History of Western Philosophy

The Rise of Modern Chinese Thought is an abridged translation of the first two of four volumes of 《現代中國思想的興起》 or, transliterated, Xiandai Zhongguo sixiangde xingqi (Beijing: Sanlian Shudian, 2004)...

One of the several good questions asked by Robin Mills in this short but rich book concerns the explanation of change in the intellectual climate of a particular time and place. In mid-seventeenth-...

In contemporary thought, as in the long eighteenth century, the politics of ridicule is split between those who see it as fundamentally uncivil and those who advocate for its emancipatory potential...

The keenly contested debates over the passage from the Middle Ages to modernity have steadily revealed how this transition was itself characterised by tensions and complexities. Narratives and inte...

The contradictions, obscurities, and downright strangeness of the Bible are not fresh discoveries of our own age, as Alison Knight persuasively shows in this compelling study; still less those of “...

Michael B. Gill’s new book on the third Earl of Shaftesbury’s philosophy of beauty gathers his articles on the same topic of the last few years, adds new chapters to them, and gives an elegant fini...

Richard Faber, the author of learned studies of Novalis, Vergil, Brecht, and Carl Schmitt, is aware that this is not the first book he has published with the same title. ad Jacob Taubes, the title...

Rocco Rubini’s far-ranging book proposes that an “intellectual tradition” (1) took shape in Italy beginning with the work of Francesco Petrarch (1404–1472) and found fruition in the writings of Ant...

Colonial Capitalism and the Dilemmas of Liberalism explores early modern theories that underpinned eighteenth- and nineteenth-century British imperialism, liberalism, and capitalism. In a novel con...

Using Peter Wirzbicki's Fighting for the Higher Law as its analytic starting, this review essay considers the place of antislavery in the developments of American philosophy. Wirzbicki considers the role of African American Transcendentalists and their appeal to a “higher law,” a concept articulated significantly by a diverse group of thinkers associated with Transcendentalism. By 1850, such thinkers appropriated aspects of British and continental idealism, especially the relationship between “understanding” and “Reason,” to aggressively attack human chattel bondage. In doing so, (...) they not only reflected the tenets of America's broader intellectual ethos (i.e., notions of democracy) but also cultivated the ground for philosophy in the postbellum period. (shrink)

Although both books discussed in this review essay address problems with relevance to our present day and its dilemmas, they have different chronological scopes and employ different methods of interpretation. Robertson focuses exclusively on the era of the “Enlightenment” (c. 1680–1790), eschewing overt “presentism” to treat a wide range of authors and works as they addressed one another in the context of the events and developments of the period, mainly in Britain, France, and Germany. Friedman's aim, emphasizing the role of (...) “religious” thought, is to explore the roots of present-day “thinking” about economics as a “science” and debates about economic policy. His book, beginning its coverage in Western Europe in the later 17th century and, following a “history of ideas” approach, gives pride of place to Adam Smith's ideas in the formulation of a “coherent” economic theory, and then in a linear account, centered on America, describes the key steps that he argues led from Smith to the present. This review essay, concentrating on what each book has to say about the Enlightenment, juxtaposes their accounts of the era and offers critical judgment of their differing treatments of its character and accomplishments. (shrink)

This article provides the first extensive study of Emanuel Swedenborg’s (1688–1772) views on Africans and slavery. Although significant scholarship has been devoted to Swedenborg’s influence on the British abolitionist movement in the 1780s-1790s, comparably little has been written on the ideas and context which inspired this influence in the first place. This article explores Swedenborg’s ties to networks and debates about African evangelization, colonization, and slavery during the neglected period of the Swedish Age of Liberty (1719–1772). It shows that Swedenborg (...) was the first Swede to condemn slavery, as early as 1741, explains why he regarded slavery as a divine punishment in the afterlife for European missionaries, and why he presented sub-Saharan Africans as superior, in contrast to the dominant dismissive views of Linnaeus, Bäck, Kant, or Buffon. Like most Lutherans of his time, Swedenborg did not advocate the abolition of slavery, yet within a generation his provocative views about African superiority and spiritual emancipation were used by his followers to articulate their abolitionist agenda. Swedenborg’s millenarian doctrines more broadly re-harnessed biblical traditions about Africa and tropes about the bon sauvage, in a counter-example to narratives about the trope’s decline in the second half of the eighteenth century. (shrink)

