Showing papers in "Journal of the History of Ideas in 2009"

Place and the "Spatial Turn" in Geography and in History

Abstract: I. INTRODUCTIONA few years ago, British Telecom ran a newspaper advertisement in the British press about the benefits - and consequences - of advances in communications technology. Featuring a remote settlement in the north-west Highlands of Scotland, and with the clear implication that such "out-of-the-way places" were now connected to the wider world (as if they had not been before), the advert proclaimed "Geography is History." What the advert signalled to as the "end" of geography in the sense of the social gradients associated with space and distance is what is known, variously, as "time-space convergence" and "time-space distanciation."1 The terms embrace not just the "collapse" of geographical space given technical advances (in travel time and in communications - consequences of what Castells calls "the information age" and "the network society"2), but also the idea that the modern world has become more homogenized. One place is now much the same as another. Further, given the likelihood of such technical and cultural changes continuing into the future, geographical distinctiveness, evident in the particularity of place, would be a thing of the past: geography would indeed be history. There is, of course, much evidence to the contrary: that, in the face of "globalisation," questions of locality, sense of place and of identity in place matter now more than ever. Even, then, as Francis Fukuyama cautioned against the "death" of liberal democratic politics as The End of History,3 geography - that is, geography understood as questions to do with place, and questions to do with where you are in the world as part of questions about how you are and who you are in the world - has had considerably heightened significance and for some places and people more than others.4These notions of place - as a particular location, and the character or sense of place - are only part of the meanings associated with place in geographical and in historical work. Like space, its regular epistemic dancing partner in geographical ubiquity and metaphysical imprecision, place is a widespread yet complex term. What follows is historiographie al in focus and, of necessity, partial in range. I offer a historiographical survey of the term place, principally but not alone within recent work in geography. In more detail, and with reference to one of the strong senses in which place is used, namely that of locale, "the local," or localness, I trace here the connections between place, space, and the idea of the local as evident in recent work in history and in geography, especially within the history and the geography of science. Particular attention is paid in this context to the distinctive features of what we may think of as the "spatial turn" in the history of science by looking at the idea of place and space in recent work in Enlightenment studies. My argument is three-fold. Notions of place and space, much debated by geographers, have been as central a concern for intellectual historians and historians of science as for philosophers and others, but they have been differently expressed. There is, I shall argue, value in looking at these different views in order to understand that whilst place is a commonplace term it is not agreed upon: working with imprecision has been both opportunity and restriction. In relation to work within the history of science and in Enlightenment studies, consideration of the so-called "spatial turn," of place as social practice and of placing as a process in accounting for the uneven movement of ideas over space and time may help provide some precision and strengthen connections between geography and history.II. PLACE (IN GEOGRAPHY): A PARTIAL HISTORIOGRAPHYPlace is one of the most fundamental concepts in human geography. It is also one of the most problematic.5 Place, or small-scale regional space, features as a subdivision within the Classical tripartite division of cosmography (the earth in relation to other planetary bodies), geography (the earth as a whole) and chorography (parts of the earth or regional geography). …

Literature in Mind: H. G. Wells and the Evolution of the Mad Scientist

Abstract: In 1893, H. G. Wells's article "Man of the Year Million" dramatically predicted the distant evolutionary future of mankind:1The descendents of man will nourish themselves by immersion in nutritive fluid. They will have enormous brains, liquid, soulful eyes, and large hands, on which they will hop. No craggy nose will they have, no vestigial ears; their mouths will be a small, perfectly round aperture, unanimal, like the evening star. Their whole muscular system will be shriveled to nothing, a dangling pendant to their minds.2The editors at Punch evidently found this prediction hilarious, publishing a poem and accompanying sketch ridiculing Wells's lopsided future humans (Figure 1, p. 318). But not everyone was laughing.As ridiculous as Wells's bodiless, large-headed "human tadpoles" may seem, they were based on the most rigorous evolutionary science of their day. Wells, a lower-middle-class academic prodigy, received a prestigious government scholarship to attend the Normal School of Science in South Kensington (later absorbed into the University of London). Though Wells left South Kensington in 1887 without earning his degree, he was greatly inspired by his biology teacher, famed physiologist Thomas Huxley. Wells absorbed Huxley's pessimistic take on late-Victorian evolutionary theory, particularly his emphasis on the inherent brutality of natural selection.Huxley's pessimism surfaces in Wells's dystopian scientific romances, which imaginatively probe the consequences of evolutionary theory run amok.3 Beginning with the eponymous mad-scientist villain of The Island of Dr. Moreau (1896) and continuing with alien invasion narratives like The War of the Worlds (1897-98) and The First Men in the Moon (1901), Wells depicts brains becoming steadily larger and more powerful as bodies grow smaller and more useless, emotions increasingly muted, and conscience all but silenced. Wells's nightmarish vision of the massively overevolved brain unites these three works, as the ruthlessly intellectual biologist Moreau morphs into the amoral, top-heavy Martians and lunar inhabitants.Wells's malevolent mad scientists and extraterrestrials owe an intellectual debt not only to Huxley, but also to discussions of genius and insanity in late-Victorian issues of Mind (1876-present).4 The now-familiar trope of the mad scientist in fact traces its roots to the clinical association between genius and insanity that developed in the mid-nineteenth century. Authors like Scottish journalist and materialist philosopher John Ferguson Nisbet, English eugenicist Francis Galton, and Austrian Jewish physician Max Nordau - all of whose works were reviewed in Mind - argued that mankind had evolved larger brains at the expense of muscular strength, reproductive capacity, and moral sensibility.5 Wells drew upon these arguments in his fiction and even contributed his own article to Mind, a philosophical reflection on science entitled "Scepticism of the Instrument" (1904).In its unique role as "the first English journal devoted to Psychology and Philosophy." Mind was an ideal venue for an inherently interdisciplinary subject like the clinical study of genius.6 The journal's first editor, George Croom Robertson, was particularly concerned that articles in Mind rise "above the narrowing influences of modern specialism."7 This disciplinary breadth attracted contributors from all fields, including fiction writers and literary critics like George Henry Lewes, Grant Allen, Andrew Lang, and, of course, H.G. Wells. During the same period, literary works probed ideas discussed in Mind, such as the nature of the soul, the possibility of free will, and the ramifications of biological determinism. In the four decades following its auspicious start, Mind provided a venue where scientists, philosophers and literary authors could find intellectual common ground.In this essay, the early fiction of H.G. Wells will serve as a case study of cross-fertilization between literature and scientific ideas discussed in Mind. …

"Refer to folio and number": Encyclopedias, the Exchange of Curiosities, and Practices of Identification before Linnaeus

Abstract: The Swiss natural historian Johann Amman came to Russia in 1733 to take a position as professor of botany and natural history at the St. Petersburg Academy of Sciences. As part of the job, he corresponded, and exchanged plant specimens, with the English merchant collector Peter Collinson in London, and the Swedish scholar Carolus Linnaeus, among others. After briefly reviewing Amman's correspondence with these scholars and the growing commerce in exotic specimens of natural history, I explore how encyclopedias came to facilitate the exchange of zoological specimens in particular. I argue that, during the seventeenth century, a new genre of zoological encyclopedias appeared on the scene whose design was particularly well-suited for the purposes of identification, a key practice in long-distance exchanges.

Sympathy in Mind (1876-1900).

Abstract: In the April 1884 issue of Mind, William James published his influential account of emotion, which stressed the bodily and physiological constitution of various feeling-states.1 The article reflected new trends in physiological psychology, but came under attack by numerous respondents in the journal who argued that there was more to the emotions than physiology.2 As the evolutionary psychologist Hiram Stanley intoned, "emotions in the higher stages are filled out by knowledge and will."3 Many noted that the higher emotions - aesthetic sentiments, sympathy, pity, envy, love - were not marked by clear physiological changes. Charles Darwin had observed that love was not discernable by prominent facial expressions.4 There was also little agreement as to how to divide sentiments from appetites, affections, and passions. What came to be known as the James-Lange theory of emotion, then, was only one of a variety of theories of emotion circulating in Anglo-American intellectual culture of the late nineteenth century.5In debates about the nature of emotion, the higher emotions - particularly that of sympathy - played a crucial role. Sympathy was most often understood to be a kind of tenderheartedness linked to, but distinct from love. At the same time, sympathy was tethered to a variety of moral and epistemological ends - as a cornerstone in evolutionary ethics, an element in aesthetic appreciation, and even as a source for knowledge of other minds. Sympathy had had a prominent place in eighteenth-century theories of aesthetics, moral sentiments and taste, in the writings of Adam Smith and Edmund Burke. In the late Victorian period, theories of sympathy drew on this lineage and increasingly became tinged with evolutionary and developmental features.Although sympathy in the Victorian period has gained the attention of literary scholars, historians of the mind sciences have not paid it much due, even though its psychological origins and moral correlates were of sustained interest in this period.6 Stefan Collini has argued that British intellectual culture was intrigued by the interplay of egoistic and altruistic tendencies, and the birth of a number of ethical societies in the final two decades of the century attests to the increased emphasis on the moral dimensions of sympathy.7 Anti-vivisection movements and societies for the prevention of cruelty to animals and children, often with appeals to sympathy, gained adherents in this period in Britain and America.8 In one study, psychologists distributed scientific questionnaires in order to assess the experiences of sympathy and pity of nearly four hundred subjects.9 There was no underestimating the importance of sympathy for Anglo-American intellectuals, who confidently claimed it was becoming more refined and more widely diffused in their era. Darwin believed that sympathy had been extended to those of the same nation, and prescriptively wrote that it should extend to all nations and races, as well as the imbecile and the maimed. Darwin was echoing here the broader enlightenment sentimentalist tradition that linked the feeling of sympathy to a conception of humanity.10In the pages of the British professional psychological and philosophical journal Mind, sympathy was under scrutiny by scholars in evolutionary and developmental psychology, ethics, and aesthetics. This journal, first published in 1876, and funded by Alexander Bain, examined new trends in physiological and scientific psychology and sought a broad philosophical framework for the understanding of mental life.11 It played a mediating role in the overlapping discussions of science and philosophy and published on a diverse array of topics. Although Mind saw itself as a specialized journal for psychology and philosophy, it was founded at an historical moment when discussions of the mind were not narrowly portioned out to the psychological sciences, as would increasingly be the case after 1900. Indeed, the experimental psychological laboratory emerged as a new scientific institution only in 1879 with Wilhelm Wundt's Leipzig laboratory, and then in 1897 at the Universities of London and Cambridge. …

Pufendorf on Natural Equality, Human Dignity, and Self-Esteem

Abstract: While the idea that human beings are somehow equal by nature has a long history, it became a topic of more intense philosophical reflection in the seventeenth century, when Thomas Hobbes, Samuel Pufendorf, and John Locke used this notion to articulate their doctrines of the state of nature and the contractual origins of human power relations. These three theorists were not the most egalitarian political writers of the seventeenth century, but they presented their rival views on the character, foundation, and conse quences of natural human equality in greater detail than any of their con temporaries.

