Showing papers in "Journal of the History of Ideas in 1992"

Humanist Methods in Natural Philosophy: The Commonplace Book

Abstract: As new evidence for the interaction between humanism and science in the Renaissance I will trace the use among natural philosophical authors of a quintessentially humanist method of reading and storing information-through the commonplace book. In this method of reading (which I will call the method of commonplaces) one selects passages of interest for the rhetorical turns of phrase, the dialectical arguments, or the factual information they contain; one then copies them out in a notebook, the commonplace book, kept handy for the purpose, grouping them under appropriate headings to facilitate later retrieval and use, notably in composing prose of one's own. Strictly defined the commonplace book is a humanist innovation, but like most Renaissance practices it adapted a concept with a glorious ancient pedigree to suit contemporary, in this case pedagogical, needs. Ancient rhetoric, from Aristotle's Topics to Quintilian's Institutio oratoria, had developed a list of the places or loci of use to the orator: including "seats of arguments" (from effects, from circumstances, from greater or lesser, for example) and rhetorical embellishments (amplification, captatio benevolentiae, and so on). In the Middle Ages florilegia and sermon manuals supplemented those theoretical guides to good arguing with substantive material which could be copied directly: moral sentences or in the case of medical handbooks, "commonplace" medical recipes, compiled for easy access.' In the Renaissance the notion of "place" continued to expand, as pupils throughout Europe were taught to keep their own commonplace books while in school and afterwards through a lifetime of reading. Guarino da Verona, Erasmus, and Vives among other pedagogues wrote specific instructions for keeping such notebooks. Alongside memorable rhetorical idioms the commonplace book was to record, often in a separate

The Idea of Teleology

Abstract: Perhaps no other ideology has influenced biology more profoundly than teleological thinking. In one form or another it was the prevailing world view prior to Darwin. (Indeed it is one of the relatively few world views seriously considered by western man.) Appropriately, the discussion of teleology occupies considerable space (10-14%) in several recent philosophies of biology.' Such a finalistic world view had many roots. It is reflected by the millenarian beliefs of many Christians, by the enthusiasm for progress promoted by the Enlightenment, by transformationist evolutionism, and by everybody's hope for a better future. However, such a finalistic world view was only one of several widely adopted Weltanschauungen. Grossly simplifying a far more complex picture, one can perhaps distinguish, in the period prior to Darwin, three ways of looking at the world: 1. A recently created and constant world. This was the orthodox Christian dogma, which, however, by 1859 had largely lost its credibility, at least among philosophers and scientists.2 2. An eternal and either constant or cycling world, exhibiting no constant direction or goal. Everything in such a world, as asserted by Democritus and his followers, is due to chance or necessity, with chance by far the more important factor. There is no room for teleology in this world view, everything being due to chance or causal mechanisms. It allows for change, but such change is not directional; it is not an evolution. This view gained some support during the Scientific Revolution and the Enlightenment, but remained very much a minority view until the nineteenth century. A rather pronounced polarization developed from the seventeenth to the nineteenth centuries, between the strict mechanists,

Hume's Revised Racism

Abstract: While Hume is generally known as an enemy of prejudice and intolerance, he is also infamous as a proponent of philosophical racism. This reputation is based on a footnote which was widely quoted by racists and defenders of slavery. Although this footnote is frequently discussed by modem scholars as well, it is not generally known that Hume revised the note for the final and authoritative edition of his works. This revision, which was mistakenly omitted from an important edition of Hume's works, makes a difference to our understanding of Hume's racism. Basing his interpretation only on the early version of the note, for example, Richard Popkin has accused Hume of holding an especially "virulent strain" of racism. Popkin also, at least in his original study of Hume's racism, believed that Hume's views may have been a casual aberration rather than a considered judgment. 1 An analysis of the revisions suggests that Hume did not, in fact, adopt the most extreme form of racism. The revisions show, however, that Hume's racism was a considered and deliberate position, rather than an offhand remark. Looking at the changes in Hume's thoughts about race also gives us a new insight into Hume's relationship to James Beattie. Although Beattie was regarded by Hume as a "bigotted silly Fellow," the revisions appear to be a response to some of Beattie's criticisms.2 At least on this subject Hume took Beattie quite seriously, and ironically it was Hume who was the bigot, not Beattie.