The invisible object, in the eighteenth century, is not an evidence. It is the result of textual and semantic learning. Which concrete strategies are used to construct and depict objects out of sight? How do we make them a cognitive reality acceptable to a scientific community? This paper first highlights the conditions for the emergence of a field of microscopic knowledge and its epistemological consequences. Then we consider the microscopic gaze in terms of learning, situated between the act of observation (...) as such and discursive practices. We conclude by studying a concrete case of “negotiation of the invisible” in a correspondence between Carl Linnaeus and John Ellis concerning corpuscles observed in mushroom infusions. (shrink)

In recent decades historians of science have argued that observation became something of a way of life in the early modern period. This article expands this analysis by shifting focus from observational practices within natural and experimental philosophy to a number of discourses and practices of self-examination and self-observation in eighteenth-century Germany. While the initial aim of these was therapeutic rather than scientific, therapeutic connotations were partly replaced by epistemic virtues and techniques adopted from natural and experimental philosophy toward the (...) end of the century. The article further argues that the subordination of self-observation to scientific modes of procedure reflected the increasingly radical interest in human subjectivity and, by extension, the emergence of a modern civic and individual self. (shrink)

This article investigates the essay the Descriptio Silentii (Description of Silence) by Celio Calcagnini, a humanist scholar from Ferrara, an essay written in the early sixteenth century and published in 1544. The article provides the first English translation of the essay, describes its inspiration and sources and reviews the content of the essay in order to assess Calcagnini’s contribution to the philosophy of silence from the Renaissance and before. Calcagnini’s essay is an ekphrasis of a picture supposedly located in the (...) ruins of the Roman temple of Fortuna Primigenia in Praeneste, the inspiration for its format is the late Hellenistic text the Tabula Cebetis, and the principal content is an appeal for the virtues of silence in human affairs and the castigation of the garrulous following the example of Plutarch’s essay De Garrulitate from the Moralia. However, this appeal to the virtues of silence is a prelude to the deeper theme and purpose of the essay: the theme of mystical silence, a silence by which it is possible to approach and understand the god-head and the divine, and which can only be expressed in non-verbal language, riddles or poetic imagery. (shrink)

With Gendering the Commonwealth, Anna Becker has given us one of the most stimulating discussions of the “language and concepts of Renaissance political thought” (1) in recent years. Over five chap...

Historians often compare the relationship between humanists and scholastics in the early sixteenth century to a battle. In such accounts, the Parisian Faculty of Theology plays the role of a major combatant keeping humanists away from religious studies. This article paints a different and more harmonious picture of humanists and scholastics in the decade before the Reformation. It draws on hitherto little explored evidence from manuscripts authored by official orators at the University of Paris: their speeches to graduating students at (...) the Faculty of Theology in 1510 and 1512. It will be argued that the speakers celebrated both humanist and scholastic competences and the speeches themselves demonstrate that eloquence had a role to play within the institution. In this way, the article adds nuance to our understanding of how the Faculty of Theology viewed humanists and introduces important new sources to the history of universities. (shrink)

India is the world’s largest democracy. It is also a peculiarly violent one, frustrating liberals who expect democracies to be well-behaved – a horse still unbridled to rule of law. Its riders have...

Baillet’s La Vie de Monsieur Descartes was the first biography of Descartes that had any claims on being more than a sketch. Published in two large volumes in 1691, the year of a royal ban on the t...

