A unified interpretation of the evolution of species, humanity, and society.

Considered the most original thinker in the Italian philosophical tradition, Giambattista Vico has been the object of much scholarly attention but little consensus. In this new interpretation, David L. Marshall examines the entirety of Vico's oeuvre and situates him in the political context of early modern Naples. He demonstrates Vico's significance as a theorist who adapted the discipline of rhetoric to modern conditions. Marshall presents Vico's work as an effort to resolve a contradiction. As a professor of (...) rhetoric at the University of Naples, Vico had a deep investment in the explanatory power of classical rhetorical thought, especially that of Aristotle, Cicero, and Quintilian. Yet as a historian of the failure of Naples as a self-determining political community, he had no illusions about the possibility or worth of democratic and republican systems of government in the post-classical world. As Marshall demonstrates, by jettisoning the assumption that rhetoric only illuminates direct, face-to-face interactions between orator and auditor, Vico reinvented rhetoric for a modern world in which the Greek polis and the Roman res publica are no longer paradigmatic for political thought. (shrink)

Criticized as a nostalgic anachronism by those who oppose her version of political theory and lauded as symbol of direct democratic participation by those who favor it, the Athenian polis features prominently in Hannah Arendt's account of politics. This essay traces the origin and development of Arendt's conception of the polis as a space of appearance from the early 1950s onward. It makes particular use of the Denktagebuch, Arendt's intellectual diary, in order to shed new light on the historicity of (...) one of her central concepts. The article contends that both critics and partisans of Arendt's use of the polis have made the same mistake: they have presumed that the polis represents a space of face-to-face immediacy. In fact, Arendt compared the polis to a series of analogues, many of which are not centered on direct exchanges between political actors and spectators. As a result, Arendt's early work on the polis turns out to anticipate many of the concerns of her later work on judgment, and her theory of the polis becomes a theory of topics. (shrink)

Quentin Skinner’s appropriation of speech act theory for intellectual history has been extremely influential. Even as the model continues to be important for historians, however, philosophers now regard the original speech act theory paradigm as dated. Are there more recent initiatives that might reignite theoretical work in this area? This article argues that the inferentialism of Robert Brandom is one of the most interesting contemporary philosophical projects with historical implications. It shows how Brandom’s work emerged out of the broad shift (...) in the philosophy of language from semantics to pragmatics that also informed speech act theory. The article then goes on to unpack the rich implications of Brandom’s inferentialism for the theory and practice of intellectual history. It contends that inferentialism clarifies, legitimizes, and informs intellectual historical practice, and it concludes with a consideration of the challenges faced by inferentialist intellectual history, together with an argument for the broader implications of Brandom’s work. (shrink)

Hannah Arendt's theory of judgment has been the object of considerable interest in the last three decades. Political theorists in particular have hoped to find in her theory of judgment a viable account of how diverse modern societies can sustain a commitment to dialogue in the absence of shared basic principles. A number of scholars, however, have critiqued Arendt's account of judgment in various ways. This article examines criticisms from Richard Bernstein, Ronald Beiner, George Kateb, Jürgen Habermas, and Linda Zerilli. (...) On the basis of early sources from Arendt's manuscripts and Denktagebuch that have not been used in these debates, this article contends that Arendt's position on judgment can be defended against these critics and that her account warrants further exploration. (shrink)