Reading the Mind: From George Eliot's Fiction to James Sully's Psychology

Abstract: What is the function and value of fiction? Debates over these questions involve considerations that range from aesthetics to ethics, from the intrinsic values of the genre to its moral effects. Recently, largely under the influence of the cognitive sciences, the question has taken on a new cast: might science give us a new answer to these long-standing issues? Studies such as Lisa Zunshine's Why We Read Fiction (2006), John Carey's What Good Are the Arts? (2005), and Alan Palmer's Fictional Minds (2004) are part of a growing area of interdisciplinary work on the relationship between art and consciousness.1 This body of work asks not just how our theories of consciousness inform our understanding of the process and function of reading fiction, but also whether fiction itself might provide a key to new theories about the nature of consciousness.The nineteenth-century novel is often considered the high point in the literary representation of mind. Indeed, the terms "psychology" and "novel" are explicitly yoked in the nineteenth-century with the simultaneous emergence of both as discrete forms of intellectual and artistic activity. Not surprisingly, George Eliot has come to be identified with the term "psychological novel": in fact, Nicholas Dames argues that she was the first to couple the words psychology and novel in this way in an 1855 review where she contrasted Charles Kingsley's historical romance Westward Ho! with "those 'psychological' novels."2 While George Eliot initially used the phrase in what Dames calls "mock disdain," by the end of the nineteenth century the term "psychological novel" had gained currency as a straightforward description of a type of Victorian novel: Wilbur Cross, in his summary The Development of the English Novel, for example, describes the form as "stressing an inner sequence of thought and feeling, which is brought into harmony with an ethical formula and accounted for in an analysis of motive." Along with Elizabeth Gaskell and George Meredith, Cross also cites George Eliot as one of his central examples of the "psychological novel."3It seems natural, then, when a critic asks, "what is the special distinguishing function of the modern art of fiction?" to turn for an answer to George Eliot's novels and their close connections with psychological science. It is perhaps surprising that this still-current question was posed by the nineteenth -century psychologist James Sully (1842-1923) in an 1881 article in the journal Mind on "George Eliot's Art."4 His essay offers us a Victorian contribution to questions about the relationship of literature and psychology that are being addressed today by critics such as Sally Shuttleworth, Athena Vrettos, Kay Young, Nicholas Dames, or Rick Rylance, especially with respect to George Eliot. James Sully's essay not only provides valuable insight into how the Victorians themselves understood the role of psychology in the novel, but also helps to place contemporary debates about fiction and consciousness into sharper relief.In the wake of important studies, such as Rylance's Victorian Psychology and British Culture (2000), that have brought renewed attention to nineteenth-century British psychology, recent scholarship has shown the central role of Victorian debates about the mind in shaping the fiction of the period.5 Nineteenth-century mental science provided material and inspiration for works of literature, with imaginative writers eager to exploit and develop the narrative and thematic potential of contemporary psychological discourse and probe the problems it raised. Novelists such as Wilkie Collins, George Eliot, and Henry James turned to some of the most current work in the science of the mind, which they saw as the most sophisticated and credible approach to psychological realism available. These and other novelists rapidly absorbed the central terms of the new science as it considered problems of consciousness, identity, and memory, and brought them to life by dramatizing and questioning them in their fiction. …

Gothicism and early modern historical ethnography.

Abstract: GOTHICISM: PROBLEMS AND POSSIBILITIESEarly-modern Gothicism, or self-identification with the Gothic peoples described by classical authors, has usually been considered a Scandinavian, and particularly Swedish, affair. Particularly in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, the Swedish court and universities insisted militantly that the kingdom was the Gothic homeland, and this has fostered an assumption that Gothicism represents a kind of embryonic nationalism. This interpretation was almost inevitable given the circumstances of modern interest in the phenomenon. Scandinavian scholars were the first to pick up the Gothic thread in the earlier twentieth century, and Swedes in particular have dominated the literature on Gothicism. At least in the early years, this may be related to a general trend to interpret the past in terms of a relatively inflexible, modern concept of nation. These earlier studies accordingly relied largely on the same, mostly Swedish, sources. Later work has generally not expanded the framework of the discourse, however.1 A number of important early modern texts that show the much broader appeal of Gothicism are not accounted for in the standard narrative of the rise of the phenomenon in the early modern period. I will show that the Scandinavian interpretation has been allowed to overshadow a much broader Gothic tradition that encompassed a broad part of Europe, including the German lands and Spain. Gothicism has thus been reduced to just one aspect of its original scope, and the scholarly nuances and historical jockeying that shaped the narrative have largely been lost. This reduction has had consequences not only for the familiar version of the story, largely derived from Swedish texts, but also for our understanding of history writing in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.The Gothicism debate may be unique in its breadth and in the intensity of interest that it elicited. It is also remarkable for the variety of approaches to historical writing that scholars applied as each tried to develop a more impregnable argument than the last. Linguistic, geographical, archaeological, antiquarian, and textual methods intersected freely, inviting shifting and overlapping versions of the Gothic narrative that sometimes trace the linguistic legacy of the tribe, sometimes the ethnic legacy, and sometimes bind the two together. All of these narratives were basically concerned with the antiquity of the Goths and their legacy in early modern Europe. The implications of this were different for various regions and rulers, but most wanted to claim for themselves the strength, prestige, and antiquity of the tribe that toppled the Roman Empire, thus enhancing their own often dubious historical legitimacy.This debate often took a polemical character, particularly in the political sphere, where there were fierce disputes over which region was the true homeland of the tribe, and thus which area (or people or ruling dynasty) could claim the greatest honor from their exploits and claim to be their most direct descendants. But there was also a very clear corollary to this contentious discourse. As scholars from across a wide area produced mountains of evidence pointing to the Gothic origins of their own regions, it became possible to think of Gothic origins not only in terms of difference - which kingdom, dynasty, or geographic region could claim the greatest antiquity and eminence - but also in terms of shared history and common identity across political, geographical, and linguistic boundaries. In general, the polemic was restricted to the origins of the Goths. Many writers seem to have accepted that the Gothic lands cumulatively formed a sort of historical unity that was lost through later political divisions, but which could still be traced through other means. Particularly in the Holy Roman Empire - a largely political boundary encompassing many smaller states ruled by famously fractious princes of different confessions and languages - the more conceptual notion of deep-seated Gothic origins opened the way for a different alignment of identity both within and without the boundaries of the Empire, and especially with Scandinavia, which contributed such rich arguments to the debate. …

Significs and the origins of analytic philosophy

Abstract: I.Studying the literature on the history of analytic philosophy may leave the impression that the members of the Vienna Circle - or more appropriately, the Schlick Circle and the associated advocates of logical empiricism - were the main agents leading philosophy to take the so-called linguistic turn. One may also think that the Circle's inspiration was, in turn, born out of the philosophical and logical contentions of Ernst Mach,1 followed by Gottlob Frege, Bertrand Russell, and the young Ludwig Wittgenstein. It is true that the seemingly rapid penetration of logical empiricism into early twentieth -century thought widely influenced the choice of markedly analytic topics in the philosophy of language, among them accounts of reference, predication, truth, and intentionality. It is equally true that some damage control has recently been deployed to overcome the rift between "continental" and "analytic" philosophies that defined the better part of the last century.2However, I aim at a perspective that makes an exception. Before proceeding, a caveat: it is not in the nature of my argument to delve into what analytic philosophy is or is not. Such a task will invariably be frustrating. The Rt. Hon. Lord Quinton takes analytic philosophy to have begun when Wittgenstein arrived in Cambridge in 1912 to study with Russell.3 Sir Michael Dummett prefers Frege and the Context Principle. But it is also known that Wittgenstein's encounters with Frege were, at best, inconclusive, and that before Frege, thinkers such as Wilhelm Wundt expressed ideas similar to Frege's Context Principle. Accordingly, Dummett's characterization amounts to the anomalous position that both the psychologism supported by Wundt and the anti-psychologism supported by Frege would have to be admitted by analytic philosophers. The upshot is that the early development of analytic philosophy is likely to be so convoluted as to be nearly impossible to trace.On balance, though, the question of the origins is not that easy to avoid. Such an investigation is challenging but worth the effort. Unfortunately, many received publications have either been content with clearing up the historical details, or sought to outline the most salient features of these traditions. My purpose is not to discuss what has been perceived as mainstream early twentieth -century European philosophical thought, but to bring to light a scientific and philosophical development that took place at the same time as the formation of early analytic philosophy but has received much less attention. I intend to examine the historical research of Friedrich Stadler, among others, on the Vienna Circle,4 in order to explain the stages of development in European intellectual history that contributed to the shaping of views on the role of language in contemporary philosophy.What was the intellectual environment in which the Vienna Circle was functioning? Where did its members inherit their interest in logical analysis of language? It is easy to home in on such general factors as modernism, scientific positivism, and monism, as well as a variety of multilateral culturally- and politically-inclined motives. My plan is to offer a connection with the Signifies Movement (Dutch: significa), a predominantly Dutch intellectual movement that scrutinized the philosophical underpinnings of language. The limited recognition of this movement is due not so much to individuals as it is to the philosophical community at large. During the last decades, philosophers have been guilty of a "crime against science" by withholding credit from developments in the history of linguistics, logic, and mathematics. The genetic origin of some of the key ideas routinely relegated to the analytic genre may often be traced back to these largelyforgotten developments.The intellectual and cultural milieux of signifies persisted even longer than those of the Vienna Circle. Driven by linguists or linguistically-minded philosophers and cultural reformists, this movement, nearly unknown today, was a strong candidate to form the basis of the science of communication and meaning of the new century. …

