Popper first developed his theory of scientific method – falsificationism – in his The Logic of Scientific Discovery, then generalized it to form critical rationalism, which he subsequently applied to social and political problems in The Open Society and Its Enemies. All this can be regarded as constituting a major development of the 18th century Enlightenment programme of learning from scientific progress how to achieve social progress towards a better world. Falsificationism is, however, defective. It misrepresents the real, (...) problematic aims of science. We need a new conception of scientific method, a meta-methodology which provides a framework for the improvement of the aims and methods of science as scientific knowledge improves. This aim-oriented empiricist idea can be generalized to form a conception of rationality – aim-oriented rationality – which helps us improve problematic aims and methods whatever we may be doing. In this way, Popper’s version of the Enlightenment programme can be much improved, indeed transformed. (shrink)

In this paper I discuss four versions of the basic idea of the French Enlightenment of the 18th century, namely: To learn from scientific progress how to achieve social progress towards an enlightened world. These four versions are: 1. The Traditional Enlightenment Programme. 2. The Popperian Version of the Enlightenment Programme. 3. The Improved Popperian Enlightenment Programme. 4. The New Enlightenment Programme. The Traditional Enlightenment Programme is the version of (...) the idea upheld by the philosophes of the French Enlightenment. It was developed throughout the 19th century and put into practice in the early 20th century with the creation of departments of social science in universities all over the world. It is however damagingly defective. The Popperian Version of the Enlightenment Programme is an improvement, but still defective. As we go down the list, from 1 and 2 to 3 and 4, each Programme improves on its predecessor, until with The New Enlightenment, which can in some respects be associated with Einstein, we arrive at a version of the idea which can genuinely help humanity make social progress towards an enlightened world. (shrink)

Aesthetics is today widely seen as the philosophy of art and/or beauty, limited to artworks and their perception. In this paper, I will argue that today's aesthetics and the original programme developed by the German Enlightenment thinker Alexander Gottlieb Baumgarten in the first half of the eighteenth century have only the name in common. Baumgarten did not primarily develop his aesthetics as a philosophy of art. The making and understanding of artworks had served in his original programme (...) only as an example for the application of his philosophy. What he really attempts to present is an alternative philosophy of knowledge that goes beyond the purely rationalist, empiricist, and sensualist approaches. In short, Baumgarten transcends the old opposition between rationalism and sensualism. His core theme is the improvement (perfectio) of human knowledge and cognition and the ways to reach this goal. The study of Baumgarten's foundational works on aesthetics should not be undertaken merely out of antiquarian interest. I will argue, instead, that Baumgarten's importance and contemporary relevance lies in this: that his Aesthetica may serve as a profound contribution to the philosophy of the cultural sciences and humanities. Revisiting Baumgarten's original idea of aesthetics will lead us to a more inclusive concept of that philosophical discipline. (shrink)

In the tradition of "The Existential Pleasures of Engineering", this meditative and enlightening work creates a new philosophical approach to programming.

ABSTRACTThis article examines a translation of the Scottish historian William Robertson’s probably most famous text in the journal of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences in the 1830s, as a case study on continuity between the Enlightenment and the era of liberal reform in Central Europe. It underlines the benefits of the comparative study of Scotland in Robertson’s time and Hungary in the Reform Age as partners in composite polities at the opposite ends of Europe, where patriotic projects of overcoming (...) limitations of political sovereignty via cultural and economic improvement were pursued. The belated reception of Robertson in Hungary took place within a larger initiative of progress and refinement, associated with the liberal Count István Széchenyi, in an environment where many potential sympathizers with his programme were ambivalent about the values of cosmopolitanism and commerce promoted by Robertson, indebted as they remained to more archaic modes of patriotism. In view of the peculiarities of translation, and selection the Hungarian rendering of the View of the Progress was attuned to the sentiments of this constituency, and may be interpreted as a set of discursive gestures aimed at conquering it for the cause of ‘liberalism as refinement.’. (shrink)

The article provides a critical assessment of the project to overcome correlationism pre­sented in Ray Brassier’s book “Nihil Unbound: Enlightenment and Extinction”. Brassier is usually considered to be among the “speculative realists”, since the starting point of his philosophy in the 2000s was the struggle against correlationism. We argue that in terms of understanding correlationism, the philosopher was influenced by his colleague in speculative realism, Quentin Meillassoux. Meillassoux proposes to understand corre­lationism as philosophical approaches that focus on the relationship (...) (correlation) be­tween the poles: subject – object, signifier – signified, noema – noesis, etc. Meillassoux reproaches correlationists for not thematizing a reality independent of thinking, without which correlation itself would not exist. Meillassoux’s pathos is justified, since correla­tionism narrows the field of philosophical research, but Meillassoux himself cannot get rid of correlationism. Ray Brassier undertakes this task, drawing on the ideas of Wilfrid Sellars, Alain Badiou, and especially François Laruelle. Some natural-science theories also receive an anti-correlationist interpretation in Brassier’s book. Thus, the philoso­pher appeals to modern neurophysiology and eliminativism, as well as to cosmological physics. Based on the results of the study, it is concluded that Ray Brassier fails to over­come correlationism. The philosopher does not offer a convincing anti-correlationist in­terpretation of the ideas of Sellars, Badiou and Laruelle, and also does not justify the ap­peal to modern natural science. In addition, we come to the conclusion that the desire to oppose correlationism is productive, and for this, philosophy should shift its attention from correlation to the everyday pressure of reality itself, which the human subject can­not get rid of. (shrink)

