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Enlightenment Contested: Philosophy, Modernity, and the Emancipation of Man 1670-1752
Abstract
The author presents the first major reassessment of the Western Enlightenment for a generation. Continuing the story he began in Radical Enlightenment, and now focusing his attention on the first half of the 18th century, he returns to the original sources to offer a new perspective on the nature and development of the most important currents in modern thought. The author traces many of the core principles of Western modernity to their roots in the social, political, and philosophical ferment of this period: the primacy of reason, democracy, racial equality, feminism, religious toleration, sexual emancipation, and freedom of expression. He emphasizes the dual character of the Enlightenment and the bitter struggle between, on the one hand, a generally dominant, anti-democratic mainstream, supporting the monarchy, aristocracy, and ecclesiastical authority, and on the other a largely repressed democratic, republican, and 'materialist' radical fringe. He also contends that the supposedly separate French, British, German, Dutch, and Italian enlightenments interacted to such a degree that their study in isolation gives a hopelessly distorted picture.
... Enlightenment philosophy contains critiques of dichotomized female virtue as variously documented by Israel (2006). For instance, Pierre Bayle thought the "cult of chastity" an invention of the modern church. ...
... Mandeville was not simply a critic, but, after a fashion, recognized the fulfillment of a societal need in dichotomizing female sexuality, as when, in the Fable of the Bees, he speaks of the "…necessity of sacrificing one part of womanhood to preserve the other, and prevent a filthiness of a more heinous nature." As Israel (2006) relates, Mandeville believed that he was explaining a seeming paradox wherein "chastity may be supported by incontinence, and the best of virtues want the assistance of the worst vices." This is a form of social engineering advocated by Mandeville, who instinctively valued the "cult of chastity" (Israel, 2006). ...
... As Israel (2006) relates, Mandeville believed that he was explaining a seeming paradox wherein "chastity may be supported by incontinence, and the best of virtues want the assistance of the worst vices." This is a form of social engineering advocated by Mandeville, who instinctively valued the "cult of chastity" (Israel, 2006). Victorian culture would eventually approximate Mandeville's rationalized society in its "division of female labor," with one class of women satisfying the urges of men, and the other satisfying the demand for social stability and good society. ...
The Madonna-Whore complex is a product of male psychology that constrains female sexuality. Exaggerating actual differences, males categorize females as chaste “Madonnas” or promiscuous “whores.” This complex is a form of sexual dissociation according to Freudian dogma, proceeds from power imbalances according to feminist theory, and is a Western cultural feature of patriarchal oppression as per postmodern critics. While the Madonna-Whore complex does indeed violate the reality of female sexuality, it may be a feature rather than a bug. As herein argued, it is an evolved psychological outgrowth of paternal uncertainty. Paternal uncertainty forces male mating into short- and long-term strategies. Understanding its biological underpinnings allows us to place the Madonna-Whore complex in an evolutionarily informed matrix of sexual conflict. Therein considered, one can see the outsized threat of cuckoldry to the male. To the extent that males oppress females when dichotomizing their sexuality, females threaten males when engaging in short-term, extra-pair copulations. Thus, from seeing a one-sided oppression of a socio-cultural origin, we progress to an understanding of mutual conflict naturally extending from the biological realities of human mating among males and females with different interests.
... In the context of the present discussion, I prefer to avoid the popular notion of "Counter-Enlightenment" and to see the phenomenon discussed as an integral part of mainstream enlightenment rather than a pure reaction. For classic presentations of counter-enlightenment (see Israel 2006;Schmidt-Biggemann 2004;Sternhell 2010). 2 Originally published in Hebrew. For an English (somewhat milder) version, see (Scholem 1971, pp. ...
German and Central European Jews shaped many primary Jewish responses to modernity. The religious renewal, or the alleged “Jewish Renaissance” among German Jews in the first decades of the 20th century, offers a radical encounter with tradition as part of Jewish modernism. In this paper, I aim to examine a group of revolutionary young intellectual anarchists, striving for a new religious excitement free of the traditional binding part of established religions. In various forms, religiosity became the only possible way of radical political thinking, a kind of antinomian liberation theology. In the absence of traditional communal ties of orthodox praxis and systematic theological speculation, these political intellectuals turn to historical discourse as their leading theological super-structure. Their critique of modernism was merged into a nostalgic rethinking of pre-modern religious forms and cultural patterns. The Zionists among them contributed much to the ammunition of the sacred covenant of Land, Blood, disrespect toward any form of legal normativity, and solid messianic expectation. This fatal combination is responsible for many disturbing elements in the contemporary Israeli public sphere.
... Avant même 1789, les Frondes de 1648-1653, puis les conflits entre les nobles, les Parlements (jansénistes) et le roi au XVIII e siècle, ont placé l'égalité comme un des enjeux centraux des dynamiques conflictuelles qui traversent le champ politique. L'historiographie récente est riche de nombreuses études portant sur l'analyse de différentes formes d'égalité étudiée, sous l'angle de la théorie politique et de l'histoire des idées (Rosanvallon 2011 ;Stuurman 2017 ;Israel 2006), comme pratique épistémique dans les sciences (Elwick 2021 ;Alder 1998) ou encore, comme enjeu économique (Piketty 2013). Markus Messling a, par exemple, souligné l'importance de l'égalité dans la construction de la modernité : il soutient que, depuis la suppression des inégalités naturelles et des « privilèges » pendant la Révolution, les discours légitimant les inégalités (sociales ou raciales) ont dû recourir à de nouvelles stratégies d'argumentation (Messling 2019, 47). ...
... China (Itō, 2004;Tanaka, 2004;Keene, 1998) with the adoption of the term shina, which reflected the English word China. Others have shown how Japan constructed a 'civilised' identity, partly using English concepts (Israel, 2006) and partly Chinese (Kleeman, 2003), and so defined themselves in opposition to the primitive Other. (Shimazu, 2007;Kleeman, 2003;Beasley, 1995;Barr, 1988). ...
This research assesses how contact with Europe and America from 1853 created a new notion of the modern in Japan and colonial Taiwan, through exploring the architectural expressions of Japanese architects. Taking a detailed look at relevant theories of the modern, and the geo-political, governmental and intellectual histories of Meiji Japan, I analyse how Japan used architecture in their nation-building process, and later the role of architecture in building colonial modernity in Taiwan. The study explores how colonial buildings crystallised Japan’s fledgling modernity, cumulating in an extensive case study of the Taiwan Governor-General’s Office, focusing on how the building spatially embedded hierarchical relationships, and how through mastery of European architectural forms it became an artefact of techno-cultural superiority.
Through these analyses I find that whilst Japan’s modernity was genuine (in that it was rationally innovative and fashionably reflected up-to-date forms and technologies) the conditions that produced it were sufficiently different that Japan effectively created a split in the idea of what it meant to be modern. Whilst modernity in Europe occurred over a long period, driven by the Enlightenment and the growth of imperialism, in Japan the primary driver was the desire to be seen as civilised, which required instrumental utilisation of reason (and later colonisation) to achieve. Japan’s architectural modernity was intrinsically tied to the state’s drive towards Great Power status, dominance over East Asian neighbours and the reframing of a national Japanese cultural identity as intrinsically superior. These diverse aims led to a unique cultural gap between public and private life developing in Japan, and to Japan politically and culturally splitting off from East Asia.
This thesis looks in detail at the story of kindai (modern) architecture in Japan, through exploring a number of themes. First, how translated concepts entered Japan through Josiah Conder, the first Professor of Architecture in Japan, who instituted a new ranking of building types that placed indigenous architecture below European masonry. Second, how political centralisation led to the creation of a modern Japanese architecture style promoted by Conder’s successor TATSUNO Kingo, which became a national style through its use first in Japan and later more extensively in Japan’s colonies. Third, due to the foundational splits in the basis for architectural education in Japan, new social boundaries were created through the Governor-General’s Office which allowed colonial architects to shore their sense of superiority whilst avoiding Orientalist rackets. In spite of this the building remains equivocal: the modern split between Japanese administration and residential architecture even applied to the Governor-General, and implied Euro-American authority remains through the necessary spatial and stylistic appropriations. As the first study that traces the formation of modern architecture in Taiwan to Japan and further back to Victorian Britain, this thesis provides a trans-disciplinary contribution to the field.