Montaigne and the Coherence of Eclecticism

Abstract: Since the publication of Pierre Hadot's essays on ancient philosophy by Arnold Davidson in 1995, 2 Michel Foucault's late work on "the care of the self"3 has appeared in a new light. We now know that Hadot's work was familiar to Foucault as early as the 1950s.4 It is also clear that Foucault's notion of "techniques of the self" is very close to what Hadot calls "spiritual exercises." At the same time, there are important differences between the views of these two philosophers, and Hadot has often expressed his regret that Foucault's untimely death prevented them from exploring these differences.5 One important point of disagreement was the status of eclecticism. In Foucault's interpretation of ancient philosophy, the "constitution of the self" implied a personal choice among disparate philosophical references: "Writing as a personal exercise done by the self and for the self, is an art of disparate truth."6 In a 1989 article Hadot argued from a historical point of view that, so far as Stoicism and Epicureanism were concerned, eclecticism had no place in a mature practice of philosophy. Foucault's favorite example, Seneca's Letters to Lucilius, in which Stoic arguments were invoked along with Epicurean arguments, was a work for beginners. In a mature practice of Stoicism, one would stick to the arguments of the Stoic school, choose them for their coherence, and instead of trying to forge a spiritual identity for oneself through writing, one would "liberate oneself from one's individuality in order to raise oneself up to universality."7 Hadot added that "it is only in the New Academy - in the person of Cicero, for instance - that a personal choice is made according to what reason considers as most likely at a given moment."8 This discussion of Foucault may give the impression that Hadot was somewhat dismissive of eclecticism. Yet in a 2001 interview Hadot claimed that he had always admired Cicero's intellectual independence, and he proposed a reappraisal "of an attitude that has always had a bad reputation: eclecticism."9Something very similar is a stake in the work of Alexander Nehamas, as Lanier Anderson and Joshua Landy showed in their study of his Art of Living. In the conception of philosophy as a "way of life" (Hadot) or "care of the self" (Foucault) or "self-fashioning" (Nehamas), a central issue is the relationship between theoretical coherence and the coherence of the person who theorizes. Elaborating on Nehamas's chapter on Montaigne, Anderson and Landy argue that there is a move in Montaigne away from doctrinal coherence and towards a coherence of the self. As they put it, "the harmonious whole Montaigne commends [ . . . ] is not a coherent body of fact or theory; it is the unified self of the theorizer."10 Anderson and Landy show that this brings up all kinds of difficulties: can this unified self be other than a fiction? If that is the case, how can philosophy be a way of life} Nehamas's answer is very much in the spirit of the late Foucault: there is a coherence of the self in Montaigne, and this coherence is the product of writing as a philosophical activity. The self is fashioned through writing.Because Montaigne writes in the ancient tradition of philosophy as a way of life, one may recall Hadot's suggestion that Foucault's notion of "writing the self" is an intriguing but historically inaccurate description of ancient philosophical practice. But perhaps Hadot agrees with Foucault after all, since in his most recent interviews, he speaks favorably of eclecticism, a notion that is central to Foucault's analysis of self-fashioning through writing. The case of Montaigne is particularly interesting for these purposes, not only because the Essays seem to be the prototypical example of "writing the self," but also because eclecticism is both discussed and practiced throughout the Essays. I propose to take a fresh look at this issue by investigating the status of eclecticism in Montaigne's Essays. This must start with an examination of the philosophical tradition most closely associated with the practice of eclecticism, the Skeptical tradition. …

Human Liberty and Human Nature in the Works of Faustus Socinus and His Readers

Abstract: I.Few issues were more hotly contested by early modern theologians than the extent of human liberty and its implications for both religion and society. In the Protestant world, the sixteenth century saw increasingly strident statements of mankind's bondage to sin and the importance of God's eternal decree of predestination, but the concept of human moral responsibility still had its defenders. One influential proponent of human liberty was Faustus Socinus (1539-1604), the Italian scholar known most commonly today for his denial of the trinity. Yet the central theme of his theology was his insistence that Christian virtues must be carried out voluntarily; it was from this principle that his more heterodox ideas flowed. He made a sharp distinction between natural and voluntary action, and argued that the practice of Christianity must be an act of human will, not one to which men were drawn by nature. Separating Christianity from the natural order, Socinus argued that eternal life awaited those who chose to follow the law of Christ rather than the natural law. His argument challenged the Protestant commitment to the unity of natural and divine law and it opened up conceptual space for voluntary action outside the natural law. In this article, I shall sketch the Socinian position on human liberty and Christianity, and suggest how and why the Italian's ideas were developed by Protestants in the early seventeenth century. His readers included the eminent Dutch scholar Hugo Grotius (1583-1645), and the exchange between Grotius and the Socinians reveals the concern on both sides to explain the relationship between human liberty, Christianity, and natural law.Socinus' life, like his theology, began within the reform movement in Italy and ended among the marginalised anti-trinitarians in Poland. Born of a long line of Italian jurists, he shared both his family's legal interests and their critical approach to the Catholic Church. In his youth he had been a courtier in Florence but his increasingly critical attitude towards Catholicism - and the death of his patron Grand-Duke Cosimo I - resulted in his departure from Italy in 1574. After a period in Basel he found a home among the Polish Anabaptists at Rakow, a young and precarious community which he helped to sustain through his advice and through the tracts which he penned on their behalf.1 During these years, he was also able to develop his own interpretation of Christianity, and to explain it in numerous works issuing from the community's press. Although his ideas generated a lively debate from the start, both in Poland and Germany, it was only after his death that they began to be absorbed into the mainstream of European intellectual discussions. Socinus' theological ideas had their attractions for some Protestant readers, but they became entangled with more political questions and their implications for civil life began to cause serious alarm. For this reason my focus will be upon the responses of Dutch and German readers, particularly Hugo Grotius and Johan Crell (15901633), both of whom addressed the civil as well as the theological aspects of Socinus' legacy. First, however, I shall draw out the salient points from Socinus' rich and complex theology, paying particular attention to his understanding of human liberty. Unlike his orthodox Protestant contemporaries, Socinus believed that liberty was the precondition for virtue.Socinus shared with the broader Christian humanist tradition the belief that Christ demanded works as well as faith from his followers. Christians must follow the pattern of ethical living laid down by their master; like Erasmus before him, and like the Italian exiles he met in Basel, Socinus saw Christianity as a religion of action.2 For this reason, he was determined to protect the liberty and capacity of each individual to act virtuously, and therefore to defend what he understood as human free will. It was, he felt, a pressing task, for these qualities were being undermined by his contemporaries and particularly by those on the Protestant side. …

Diplomatic Arts: Hickes against Mabillon in the Republic of Letters

Abstract: Great scholars are survived by the debates they engender. In 1709, two years after the death of Jean Mabillon, his friend, biographer, and fellow Benedictine, Thierry Ruinart, published a preface to the second edition of the monumental De re diplomatica. Ruinart recorded with pride that, since its initial publication in 1681, Mabillon's work had instructed and excited scholarship throughout Europe. Not only in France, but in Spain, Germany, Italy, and England learned men had read and responded to Mabillon's teachings on the diplomatic art. In Germany, Gottfried Leibniz had brought forth the first volume of his Codex juris Gentium Diplomaticus in 1693; five years previously, the Spanish Benedictine Jose Perez de Rozas had published his Dissertationes on ecclesiastical and political history "ac ad rem Diplomaticam"; in France, Bernard de Montfaucon had produced a Greek paleography "Mabillonii exemplo excitatus," and in Italy the Roman professor Giusto Fontanini, assisted by Domenico Passionei, had recently published the Vindiciae Antiquorum Diplomatum, a work aimed squarely against Mabillon's Jesuit opponent, Bartholomy Germon.1 Finally, Ruinart noted, in 1705 two large volumes had emerged from the Sheldonian Theatre in Oxford, published by one George Hickes, and entitled Linguarum veterutn septentrionalium thesaurus.In the Thesaurus Hickes (1642-1715) had praised Mabillon and his De re diplomatica often, and he held both up as models to be imitated by future scholars. But, as Ruinart had to admit, Hickes was simultaneously a follower and a critic of Mabillon. In particular, the Englishman expressed vehement disapproval of Mabillon's approach to forged documents. Hickes had devoted a lengthy passage in the preface to the Thesaurus to a critique of six "rules" proposed by Mabillon, noting their dangers, inconsistencies, and their failure when applied to known forgeries. Far from promoting the separation of truth from falsehood in antique documents, Hickes alleged, Mabillon had made it so easy to excuse falsehood that gross forgeries might escape condemnation. Ruinart, in response, recorded each of Hickes's objections and defended his master, arguing that Hickes had variously misunderstood, and overreacted to, Mabillon's approach to antique documentation.2Within the "Republic of Letters" such episodes of dissension were normal, indeed desirable. Far lengthier critiques had been and would be written in response to Mabillon, above all by Germon, who insisted on the falsity of all extant Merovingian charters, and by Jean Hardouin, the numismatist who was developing a theory that almost the entirety of classical Latin literature had been forged in the later Middle Ages.3 The criticism made by Hickes nevertheless struck a nerve. Although Mabillon was said to have praised and recommended Hickes shortly before his death,4 he was also, according to Ruinart, planning to issue a response to the criticisms contained within the Thesaurus.5 Nor can it be said that, once dismissed, Hickes's animadversions were forgotten. Testament to their enduring irritation to Mabillon's disciples is the six-volume Nouveau Traite de Diplomatique of the Benedictines Charles-Francois Toustain and Rene-Prosper Tassin, which appeared in the course of the 1750s and 1760s, and included several references and extended refutations of Hickes's critique of Mabillon.6 Hickes's evident learning in the field of Anglo-Saxon documents gave him an authority that demanded his criticisms be rebutted, particularly when he argued that documents accepted by Mabillon as genuine were in fact forgeries. Yet this alone would not, one suspects, have earned Hickes the compliment of a vigorous refutation. The potentially damaging aspect of Hickes's criticism of De re diplomatica was his assertion that Mabillon had failed to devise adequate rules - or indeed any rules worthy of the name - for the discernment of true from false documents. Hickes's attack, in other words, came not from the camp of the extremists such as Germon and Hardouin who denied the veracity of entire archives, but from the perspective of a practitioner of Mabillon's antiquarian art, a self-styled cultor, who had found the great man's precepts wanting. …