Francis Bacon and the Progress of Knowledge

Abstract: One of the most famous images in English Renaissance literature is the engraved title page to Bacon's Instauratio Magna, showing the ship of learning sailing back through the "pillars of Hercules"-the straits of Gibraltar which traditionally marked the limits of human knowledge of the world-returning from the open seas, bringing with it new ideas and discoveries. Underneath the engraving is a quotation from the Book of Daniel (12:4) in the Latin Vulgate: Multi pertransibunt et augebitur scientia. Bacon adopted this quotation as his own, giving it a rather personal interpretation, as he explained when using it for the first time in chapter 1 of Valerius Terminus, entitled "of the limits and end of knowledge." Here he writes that although the highest "law of nature" is reserved for God, the inferior levels of knowledge are still "many and noble," and are

Passion as "confused" perception or thought in Descartes, Malebranche, and Hutcheson.

Abstract: A curious feature of the Cartesian theory of the passions is their characterization as "confused" thoughts or perceptions. The contrast to the "clear and distinct ideas" which Descartes took as the basis of rational thinking is obvious; yet there is much more to the intrinsic "confusion" of sense perception and passion. The present essay considers three works which develop this notion, Descartes's Les Passions de l'Ame (1649), Malebranche's De la Recherche de la Verite (1674-75/1712), and Hutcheson's Essay on the Nature of the Passions and Affections (1728/1742). One implication of this use of "confused" is that it is the very relation of passion to sensation, or alternatively the very involvement of the body (in an agitation of animal spirits), that makes passion an obstacle to human knowledge and autonomy. In his insistence on confusion Descartes is reviving a theme of classical philosophy, giving it a new definition and application. The theme takes on further new senses and uses in Malebranche and Hutcheson. I They all acknowledge the necessity of passion, however, implicitly recognizing the virtues of "confusion."

Epicureanism in Renaissance Moral and Natural Philosophy

Abstract: The history of Renaissance Epicureanism is replete with interpretive puzzles, and whether one focuses on ethics or natural philosophy, it is extremely difficult to construct a coherent narrative which adequately accounts for all manifestations of Epicurean beliefs and practices in Europe from the fifteenth through the seventeenth centuries. 1 My aim in this paper is not to supply a finished narrative but to show why the interpretive puzzles are so intractable yet so interesting. In fact what I hope to suggest is that if we could adequately give an account of what happened to the philosophy of Epicurus during this period, we would first have to take a position on at least one key set of issues which underlies not only the cultural history of the Renaissance but the history of culture as such: what does it mean to belong to a linguistic community? How do our beliefs depend on the languages in which they are expressed, and how do they depend on the social and intellectual communities which speak those languages? Nowhere are the interpretive puzzles concerning Renaissance Epicureanism more clearly illustrated than in ethics. I refer now to two formulations of Epicurean ethics, one expounded by Lorenzo Valla in the mid-fifteenth century and one expounded by Pierre Gassendi in the midseventeenth century. Valla's ethical writings, especially his De vero bono (1433) and his Dialectical Disputations (third redaction, 1449-57), contain one of the most ambitious projects for reform in the history of ethics. Valla sought no less than the total rejection of the virtue ethics of Aristotle and the Stoics. These were of course two distinct kinds of virtue ethics, and he argued against each for different reasons. In their place, he provided an Epicurean-inspired theory of pleasure whose ultimate aim was the redefinition of good and evil for Christians. He consequently attacked the medieval scholastic synthesis of Aristotelian ethics and Christian doctrine while demonstrating how Christianity could be realigned with an alternaI A useful survey of ancient and modern Epicureanism is Howard Jones, The Epicurean Tradition (London, 1989).