The Abbé Sieyès is usually portrayed as a thoroughly modern thinker and a critic of the nostalgic Classical Republicanism of some of his contemporaries, in favour of a “modern republicanism”, founded upon the division of labour and commercial sociability in a nation composed of equal labourers and producers. But Sieyès’s unpublished manuscripts suggest he, in fact, regarded modern labourers as unskilled “Machines du Travail”, dulled by work and incapable of exercising the duties of citizenship, a critique grounded in a critical (...) account of commercial society as compared to the ideal republican polity. Where most scholars regard this as either a simple contradiction or a passing juvenile nostalgia, this paper argues that, influenced by Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Sieyès consistently sought to counteract the degrading effects of the inequalities generated by commercial society and the division of labour. It was on this basis that Sieyès sought to construct a new political system which would reconcile participatory politics with representative government, enabling all citizens to enjoy a life of Active Citizenship. Based on these insights, this paper reinterprets Sieyès’s political project as an attempt to reconcile the classical conception of citizenship with the demands of a commercial society. (shrink)

In the Republic, the city-soul analogy made by Plato paves the way for the entire dialogue. The main interlocutors use the analogy to show the nature of justice and aim to prove that just people live better and are happier than unjust people, by establishing a city to which justice, as defined by them, is applied. Scholars have recently been debating the validity of this analogy. Some critics assert that there are several significant structural inconsistencies and logical misconceptions, thus making (...) the analogy fallacious; at the same time, there are proponents who write extensively in favor of this analogy and defend it against the objections raised. In this paper, I will re-examine passages in the Republic where the analogy first occurs, evaluate the critique made by Bernard Williams, and present arguments defending Plato’ strategy. Ultimately, I will show that Plato’ city-soul analogy is not as far-fetched as Williams argues and this analogy – as a crucial strategy of Plato’s – is efficient and powerful enough in showing the similarities between the city and the soul, for the interlocutors to justifiably and reasonably reach the conclusion that the justice of the individual is the same as that of the city. (shrink)

Richard Price’s moral epistemology provides a distinctive account, not only of the sources of our moral knowledge, but also of its limits – that is, of the moral truths that we do not and even cannot know. According to this moral epistemology, the fundamental moral truths are necessary rather than contingent; if they are knowable at all, they are knowable a priori. In general, fundamental moral truths are akin to mathematical truths. Specifically, these necessary moral truths are grounded in the (...) essences of act-types, which are knowable through ‘intuition’ if knowable at all. However, Price firmly rejects utilitarianism, recognizing several different ‘branches of virtue’, which can conflict with each other. As he argues, we cannot know the truth about act-types that exemplify such conflicting branches of virtue if the competing considerations are too finely balanced. This view of moral epistemology is compared with those of several other philosophers, including W. D. Ross. It is argued that Price has a more unified view than Ross: for Price, all moral knowledge flows from a priori intuition, but this is compatible with our being ignorant of many of the fine details of the fundamental truths of morality. (shrink)

Hybride et émergent, artéfactuel et culturel sans cesser d’être naturel, le monde humain tel que l’entend Joseph Margolis est aussi, en cela même, dans ses différentes dimensions, un monde fragile, instable et en perpétuelle reconstruction. Les enquêtes scientifiques et philosophiques ne peuvent en effet s’affranchir d’une condition d’impermanence où le flux l’emporte sur la fixité, ni s’émanciper d’un horizon de discours symbiotique ancré dans le langage ordinaire. Métisses et solidaires d’un monde médian conversationnel, les langues humaines répondent également, dans leur (...) indétermination même, aux exigences de formes de vie partagées et changeantes. Les personnes humaines enfin, enculturées et enlangagées, restent inscrites dans un monde Intentionnel et historique, qu’elles s’incorporent et transforment. (shrink)

En partant de la théorie des émotions développée par Mead et Dewey dans les années 1890, les aspects centraux de la théorie gestuelle de Mead, qui sous-tend sa théorie de l’émergence de la signification, du langage et de la cognition humaine, seront mis en évidence. L’article souligne, en outre, comment la théorie de Mead s’inscrit dans une perspective sociobiologique sur la naturalisation du langage qui gagne en intérêt aujourd’hui, notamment dans le domaine des théories évolutionnistes du langage et parmi les (...) neuroscientifiques. (shrink)

