natures. Locke offered a “linguistic model” (9) that sees interactions between minds happening through language, which is “socially determined.” Finally, Hume offered a “medical model” (9) that sees mental states as sympathetically shared between minds (9). Lenz claims he chose these three authors because they “provide the ‘clearest’ accounts by beginning to work toward a solution to the ‘contact problem’ without already having one at hand.... [Thus,] I wish to present the chosen authors as case studies of the proposed models. Roughly put, all three authors encountered a theory of ideas that they must have thought needed revision so as to accommodate the interaction of minds” (13). The real challenge, then, for Lenz is to defend his attribution of these models of intersubjectivity to Spinoza, Locke, and Hume, respectively.In the Ethics, says Lenz, Spinoza confronted a peculiar form of the contact problem. Human minds contain prejudices, unfounded assumptions, and superstitions. Humans are largely ignorant of, if not mistaken about, the causes of these unfortunate beliefs and ideas. Many of these causes lie outside of us, and some of them even lie within other minds. These connections with other minds arise because the causes of ideas are themselves ideas and because human minds, being nothing more than bundles of ideas, are complex ideas themselves. Therefore, many of our ideas and beliefs come from other minds. But the situation for Spinoza is even more peculiar, according to Lenz. In some cases, the ideas and beliefs that come into one’s mind are the mistaken beliefs of another mind. So, Spinoza’s mind-mind interactions determine ideas by literally sharing ideas—in other words, by one mind placing its ideas into another mind. Thus, the question “how can those minds come into contact in order to determine and share ideas” is Spinoza’s version of the contact problem. Spinoza’s answer, says Lenz, involves the conatus of ideas. (Because minds have a conatus and minds are nothing but complex ideas, all individual ideas have their own conatus, argues Lenz.) The conatus of an idea is its will to affirm the existence of its object. Minds interact through the struggle of contrary conatus to affirm the existence of their objects. Because this struggle is a metaphysically dynamic event, rather than a merely logical one, Spinoza’s intersubjectivism takes the form of a metaphysical model. As a result, the holism of ideas that Spinoza develops is an intersubjective holism, what Lenz calls an “ecosystem of ideas” (77).Lenz sees Locke’s contact problem as arising from his “essence agnosticism” (101) (the idea that real essences are cognitively inaccessible). This essence agnosticism cuts Locke off from Aristotle’s answer for why we share cognitive content about substance ideas (viz. that our concepts derive from the same essences being contained in external objects). Because of this, says Lenz, Locke saw... (shrink)

Not long ago, historians of philosophy realized with some excitement the canonical texts of the early modern period could be rendered increasingly intelligible if they were read not as discussing a series of atemporal “purely philosophical” questions, but as embedded in the issues raised by contemporaneous events such as the scientific revolution. To take an often-discussed example, it was hoped that, so contextualized, Locke’s notoriously puzzling distinction between primary and secondary qualities would fall into place as an (...) expression of his colleague Boyle’s corpuscularianism. But even so contextualized, Locke’s texts and many others remained puzzling. Part of the problem, we are now learning, is that the very concept of the scientific revolution itself needs to be contextualized. Historians of philosophy relied too heavily on an understanding of the scientific revolution constructed with an eye to our present-day understanding of science which overprivileges the physical sciences and papers over differences flourishing in the early modern period. In The Invisible World, Catherine Wilson, a philosopher, takes matters into her own hands and, through an examination of the history of the microscope, contributes important evidence for the need to enrich our understanding of the nature of science in the period from 1620 to 1720. (shrink)

ABSTRACTThis paper discusses how early modern materialism can be defined and delineated, before turning to a brief survey of the main philosophical resources early modern materialist theories draw on. Subsequently, I discuss competing overall narratives concerning early modern materialism, and conclude with a defence of the controversial view that material soul theories belong to materialism proper.