John Stuart Mill as Moralist

Abstract: John Stuart Mill was long regarded as a good man but a muddled thinker.' He was, according to this account, an "arch-eclectic," "bewildered by the intricacies of his own thought." His mind was, in Jevons's words, "essentially illogical."2 The renewed scholarly interest in his work in the last two decades has made this interpretation look increasingly dated, but consensus remains elusive, not least because recent work seems to point in two radically different directions. On the one hand, commentators have emphasized the centrality of A System of Logic and have asserted the systematic nature of Mill's work. These authors have highlighted Mill's defense of empiricist logic against the challenge of intuitionism and have stressed his continuing debt to the intellectual system on which he was reared.3 At the same time we have been forced to revise our understanding of the phases of liberal thought in Victorian England, and this has had implications for our interpretation of Mill. Boyd Hilton has depicted the pervasive moral outlook of the early nineteenth centuryinformed as it was by evangelicalism-and has seen that outlook as largely defunct by the 1850s4, and Michael Freeden has suggested that organicism rather than Green's idealism was the compulsive intellectual force behind Edwardian New Liberalism.5 These two historiographical trends have created space for a new emphasis on the distinctiveness of Liberal thought

Havelock on Greek Orality and Literacy

Abstract: For nearly thirty years Eric A. Havelock advocated the view that alphabetic literacy was chiefly, or even solely, responsible for the Greek Enlightenment and thus provided the foundations of western civilization. In this view the creation of the Greek alphabet (and it alone) was able to bring about widespread literacy, which in turn radically and permanently transformed human consciousness. Alphabetic literacy enabled thought to transcend the limitations of "oral mind," represented by Homer, to become the instrument of logic, philosophy and science-an entirely new kind of consciousness, whose first great exponent was Plato. Havelock's theory first appeared in 1963 in his Preface to Plato, was developed further in The Greek Concept of Justice and in a series of papers collected in The Literate Revolution in Greece and Its Cultural Consequences and received its last compendious formulation in The Muse Learns to Write. ' Though Havelock made minor modifications, his theory has remained essentially the same and its claims ever more resolutely voiced. Havelock's work has not on the whole been very well received by his fellow classicists (a reception about which he seemed a bit rueful in his last book).2 But their objections have for the most part revolved around the history of Greek literacy-its origins, the chronology and extent of its spread, and so on. They have given hardly any attention to Havelock's claims for the cognitive effects of literacy, which are the center of his project. Elsewhere, however, Havelock's influence has been considerable. His books have been and continue to be widely read and cited (especially the seminal Preface to Plato, which has remained in print for over a quarter of a century). His influence has been greatest among students of orality and literacy-a field that has grown enormously in recent decades-who frequently acknowledge their indebtedness to his work as founda-

Isaac Watts and the Idea of Public Religion

Abstract: Isaac Watts (1674-1748), pasteur et poete anglais, a contribue a l'elaboration de la notion de religion civile

Reassessing Humanism and Science

Abstract: The notion that "humanism" and "science" are inevitably opposed to one another in their content, methods, and goals, has multiple origins which reinforce its currency. While one can trace the fear that "scientism" would undermine traditional morality and mythology back to the Athens of Aristophanes,' the more relevant source for the twentieth-century sense of a gulf between the notorious "two cultures"2 lies no doubt, as Owen Hannaway argues below, in the segregation in the European educational system since the nineteenth century between classical studies and scientific and technical training. The cultural biases engendered by this split made it easy for historians like George Sarton or Lynn Thorndike to conclude that Renaissance humanism, with its concern for elegant style and ancient books, was inevitably antithetical to the skills of observation, experiment, and mathematization on which modem science was built. The role of humanism was further diminished by the spate of works from Pierre Duhem and Anneliese Maier to Alistair Crombie which emphasized the continuity between late medieval developments in methodology, the science of motion, and other fields and Galileo's "modern" formulations.3 On this view, the humanist interlude of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries was at best a holding ground for the medieval seeds of the Scientific Revolution; at worst it actually threatened to sterilize them. In reviling the humanists for their bookish attention to philology historians merely took their cues from the "founders of modern science" themselves, those self-styled prophets of a new intellectual order and

Who is the Ubermensch? Time, Truth, and Woman in Nietzsche

Abstract: In this essay I seek to examine the question of the identity of Nietzsche's Ubermensch in the light of the intellectual revolution brought about in our understanding of texts by deconstruction. With its notions of textuality, interpretation, the metaphoricity of language, and the undecidability of philosophical discourse, deconstruction has radicalized the way in which we construe questions of authorship. I shall draw freely on

Georgius Agricola as humanist.