... While there are various interpretations of our modern crisis (Bendle 2002;Boggs 1993;Duara 2015;Frosh 1991), in this paper we use this term to refer to the problems existing in modern society-more specifically, those problems faced by modern people since the European Enlightenment (Barnett 2004;Israel 2006). From the perspective of external phenomena, these problems generally include environmental pollution (Adam 1998;Mol and Spaargaren 1993), natural disasters (Kverndokk 2020;South 2013), energy crises (Love and Isenhour 2016;Malanima 2006;Spaargaren and Mol 1992), the threat of nuclear war (Albrow 1997;Dalby 1992), terrorist attacks (Di Cesare 2019 ;Mazarr 2007;Zafirovski and Rodeheaver 2013), the gap between the rich and the poor (Brian 2015;Lucas and Schimmack 2009;Reardon 2011), and vast moral decline (Bennett 2019;Turiel 2002). ...
Desire is an important philosophical topic that deeply impacts everyday life. Philosophical practice is an emerging trend that uses philosophical theories and methods as a guide to living a eu‐ daimonic life. In this paper, we define desire philosophically and compare different theories of desire in specific Eastern and Western traditions. Based on the Lacanian conceptual–terminological triad of “Need‐Demand‐Desire”, the research of desire is further divided into three dimensions, namely, the subject of desire, the object of desire, and the desire itself. The concept of desire is then an‐ alyzed from this triad and these three dimensions through different philosophical theories. This paper selects Buddhism as the representative of Eastern tradition, and Stoicism as the representative of the West, paying special attention to Stoicism’s “spiritual exercises” following Pierre Hadot. By exploring and comparing the Buddhist paths to liberation from suffering (i.e., the Four Noble Truths and the Noble Eightfold Path) and the two theoretical pillars in Stoicism (i.e., the notions of “living according to nature” and “the dichotomy of control”), practical guidance is then provided for un‐ derstanding and regulating desire in times of crisis. This understanding and regulation of desire constitutes a philosophical therapy for today’s troubles, particularly those caused by excessive or irrational desires.
... They join longstanding critiques in literary studies (Said 1978;Spivak 1999), history (Chakrabarty 2000), philosophy (Dussel 1980;Mignolo 2011), and postcolonial theory (Nandy 1994;Chatterjee 1986) demonstrating how Euro-American theory secures its "positional superiority" (Said 1978, 7) by portraying the west as the pinnacle of a fixed process of historical evolution. More or less deterministic theorizations of social progress shape the conjectural histories of Smith, Ferguson, Robertson, and Kames (Pitts 2005;Sebastiani 2008;Meek 1976), those of their more critical continental counterparts, such as Lahontan, Turgot, Rousseau, and Diderot (Muthu 2003;Israel 2006), Kant's, Herder's, and Hegel's philosophical histories (Marwah 2021;Church 2022), eighteenth-and nineteenth-century liberalism-most notoriously, in the Mills and Tocqueville (Pitts 2005;Mehta 1999)-and conservatism (O'Neill 2016), Marx's historical materialism (Chakrabarty 2000;Anderson 2010), and twentieth-century modernization theory (McCarthy 2009). For all their variations, these developmentalisms consistently depict European modernity as the endpoint of a singular, universal course of progress. ...
This article examines how Indian anticolonialists drew on Darwinism and evolutionary theory to resist British imperialism at the turn of the twentieth century. Drawing on archival material from The Bengalee (and beyond), I show how Indian nationalists marshaled evolutionist schemas to contest stage-based accounts of social advancement rationalizing despotic rule in India. I argue that Darwinian evolutionism enabled anticolonialists to respond to a particular decolonial dilemma—that of developmentalism, the unilinear notion of historical time justifying India’s political subjection. While Darwinism’s social application is commonly understood to sustain imperialism, I demonstrate that it served, in the colonial context, to deconstruct historicist tropes portraying India as politically immature. Drawing on evolutionism, nationalists contested the presumptions of imperialist discourse and reconceptualized progress in novel, anticolonial terms. Darwin’s travel to India thus exposes a distinctive decolonial quandary, the syncretic Indian anticolonial response to it, and the intractability of the contradictions facing decolonizing movements globally.
... Since then, philosophers as well as social scientists have relied heavily on reason to speculate, debate, define, and theorise social phenomena. It was precisely their insistence on the pre-eminence of reason that gave birth to various research methodologies based heavily in rational linear thinking and empirically verifiable data (Israel, 2006). The rigour of research is measured by how logical the arguments are, whether the same conclusions can be reached by the same inductive or deductive analysis, and to what degree the findings can be generalised to other contexts. ...
The Coerced Conscience examines liberty of conscience, the freedom to live one's life in accordance with the dictates of conscience, especially in religion. It offers a new perspective on the politics of conscience through the eyes of some of its most influential advocates and critics in Western history, John Milton, Thomas Hobbes, Baruch Spinoza, and Pierre Bayle. By tracing how these four philosophers, revolutionaries, and heretics envisioned, defended, and condemned this crucial freedom, Amy Gais argues that liberty of conscience has a more controversial history than we often acknowledge today. Rather than defend or condemn a static, monolithic view of liberty conscience, these figures disagreed profoundly on what protecting this fundamental principle entails in practice, as well as the threat of hypocrisy and conformity to freedom. This revisionist account of liberty of conscience challenges our intuitions about what it means to be free today.
The ability of political orders to command respect rather than just compliance is one of the most pervasive themes in political theory (Outhwaite 2009, p. 62). The death of god, in the Hegelian sense, means that legitimacy based on some divine ordained right to rule are no longer valid, and modern states must seek fresh rationales for the legitimacy to rule. This chapters argues that the Weberian schemes of legitimacy do not consider the possibility that a regime may be illegitimate. The thicker liberal concepts of legitimacy, for example, John Rawls’s Political Liberalism, however, set the bar too high, and if followed to their logical conclusions, can render all regimes illegitimate. This chapter draws on the writings of Bernard Williams and Jurgen Habermas to arrive at a legitimacy framework based on democratic legitimation and the interchangeability between norms, values and the promise of rewards. This framework makes no normative requirement of a regime except for popular sovereignty, a concept already invoked by almost all modern secular regimes. It is devised to be suitable for the examination of liberal as well as non-liberal orders, and therefore appropriate for the examination of legitimacy of the Chinese state.
The first volume of this History of Economic Thought in France is devoted to the period of Enlightenment, during which political economy started to develop as a new discipline – the number of publications on economic matters dramatically increased in the second half of the eighteenth century. The main features of the period are defined, and a kind of “review of the troops” proposed, mainly focusing on two main lines of thought: “commerce politique” – a French adaptation of the British “science of trade” – and what properly forms the novelty of the period, “philosophie économique”. The first group of authors includes for example Jean-François Melon, Richard Cantillon, J.C.M. Vincent de Gournay or François Véron de Forbonnais. The second group, Pierre de Boisguilbert, François Quesnay and the physiocrats, or A.-R.-J. Turgot and sensationist political economy. The theories proposed during this period, however, benefited from developments made during the previous centuries: this chapter identifies such themes, stressing in particular the importance of Scholastic writings.
The notion of Confucian modernity has appeared in the arguments on Confucian capitalism, Confucian democracy, and “the resurgence of East Asia.” This concept can be understood in two ways. One is to understand it as a creative adaptation of Western modernity. The other is to interpret it as internalized in its history and intertwined later with the other modernities. The notion of Confucian modernity has undergone great changes following three distinctive stages. Until the 1960s, it was considered an oxymoron. From the 1970s, with the economic success of Japan, South Korea, Taiwan, Singapore, and Hong Kong, some parts of Confucian legacies came to be considered conducive to modern capitalist development. From the 1990s, with the rise of China as a culmination of “the resurgence of East Asia,” originality and authenticity of Confucian modernity have been stressed.