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Academic Skepticism in Early Modern PhilosophyJosé R. Maia NetoAncient skepticism was more influential in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries than it had ever been before. Thanks to the groundwork of Charles B. Schmitt and Richard H. Popkin on the influence of ancient skepticism in early modern philosophy and to the extensive research that followed their lead, skepticism is now recognized as having played a (...) major role in the rise of modern thought. 1There were two ancient skeptical schools, Academic skepticism and Pyrrhon-ism. Were both equally influential? Until the sixteenth century, Pyrrhonism was scarcely known. Only a few copies of Sextus’s books (the only surviving primary source of ancient Pyrrhonism) have been discovered in medieval libraries. By contrast the main source of Academic skepticism, Cicero’s Aca-demica, was occasionally referred to by medieval authors and was the object of some commentaries and criticism in the Renaissance. 2 Academic skepticism was preserved from the Middle Ages to the Renaissance not only through Cicero’s Academica, but also through Lactantius’s Divinae Institutiones and [End Page 199] Augustine’s Contra Academicos. 3 This situation changed when Sextus’s works were translated to latin and published in 1562 and 1569. Sextus presents a much more complete and detailed account and defense of ancient skepticism than that of Cicero’s Academica. Sextus presents Pyrrhonism as a coherent form of skepticism and Academic skepticism as a kind of negative dogmatism. 4 It was thus natural that the ancient skepticism that fascinated some (and troubled so many) early modern thinkers was mostly Pyrrhonian. Because of the publication of Sextus’s works, according to Schmitt, the increasing influence of Cicero’s Academica in the Renaissance was halted. Sextus’s Hypotyposes and Adversus Mathematicos took the place of Cicero’s Academica and drastically increased the influence of ancient skepticism. 5 The skeptical crisis at the dawn of modern philosophy is called “pyrrhonienne” not “academicienne.”While the appearance of Sextus’s works in Latin turned him and Pyrrhonism into the main source and influence of ancient skepticism in early modern philosophy, further research on the history of skepticism in the period has shown that the role of Cicero’s Academica and of Academic skepticism in general continued to be considerable. First, Cicero’s works were important items in the university curricula. Although Cicero’s works of rhetoric and morals were those more read, the students could certainly learn about Academic skepticism through at least some of them. Second, many editions of De Natura Deorum, a work of Cicero’s in which Academic skepticism is quite central, were published during the seventeenth century. Third, features of Academic skepticism, exhibited above all in Cicero’s Academica, are basic to the skepticism revived in the late Renaissance by Montaigne and Charron; were related to the new science in the first half of the seventeenth century by Gassendi; were used in the anti-Cartesian reaction of the late seventeenth century by Rapin, Huet, Bayle, and above all Foucher; and were radicalized in the eighteenth century by Hume. Despite the Academic features of Montaigne’s, Charron’s, and Gassendi’s skepticisms, it does seem that from the publication of Sextus’s works to the mid-seventeenth century, Academic skepticism was secondary to Pyrrhonism. But the appearance of Descartes and the development of Cartesianism in the second half of the seventeenth century set conditions for a complete revamping of Academic skepticism, bringing about what Schmitt thought was precluded by the appearance of Sextus in the modern scene, namely, a “full flowering of the Academica as a work to inspire new directions of philosophical thought.” 6 [End Page 200]Montaigne’s Apologie pour Raimond Sebond is rightly considered the first major result of the revival of ancient Pyrrhonism in modern thought. 7 Montaigne never cites the name of Sextus nor acknowledges his source and, by contrast, fills his Apology with passages from Cicero on the Academic skeptics. It is clear, however, that Montaigne follows closely Sextus’s Outlines of Pyrrhonism in the central part of the Apology where he gives a detailed and sympathetic exposition of ancient skepticism.After dwelling on the evils and problems arising from knowledge and science, Montaigne... (shrink)

The early modern period in Western philosophy is the source of many of our most powerful and seductive intellectual commitments. While we may disagree with philosophers of this period, the terms of philosophical inquiry and our standards of rational argumentation are in part derived from the work of Descartes, Leibniz, Locke, Berkeley, Hume and Kant. For this reason, we will pursue a rigorous and sustained introduction to this episode of human intellectual history. We will cover topics (...) in Metaphysics, Epistemology and Philosophy of Mind. (shrink)