Abstract: Humanism and science, like science and religion, form one of those subjects that invite periodic reassessments. In part this stems from the instinct that we are here dealing with another pair of antitheticals. It has seemed that way in Western culture from about the beginning of the nineteenth century, when proponents of Humanismus consciously set the reality and ideal of a classical education (i.e., one built around the study of the literary classics of ancient Greece and Rome) against the intellectual and cultural claims of science and technology. What science and technology trumpeted was their intellectual superiority and mastery over nature. Humanismus, on the other hand, proclaimed a kind of moral superiority in its educational program claiming that here lay the better half of humankind's experience and response to life.1 Even in that disarticulated version of Humanismus that today we call "the humanities," educated society seems to seek some remedy-or is it merely solace-for the alienating effects of the dehumanized categories of modern science and technology. "Take more humanities courses" is a familiar nostrum. I raise these points not because I wish to identify Humanismus and "the humanities" with the early modern phenomenon of humanism that is the subject of this group of papers, although they are clearly historically connected.2 I do so in order to provide a reminder that the antithesis between science and humanism is of fairly recent origin and came into being only in response to the maturation and professionalization of science in the academy at the beginning of the nineteenth century. It was no part of humanism in the sixteenth century when the recovery of ancient learn-

Lewis Mumford and the Organicist Concept in Social Thought

Abstract: One of the best-known twentieth-century exponents of social organicism, Lewis Mumford has woven many of the sturdiest strands of organicist thought-classical, medieval, and modem-into a complex whole. Throughout his career he has emphasized the importance of the family and neighborhood as indispensable components of a genuinely organic social life. At the same time his vision of the ideal society embraces a balanced or "organic" relationship not only with its natural environment but also with its material and technological apparatus. To speak in broader terms, Mumford has sought to define a version of social organicism which-by allowing for individual, local, and regional autonomy, a diversity of competing interests, and the possibility of historical developmentescapes the charge often levelled by both leftists and liberals against social organicist thinking: that is, that it assumes the priority of the collective over the individual and thus leads inevitably to a falsely normative totality characterized by a centralized authoritarian government and a static, hierarchical organization-in short, conservative or fascist reaction. Generally, Mumford has avoided the familiar pitfalls of social organicist thought, in large part by subjecting his own theories to criticism and revision. If anything, the greatest challenge to his social theory came in the 1950s and 1960s, with the unparalleled explosion of the chaotic megalopolis and above all with the emergence of what Jacques Ellul has termed the dominance of technique or the "technological society." Technique threatens at once to replace the organic environment and to sacrifice the last vestiges of individual and local autonomy to the imperatives of technological adaptation. Under such conditions the very terms

Durkheim's Individual in Society: A Sacred Marriage?

Abstract: The characteristic sacredness with which the human being is now invested ... is not inherent. Analyze man as he appears to empirical analysis and nothing will be found that suggests this sanctity; man is a temporal being. But ... the human being is becoming the pivot of social consciousness among European peoples and has acquired an incomparable value. It is society that has consecrated him. Man has no innate right to this aura that surrounds and protects him against sacrilegious trespass. It is merely the way in which society thinks of him, the high esteem that it has of him at the moment, projected and objectified. Thus very far from there being the antagonism between the individual and society which is often claimed, moral individualism, the cult of the individual, is in fact the product of society itself. It is society that instituted it and made of man the god whose servant it is.'

