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...

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...

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...

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 But Sieyès’s unpublished manuscripts suggest he, in fact, regarded modern labourers as unskilled “Machines du Travail”, dulled by work and incapable of exercising the duties of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)

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 “...

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)...

David Hume’s historical thought was shaped before he even began writing the History of Great Britain in 1752. This article shows how Hume developed his historical thought in an attempt to combine two historical structures: the natural-jurisprudential conjectural history of the Treatise of Human Nature and the early eighteenth-century historical narratives of modern Europe that featured in his Essays. The Treatise’s conjectural history used the developmental categories “rude” and “civilised” to explain the origins of justice, government and the moral sentiment. (...) The narratives of modern Europe, in contrast, revolved around the historical categories “ancient” and “modern.” Hume’s historical thought was shaped by the attempt to merge those two structures into a single, coherent structure. The critical question concerned the relation between the ancient and the modern: was modern Europe merely a “revival” of classical antiquity? Or did it have new, “post-ancient” dimensions? The article shows how Hume gradually distanced classical antiquity from modern Europe, thereby creating space for exclusively modern concepts such as “civilised monarchies” and the narrative of modern civilisation that structured his History of England (1754–1762). The paper concludes by suggesting that this structure defined Enlightenment philosophical history, not just Hume’s version of it. (shrink)

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...

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 2023 we celebrate the tricentenary of Adam Smith’s birth with the publication of an amazing amount of critical work, even though the story of Smith’s reading and reception is rather uneven. From...

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...

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)

Hobbes’s account of the individual’s right to resist sovereign authority is nuanced. His allowance for cases in which a sovereign’s command falls outside the terms of the social contract, despite recent reappraisals, cannot rescue him from the accusation that his system is contradictory. It has been suggested that some Hobbesian rights can be transferred whilst others are quarantined, or that it is the institution of law, rather than the particular commands of the sovereign, which Hobbes ultimately upholds. By reconsidering Hobbes’s (...) concept of sovereignty alongside his theory of natural law, I argue that his system remains in tension with itself. Hobbes’s prioritisation of sovereign judgement over that of the individual, when combined with the principles he retains from the natural law tradition, renders his theory of resistance irreconcilable with his position on sovereignty. (shrink)

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)

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...

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)

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)

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)

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)

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...

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)

Sabrina Ebbersmeyer and Sarah Hutton have assembled a rich collection of essays on Elisabeth of Bohemia that were initially presented at a 2018 conference at the Center for the History of Women Phi...

Flora Champy shows how Rousseau developed his political philosophy by reference to ancient examples, intertexts, and interlocutors. Her literary methodology involves close readings of published tex...

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...

Renaissance magic was an attempt to supply Platonism with a philosophy of nature that could compete with Aristotelian physics. It was expected to heal the increasing breach between science and faith. However, the basic presupposition of every magic worldview, the notion of a living universe, favors immanentism and arguably hastened the rise of secularism. Secularism, it should be noted, was not an identifiable set of theories but a process towards modernity with its correspondent philosophical theology. Three different stages in that (...) development can be shown in the philosophical systems of three famous Renaissance magicians: Henry Cornelius Agrippa, Giordano Bruno, and Tommaso Campanella. (shrink)

Pantheism, Panpsychism, and secularism? To any historian of ideas still under the die-hard spell of the Enlightenment narrative, this would appear as an unlikely connection.1 If ever the theory of...

The famous controversy between Marsilio Ficino and Giovanni Pico della Mirandola is known to regard the proper use of Platonism in humanist and Christian context. With special attention to Pico’s Commentary on a Canzone, the point of disagreement with Ficino, which is not at all obvious, is examined through a close reading. The result is that Pico sees the temptation of a pantheistic and anthropocentric understanding of the relationship between the human realm and God. Whereas Ficino engaged in making pagan (...) philosophy amenable to Christian theology, Pico was concerned with upholding the otherness of the divine. For the humanist agenda, Ficino made plausible that the human world is divinized, while Pico called for the ascent to God. In Pico’s view the Neoplatonists secularized the divine, as was evident in Ficino’s philosophical theology. (shrink)

This paper focuses on a neglected part of Dilthey’s œuvre that consists of papers on 16th–17th century philosophical issues. These papers are closer to interpretive articles than to original works, and so they are neither considered Dilthey’s original contributions to his own philosophy nor studied as part of the secondary literature. One of the most characteristic features of Dilthey’s philosophic style is the historical-systematic method mostly repudiated as concealing the real statement of the author “between the lines,” i.e. behind historical (...) analyses. Therefore these papers are not reckoned among Dilthey’s great works of enduring significance. This paper aims to make the reader more sensitive to the world and claims of these papers by way of an intermediary approach to them that acknowledges their intermediary position between a historical description and a systematic analysis. This is to be accomplished by having a look at the “pantheism” of Georg Misch, Dilthey’s largely forgotten pupil and son-in-law. (shrink)

