Philosophy was at the core of the eighteenth century movement known as the Scottish Enlightenment. The movement included major figures, such as Francis Hutcheson, David Hume, Adam Smith, Thomas Reid and Adam Ferguson, and also many others who produced notable works, such as Gershom Carmichael, George Turnbull, George Campbell, James Beattie, Alexander Gerard, Henry Home (Lord Kames) and Dugald Stewart. I discuss some of the leading ideas of these thinkers, though paying less attention than I otherwise would to Hume, (...) Smith and Reid, who have separate Encyclopedia entries. Amongst the topics covered in this entry are aesthetics (particularly Hutcheson's), Moral philosophy (particularly Hutcheson's and Smith's), Turnbull's providential naturalism, Kames's doctrines on divine goodness and human freedom, Campbell's criticism of the Humean account of miracles, the philosophy of rhetoric, Ferguson's criticism of the idea of a state of nature, and finally the concept of conjectural history, a concept especially associated with Dugald Stewart. (shrink)

Recent historical work on changing perceptions of the human body has been influenced by Michel Foucault’s contention that the self of western individualism was created by new regimes of disciplining the body. A different approach is taken here, one that focuses on how individual bodies came to be viewed as separate and inviolable, that is, as autonomous. The separateness and inviolability of bodies can be traced in the histories of bodily practices as different as portraiture and legal torture. After 1750, (...) regular public exhibitions, themselves a new feature of the social landscape, showed increasing numbers of portraits in London and Paris. The proliferation of individual likenesses encouraged the view that each person was an individual, that is, single, separate, distinctive and original. At the same time, the tide turned against judicially sanctioned torture and cruel punishment. Long-held notions of sacrificial punishment and truth through pain withered under the pressure of new experiences of the body that in turn facilitated the emergence of new conceptions of rights of individuals. (shrink)

In the study the author focuses on various aspects of bookselling in the late 18th century. The author seeks to describe the book market environment and the booksellers’ community in Bratislava at that time. She therefore documents communication channels between booksellers in Bratislava and their colleagues in Germany (mainly in Leipzig, Halle, and Berlin).

This article discusses the common ground between William James and the tradition of philosophical anthropology. Recent commentators on this overlap have characterised philosophical anthropology as combining science and Kantian teleology, for instance in Kant’s seminal definition of anthropology as being concerned with what the human being makes of itself, as distinct from what attributes it is given by nature. This article registers the tension between Kantian thinking, which reckons to ground experience in a priori categories, and William James’s psychology, which (...) begins and ends with experience. It explores overlap between James’s approach and the characteristic holism of 18th-century philosophical anthropology, which centres on the idea of understanding and analysing the human as a whole, and presents the main anthropological elements of James’s position, namely his antipathy to separation, his concerns about the binomial terms of traditional philosophy, his preference for experience over substances, his sense that this holist doctrine of experience shows a way out of sterile impasses, a preference for description over causation, and scepticism. It then goes on to register the common ground with key ideas in the work of anthropologists from around 1800, along with some references to anthropologists who come in James’s wake, in particular Max Scheler and Arnold Gehlen, in order to reconceptualise the connection between James’s ideas and the tradition of anthropological thinking in German letters since the late 18th-century, beyond its characterisation as a combination of scientific positivism and teleology. (shrink)

The term "Mughal" comes from a mispronunciation of the word "Mongol," but the Mughals of India were mostly ethnic Turks not Mongolians. However, Barbur (1483-1530), the first Mughal emperor, could trace his blood line back to Chinggis Khan. The Muslims of Central Asia had good reason to hate the Mongols because they destroyed the Abbasid Caliphate when they sacked Baghdad in 1258. During the 300 years after the death of Chinggis, the Mongol Empire had split into four parts: the Golden (...) Horde of Russia (1242-1359), the Ilkhanate of Iran and Iraq (1256-1353), the Chinese Yuan Dynasty (1271-1368) ruled by Kublai Khan, and finally the Mughal Empire of India.. (shrink)