The New Meaning of Modern War in the Thought of Reinhold Niebuhr

Abstract: Reinhold Niebuhr was the archetypical American "Cold War" intellectual. A leftist minister in the 1920s and an anti-utopian socialist in the 1930s (his finest book, Moral Man and Immoral Society [1932] attacked technocratic optimism from the left), Niebuhr forsook his modern political visions during World War II for an old-fashioned Protestant doctrine based upon sin. This new pessimism, which he would come to call "Christian realism," outlasted the war, and he consequently supported the American decision to confront the Soviet Union in 1945 and 1946. Niebuhr's wholehearted, if guilt-ridden, endorsement of the Cold War decisively affected the course of American intellectual life, especially among Democratic party liberals, for whom Niebuhr's articles in The Nation and in his own Christianity and Crisis had been required reading. Many of these liberals, once eager to maintain amity with the Soviet Union after the war, followed Niebuhr's defection to the Cold War camp. Without this conversion of the American mainstream left, President Truman's decision to wage the Cold War would have riven the Democratic party and prompted a political crisis. Thus was born American "Cold War liberalism," a combination of welfare state domestic policy and "realist" foreign policy. Realists regarded Stalin as a specific global menace, and international politics generally as a nasty business in which America nevertheless had to participate. Realism provided the intellectual basis of the Cold War, and Niebuhr took his place along with George Kennan, Hans Morgenthau, and Walter Lippmann as a leading philosopher of this new American realism and hence as a primary intellectual apologist for the Cold War. Niebuhr naturally incorporated the issue of the atomic bomb into his new philosophy, until the appearance, in the late 1950s, of both Soviet and American

David Hume and John Keill and the Structure of Continua

Abstract: In Part II of Book I of the Treatise of Human Nature David Hume discusses the alleged possibility of infinite divisibility of a continuum (extension). Hume's discussion is part of his examination of our ideas of space and time. The few scholars who have bothered to deal with Hume's discussion have generally followed the lines set out in the essential study of Kemp Smith.1 Hume's discussion of continuity is considered to be unsatisfactory to say the least, and it has become regarded as an answer to Bayle's treatment of the subject in the Zeno article in his Dictionnaire critique et historique.2 As a matter of fact, however, Pierre Bayle is nowhere mentioned by name in the Treatise, nor is it as clear as some scholars would like us to believe that Hume's account of continuity is formulated explicitly as an answer to Bayle's skeptical arguments.3 This is not to say that it is totally inconceivable that Bayle has been a source for Hume. It only means that one would have to state one's case more carefully than has been done in the past and that one should also certainly wish to take into account Bayle's Systeme de philosophie, in which one section is explicitly devoted to the

On the Practice of Esotericism

Abstract: Esotericism, formerly called esoterism, is a complex phenomenon which does not permit any simple or uniform explanation. The practice of esotericism or the detection of esoteric doctrines has a lengthy history involving occultists, alchemists, kabbalists, numerologists, poets, mystics, and astrologers. In almost every case the contention that a book or a doctrine contains an esoteric or arcane message generates controversy. But perhaps nowhere is the subject more controversial than in the suggestion that esotericism was practiced by philosophers of the past. My intention in this essay is to consider some general aspects of esotericism as it applies to philosophy and philosophic communication and then focus on a particular type of it which has become quite neglected.

Tabula Rasa, Social Environmentalism, and the "English Paradigm"

Abstract: A hallmark of the ideology of the Enlightenment is the doctrine of social environmentalism. Its different modes are variations on the familiar theme-indeed as old as social speculation-of the malleability of human nature characterizing much of the thought of classical antiquity and continued by Renaissance figures like Machiavelli, Pico, Erasmus, More, and Vives. If man's being is partially plastic and each person's outlook and conduct result to some extent from upbringing, example, schooling, associations, and circumstances, then it follows that the human makeup can be shaped, at least to some extent, by action upon the social environment. To make happy, virtuous, and cooperative individuals dedicated to the common good, the social context must be rendered amenable to such ends. Social, political, and legal institutions and arrangements can be positive instruments in fashioning the human raw stuff according to some ideal model, either by gradual alteration and reform or by the radical restructuring of society. Socially subversive behavior, delinquency, and crime, or so it is maintained, can be appreciably reduced by refurbishing the institutional and legal setting. Depending upon the degree of malleability assigned to human nature, utopia, or something approaching it, is a distinct possibility. When given a chronological emphasis, the doctrine of social environmentalism during and after the Enlightenment is transformed into several brands of historicism, often with an incremental theory of human development entailing a pattern of the progressive interaction of individual and society, both changing in a dialectical process. We create and recreate ourselves by altering our social environment. A most significant realm of theory and practice was thus opened up by the Enlightenment's doctrine of social environmentalism, to become a major feature

