Essays on philosophy and intellectual history, focusing in particular on John Locke.

ABSTRACT This article offers some reflections on the importance Adam Smith accorded to luck in The Wealth of Nations. While the place of moral luck in The Theory of Moral Sentiments has been the subject of some scholarly attention, this has not been the case for luck in his best-known work. It focuses on what Smith thought particularly striking about our estimation of our own good fortune and argues that it accentuated the need for trustworthiness and trusted friends.

Review of Nancy Hirschmann's Gender, Class and Freedom in Modern Political Theory.

British Journal for the History of Philosophy, Volume 20, Issue 4, Page 847-849, July 2012.

It is particularly fitting for this philosophical journal to carry a review of Moses Mendelssohn's Philosophical Writings, since Mendelssohn himself made use of dialogues to discuss a number of subjects, most notably the sublime and the naive. Indeed, this volume's second essay is simply entitled "Dialogues," while the first, "On Sentiments," takes the form of an exchange of letters. The two essays which constitute Part I of the Philosophical Writings were first published in 1755 within a few months of each (...) other. "Rhapsody or Additions to the Letters on Sentiments", "On the Main Principles of the Fine Arts and Sciences", "On the Sublime and the Naïve in the Fine Sciences", and "On Probability" constitute Part II of the work, which was first published as a whole in 1761, and in a revised edition in 1771. Thus, apart from "Rhapsody" which was newly written, Philosophische Schriften brought together works already known to the public. The present translation contains two further essays, "On the Ability to Know, the Ability to Feel, and the Ability to Desire" and "On the Question: What Does to Enlighten Mean?". These are preceded by "On Evidence in Metaphysical Sciences", on which the Royal Prussian Academy of Sciences bestowed a prize, making Kant's entry, Inquiry into the Distinctness of the Fundamental Principles of Natural Theology and Morals, a close runner-up. (shrink)

The long eighteenth century was a good time for history and historians. This article considers one of its most original genres, conjectural history, and of one of conjectural history’s most interesting subjects, woman. What made the conjectural history of woman most interesting was not only that it brought together all the elements that were themselves the subjects of theoretical histories, such as language, the arts and sciences, society, religion, and man, but continued to matter politically well into the nineteenth century. (...) Indeed, one might argue that it continues to shape understandings of what it means to be civilized to this day. Following some observations on some of the challenges such a history presented to its practitioners, the essay turns to Engels’s The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State: in the Light of the Researches of Lewis H. Morgan and his contestation of the eighteenth-century view of the history of woman. It ends with some reflections on the importance of revisiting such histories. (shrink)