In her Discourse on Happiness, Émilie Du Châtelet claims that one must be susceptible to illusions to be happy. She gives almost no explanation of what illusions are or what causes them, and thus the claim appears to lack an adequate defense. I offer an account of Du Châtelet’s theory of illusion by drawing upon the previously unexamined influence of other French philosophers’ accounts of the connection between passion and illusion, including Descartes, Malebranche, and Anne-Thérèse, Marquise de Lambert. According to (...) this tradition, the passions misrepresent their objects in the imagination, and these misrepresentations can be referred to as “illusions.” Attributing this theory of passionate misrepresentation to Du Châtelet solves two puzzles about illusion that arise in the Discourse. First, it explains why she claims illusions are necessary for happiness. Second, it explains how illusions can be distinguished from cognitive errors made in other domains, like philosophy and natural science. (shrink)

In Alciphron (1732) Berkeley engages in extensive criticism of the Anthony Ashley Cooper, Third Earl of Shaftesbury. Berkeley’s criticism of the Earl is remarkably aggressive. It culminates in §§12-14 of the Third Dialogue, where Berkeley launches a vicious personal attack against Shaftesbury, under the name of ‘Cratylus’. In this way the third dialogue differs radically in tone from Berkeley’s other philosophical works and has been viewed with shock and derision. In this paper I will show that Berkeley names Shaftesbury ‘Cratylus’ (...) because he wants to impute the kind of self-deception against the Earl that Plato vividly describes in the dialogue Cratylus. This, moreover, is the key to correctly understanding Berkeley’s argument against Shaftesbury’s moral theory, which is an attack on a pernicious form of moral subjectivism, rather than an attack on virtue ethics, as is commonly thought. (shrink)

In this paper I show that James Africanus Beale Horton launched an internal critique of race science as it developed in the hands of Robert Knox, Carl Vogt, and James Hunt. The latter three held an inductivist Baconian conception of science. Horton shows that their practices as scientists and natural philosophers contradict their own conception of what one must do in order to do good science. Horton’s critique of race science has important implications for philosophical anthropology as it took shape (...) over the course of the nineteenth century and for our understanding of the history of African philosophy in its global context. (shrink)

Many antislavery authors in the eighteenth century contend that enslavement degrades the human mind and causes enslaved people to exhibit inferior moral or intellectual traits. They often use this contention to combat the racist claim that Black people are naturally inferior to Whites and that this natural inferiority justifies enslavement, insisting instead that the disparity is simply an effect of enslavement. After examining this argumentative strategy and what makes it appealing, this paper investigates several ways in which it is problematic. (...) First, this strategy was sometimes used to oppose the immediate abolition of slavery: some eighteenth-century authors argue that many enslaved people have become incapable of living good lives outside of slavery and that immediate emancipation would therefore be detrimental for them and for society. Moreover, this strategy may further marginalize and demonize an already oppressed group and it sometimes blames, or seems to blame, enslaved people for their condition. The paper ends with some reflections on whether the strategy can nevertheless be useful for antislavery purposes. (shrink)