Although one of the most prominent and important philosophers (as well as art critics and literary figures) of the Enlightenment era, Denis Diderot (1713–1784) never received either much remuneration for his immense efforts or any form of official recognition or honors. This was mainly due to the subversive implications of his thought, which aimed at undermining existing structures of authority both with respect to religion and, especially during the last phase of his life, from the late 1760s onwards, also with respect to the political and legal sphere.
Anxiety about the threat of atheism was rampant in the early modern period, yet fully documented examples of openly expressed irreligious opinion are surprisingly rare. England and Scotland saw only a handful of such cases before 1750, and this book offers a detailed analysis of three of them. Thomas Aikenhead was executed for his atheistic opinions at Edinburgh in 1697; Tinkler Ducket was convicted of atheism by the Vice-Chancellor's court at the University of Cambridge in 1739; whereas Archibald Pitcairne's overtly atheist tract, Pitcairneana, though evidently compiled very early in the eighteenth century, was first published only in 2016. Drawing on these, and on the better-known apostacy of Christopher Marlowe and the Earl of Rochester, Michael Hunter argues that such atheists showed real 'assurance' in publicly promoting their views. This contrasts with the private doubts of Christian believers, and this book demonstrates that the two phenomena are quite distinct, even though they have sometimes been wrongly conflated.
I construct a simple theoretical model that incorporates the role of ideas and contested persuasion in processes of institutional change, specifically democratization. The model helps reconcile the view that extensions of the franchise in Western Europe tended to occur as a response to the threat of revolution with the view that these occurred based on a change of social values due to the Enlightenment. In particular, the model puts forward the argument that institutional changes become possible once ideological entrepreneurs –the carriers of an alternative worldview– win an ideological contest against the holders of traditional ideas so that the rest of society adopts their worldview, and a revolutionary threat becomes credible. The model shows that the preferences of the ideological entrepreneurs are key. A revolution takes place only if they prefer it to a peaceful transition. Also, the model predicts that actual revolutions occur only when the probability of them being successful is either low or high. Finally, the ideological benefits associated with adhering to a specific ideology affect whether institutional change is peaceful or not. A strong traditional ideology generating large psychological benefits of adhering to the status quo makes it more likely that democratization occurs through revolution. On the contrary, a strong alternative ideology favoring the extension of the franchise makes it more likely that democracy emerges but has an ambiguous effect on the likelihood of a revolution.
The early German Enlightenment is seen as a reform movement that broke free from traditional ties without falling into anti-Christian and extremist positions, on the basis of secular natural law, an anti-metaphysical epistemology, and new social ethics. But how did the works which were radical and critical of religion during this period come about? And how do they relate to the dominant 'moderate' Enlightenment? Martin Mulsow offers fresh and surprising answers to these questions by reconstructing the emergence and dissemination of some of the radical writings created between 1680 and 1720. The Hidden Origins of the German Enlightenment explores the little-known freethinkers, persecuted authors, and secretly circulating manuscripts of the era, applying an interdisciplinary perspective to the German Enlightenment. By engaging with these cross-regional, clandestine texts, a dense and highly original picture emerges of the German early Enlightenment, with its strong links with the experience of the rest of Europe.
El concepto de virtud cívica ha sido uno de los más recurrentes en la historia de la filosofía moral y política. La presente voz se propone un triple objetivo: en primer lugar, presentar un breve recorrido histórico de sus usos, atendiendo especialmente al cambio que se produce en los inicios de la modernidad; en segundo lugar, plantear analíticamente una comprensión de los elementos constitutivos del concepto (las nociones independientes de «virtud» y «cívico»); por último, explorar de dónde surge la virtud cívica, atendiendo tanto a los planteamientos liberales como a los planteamientos republicanos, estos últimos centrados en la importancia de la independencia material de los individuos.
This article explores the theme of nihilism from the perspective of post-continental philosophy by focusing on semiotics and information theory and the question of “meaning” at stake between them. Nihilism is characterised here as an avatar of the counter-Enlightenment tradition. Post-continental philosophy is defined by a positive revaluation of reason, science, and technology, which were critiqued for their nihilistic effects by key continental philosophers. Rather than critiquing nihilism, then, post-continental philosophers have tended to affirm it. This article argues that, despite appearances, such developments in fact allow a deepened response to nihilism, considered as an existential problem. It does so by using Lyotard’s critique of semiotics to show how the kind of linguistic and cultural meaning associated with continental philosophy is itself a kind of nihilism. It then examines Meillassoux’s theory of the meaningless sign and Laruelle’s idea of the secret truth of Hermes to argue that this new paradigm of post-continental philosophy allows a response to nihilism by offering an alternative to semiotic meaning. Thus freed, this new paradigm allows the embrace of information theory as a plural articulation of meanings grounded in meaningless data, which enables a superior response to nihilism in the information age.
This paper starts with the observation that at least for the last century there has been an orthodoxy in the social sciences characterized by sui generis structures of various kinds but also (paradoxically) by the unique role of individuals in their ability to intervene in the flow of events. This paper argues that there is a commonality to a number of challenges to orthodoxy that dates back to the beginnings of the social sciences themselves with Vico. Although many connections have been made between elements of these critiques (Latour’s connection to Whitehead, Deleuze’s connection to Tarde), this paper proposes to make such connections more explicit by focusing on a central commitment to or tendency towards a monism characterized by a univocal ontology. The implication is that these various alternatives perhaps have more in common than normally thought and can continue to learn from each other. Most importantly, they present a coherent and viable alternative to social science orthodoxy.
Este trabalho analisa se, no Brasil, pode haver uma relação entre o quanto a liberdade de expressão é valorizada e o quanto a liberdade política é exercida, especialmente considerando a pervasividade contemporânea da internet. O World Values Survey (WVS) é mobilizado para possibilitar uma abordagem estatística da questão. Teorias da liberdade são discutidas, em especial os conceitos negativo, positivo e republicano de liberdade. A seguir a liberdade de expressão é explorada, com referência à legislação, ao conceito como formulado por Mill e expandido por autores como Haiman, Baker, Sunstein e Fish, e à fundação teórica da ligação entre a valorização da liberdade de expressão e a participação política encontrada em Dahl. O conceito de participação política é então discutido, com foco no surgimento do conceito na tradição intelectual ocidental e nas formas de participação categorizadas pela teoria política contemporânea. Os dados providenciados pelo WVS são analisados, e dão suporte apenas a uma fraca correlação positiva entre a valorização da liberdade de expressão e a participação política. Conclui-se com uma avaliação da relação entre as ideias de participação e expressão.
Este artículo tiene como objetivo examinar la problemática del surgimiento del culto a los dioses en la Lettre de Thrasybule à Leucippe, manuscrito clandestino atribuido a Nicolás Fréret. Analizamos los distintos estratos del ateísmo que expresa allí Trasíbulo, el ficticio autor de la carta. Reconstruimos y examinamos el proceso mediante el cual, según Trasíbulo, la humanidad originaria habría creado las deidades e instituido rituales de adoración de estas. Nos proponemos mostrar que si bien tal proceso comporta cierto pesimismo acerca del progreso de la secularización, también presupone que la superstición no es necesariamente un destino inexorable de la humanidad.
Constantine Rodocanacis’ work Ἀνθογνωμία διὰ στίχων Ρυθμικῶν (1721) was published with an introductory letter in Latin by Jacobus de Richebourcq and an introductory note in Greek by the writer. The poems are written in an archaic form of Greek, using accentuated meter and rhyme. The introductory letter edited in this volume (along with the writer’s short note) is seemingly an essay on comparative metrics, concerning the transition from prosody of the Ancient Greek to the Modern Greek accentuated meter. Nevertheless, when we read it carefully we can see through the lines an essay on the cultural status of his contemporary Greeks, as a general view and opinion on their proximity to the Orient and their distance from the occidental world of his days. Lamenting the loss of prosody, Richebourcq refuses to accept that similar changes in metric forms happened in occidental peoples. He sees no western influence on Greek poetry, stressing that the main influence was from the Arabs (apart from Turks). It is clear that, what annoys him most, is the coexistence of an archaic form of language in poems written with rhyme and accentuated (popular) meter. Given the fact that the writer’s note in Greek can shed light on the arguments presented by Richebourcq, it was necessary to be edited and translated after the introduction by the Dutch lawyer. These two texts are equally important both for the metric identity of the Modern Greek poetry and for the cultural identity of the 17th century Greeks.