ABSTRACT The chief contribution of P. Kitromilides’ Enlightenment and Revolution is that it reconstructs the Modern Greek Enlightenment as a radical programme of social and political transformation. At the same time, it describes the petering out of the Enlightenment legacy in the newly independent Kingdom, whose public life was gradually infused with a romantic nationalism with mystical and religious overtones. During the twentieth century, this led to the decoupling of the Greek public mind from the idea (...) of Europe, which had been the lodestar for the leaders of the eighteenth century Greek Enlightenment and the Revolution of 1821. The writers of the ‘Generation of the Thirties’ constructed a notion of ‘Neohellenism’ in conscious disjunction from the ‘rationalist’ legacy of the West. Still, the institutional legacy of the Enlightenment survives as the foundation of Modern Greek public life, and its resilience was successfully tested against the onslaught of the ‘politics of unreason’ in the teens of the present century. (shrink)

Two great problems of learning confront humanity: learning about the nature of the universe and about ourselves and other living things as a part of the universe, and learning how to become civilized or enlightened. The first problem was solved, in essence, in the 17th century, with the creation of modern science. But the second problem has not yet been solved. Solving the first problem without also solving the second puts us in a situation of great danger. All our current (...) global problems have arisen as a result. What we need to do, in response to this unprecedented crisis, is learn from our solution to the first problem how to solve the second one. This was the basic idea of the 18th century Enlightenment. Unfortunately, in carrying out this programme, the Enlightenment made three blunders, and it is this defective version of the Enlightenment programme, inherited from the past, that is still built into the institutional/intellectual structure of academic inquiry in the 21st century. In order to solve the second great problem of learning we need to correct the three blunders of the traditional Enlightenment. This involves changing the nature of social inquiry, so that social science becomes social methodology or social philosophy, concerned to help us build into social life the progress-achieving methods of aim-oriented rationality, arrived at by generalizing the progress-achieving methods of science. It also involves, more generally, bringing about a revolution in the nature of academic inquiry as a whole, so that it takes up its proper task of helping humanity learn how to become wiser by increasingly cooperatively rational means. The scientific task of improving knowledge and understanding of nature becomes a part of the broader task of improving global wisdom. The outcome would be what we so urgently need: a kind of inquiry rationally designed and devoted to helping us make progress towards a genuinely civilized world. We would succeed in doing what the Enlightenment tried but failed to do: learn from scientific progress how to go about making social progress towards as good a world as possible. (shrink)

Since the 1990s, there has been a growing tendency to interpret Diderot as a radical who first put into question absolutism in the Encyclopédie and then became a fierce opponent of any kind of ‘despotism’, even the ‘enlightened’ one, and a fervent partisan of democratic revolutions in the 1770s. It is argued here that the narrative that cuts Diderot’s life into different phases obscures continuities in his political thought, and misrepresents partly the political vision he had in the 1770s. Diderot’s (...) political thought may have been more coherent than usually acknowledged, and this coherence is to be found in his ideal of a paternalistic monarchy taking advice from its subjects and respecting their rights, that is the constitution of the realm. This idea is not to be mixed up with a democratic programme of government by the people, nor with the endorsement of political change via a revolution. Rather, when towards the end of his life Diderot lost hope that the constitutional order of the French monarchy would be respected, he both feared civil war and hoped that these tumults might bring about the regeneration of the French monarchy. This vision derived from a classical cyclic view of history. (shrink)

We face two great probems of learning: learning about the universe and about ourselves as a part of the universe, and learning how to create world civilization. We have solved the first problem, but not the second. We need to learn from our solution to the first problem how to solve the second. That involves getting clear about the nature of the progress-achieving methods of science, generalizing these methods so that they become fruitfully applicable to any problematic endeavour, and then (...) getting these generalized progress-acheving methods into all our other institutions besides science, and above all into the endeavour to make progress towards a good, civilized world. This article spells out what this programme involves. (shrink)