Jacques Basnage and the History of the Jews: Anti-Catholic Polemic and Historical Allegory in the Republic of Letters

Abstract: Since the first Christian communities sought to distance themselves from Judaism, Jews and their religion have haunted Christians. The medieval Christian exegetical tradition tried to exorcise the ghost of Judaism by "appropriating" the Hebrew Bible. Christians transformed it into a book that predicted the coming of Christ and God's rejection of the Jews. ' By thus neutralizing the internal validity of Judaism, Christians could take advantage of the rabbinical tradition as an aid in interpreting Christianized Scripture.2 For Christian exegetes of the Middle Ages from Andrew of St. Victor to Nicholas of Lyra, the rabbis and their commentaries increasingly became a repository of information that could assist in understanding the heavenly language of Moses. Their knowledge of Hebrew, however, did not generally deter Christian scholars from reading Christian sensibilities into the Hebrew Bible. Medieval exegetes were uniformly concerned that the Jews had corrupted the original Hebrew of the Old Testament either by ignorance or through self-conscious attempts to distort predictions about the Messiah.3 Humanist scholars of the Renaissance and Reformation continued to harp on the corrupted nature of the Hebrew text, but the advantages to be reaped from exploiting Jewish sources were too great

Theory of Comets at Paris during the Seventeenth Century

Abstract: There is an important and growing literature on the tenacity and vitality of scholastic Aristotelianism in the seventeenth century, when (according to an older view) Aristotelianism was supposed to have become moribund and degenerative. 1 This literature emphasizes the importance of seeing late scholasticism as a living tradition, reacting to other intellectual movements and trying to come to terms with them.2 However, much work still needs to be done to fill in this suggestive picture. It is one thing to show that the central concepts of Aristotelian philosophy, such as the distinction between matter and form and the metaphysics of substance and accident, survived through the seventeenth century, and another to show that doctrines of natural philosophy, such as the incorruptibility of the heavens and the explanation of comets did so; the latter are thought by most not to have withstood the onslaught of damaging telescopic observations during the 1610s. Thinkers maintaining their allegiance to such doctrines are usually thought to have been impossibly intransigent. I wish to show that Aristotelianism in the seventeenth century was able to deal straightforwardly with the post-1610 celestial novelties. In fact, instead of looking intransigent, the Aristotelians seem, more like some ancient civilizations, able to absorb and assimilate all invaders. On 4 June 161 1 an important event occurred at the Jesuit College of La Fleche-one in which the young Rene Descartes must have participatednamely, the first memorial celebration of the death of Henry IV, the

Dating Adam Smith's Essay "Of the External Senses"

Abstract: According to the received view, Adam Smith's essay "Of the External Senses" was written sometime before 1752. The evidence for this claim comes from the fact that this essay argues for a distinction between primary and secondary qualities of material objects, a distinction which was denied by Berkeley in his Principles ofHuman Knowledge (1710). However, Smith did commend Berkeley's Essay towards a New Theory of Vision (1709), thus the presumption is that Smith maintained the primacy of solidity, extension, etc. only because he was not familiar with Berkeley's later argument. "It is therefore probable that he wrote the essay before digesting Hume's Treatise (1739) or even before becoming closely acquainted with Hume, as there is reason to believe he did before 1752 (Stewart, 1.13)."'1 Of course this line of reasoning hinges upon the idea that Smith would have agreed with Hume's and Berkeley's analyses of the sensory origin of knowledge, but this assumption must be questioned simply because it is certain that the essay was written during or after the year 1758, a late enough date that we can reasonably assume that Smith was well aware of Berkeley's idealist argument against the distinction between primary and secondary qualities of bodies, either directly or via Hume. The evidence for this lower bound of 1758 comes from the essay itself, particularly Smith's various references to Linnaeus's Systema Naturae.2 As is well known, the great Swedish botanist Carolus Linnaeus was the first naturalist successfully to organize all the known plants and animals into their class, order, genus, and species, although the English naturalists John Ray and Francis Willughby had undertaken the same task a half-century earlier. This