The Jewish Spinoza

Abstract: Among the great, dead philosophers of the early modern period, Baruch Spinoza is perhaps the most deeply fascinating but mysterious and enigmatic of them all. Whether it is due to the sheer difficulty of navigating the "geometric method" and esoteric jargon of his philosophical masterpiece, the Ethics; or because so much of his life remains for us in the shadows, given the frustrating lack of extant documentation, the "real" Spinoza seems often to escape us. Thus, it should come as no surprise that Spinoza has also become one of the most mythologized (and even fictionalized) philosophers in history.This is especially true of his relationship to Judaism. Despite attempts to "marranize" Spinoza's experience,1 his upbringing and education took place within an open, well-established, albeit not always perfectly orthodox Jewish community (because of its historical converso roots). It is true that his parents had been through the marrano experience, in Portugal and, in the case of his father, France. But Spinoza himself grew up under the watchful eyes of the rabbis of Amsterdam's Portuguese kehilla: he attended the elementary school of the united Talmud Torah congregation, paid his dues as an upstanding member of the community, and (after taking over his father's mercantile business) most likely continued his adult studies in the Keter Torah yeshiva run by the congregation's chief rabbi, the Ashkenazic import Saul Levi Mortera.In July of 1656, however, Spinoza was expelled from the Amsterdam Portuguese community with the harshest writ of herem (ostracism) ever issued by its leaders. The only extant documentation of this event refers to his "abominable heresies" and "monstrous deeds," but it still remains something of a mystery why exactly Spinoza was punished with such extreme prejudice. It has been suggested recently that the cause of his expulsion lay in certain financial irregularities, in particular, because he went outside the jurisdiction of the Portuguese community to the Dutch authorities in order to relieve himself of debts he inherited from his father, in direct violation of the community's regulations.2 However, in light of the vitriolic language of the herem, its extraordinary harshness when compared with other expulsions from the period, as well as the reference to his "heresies," it is hard to believe that it all amounted to merely a legal matter. More likely, it was a question of ideas, in particular, just the kind of bold philosophical, theological, and religious views that Spinoza would begin expressing in his written works within a couple of years. Be that as it may, the expulsion order was never rescinded, and Spinoza lived the rest of his life outside any Jewish context. In fact, he seems not to have had any residual sense of Jewish identity. In his writings, he goes out of his way to distance himself from Judaism, and always refers to the Jews in the third person as "them." Nor does he exhibit any fundamental sympathy with Jewish history or culture; indeed, he seems to harbor a degree of hostility to the Jewish people, about whom he has some very unkind things to say.And yet, it can hardly be said that Spinoza's break with Judaism was perfectly clean and complete. Things are rarely so black and white in the history of ideas, least of all with as deep and complex a philosopher as Spinoza. While he may no longer have thought of himself as a Jew, and while he even had great contempt for Judaism and other organized sectarian religions, it cannot be denied that Jewish texts, history, and thought continued to play an important role in Spinoza's thinking, so much so that Spinoza can rightfully be considered a Jewish philosopher, both because his ideas exhibit a strong engagement with earlier Jewish philosophy and because in his major works he philosophized about Judaism.3For many years, however, a reader of the literature on Spinoza would have had little reason for thinking this. Scholarship on Spinoza in the late nineteenth century and much of the twentieth century, especially in the Anglo-American analytic tradition but also to some degree in France, the Netherlands, Italy, and Germany, was focused almost exclusively on his seventeenth -century philosophical context: primarily Descartes and Cartesianism, but also Hobbes, Leibniz, and others, including fellow Dutch thinkers of the republican political persuasion. …

Polanyi in the United States: Peter Drucker, Karl Polanyi, and the Midcentury Critique of Economic Society

Abstract: An extraordinary trend in the social sciences has been the revival, from relative obscurity, of Karl Polanyi's The Great Transformation With the end of the Cold War and the rise of neoliberalism, Karl Polanyi's ideas are, ironically, more relevant today than they were in 1944, when his book was first published Social theorists concerned with political economy in particular have latched onto The Great Transformation for its powerful criticisms of market-based policies and for its defense of the role of the state Rather than speaking of the need for governments to don what Thomas Friedman calls "the golden straight] acket" of market discipline, Polanyians speak of states creating the sorts of markets that meet human needs - economic structures that will serve society, not command it1 Enthusiasm for such an approach has led admirers of Polanyi to found the Karl Polanyi Institute of Political Economy, hold eleven international Karl Polanyi conferences, translate The Great Transformation into at least nine languages, and publish numerous books and articles on Polanyi's ideasAnd yet, despite Polanyi's current popularity, his path to prominence has been a tortuous one Initially, Polanyi's intellectual legacy was limited to the field of anthropology, where his insistence that the rules of the market society did not apply to much of the world was taken as an invitation to do more research on nonmarket economies Polanyi and his followers - known collectively as the "substantivist" school of economic anthropology (a Polanyian term) - explored the exchange, control, and distribution of land, labor, and resources in the absence of the price-setting mechanism of the market It was only really in the 1980s that other social scientists turned back to The Great Transformation and recognized Polanyi as having something to say to students of the modern market economy as well Since then, The Great Transformation has become something of a canonical text in sociology, political science, and development studies, with its trademark concepts of embeddedness, the double movement, and fictitious commodities taking on rich lives of their own Historians, however, have been slow off the mark in the race to make something of Polanyi, despite Polanyi's keen interest in historical questions At least in the Anglophone world, the British Marxists and particularly E P Thompson have had such a large disciplinary influence that Polanyi's criticisms of economistic thinking and of the universality of the profit motive have seemed to many like old news It is no great surprise that the Karl Polanyi Institute of Political Economy counts on its executive board of sixteen academics only one historianI will not make the case here that historians ought to become Polanyians I would submit, however, that historians, treating Polanyi as a historical subject, have an important perspective to add to the growing Polanyi literature Examining Polanyi from within my own field of US history, I will argue that The Great Transformation can fruitfully be read in the context of an important and only recently unearthed episode in US intellectual history: the midcentury critique of economic society In particular, Polanyi's book ought to be read alongside the early work of management theorist Peter Drucker Doing so sheds light on a number of matters First, acknowledging how much Polanyi shared with his contemporaries in the United States makes it easier to see how he came to develop the theories for which he is rightly famous Second, exploring the important differences between Polanyi's critique of economic society and those articulated by his fellow thinkers draws Polanyi's theory into focus and exposes some of its limits Finally, having placed Polanyi within the context of the United States (where he wrote and published his book), we can take The Great Transformation as a noteworthy contribution the disparate movement to jettison homo economicus as the basis for society …

European Reference Index for the Humanities

Abstract: As historians of ideas, we agree with our colleagues in the History of Science who have recently protested against the creation of a European Reference Index for the Humanities by the European Science Foundation. The creators of the Index present it as an effort to rank journals—including historical journals—by objective criteria. Theoretically, it grades journals not by subjective qualities but by the breadth of their readership, their methods of peer reviewing and the like, in order to provide a ‘‘research information system for the Humanities.’’ In fact, however, the Foundation nowhere makes clear how it chose the members of its ratings committees or what measures it took when gathering the information that enabled them to sort journals into three categories. Journals of very similar age, quality and standing receive different ratings—a symptom of arbitrary procedures and one that saps faith in the results. Yet the use of terms like ‘‘top-quality’’ and ‘‘first-rate’’ inevitably creates the impression that these rankings correspond in some way to the scientific importance of journals. Worst of all, journals published in English and addressed to a large readership are clearly granted precedence over journals published in other languages and devoted to more specialized subjects and limited publics—a violation of the basic principle that, as our colleagues write, ‘‘Great research may be published anywhere and in any language. Truly ground-breaking work may be more likely to appear from marginal, dissident or unexpected sources, rather than from a well-established and entrenched mainstream.’’ As presently conceived and executed, this exercise will harm the humanistic disciplines that it seeks to serve.

The Aristotelianism of Locke's Politics

Abstract: Those, then, who think that the positions of statesman, king, household manager, and master of slaves are the same are not correct. For they hold that each of these differs not in kind but only in whether the subjects ruled are few or many . . . the assumption being that there is no difference between a large household and a small city-state. . . . But these claims are not true.Aristotle, Politics, 1252a1The Power of a Magistrate over a Subject may be distinguished from that of a Father over his Children, a Master over his Servant, a Husband over his Wife, and a Lord over his Slave. All which distinct Powers happening sometimes together in the same Man, if he be considered under these different Relations, it may help us to distinguish these Powers one from another, and show the difference betwixt a Ruler of a Common-wealth, a Father of a Family, and a Captain of a Galley.Locke, Two Treatises of Government, 2.22When the political theory of John Locke first appeared in print in 1689, the imposing authority of Aristotle stood ready to defeat it. So believed many of Locke's critics, at any rate. After his death in 1704, when it was confirmed that the internationally renowned author of An Essay Concerning Human Understanding had also written the anonymously published Two Treatises of Government, Locke was widely taken to represent a distinctive type of political theory based on individual rights and the social contract. Learned opposition to this sort of voluntaristic account of politics has often rested on Aristotle, "the Philosopher," the ancient authority on the human instinct for sociability and the hierarchal communities arising therefrom. Within the modern academy "liberals," "communitarians," and "republicans" have again made a habit of pronouncing the names of Locke and Aristotle in tones of antagonism. In broad outline the reasons have not changed in two or three centuries ago: the first stands for natural-rights individualism and the second for an organic conception of community.3What are we to make of this conventional opposition in light of the awkward fact that the second of Locke's Two Treatises, "Of Civil Government," takes the reclamation of the Aristotelian conception of political power as its principal purpose? Locke announced in the opening chapter of that essay that his chief target, Robert Filmer, had misunderstood the nature of distinctively political relationships, mainly by ignoring the differences between authority in political society and authority within the family (L 2.1-2). Locke alleged that this basic conceptual mistake of the Filmerian theory of "absolute" and "arbitrary" government was the source of its disastrous practical ramifications, which he had summed up in the first Treatise as "Chains for all Mankind" (L 1.1). Filmer, in turn, had taken Plato's side in the debate about political and familial rule which Aristotle had joined in the opening lines of his Politics (A 1252a). Though a perceptive reader long ago noticed the Aristotelianism of Locke's response to Filmer - Locke and Algernon Sidney were the "two famous men" to whom Rousseau alluded as having defended Aristotle against Filmer's Platonic notions of power - no modern scholar has attempted a full explanation of the significance of Locke's intervention in this debate.4The analysis below will show that Aristotle was the classic source for both the principal theoretic argument of Locke's second Treatise and the method employed to pursue it, i.e. using analogies of power for conceptual comparison and distinction. But my argument for the Aristotelianism of Locke's politics will rest on contextual as well as textual grounds. Not only was Locke pursuing an evident variation on the central theme of bk. 1 of Aristotle's Politics; he was far from alone in doing so. This sort of project was by the 1680s typical of radical constitutionalist writing in Europe, including not only English Whigs like Sidney and James Tyrrell but also a long line of writers on both sides of the English Channel, stretching back at least a century, who deployed a particular interpretation of Aristotle in the service of critiques of absolute monarchy. …

