Este libro, por un lado, propone nuevas perspectivas y materiales de estudio sobre algunos de los temas, autores y textos clásicos de la filosofía moderna; por otro lado, invita a descubrir rarezas, temas, autores y textos poco conocidos o ignorados, que lleven a renovar el canon de la filosofía moderna. Realiza una revisión crítica de las categorías empirismo y del racionalismo modernos y dedica artículos a una serie de filósofas modernas con el fin de renovar el canon filosófico moderno.

O conceito de empirismo evoca tanto uma tradição histórica quanto uma rede de questões filosóficas. Ambas frequentemente associadas a nomes como os de Francis Bacon, John Locke, George Berkeley e David Hume. Porém, lembremos que nenhum desses filósofos utilizaram o termo empirismo, e nem compartilharam de uma única escola epistemológica. Do ponto de vista histórico é comum encontrarmos estudos de História e Filosofia da Ciência que relacionam o conceito de ‘empirismo’ com a chamada Escola Empírica Médica, desenvolvida na Grécia Antiga. (...) Porém, mais uma vez, temos que ter cautela com essas simplificações históricas, afinal se por uma Escola médica compreendemos um número de médicos que se reconhecem como pertencentes a um grupo que defendem exatamente as mesmas ideias e conceitos, a Escola Empírica Médica é simplesmente uma invenção histórica. De fato, observaremos alguns elementos comuns dentro dessas escolas, mas não correntes unívocas. Essa postura historiográfica usualmente acarreta sérias consequências. Assim, por exemplo, os estudos que marcam a diferença entre as filosofias do continente europeu e as da Inglaterra do século XVII, distinguindo-a por meio de noções amplas, tais como racionalismo e empirismo, podem cair em reducionismos importantes. Se, por um lado, vincular o empirismo moderno à escola médica antiga acarreta numa compreensão histórica equivocada; por outro lado, aceitar a dicotomia empirismo x racionalismo como a única narrativa possível para compreendermos a gênese da filosofia moderna carrega consigo problemas de cunho epistemológico. Dos vários problemas que surgem dessa perspectiva historiográfica, isto é, de aceitarmos acriticamente a narrativa padrão, dois deles nos importam mais de perto: ela fornece uma ênfase às questões de cunho epistemológico, subestimando, então, a importância dos debates em outras áreas, como filosofia natural, ética e política, por exemplo; e deixa de lado pensadores que combinam elementos das duas correntes e, portanto, não operam stricto sensu com a dicotomia entre razão e experiência. Nesse sentido, objetivamos problematizar e aprofundar essa questão, ao discutir aspectos epistêmicos e metodológicos do chamado “programa baconiano” de conhecimento, bem como alguns de seus desdobramentos, especialmente no âmbito da química e da medicina no século XVII inglês. (shrink)

Pedagogical situations require white lies: in teaching philosophy we make decisions about what to omit, what to emphasise, and what to distort. This article considers when it is permissible to distort the historical record, arguing for a tempered respect for the historical facts. It focuses on the rationalist/empiricist distinction, which still frames most undergraduate early modern courses despite failing to capture the intellectual history of that period. It draws an analogy with Michael Strevens's view on idealisation in causal explanation to (...) distinguish between myths and caricatures. Myths are distortions of the historical record that undermine students' understanding of the past, despite having other pedagogical benefits. Caricatures are distortions that either increase or are indifferent to understanding of the past. Mythmaking, the article argues, is unjustified. (shrink)

Although the notion of empiricism looms large in many histories of early modern philosophy, its origins are not well understood. This paper aims to shed light on them. It examines the notions of empirical philosopher, physician, and politician that are employed in a range of seventeenth- and eighteenth-century texts, alongside related notions (e.g. "experimental philosophy") and methodological stances. It concludes that the notion of empiricism used in many histories of early modern thought does not have pre-Kantian origins. It first appeared (...) and became widely used in late eighteenth-century Germany, in the course of the early debates on Kant's Critical philosophy. (shrink)

This paper traces the ancestry of a familiar historiographical narrative, according to which early modern philosophy was marked by the development of empiricism, rationalism, and their synthesis by Immanuel Kant. It is often claimed that this narrative became standard in the nineteenth century, due to the influence of Thomas Reid, Kant and his disciples, or German Hegelians and British Idealists. The paper argues that the narrative became standard only at the turn of the twentieth century. This was not due to (...) the influence of Reid, German Hegelians, or British Idealists as they did not endorse the narrative, although Thomas Hill Green may have facilitated its uptake. The narrative is based on Kant’s historiographical sketches, as corrected and integrated by Karl Leonhard Reinhold. It was first fleshed out into full-fledged histories by two Kantians, Wilhelm Gottlieb Tennemann and Johann Gottlieb Buhle. Numerous historians, several of whom were not Kantians, spread it in the English-speaking world. They include Kuno Fischer, Friedrich Ueberweg, Richard Falckenberg, and Wilhelm Windelband. However, the wide availability of their works did not suffice to make the narrative standard because, until the 1890s, the Hegelian account was at least as popular as theirs. Among the factors that allowed the narrative to become standard are its aptness to be adopted by philosophers of the most diverse persuasions, its simplicity and suitability for teaching. (shrink)