La question des instincts est une voie d’entrée privilégiée pour le rapport du pragmatisme au naturalisme. Le problème que soulève la théorie des instincts de William James et John Dewey vient du maintien, à première vue surprenant, de l’idée d’une « nature humaine ». Je soutiens que c’est au sein même de la théorie pragmatiste des instincts que l’on trouve des arguments pour montrer que la nature humaine ne détermine pas univoquement la conduite. Bien comprendre la naturalité de l’être humain (...) suffit à défaire toute tentative pour l’ériger en source d’autorité des principes de la conduite. (shrink)

Contemporary philosophers have largely neglected Richard Taylor’s design argument. Given that the initial responses to the argument were largely negative, one might be tempted to conclude that the argument is simply philosophically inadequate. This paper rejects that conclusion by showing how Taylor’s argument has been misunderstood by his critics. In defending Taylor, it is shown that the two types of objections levied against him fail to even blemish his design argument, let alone refute it. Consideration is also given to the (...) argument’s historical lineage, along with a proposal for future considerations of the connection between epistemological realism and design. (shrink)

Friedrick Carl Beiser's Johann Friedrich Herbart: Grandfather of Analytic Philosophy stands out as it is the inaugural English-language monograph on Herbart, an almost ‘forgotten’ thinker in the En...

Ethics plays an essential role in the philosophical framework of Abū Bakr al-Rāzī. Although most of his philosophical works have become extinct, two surviving works serve as primary sources for understanding his ethical theory. Although sharing certain foundational principles, these two works diverge in terms of ethical standards and exhibit distinct logical approaches to ethics, a facet that has largely remained unexplored within contemporary scholarly discourse. I aim to extract and reconstruct both of his ethical decision-making systems by shedding light (...) on the place of ethics in his philosophy, explaining the interconnection of the two ethical frameworks, reconstructing both of these ethical systems, and finally presenting them in patterns. (shrink)

Muito se ouve falar em cidadão, ser cidadão, direitos e deveres do cidadão, bem como atuar ativamente enquanto cidadão. Porém, inúmeras pessoas ignoram esse tão complexo, profundo e importante termo. Saber sua origem, etimologia, sentido e significados são de suma importância para os sujeitos que fazem parte de uma estrutura, sistema e conjuntura social que abarca os indivíduos como seus cidadãos. Desse modo, o presente trabalho busca uma compreensão mais aprofundada do que é cidadão, ser cidadão, sua origem, ativação e (...) a efetividade prática de tal conceito na realidade social, política, econômica e histórica, uma vez que, o conceito ou termo deriva de origens longínquas e como construto e produção humana no social, não veio do acaso, mas através e por meio da racionalidade, experiências, processos, vivencias e percepções diante das relações sociais, políticas, econômicas e históricas. Logo, nos foi necessário realizar procedimentos e movimentos historiográficos e de filosofia da linguagem, indo a Grécia e Roma Antigas, no qual foram configurando o termo em suas origens e legando para as posteridades, inclusive para nós brasileiros. Sendo assim, fizemos o esforço de buscar as origens do termo, conceito e aplicabilidade no social partindo brevemente da Grécia e Roma Antiga, e relacionando-o com a realidade e aspectos da linguagem, inclusive sua relação com o processo contemporâneo, no qual nos movem a indagar quais problemas envolvem o termo, prática, direitos do cidadão e ou ser cidadão, onde surgem questões também como se há algum problema de semântica, de conceito, falta de entendimento do termo ou uma economia da concretude e aplicabilidade. Bem como, se há cidadãos de primeira, segunda e terceira categoria. Anacronismos ou resgates dos significados e sentidos? E o que dizer da exclusão das mulheres, negros, indígenas, crianças e outros da investidura como cidadãos? Logo, o trabalho em tela é de ordem Bibliográfica, de Revisão da Literatura e abarcando áreas, elementos, instrumentos e aspectos da historiografia, filosofia da linguagem, análises do discurso, sociologia e da antropologia social e cultural. (shrink)