Descartes's Early Doctrine of Clear and Distinct Ideas

Abstract: Philosophers since Arnauld have often found the doctrine of clear and distinct ideas, as it figures in works such as the Meditations, distinctly odd and implausible. My aim in this paper is to show that the original version of the doctrine, which Descartes held up to 1628, is very different from the doctrine that is defended in Meditations. I shall argue that the earlier doctrine is both more plausible and more restricted than the later metaphysical doctrine. It is not a doctrine that derives from considerations about our cognitive relation to the external world but one that is concerned rather with the evidential quality of images, not one which concerns itself so much with absolute certainty as with conviction, and the mental images it works with are not the highly abstract ideas of the later writings but vivid pictorial representations. Nevertheless, it is this earlier doctrine that develops into the later doctrine of clear and distinct ideas, and I believe that a number of the severe problems that the later doctrine was subject to derive from the anomalous nature of its origins. I shall not concern myself with the development and transformation of the doctrine after the abandonment of the Regulae in 1628. A study of the early version indicates, however, that the later one is a doomed attempt to convert a good but limited rhetorical-psychological criterion of what constitutes compelling evidence into a criterion which purports to guarantee our cognitive grasp against hyperbolic doubt. Moreover, the pictorial nature of the images to which the early doctrine is directed militates against the view, encouraged by Descartes himself and still widely accepted by commentators, that the doctrine of clear and distinct ideas derives from reflection upon mathematics. In fact, as I shall show, in so far as the early doctrine has a specific bearing upon mathematics, it is actually in conflict with it. But even if the two were in agreement, the source of the doctrine certainly does not lie in mathematics. The source, as I shall show, is ultimately rhetorical-psychological. The Regulae ad directionem ingenii, which were not published until after Descartes's death, were once generally thought to have been composed in 1628. There have, however, always been those who have believed

John Dewey, Empiricism, and Experimentalism in the Recent Philosophy of Mathematics

Abstract: In the fall of 1956, while a member of the Institute for Advanced Study, I met Oswald Veblen, one of the great mathematicians of the century, and mentioned to him that I knew he had studied with John Dewey at the University of Chicago in the early 1900s.2 Veblen recalled taking a seminar in logic with Dewey. Regarded as a rising star in mathematics, Veblen said, he assumed that he could take over leadership of the course and proceeded forcibly to present his views on logic and mathematics. Dewey allowed him free rein and only occasionally raised questions for Veblen to consider. At the end of the course Veblen realized that the views he then held were very different from the ones he had espoused at the beginning. Dewey, Veblen declared, was the greatest teacher he ever had.

A Tradition Invented: Petrarch, Augustine, and the Language of Humanism

Abstract: You wrote one time-I forget when but I remember the incident-that you had been seriously ill but that you had been delivered by the grace of God and the work of doctors. I then responded-this I remember-that I was very shocked by the paths through which that vulgar error had arisen in such a lofty mind; for God did all things and your noble nature. Doctors did nothing nor could they have, except what a chattering dialectician can do, one abounding in tedium but powerless to cure.'