In Smith’s view, the dédoublement that structures any act of sympathy is internalized and doubled within the self. In endeavoring to “pass sentence” upon one’s own conduct, Smith writes, “I divide myself, as it were, into two persons; and … I, the examiner and judge, represent a different character from that other I, the person whose conduct is examined into and judged of” . Earlier in his book, Smith claims that in imagining someone else’s sentiments, we “imagine ourselves acting the (...) part” of that person ; here he pictures us trying to play ourselves by representing ourselves as two different characters. “The first,” writes Smith, “is the spectator, whose sentiments with regard to my own conduct I endeavour to enter into, by placing myself in his situation.” The second character, according to Smith, is “the agent, the person whom I properly call myself, and of whose conduct, under the character of a spectator, I was endeavouring to form some opinion” . In the version of this chapter that appeared in the first edition, Smith made these roles explicitly by stating that “we must imagine ourselves not the actors, but the spectators of our own character and conduct” . In his final exposition, he makes it clear that we are both actors and spectators of our characters. We are actors not just because we appear before spectators played by ourselves but also because, as Smith describes, we personate ourselves in different parts, persons, and characters. The self is theatrical in its relation to others and in its self-conscious relation to itself; but it also enters the theater because “the person whom I properly call myself” must be the actor who can dramatize or represent to himself the spectacle of self-division in which the self personates two different persons who try to play each other’s part, change positions, and identify with each others. Ironically, after founding his Theory of Moral Sentiments on a supposedly universal principle of sympathy, and then structuring the act of sympathy around the epistemological void that prevents people from sharing each other’s feelings, Smith seems to separate the self from the one self if could reasonably claim to know: itself. In order to sympathize with ourselves, we must imagine ourselves as an other who looks upon us as an other and tries to imagine us. Indeed, calling the spectator within the self the person judged of, Smith writes, “but that the judge should, in every respect, be the same with the person judged of, is as impossible, as that the cause should in every respect, be the same with the effect” . Thus the actor and spectator into which one divides oneself can never completely identify with each other or be made identical. Identity is itself undermined by the theatrical model which pictures the self as an actor who stands beside himself and represents the characters of both spectator and spectacle.14 14. Smith’s depiction of the impartial spectator and the relations it creates within the self suggest that he has been reading Shaftesbury. The characterization of the impartial spectator as the “man within the breast” recalls Joseph Butler’s discussion of “the witness of conscience” in his sermons “Upon the Natural Supremacy of Conscience” . Hume discusses the moral value of considering how we appear in the eyes of those who regard us: “By our continual and earnest pursuit of a character, a reputation in the world, we bring our own deportment and conduct frequently in review, and consider how they appear in the eyes of those who approach and regard us. This constant habit of surveying ourselves, as it were, in reflection, keeps alive al the sentiments of right and wrong” . It is Shaftesbury, however, who expounds a “doctrine of two persons in one individual self” as he presents his “dramatic method” …. The terms and figures of theater are clearly inscribed within Smith’s characterizations of sympathy and the impartial spectator but they are clearly informed by Shaftesbury’s meditation on the dramatic character of the self and the problem of theatricality that threatens the self as it appears before the eyes of the world. This interpretation of Shaftesbury is developed at length in my The Figure of Theater. David Marshall, assistant professor of English and comparative literature at Yale University, has written on Rilke and Shakespeare. The present essay is adapted from a chapter of his forthcoming book, The Figure of Theater: Shaftesbury, Defoe, Adam Smith, and George Eliot. (shrink)

