In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Journal of the History of Philosophy 40.4 (2002) 549-550 [Access article in PDF] Book Review The Millenarian Turn: Millenarian Contexts of Science, Politics, and Everyday Anglo-American Life in the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries James E. Force and Richard H. Popkin, editors. The Millenarian Turn: Millenarian Contexts of Science, Politics, and Everyday Anglo-American Life in the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries. Vol. 3 of Millenarianism and Messianism in Early (...) Modern European Culture. Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic Publishers, 2001. Pp. xxv + 190. Cloth, $85.00. In the late 1960s and early 1970s, a significant body of scholars called attention to the idea of the millennium in English thought during the seventeenth century. These scholars argued that, especially during the epoch of the Civil Wars and Commonwealth, 1640 to 1660, religious speculation that history was moving toward its imminent consummation in a thousand-year reign of Christ exercised powerful influence on English politics and society, both in England itself and in colonial New England. To a lesser extent, scholars also noted the persistence of millennial anticipation after the Restoration, including speculation by mathematicians and scientists such as Isaac Newton.Richard H. Popkin, in addition to his well-known work on the history of skepticism, has played an important role in fostering and contributing to continued scholarship on millenarian and messianic ideas in the early modern era. In The Millenarian Turn: Millenarian Contexts of Science, Politics, and Everyday Anglo-American Life in the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries, Popkin collaborates with James E. Force to publish eleven papers from a 1998 conference at the William Andrews Clark Memorial Library, UCLA. The book interprets the work of biblical exegetes, theologians, and scientists in the two centuries from 1600 to 1800 and places millenarian ideas in such varied contexts as Whig politics, the production of almanacs, Jewish-Christian relations, and early modern theories of geological history.The essays that comprise The Millenarian Turn are most successful when they reconstruct the millennial ideas of particular thinkers, relate these ideas to other aspects of a given individual's thought, and trace the revision of millennial ideas through successive generations. For example, Sarah Hutton of the University of Hertfordshire carefully describes the influential commentary on the Book of Revelation by the Cambridge biblical scholar Joseph Mede (1586-1638), in order to demonstrate the paradoxical point that Mede's theories were appropriated for dramatically different political and ecclesiastical purposes by Puritan radicals and by Church of England apologists. Margaret J. Osler of the University of Calgary shows that the physicist and chemist Robert Boyle (1627-1691) was not only preoccupied with questions about the extent and limitations of human knowledge, but also consistently extended these questions into his views on the afterlife, in which he identified heaven with enlarged capacities for knowing the beauty and harmony of the cosmos. And Reiner Smolinski of Georgia State University expertly traces the series of exegetical and theological shifts from early seventeenth-century millenarians to the New England minister Cotton Mather (1663-1728), who became "the first American to develop a fully coherent premillennialist system in the modern sense" organized around the idea that Christ's return at the beginning of the millennium would purify the world from "wickedness, death, and destruction" (166).As these three examples suggest, The Millenarian Turn makes an important contribution through the chronological span of its essays. Chapters usefully describe the principal millenarian exegetes of the early seventeenth century (Thomas Brightman, Joseph Mede, J. H. Alsted), but nine of the book's eleven chapters focus on the continued vitality of millenarian ideas after 1660. In this regard, the book stakes out an important agenda for future scholarship on the cultural history of millenarian and messianic beliefs and movements.At the same time, it must be said that Force, Popkin, and their colleagues could have done more to explore the cultural work done by millenarianism in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Having provided extensive evidence of the... (shrink)

Sarah Hutton presents a rich historical study of one of the most fertile periods in philosophy. It was in the seventeenth century that Britain first produced philosophers of international stature. Bacon, Hobbes, and Locke, and many other thinkers are shown in their intellectual, social, political, and religious context.

The seventeenth century marked a critical phase in the emergence of modern science. But we misunderstand this process, if we assume that seventeenth-century modes of natural inquiry were identical to the highly specialised, professionalised and ever proliferating family of modern sciences practised today.

