I appreciate Benson Mates's generous review of my book, and also the editor's willingness to allow me to comment on it. There is one point where Professor Mates attributes to me a view I did not intend to assert, although what I did say is so compressed that even I have had some difficulty divining my intentions. And it may well be that Professor Mates will find the view that I did intend to assert even less satisfactory than the view (...) that he attributes to me, which I did not intend to assert. (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)

Damaris Cudworth, later Lady Masham, was born in 1659 and died in 1708. She was the daughter of Ralph Cudworth, the wife of Sir Francis Masham, and the close friend, confidante, and, ultimately, caretaker of John Locke. Her philosophical writings — and writings to or about philosophers — consist in the following: (1) an account of Locke's life contained in a letter to Jean le Clerc; (2) various letters — mostly personal — to Locke; (3) letters to various other philosophers, (...) including Van Limborch, Shaftesbury, and Leibniz; (4) two monographs, each published anonymously: A Discourse Concerning the Love of God, which appeared in 1696, and Occasional Thoughts in Reference to a Vertuous or Christian Life, which appeared in 1705. This chapter focuses on correspondence between Masham and Leibniz. The correspondence is printed in volume 3 of Gerhardt's Die Philosophischen Schriften von Leibniz. (shrink)

Camus's apparent flirtation with Catholicism is rooted in his notion of absurdity. Paradoxically, an absurdity of existence both unites us to the world and alienates us from it. Whereas the alienation was avoided by a traditional philosophy that improperly imposed reason on reality, ultimate reality was construed by religion as a God who passes understanding. And though limitations on understanding are embodied by such things as a paradox of Christ who is both man and not man, Camus's profound insights on (...) man's absurd condition may have been remiss because he imposed an understanding of rational philosophy on religion. (shrink)

Wittgenstein and Heidegger were not merely pioneering leaders of different philosophical schools. They both disavowed a Judeo-Christian God and influenced trends opposed to traditional metaphysical arguments. Therefore, we may suppose that they had a major role in relegating medieval arguments for God to archaic syllogistic pedantries. But I will argue that a conditional premise in Thomas’ Second-Way argument not only finds expression in modal logic, since it specifies necessarily if there is no God, there is no world, but involves a (...) natural sort of reasoning. Its ordinariness bears on Wittgenstein and Heidegger because they had extraordinary moods induced by considering the world’s possible nonexistence. Taken with their expressed disbelief in God when they consider the nonexistence, these things suggest a surreptitious embracement of Thomas’ reasoning. This fact both strengthens and makes it relevant to a pervasive twentieth-century “angst.”. (shrink)