This is the first book-length study of one of the most influential traditions in eighteenth-century Anglophone moral and political thought, 'theological utilitarianism'. Niall O'Flaherty charts its development from its formulation by Anglican disciples of Locke in the 1730s to its culmination in William Paley's work. Few works of moral and political thought had such a profound impact on political discourse as Paley's Principles of Moral and Political Philosophy. His arguments were at the forefront of debates about the constitution, the judicial (...) system, slavery and poverty. By placing Paley's moral thought in the context of theological debate, this book establishes his genuine commitment to a worldly theology and to a programme of human advancement. It thus raises serious doubts about histories which treat the Enlightenment as an entirely secular enterprise, as well as those which see English thought as being markedly out of step with wider European intellectual developments. (shrink)

This superb collection of writings on buddha nature by the Third Karmapa Rangjung Dorje (1284-1339) focuses on the transition from ordinary deluded consciousness to enlightened wisdom, the characteristics of buddhahood, and a buddha's enlightened activity. Most of these materials have never been translated comprehensively. The Third Karmapa's unique and well-balanced view synthesizes Yogacara Madhyamaka and the classical teachings on buddha nature. Rangjung Dorje not only shows that these teachings do not contradict each other but also that they supplement each other (...) and share the same essential points in terms of the ultimate nature of mind and all phenomena. His fusion is remarkable because it clearly builds on Indian predecessors and precedes the later often highly charged debates in Tibet about the views of Rangtong ("self-empty") and Shentong ("other-empty"). Although Rangjung Dorje is widely regarded as one of the major proponents of the Tibetan Shentong tradition (some even consider him its founder), this book shows how his views differ from the Shentong tradition as understood by Dolpopa Taranatha and the First Jamgon Kongtrul. The Third Karmapa's view is more accurately described as one in which the two categories of rangtong and shentong are not regarded as mutually exclusive but are combined in a creative synthesis. For those practicing the sutrayana and the vajrayana in the Kagyu tradition, what these texts describe can be transformed into living experience. (shrink)

What kind of science – or, more generally, what kind of academic inquiry – can best contribute to the public good? Two answers are considered: knowledge-inquiry and wisdom-inquiry. The former is what we have at present. It is, however, damagingly irrational. The latter is more rigorous and, potentially, of greater value in human and intellectual terms. It arises as a result of putting the Enlightenment Programme properly into practice. We urgently need to bring about a revolution in academia, (...) so that wisdom-inquiry is put into practice. (shrink)

Essays devoted to the work of the late Neil Wilson, Canadian philosopher and contributor to the field of semantic analysis that emerged from the fusion of logic, pragmatism, and ontology. Many of the essays in this volume take their initial inspiration from Wilson's seminal work Substances Without Substrata.

La physiocratie occupe une place majeure dans l'histoire du siècle des Lumières. La doctrine élaborée par le docteur François Quesnay, le marquis de Mirabeau et leurs disciples constitue un modèle original de réforme de la société d'Ancien Régime. Liberté du commerce, impôt unique sur les terres, abolition des corporations, établissement du "despotisme légal", reconnaissance du triptyque "liberté, propriété, sûreté" au rang de droits fondamentaux, les propositions des physiocrates bouleversent l'ordre juridique et social traditionnel. Par ses théories universalistes, la physiocratie s'exporte (...) bien au-delà des frontières françaises. De quelles manières les idées de cette "science nouvelle" ont-elles circulées et comment ont-elles été reçues en Europe?"--Page 4 of cover. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:The Cambridge Companion to the Scottish EnlightenmentJames A. HarrisAlexander Broadie, editor. The Cambridge Companion to the Scottish Enlightenment. Cambridge-New York: Cambridge University Press, 2003. Pp. xvi + 366. Cloth, $65.00.A Cambridge Companion can be expected to attempt to do two different things at the same time: to provide a clear and concise introduction to the existing scholarly literature on all the principal topics discussed by the philosopher (...) or school of philosophy to which the Companion is devoted; and to advance the discussion in ways that will be of interest to those already working in the field. Alexander Broadie's Cambridge Companion to the Scottish Enlightenment succeeds admirably at both tasks. Excellent introductions are provided to eighteenth-century Scottish writing on religion, the philosophy of mind and its engagement with scepticism, the history of the human species and the basis of human sociability, mathematics and natural science, moral philosophy, political philosophy and theories of justice, economic theory, legal theory, historiography, and aesthetics. In the process, familiar figures such as Hutcheson, Hume, Smith, Robertson and Reid are placed amid a huge range of writers no longer very often taught at the undergraduate level, and the result provides a rich resource for those who want to begin to broaden and deepen textbook accounts of what was achieved in Scotland during le Siècle des lumières. In fact, as a single-volume introduction to the wealth of ideas bestowed to posterity by the Scottish Enlightenment, this book has no serious competition. It is almost entirely free of the overblown rhetoric and blatant chauvinism characteristic of some recently published accounts of what the Scots contributed to the modern world.In addition, many of the chapters contain information and arguments that will stimulate and sometimes provoke those who need no introduction to the Scottish Enlightenment. M. A. Stewart, for example, reminds us how easy it is to exaggerate the damage Hume did to religious belief in his own time. His Scottish contemporaries did their best to minimize Hume's impact and to downplay his significance; and, Stewart shows, for the most part they succeeded. Aaron Garrett describes the various ways, some rather less-than-enlightened, in which historians used animals, women, and racial difference in order "to get at the original of man." The editor of the volume takes important steps toward placing Scottish writing on the arts and aesthetic judgment in the context of what he terms "the general [End Page 479] programme of improvement that characterised the Scottish Enlightenment from its earliest days" (295).In his Preface, Alexander Broadie sets out three rival large-scale interpretations of the Scottish Enlightenment considered as a whole: one that gives priority to political economy and the disciplines which form its intellectual foundation (moral philosophy, jurisprudence, and the historical study of social institutions); another which sees the cultivation of mathematics and the natural sciences as central to the process of enlightenment in Scotland; and a third which portrays the Scottish Enlightenment as being a cultural phenomenon as much as a purely intellectual one, using just enough of both the "political economic" interpretation and the "natural scientific" interpretations as is necessary to understand how the Scottish "literati" worked within and transformed the institutions that shaped the Scotland of their day: the law, the Kirk, and the universities. My judgment is that the reader of this volume will find himself leaning toward the first of these three approaches. This is partly because the chapters both on the disciplines on which political economy was built and on economics itself are the strongest in the book: Fania Oz-Salzberger on political theory, Knud Haakonnsen on natural jurisprudence, Andrew Skinner on economics, John Cairns on legal theory, and Christopher Berry on "sociality and socialisation". Ironically, perhaps, these chapters work so well because they build on a brilliant account of "The Contexts of the Scottish Enlightenment" provided by one of the chief exponents of the "natural scientific" approach, Roger Emerson.Broadie claims that it is "arguable that science is crucially important to the Scottish Enlightenment, perhaps more important than were moral philosophy, historiography and political economy" (4). It is to be regretted, then, that so little space... (shrink)