Through readings of works by Marivaux, Diderot, Rousseau, and Mary Shelley, David Marshall provides a new interpretation of the eighteenth-century preoccupation with theatricality and sympathy. Sympathy is seen not as an instance of sensibility or natural benevolence but rather as an aesthetic and epistemological problem that must be understood in relation to the problem of theatricality. Placing novels in the context of eighteenth-century writing about theater, fiction, and painting, Marshall argues that an unusual variety of authors and (...) texts were concerned with the possibility of entering into someone else's thoughts and feelings. He shows how key eighteenth-century works reflect on the problem of how to move, touch, and secure the sympathy of readers and beholders in the realm of both "art" and "life." Marshall discusses the demands placed upon novels to achieve certain effects, the ambivalence of writers and readers about those effects, and the ways in which these texts can be read as philosophical meditations on the differences and analogies between the experiences of reading a novel, watching a play, beholding a painting, and witnessing the spectacle of someone suffering. The Surprising Effects of Sympathy traces the interaction of sympathy and theater and the artistic and philosophical problems that these terms represent in dialogues about aesthetics, moral philosophy, epistemology, psychology, autobiography, the novel, and society. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:The Current State of Vico ScholarshipDavid L. MarshallGiambattista Vico is one of those chameleon figures in the history of ideas who is so intellectually rich that he can be constantly reinvented. It is indicative of the rich ambiguity of his thought that two of the most prominent intellectual historians working today should have come to opposite conclusions about his relationship to the master-category of eighteenth-century intellectual history: for Mark (...) Lilla, Vico was a Counter-Enlightenment thinker; for Jonathan Israel, he was a figure in the Radical Enlightenment.1 Vico’s fungibility gives reason for pause. Someone who can be folded into all manner of intellectual projects may be suspect. But Vico is more colonizing than colonized and, thus, the diversity of his receptions is evidence of creativity, and not merely malleability. The only way to deal with Vico is to dive into the multiplicity of plausible interpretations and find in them the makings of a new line of inquiry. Vico’s moment of flourishing in the Anglophone world came initially in the 1960s and 1970s, but if the diversity and quality of receptions in the last five years is anything to go by then we can say that Vico remains—especially in Italian, French, and German— an intellectual historical provocateur.This review essay surveys such literature and makes a single recurring observation: the various specifications of Vico’s place in intellectual history come into alignment as dimensions of what one might term Vico’s reinvention of rhetoric. As a professor of rhetoric in a culture that possessed—for [End Page 141] the most part—very weak oratorical institutions, Vico found himself in a particularly paradoxical situation. Recent research on Vico suggests that this paradox worked itself out in Vico’s thought in a number of highly interesting ways. First, Vico constitutes an opportunity for intellectual historians of the scientific revolution by offering a simultaneously rhetorical and pragmatic gloss of the early modern logic of experiment. Second, for intellectual historians of religion, Vico constitutes a study in how early moderns could examine the rhetorical functioning of theological vocabularies without necessarily committing themselves to the independent existence of the referents of those vocabularies. Third, for intellectual historians of Enlightenment, Vico confirms that encyclopedism was not a merely French practice in the eighteenth century and that the kind of omnicompetence implicit in encyclopedic multidisciplinarity had roots in rhetorical criticism. Fourth, intellectual historians of Counter-Enlightenment cannot easily fold Vico into their narratives, in part because his legal works (which have been read as a call for cultural retrenchment in response to early modern skepticism) are in fact an account of how Greek rhetoric found its analogue in Roman jurisprudence. Fifth, for historians of the idea of language, Vico demonstrates that there were powerful alternatives in early modernity to the dominant contractualist account of the origin of language (offered by Hobbes, Locke, and others) that were rhetorical and yet did not emphasize the priority of speech over writing.When it appeared in 1961, Nicola Badaloni’s Introduzione a G.B. Vico was the most sophisticated attempt to locate Vico in the Neapolitan philosophical tradition. In many ways, it remains the best attempt at contextualizing a thinker who is notoriously difficult to situate among his contemporaries. John Robertson’s recent Case for the Enlightenment has many virtues (not least its revealing supposition that Vico ought to be read alongside Hume), but as an attempt at contextualization Robertson’s work is not as rich as Badaloni’s.2 In particular, Badaloni did a great deal to reconstruct the history of natural philosophical inquiry at Naples in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. In Badaloni’s description, Naples was a place in which a strong culture of natural philosophical investigation set the foundation for concepts such as experimentalism and pantheism. Furthermore, Badaloni argued that, although such concepts originated in natural philosophy, they cross-pollinated with ideas prominent in the Neapolitan schools of jurisprudence—particularly probabilism. In the [End Page 142] broadest terms, Badaloni argued that Vico’s intellectual project was an examination of the pantheistic principle that Jovis omnia plena (“all things are made of Jove”) in the domains of law, poetry, and history... (shrink)

_ Source: _Page Count 26 The dilemma of presentism is sometimes represented as a choice between the increased relevance and utility of a historiographic practice that can articulate its relation to the present and the increased objectivity or openness to the otherness of the past of a historiographic practice that articulates the past “on its own terms.” The present article argues that, at least with reference to intellectual history, we should understand that ideas appear most fully when they are run (...) through a multitude of contexts and not rooted exclusively in circumstances contemporaneous to _either_ the original emergence of an idea _or_ the writer and first reader of the historical account. The following thesis is advanced: ideas appear only over time, and the contextualization, decontextualization, and recontextualization of ideas in different places and times are all essential to such intellectual historical “appearance.” The article then articulates its position more precisely by means of Robert Brandom’s inferentialism. And, finally, this line of inquiry is exemplified and interrogated by means of a concrete historiographic case—namely, a political theoretical investigation of the intellectual legacy of the Weimar Republic. (shrink)

In the early work of Martin Heidegger, I argue, we can confect a particular and particularly useful conception of rhetoric as a capacity to articulate situatedness by means, in part, of a more precise vocabulary for what I call the phenomena of everydayness. One aspect of this claim is that rhetoric is a diagnostic of established positions. Practicing what I preach, my first task here is to articulate as synoptically as possible the established positions on the topic at hand. In (...) the most general terms, that topic is “Heidegger and rhetoric.” We can identify eight stances in the literature. I articulate them in order of determinateness, as a series of specifications. First, before the publication in recent... (shrink)