It is beyond the scope of this paper to describe in detail the rise to popularity of the emboîtement theories during the last decades of the seventeenth century.51 Eventually the theories did gain great influence, but some points emerging from the above discussion indicate that the rise to popularity was not, perhaps, quite as rapid as has sometimes been assumed.52 Although the earlier preformation theories were sometimes regarded as the ancestors of the later ideas,53 there was little intellectual (...) continuity between the two movements, based as they were upon such divergent motivations. Nor can the preformation theories be regarded as the origin of the belief that a miniature can actually be seen within the egg, since the existence of metamorphosis as a perfectly valid alternative to epigenesis meant that the work of Malpighi and others, usually described as “preformationist,” was not always taken in this latter sense at the time it was published. The pre-existence theories developed in response to particular philosophical problems, and were themselves responsible for the reinterpretation of the observations. In France, the thoughts of Malebranche and Perrault were probably already exerting influence before their written support for pre-existence appeared, but elsewhere the idea was not taken up so rapidly, and ovism, for instance, could develop without associating itself with emboîtement. Malpighi always seems to have remained opposed to pre-existence,54 but by the last decade of the century, the idea had become sufficiently powerful to influence Ray and Garden in Britain, and was receiving support from as influential a thinker as Leibniz.55 But Garden and Hartsoeker were responsible for dividing emboîtement between two schools, just as the concept itself was becoming popular. The work of both Malpighi and Leeuwenhoek served as the basis of the animalculist version, illustrating how the microscopic discoveries served as much to disrupt the intellectual development of the emboîtement concept as they did to promote it. *** DIRECT SUPPORT *** A8402051 00002. (shrink)

The category of sympathy marks a number of basic divisions in early modern approaches to action explanations, whether for human agency or for change in the wider natural world. Some authors were critical of using sympathy to explain change. They call such principles “unintelligible” or assume they involve “mysterious” action at a distance. Others, including Margaret Cavendish, Anne Conway, and Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz, appeal to sympathy to capture natural phenomena, or to supply a backbone to their metaphysics. Here I discuss (...) how concerns about sympathetic actions form at least a partial background for differing seventeenth-century conceptions of what it is to explain action. I argue that critics of sympathy generally insist on an “atomistic” approach to action explanation, which makes primitively relational phenomena come out as problematic. Proponents of sympathy, by contrast, allow for a more holistic approach to action explanation, which allows for such basic connections. Hence, divergent attitudes toward sympathetic action in part explain differences in approaches to explanation. I conclude by showing how some of these core concerns fade into the background when in the eighteenth-century sympathy gets psychologised and individualised. (shrink)

According to the received view (Bocheński, Kneale), from the end of the fourteenth to the second half of nineteenth century, logic enters a period of decadence. If one looks at this period, the richness of the topics and the complexity of the discussions that characterized medieval logic seem to belong to a completely different world: a simplified theory of the syllogism is the only surviving relic of a glorious past. Even though this negative appraisal is grounded on good reasons, (...) it overlooks, however, a remarkable innovation that imposes itself at the beginning of the sixteenth century: the attempt to connect the two previously separated disciplines of logic and mathematics. This happens along two opposite directions: the one aiming to base mathematical proofs on traditional (Aristotelian) logic; the other attempting to reduce logic to a mathematical (algebraical) calculus. This second trend was reinforced by the claim, mainly propagated by Hobbes, that the activity of thinking was the same as that of performing an arithmetical calculus. Thus, in the period of what Bocheński characterizes as ‘classical logic’, one may find the seeds of a process which was completed by Boole and Frege and opened the door to the contemporary, mathematical form of logic. (shrink)

Summary The investigation and representation of insects in the seventeenth century posed huge problems: on the one hand, their size and texture required optical tools and fixation techniques to disentangle and identify their tiny parts; on the other, the esoteric nature of those parts required readers to make sense of images alien to their daily experiences. Naturalists and anatomists developed sophisticated techniques of investigation and representation, involving tacit and unusual conventions that even twentieth-century readers found at times (...) baffling. This essay develops a comparative approach based on seven pairs of investigations involving Francesco Stelluti, Francesco Redi, Giovanni Battista Hodierna, Robert Hooke, Marcello Malpighi, and Jan Swammerdam. Seen together, they document an extraordinary time in the study of insects and reconstruct a number of iconographic dialogues shedding light on the conventions and styles adopted. (shrink)

Early feminist or pro-woman works often combine the claim that the rational souls of men and women are the same with an argument for the superiority of women. This article considers two such works, Lucrezia Marinella's The Nobility and Excellence of Women and the Defects and Vices of Men (Venice, 1601 [1999]) and Marguerite Buffet's In Praise of Illustrious Learned Women, both Ancient and Modern (Paris, 1668), in order to show the continuities and distinctive features of feminist arguments for superiority, (...) to emphasize the differences in the conceptions of reason and physiology that distinguish them, and to demonstrate that claims of superiority persisted even as those defending women's worth began to adopt egalitarian positions. (shrink)