This paper examines the views of Joseph-Márie Degérando and Wilhelm Gottlieb Tennemann about empiricism, and the scope and limits of experience as well as its relation to reason and its role in the attainment of true knowledge. While Degérando adopted the “philosophy of experience” and Tennemann advocated Kant’s critical philosophy, both authors blamed each other for the same mistake: if Degérando considered that, despite all appearances to the contrary, critical philosophy fell into empiricism, Tennemann judged that the philosophy of experience (...) was nothing but pure and simple empiricism. Degérando’s and Tennemann’s discrepancies involved not only a discussion of “nomenclatures” and of the role and limits of experience in knowing, but also an epistemological and ideological commitment to the pacification of the intellectual field in the aftermath of the French Revolution. In this line, Degérando’s alignment with the philosophy of experience attempted to distance himself from the politically dangerous sensualism attributed to the idéologie. But, unlike his countryman Charles Villers, he did not want to replace the sensualism by critical philosophy. His opposition to philosophical novelty (which he associated with political revolution) led him to praise only the “eclectic” spirit of Kant’s philosophy. (shrink)

The past can be a stubborn subject: it is complex, heterogeneous and opaque. To understand it, one must decide which aspects of the past to emphasise and which to minimise. Enter frameworks. Frameworks foreground certain aspects of the historical record while backgrounding others. As such, they are both necessary for, and conducive to, good history as well as good philosophy. We examine the role of frameworks in the history and philosophy of science and argue that they are necessary for both (...) forms of enquiry. We then suggest that the right attitude towards frameworks is pluralism rather than monism: there is no single correct framework to be applied to a given scientific episode. Rather, a multitude of different frameworks are more or less appropriate given various contexts and aims. From this perspective, good frameworks generate and further, rather than frustrate, historical and philosophical enquiry. Our view sheds light on historical disagreement, and on the relationship between philosophy and history of science. (shrink)

Resumen: Ante las críticas insistentes a la distinción entre el empirismo y el racionalismo, se han propuesto alternativas para comprender de manera más adecuada el quehacer de los filósofos modernos. Entre ellas está la distinción entre filosofía especulativa y experimental. Intentaré evaluar la validez de esta distinción para la filosofía moral experimental del siglo XVIII y, en particular, para la propuesta de Hume. Mostraré que si la distinción se entiende en términos excluyentes, resulta inapropiada porque el mismo Hume plantea que (...) la especulación es lo que define a la filosofía. Además, antes que considerarlas como excluyentes, el filósofo escocés propone una conciliación entre la práctica de la experimentación y la teorización. Por último, sostendré que aquello que Hume considera como “falsa filosofía” no puede entenderse como sinónimo de filosofía especulativa.: A persistent criticism of the distinction between empiricism and ra-tionalism has provoked the emergence of new distinctions in order to under-stand modern philosophy in a more adequate way. One of those distinctions is that between speculative and experimental philosophy. My aim is to evalu-ate the validity of this distinction for eighteenth-century experimental moral philosophy in general and for Hume’s thought in particular. I will show that if this distinction is understood in exclusive terms, then it cannot be adequate because Hume himself states that speculation is what defines philoso-phy. Hume also proposes a reconciliation between experimental practice and theoretical activity instead of considering that they are mutually exclusive. Finally, I will make clear that what Hume condemns as “false philosophy” is not a synonym for speculative philosophy. (shrink)

Women philosophers of the past, because they tended not to engage with each other much, are often perceived as isolated from ongoing philosophical dialogues. This has led—directly and indirectly—to their exclusion from courses in the history of philosophy. This article explores three ways in which we could solve this problem. The first is to create a course in early modern philosophy that focuses solely or mostly on female philosophers, using conceptual and thematic ties such as a concern for education and (...) a focus on ethics and politics. The second is to introduce women authors as dialoguing with the usual canonical suspects: Cavendish with Hobbes, Elisabeth of Bohemia with Descartes, Masham and Astell with Locke, Conway with Leibniz, and so on. The article argues that both methods have significant shortcomings, and it suggests a third, consisting in widening the traditional approach to structuring courses in early modern philosophy. (shrink)

The lasting effects of the debate over canon-formation during the 1980s affected the whole field of Humanities, which became increasingly engaged in interrogating the origin and function of the Western canon. In philosophy, a great deal of criticism was, as a result, directed at the traditional narrative of seventeenth-and eighteenth-century philosophies—a critique informed by postcolonialism as well as feminist historiography. D. F. Norton, L. Loeb and many others1 attempted to demonstrate the weaknesses of the tripartite division between rationalism, empiricism and (...) critical philosophy.2 As time went on, symptoms of dissatisfaction with what has... (shrink)