Lovejoy's Readings of Bruno: Or How Nineteenth-century History of Philosophy was "Transformed" into the History of Ideas

Abstract: I. INTRODUCTIONArthur Oncken Lovejoy (1873-1962) dedicated a considerable amount of work to the Italian Renaissance philosopher Giordano Bruno (1548-1600). His first publication on Bruno was an essay published in 1904, "The Dialectic of Bruno and Spinoza."1 It appeared only a few years after Lovejoy had finished his philosophical training at the University of California (1891-95) and Harvard University (1895-99).2 More than thirty years later, in 1936, he returned to Bruno in his famous work illustrating his methodology for the history of ideas, The Great Chain of Being?Lovejoy's readings of Bruno in these two studies introduced a paradox. On the one hand, he presented The Great Chain as an example of a new discipline, the history of ideas, and he emphasized the methodological innovation of this new discipline as compared to the history of philosophy. On the other hand, we can observe a high degree of continuity in Lovejoy's practice in these two works. He continued to use the same historiographical terms, in particular, "principles," "deductions" from these "principles," and "system of philosophy," a body of philosophical doctrines so established. Such terms were all conventional historiographical tools in nineteenth -century history of philosophy.In order to resolve this apparent contradiction, we can consult the opening chapter of The Great Chain of Being, where Lovejoy announces the new method governing the history of ideas, and contrasts it explicitly with that of the history of philosophy:By the history of ideas I mean something at once more specific and less restricted than the history of philosophy. It is differentiated primarily by the character of the units with which it concerns itself. Though it deals in great part with the same material as the other branches of the history of thought and depends greatly upon their prior labors, it divides that material in a special way, brings the parts of it into new groupings and relations, views it from the standpoint of a distinctive purpose. Its initial procedure may be said - though the parallel has its dangers - to be somewhat analogous to that of analytic chemistry. In dealing with the history of philosophical doctrines, for example, it cuts into the hard-and-fast individual systems and, for its own purposes, breaks them up into their component elements, into what may be called their unitideas.4In this passage Lovejoy placed the concept of unit-idea at the center of his method for the history of ideas, and he referred to this notion repeatedly in the remaining part of the introductory chapter.5 However, in the remaining part of the book, which exemplified the new method for the history of ideas, he did not use the term "unit -idea" at all.6 Instead, Lovejoy employed historiographical terms traditionally used in nineteenth-century history of philosophy, namely "principles" and "systems of philosophy."7 Lovejoy himself resolved this apparent conflict between precept and practice in his opening chapter by explaining that the term "unit -idea" may have different senses, but that in this work it meant "principle":The type of "idea" with which we shall be concerned is, however, more definite and explicit, and therefore easier to isolate and identify with confidence, than those of which I have been hitherto speaking. It consists in a single specific proposition or "principle" expressly enunciated by the most influential of early European philosophers, together with some further propositions which are, or have been supposed to be, its corollaries. . . . The character of this type of ideas, and of the processes which constitute their history, need not be further described in general terms since all that follows will illustrate it.8Although Lovejoy explained this uneven use of historiographical concepts in the opening chapter, he leaves the reader with the impression that unitidea is a new and distinct notion in his new approach to the past. …

The journal Mind in its early years, 1876-1920: an introduction.

Abstract: At its inception, and in the succeeding decades, the journal Mind was a publication of singular significance. Founded in 1876 by Alexander Bain, it was the first of its kind: the pioneering "philosophical journal" in the Anglophone world, to use Bain's own description.1 Close on the heels of Nature, the hugely successful periodical established seven years earlier to address progress in the natural sciences, Mind would devote itself to another important domain of intellectual work in Britain and worldwide. At the time, science and philosophy were as yet poorly demarcated areas, and the primary ground on which this distinction was negotiated was the study of the human mind and its role in social phenomena.2 Especially under its first two editors, George Croom Robertson (serving from the foundation to 1891) and G. F. Stout (from 1892 until 1920), the journal bore witness to a wholesale transformation of scholarly activity regarding these subjects.The purview of Mind was advertised on its opening page by Croom Robertson.3 This introductory offering bears close scrutiny as an indication of how the journal would develop. Foremost, in his mission statement, Robertson elaborated his position in terms of a series of dichotomies that Mind would bridge. As both an "organ for . . . original researches" and a "critical record," the journal would be an announcer for and a judge of new work on the phenomena of "subjective consciousness" as well as "objective" physiological operations. On the side of psychology, it would deal with such "natural" mental productions as language as well as the "abnormal mental phases" of insanity. It would treat the mental character of animals in addition to that of humans, employing a relative methodology encompassing "much of . . . Anthropology and all that is meant by Comparative Psychology." In its philosophical aspect, Mind would range from the theoretical ground of "ultimate questions" to applications in educational practice and "Logic, Aesthetics, and Ethics." It would deal with the historical background of philosophy and with "what is being done or left undone in the present day." While an obvious focus was expected on the intellectual community in Britain itself, attention would be granted to work "on the Continent and in America" and the reader was assured that "Mind will not be the organ of any philosophical school."Mind's masthead, formally unchanged until 1972, denominated it as a "Quarterly Review of Philosophy and Psychology" but Robertson's comments indicate that it would encompass far more than this phrase might immediately suggest. Explicitly at issue was a wide range of controversies then current in Britain. Late Victorian culture was characterized by a selfconscious examination of its own status and prospects. Especially vital concerns included the secularization of knowledge-making institutions4; shifts in the role of public social movements5; the reshaping of scholarship to accommodate new modes of inquiry, fostering in the process new relationships between literature and science6; and the morality of scientific practice7 - all items of substantive interest for Mind and its founding editor.As detailed in a pair of articles written for the journal's centennial in 1976, Mind under its first two editors gradually transformed into an exclusive forum for academic philosophy, shedding its aspirations to chronicle scientific psychology as well as its other broader goals for social reform.8 However, for a significant period, it continued to pursue the ambitious program of inquiry indicated on its very first page. In Robertson's introduction, Mind's territory was effectively defined to cover all of what was then known alternately as "moral philosophy" or "moral science." At the moment of the journal's foundation, this was a field undergoing wholesale transformation. An examination of the project of the new periodical provides a window into many important changes underway in intellectual activity at the time. …

Beyond Revisionism: The Bicentennial of Independence, the Early Republican Experience, and Intellectual History in Latin America

Abstract: Latin America's Revolution of Independence was an event of worldhistorical importance. Citizens of different regions simultaneously created new nation states and established republican systems of government. This occurred at a time when the very meaning of the notions of "nation" and "republic" remained ill-defined. In such a context, a number of debates naturally emerged regarding the tenets of modern politics, and the kind of dilemmas and problems contained therein.Yet the assessment of the historical relevance of these disputes has been precluded by the ideological assumptions which have informed traditional approaches in the history of ideas. These assumptions have led historians to interpret these disputes as mere expressions of local prejudices that prevented the correct understanding of the true meaning of the modern liberal concept of representative democracy. According to this traditional view, the concerns of Latin American commentators were seen as "deviations" from the rational path of conceptual development and understanding. It was necessary to undermine this traditional teleological prejudice before the debates around these notions produced in Latin America in the nineteenth century could reveal their historical significance and become matters for systematic analysis. The rise of a "new intellectual history," insofar as it has questioned the assumed rationality and logical consistency of the putative models and disclosed the contingent nature of their foundations, has opened the door to an entirely new universe of problems and issues for scholarly research in the field of Latin American politico-intellectual history.The great wave of new studies on the crisis of the Spanish and Portuguese empires and the emergence of new national states, triggered by the approach of the Bicentennial of Independence, has been greatly influenced by this new set of questions.1 Historians from different countries in Latin America have revisited that fundamental event, and have sought to revise established perspectives in the field. This has made room for the development of a self-defined "revisionist" position. However, what is to be revised has not always been clear.The revisionists seek to dislocate an epic narrative of independence as the epiphany of long-lasting struggles of oppressed nations to recover their rights to self-determination.2 They argue that the teleological, nationalistic biases of traditional approaches led their authors to see as already present at the point of departure an entity (the nation) which actually could be perceived only at the point of arrival. If understood in this way, however, the revisionists' contributions are hardly innovative. In the decade of the 1960s, a series of studies, propelled by the spread in Latin America of Marxist thought and social history, as well as by the increasing presence of American and European historians in the field, had already destabilized Manichean emplotments of the Revolution of Independence as a struggle between liberty and oppression.3 These studies introduced a number of nuances that questioned the objective basis of the states that emerged from the rupture of colonial ties. Instead, they demonstrated that the new states were the result of the contingent process of formation rather than its premise. Yet it is not here that the profound transformation of the discipline has occurred. Revisionists do concentrate their criticism on the contents of nationalistic narratives, but leave untouched the theoretical premises on which these narratives rest. They fail to penetrate and undermine the sets of antinomies on which those teleological perspectives are grounded: enlightenment / romanticism; rationalism / nationalism; "liberty of the Modern" / "liberty of Ancient;" modernity / tradition; individualism / organicism, etc. In the following pages I will trace the origins of revisionism in Latin American, its contributions to the field of politico-intellectual history, and the kind of problems that it raises in turn. …