The crisis of our times is that we have science without wisdom. All our current global problems have arisen as a result. Learning how to become wiser has become, not a luxury, but a necessity. The key is to learn from the success of science. We need to learn from scientific progress how to achieve social progress towards a wiser world. This is an old idea that goes back to the French Enlightenment. However, in developing the idea, the philosophes (...) of the Enlightenment made serious blunders, and it is their botched version of the Enlightenment programme that was developed throughout the 19th century, and built into academia all over the world in the early 20th century with the creation of the social sciences. As a matter of great urgency, we need to put right the intellectual/institutional blunders we have inherited from the 18th century. We need to bring about a revolution in academic inquiry so that the basic task becomes, not just to acquire knowledge, but to help humanity learn how to make progress towards a wiser world. (shrink)

Steven Pinker's "Enlightenment NOW" is in many ways a terrific book, from which I have learnt much. But it is also deeply flawed. Science and reason are at the heart of the book, but the conceptions that Steven Pinker defends are damagingly irrational. And these defective conceptions of science and reason, as a result of being associated with the Enlightenment Programme for the past two or three centuries, have been responsible, in part, for the genesis of the (...) global problems we now suffer from, and our current inability to deal with them properly. There is not a glimmering of an awareness of any of this in Pinker’s book. This flaw in Enlightenment NOW is serious indeed. (shrink)

As part of a programme of disintegrating and re-assembling the concept or concepts of ‘Europe’, there is offered a revision of Franco Venturi's exceptionalist account of England's place in Enlightenment, an alternative to Isaiah Berlin's account of the movement through Enlightenment to historicism. The objective is to enhance the British and English role in European intellectual history, while showing that we must rewrite the concept of ‘Europe’ in order to do so. There persists the ‘Eurosceptical enquiry’ whether (...) ‘Europe’ is interested in history at all. (shrink)

Maxwell’s programme did supersede the Ampere-Weber one because it did assimilate some ideas of the Ampere-Weber programme, as well as the presuppositions of the programmes of Young-Fresnel and Faraday. But the opposite proposition is not true. Ampere-Weber programme did not assimilate the propositions of the Maxwellian programme. Maxwell’s victory over his rivals became possible because the core of Maxwell’s unification strategy was formed by Kantian epistemology looked through the prism of William Whewell and such representatives of (...) Scottish Enlightenment as Thomas Reid and William Hamilton. (shrink)

Two great problems of learning confront humanity: learning about the nature of the universe and our place in it, and learning how to become civilized. The first problem was solved, in essence, in the 17th century, with the creation of modern science. But the second problem has not yet been solved. Solving the first problem without also solving the second puts us in a situation of great danger. All our current global problems have arisen as a result. What we need (...) to do, in response to this unprecedented crisis, is learn from our solution to the first problem how to solve the second. This was the basic idea of the 18th century Enlightenment. Unfortunately, in carrying out this programme, the Enlightenment made three blunders, and it is this defective version of the Enlightenment programme that we have institutionalized in 20th century academic inquiry. In order to solve the second great problem of learning we need to correct the three blunders of the traditional Enlightenment. This involves changing the nature of social inquiry, so that social science becomes social methodology or social philosophy, concerned to help us build into social life the progress-achieving methods of aim-oriented rationality, arrived at by generalizing the progress-achieving methods of science. It also involves, more generally, bringing about a revolution in the nature of academic inquiry as a whole, so that it takes up its proper task of helping humanity learn how to become wiser by increasingly cooperatively rational means. The scientific task of improving knowledge and understanding of nature becomes a part of the broader task of improving global wisdom. (shrink)