One of the key concepts in modern science is force (F). In present studies on the history of dynamics, Patricius is either completely omitted or only cursorily mentioned. The aim of this text is to show that Patricius’s concept of the soul, as he developed it in his Nova de universis philosophia from 1591, comes close to the modern (i.e. Newtonian) understanding of force. This should support the more general position that one of the most intriguing aspects of Patricius’s philosophy (...) is his contribution to the emergence of modern science. (shrink)

Schelling’s “Bruno” provides a provocative illustration of his conviction that early modern science has adopted a radically flawed and impoverished concept of matter, and therefore of nature. The “Bruno” has been read as a settling of scores with Fichte, with whom Schelling had recently quarreled, and as a critique of Kant’s idealism. I propose to look at how the dialogue reveals Schelling’s developing understanding of pantheism, as reflected in the arguments he borrows from Giordano Bruno and then transforms. “Bruno” is (...) a dialogue with four interlocutors, and ranges widely. I will discuss two central sections, in which the two main roles are played by Bruno (Schelling) and Lucian (Fichte). Lucian begins by restating their agreement in an earlier section of the dialogue that when it is considered in the light of the supreme idea, the distinction of knowledge and being is untrue, a tantalizing claim. He then goes on to pose the question of how it can be possible to understand the departure of the finite from the eternal. (shrink)

One of the most striking features of Giordano Bruno’s philosophy is the marriage of universal animation with atomism. This unusual combination produced an extraordinary image of the universe, which was governed by the World-Soul and its universal intellect along with an infinite number of living atoms or corpuscles, animated by their internal spiritual principle. After examining Bruno’s principal arguments on the World-Soul, universal animation and living atoms or corpuscles, this article explores two possible sources among the works of his near-contemporaries. (...) The first author, Agostino Steuco, tried to reconcile the doctrine of the World-Soul with Christianity, integrating the idea of Anaxagoras on the cosmic mind as the demiurgic agent of the universe. The second figure, Jacob Schegk, further elaborated his unusual atomistic or corpuscular reinterpretation of this Presocratic philosopher’s ideas. (shrink)

The main aim of the article is to show how panpsychism, that is, the idea the everything in the world is endowed with a soul, was varied even during the periods in the history of philosophy when it flourished. In the Renaissance, I focus on Francesco Patrizi: he coined the term, which originally meant that everything is ensouled. The article starts by an investigation of Patrizi’s attempt to trace panpsychism back to the most ancient thinkers. His conclusions are, in general, (...) in agreement with current scholarly assessment of early Greek philosophers, whose views I attempt to reconstruct in a kind of survey. A closer comparison, however, shows significant differences between Patrizi’s and today’s account of the most ancient conception of panpsychism. While Patrizi uses the concept to state that the world as a whole is ensouled, early Greek philosophers understood it to mean that every thing in the world possesses a particular soul. From a broader perspective, it is clear that, while Patrizi builds on the notion of all-embracing ancient philosophy, modern scholarship assumes a more historical account of ancient thought characterised by a gradual progress from simple, more empirically based concepts, to more complex and metaphysical ones. (shrink)

Not so long ago, the idea that analytic philosophers would be taking panpsychism seriously would have been hard to believe. That is because in its early, logical positivist, stage, the analytic movement earned the reputation of being militantly anti-metaphysical. But analytic philosophy has come a long way since the heyday of logical positivism; and, in fact, the dialectic of recent debates on the mind–body problem among analytic philosophers has pushed many of them in the direction of panpsychism. In this paper, (...) I want to explain how this has come about and take a look at some of the versions of panpsychism that have emerged. This will involve running through a quick history of debates on the mind–body problem since about 1960, focusing on how panpsychism has been proposed as a promising, though not unproblematic, way of breaking an apparent impasse that has emerged between more standard physicalist and dualist theories of mind. Along the way, I will also have occasion to comment on the prospects of panpsychism as a respectable scientific theory and how a number of scientists stand on this. (shrink)

In my paper, I dispute Christian Hengstermann’s analysis of More’s philosophical system as a form of panentheistic panpsychism in which matter is alive by virtue of being the last emanation from God. I show that, in his mature period, More explicitly rejected such an emanationist doctrine and attributed the non-mechanical powers of matter to an outside immaterial principle, the Spirit of Nature. Ultimately, this leads to a system in which divine space, the Spirit of Nature and the spirit of God (...) are representations of various aspects of the divine essence, as it is at work in the world. On the other hand, matter is not part of this triadic structure and can only be said to be alive at the cost of a rather counterintuitive redefinition of the notion of “life”. (shrink)