This essay proposes a bifurcation within the concept of moderation in early modern Europe. To draw this out it reconstructs an “encounter” between two citizens of the scholarly Republic of Letters in the years around 1700—Lodovico Antonio Muratori and Jean Le Clerc—and the concept of moderation each maintained. It proposes that the former maintained an ideal of moderation which was “hard” principally about self-regulation, while the latter maintained an ideal of moderation which was “soft” and principally about (religious) toleration. It then attaches this “encounter” to an analogous conflict between uses of moderation in late seventeenth- and early eighteenth-century England. It concludes by proposing that this bifurcation, while occurring within scholarly and theological debates, has enduring significance for our interpretation of the Enlightenment, and for the passage of political moderation into the modern world.
Cette thèse entend rendre compte du processus conflictuel par lequel, en France, la philosophie s’est constituée comme une discipline autonome, et s’est dotée d’un « canon » d’auteurs et de problèmes par lesquels elle se définit. Je l’analyse par le prisme de la réception de Blaise Pascal dans l’institution scolaire française entre 1809 et 1914. En effet, cet auteur occupe une position tout à fait singulière dans le processus de formation du canon. Il n’est ni un « oublié » ni une de ses grandes figures indiscutées de la philosophie. Sa réception très polémique au XIXe siècle est même structurée par les questions relatives aux critères d’entrée – ou de sortie – du canon. Étudier la place de Pascal dans l’institution scolaire me permet ainsi de mettre au jour les critères selon lesquels une philosophie devient acceptable comme telle en France au XIXe siècle. Ceux-ci sont à la fois internes (édition critique et fiable des œuvres, mise en évidence de leur portée théorique) et externes (acceptabilité morale d’une philosophie longtemps perçue comme « sceptique », compatibilité avec l’affirmation de la laïcité des institutions). Des effets de cette recherche sont attendus en retour sur notre pratique d’historiens et historiennes de la philosophie, dans la mesure où nous n’avons pas toujours conscience des critères selon lesquels nous apprécions telle ou telle philosophie.
This article presents a new interpretation of Spinoza’s account of religious intolerance. According to Rosenthal and Steinberg Spinoza explains the origins of religious intolerance in two ways. The first is in the Ethics, which is grounded on the affect of ambition; the second in the Theological-Political Treatise, which is based on the opposed affects of fear and hope. I agree with this interpretation, yet I considerably modify and supplement this account. The interpretation I propose rests on the observation that in order to understand Spinoza's view we need to draw the subtle distinction between the explanation of the psychological causes of religious intolerance and the elucidation of why religious intolerance appears to appeal so much. First, I shall discuss Spinoza’s account of the origin of religious intolerance. Second, I shall consider the measures which, in his view, should be taken in order to curb religious intolerance effectively.
This article compares the first two Dutch translations of the Qur’an printed in the Dutch Republic: De Arabische Alkoran (1641) published by Barent Adriaensz Berentsma and Mahomets Alkoran (1657) published by Jan Rieuwertsz. It builds upon previous bibliographic research by quantifying the abbreviation of the Surahs in the two editions, identifying the sources of the paratexts, and describing the different strategies for translation. This analysis reveals how different editing choices reflect contradictory ideological attitudes among the publishers and translators involved. These producers of the first Qur’an translations echoed the widespread hostility towards Islam in Western discourses while also highlighting the peaceful nature of Muhammad and the similarities between the Bible and the Qur’an. This ‘Orientalist ambivalence’ not only resonated in local debates about freedom of conscience among Amsterdam Mennonites, but also signalled a more fundamental epistemological uncertainty following the rise of Cartesianism in the Dutch Early Enlightenment.
The British Enlightenment threatened to end allegory. Enlightenment writers put pressure on the allegory, preferring more transparent literary forms. But this pressure had a surprising effect. It encouraged writers to experiment with allegory rather than letting it die.
The seventeenth century saw the publication of an immense quantity of books of all kinds concerned with Asia in all its variety. This literature, and the development of European awareness of Asia in general, has been extensively documented and analysed, above all in the current work of Donald F. Lach and Edwin J. Van Kley.1 However, it is not at all a simple matter to evaluate the effect that this produced in Europe itself. The purpose of this article is to study the impact of a particularly widely-read form, the travel account, on the work of one highly influential figure in the history of ideas.
Abvé Trublet is known to have been an admirer and the historiographer of Fontenelle and Houdar de la Motte. In his Mémoires about them, as well as in all his works of criticism, he assumes a radical empiricism, despising any overall plan and accumulating precise details which contribute to a general interpretation. When it came to religion, he was not concerned with abstract proofs or theological systems and was certainly closer to the Jesuits than to the Jansenists, defending an extremely liberal Christianity which absorbed apparently alien philosophies. Thus he re-christianised Fontenelle, Montesquieu and even Voltaire; only La Mettrie was beyond recuperation.
Until recently, 18th-century scholars have paid little attention to the Vatican archives of the Index and the Holy Office, which were opened to the public in 1998. However, archive documents on book censorship throw new light on how orthodox Catholicism actually read the works of the French Enlightenment. In spite of methods inherited from the past of both congregations, Vatican censorship rapidly grasped the political and diplomatic issues raised by the Enlightenment The censors patiently constituted a new corpus of heterodoxy, paying attention to the diversity of philosophical positions and to the main characteristics of the Enlightenment debate, such as die increasing importance of politics and the progressive extension of enlightened ideas to the whole of Europe. Perhaps more surprisingly, they also pointed out the strength of the stylistic means used by Voltaire and his successors to serve the Enlightenment, and revealed the Church's anguish at the extension of the reading public.
BACKGROUND Stoicism is a philosophy of moral rigor. This rigor has given rise to two stereotypes. First, a Stoic either has no feelings or successfully suppresses them. Second, the Stoics' belief in an all-encompassing fate only leaves humans with the option of readily complying with its predetermined order. If compliance with fate is the bottom line of Stoic philosophy, what could be more reasonable than an unemotional resignation to its ineluctable decrees? Though in antiquity both friends and foes had a much more complex view of Stoic philosophy, its particular version of determinism was the target of attacks by members of rival schools from early on. What could be the point of moral reflections and an active engagement in life's concerns if everything is fated to happen anyway? The debate on the question of the compatibility of fate with human responsibility therefore never ceased during the five hundred years of that school's existence. Though the long and intensive intellectual life of the school makes it unlikely that its entire philosophy was based on inherently contradictory principles, the continued attacks and counterattacks at least suggest some tension in the type of determinism fostered by the Stoics. What then, is the gist of Stoic determinism and in what way is it compatible with their insistence on an active life in compliance with carefully worked-out moral principles? Since pioneers like Pohlenz, Sambursky, Long, Rist, and Sandbach have drawn attention to the intricacies of Stoic philosophy, the debate on Stoic compatibilism in secondary literature has steadily increased, and to this very day the question has not been settled to everyone’s satisfaction. © Cambridge University Press 2003 and Cambridge University Press, 2006.
DIFFUSION AND DIMINUTION Of all the ancient philosophies, Stoicism has probably had the most diffused but also the least explicit and adequately acknowledged influence on western thought. No secular books were more widely read during the Renaissance than Cicero's On Duties (De officiis), the Letters and Dialogues of Seneca, and the Manual of Epictetus. Thomas More's Utopians define virtue as 'life in accordance with nature', and this is characteristic of the way slogans and concepts of Stoic ethics were eclectically appropriated from about 1500 to 1750. Neo-Stoicism (capitalized) is a term often used to refer to currents of thought in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, and it is quite appropriate to such figures as Lipsius and du Vair. Yet, despite the Stoic traces in Descartes, Spinoza, Leibniz, Rousseau, Grotius, Shaftesbury, Adam Smith, and Kant (traces that modern scholars are increasingly detecting), Neo-Stoicism scarcely had an identifiable life comparable to Medieval Aristotelianism, Renaissance and later Scepticism, seventeenth-century Epicureanism, or Renaissance Platonism and the Cambridge Platonists. It was not determinate enough to mark a whole period or intellectual movement. © Cambridge University Press 2003 and Cambridge University Press, 2006.