The political thought of Judith Shklar is often invoked by contemporary theorists of realism in support of their arguments. This article contends, however, that realist discussion of Shklar has overlooked a concern central to her thought – the worry that individuals are often unwilling to reevaluate their views on the questions of political life. Shklar’s theoretical concern with this ‘problem of political motivation’ will be demonstrated by examining the evolution of her views on the relationship between utopia and hope, showing (...) how this evolution maps on to her view of the affective conditions necessary to motivation. The article proceeds to show that Shklar seeks to address this problem directly, aiming to shape the psychology of her readers through her prose, and that in this she takes inspiration from her reading of Jean-Jacques Rousseau. Evaluation of Shklar’s reflections on the purposes of political theory reveals her concern with the problem of political motivation to be a vital aspect of her conception of the discipline. This problem, I suggest, is one which should be taken into consideration by contemporary theorists of realism if they are to produce theories which fully adhere to the realistic moral psychology they endorse. (shrink)

School of Historical and Philosophical Studies, Faculty of Arts, Australia This article analyses the role of early radical and socialist texts in forming the understanding of the Paris Commune in Britain and the United States. The Commune, while a French event, came to be associated with socialists, radicals, and as a symbol of internationalism. Marx’s The Civil War in France established the interpretation of the Commune that would see it become a radical shibboleth. This article analyses articles by Edward Beesly, (...) Lissagaray’s History of the Commune of 1871, E.B Bax’s Short History of the Commune, and Lenin’s State and Revolution to trace the influences of Marx’s interpretation. This analysis includes examination of the radical publishers in both Britain and the United States to explore how these texts were edited and changed, and how they were circulated to reach the intended working-class audience. The article’s core questions are where did this interpretation come from, how was it constructed, and how did it come to dominate the interpretation of the Commune. This is significant due to the Commune’s pre-eminence within socialist history and how it became an example of the ‘Dictatorship of the Proletariat’ for many future revolutionaries. (shrink)

The British political theorist and architect Arthur J. Penty (1875-1937) is today remembered as the co-originator of ‘post-industrialism’ and as the first guild socialist. His writings evince a lifelong aversion to the evils of commercial society, as well as an intense appreciation for Medieval life. Yet Penty's conservative tendencies belie his attentiveness to what Harold Perkin would call ‘professional society.’ Though he abhorred capitalism, Penty believed in assigning status to workers on the basis of social function and technical expertise. Most (...) surprisingly, given his reputation, he held that the guarantee of such status represented the first step towards a more democratic society. This essay accordingly recasts Penty as a political theorist of the professions. It does so through the analysis of not only his core interventions in political theory, but also his lesser-known trade writings. The first section focuses on Penty's early life and context. The second explains his historical understanding of architectural decline through his contrasting narratives of Classical and Gothic aesthetics. The third section outlines his theory of how to restore democratic architecture in modernity. The fourth section comments on Penty's larger significance in the history of ideas at a time of increasing populist references to ‘traditional’ aesthetics. (shrink)

Liberalism in Dark Times seeks to reconstruct an ethically oriented form of liberalism that is demanding, skeptical, and non-perfectionist. My friendly, astute interlocutors appropriately hold me t...

In a study both ambitious and impressive in scope and breadth – spanning across a century of political thought and various intellectual traditions – Joshua L. Cherniss proposes a historical-normati...

This is a good book, well worth the reading. Naoíse Mac Sweeney, who holds a post in classical archaeology at the University of Vienna, refers to herself as a ‘questioner’ of the concept of ‘the We...

Liberalism in Dark Times claims to have two aims, to reconstruct a particular form of liberalism that developed in the interwar years and to save it from neglect because it can serve us well in con...

Typically, the quantification and management of population as a reason of state is associated with modernity. As scholars, we tend to take this for granted, especially in our post-Foucauldian theor...