Kenelm Digby was among the first authors in England to embrace Cartesianism. Yet Digby’s approach to the mind–body problem was irenic: in his massive Two treatises (Paris, 1644), the author advocates a corpuscular philosophy that is applied to physical bodies, whereas the intellectual capacities of human beings remain inexplicable through the powers of matter. The aim of the present article is to highlight the (rather reticent) relationship of Digby’s corpuscularism with doctrines of spirits in connection with the Renaissance Neoplatonic tradition. (...) Not uncommon in seventeenth-century natural philosophies, such “spirits” are notoriously evasive entities: half spirit, half matter acting as mediators between the realms of bodies and souls. This article suggests that Digby sought to preserve the inveterate ideas of a universal spiritus and a world soul and, in particular, that Kenelm Digby translated (rather than “overcame”) Marsilio Ficino’s (1433–1499) spiritus doctrines into the language of seventeenth-century corpuscularism. (shrink)

The ingenious thought of Anton Günther (1783–1863) is rarely mentioned in the annals of nineteenth-century philosophy. However, in the eyes of his contemporaries, Günther belonged to the key thinkers of his age on par with Kant, Fichte, Hegel, and Schelling. Günther was an original writer yet he left many of his insights undeveloped or ambiguously formulated. As a flamboyant and popular debater, he attacked the most influential philosophers of his time. His attacks were aimed especially at what he termed the (...) unavoidable pantheism of these thinkers, a pantheism Günther often identified with monism. Monism, semi-monism, pantheism, and semi-pantheism are recurring charges of Günther against many influential thinkers, including even Descartes, whose thought Günther considered otherwise epoch-making. Based on a reformed Cartesianism, Günther elaborated his antidote he termed dualism. Yet Güntherian dualism turns out to be a synthesis properly termed organicism. On such a basis, Günther carried out a heroic attempt to transcend the horizon of traditional views and open the vista of an I-centered philosophy built on the universal notion of revelation. By re-reading this Bohemia-born thinker, one can have a better understanding of the scope and influence of what we term Austrian Philosophy. (shrink)

This research paper proceeds in three parts. After a brief presentation of Bernard Palissy, the first part examines his panpsychic ideas, the second part his ideas on art, which I connect in the third part to some of his remaining works and projects.

Paul Scheerbart (1863–1915) is rarely referred to as a philosopher. He is known as the author of Glasarchitektur (1914), and of numerous books, essays, and stories of “fantasy” and anti-militarism. As a follower of Berkeley’s skepticism, he proposed an aesthetic of the fantastic, an art program in contrast to current realism and impressionism. Studying technical and scientific progress, he developed alternative ideas, in a unique blend of fiction and science. His “astro-” or “cosmopsychology” is a variant of ancient panpsychism or, (...) as Jan Assmann calls it, cosmotheism, which was suppressed by the “Mosaic distinction,” the introduction of true and false in things religious. Exponents of this dualism are the supporters of the “Great chain of being” (Lovejoy): Plato, Nicholas of Cusa, and Kant in his refutation of hylozoism. The late Kant, however, comes close to Scheerbart in calling planet Earth an “organic,” though not “living” body. Fechner and, after him, Scheerbart overcome such hesitation. In Lovelock’s Gaia hypothesis, scrutinized by Bruno Latour, the old intuition of a non-dualistic eco-holism takes on its actual form. (shrink)

This article offers an introduction to the question of God’s omnipresence as debated within the late medieval scholastic tradition as seen through the lens of Francis of Meyronnes. In Meyronnes’s commentary on distinction 37 of Peter Lombard’s Sentences, he attempts to categorize the various ways one might prove God’s existence in all things through a four-fold classification. In following his classifications, we are able to look back at some of the historical ways earlier scholastics have attempted to prove God’s omnipresence (...) and follow some of the changes in those approaches as the tradition has developed. Likewise, Meyronnes’s fourth and final classification will point us toward the future. His fourth way—interesting and puzzling in and of itself—offers early hints of future debates about God’s omnipresence and his relationship to place that will emerge in the late 14th century and then again in the 15th, 16th, and 17th centuries. (shrink)

In this paper, I will argue how Paracelsus's concept of the universal ensoulment of nature may relate to his understanding of the self-healing capacity of the body, as shown in his Grosse Wundartzney (1536). Here, his new approach to medicine is visible, focusing not on retaining or restoring the balance of bodily humours but on strengthening the inner “essence” of life (the so-called “balsam,” “mummy,” “astral spirit,” etc.). This is possible by means of life-endowed essences of healing substances which can (...) affect the body’s vital principle by means of inner sympathies. Here, a link is established to medical alchemy as a way to produce more subtle medicines, the “essences” of things. Such an undertaking is possible only in the framework of the natural magic concept with its underlying microcosm-macrocosm analogy. It is my aim to show not only the principles of Paracelsus's new medicine, alchemy, and his worldview in general, but also how his theories may relate to his predecessors, including Marsilio Ficino, one of the few authors who escaped Paracelsus's harsh critique. (shrink)