This is the first major work in English to explore at length the meaning, context, aims, and vital importance of Thomas Hobbes's concepts of the law of nature..

Photos. "This is a masterly book which brings together the two major Bacons--the politician and the philosopher. . .

This essay surveys the present position of postmodernism with respect to the effect of its ideas upon historiography. For this purpose it looks at a number of writings by historians that have been a response to postmodernism including the recently published collection of articles, The Postmodern History Reader. The essay argues that, in contrast to scholars in the field of literary studies, the American historical profession has been much more resistant to postmodernist doctrines and that the latters' influence upon the (...) thinking and practice of historians is not only fading but increasingly destined to fade. The essay also presents a critical discussion of the current philosophy of postmodernism in its bearing upon historiography, directed chiefly against its claim that the world has undergone an epochal transition from the modern to a postmodern age; its theory of language and linguistic idealism; its opposition to historical realism and denial of the actuality of the past as a possible object of reference; and its theory of historical narrative as unconstrained fictional construction. This discussion includes a consideration of the work of postmodernist thinkers such as J.-F. Lyotard, of the recent books by David Roberts and Robert F. Berkhofer, Jr. which espouse a postmodernist theory of history, and of the narrativist theory of Hayden White. The essay also notes some of the reasons for postmodernism's appeal; and while it does not deny that postmodernist philosophy may have served a useful purpose in provoking historians to be more self-critical and aware of their presuppositions and procedures, it maintains that its skeptical and politicized view of historical inquiry is deeply mistaken, out of accord with the way historians themselves think about their work, and incapable of providing an understanding of historiography as a form of thought engaged in the attainment of knowledge and understanding of the human past. (shrink)

Zagorin presents a critique of F. R. Ankersmit's postmodernist philosophy of history as fallacious and opposed to some of the fundamental convictions and intuitions historians feel about their discipline. It questions Ankersmit's conclusion that the overproduction of historical writings and continuing generation of new interpretations has obliterated the past as an object of knowledge. It argues that Ankersmit's attempt, in accord with Hayden White, to aestheticize historiography and regard it as a linguistic construction indistinguishable from literature, must sever it from (...) its necessary grounding in reality and truth. It also rejects as groundless Ankersmit's claim to have deconstructed causality, and concludes that the postmodernist conception trivializes historiography and deprives it of its essential function in education and culture. (shrink)

This paper examines the concept of objectivity traceable in Francis Bacon's natural philosophy. After some historical background on this concept, it considers the question of whether it is not an anachronism to attribute such a concept to Bacon, since the word ‘objectivity’ is a later coinage and does not appear anywhere in his writings. The essay gives reasons for answering this question in the negative, and then criticizes the accounts given of Bacon's understanding of objectivity by Lorraine Daston and Julie (...) Robin Solomon. It argues that this understanding is most directly and fully expressed in his discussion of the idols of the mind. In this connection, the paper notes Bacon's critical attitude to sixteenth-century scepticism and its relevance to the idea of objectivity implicit in his comments on the idols. In conclusion, the paper argues that Bacon was not a pure empiricist and describes the place assigned to theories and hypotheses in his natural philosophy. (shrink)

This collection of essays looks at the distinctively English intellectual, social and political phenomenon of Latitudinarianism, which emerged during the Civil War and Interregnum and came into its own after the Restoration, becoming a virtual orthodoxy after 1688. Dividing into two parts, it first examines the importance of the Cambridge Platonists, who sought to embrace the newest philosophical and scientific movements within Church of England orthodoxy, and then moves into the later seventeenth century, from the Restoration onwards, culminating in essays (...) on the philosopher John Locke. These new contributions establish a firmly interdisciplinary basis for the subject, while collectively gravitating towards the importance of discourse and language as the medium for cultural exchange. The variety of approaches serves to illuminate the cultural indeterminacy of the period, in which inherited models and vocabularies were forced to undergo revisions, coinciding with the formation of many cultural institutions still governing English society. (shrink)