I begin with a diagnosis. Present-day scholarly work on the Scottish Enlightenment is bifurcated: it is either focused on the areas of moral philosophy or of natural philosophy, broadly construed in both cases. The aspiration to combine these inquiries is rare and unsystematic. This paper makes a case for the need and possibility of a perspective that conceives moral and natural inquiry as integrated enterprises in the period. It also suggests that potentially useful interpretive devices can be adopted from (...) the historiography of science and philosophy, as well as science studies. (shrink)

For forty years I have argued that we urgently need to bring about a revolution in academia so that the basic task becomes to seek and promote wisdom. How did I come to argue for such a preposterously gigantic intellectual revolution? It goes back to my childhood. From an early age, I desired passionately to understand the physical universe. Then, around adolescence, my passion became to understand the heart and soul of people via the novel. But I never discovered how (...) to tell stories in order to tell the truth. So, having failed to become a physicist, and failed to become a novelist, I studied philosophy at Manchester University and then, in six weeks of inspiration, discovered that the riddle of the universe is the riddle of our desires. Philosophy should be about how to live, and should not just do conceptual analysis. I struggled to reconcile the two worlds of my childhood ambitions, the physical universe and the human world. I decided they could be reconciled with one another if one regarded the two accounts of them, physics and common sense, as myths, and not as literal truths. But then I discovered Karl Popper: truth is too important to be discarded. I revised my ideas: physics seeks to depict truly only an aspect of all that there is; in addition, there is the aspect of the experiential features of the world as we experience it. I was immensely impressed with Popper’s view that science makes progress, not by verification, but by ferocious attempted falsification of theories. I was impressed, too, with his generalization of this view to form critical rationalism. Then it dawned on me: Popper’s view of science is untenable because it misrepresents the basic aim of science. This is not truth as such; rather it is explanatory truth – truth presupposed to be unified or physically comprehensible. We need, I realized, a new conception of science, called by me aim-oriented empiricism, which acknowledges the real, problematic aims of science, and seeks to improve them. Then, treading along a path parallel to Popper’s, I realized that aim-oriented empiricism can be generalized to form a new conception of rationality, aim-oriented rationality, with implications for all that we do. This led on to a new conception of academic inquiry. From the Enlightenment we have inherited the view that academia, in order to help promote human welfare, must first acquire knowledge. But this is profoundly and damagingly irrational. If academia really does seek to help promote human welfare, then its primary tasks must be to articulate problems of living, and propose and critically assess possible solutions – possible actions, policies, political programmes, philosophies of life. The pursuit of knowledge is secondary. Academia needs to promote cooperatively rational problem solving in the social world, and needs to help humanity improve individual and institutional aims by exploiting aim-oriented rationality, arrived at by generalizing the real progress-achieving methods of science. We might, as a result, get into life some of the progressive success that is such a marked feature of science. Thus began my campaign to promote awareness of the urgent need for a new kind of academic inquiry rationally devoted to helping humanity create a wiser world. (shrink)

However, other leading philosophers of the era--such as David Hume, Adam Smith, and J.G. Herder--placed greater emphasis on feeling, seeing moral and political ...

In Rethinking the Enlightenment, Dr. Stuart demonstrates that the three primary strategies employed during the Enlightenment -- conflict, engagement, and retreat -- are time-tested methods that should be employed in our own anti-Christian age"--The publisher.