Eclecticism and the Technologies of Discernment in Pietist Pedagogy

Abstract: While the Franckesche Stiftungen (the Francke Foundations) of Halle/Saale are perhaps best known today as the institutional centre of German Pietism, throughout much of the eighteenth century they were widely regarded as a pedagogically innovative Schulstadt (or city of schools). The founder of this Schulstadt, August Hermann Francke (1663-1727), was many things to many people: Pietist, radical Lutheran, theologian, pedagogue, professor of Greek and Oriental languages, preacher, member of the Berlin Academy of Sciences and proponent of a Protestant mission. Like most participants in what was initially a grassroots movement oriented around the personality of Philipp Jakob Spener (1635-1705), a minister active in Frankfurt am Main around 1670 who sought to breathe new life into the Lutheran church,2 Francke rarely referred to himself as a Pietist. From his post at the University of Halle (founded in 1694), this Spenerian protege set out to create a new "universal seminar" that would make the assimilation of many diverse points of view, identities, and competing strands of knowledge its defining mandate. "My purpose," Francke wrote in a letter to a Pastor Ring from Grunebartau (October 29, 1712), "is to develop a universal institution, useful for bringing into a good and holy order all that is important for the Christianity of all orders of society and relates, in some way, to the healing power of the soul."3 His Schulstadt would "bring into order" a myriad of relationships around a single point and relied, quite deliberately I propose, on an eclectic methodology to do this.In recent years, the relationship of Francke's Schulstadt to the implementation of Brandenburg-Prussia's first compulsory schooling system and teacher training institutes has been better documented than in the past.4 Scholars of education have paid closer attention to the methodological innovations of Pietist pedagogy, and its points of convergence with the ideas of John Locke (1632-1704), Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1712-1778) and Johann Heinrich Pestalozzi (1746-1827) have become subjects of mounting interest.5 Francke's significance for the history of education has been assessed mainly in terms of his ability to realize the pedagogically inclined reform projects of seventeenth -century figures, such as Johann Amos Comenius (1592-1670). 6 We know that the thousands of children who participated in the life of the Schulstadt very often left Halle to become actively involved as teachers and ministers throughout the German states. Several played pivotal roles in the development of the late eighteenth-century educational reform movement known as Philanthropismus and its associated practices and institutions.7Perhaps the most striking feature of Francke's Schulstadt was its curriculum, which featured innovative training regimens in applied mathematics for children from diverse social backgrounds.8 The scale and rigor of these programs were to be found nowhere else at the time and can be linked to the overtly pedagogical mandate of the Berlin Academy of Sciences (f. 1701). These regimens deliberately juxtaposed artisanal and learned knowledge and stressed the importance of the eye as a conciliatory medium.9 Despite having acquired largely anti-empiricist reputations over the years due to their lingering interest in alchemy and their roles in securing the banishment of the "rationalist" mathematician and philosopher, Christian Wolff (1679-1754), from their community in 1723, careful consideration of what Halle Pietists were teaching in their schools suggests a different view. These historical actors reconciled categories of knowledge production and transmission often framed as oppositional - despite what several scholars have recently shown to be their clear interconnectedness.10I argue here for the predominance of eclecticism in the Schulstadt, including a pronounced emphasis on the "middling" mathematical and mechanical sciences as tools of conciliation and self-improvement. …

Variations on Montesquieu: Raynal and Diderot's Histoire des deux Indes and the American Revolution

Abstract: Within the rich body of literature on the United States published in France during the period extending from the beginning of the rebellion in the colonies to the start of the French Revolution, Raynal and Diderot's Histoire philosophique et politique des etablissements et du commerce des Europeens dans les deux Indes (A Philosophical and political history of the settlements and trade of the Europeans in the East and West Indies, 1770-80) holds a privileged place.1 Little known today, the Histoire des deux Indes, an encyclopedic philosophical history of European colonization throughout the world, was one of the most important and successful works written by the philosophes of the French Enlightenment. In fact, the chapters devoted to the thirteen colonies and the United States in the Histoire2 constitute what was probably the single most influential account of America written in eighteenth -century France.3 First published in 1770, RaynaPs colonial encyclopedia was then revised and substantially expanded in 1774 and 1780. It went through thirty to fifty editions between 1770 and 1820, depending on whether only official editions are considered or pirated ones as well.4 Such was its success that it was very rapidly translated into the main European languages.5In addition, the Histoire des deux Indes was not the work of Raynal alone, but of several contributors, chief among them Diderot.6 Its mode of composition, characterized by a plurality of collaborators, successive revisions and additions, and RaynaPs own practice of borrowing freely from various sources, while creating inconsistencies and some lack of cohesion in structure and content, also made the Histoire a remarkably representative work. By incorporating so much of the ideological patrimony shared by the philosophes, it became a faithful reflection of their outlook and a sort of encyclopedia of liberal ideas widely adopted by reformist intellectual elites of late eighteenth-century France. Indeed, the Histoire should be numbered among the most significant early, pre-revolutionary examples of French liberal political thought. The sections on the United States are particularly interesting in this regard, partly because they abound in - mostly unacknowledged - references to The Spirit of the Laws (1748), thereby illustrating both the continued relevance of Montesquieu in the political debates of the end of the Old Regime and the sort of uneasy ambivalence elicited by the Montesquieuan approach to politics among those who argued for profound political reforms.As with the Histoire des deux Indes as a whole, Raynal and Diderot's observations on America present a characteristic blend of historical analysis and liberal political aspirations. On one hand, the two philosophes were fairly well-informed about American realities. Raynal, for example, was a member of the American Philosophical Society and consequently corresponded with it. On the other hand, the Histoire contributed greatly to the propagation in France, Europe, and beyond, of a "philosophical" image of America. This idealized image of America as a land of frugal, virtuous republicanism reminiscent of Antiquity played a critical role in the historical development of American national consciousness. Moreover, the impact of RaynaPs work in this respect was further magnified by Crevecoeur, whose influence on the emergence of a distinctly American sense of national identity was considerable. Crevecoeur had read the Histoire with enthusiasm and even dedicated his Letters from an American Farmer to Raynal.7For such reasons, Raynal and Diderot's reflections on the American Revolution deserve to be rescued from the relative oblivion to which they have been confined for the past two hundred years. Groundbreaking work on the Histoire and Diderot's contribution to it was published by Yves Benot and Michele Duchet in the early 1970s. More recently, important studies by Anthony Pagden, Sankar Muthu, and J. G. …

The Plagiarism of the Heathens Detected: John Wood, the Elder (1704-1754) on the Translation of Architecture and Empire

Abstract: Tucked into the cover of Sir John Soane's copy of Bath architect John Wood's The Origin of Building: or, The Plagiarism of the Heathens Detected (1741) are the reading notes of Sir William Chambers. They deliver a hasty and bruising synopsis: "this book contains a good deal of Learning a great deal of Enthusiasm and some nonsense the Author is so desirous of proving his favorite System that he confounds dates wrests meanings cites falsely and in short Sticks at nothing to accomplish his design."1 Even with that, Chambers was far from being Wood's least sympathetic reader. In a letter to William Stukeley, the dogmatic William Warburton judged Wood's "a most ridiculous Book," its author "a great fool."2 Wood separately earned Stukeley's enmity with his Choir Gaure, Vulgarly called Stonehenge, on Salisbury Plain (1747), which presumed to correct the antiquarian's interpretation of that "Druidical Temple."3 Wood's handling of uncommon matter, guided by a belief in the literal truth of revelation and the authority of Mosaic dispensation, continues to cause consternation. In her delineation of Wood's "system of architecture," Eileen Harris usefully corrects the impression produced by a less patient historian who deemed the treatise a "stupefying mass of Scriptural summary and exegesis amplified with reference both to pagan and Christian writers of antiquity, and to modern scholars."4 This thorny bramble of text is where a reading of Wood's prophetic view of architectural history needs to commence. This was Wood's vineyard to tend.The point of this essay is not to vindicate Wood's treatise, in spite of (or because of) its strained argument and barely tolerable style. Rather, it is to address the persistent difficulties encountered by Wood's readers by examining what sort of reader Wood himself made of sacred, profane, and apocryphal texts. Narrowly viewed as an attempt to reconstruct the plan and proportions of the Mosaic Tabernacle and Jerusalem Temples, Wood's treatise appears a lesser and somewhat late contribution to a widespread early modern polemic that engaged architects, scholars, antiquarians, and exegetes, notably including Sir Isaac Newton.5 James Bennett and Scott Mandelbrote's exhibition catalogue, The Garden, the Ark, the Tower, the Temple (1998), is an indispensable guide to the revenant sacred architectural landscape these rational and faithful seekers produced. Yet the startling originality of Wood's treatise resides in his accusation against the heathen Vitruvius, the presumable "Father of Architecture." For it was he who allegedly committed the culminating act of plagiarism Wood set out to detect. The "Hypothesis" of Wood's treatise, articulated in the cumbersome form of a Matthew pericope, intended to attach the authority of the Vitruvian canon: "Rendering unto Cassar, the things which are Caesars, and unto God, the things which are Gods."6This crucial facet of Wood's plot of architectural history - that is to say, history as the legacy of plagiaristic depredation - has not been adequately addressed in the responses his treatise has to date produced. A description of the Tabernacle and Temple was the necessary vehicle for Wood's discussion of the origin of building. But his guiding concern was for the mistaken posterity of these sacred models. His central argument is as follows: "Architecture has been the chief Cause of the Glory and Envy, as well as of the Ruin of Kings and Kingdoms, Emperors and Empires, each Potentate endeavoring to outdo the other in Works that wou'd render him most remarkable to Posterity."7 In making his case, Wood restored an ancient theory of universal history, translatio imperii (translation of empire), as centrally articulated in the Book of Daniel. Guided by Daniel's prophecy, and its sustaining "Hope" for a messianic kingdom in opposition to the oppressive kingdoms of this world, Wood equates translation - invariably the result of conquest and plunder - with plagiarism, which term, frustratingly enough, he never explicitly defines. …

