Journal of the History of Philosophy

This admirable volume treats the period from Montaigne to Kant. As the editor, Donald Rutherford, promises in his Introduction, the volume reflects the broadly contextualist consensus among scholars in the field over the last few decades. Neither intellectual history nor abstract conceptual analysis, contextualist scholarship looks at the way philosophical ideas develop in concrete settings, within intellectual horizons, and in response to specific philosophical problems. Thus this Cambridge Companion is committed to the idea that a philosopher’s published works must be read in connection with both his or her correspondences, drafts, and other papers, as well as in connection with the thinkers whose works constitute that philosopher’s intellectual environment and matrix. Simply put, contextualist historians of philosophy deny that philosophical work takes place in a conceptual or historical vacuum. Second, this collection reflects the expanding list of important thinkers, works, and issues in the period. The familiar authors Rutherford terms the “canonical seven” (2)—Descartes, Spinoza, Leibniz for the “rationalists” and Locke, Berkeley, Hume for the “empiricists,” all followed by Kant—are joined by, among others, Francisco Suárez, Hugo Grotius, Thomas Hobbes, Antoine Arnauld, Anne Conway, Blaise Pascal, Pierre Bayle, Adam Smith, and Jean-Jacques Rousseau. This expanding canon reflects new attention directed toward ethics, political and social philosophy, and theology in the period. If sustained attention to the relationship of early modern philosophy to early modern science was a first contextualist shift in Anglo-American scholarship, and the expansion of the canon a second, then moving beyond metaphysics, epistemology, and logic is the third. To offer but a few examples, one need not look far to see how metaphysics, ethics, and politics are closely linked in Spinoza, or how problems in physics and problems of free will are connected in Leibniz, or how skepticism is closely associated with the history of debates about religious toleration.

The authors examine early modern philosophy in terms of what Rutherford terms the “changing shape of philosophical inquiry” (3) in the period. As a result, the book is organized not by accounts of individual thinkers, but rather by areas of inquiry and philosophical histories of problems. Thus the period emerges as one in which the ancient and medieval inheritance (and the early moderns were in possession of a very complete library of their predecessors) is transformed and re-thought in view of changes in science, politics [End Page 645] (e.g., the rise of the nation-state and revolutions), and religion (e.g., the Protestant Reformation and the Wars of Religion fought from roughly 1550–1650), as well as economics and other facets of human culture and society. A great advantage of this way of organizing the books is that readers will come away with a sense of how the early moderns thought about a variety of issues; index entries for Locke, for example, cover everything from the theory of sense perception and cognition to law, sovereignty, and the relationship of faith and reason. After an opening essay on conflicts and tensions in early modern philosophy by Rutherford, the chapters focus on issues of method and conceptual change in natural science (Stephen Gaukroger, Dennis Des Chene); metaphysics (Nicholas Jolley); philosophy of mind and epistemology (Tad Schmaltz); language and logic (Michael Losonsky); ethics, morality, and the passions (Susan James, Stephen Darwall); political philosophy (A. John Simmons); and theology (Thomas M. Lennon). The final chapters discuss early modern Scholasticism (M.W.F. Stone) and suggest a view of the period from the vantage point of Kant (J.B. Schneewind). As all scholars of the period know, the early moderns were remarkable philosophical interlocutors, correspondents, and critics, and each article in the anthology conveys a lively sense of these exchanges. One thinks, for example, of Mersenne’s Paris gatherings, Henry Oldenburg’s role in the Royal Society in London, and the travels of Hobbes, Leibniz, and others.

Each essay in this anthology can be read with profit by established scholars as well as students. Each of us, as readers...