_ Source: _Page Count 26 The dilemma of presentism is sometimes represented as a choice between the increased relevance and utility of a historiographic practice that can articulate its relation to the present and the increased objectivity or openness to the otherness of the past of a historiographic practice that articulates the past “on its own terms.” The present article argues that, at least with reference to intellectual history, we should understand that ideas appear most fully when they are run (...) through a multitude of contexts and not rooted exclusively in circumstances contemporaneous to _either_ the original emergence of an idea _or_ the writer and first reader of the historical account. The following thesis is advanced: ideas appear only over time, and the contextualization, decontextualization, and recontextualization of ideas in different places and times are all essential to such intellectual historical “appearance.” The article then articulates its position more precisely by means of Robert Brandom’s inferentialism. And, finally, this line of inquiry is exemplified and interrogated by means of a concrete historiographic case—namely, a political theoretical investigation of the intellectual legacy of the Weimar Republic. (shrink)

Over the last 25 years, major research in media and cultural studies has investigated the play of affect in our cultures. ‘Affect’, as a term derived from its neurophysiological and psychological origins, defines the particular movement of feeling from sensation to its attribution as an identifiable emotion. This article explores the way that ‘affect’ to emotion is being curated online by users particularly of social media as they learn to structure how they are perceived in online culture by others. It (...) also investigates how the specific correlating of affect to emotion is one of the essential algorithmically generated activities of social media and online corporations. To discern this flow of affect and emotion, the article works to identify how this online cultural pandemic has intersected with the COVID-19 pandemic and produced a new level and intensity of affect and emotion curation as greater parts of our connected cultures are being managed and moderated by ourselves as well as governments, corporations and institutions. The neologism ‘covidiquette’ is used to describe this new form of online curation of cultures, and a further pandemic expansion of this movement of affect into attribution – transnationally, governmentally and commercially. Key pathways for investigating this correlation – and curation – of affect are analysed in this paper during 2020 and 2021 and the ever-presence of COVID-19 and its unique capacity to produce a proliferation of sharing, connection and – critically – surveillance. (shrink)

This article explores the intellectual life of Max Harold Fisch, the twentieth-century American scholar of Giambattista Vico and Charles S. Peirce. Fisch was a thinker with fundamental commitments to both history and philosophy. The claim here is that his life exemplifies a constitutive tension in the work of intellectual historians, who operate in the interstice between these two disciplines. What we learn is that intellectual historians may have a double investment both in the filigree of particular historical contexts and in (...) the principles that emerge in and then detach from those contexts. The article explores this double investment by following it through five decades of Fisch’s intellectual labor between 1930 and 1980. (shrink)

When Giambattista Vico wrote and rewrote the Scienza Nuova between 1725 and 1744, he all but completely occluded his own discipline – rhetoric. Professor of Latin Eloquence at the University of Nap...

Scholars have largely ignored Walter Benjamin's assertion that his work was a continuation of initiatives begun by Giambattista Vico and Carl Gustav Jochmann. But Benjamin's assertion is important. It situates his work in a tradition of rhetorical inquiry. In turn, rhetorical inquiry ought to be understood as a form of political thought. This article traces the intrication and development of Benjamin's rhetorical and political interests from his early work on Trauerspiel through a sequence of texts written before and after the (...) fall of the Weimar Republic in 1933, up to and including the various redactions of the 'Kunstwerk' essay. (shrink)

Notice --- Hobbes and Adams as Thucydideans --- Ancient Greece --- Alternative Concepts of the Human Condition --- Medieval Monarchy --- Renaissance Republics --- Founding Fathers --- The Moral Recuperation of Self-Interest --- Other Human Worlds --- Now is the Whimper of Our Self-Contempt --- Culture is the Human Nature.

Science lies at the intersection of ideas and society, at the heart of the modern human experience. The study of past science should therefore be central to our humanistic attempt to know ourselves. Nevertheless, past science is not studied as an integral whole, but from two very different and divergent perspectives: the intellectual history of science, which focuses on the development of ideas and arguments, and the social history of science, which focuses on the development of science as a social (...) undertaking within its broader contexts. There is almost universal agreement that this bifurcation of the field is lamentable, and nearly universal disagreement about where, exactly, the problem lies. In order to identify the difficulty, this paper examines the institutional histories and disciplinary philosophies that have constituted the study of past science. I argue that science history, eventually allied itself with either History or Philosophy in order to find institutional support, thereby suffering the artificial imposition of the disciplinary prejudices of its allied fields, which lead science historians to adopt either the intellectual or the social perspective. Science history must reconcile its distinctions on its own terms, as an integrated unity with its own disciplinary bounds, and apart from History and Philosophy. As a catalyst for rapprochement, the historical and philosophical examination also yields a mapping of the field of science history that can be used to locate the problematic divisions in present scholarship and to draw new disciplinary bounds. (shrink)