This essay survey the attempts by art historians to discover the meaning of the peasant paintings and other works of Pieter Bruegel the Elder and to determine whether his oeuvre reflects any underlying philosophy. It examines some of the recent literature on Bruegel dealing with the question of his political allegiance, his supposed affiliation with the circle of distinguished intellectuals in Antwerp that included the printer-publisher Christophe Plantin and the geographer Abraham Ortelius, the possible influence of Stoic ideas in his (...) depiction of landscape, and his social ideals and attitude toward his peasant subjects. The essay suggests that there are obscurities in Bruegel's works that may never be resolved. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Two Books on Thomas HobbesPerez ZagorinQuentin Skinner, Reason and Rhetoric in the Philosophy of Hobbes (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), xvi, 477p.The Correspondence of Thomas Hobbes, ed. Noel Malcolm, 2 vols. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1994), lxxxv, 1008p.The literature on Hobbes in English and other European languages has grown so large in the past two decades that it has become almost unmanageable by students of the philosopher. No one who (...) is interested in Hobbes, however, can afford to overlook the two books that are reviewed here, the first, Quentin Skinner’s study of the relationship of Hobbes to rhetoric, and the second, Noel Malcolm’s edition of Hobbes’s correspondence.Skinner is well known not only as a leading British Hobbes scholar and historian of early modern political thought but likewise for his ideas concerning the correct method of studying the history of political philosophy. In a view akin to R. G. Collingwood’s he maintains that there are no permanent or perennial questions in political philosophy and that a historical approach based on a thorough comprehension of context is the only way to grasp what political philosophers are doing and saying when they write their texts. In implementing this prescription, he argues that to understand a historical text it is necessary to reconstruct its author’s intentions and the meaning of his ideas by ascertaining the linguistic conventions and usages and the intellectual currents and back-ground that form its context. He offers the present study both as an exem-plification of this method and as a new interpretation of the principles of Hobbes’s political philosophy which takes rhetoric as its focal theme. His aim, he tells us, is to situate Hobbes’s theory and practice of civil science within its intellectual context and to depict the philosopher less as the author of a philosophical system than as a contributor to a series of debates about the moral sciences within Renaissance culture. Our judgment of the success of his work will accordingly depend on whether or not we are satisfied that rhetoric possessed for Hobbes and his philosophy the crucial significance that Skinner claims for it [End Page 361].In recent years a number of scholars have discussed Hobbes’s attitude to rhetoric, and there have been at least two books on the subject. 1 Commensurate, however, with its ambitious goal of proffering a new interpretation of Hobbes’s work on politics, Skinner’s treatment of his involvement with rhetoric is much richer and far more learned than preceding studies. By rhetoric most people nowadays mean no more than a writer’s literary strategy, but this is not what Skinner intends by the term. He deals with rhetoric precisely as Hobbes would have understood it and in the sense it bore in the ancient world and the Renaissance, when it signified a major discipline of knowledge concerned with the various figures of speech and devices of language that constituted an art of persuasion and eloquence indispensable in the education of the orator, the statesman, the writer, and the gentleman.Skinner perceives Hobbes’s mind as formed in the early years of his career by his classical education and immersion in the literary-rhetorical culture of English Renaissance humanism derived from Greco-Roman antiquity and ancient authors on rhetoric like Aristotle, Cicero, and Quintilian. Starting from this point, he pictures Hobbes’s intellectual evolution as consisting of three successive stages: a humanist, a scientific, and a scientific-humanist. In the first, as a late Renaissance intellectual, Hobbes’s initial interest in politics as a civil science was shaped by his involvement in the humanistic disciplines of rhetoric, history, poetry, and moral and political philosophy. The result was the publication in 1629 of his English translation of Thucydides’ History, with the observations contained in his introduction. In the second stage he turned against the literary-rhetorical character of Renaissance culture and its approach to politics. This shift, which occurred in the 1630s, was caused by his discovery of the geometrical method, his pursuit of his scientific interests through his association with Sir Charles Cavendish and his friends, and his introduction to the Parisian scientific circle of Marin... (shrink)

This book is a concise, readable introduction to the Greek author Thucydides, who is widely regarded as one of the foremost historians of all time.Why does Thucydides continue to matter today? Perez Zagorin answers this question by examining Thucydides' landmark History of the Peloponnesian War, one of the great classics of Western civilization. This history, Zagorin explains, is far more than a mere chronicle of the conflict between Athens and Sparta, the two superpowers of Greece in the fifth century BCE. (...) It is also a remarkable story of politics, decision-making, the uses of power, and the human and communal experience of war. Zagorin maintains that the work remains of permanent interest because of the exceptional intellect that Thucydides brought to the writing of history, and to the originality, penetration, and the breadth and intensity of vision that inform his narrative. The first half of Zagorin's book discusses the intellectual and historical background to Thucydides' work and its method, structure, and view of the causes of the war. The following chapters deal with Thucydides' portrayal of the Athenian leader Pericles and his account of some of the main episodes of the war, such as the revolution in Corcyra and the Athenian invasion of Sicily. The book concludes with an insightful discussion of Thucydides as a thinker and philosophic historian.Designed to introduce both students and general readers to a work that is an essential part of a liberal education, this book seeks to encourage readers to explore Thucydides--one of the world's greatest historians--for themselves. (shrink)