In recent years historians of science have come to an increasing appreciation of the role played by such moral and affective categories as “trust,” “wonder,” “pedantry,” and “self‐discipline” in the knowledge‐making enterprises of the early modern period. Barbara Benedict's book on curiosity is a most welcome contribution to the literature devoted to such topics. In a lively and entertaining work, Benedict sets out to “analyse literary representations of the way curious people, including scientists, authors, performers, and readers, were (...) engaged in practicing and producing curiosity itself” . The author modestly states at the outset that the work is not, and does not claim to be, a history of science, and indeed as a whole the essay perhaps falls short of the more ambitious promise of the subtitle—“a cultural history of early modern inquiry.” Yet it deals with a subject that is nonetheless of profound importance for historians of seventeenth‐ and eighteenth‐century science.Of particular significance is the way in which the book demonstrates how curiosity and its representations served to demarcate the boundaries of legitimate topics of knowledge and modes of enquiry. The discourse about curiosity thus served to inform central epistemological questions of the period: Is it appropriate to seek all knowledge on all topics, and is it to be sought by all people? If there are areas of knowledge that are illicit, what are they and why are they proscribed? What are the proper methods for the various spheres of knowledge? Benedict carefully articulates the role played by the discourse of curiosity in the sanctioning of some projects and the censuring of others. To take one of the many telling examples found in the book, the protagonist of Thomas Shadwell's Virtuoso is presented as epitomizing the curious impulse, here manifested as a puzzlingly earnest quest for useless knowledge and a strange fascination with base and undignified natural objects. The odd proclivities of this character demonstrate in a forceful way how the new natural philosophy could be regarded as merely an outlet for the intellectual vice of curiosity—and how far the new knowledge‐making enterprises fell short of social approval amongst those whose approbation mattered most. The familiar seventeenth‐century rhetoric of the “usefulness of natural philosophy” was thus in part a response to accusations of curiosity leveled against experimental philosophers. Benedict observes that “early modern literary culture struggled to mold curiosity into forms that would preserve public values” . Apologists for the scientific activities of the Royal Society, in keeping with this goal, sought to depict the quest for natural knowledge as a legitimate expression of a curiosity that had been appropriately disciplined and directed in ways that would contribute to the common good.The book also traces the varying fortunes of curiosity, nicely delineating the reciprocal relations between subjective and objective, between the curious sensibility and curiosities, between wonder and wonders. At times it might have been helpful for the author to have transgressed the self‐imposed limitation of examining literary representations and to have considered some formal accounts of curiosity as they occur in contemporary works of moral psychology in which this human propensity is carefully described and precisely located among the other affections. Without more direct information about the contemporary taxonomy of the affections curiosity too easily shades into wonder, credulity, greed, avarice, and acquisitiveness. In short, the relations of curiosity with its neighboring affections—the subtle transformations of which constituted an integral part of the changing status of curiosity—could perhaps have been more finely drawn. This, however, is a minor issue. Benedict has written a good book on an important topic, not least for historians of science because it clearly shows how the eventual establishment of the social respectability of curious individuals and objects was an essential phase in the legitimation of natural history and natural philosophy. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:Hellenistic and Early Modern PhilosophyChristopher S. CelenzaJon Miller and Brad Inwood, editors. Hellenistic and Early Modern Philosophy. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2003. Pp. xii + 330. Cloth, $60.00.There are at least two ways of writing the history of philosophy: the first and most common among those self-identified as "philosophers" treats philosophers of the past as if they were in live (...) dialogue with the present. Only the text is dissected, studied, and analyzed as the interpreter attempts to reconstruct, examine, and occasionally challenge the arguments under consideration. Practitioners of this first way assume that systematic and seemingly internally coherent styles of thought are most worthy of the name "philosophy." These thinkers believe that the term "philosophy," as Richard Rorty pointed out long ago, has an "honorific" sense: philosophy as such stands above other forms of thought, it is regulative in scope, and it serves as something that examines the conclusions of other, necessarily less rigorous fields. The second way is more explicitly contextualist, seeking to understand what a past thinker may have meant in his own time, what outside factors may have shaped his arguments, and how his thought may be part of broader historical currents that are none the less worthy of being remembered and studied now. Practitioners of this way are more likely to believe that ambiguities or seeming deficiencies of clarity that we find in the work of a past thinker are unlikely to be resolved by hypothetical, propositional reconstruction; rather the ambiguities are apparent to us because we are differently situated, so that the study of history is a more powerful tool in helping us satisfactorily access the work of a past thinker than rationalistic reconstruction. (Full disclosure: I am an advocate of the second way.) This volume presents studies that fall into both of the two camps, as Jerome Schneewind points out in his cogent introduction.The volume has a manifest unity: almost all of the articles are concerned in some way with different Hellenistic schools of thought and the way early modern thinkers used, re-imagined, and interpreted them. The studies are often meticulous and all are stimulating. Anthony Long offers a wonderfully synthetic presentation of ancient Stoicism as a coherent system, after which he examines the way Spinoza, Justus Lipsius, and the eighteenth-century Anglican bishop Joseph Butler measure up; unsurprisingly, they don't measure up that well. Margaret Osler seeks to illuminate the way Gassendi appropriated certain aspects of Epicureanism. Philip Mitsis argues that modern scholarship on Locke has not taken Locke's interest in Cicero's De officiis as a tool for teaching morality seriously. Donald Rutherford studies Leibniz's critique of Stoicism, which "centers," he writes, on their "failure to offer an adequate explanation of the nature of moral progress and of the dependence of human happiness on the hope for such progress" (62-63). Catherine Wilson presents a study of the corpuscular aspect of Epicurean natural philosophy among Leibniz and his contemporaries. Jon Miller eloquently and thoughtfully discusses the way Grotius and Spinoza worked with the natural law theory of the Stoics. Among a number of excellent articles, perhaps the most interesting is Stephen Menn's. Menn makes a compelling case that Descartes's intellectual autobiography in the Discourses may be seen as part of a tradition. In it, the writer presents himself as reaching a moment of dissatisfaction with the intellectual customs with which he has come into contact and as needing to strike off into new directions, unencumbered by the vestiges of those customs. While others, most notably Dan Garber, have shown that, as Menn puts it, "none of Descartes's contemporaries seem to have thought in 1637 that they were witnessing a revolution" (142), Menn's study is striking because it shows the depth of the tradition within which Descartes was working. Next, Gail Fine finds that the Cyrenaics, as presented by Sextus Empiricus, seem to have [End Page 207] endorsed "the view that there are truths, beliefs, and knowledge about the subjective" (214). Steven Nadler seeks to show that there is no mysticism in Spinoza's thought, even though it was not uncommon in Spinoza's own day to... (shrink)