Bachofen's Rome and the Fate of the Feminine Orient

Abstract: I.When the Swiss jurist and historian Johann Jakob Bachofen (1815-1887) rose to speak at the sixteenth Assembly of German Philologists, Orientalists and Scholars on September 24, 1856, he presented for the first time his theory, based on an unshakable belief in the veracity though not infallible accuracy of ancient sources, of an ancient matriarchal society and its passing.1 Despite Bachofen's authoritative opening, "the object which I have chosen to discuss possesses no literature," speculation about a matriarchal society was nothing new in contemporary Europe.2 "Even if some [literature] for individual points is not entirely absent," Bachofen went on that day, "the question has never been subjected to reflection as a totality." Moreover, he adds, "Mother-Right contradicts everything to which we are accustomed."3In this instance Bachofen limited himself entirely to Greece, to what he called "attic pre-history" and called upon Aeschylus's Eutnenides or Furies to illustrate the nature of the conflict between the masculine and feminine principles, its sharpness and severity, and its importance to an understanding of ancient thought. Orestes became the foremost transgressor for having committed the greatest possible outrage in the age of Mother-Right: the murder of the mother. His trial and eventual acquittal were seen by Bachofen as the representation on the Greek stage, of the main turning point in human history.4 This lecture was to become the basis of Das Mutterrecht, Bachofen's best known work, published in Stuttgart in 1861.5 In it he developed his grand conception of the struggle in the ancient world, a stage he called "the antiquity of antiquity," between the spiritual "Father-Right" and the earth-bound, material and corporeal "Mother-Right," as universal stages in human history.This notion, which has been called "the most exciting myth of the nineteenth century," was to attain a powerful resonance among a vast range of interpreters in the following century.6 It would occasion a debate in the 1920s and 1930s, when much of Germany was fascinated with the implications and possibilities of "Mother-Right."7 Throughout his work, but particularly in the 1860s, Bachofen developed the same dialectic: on one side stood the feminine, endowed with a powerful independent claim to authority and representing the infancy of humanity; on the other side stood the paternal emancipation from that feminine its negation in favor of humanity's normative maturity.8In his inaugural lecture as a Professor in Basel in 1841, at the end of an exhortation not to idolize one's own reason and be taken in by "brilliant systems" at the expense of an investigation of history, Bachofen had hinted at the object of his future study: "let us follow, for the sake of our own peace of mind, the old oracle given to Aeneas, Antiquam exquirite matrem, 'search for the ancient mother.' "9 At bottom, Bachofen's idea of the feminine was that it alone united the sensuous and the other-worldly: woman's religiosity was, for him, inseparable from the senses and the corporeal.10 It is this quality that explains the power of the matriarchal age: its corporeality and materiality had a palpably divine sanction. It is an idea that he had derived from his study of early Roman history in which he discerned the foundation of political authority in the theocratic nature of the state. The same term, Stellvertreter(in), or representative of the deity, which Bachofen used in 1851 to describe the authority of the patrician class in early Rome, was later used by him to describe the authority of the feminine principle in Mother-Right.11I argue in what follows that Bachofen's own development in the 1860s signified a transition from a Greek to a Roman description of the confrontation in history between Mother-Right and Father-Right as part of a return to his earlier interest in the history of Rome. Bachofen has rightly been seen in his Basel context as sharing his colleagues' aversion to the bombastic modernity of Prussia and imperial Germany, and as a defender of patrician humanism (though this view is not uncontested). …

"Another" Patriotism in Early Shōwa Japan (1930–1945)

Abstract: Patriotism is one of the most controversial concepts in the history of modern Japan. It was a key ideological concept underpinning Japan's ultranationalism before and during the Second World War. Since Japan's defeat in 1945, patriotism has been a focus of controversy. Already by 1950, the sociologist Shimizu Ikutaro (1907-88) published a short but influential book entitled Aikokushin (patriotism).2 In the 1960s, patriotism continued to attract widespread media attention.3 Perhaps the so-called Nihonjin-ron, a literary genre which emphasized the singularity and uniqueness of Japanese culture, may also be seen as a disguised form of patriotic aspirations.4 Since the economic bubble burst in the 1990s, however, literature on patriotism has been growing at an escalated pace. The economic boom of the 1970s and 1980s defined Japan's new identity as an economic superpower. However, the so-called "lost decade" from the early 1990s seriously undermined Japanese identity. When national identity is in crisis, a natural response is to try to restore it. So we are currently witnessing an eruption of patriotism in public discourse.5 The Liberal Democratic government was indeed sensitive to the gradual loss of national identity. The recent "reform" of elementary and secondary education in Japan emphasized the love of country by underscoring the pedagogical and moral importance of the national flag and national anthem.Interestingly, a surging interest in patriotism in Japan has coincided with the debate over patriotism in the West. From the 1990s onwards the discussion has revolved around two types of patriotism: constitutional patriotism and republican patriotism. Constitutional patriotism was most clearly conceptualized by Jurgen Habermas6 as loyalty to the universal principles and practices of liberal democracy and human rights, a position defended recently by Jan- Werner Muller.7 Republican patriotism, on the other hand, derived from historical studies of the European republican tradition. Maurizio Viroli defines republican patriotism as the loyalty of citizens to the free polity which can be ethnically and culturally diverse, thereby differentiating it from nationalism which is characterized by its concern with the unity of ethnicity and culture.8While a number of Anglo-American philosophers and social scientists have participated in the debate on patriotism,9 it is probably not coincidental that the key proponents of patriotism in the West - Habermas and Viroli - are German and Italian respectively. The idea of patriotism evokes ambivalence and even abhorrence from Germans and Italians who have to come to terms with the "shameful" past in their recent history. Love of country is indeed controversial in light of the atrocities of Nazi Germany and Fascist Italy, and yet the need for an alternative theory of citizenship and civic allegiance has been widely recognized by these nations. In this respect, Japan is no exception. The recent revival of public debate on patriotism in Japan cannot be understood without this historical context.One dominant feature of current Western discourses on patriotism is to dissociate patriotism from the German or the Italian past of chauvinistic and belligerent nationalism. However, the Habermasian constitutional patriotism, which is characterized by universalistic political and legal principles, has been criticized for disconnecting citizenship from the "specific historical and cultural background of the nation."10 Constitutional patriotism indeed entails "hopes for the transcendence of existing nation-states"; however, this inclination to "world citizenship" has been criticized for seeing nation states as essentially "creatures of artifice" and overlooking the significance of "birth and inheritance" in the idea of nationhood.11 Viroli's republican patriotism, on the other hand, is an attempt to rehabilitate the republicanism of Renaissance Italy, which was, as is well known, disseminated to other parts of Western Europe as well as the New World. …

The Lovejovian Roots of Adler's Philosophy of History: Authority, Democracy, Irony, and Paradox in Britannica's Great Books of the Western World

Abstract: I.On April 15, 1952, the Encylopaidia Britannica Corporation hosted a celebratory banquet in New York City's Waldorf Astoria Hotel announcing the publication of what the New York Times dubbed a "literary leviathan," the 54-volume Great Books of the Western World. Noteworthy invitees included: Connecticut Senator William Benton; Hollywood film "Code" enforcer Will H. Hays; Simon and Schuster publisher M. Lincoln Schuster; Book-of-the-Month-Club editor Irita Van Doren; and prominent businessmen Alfred Vanderbilt, Marshall Field, Jr., and Nelson A. Rockefeller. Dinner speakers were, in order of appearance, the University of Chicago's Chancellor, Lawrence Kimpton (as master of ceremonies), the French philosopher Jacques Maritain, literary critic Clifton Fadiman, University of Chicago President Robert Hutchins, University of Chicago Professor Mortimer J. Adler, and Senator Benton. While several of the aforementioned were friends of Adler and Hutchins, other members of Adler's community of discourse, old and new, attended: Jacques Barzun, Scott Buchanan, William Gorman, Richard McKeon, and Mark Van Doren.1 Never before - and never again after - would one spot hold so many thoughtful, influential, and sophisticated supporters of the great books idea.The gala dinner provided a moment for sanguine great books enthusiasts to look forward and backward. Attendees feasted on prime rib and inspected "Founders Editions" of the set's two-volume Syntopicon and introductory volume, The Great Conversation. Subscribers had earned a place at the table by helping purchase the necessary 500 sets, priced at $500 each, to get the set published.2 In his memoirs Adler recalled the event deliberately: "the excellence of the food and wine," the speakers' "eloquence," and the prominent attendees. For his part, beginning in 1943 he had worked nine years on the project - from conception to the personal hustling of the numbered Founder's Editions to get the Great Books in print. The banquet capped the hardest labor, intellectual and otherwise, of the first half of his life.3All speakers feted the occasion's cause celebre, spending a great deal of time meditating on the meaning of tradition and history in relation to the great books idea. Kimpton opened by noting that Hutchins, Adler, and Benton were "zealous missionaries of the intellectual salvation . . . attained through the study of the Great Books."4 Temporary French expatriate, Princeton and Columbia University faculty member, and pre-eminent Thomistic philosopher, Jacques Maritain, followed Kimpton. Maritain's familiarity with the Britannica project derived from Adler, with whom he had formed a connection in the 1940s due to shared philosophical interests. At the dinner, Maritain addressed aspects of the set's "European heritage":Allow me, as a European, to stress the significance of [the] . . . faithful attention of this country to the European tradition it has inherited. It seems remarkable to me that the notion of tradition, in its living and genuine sense, is now being rehabilitated, and the task of saving and promoting the best of this very tradition taken over by the pioneering spirit itself of America. This is a sign [that] . . . the historic process . . . [of] intellectual and spiritual struggle on which the destinies of the world depend [have] shift [ed] to this country. Yet this . . . struggle remains universal in nature, and the European mind is involved in it as deeply as the American mind. . . . The Atlantic is now becoming that which the Mediterranean was for thirty centuries, the domestic sea of Western Civilization.5Maritain's pleasure in the set clearly centered on its mooring in Western traditions and history. He next covered the Syntopicon, a set of 102 introductory essays on the same number of "Great Ideas" identified as common topics of thought by the collection's authors. Maritain called it "an instrument for, and a harbinger of, the new endeavor of critical examination and creative synthesis through which alone the tradition of the Western world can survive. …

Keeping Philosophy in Mind: Shadworth H. Hodgson's Articulation of the Boundaries of Philosophy and Science