In Descartes’s reformulation of natural philosophy, two aspects of what came to be known as the mechanical philosophy were intimately joined: mechanism as an ontology of nature, according to which all natural things had only ‘mechanical’ properties; and mechanism as a method of explanation. One could, and many philosophers did, adopt mechanism as a method of explanation without adopting a mechanistic ontology. I examine two successors of Descartes who did just that, and one who did not. Giovanni Alfonso Borelli in (...) his De motu animalium and Charles Perrault in his Mécanique de animaux propose and argue for a variety of mechanical accounts of the operations of animals, in particular of their muscles. They reject, however, the Cartesian reduction of animal souls to mechanical forces; the principle of animal motion for them remains a non-mechanical soul. Pierre Sylvain Régis in his Cours entier de philosophie follows Descartes in taking the ‘physical cause’ of motion in animals to be the fermentation of blood in the heart, and thus denies animal souls any role in his physiology. That he can do so while taking over, sometimes word for word, Perrault’s accounts of animal motion shows that mechanistic explanation and mechanistic ontology could easily part company. (shrink)

In 1685, during the heyday of Scottish Cartesianism, regent Robert Lidderdale from Edinburgh University declared Cartesianism the best philosophy in support of the Reformed faith. It is commonplace that Descartes was ostracised by the Reformed, and his role in pre-Enlightenment Scottish philosophy is not yet fully acknowledged. This paper offers an introduction to Scottish Cartesianism, and argues that the philosophers of the Scottish universities warmed up to Cartesianism because they saw it as a newer, better version of their own traditional (...) Reformed scholasticism, chiefly in metaphysics and natural philosophy. (shrink)

Islamic Intellectual History in the Seventeenth Century: Scholarly Currents in the Ottoman Empire and the Maghreb. By Khaled el-Rouayheb. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2015. Pp. xvi + 399. $99.99, £64.99.

The seventeenth century saw dramatic advances in mathematical theory and practice. With the recovery of many of the classical Greek mathematical texts, new techniques were introduced, and within 100 years, the rules of analytic geometry, geometry of indivisibles, arithmatic of infinites, and calculus were developed. Although many technical studies have been devoted to these innovations, Mancosu provides the first comprehensive account of the relationship between mathematical advances of the seventeenth century and the philosophy of mathematics of (...) the period. Starting with the Renaissance debates on the certainty of mathematics, Mancosu leads the reader through the foundational issues raised by the emergence of these new mathematical techniques, including the influence of the Aristotelian conception of science in Cavalieri and Guldin, the foundational relevance of Descartes' Geometrie, the relation between geometrical and epistemological theories of the infinite, and the Leibnizian calculus and the opposition to infinitesimalist procedures. In the process Mancosu draws a sophisticated picture of the subtle dependencies between technical development and philosophical reflection in seventeenth century mathematics. (shrink)

Scottish philosophy of the seventeenth century was an important part of a wider European philosophical discourse. After situating such thought in its political and religious contexts, the contributors to this volume investigate the writings of a variety of Scottish thinkers in the areas of logic, metaphysics, politics, ethics, law, and religion.

Most of our histories of philosophy, in our books and especially in our courses, are what William James called “appreciative chronicle[s] of human master-strokes”. They resemble tours of grand and isolated monuments. Sarah Hutton’s magnificent British Philosophy in the Seventeenth Century is a different kind of history, in which masterpieces are placed in conversation with books that are now neglected or all but forgotten. By means of this “conversation model,” Hutton provides what she justly terms “a ‘thick description’ (...) of seventeenth-century culture, setting marginal and ‘major’ thinkers within [an]… integrated account of... (shrink)

Francis Bacon's position on the existence of void and its nature has been mostly studied with regard to his views on the atom. This approach is undoubtedly right, but it disregards further topics related to Bacon's account of void, namely the world system and the transmutation of bodies. Consequently, a more comprehensive study of Bacon's view on vacuum seems desirable where all the contexts are taken into account. To address this desideratum, the present paper examines Bacon's different views on vacuum (...) drawing attention to the various contexts of the discussion. It also gives an evaluation of the arguments put forward in support of his positions. The first section presents a reconstruction of Bacon's consecutive positions and the reasons for his changes of mind. The second section lists the experimental facts traditionally cited in debates about vacuum and Bacon's interpretation of these. The final section evaluates the role that these experimental facts played in Bacon's arguments. As a result, it is shown that Bacon fits entirely into the general pattern of the early seventeenth century. Empirical arguments by themselves had little value for solving the question of the void; it was also necessary to have a formerly established theory. (shrink)