Philippe Descola has become one of the most important anthropologists working today, and Beyond Nature and Culture has been a major influence in European intellectual life since its French publication in 2005. Here, finally, it is brought to English-language readers. At its heart is a question central to both anthropology and philosophy: what is the relationship between nature and culture? Culture—as a collective human making, of art, language, and so forth—is often seen as essentially different from nature, which is portrayed (...) as a collective of the nonhuman world, of plants, animals, geology, and natural forces. Descola shows this essential difference to be, however, not only a specifically Western notion, but also a very recent one. Drawing on ethnographic examples from around the world and theoretical understandings from cognitive science, structural analysis, and phenomenology, he formulates a sophisticated new framework, the “four ontologies”— animism, totemism, naturalism, and analogism—to account for all the ways we relate ourselves to nature. By thinking beyond nature and culture as a simple dichotomy, Descola offers nothing short of a fundamental reformulation by which anthropologists and philosophers can see the world afresh. (shrink)

First devised as after-dinner entertainment at a decennial meeting of the Association of Social Anthropologists in Great Britain, and first published by Prickly Pear Press in 1993, this expanded edition of _Waiting for Foucault_ represents some of the brightest anthropological satire—mixed in with some of the most serious intellectual issues in the human sciences. Whether he's summing up the state of the discipline or ruminating on the ancients, Sahlins delivers a strong mixture of wit and wisdom.

The novel understanding of the physical world that characterized the Scientific Revolution depended on a fundamental shift in the way its protagonists understood and described space. At the beginning of the seventeenth century, spatial phenomena were described in relation to a presupposed central point; by its end, space had become a centerless void in which phenomena could only be described by reference to arbitrary orientations. David Marshall Miller examines both the historical and philosophical aspects of this far-reaching development, (...) including the rejection of the idea of heavenly spheres, the advent of rectilinear inertia, and the theoretical contributions of Copernicus, Gilbert, Kepler, Galileo, Descartes, and Newton. His rich study shows clearly how the centered Aristotelian cosmos became the oriented Newtonian universe, and will be of great interest to students and scholars of the history and philosophy of science. (shrink)

Newton’s argument for universal gravitation in the Principia eventually rested on the third “Rule of Philosophizing,” which warrants the generalization of “qualities of bodies.” An analysis of the rule and the history of its development indicate that the term ‘quality’ should be taken to include both inherent properties of bodies and relations among systems of bodies, generalized into `laws'. By incorporating law‐induction into the rule, Newton could legitimately rebuff objections to his theory by claiming that universal gravitation was justified by (...) his method even if he could not specify the cause of gravity . †To contact the author, please write to: Department of Philosophy, Duke University, 201 West Duke Building, Box 90743, Durham, NC 27708; e‐mail: david[email protected]. (shrink)

The history of the Parallelogram Rule for composing physical quantities, such as motions and forces, is marked by conceptual difficulties leading to false starts and halting progress. In particular, authors resisted the required assumption that the magnitude and the direction of a quantity can interact and are jointly necessary to represent the quantity. Consequently, the origins of the Rule cannot be traced to Pseudo-Aristotle or Stevin, as commonly held, but to Fermat, Hobbes, and subsequent developments in the latter part of (...) the seventeenth century. (shrink)

In June 1993, conjoined twins Amy and Angela Lakeberg became the focus of national attention. They shared a complex six‐chambered heart and one liver; only one could survive separation surgery, and even her chances were slim. The medical challenge was great and the ethical challenges were even greater.

The exportation of Western biomedicine throughout the world has not resulted in a systematic homogenization of scientific ideology but rather in the proliferation of many forms and practices of biomedicine. Similarly, in the last decade, bioethics has become increasingly an international enterprise. Although there may be consensus regarding the inherent value of ethical discourse as it relates to health and medical care, there are disagreements about the nature and parameters of medical morality. This lack of consensus exists because our beliefs (...) about morality are culturally constituted, embedded in social, religious, and political ideologies that influence particular individuals and communities at specific historical moments. (shrink)