Historians of philosophy are increasingly likely to emphasize the extent to which their work offers a pay‐off for philosophers of un‐historical or anti‐historical inclinations; but this defence is less familiar, and often seems less than self‐evident, to intellectual historians. This article examines this tendency, arguing that such arguments for the instrumental value of historical scholarship in philosophy are often more problematic than they at first appear. Using the relatively familiar case study of René Descartes' reading of his scholastic (...) and Aristotelian contemporaries, the article attempts to problematize this notion of pay‐off from an historian's perspective. (shrink)

In this collection of essays, philosopher Paul Russell addresses major figures and central topics of the history of early modern philosophy. Most of these essays are studies on the philosophy of David Hume, one of the great figures in the history of philosophy. One central theme, connecting many of the essays, concerns Hume's fundamental irreligious intentions. Russell argues that a proper appreciation of the significance of Hume's irreligious concerns, which runs through his whole (...) philosophy, serves to discredit the deeply entrenched framework for understanding Hume - and much of early modern philosophy - in terms of the idea of "British Empiricism". In a substantive introduction, Russell outlines how his various insights overlap and connect to each other. -/- The volume is organized thematically into five sections: metaphysics, free will, ethics, religion, and general interpretations of Hume's philosophy. The collection also features a previously unpublished essay on Hume's atheism and an essay on Adam Smith's views on religion and ethics that has not been previously published in English. -/- Recasting Hume and Early Modern Philosophy presents the reader with Russell's substantial and significant set of interconnected observations and insights on the matters and figures of the greatest importance in early modern philosophy. These essays not only provide different and original perspectives on the subject, they also show that the various issues addressed are very relevant to each other, as well as to a number of major topics in contemporary philosophy. (shrink)