Three Stoic doctrines have heavily influenced the course of later moral philosophy: (1) Eudaemonism: the ultimate end for rational action is the agent's own happiness. (2) Naturalism: Happiness and virtue consist in living in accord with nature. (3) Moralism: Moral virtue is to be chosen for its own sake and is to be preferred above any combination of items with non-moral value. These Stoic doctrines provide some later moralists with a starting-point and an outline that they try to develop and amplify. These moralists include supporters of the position that I will call 'Scholastic naturalism'. For other later moralists, Stoicism provides a target; they develop their own positions by explaining why they reject the Stoic position. Still others defend some of these Stoic doctrines and reject others. For obvious reasons, my account of the influence of these Stoic doctrines will be highly selective. I will simply sketch Scholastic naturalism through a few remarks about Aquinas, Suarez, and Grotius. On the other side, I will examine Pufendorf’s reasons for rejecting Scholastic naturalism, and the attempts of Butler and Hutcheson to defend some Stoic doctrines while rejecting others. My interest in these reactions to Stoicism and Scholastic naturalism is primarily philosophical. I hope to understand how different people argue for or against these doctrines, and to see how reasonable the arguments are. It will be clear that I cannot complete this task in this one chapter; I will simply try to identify the main arguments and to raise some relevant questions about them. © Cambridge University Press 2003 and Cambridge University Press, 2006.
Diderot, who is particularly known as a translator from the English, can be seen as a great translator of philosophy, as the Encyclopédie article LEIBNIZJANISM shows. The present reading of this article emphasizes the metatheoretical agreement between Diderot and Leibniz ; more precisely their theoretical differences mask less a confused influence than a methodological and conceptual similarity. In addition, the article's eclecticism is, we believe, underscored by textual references to Leibniz's works. The abridged exposition of Leibniz's philosophy in the second half of the article LEIBNIZIANISM is in fact a translation of a Latin work called Meditations on Knowledge, Truth and Tdeas, followed by a translation of a Latin version of the Monadology. A comparison of this translation with the original texts confirms that the metatheoretical convergence between metaphysics and materialism is closely linked to Diderot's Encyclopédie translation and interpretation of Leibniz.
The concept of a philosophical legacy is figurative. A literal legacy involves the transfer of tangiblegoods (and perhaps intangible ones, such as peerages) from one generation to another. Like literal legacies, philosophical legacies also involve the transfer of goods between generations. But unlike literal legacies, the goods being transferred in philosophical legacies are ideas, arguments, systems, or other such philosophical entities. This difference in a philosophical versus literal legacy is important, and complicates considerably the correct use of the notion of philosophical legacy itself. Because philosophical legacies consist in ideas, arguments, and so forth, those “inheriting” them must necessarily engage in acts of interpretation. Becausephilosophical legacies necessarily involve interpretation, they are not fixed: what the legacy or bequest actually means or amounts to depends, to a greater or lesser extent, on the person receiving it. This is not necessarily the case with literal legacies, in which the inheritors can receive their inheritance without any effort (intellectual or otherwise) on their part.I begin with these comments because the Stoics' theory of the natural law has long been regardedas one of their most lasting and influential legacies. This is arguably true, but depending on how the notion ofthe legacy itself is understood, there is a real risk of simplifying and distortingthe interactions that occurred between the Stoics and their successors.
Diffusion and DiminutionOf all the ancient philosophies, Stoicism has probably had the most diffused but also the least explicit and adequately acknowledged influence on Western thought. No secular books were more widely read during the Renaissance than Cicero's On duties (De officiis), the Letters and Dialogues of Seneca, and the Manual of Epictetus. Thomas More's Utopians define virtue as “life in accordance withnature,” and this is characteristic of the way slogans and concepts of Stoic ethics were eclectically appropriated from about 1500 to 1750. Neo-Stoicism (capitalized) is a term often used to refer to currents of thought in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, and it is quite appropriate to such figures as Lipsius and du Vair. Yet in spite of the Stoic traces in Descartes, Spinoza, Leibniz, Rousseau, Grotius, Shaftesbury, Adam Smith, and Kant (traces that modern scholars are increasingly detecting), Neo-Stoicism scarcely had an identifiable life comparable to Medieval Aristotelianism, Renaissance and later Scepticism, seventeenth-century Epicureanism, orRenaissance Platonism and the Cambridge Platonists. It was not determinate enough to mark a whole period or intellectual movement.In recent decades, ancient Stoicism has become a mainstream scholarly interest. Not coincidentally, this revival is echoed in work by such well-known thinkers as Foucault, MacIntyre, and Taylor, and we now have Becker's intriguing book, A New Stoicism, which offers itself as the kind of ethical theory that a modern Stoic could and should defend. But Stoicism as systematic philosophy has hardly been refashioned at any time.
This article analyses the importance of Enlightenment themes in the Janse-nists' clandestine journal, taking 1750 as a test. The Nouvelles ecclésiastiques only dealt with religion, recounting persecutions or reviewing theological works. On the occasion of the condemnation of Colonia's Bibliothèque janséniste, the paper drew up a list of good books, often from the 17th Century, written by the 'friends of truth'. But despite this fascination with Port-Royal, current events intruded; the journal reviewed works, all described as irreligious, by Molinists or by Philosophes such as Montesquieu or Buffon, discussed at length. The journalists refused any bridge between good and bad books, and the Philosophes were clearly the authors of the latter; but the persecuted Appelants described by the journal are readers of forbidden works and examples of resistance to authority, seen as blind and arbitrary. Thus, while the Nouvelles Ecclésiastiques violently opposed the ideas of the Enlightenment in its book reviews, these ideas reappear in the biographies of exemplary Jansenists, seen as champions of individual conscience against oppression.
I use Euro-Sinica to denote the European (re-)construct of Chinese culture. In historical perspective, the present constitutes the crystallization of the past and, at the same time, the foundation of the future. Within this framework, my paper has four parts: the first three parts analyze the historical stages from the 17th to the 20th centuries (inclusive) and the last part forecasts, based on past experience, possible future developments. We as scholars in the present should try to sow seeds and thus help influence future attitudes concerning intercultural perspectives between China and Europe so that some day, there will be a diversified humanity-culture, i.e., a true multi-cultural world. In comparison, the past is easy to delineate. The first part can be called the Jesuit Epoch. Here I present the accommodation and the Figurist theory of the most influential Jesuit Fathers, as well as the discussions of those philosophers such as Leibniz and Voltaire who were sympathetic to the accommodation. The second phase can be termed the Protestant Epoch, because after the Rites Controversy it was mainly the Protestant philosophers, with a scattering of French (Roman Catholic) ones, who consciously or unconsciously used the Bible or their interpretation of it, to judge Chinese culture. Most of the philosophers in this category were German, including Herder, Hegel, Schlegel, and Schelling. They were followed by Protestant missionaries who entered China after the First Opium War. However, at the height of this period, about the time of the Boxer Rebellion, the orthodox and quasi-fundamentalist attitude began to change. In the third period, some Protestant missionaries, writers, and philosophers took a sympathetic view to Chinese culture. Schopenhauer, Richard Wilhelm, Bertrand Russell, and Martin Buber were prominent examples. Perhaps we can call this third period non-denominational, because these thinkers did not judge China based on orthodox religious views. These "inclusivists", of course, co-exist with the "exclusivists" such as Max Weber of the first half, and Julia Kristeva of the second half of the 20th century. Based on the "inclusivist" view, I shall propose a scenario (perhaps more than one) of possible future development. It is in part be based on Karl Jaspers's initiative of putting Socrates, Buddha, Confucius, and Jesus Christ on equal footing so we can study them and their ideas as human beings. If we can respect all great personages who contributed to the formation of important cultures, then we shall have no need for Utopias.