Broadly speaking, “empiricism” is a label that usually denotes an epistemological view that emphasizes the role that experience plays in forming concepts and acquiring and justifying knowledge. In contemporary philosophy, there are some authors who call themselves as empiricists, although there are differences in the way they define what experience consists in, how it is related to theory, and the role experience plays in discovering and justifying knowledge, etc. (e.g., Ayer 1936; Van Fraassen 2002). In contrast, in the early modern (...) period, empiricism was not a label that philosophers traditionally characterized until nowadays as empiricists (most famously, John Locke, George Berkeley, and David Hume) used to describe their doctrines. Indeed, as attributed to early modern philosophical authors, empiricism is not an actor’s category, but an analytic historiographical category retrospectively applied to them and confronted to rationalism, whose main representatives were considered to be Rene Descartes, Baruch Spinoza, and G.W. Leibniz. Such a narrative began to be established by the late nineteenthcentury and described early modern empiricism as an epistemological stance maintaining (1) that the origin of all mental contents lies in experience (a genetic statement), and (2) that knowledge can only be justified a posteriori (an epistemic statement). This entails that empiricists deny the existence of innate mental contents and the possibility of a purely a priori knowledge. In the history of early modern science such a dichotomy has been usually rendered in terms of the opposition between continental rationalist Cartesian science vs British empiricist Newtonian science. In the last four decades, many aspects of this traditional narrative have been criticized, and the meaning of early modern empiricism is subject of renewed studies. (shrink)

Las narraciones que presentan la filosofía moderna como un periodo particular de la historia de la filosofía, al igual que las narraciones sobre otros periodos de la historia de la filosofía, son deudoras tanto de determinadas concepciones de la filosofía como de ciertas concepciones de su historia y de la historia. La mirada hacia el pasado filosófico se sitúa en un presente que, implícitamente o no, delimita el campo de lo que es considerado como filosofía y de lo propiamente filosófico, (...) delimitación que implica una selección de las manifestaciones que caracterizan la filosofía, como, por ejemplo, sus autores, sus problemas, sus escenarios y sus formas discursivas. Dicho de otra manera, al narrar una historia de la filosofía se determinan de alguna manera quiénes son filósofes, qué temas son filosóficos, dónde se hace filosofía y cómo se escribe filosofía, entre otras cosas. A su vez, la narración histórica de las expresiones de ese pasado asume ciertas posiciones acerca de la historicidad de lo filosófico, de sus relaciones con los diferentes ámbitos de su emergencia, de sus métodos de investigación y de las modalidades discursivas deseables para esta narración. (shrink)

Tokom dvadesetog veka na engleskom govornom području uspostavljen je standardni narativ rane moderne filozofije prema kome se svi autori ovog perioda dele u dve škole mišljenja: racionalističku i empirističku. Glavni cilj postavljen u ovom tekstu jeste da se ispitivanjem centralnih odlika ovog narativa pokaže njegova nepot- punost i neadekvatnost u prikazivanju filozofskih odnosa koji su postojali među figu- rama sedamnaestog i osamnaestog veka. Videćemo da su u poslednjih nekoliko dece- nija iznete ubedljive kritike ove teorije, kojima se predočavaju njeni glavni (...) nedostaci. Drugi cilj ovog rada jeste da se, analizom tekstova Imanuela Kanta, pokaže da on nije odgovoran za stvaranje i širenje ovog narativa, iako se u sekundarnoj literaturi često ističe suprotno. (shrink)

In the last few decades, the historiographical categories rationalism and empiricism have been criticized for their limitations to explain the complex positions and the links held by the philosophers tradiotnally attached to them. This narrative was firstly conceived by Kantian German historians and began to become standard at the turn of the twentieh century. Nonetheless, nineteenth-century French historiography developed other narratives by which early modern philosophers were classified according to alternative criteria. In the first edition of Histoire comparée des systémes (...) de philosophie (1804), Joseph-Marie Degérando distinguishes three first-order early modern schools founded by Bacon, Descartes and Leibniz, respectively. Degérando introduces the empiricism and rationalism distinction as one among others, and not as the fundamental one. In addition, he separates empiricism from experimental philosophy. The last one, along with speculative philosophy, is said to conciliate senses and reason. As a result, this account offers philosophical groupings different from those constructed by the standard narrative. Furthermore, it draws on labels and classification criteria which were part of the early modern philosophical discourse. (shrink)

The historiographical narrative describing early modern European philosophy as the confrontation between rationalism and empiricism and its overcoming through the Kantian synthesis had a huge spread in Argentina. This article investigates the genesis of this traditional account in the universities of Córdoba, Buenos Aires and La Plata between 1780 and 1920. It offers an introduction concerning the formation of this narrative in Europe and a survey of the teaching of early modern philosophy in Argentina during that period. It concludes that, (...) although some of its components are found during the nineteenth century, it was only in the second decade of the twentieth century that the traditional narrative was formulated in its entirety, in parallel with the introduction of Kantianism in Argentine. However, the construction of this narrative is not merely explained by this fact but also by the weight that the history of philosophy gained in the syllabus as part of the demands involved in the shaping of the academic philosophical field. Finally, this paper suggests ways to reconfigure and renew the canon. (shrink)