Since antiquity, there had been close ties between imagined movement through built spaces and organising knowledge. Philosophers and rhetorical theorists had argued that one remembered most effectively by imagining a sequence of places, including built spaces, and storing images of what should be recalled in those places. Authors of medieval pilgrimage narratives had led their readers on tours of sacred sites beginning in the twelfth century. From the late fifteenth century, however, imagined movement became more insistently physical and increasingly deployed (...) to communicate, rather than simply store, knowledge: built memory spaces were for the first time categorised according to size; volumes began to present pre-designed memory structures devoted to a particular topic; guidebooks to Rome started to lead readers on tours similar to those of pilgrimage narratives; and university botanic gardens offered the lived equivalent of sequences of memory places. By the seventeenth century, tours with sequences of spaces that stored information were a familiar technique across discourses from natural philosophy to architecture. This article examines the increasing physicality of imagined movement through these spaces and its connection to communicating knowledge as well as to shaping the attitudes of readers. I focus on mnemonic treatises and volumes presenting pre-designed spaces, the books where imagined movement was especially apparent, alongside guidebooks and botanic gardens. Consequently, built memory spaces, which have been little studied, are highlighted, and two rich but usually discrete strands of early modern history are brought together: history of memory and studies of movement through the built environment. (shrink)

This Handbook re-examines the concept of early modern history in a European and global context. Volume II engages with philosophy, science, art and architecture, music, and the Enlightenment, and examines the military and political developments within and beyond the boundaries of Europe.

Oxford Studies in Early Modern Philosophy is an annual series, presenting a selection of the best current work in the history of early modern philosophy. It focuses on the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries -- the extraordinary period of intellectual flourishing that begins, very roughly, with Descartes and his contemporaries and ends with Kant. It also publishes papers on thinkers or movements outside of that framework, provided they are important in illuminating early (...) class='Hi'>modern thought. (shrink)

In early modern science, the struggle between feminine and masculine allegories of science was played out within fixed parameters. Whether science itself was to be considered masculine or feminine, there never was serious debate about the gender of nature, one the one hand, or of the scientist, on the other. From ancient to modern times, nature—the object of scientific study—has been conceived as unquestionably female.5 At the same time, it is abundantly clear that the practitioners of science, (...) scientists, themselves, overwhelmingly have been men.But what about science? What gender was it—as an activity and set of ideals—to have? In one tradition the answer was clear: science was a woman. This tradition, stretching back at least to Boethius’ sixth-century portrayal of Philosophy as a woman, was codified and explained in Cesare Ripa’s Iconologia, the Renaissance bible of iconography.6 In this work, Ripa portrayed each of the sciences as a woman. “Scientia”—knowledge or skill—was portrayed as a woman of serious demeanor, wearing stately robes . “Physica”—physical science—was a goddess with a terrestrial globe at her feet. Geometry was a woman holding a plumb line and compass. Astrology, too, was a woman, dressed in blue, with a crown of stars and wings signifying the elevation of her thoughts to the distant stars. With a compass in her right hand and the celestial sphere in her left, she studied the movement and symmetry of the skies. 5. See Carolyn Merchant, The Death of Nature: Women, Ecology, and the Scientific Revolution .6. Boethius describes female Philosophy as she appeared to him in a dream in his De consolatione philosophiae. See also Cesare Ripa, Iconologia , first illustrated in 1603. Londa Schiebinger is an assistant professor of history at Pennsylvania State University. Her book, “The Mind has no Sex”: Women in the Origins of Modern Science, will be published next spring. (shrink)