The title of this paper is taken from Zhuang-zi, who was an optimistic skeptic, constantly at play with paradoxes. Of them, the most famous is his debate with his friend, Hui Shi, about how a human could know that the minnows were happy, dashing to and fro in the stream under the bridge. The minnows were happy, perhaps, but were more likely laughing at the confidence of the two apparently intelligent thinkers. Both of them believed that they had the answer. The post-modernist would also laugh at the same kind of self-confidence that there is an absolute answer to every question, and that the answer should be at once universal and logical. Whereas the post-modernist position often leads to so-called "culture wars", its stance is actually one that is inquisitive, humble, forward-looking, and democratic. Unfortunately, when such attitudes are taken over to interpret the "other", the "other" often uses the open attitude to subvert and to seek for hegemony. They do so by way of constructing a new narrative, masquerading it as not merely one of many, but the unique, way to "truth". Post-colonialist historiography has powerfully demonstrated how this strategy can work. In recent historiography of China, the same tendency has worked to the advantage of the Chinese nationalist historians, an advantage the old argument that "China was different or unique" often was not able to achieve. In short, the old nationalist historiography often used the post-modernist and post-colonialist relativism to seek for prominence, to claim its legitimate position of the "other", and then as first among the equals. Some Western historians of China are also criticizing the modernist project, proclaiming that the historiography of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, with its linear time concept and idea of progress, has not only distorted the understanding of China's past, but also prevented the Chinese from finding value and meaning in their own history. The post-modernist project paradoxically creates a situation that is actually preventing us from seeing the true picture of China's past. But then this after all is what post-modernists want, is this not? The minnows should know better.
This article argues that Spinoza's Theological-Political Treatise must be read in light of its rhetorical strategy which is based on the theory of the affects found in the Ethics. This first section surveys some of the recent interpretations of the text and their views on its audience and ambitions. The second section claims that the rhetorical strategy of the text is based on Spinoza's analysis of the prophets and their use of hope and fear. The third section shows that the affect of wonder is crucially important in the key chapter on scriptural hermeneutics. The fourth section applies this analysis to the role of history, where the affects of confidence and despair reign. The article defends the thesis that Spinoza not only tried to persuade his readers by appealing to their passions, but also taught the principles of political rhetoric in his theory of prophecy and scriptural interpretation.
Au-dela des critiques christianisantes et modernisantes du projet des Lumieres, l'une faisant de la science la nouvelle religion de l'humanite, l'autre faisant de la civilisation postmoderne l'enfant monstrueux du XVIII e siecle, l'A. montre que l'etat-nation etabli par les Revolutionnaires francais a trahi le sens du fameux projet des Lumieres fonde sur les idees de tolerance et souverainete pronees par Voltaire et Rousseau. Considerant les philosophes du XVIII e siecle comme les engages volontaires de la raison et de la verite au sein de la republique internationale des lettres, l'A. montre que la theorie de la representation appliquee par Sieyes sous la Revolution n'est pas celle, republicaine, de Rousseau, mais celle, anti-representationnaliste, de Hobbes
Spinoza’s Ethics is rarely read as a work of political theory. Its formidable geometric structure and its author’s commitment to a kind of metaphysical determinism do not seem promising materials from which to fashion a theory of democratic self-government. Yet impressions can mislead. A close reading of the Ethics reveals it to be an impassioned, deeply political book. Its aim is not only to liberate the individual from false beliefs and systems of power but also to enable us to act in concert as members of a democratic community. Above all, the work represents a celebration of individuality and the joys of life in all its plenitude. The Ethics provides Spinoza’s clearest answer to the question “What is a free people ( libera multitudo)?” only briefly alluded to at the end of his unfinished Political Treatise.
It is a remarkable fact that of all the ideas and aspirations which led up to the Revolution the concept and desire of political liberty, in the full sense of the term, were the last to emerge, as they were also the first to pass away.
Alexis de Tocqueville
Arguably, the tradition of democratic republican theory which arose in the Dutch Republic in the years around 1660 in the writings of Johan and Pieter de la Court, Franciscus van den Enden and Spinoza played a decisively important role in the development of modern democratic political theory. The tradition did not end with Spinoza but continued to develop in the United Provinces and–in the work of Bernard Mandeville, who seemingly belongs more to the Dutch than the British republican tradition–in London, down to the early 18th century. The failure in most histories of republicanism to appreciate how strikingly different intellectually, and as an ideology, the Dutch tradition was from the Anglo-American republican tradition, has had the effect of obscuring its central importance in the development of radical republicanism in mid- and late 18th-century France.
I argue that Condillac was committed to four mutually inconsistent propositions: that the mind is unextended, that sensations are modifications of the mind, that colours are sensations, and that colours are extended. I argue that this inconsistency was not just the blunder of a second-rate philosopher, but the consequence of a deep-seated tension in the views of early modern philosophers on the nature of the mind, sensation, and secondary qualities and that more widely studied figures, notably Condillac's contemporaries, Hume and Reid, were not ultimately any more successful at developing an account of vision that unproblematically avoids the paradox. In passing, I take issue with Nicholas Pastore's account of how Condillac's Treatise on Sensations deals with the visual perception of form (in A Selective History of Theories of Visual Perception).
Journal of the History of Ideas 65.2 (2004) 171-189
In the first century bc the Greek historian Diodorus Siculus observed that there were kings before the discovery of writing. Diodorus was right: the shared reflection about the human condition made possible by writing emerged in societies where distinctions between ruler and ruled, man and woman, master and slave, lord and commoner, and finally native and foreigner constituted the "deep normality" of social life. No wonder that so much of early social and political thought consists of justifications of inequality. Powerful discourses of inequality told everyone what their station in life was and instructed them to speak and behave accordingly.
What is truly remarkable, viewed against this background, is the emergence of ideas of equality. Why and how did people arrive at the daring and implausible idea that men are equal? In the history of political thought this question is usually discussed in the context of the advent of democratic rule in the Greek polis, that is, in a situation in which the demos is already constituted as a political actor. To constitute itself politically, however, the people or its spokesmen must already command a language in which the claim of equality can be expressed. In this essay I seek to retrieve the origins of that language, the historical moment when equality became thinkable in a setting in which the politicized demos had not yet appeared on the horizon. I will examine the famous Thersites episode in Homer's Iliad to show how this could happen, but my argument goes beyond the case of Homer. In the conclusion of this essay I will outline a general framework for the analysis of the interplay between social experiences, available languages, and the origins of ideas of equality.
Equality was not an empirical idea. Quite the contrary, the numbing repetition of the daily routines of inequality would seem to make it almost unthinkable, in the same category as black suns and men walking upside down. In such circumstances where was there space for the very thought of equality? How could it even find a voice amidst the deafening roar of kings, priests, and aristocrats? That simple question is my starting point.
I will approach this question by means of an equally simple conjecture. Ideas of equality emerge when men or women draw on the egalitarian potentialities of available shared languages, and they do so to make sense of and to change or sustain determinate social experiences. Notions of equality do not arise out of the blue. They usually take the form of a critique of prevailing ideas about the superiority of some people above others. In that sense every discourse of equality is grafted upon some previously articulated discourse of inequality. All discourses of equality are potentially egalitarian because "equality, as an idea, consists in the belief that things can be alike and when alike should receive similar treatment." When somebody asserts that "we" are in some relevant sense "like them," the very utterance of the claim implies a questioning of the given relationship between "us" and "them."
Where to begin our investigation? I start from the assumption that civilizations are, among other things, defined by the texts on which they confer canonical status. That is not to say that such texts are unquestionable or that their message is unequivocal. Canonical texts are not simply commands or prescriptions, they rather provide the master narratives and exemplary stories later authors draw upon to formulate authoritative interpretations. The major canonical texts of civilizations can usefully be seen as the stepping stones leading to the main interpretative traditions. The Homeric epics, the Hebrew Bible, the New Testament, the Qur'an, and the Analects of Confucius are outstanding examples of such canonical texts. The first step in our investigation is therefore an examination of such texts, looking for critiques of inequality as well as implicit or explicit notions of equality.
On the face of it Homer may seem an unlikely source for the emergence of any notion of equality. In his influential history of ethics, Alasdair MacIntyre asserts that the Homeric...