In the modern debate in metaethics and moral psychology, moral rationalism is often presented as a view that cannot account for the intimate relation between moral behaviour on one hand and feelings, emotions, or desires on the other. Although there is no lack of references to the classic rationalists of the 18th century in the relevant discussions, the works of these writers are rarely ever examined detail. Yet, as the debate in Kant scholarship between “intellectualists” and “affectivists” impressively (...) shows, a more thorough analysis of what the classic rationalists actually have to say about moral motivation is suited to cast serious doubts on the idea that moral rationalism must crucially neglect the affective–conative side of human psychology. The aim of this paper is to analyse the conceptions of moral motivation that were embraced by Kant's rationalist predecessors—Clarke, Wolff, Burnet, Balguy, and Price—which have not attracted a similar amount of attention by specialists so far. The claim I will defend is that none of those early rationalists actually embraces the motivational thesis that is often taken to be characteristic of moral rationalism, a thesis I shall refer to as strong rationalism about (moral) motivation. (shrink)

The 18th century in Europe is the ideal period to study the interaction of traditional beliefs and new ideas stemming from scientific observation and philosophical rationalization. The purpose of this paper is to examine the role played by Charles de Brosses and Antonio Niccolini in the process of transmission of knowledge coming through influential members of a European aristocracy that remained attached to traditional values. In fact, the rediscovery of the Classical heritage and its dissemination in print, albeit (...) an expensive enterprise, was not deemed by men such as Niccolini and de Brosses as incompatible with their traditional religious beliefs. The unpublished correspondence between these two men provides the evidence for this claim. The two men exchanged information about the continental nature of Australasia, about the latest mathematical discoveries, about the origin of languages and on oriental religions. At the same time, their religious and political convictions remained firmly based on the received notions about religion and society. (shrink)

The study focuses on the debates on self-love in early 18th - century British moral philosophy. It examines the intricate relations of these debates with questions concerning human nature and morality in five central authors : Anthony Ashley Cooper the 3rd Earl of Shaftesbury, Bernard Mandeville, Francis Hutcheson, Joseph Butler and Archibald Campbell. One of the central claims of this study is that a distinction between five different concepts of self-love is necessary to achieve a clear understanding of (...) the debates on self-love. Thus, egoistic self-love, self-love as love of praise, self-love as self-esteem, self-love as excessive pride and self-love as self-respect are distinguished. The role of these different concepts is analysed in the mentioned authors ’ theories of human nature and morality, and the relations between the concepts of self-love and other essential concepts of moral philosophy such as benevolence, pity and virtue are examined. This study highlights the importance of the widely discussed claim that self-love is the only motive for human agents and shows that the moral rehabilitation of self-love becomes an important issue for the period. Commentators generally agree on the importance of the notion of self-love for the period’s moral philosophy, yet little attention has been paid to the different concepts of self-love. Present-day philosophy’s tendency to equate self-love with egoism is too simplistic, and the insufficient recognition of the vagueness of the notion of self-love is shown to be an impediment to an appropriate reconstruction of important arguments in the debates on self-love. The framework suggested in this study thus enables a better comprehension of the different accounts of self-love in the selected authors ’ moral psychologies, and of their views of the moral value of self-love. This facilitates the shedding of light on central aspects of moral philosophy at the beginning of the 18th century. (shrink)

1. Introduction: 1.1 Difficulties of Approach; 1.2 Philosophical Background. 2. The Context of Early Modern Theories of the Passions: 2.1 Changing Vocabulary; 2.2 Taxonomies; 2.3 Philosophical Issues in Theories of the Emotions. SUPPLEMENTARY DOCUMENTS: Ancient, Medieval and Renaissance Theories of the Emotions; Descartes; Hobbes; Malebranche; Spinoza; Shaftsbury; Hutcheson; Hume.