In this account of the philosophical and scientific pursuits of Pierre Gassendi , I challenge a traditional view which says that the inspiration, motivation, and demonstrative grounds for his physical atomism consist not in his empiricism but in his historicist commitments. Indeed, Gassendi suggests that it's a consequence of our best theory of knowledge and sound scientific method that we get evidence which warrants his microphysical theory. ;The primary novelty of his theory of empirical knowledge is his proposal, against the (...) Stoics and Descartes, that it is not a necessary condition of our knowing some claim that we are certain of it. This move immediately broadens the scope of what we can know through the senses, as does his suggestion that we include among such knowledge claims those assertions about what is hidden to the senses which we legitimately infer from the evidence of the perceptually given. ;On the basis of these epistemological positions, Gassendi develops his views on scientific method according to which we attain and justify our best empirical claims by deduction yet, he believes, these claims are at root probabilistic, and we may maintain hypotheses as the basis of our scientific reasoning so long as there is some empirical evidence for them, however broadly construed. ;Hence Gassendi suggests that his atomism constitutes a 'most likely hypothesis' for which we have empirical evidence--which of necessity is found indirectly in 'indicative' signs, those surface level phenomena for which he takes the existence of atoms to be a sine qua non condition. Perhaps the paramount case of such evidence consists in those microscopic observations of crystalline formation and dissolution that he takes to demonstrate the molecular structure of matter--a key and innovative consequence of his atomism. ;The robust character of Gassendi's method emerges in his appeals to indirect evidence for claims about the unobservable and his willingness to count this as adequate empirical grounds for maintaining an atomist hypothesis. Remarkably, he stands at the dawn of the modern era with at least a proposal as to how to resolve one of empiricism's more vexing difficulties, still with us in some form today. (shrink)

In psychoanalytic theory, the notion of the person inevitably evokes the notion of subjectivity. Not that the former can be reduced to the latter; but if psychoanalytic theory is anything more a certain type of therapeutic practice, it is indeed a theory of the subject or a theory of the subjective relation. We should perhaps begin by specifying that the subjective relation must be understood as a complex whole: an intrapsychic relation, that is, a relation between the various instances that (...) make up the subject, and at the same time an inter subjective relation, that is, a relation between (at least) two subjects. These two aspects are both inseparable and conflictual. They are inseparable because the self cannot exist, cannot construct itself without the other (whether this be a parental other or a peer). They are conflictual for at least two reasons. On the one hand, because the intrapsychic relation is by definition an arena of conflict: the conflict that opposes the Ego to the contradictory but equally tyrannical demands of the Id - which translates its attachment to the body and testifies to its inherent drives - and of the Superego, which represents its rootedness in the social and cultural sphere. And on the other hand, because this subject, which is thus divided within itself, must undergo the trial of bringing its desire face to face with the desire of the others with whom it is destined to live. The psychoanalytic theory of the subject is therefore the theory of a doubly heterogeneous relation: there is the heterogeneity of the components of the self, which go, once again, from their anchorage in somatic drives to the most ethereal expressions of the ideal; and there is the heterogeneity of the relation between this self and the self of the other. Moreover, this double heterogeneity is not limited to the matter of components: after all, these, one might think, would ideally be open to reabsorption into the homogeneity of the individual. On the contrary, this heterogeneity gives rise to a double rationality or double logic. Psychic causality - to borrow André Green's expression - is also driven by the conflict that opposes what in psychoanalysis are known as the primary processes, which Freud has described in chapter 7 of the Traumdeutung and which govern the formation and organization of the dream images, to the secondary processes, which are those processes that govern our daytime thoughts. Psychic causality is formed by the struggle for hegemony between these two logics, each of which is itself acted upon by an antagonism between what Freud, at the end of his life, called Eros and Thanatos, the urge for Life and the drive toward death or destruction. (shrink)

This chapter contains section titled: Introduction Mind‐Body Subjectivity Ideas Intentionality Opponents of Descartes Conclusion References and Further Reading.

This paper is an essay-review of J. Yoder's "Unrolling Time: Christian Huygens and the Mathematization of Nature" (Cambridge, 1989). Highlighting the scholarly thoroughness and mathematical competence of Yoder's reconstruction of Huygens's heuristic path to his ground-breaking results on centrifugal force, cycloidal motion and evolutes, the essay also deals with Yoder's attempts to characterize Huygens's way of using mathematics in physical problems. In opposition to Yoder's thesis, this paper argues that evidence internal to Huygens's work as well as the contemporary reaction (...) to it suggest the existence of substantial methodological differences between Huygens's mathematization of nature and Newton's. (shrink)