Journal of the History of Ideas 63.2 (2002) 225-237
Of course Bayle read Saint-Evremond—he quotes him. Moreover, he published one of Saint-Evremond's texts. But there is reading, and then there is reading. There is selective, inattentive perusal of excerpts or even secondary sources, with no attempt to penetrate beyond a superficial understanding; and then there is comprehensive, close scrutiny of the best primary sources, with sensitivity to nuance, and attention to context. In short, there is a difference between skimming and studying. Did Pierre Bayle (1647-1706) skim or study the work of Saint-Evremond (ca.1614-1703)?
This article argues that Bayle's first-hand knowledge of Saint-Evremond's work was superficial and dependent on a secondary source that gives that work a less than obvious, and hitherto unappreciated meaning for Bayle. This shift matters because it bears on the question of the status of Bayle's religious faith. With her classic Pierre Bayle (1963-64), Elizabeth Labrousse set aside the traditional view of Bayle as a religious skeptic whose professions of faith cannot be taken at face value. Such had been the view held by many in Bayle's own time, most notably by Pierre Jurieu, and near-universally from the Enlightenment into the twentieth century. Very recently, in a work that is no less impressive than hers on this and other topics in Bayle, Gianluca Mori has defended the traditional view, basing a part of his argument on Bayle's use of Saint-Evremond. Thus the question above. Moreover, the matter of Bayle's religious belief is not a merely biographical one. First, there is the fact of his influence, especially given his huge readership, although Bayle's influence may well be other than anything he intended. Secondly, in any case, the interpretation of Bayle's work as a whole depends on it, for virtually everything he wrote besides the Dictionnaire has a religious dimension.
To appreciate the importance of the question, something must first be said about Charles de Marguetel de St. Denis, sieur de Saint-Evremond. He was known in his time, and still is, as a libertine. It is difficult, however, to define libertinage beyond a combination of hedonistic mores and dubious religious beliefs—Epicureanism in some loose and popular sense. What is more important, in any case, is how Bayle might have thought the term applied to Saint-Evremond; and here it is clear that outright atheism may have been at issue. Bayle reports that it was publicly known that Saint-Evremond "ended his long life, just as he had lived it, en esprit fort." He seems certainly to have died without benefit of religion. When asked on his deathbed whether he wished to be reconciled, says Bayle, he answered yes, "with all my heart. I would like to be reconciled with my appetite. For my stomach is no longer functioning in its usual way." Bayle was often at pains to insist upon the ultimate inaccessibility of others' real beliefs (and of the inappropriateness of attempting to reach them). In this case, however, he was prepared to hold up Saint-Evremond as a counter-example to the widely-held belief that there were no speculative atheists, i.e., people who would sincerely deny the existence of God, but only practical atheists, i.e., people who live as if they did not believe in the existence of God, but who, try as they may, are at least occasionally aware of it.
This view of Saint-Evremond is important because, when accused of irreligion himself, Bayle cited the libertine's work as indicative of his own beliefs. To understand how Bayle came to be accused, and the significance of this response to it, some of the historical background is first necessary. Bayle's Dictionnaire historique et critique sold better than any text in the eighteenth century, philosophical or otherwise; and it was a best-seller right from the publication of its first edition, in Holland, in 1697. It sold so well in Paris that book-dealers there sought a privilège for a French printing. This led Boucherat, the French Chancellor, to charge the abbé Renaudot, then editor...
Jewish Social Studies 6.3 (2000) 31-51
There was very little serious intellectual interaction between Jews and Christians in Western Europe during the eighteenth century. The debate -- or self-styled "friendly conversation"--between the leading Dutch Remonstrant Phillip van Limborch and the Sephardic physician and polemicist Orobio de Castro, which took place in Amsterdam in the early 1680s, was the last prominent respectful theological encounter between a Christian and a Jew until the acceptance of Moses Mendelssohn into the circles of the German Enlightenment more than two generations later. Textual scholarship, above all on the Hebrew Bible, remained an important field of contact between Jews and Christians. In the fashionable intellectual circles of the Enlightenment, however, Christian Hebraist erudition no longer commanded the respect that it had widely held in the previous century. For many of the self-defined members of the Republic of Letters, it was a commonplace to adopt a denigratory attitude toward Jewish culture and learning, which was typically figured as the quintessence of pedantic insularity.
This abstract representation of Judaism, however, did not easily reconcile with the attitudes and behavior of those Jews who were most visible in polite circles in Paris, Amsterdam, or London. During the mid-eighteenth century, members of North-West European Sephardic elites tended increasingly to loosen their community ties and to seek to augment their status in Gentile society. The attempts of these Jews to gain entry into a cultural community that accepted them only with considerable ambivalence both foreshadows the predicament of much of nineteenth-century Jewry and highlights internal fractures within the Enlightenment itself.
Nowhere is this tension between eighteenth-century cultural exclusiveness and idealistic universalism more sharply illustrated than in the epistolary exchange of 1762 between Voltaire, the philosophe most notoriously hostile to Judaism, and Isaac de Pinto, the Amsterdam Sephardic writer and patrician. De Pinto's struggle to gain recognition as a philosophe in his own right underscores the exclusionary attitudes toward Jews that endured at the heart of Enlightenment culture. His personal negotiation of the complicated relationships between his Jewishness, his political and economic interests, and his cultural and intellectual aspirations also offers a valuable insight into the precariousness of Jewish identity at the threshold of secular modernity. De Pinto's Jewishness repeatedly marked him apart in the minds of those from whom he sought to gain acceptance as an equal. However, his status as a member of a transnational minority also inflected his intellectual relationship to the values of the Enlightenment. De Pinto's intense commitment to a transnational cosmopolitanism carried a very different weight than did the superficially similar invocations of inter-nationalist rhetoric by non-Jewish intellectuals whose interests and identities were securely identified with either of the rival nation-states of Britain or France.
Voltaire's extreme hostility toward Judaism and the Jews has been widely noted. In a great many of his texts, he derides with wit and relish what he regards as the absurdities of the Old Testament and the legalistic sterility of the Jews' religious observance. A striking contradiction, however, runs through his treatment of Judaism: despite his avowed distaste for the subject, he repeatedly returns to it. In his Philosophical Dictionary, he asserts that "it is with regret that I discuss the Jews: this nation is, in many ways, the most detestable ever to have sullied the earth." And yet this text, ostensibly a universalist philosophical handbook, is replete with repetitious polemical attacks on the immorality and depravity documented in the Old Testament. In a great many of his other writings, he dismisses the Jews in such terms as "an insignificant Arab tribe" and the Bible as a tissue of "absurd fairy tales," expounding these arguments at length and simultaneously proclaiming them to be both unpleasant and uninteresting.
Voltaire's historiography is animated by a desire to displace the Jews from their traditional historical centrality. This exclusionary impetus can be most clearly seen in his vast Essay on the Customs and Spirit of Nations: a work of more than half a million words, and arguably the first sustained modern attempt to write a truly global history. In this Essay...
Journal of the History of Ideas 63.3 (2002) 447-464
—Leibniz (to Peter the Great), 1716
Leibniz worked tirelessly to promote tolerance, peace, and the exchange of ideas, perhaps most in his attempts to bridge religious factions in Europe, but also in his receptiveness to the past and his attitude toward other cultures. This accommodation of differences is rooted in the belief that the most perfect possible world maximizes both diversity and harmony. In a time of rapid globalization, as the imperative to maximize diversity and harmony grows, I believe it is worthwhile to turn our attention to Leibniz's philosophy, particularly as it is expressed in his writings on China. The ground of Leibniz's openness toward other cultures is different from the ground to which we are accustomed. Multiculturalism is usually grounded in skepticism. We should accept and tolerate others because we can never be certain that our own beliefs are correct. The ground of Leibniz's tolerance leads in the opposite direction—we should accept others not because no one knows the truth but because everyone knows something of the truth.