Philosophical Forgetfulness: John Stuart Mill's "Nature"

Abstract: In a letter to The Republican of 3 January 1823, one of his earliest appearances in print, John Stuart Mill objected to "the use which you frequently make of the term Nature as denoting some positive, active, if not intelligent being."' Throughout his career Mill would continue to attack the "infirmity," as he put it nearly fifty years later, of "being led away by phrases and treating abstractions as if they were realities which have a will and active power" (17: 1912). "Nature," completed in 1854, is Mill's most sustained dissection of the most important of those abstractions, and a landmark among skeptical treatments of "the natural" as an ethical norm. Yet Mill's extraordinary rhetoric in this essay seems strangely at odds with his skeptical aim:

Toward a Theory of Totalitarianism: Franz Borkenau's Pareto

Abstract: In an article that appeared in the October 1985 issue of Commentary, historian Walter Laqueur posed the question, "is there now, or has there ever been, such a thing as totalitarianism?"' Laqueur's query was of course intended as a challenge to those who either deny the existence of totalitarianism as a unique type of dictatorship or challenge the validity of the so-called "theory of totalitarianism." Not surprisingly, Laqueur's provocatively phrased question and the answer he supplied generated a sharp debate. The point of his article was not simply to defend the Cold War era theory of totalitarianism, which paired German National Socialism with Soviet Communism as structurally similar regimes, but instead to examine the reasons (good ones, he argued) for the persistence of the idea of totalitarianism. Laqueur's article and the response it drew were part of a longstanding debate about modern dictatorships and the adequacy of some version of a concept of totalitarianism to describe them.2

The Problem of Oral Tradition in Vico's Historical Scholarship

Abstract: Rhetoric, an ancient discipline shunted to the margins of learning two centuries ago, flourishes once more in our times. Not surprisingly, the new rhetoric has inspired a revival of interest in the work of the eighteenth-century Neapolitan philosopher Giambattista Vico.I In his day he was admired as a teacher of rhetoric; but today he is remembered primarily for his "new science" of history, devised late in life through his search for the deep sources of the discipline that he had practiced. Rhetoric was the mainstay of a manuscript culture dating from antiquity, preserving and adapting techniques of oral tradition to serve its needs. For more than a millennium rhetoricians had founded their reputation on their verbal skill in expounding upon written texts for an audience still heavily dependent upon oral communication. As a late exemplar of this rhetorical radition of teaching, Vico, too, was engaged in such exegesis. But as a scholar aware that interest in his field of study was flagging, he inquired into the nature of the mindset from which it was derived. Vico's originality lies in his analysis of ancient texts for what they reveal about a still earlier, preliterate culture. It is the nature and significance of these investigations that I propose to consider in this essay. If Vico was a teacher of rhetoric of modest reputation in his own day, he should be honored by ours as a pioneering historian of oral tradition. Some sense of Vico's crossing from rhetoric into history and back again may be immediately surmised from the diagrams that embellish his preface to the third edition of the New Science (1744), the masterpiece in which his studies culminated.2 He begins with a frontispiece, presenting in pictorial design a mnemonic scheme of the argument he propounds

The Huguenot Republic and Antirepublicanism in Seventeenth-Century France

Abstract: Scholars have often recognized that "republicain" was a standard term of abuse in political discourse in seventeenth-century France, to be brandished at anyone who opposed the policies of a Cardinal Richelieu or a Louis XIV. Yet an important issue regarding this antirepublican bias has been less often addressed: why did republics or democracies arouse such hostility? Was it simply that a republic was ipso facto a nonmonarchical form of government? Or were there other implications to a republican polity that led French political thinkers to despise and fear it?' By the seventeenth century, of course, the term "republic" had found a variety of meanings and connotations in political discourse. The first meaning was simply the republic as res publica, or la chose publique, referring to any legitimately constituted political community, as in Jean Bodin's Six Books of the Republic (1576). Republics were also those contemporary states which governed themselves without a single sovereign prince, such as the United Provinces or Venice. In classical, Aristotelian terms a republic was ruled by the few (as in the case of Venice) or the many, rather than by the one. In fact, for political theorists in the seventeenth century, the categories of aristocracy and democracy were in one sense a distinction without a difference: neither invested sovereign power in a single head, a legitimate monarch.2 This fact that democracies