Despite Robert Boyle’s enthusiasm as a leading chemist in the early years of the Royal Society, his experiments on animals raised acute moral and theological issues in regard to animal suffering. Many years after Boyle’s experiments in the scientific field of pneumatics, Joseph Wright of Derby painted a complex representation of Boyle’s early experiment called An Experiment on a Bird in an Air Pump. I use an art historical methodology to resituate Wright’s imagined painting of group performance as a microcosm (...) of 18th-century morality against the backdrop of Boyle’s profound eschatological beliefs and earlier discourse on animal ethics. (shrink)

This collection reissues 17 titles that provide an excellent overview of 18th century philosophy - as well as the debates that surround the topic. Featuring works on Berkeley, Hume, Kant and Rousseau, among others, the collection examines a host of philosophical arguments by the leading thinkers of the time. It is an essential reference collection.

An error that medicine has long shared is to attribute to a desire or an effect of the mother’s imagination during gestation, the deformities, growths or spots that a child bears at birth. The imagination would be capable of imprinting external modifications on a matter and would have an impact on the perceptions and sensory development of the fetus. Returning briefly to the genealogy and posterity of the topos, this article focuses on the successes and refutations of the Malebranchist paradigm (...) in the 18th century, through a corpus of medical popularization texts where the debates oppose the supporters of the imagination for whom emotion alters the organs of the fetus and the detractors of this thesis who only see it as prejudice. Mechanistic systems had in common that they avoided the soul to explain life. Although each era has its hermeneutic system of representations, and that medicine—closely dependent on the philosophical and moral conceptions of its time—is also a cultural production, it is nevertheless not uninteresting to question on the fortune of a motive and the scientific topicality of the question. What does the baby perceive in utero? Does he feel his mother’s pain? If so, what is the biological impact? To what extent can the maternal imagination and experience mark the child’s body? Informed by functional imaging technologies, recent research returns to the symbiotic link of mother-fetus interactions. Convergences appear between this 18th century and our 21st century. In no case did we want to contrast today’s scientists who are firmly in touch with reality and their predecessors who are prey to imagination. Science, whatever the era, always feeds on imagination. (shrink)

In a time of political, epistemic and aesthetic revolutions, early 18th-century Britain saw the emergence of a public discourse of common sense which had a lasting influence on cliched concepts of cultural identity. By retracing the compensatory impulses of common sense discourse and highlighting the role of literary texts in its formation and dissemination, this study challenges the received view of Augustan England as a mere Age of Reason.".

This article critically explores the history and nature of a hermeneutic assumption which frequently guided interpretations of Plotinus from the 18th century onwards, namely that Plotinus advanced a system of philosophy. It is argued that this assumption was introduced relatively late, in the 18th and 19th centuries, and that it was primarily made possible by Brucker’s methodology for the history of philosophy, dating from the 1740s, to which the concept of a ‘system of philosophy’ was essential. It (...) is observed that the concept is absent from Ficino’s commentary from the 15th century, and that it remained absent in interpretations produced between the 15th and 18th centuries. It is also argued that the assumption of a ‘system of philosophy’ in Plotinus is historically incorrect—we do not find this concept in Plotinus’ writings, and his own statements about method point in other directions. Eduard Zeller is typically regarded as the first to give a satisfying account of Plotinus’ philosophy as a whole. In this article, on the other hand, Zeller is seen as having finalised a tradition initiated in the 18th century. Very few Plotinus scholars have examined the interpretative development prior to Zeller. Schiavone and Bonetti , for instance, have given little attention to Brucker’s introduction of the concept of a ‘system of philosophy’. The present analysis, then, has value for an understanding of Plotinus’ Enneads. It also explains why “pre-Bruckerian” interpretations of Plotinus appear alien to the modern reader; the analysis may even serve to make some sense of the hermeneutics employed by Renaissance Platonists and commentators, who are often eclipsed from the tradition of Platonism. (shrink)

Ape to Apollo is the first book to follow the development in the eighteenth century of the idea of race as it shaped and was shaped by the idea of aesthetics.