The well-known metaphor of monads as perspectives on a city illustrates this approach. Leibniz writes, "Indeed, all individual substances are differentexpressions of the same universe and different expressions of the same universal cause, namely God. But the expressions vary in perfection, just as different representations or drawings of the same town from different points of view do." The metaphor of different monads as different perspectives on a town captures what is needed for cultural exchange. What each of us "sees" is not wrong but partial or perspectival. Because our view is limited, we must learn from others whose views have different limitations, and we must be careful not to force our perspective on others. At the same time, each perspective is grounded in truth, which is what Leibniz intends when he says that each monad expresses the same universe.
Leibniz gives many examples. An idea expresses its object. The perception of a monad expresses the universe, and the understanding of a mind expresses the understanding of God. Every effect expresses its cause. The senses and secondary qualities express their objects, as well as the body and its organs. Definitions express the essence of what they define. Paintings express the cities they represent. What do such dissimilar relationships have in common? The two things need not be similar but their conditions must be analogous. In the New Essays Leibniz writes that the resemblance is a relation of order, as an ellipse resembles the circle whose projection it is, "there is a certain precise and natural relationship between what is projected and the projection which is made from it, with each point on the one corresponding through a certain relation with a point on the other." In the Theodicy Leibniz says that the representation has a natural relationship to what is represented. If this representation is imperfect, then it suppresses something in the object. No matter how imperfect the representation is, though, it can add nothing to what is represented (or else it would be not just imperfect but false), nor can it suppress everything in what is represented. An expression is thus in one way exact—it...
Journal of the History of Philosophy 41.1 (2003) 111-120
The reason of a thing is not to bee inquired after till you are sure the thing it selfe bee soe. Wee comonly are att (What's the reason of it?) before wee are sure of the thing. T'was an excellent question of my Lady Cotton, when Sr. Robert Cotton was magnifying of a shoe, wchwas Moses's or Noahs, & Wondering att the strange shape & fashion of it: but, Mr. Cotton, sayes shee, are you sure 'tis a shooe.
A law of nature is a rule discovered by reason. This is the key to John Deigh's attempt to show that "Hobbes's ethics is logically independent of his moral psychology." By this he means that the "theorems" of Hobbes's ethics, the laws of nature, "have no other ground than the definition on which it [his ethics] is based." Deigh thinks he establishes this conclusion by taking seriously both Hobbes's definition of a law of nature as "a Precept, or generall Rule, found out by Reason, by which a man is forbidden to do, that, which is destructive of his life," and his definition of reason as "nothing but Reckoning (that is, Adding and Substracting) of the Consequences of generall names." Deigh puts these two definitions together to argue that Hobbes's ethics is a deductive science, and that those who instead think of his ethics as dependent on desire or as involving instrumental reason ("means-to-ends thinking," as he calls it) are mistaken. The particular virtue of this interpretation, Deigh says, is that without it we have to read Hobbes in the Leviathan as sometimes using "reason" in a way that is different from the way he defines it in chapter 5.
I will argue that Deigh misunderstands the basis, status, and scope of Hobbesian natural law. In his attempt to save Hobbes from using "reason" equivocally, Deigh attributes mistakes and inconsistencies to him that are more serious and have less textual justification than that apparent equivocation. A source of the misunderstanding is a simplification—accepted by Mark Murphy and many other interpreters—of Hobbes's conception of reason.
Let us begin with Deigh's view of the scope of the law of nature, as he admits that his interpretation would be undermined were he wrong about this. "While the laws of nature are dictates of reason for people living in a state of nature," he says, "they are not truly laws in such circumstances and therefore not sources of obligation in them." If Murphy is right that Hobbes does think they are obligatory outside of civil society, then it is, Deigh concedes, "a genuine problem" for his account. In reply, Deigh refers to the two passages where Hobbes says that the laws of nature are "not properly Lawes," quoting the one from chapter 26, which explicitly recapitulates a claim from chapter 15. In this earlier passage, however, Hobbes adds: "But yet if we consider the same Theoremes, as delivered in the word of God, that by right commandeth all things; then are they properly called Lawes." Hobbes thinks that the laws of nature are always obligatory. He holds, for example, that the law of nature that covenants be kept obliges even "in the condition of meer Nature" or "condition of Warre," and that "the rule of Manners, without Civill Government, is the Law of Nature." Hobbes says that although the laws of nature donot always oblige "in foro externo; that is, to the putting them in act," they do always "oblige in foro interno; that is to say, they bind to a desire they should take place." Although they only require "a desire, and endeavour," Hobbes makes clear that these requirements are laws, and that they are binding and obligatory.
If Deigh were right, sovereigns would not be obligated by the laws of nature. But Hobbes says that "Soveraigns are all subject to the Lawes of Nature; because such lawes be Divine, and cannot by any man, or Common-wealth be abrogated." Deigh claims that Hobbes "denies that the laws of nature are sources of obligation unconditionally." Hobbes, however...
On the face of it, Montesquieu's Considerations on the Causes of the Greatness of the Romans and their Decline would appear to be a work of erudition and a philosophical history, and as such it has generally been read. It was never, however, intended to stand alone. It was composed as part of a larger, polemical work, akin in purpose to the Philosophical Letters of Voltaire, and it should be read in light of the other components of that work - Montesquieu's Reflections on Universal Monarchy in Europe and his Constitution of England. Had Montesquieu not been forced by fear of the censor to suppress the book he at first intended to publish, we would not now have difficulty in recognizing his little tract on the Romans as a meditation on the significance of the Duke of Marlborough's victories over Louis XIV in the War of the Spanish Succession.
Raynal and his collaborator, Diderot, offer views on the history and nature of the British Constitution in various parts of their encyclopedic account of Western expansion, The History of the Two Indies (1770, revised versions 1780 and 1784). These opinions are analysed in comparison with the judgments of Montesquieu, Voltaire, Hume, Bolingbroke, De Lolme and others. The evolution of Raynal's ideas on the subject is discussed in the light of his earlier anglophobic History of the Parliament of England (1748) and the mutually contrasting French historians he used for that work, the Jesuit Pierre-Joseph d'Orleans and the Huguenot Paul de Rapin-Thoyras. Raynal's conversion to a liberal admiration for British institutions is seen both in the context of the American Revolution and his relationship with Diderot. His insistence on a historical approach clashes with Diderot's more radical and philosophical rhetoric, and the stress between their attitudes becomes apparent in the compromises they attain. Notable among their conclusions are the rejection of English appeals to antiquity, and the fortuitous development of liberty through a series of well defined stages.
Montesquieu's The Spirit of the Laws (1748) illuminates the many factors that affect human behaviour and hence constrain the capacity for self-guided action, but his work also contains a defence of this capacity in his treatment of the soul. Yet Montesquieu also thought it important to establish reliable limits on human action so as to protect political liberty, and he looked to the constitutional traditions of particular peoples for standards of right that would provide effective checks on individuals and political powers without fundamentally eroding the animating power of the soul. Together Montesquieu's concept of the soul and use of history point to a nascent form of limited human agency, one that balances the elements of determinism present in his new scientific approach to politics and society.
Etude du mouvement du libertinisme erudit en France et en Italie au XVII e siecle, qui rassemble les doctrines marquees par la crise et la critique des valeurs morales et religieuses traditionnelles. Examinant les references anciennes de la culture libertine (Diogene Laerce, Epicure, Sextus Empiricus, Aristote, Ciceron, Pline), l'A. montre que le libertinisme developpe sa propre reinterpretation de l'Antiquite dans un sens resolument sceptique, anti-metaphysique et anti-theologique qui explique certaines references a des auteurs de la Renaissance comme Pomponazzi, Machiavel, Montaigne, Vanini qui reflechissent sur les origines politiques de la fonction de la religion
In 1697, the Huguenot writer Pierre Bayle (1647–1706) published his Dictionnaire historique et critique ‐ a one‐man encyclopaedia. The article entitled Macon drew attention to the cruel atrocities perpetrated during the French Wars of Religion. This article explains the context of Bayle's critique, arguing that he uses the example to reflect on the Gallican regime's renewal of persecution against his community, and on the notorious revocation by Louis XIV, in 1685, of the Edict of Nantes. As a long‐term remedy for state violence against a law‐abiding minority, he recommends deliberative freedom within a framework of government impartiality, thereby anticipating a new secular order. A new translation of Bayle's article Macon can be found in the appendix.