Maxwellian electrodynamics genesis is considered in the light of the author’s theory change model previously tried on the Copernican and the Einstein revolutions. It is shown that in the case considered a genuine new theory is constructed as a result of the old pre-maxwellian programmes reconciliation: the electrodynamics of Ampere-Weber, the wave theory of Fresnel and Young and Faraday’s programme. The “neutral language” constructed for the comparison of the consequences of the theories from these programmes consisted in the language (...) of hydrodynamics with its rich content of analogous models ranging from the uncompressible fluid up to molecular vortices. The programmes’ meeting led to construction of the whole hierarchy of crossbred objects beginning from the displacement current and up to common hybrids. After that the interpenetration of the pre-maxwellian programmes began that marked the beginning of theoretical schemes of optics and electromagnetism unification. Maxwell’s programme did assimilate some ideas of the Ampere-Weber programme, as well as the presuppositions of the programmes of Fresnel and Faraday; and the significance of this fact for further methodology of scientific research programmes development is discussed. It is argued that the core of Maxwell’s unification strategy was formed by Kantian epistemology looked through the prism of William Whewell and such representatives of Scottish Enlightenment as Thomas Reid and William Hamilton. All these enabled Maxwell to start to unify not only optics and electromagnetism, but British and continental research traditions as well. Maxwell’s programme did supersede the Ampere-Weber one because Maxwell did put forward as a synthetic principle the idea, that differed from that of Ampere-Weber by its flexible and contra-ontological, strictly epistemological, Kantian character. For Maxwell, ether was not the last building block of physical reality, from which fields and charges should be constructed . “Action at a distance”, “incompressible fluid”, “molecular vortices” were only analogies for Maxwell, capable to direct the researcher on the “right” mathematical relations. From the “representational” point of view all this hydrodynamical models were doomed to failure efforts to describe what can not be described in principle – things in themselves, the “nature” of electrical and magnetic phenomena. On the contrary, Maxwell aimed his programme to find empirically meaningful mathematical relations between the electrodynamics basic objects, i.e. the creation of inter - coordinated electromagnetic field equations system. Namely the application of this epistemology enabled Hermann von Helmholtz and his pupil Heinrich Hertz to arrive at such a version of Maxwell’s theory that served a heuristical basis for the radiowaves discovery. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:The Dogmatic Slumber ofHume Scholarship Nicholas Capaldi State of the Art If one were to enumerate the issues that have received the most attention in Hume scholarship during the last half century, the list would undoubtedly feature the so-called principle ofinduction, causal necessity, the self, the relationship offact and value, scepticism, and the argument from design. If one were to ask what is the popular consensus on Hume's position (...) vis-à-vis these issues, the answer would be something Uke the following: Hume in his Treatise, first challenges his reader to produce a single simple idea that is not a copy of a corresponding impression. And he then abandons the inductive pattern of argumentation so as tobe free to use his inductively supported principle—the principle that every simple idea is a copy of a previous impression—as the foundation of his deductive arguments that we have no rational title to believe in the existence of causal connexions, objective moral values, continuing selves, or physical processes independent of our experience.1 Depending on how they are understood, each of these assertions about Hume could be either false or misleading. We note, for example, that Hume made complex ideas and not simple ideas the centre ofhis philosophy; thatcomplex ideas are not whollyreducible to simple ideas, and therefore not analysable without remainder into component impressions; that complex ideas were explicated by Hume in terms of the natural relations that spring from the mind's association of ideas (Hume claimed that "the principle of the association of ideas" was his major innovation in philosophy);2 that the associative activity of the mind is an instance, in Hume, ofthe self, notits denial; that the positive Humean conception ofthe selfis given in book 2 on the passions, which many never read; that Hume's entire Newtonian programme in the Treatise is based on the assumption that there are physical processes independent of human experience; that Hume did not deny causal connections, only the philosophical "necessity" that others ascribe to causal connections, and that he did so in the interest ofexplicating how Volume XVIII Number 2 117 NICHOLAS CAPALDI Newton's physicshadreplacedAristotelian physics; and, finally, Hume argued for the intersubjective validity ofconventional moral values on transcendental grounds. Few, ifany, ofthese positive points made here about Hume are new, mosthaving already appeared somewhere in the secondary literature. Yet these points have had little cumulative impact. The reason for this is that we are all always working under or against a pervasive misrepresentation of Hume. The thesis ofthis paper is that despite the best efforts ofa number of writers, starting all the way back with Kant and including John Davis, a canonic misreading of Hume continues to haunt textbooks, courses in the history of philosophy and philosophical education in general, journals, endless dreary dissertations, programme committees, and the minds of Hume scholars. We hope that by identifying and spelling out the programmatic nature of the canonic misreading, Hume scholarship will be awakened from its dogmatic slumber. What is the origin of the present canonic misreading of Hume?3 Some clue can be gained by noting the kind of unity the misreading quoted above imposes on Hume. The misreading derives all ofHume's positions in neat deductive order from Hume's supposed epistemology. Itmakesitappearasifeverypositionis the natural logical consequence of Hume's alleged empiricism. The recent origin of this canonic misreading ofHume is analytic philosophy. The Origin ofthe Canonic Misreading ofHume Analytic philosophy has been and remains the dominant school of philosophy in the twentieth century in the English language cultures where Hume is most hkely to be read. Analytic philosophy is itself a product of, and the twentieth century voice of, the Enlightenment Project.4 As an eighteenth century writer, Hume is not only associated with the Enlightenment Project but it is claimed by analytic philosophers that Hume is one of the progenitors of that project5 and therefore one of the progenitors of analytic philosophy itself. In short, the present canonic misreading of Hume originates in the analytic misappropriation of Hume to its own version of the Enlightenment Project. What is the Enlightenment Project? It is generally said that the Enlightenment replaced authority, faith, and tradition with reason... (shrink)