The growth of botany following European expansion and the consequent increase of plants necessitated significant development in classification methodology, during the key decades spanning the late 17th to the mid-18th century, leading to the emergence of a “natural method.” Much of this development was driven by the need to accurately identify medicinal plants, and was founded on the principle of analogy, used particularly in relation to properties. Analogical reasoning established correlations (affinities) between plants, moreover between their external and (...) internal characteristics (here, medicinal properties). The diversity of plants, names, and botanical information gathered worldwide amplified confusion. This triggered the systematisation of the collection and referencing of data, prioritizing the meticulous observation of plant characteristics and the recording of medicinal properties as established by tradition: it resulted in principled methods of natural classification and nomenclature, represented by the _genus_, to enhance reliability of plant knowledge, which was crucial in medical contexts. The scope of botany increased dramatically, with new methods broadening studies beyond traditional medicinal plants. The failure of chemical methods to predict properties, particularly of unknown flora, amplified the reliance on analogy and on natural affinities. (shrink)

One may discuss the role played by mechanical science in the history of scientific ideas, particularly in physics, focusing on the significance of the relationship between physics and mathematics in describing mathematical laws in the context of a scientific theory. In the second Newtonian law of motion, space and time are crucial physical magnitudes in mechanics, but they are also mathematical magnitudes as involved in derivative operations. Above all, if we fail to acknowledge their mathematical meaning, we fail to comprehend (...) the whole Newtonian mechanical apparatus. For instance, let us think about velocity and acceleration. In this case, the approach to conceive and define foundational mechanical objects and their mathematical interpretations changes. Generally speaking, one could prioritize mathematical solutions for Lagrange’s equations, rather than the crucial role played by collisions and geometric motion in Lazare Carnot’s operative mechanics, or Faraday’s experimental science with respect to Ampère’s mechanical approach in the electric current domain, or physico-mathematical choices in Maxwell’s electromagnetic theory. In this paper, we will focus on the historical emergence of mechanical science from a physico-mathematical standpoint and emphasize significant similarities and/or differences in mathematical approaches by some key authors of the 18th century. Attention is paid to the role of mathematical interpretation for physical objects. (shrink)

The idea that science teaching in schools should prepare the ground for society's future technical and scientific progress has played an important role in shaping modern education. This idea, however, was not always present. In this article, I examine how this idea first emerged in educational thought. Early in the 17th century, Francis Bacon asserted that the study of nature should serve to improve living conditions for all members of society. Although influential, Bacon's idea was not easily assimilated by (...) educational thinkers who remained committed to the traditional aims of teaching about nature. Yet in the second half of the 18th century a change has occurred; educational thinkers started to embrace Baconian ideas and therefore argued that science teaching should be oriented towards generating future scientific progress. Analysing the work of 18th century French and British educational thinkers, this article links the emergence of this new view to developments in the understanding of natural philosophy and to a rising interest in it. It is argued, however, that in themselves, these developments could not adequately explain why Baconian ideas started to influence educational theory in the time in which they did. It is maintained that the incorporation of Baconian ideas into educational thought resulted from a fundamental theoretical shift in the understanding of the role of education itself. (shrink)

Abstract It is argued that the scattered remarks on the fine arts made in Reid's Inquiry into the Human Mind (1764) present a conception of the relation between perception and the fine arts that is at once compatible with and different from Reid's mature theory of art in Of Taste (1785). This alternative account of art-relevant perception also points beyond the limits of a philosophy of art developed according to the traditional theory of taste dominant in 18th-century Scottish (...) aesthetic thought, and anticipates certain 20th-century theories. (shrink)

The great plague in London in 1665 was the last in a series of epidemics that had begun with the Black Death in the 14th century. Plagues continued elsewhere in Europe into the 18th century, but after 1679 no cases of plague were reported in England at all. The disease seemed to have disappeared. How could that be explained? The purpose of this paper is to discover when contemporaries began to think that plague had gone for good, (...) and why they thought that had happened. The paper falls into two parts. The first concentrates on the decade of the 1720s, when plague was expected to come from Marseilles and never arrived. In the space of a few months there was fierce and concentrated public debate about a new Quarantine Act to be enforced if an epidemic developed, much of it arguing that the Act was unnecessary because plague was plainly not contagious at all. It depended wholly on local environments, and in England they had been improving ever since the Great Fire of London. The second part of the paper takes the story forward into the later 18th century, when there was no longer much dispute that plague was indeed contagious, but it was confidently supposed that England now enjoyed the double protection of further environmental improvement at home combined with effective quarantine of shipping abroad, especially in the Mediterranean. Over the century, contending explanations for plague were debated, interpretations of the past disputed and sometimes falsified, and expectations and ambitions for the future remodelled, because one epidemic threat had disappeared for good. (shrink)