Can we meet intolerance with tolerance? Illiberalism with liberalism? Political ruthlessness with a certain temperament? This is the ‘liberal predicament’ that Joshua Cherniss, in his thought-provo...

History, as we all know, is written by the victors. But in political theory the writing of history is a part of the struggle. Joshua Cherniss’s Liberalism in Dark Times makes a distinguished additi...

Deep-seated intellectual problems lie at the root of explaining religious change in the sixteenth century. The idea of reformatio denoted a return to an original, pristine order. It was about recov...

Histories of liberalism often begin with the observation that, prior to the French Revolution, the term ‘liberal’ originally referred to a state of mind. In England, it had been used ‘to denote ass...

This paper offers a reinterpretation of Eduard Bernstein’s theory of evolutionary socialism. It does so by examining the leading role that he envisioned for unions of skilled workers in the socialist movement. During his time in London in the 1890s, Bernstein’s engagement with English Fabianism led him to emphasize the proletariat’s differentiated nature. He claimed skilled workers most readily organized and became the first proletarians to develop class consciousness. Unskilled workers, on the other hand, remained largely unorganized and estranged from (...) the socialist movement. Bernstein opposed the socialist political strategy of nationalization because it would subordinate unskilled workers to party revolutionaries rather than realize cooperative self-government in industry. This focus on promoting industrial self-government made Bernstein stress the importance of workers’ further unionization and adoption of skilled unionists’ method of collective bargaining. This would produce socialist cooperation because it facilitated cooperative wage determination. In Bernstein’s view, skilled unionists influenced the socialist party to take political action to organize and elevate more proletarians to class consciousness. In contrast to those who claim Bernstein prioritized the party’s autonomous ethical appeals and legislation, I emphasize his focus on union-party interactions and defense of unions as central for the advance into socialism’s cooperative society. (shrink)

Despite his producing voluminous writings beyond Utopia, scholarly consensus seems to be that if we want to understand the political thought of Thomas More, we must turn to this ‘little book’. This approach, however, has yielded little consensus about how to categorise More as a political thinker, as Utopia is notoriously and intentionally enigmatic. This article attempts to generate a portrait of More as a political thinker by going beyond an investigation of Utopia alone and taking into consideration those texts (...) often overlooked or rejected by scholars, primarily his polemical and religious writings. Doing so provides an outline of More as a thinker concerned with themes of natural and artificial inequality, popular authority and representation and, at the least, justifies the exercise of reading More’s work beyond Utopia. (shrink)

The paper clarifies Havel’s perception of post-democracy through his various writings and speeches, in comparison with the concepts of post-democracy as proposed by C. Crouch, J. Rancière, R. Rorty, S. Wolin, J. Habermas, and Ch. Mouffe. Consequently, Havel’s critique of the then Western parliamentary democracy and the very essence of his notion of post-democracy will be thoroughly illuminated. The historical and intellectual circumstances that shaped his thinking on the topic will be analysed as well. Some misinterpretations of Havel’s thinking that (...) have emerged in the meantime will also be clarified. (shrink)

Emily Thomas has written a superb short book about the British philosopher Victoria Welby (1837-1913). Working from the 1880s into the early twentieth century, Welby wrote many articles and several...

Based on published works and unpublished materials, this article analyses how cybernetics was received by two Spanish thinkers exiled in Mexico: José Gaos (1900–1969) and Eduardo Nicol (1907–1990). This reception is particularly intriguing especially when considering the substantial presence and social impact that Norbert Wiener had in Mexican society because of his friendship with Arturo Rosenblueth. Gaos and Nicol are the first philosophers to develop a complex and original diagnosis of cybernetics in Mexico. It will be shown how the exiled (...) thinkers take on the philosophical implications of this science in the light of their respective theoretical projects, and finally, it will be defended how the critical perspective they develop is particularly significant for Mexico’s political and academic context since it illuminates some negative aspects of cybernetics that Wiener did not foresee and that had not been reported there until then. (shrink)