SummaryThe College of New Jersey (which later became Princeton University) provides an example of how Scottish philosophy influenced American higher education in an institutional context during the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. This article compares the administrations of John Witherspoon (served from 1768 to 1794), Samuel Stanhope Smith (served from 1795 to 1812) and James McCosh (served from 1868 to 1888) at Princeton and examines their use of Scottish philosophy in restructuring the curriculum and reforming its institutional purpose. While presiding (...) over Princeton during its most significant transitional moments, these philosophers of the Scottish School of Common Sense instituted different versions of moral education. Meanwhile, Witherspoon's legacy of balancing the interests of Evangelicalism and Scottish philosophy as Princeton's driving purpose influenced the creation and reception of nineteenth-century programmes of moral education. The broader question this article addresses is: how did the interconnecting points among Scottish philosophy, Calvinism and moral education inform notions of didactic Enlightenment at Princeton across a century? (shrink)

It is discerned what light can bring the recent historical reconstructions of maxwellian optics and electromagnetism unification on the following philosophical/methodological questions. I. Why should one believe that Nature is ultimately simple and that unified theories are more likely to be true? II. What does it mean to say that a theory is unified? III. Why theory unification should be an epistemic virtue? To answer the questions posed genesis and development of Maxwellian electrodynamics are elucidated. It is enunciated that the (...) Maxwellian Revolution is a far more complicated phenomenon than it may be seen in the light of Kuhnian and Lakatosian epistemological models. Correspondingly it is maintained that maxwellian electrodynamics was elaborated in the course of the old pre-maxwellian programmes’ reconciliation: the electrodynamics of Ampére-Weber, the wave theory of Young-Fresnel and Faraday’s programme. To compare the different theoretical schemes springing from the different language games James Maxwell had constructed a peculiar neutral language. Initially it had encompassed the incompressible fluid models; eventually – the vortices ones. The three programmes’ encounter engendered the construction of the hybrid theory at first with an irregular set of theoretical schemes. However, step by step, on revealing and gradual eliminating the contradictions between the programmes involved, the hybrid set is “put into order” (Maxwell’s term). A hierarchy of theoretical schemes starting from ingenious crossbreeds (the displacement current) and up to usual hybrids is set up. After the displacement current construction the interpenetration of the pre-maxwellian programmes begins that marks the commencement of theoretical schemes of optics, electricity and magnetism real unification. Maxwell’s programme surpassed that of Ampére-Weber because it did absorb the ideas of the Ampére-Weber programme, as well as the presuppositions of the programmes of Young-Fresnel and Faraday properly co-ordinating them with each other. But the opposite statement is not true. The Ampére-Weber programme did not assimilate the propositions of the Maxwellian programme. Maxwell’s victory over his rivals became possible because the gist of Maxwell’s unification strategy was formed by Kantian epistemology looked in the light of William Whewell and such representatives of Scottish Enlightenment as Thomas Reid and Sir William Hamilton. Maxwell did put forward as basic synthetic principles the ideas that radically differed from that of Ampére-Weber approach by their open, flexible and contra-ontological, genuinly epistemological, Kantian character. For Maxwell, ether was not the ultimate building block of physical reality, from which all the charges and fields should be constructed. “Action at a distance”, “incompressible fluid”, “molecular vortices”, etc. were contrived analogies for Maxwell, capable only to direct the researcher at the “right” mathematical relations. Key words: J.C. Maxwell, unification of optics and electromagnetism, I. Kant, T. Reid, W. Hamilton . (shrink)

The Euclidean Programme embodies a traditional sort of epistemological foundationalism, according to which knowledge – especially mathematical knowledge – is obtained by deduction from self-evident axioms or first principles. Epistemologists have examined foundationalism extensively, but neglected its historically dominant Euclidean form. By contrast, this book offers a detailed examination of Euclidean foundationalism, which, following Lakatos, the authors call the Euclidean Programme. The book rationally reconstructs the programme's key principles, showing it to be an epistemological interpretation of the (...) axiomatic method. It then compares the reconstructed programme with select historical sources: Euclid's Elements, Aristotle's Posterior Analytics, Descartes's Discourse on Method, Pascal's On the Geometric Mind and a twentieth-century account of axiomatisation. The second half of the book philosophically assesses the programme, exploring whether various areas of contemporary mathematics conform to it. The book concludes by outlining a replacement for the Euclidean Programme. (shrink)