The correctness of application of orientalist discourse of E. Said to the colonial policy of the Russian Empire is analyzed in the article on the example of P. I. Rychkov research. By studying integration of Bashkirs in the structure of the Russian state, the author came to the conclusion that Russia’s policy in the East was based on the experience of the management of non-Russian peoples, which was developed in the 16-17th centuries. The establishment of ‘cultural distance‘ is typical only (...) for a small group of educated administrators of past-Petrine era. Most of the officials of the region, as in the preceding period, and during the time of Rychkov and Tatishchev preferred to rely on traditional methods of Bashkir management, which was developed in the period of their voluntary accession. Managerial stereotypes of 16-17th centuries, had significant influence on policy towards South-Eastern peoples of Russia even in the 19th century. The Russian administration inherent in the desire to integrate the non-Russian peoples in the General class structure of the state on the basis of analogies or correspondences, the objective of which was social and cultural rapprochement of the two societies. (shrink)

Thomas Taylor’s interpretation of Plato’s works in 1804 was condemned as guilty by association immediately after its publication. Taylor’s 1804 and 1809 reviewer thus made a hasty generalisation in which the qualities of Neoplatonism, assumed to be negative, were transferred to Taylor’s own interpretation, which made use of Neoplatonist thinkers. For this reason, Taylor has typically been marginalised as an interpreter of Plato. This article does not deny the association between Taylor and Neoplatonism. Instead, it examines the historical and historiographical (...) reasons for the reviewer’s assumption that Neoplatonic readings of Plato are erroneous by definition. In particular, it argues that the reviewer relied on, and tacitly accepted, ethical and theological premises going back to the historiography of philosophy developed by Jacob Brucker in his Historia critica philosophiae . These premises were an integral part of Brucker’s Lutheran religiosity and thus theologically and ethically biased. If these premises are identified, articulated and discussed critically—which they have not been so far in connection with Taylor’s reception—it becomes less obvious that the reviewer was justified in his assumption that the Neoplatonic reading was erroneous by definition. This, in turn, leaves Taylor’s Plato interpretation in a more respectable position. (shrink)

The investigation aims at analysing the two general notions of mankind and people in two lexicographic reference works on trade and commerce published in London in the 1750s: Rolt’s A New Dictionary of Trade and Commerce (1756) and Postlethwayt’s The Universal Dictionary of Trade and Commerce (1757). An overview of the same notions in universal dictionaries of arts and sciences (cfr. References, Primary Sources), issued before and after ND and UD, will also be of help to define a more general (...) background. Starting from the key words mankind and people, their frequency and relevance in the two dictionaries, the investigation is widened to include related terms (e.g. multiword expressions and language patterns in which mankind and people occur) and semantic categories (e.g. specific contexts of use: social condition, social values, demography, identity and citizenship, etc.). The many entries, cross-references, and the various lexical clusters reveal a complex lexicographic and lexicological network. This network, beyond providing information and contents on specific topics, ultimately emphasises the hierarchical organising principle at the basis of Late Modern British society: in particular, people unfolds into a myriad of ‘entities’. Dictionaries of trade and commerce are plentiful sources of knowledge, from general concepts and notions to more specific contents, but also powerful ideological tools. (shrink)

Empiricism has many different faces. As the contributions to this volume demonstrate, in the 17th and 18th century demonstrate medical and philosophical empiricism is less about an "essence" and more a series of specifically modern "acts" or "gestures.".