Abstract: INTRODUCTIONShadworth H. Hodgson's (1832-1912) contributions to Victorian intellectual discourse have faded from prominence over the past century. However, despite his current anonymity, Hodgson's case is important to an understanding of the historical split between philosophy and science in late nineteenth-century Britain. In particular, his example illuminates the specific role played by developing concepts of the mind in a period of deep transition in the British intellectual community. His virtual disappearance from the record, I contend, is indicative also of the disappearance of his form of philosophy as a vital social project. His ideas, rather than being rejected, were instead largely neglected - they became lost as philosophical discussion moved elsewhere, both conceptually and institutionally. However, in the inaugural volume of Mind in 1876, Hodgson's ideas initially found a prominent place in a central dialogue over the position of philosophy with respect to science. There, and throughout his career, Hodgson engaged in the defense of an intellectual tradition he regarded as under threat from psychological science. Both his particular formulation of an ongoing role for philosophy and his own uneasy position in the intellectual environment of late Victorian Britain shed significant light on an under-examined issue of the period: the fraught relationship between philosophy and science as competing enterprises engaged in the study of the human mind."Philosophy" and "science" are easily construed as partnered intellectual complexes in modern Western society. However, closer scrutiny of the historical record shows that the two terms - whether as theoretical referents or actors' categories - have often reflected divergent priorities and that transitions from "philosophical" to "scientific" terms have been contentious. In examining the birth of natural science out of natural philosophy during the Enlightenment, the historian Andrew Cunningham has emphasized how the reordering of intellectual fields created new conflictive relationships between philosophy, science, and religion.1 He reminds us that the process of scientific secularization was but one of a set of constitutive shifts among these human activities, and that the earlier natural philosophy thus played by fundamentally different rules than its successor. A similar story can be told about the late nineteenth -century transition I am considering: in a nutshell, to borrow a phrase from Cunningham, men did not start doing mental science until they stopped doing moral philosophy. However, this time, philosophy already stood in competition with existing scientific institutions, sparking a more severe contest for authority. As mental science began to develop along the lines of the natural disciplines, Hodgson and others feared little would remain as a distinctive domain for philosophy as such, moral or otherwise. His efforts on the part of philosophy thus represent one front in an intellectual "turf war" - what recent scholars have called "boundary work," shoring up the institutional positions of different intellectual enterprises competing for authority in the world.2 Gieryn's formative analysis of boundary work was based on the contemporaneous example of John Tyndall's campaign to promote scientific over religious authority in Victorian Britain, but this was much more than a two-way struggle. The early career of Mind bears witness to a closely related, but less discussed, battle for influence between philosophy and science, in which the journal itself served as a critical "boundary object," a medium for enforcement of the distinctions between these two intellectual fields.3Thomas Dixon has recently surveyed the origins of this shift. Like Cunningham, Dixon emphasizes the constitutive differences in scope and orientation of the two intellectual enterprises, salient among them the secularization of the new human sciences.4 This process - begun tentatively by Thomas Brown and brought to fruition by Bain, Spencer, and Darwin - involved wholesale shifts in the scholarly linguistic complex, from a set of several mental categories rooted in Christian philosophical categories - affections, passions, sentiments, etc. …

Beethoven the Romantic: How E. T. A. Hoffmann Got It Right

Abstract: In July 1809, E. T. A. Hoffmann received a copy of the score to Beethoven's Fifth Symphony and in July 1810, he published a review of the Fifth Symphony in the German journal for music criticism Allgemeine musikalische Zeitung . Hoffmann need not have actually heard a performance; in his review, the purely musical analysis could easily have been based entirely on his reading of the score. In its basic structure, the review follows the pattern of reviews published in the AMZ . What is groundbreaking, however, is what Hoffmann has done with the introductory portion: Hoffmann serves up a full-blown theory of musical romanticism. His idea is to put Beethoven forward as the ultimate musical romantic.

Christian Humanism in the Age of Critical Philology: Ralph Häfner's Gods in Exile

Abstract: Hauler's book is a monumental study and a milestone of Germ an -language research.1 He delineates, for the first time, a comprehensive picture of the Christian humanism of European philologists in the era of criticism. Recovering an immense wealth of forgotten sources, the book reveals the complex interaction and tension between pagan mythology and Christian culture in philological controversies. Though authors might denounce the pagan histories of gods as fabulae, they were constitutive for the productive and emulative reception of ancient Greco-Roman patterns in Renaissance and Baroque culture. How could the peculiar logic of this paganizing be handled? Was it advisable to have faith in the integrative power of Christian truth, which was capable of finding precursors or even proofs of one's own truth in pagan patterns, or should the pagan be selectively separated from the Christian? And what was the role of philology in this process? Did the growing expertise in criticism advance the process of dissociation of paganism and Christianity? Did it further new possibilities of synthesis in the spirit of Apologetics?The reconstruction of these processes involves much more than what the book's very specific title suggests. It is a large-scale history of scholarship written from the perspective of the most important tensions that Christian humanism had to overcome in its final stage. From an Anglo-American perspective, this book contributes to recent reconstructions of ideas of early modern men of learning, as well as the growing number of studies on antiquarianism and the history of religion.2 The final stage of Christian humanism, the period of time covered by the book, begins in the late sixteenth century and ends in the 1730s, a point in time which Hamer presents, with some justification, as the end of an era.HYMNOLOGY AND POLYMATHYThe study consists of three basic parts. The first one is the "Persistence of Orphic-Platonic Hymnology in Christian Humanism" ("Fortleben der orphisch-platonischen Hymnologie im christlichen Humanismus"). This topic, apparently very specialized and marginal, proves to be a key arena of early modern scholarship, an arena traversed by the battle lines between pagan tradition and Christianity as well as between poetry and theology. Were hymns inspired poetry? What kind of inspiration could and should be conceded to hymns to Jupiter and the sun? Of course, those humanists who reappropriated Orphism and Neo-Platonism were interested in this genre. In the fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries, and even into the midsixteenth century, this was not yet a problem. However, the more philological consciousness (and confessionalization) evolved, the more the genre's scope was delimited. What scope remained? Hafner relates the problem to the revival of an "eclectic Platonism" in the wake of the Second Sophistic. This "eclectic Platonism," which was particularly influential from 1500 on, combined Platonism with rhetorics, and the claim of comprehensive polymathy with the joyful presentation of the findings of reading. In this respect, Apuleius and Aulus Gellius were two model authors for early modern polyhistors. We must include Martianus Capella as a continuation of the "Renaissance of the Second Sophistic into Early Christian Encyclopedism" ("Renaissance der Zweiten Sophistik bis in die fruhchristliche Enzyklopadie hinein," p. 18).Hafner's approach is starkly original and, in my opinion, highly productive for the current debates about early modern encyclopedism and "cultures of knowledge" that are sometimes deadlocked.3 Too frequently, polymathy is used synonymously for encyclopedism, which is often associated with modern concepts of systematic classification. Yet, according to Hamer, this is a misunderstanding. It neglects the playful elements and skillful rhetorical options of throwing questions out into the open rather than narrowing them dogmatically. Perhaps the only addition to Hafner's sources could have been Louis de Cressolles's Theatrum veterum Rhetorutn, which, according to Marc Fumaroli in L'âge de l'eloquence, marked the return of the Second Sophistic. …

"Theismus des Gefühls": Heydenreich, Fichte, and the Transcendental Philosophy of Religion

Abstract: Belief in God is a living and animating principle within human beings, and it springs from life itself, not from dead concepts.("Concluding Remark by the Editor," 1/6, 411; IW, 179).1The controversy between Mendelssohn and Jacobi, which erupted publicly in 1785, impacted the development of German philosophy in the subsequent decades in almost incalculable respects. To name just two of these, the rise of German Idealism and of early German Romanticism are both inconceivable apart from the flowering of Spinozism occasioned by the earlier controversy. As Frederick C. Beiser has convincingly shown, nothing less than the authority of reason itself was at stake in the so-called "Pantheismusstreit."2 Still, it is important to keep in mind that the heart of the issue was the authority of reawn vie-I-vie religioue belief. The debate between Mendelssohn and Jacobi, on which virtually every major figure of the penod had something to say, was fundamentally a debate about religion. It brought to a head a long-standing tension in eighteenth-century thought, particularly in Germany, between the partisans of rationalist metaphysics and those (most famously in Germany, J.G. Hamann) who took religion to be fundamentally a matter of pre- or sub-rational "sentiment [Emp findung]." This tension is articulated most clearly in K. L. Reinhold's intervention into the dispute, the Briefe uber die Kantische Philosophie.~ Reinhold's work presents the issue in terms of the relationship between rational reflection, on the one hand, and common sense "natural" faith, on the other. In this epochal work, Reinhold attempted to bring Kant's new "critical" perspective to bear on the larger issue of the relationship between philosophical reflection and religious belief.Reinhold's work in turn stimulated others to take up the torch of Kantianism and to address the religious questions of the era from that point of view. In particular, the little known Leipzig philosopher K. H. Heydenreich (1764-1801) and the better known pioneer of idealism, J. G. Fichte (17641814), each attempted to develop a new philosophical synthesis that responded to the "Pantheismusstreit" in the "spirit" of Kant's phiosophy.~ Heydenreich, though virtually ignored by contemporary scholars, played a key role in shaping the larger intellectual context in which post-Kantian philosophers, including Fichte, worked out their views. The present essay has three interlocking goals: (1) to rehabilitate Heydenreich as an important figure in his own right and as an important player in the development of the philosophy of religion in Germany in the 1790s; (2) to explore the hitherto overlooked role that Heydenreich played as a stimulus to Fichte's intellectual development during the crucial "Jena phase" (1794-1800) of his career; and (3) to utilize Heydenreich's views to bring out some of the distinctive aspects of Fichte's position during this period.Karl Heinrich Heydenreich (1764-1801) was an important figure in the tumultuous German philosophical scene in the 1790s, and yet he has been all but forgotten.5 His System der Asthetik (1790) was the first serious philosophical response to Kant's Critique of Judgment. In two works from the 1780s, Uber Mendelssohns Darstellung des Spinozismus (1787) and Natur und Gott nach Spinoza (1789), he addressed directly the intellectual watershed of his age, the so-called "Pantheismusstreit" described above. His attempt at a fair-minded presentation of Spinoza's philosophy was widely noted, and it earned him an appointment in philosophy at the University of Leipzig. Heydenreich's work exercised a profound influence on the reception of Spinoza by the young Romantic generation, with Schleiermacher (ca. 1793-94) and Holderlin (ca. 1795) being particular beneficiaries.6As it did for Fichte, the publication of Reinhold's Briefe and Kant's Critique of Practical Reason led to a profound shift in Heydenreich's position.7 His ardent partisanship for Spinoza cooled somewhat, and he took up the project of developing a thoroughly Kantian philosophy of religion. …