Franz Anton Mesmer’s 1766 thesis on the influence of the planets on the human body, in which he first publicly presented his account of the harmonic forces at work in the microcosm, was substantially copied from the London physician Richard Mead’s early eighteenth-century tract on solar and lunar effects on the body. The relation between the two texts poses intriguing problems for the historiography of medical astrology: Mesmer’s use of Mead has been taken as a sign of the Vienna physician’s (...) enlightened modernity while Mead’s use of astro meteorology has been seen as evidence of the survival of antiquated astral medicine in the eighteenth century. Two aspects of this problem are discussed. First, French critics of mesmerism in the 1780s found precedents for animal magnetism in the work of Paracelsus, Fludd and other early modern writers; in so doing, they began to develop a sophisticated history for astrology and astrometeorology. Second, the close relations between astrometeorology and Mead’s project illustrate how the environmental medical programmes emerged. The making of a history for astrology accompanied the construction of various models of the relation between occult knowledge and its contexts in the enlightenment. (shrink)

This chapter discusses whether the appropriation of Kuhnian thoughts by the so-called Strong Programme in the sociology of scientific knowledge is appropriate. In order to answer the question of appropriate appropriation, Kuhn’s and the Strong Programme’s stances on two “isms” are compared: relativism and naturalism. It is shown that the Strong Programme clearly goes beyond Kuhn and breaks more radically with philosophical tradition. Nevertheless, there are also philosophical continuities and similarities.

The Epicurean account of the origin of language appealed to eighteenth-century thinkers who tried to reconcile a natural history of language with

the biblical account of Adamic name-giving. As a third way between Aristotelian linguistic conventionality and what was perceived as a Platonic supernatural congruence between words and things, Epicurus’

theory allowed for a measure of contingency to emerge in the evolution of initially natural signs. This hypothesis was taken up by authors as different from one another as Leibniz, Vico, Condillac and (...) Mendelssohn. By integrating the Epicurean account of language into their own theories, however, these authors also revived the tensions inherent in the ancient thesis and had to confront the ensuing difficulties in innovative ways. (shrink)

Montesquieu, Hume, Voltaire, Diderot, Smith, Gibbon, Bentham... These are among the great thinkers who contributed to the dramatic developments in religion, science, and philosophy that we now call the Enlightenment. Written by a world authority, this brief history of the Enlightenment concludes with a perceptive assessment of the cultural, religious, ethical, and political dimensions of its legacy.

Historical Dictionary of the Enlightenment, Second Edition contains a chronology, an introduction, and an extensive bibliography. The dictionary section has more than 300 cross-referenced entries. This book is an excellent resource for students, researchers, and anyone wanting to know more about the Enlightenment.

(1983). RATIONALISM AND THE STRONG PROGRAMME OF THE SOCIOLOGY OF KNOWLEKE: RECONCILIATION WITHOUT TEARS. Philosophical Papers: Vol. 12, No. 1, pp. 1-31.

MacIntyre’s mature ethical philosophy was the result of his becoming aware of trends in the philosophy of science in the 1970s when MacIntyre had reached a block in the development of his ethical theory. MacIntyre translated Kuhn’s theory of “paradigms” and Lakatos’s “research programmes” into his richly developed theory of ethical “traditions,” which constitutes a historicist ethical philosophy. This point is argued by a detailed comparison of Kuhn’s theory of paradigms with MacIntyre’s traditions; emphasizing paradigms rather than research programs is (...) more productive for highlighting the historicist aspects of MacIntyre’s ethical philosophy. Paradigms and traditions are compared in four areas. Both philosophies deny the validity of the Enlightenment ideal of universal reason, and of social science. Kuhn never resolves the issues connected with the radical incomparability of paradigms. MacIntyre does derive a method of comparing ethical traditions in favor of the Augustinian/Aristotelian/Thomistic one. Questions of ontology remain. (shrink)

Here is an idea that just might save the world. It is that science, properly understood, provides us with the methodological key to the salvation of humanity.

The history of eugenics is getting tricky. Once regarded as an initially idealistic concept that degenerated into the monstrous Nazi race hygiene project or into an American sterilization assault against the disadvantaged and racially “inferior”, eugenics was deemed to have died after the Second World War, utterly discredited by better biological science and more enlightened social ideas. However recent research has shown that eugenics was more variegated than once thought — there were leftist and “reform” eugenists as well as “mainline” (...) or reactionary eugenists, with dedicated opposition coming more from liberal and religious quarters. Ingrained into contemporary structures and social issues such as demography, welfare, race and gender, eugenics proved more resilient and widespread than previously thought. Historians were slow to recognize its pervasive influence in Scandinavia, Latin America and Asia, where local variants evolved as adaptations to local culture and conditions. And it has persisted to the present day. In welfarist Scandinavia, eugenics has been repackaged as reproductive autonomy or “medical” measures.1 In Communist China it is alive and well in sterilization programmes and the one baby policy.2 More than this, critics allege, it has been resurrected in the “new genetics” of recent times. Geneticists have historically been strong supporters of eugenics as a way of scientifically improving the genetic quality of the human race. As I have argued in another place, during the inter-war period they failed properly to scrutinize methodologies and data used to support sterilization of mental defectives,3 and it is contendable that social and ideological factors have continued to play a role — alongside epistemic factors associated with the expansion of genetic knowledge — in. (shrink)