ISSN 1545-0449 |
Set ISBN |
Vol. 4 ISBN |
John Locke trained as a physician in 1660s Oxford, when research on respiration and
physiology was being undertaken by such luminaries as Robert Boyle, Richard Lower, and Thomas Willis. The
disputation "Respirationis usus" was the culmination of Locke's work on this topic.
The longest extant medical manuscript from this part of Locke's career, it is of
particular significance in the assessment of his early natural philosophical views.
This article provides a new transcription and translation of this text, facilitating
an accurate assessment of Locke's work on this topic.
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| Although the basic facts about Locke's expulsion from Christ Church are well known, the precise cause still remains something of a mystery. The reasons given at the time, that he had "upon severall occasions behaved him selfe very factiously and undutifully to the Government", were vague and unspecific and could have covered almost anything. A contemporary letter from the English envoy in the Netherlands shows that he was suspected of writing libelous pamphlets and of keeping bad company, but this particular letter cannot have reached England until after the decision had been made to expel him. When he heard of this Locke vigorously denied all the allegations against him. The purpose of this paper is to describe these events and to see what can be discovered about the underlying reasons for Locke's expulsion. |
| This essay examines the importance of The Turkish Spy, a popular literary work in eighteenth-century Britain, for understanding early modern theriophilic argumentation in favor of animals. The work is depicted as an important and hitherto neglected source exemplifying early modern ethical consideration of animals. This consideration gained in importance despite the persistence of the traditional view of the mental inferiority of animals compared to human beings. The Turkish Spy thus elucidates both the extent of early modern theriophily and its clear limits. While there was a growing awareness of animal feeling and suffering in this period, that subject rarely achieved the ethical status accorded human affliction. In consequence, the common interpretation of the eighteenth century as a time of rising sensitivity to animal suffering seems to require serious qualification. |
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| Notions of a developing public sphere in the eighteenth century have assumed, following Jürgen Habermas, that this is a necessarily secular space in which the better argument alone would prevail. This project examines efforts by French Jansenists to use the new public sphere to argue in public that God had performed miracles through a Jansenist saint, the late deacon François de Pâris, and thus expressed His rejection of the standing order in church and state. These works, culminating in Carré de Montgeron's 1737 Verité des miracles, sought to base their case on 'facts' and 'evidence' for the miracles; they used techniques of virtual witnessing that bore a striking similarity to the literary techniques of early modern science as analyzed by Steven Shapin. Savants responded to Montgeron's case not with refutation but with a refusal to give any serious consideration to the 'evidence' presented. The Pâris affair is therefore a revealing moment in the emergence of enlightenment epistemology; it further raises questions about the degree to which modernity is necessarily secular. |
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| I argue that the debate over whether the mature Leibniz (roughly 1695-1716) was a realist or an idealist has been obstructed by a consistent failure on the part of scholars to clarify just what sort of entities, if any, Leibniz may have been a realist about. I show, in particular, that the concepts of organism, organic body, and corporeal substance have generally been presumed to be interchangeable, while they in fact play very distinct roles within Leibniz's systematic philosophy. I argue on the basis of these distinctions that the question whether or not Leibniz was an idealist is an anachronistic one, that Leibniz in fact remains rooted in pre-Cartesian body theory, which holds that it is a precondition for the existence of a body that it be intelligently ordered ('organic', in Leibniz's terms), and that non-organic or non-bodily matter exists only as a conceptual limit but not as an independent ingredient of the world |
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| While much has been written about the influence of John Locke on Laurence Sterne's novel Tristram Shandy, little attention has been given to the extent to which Sterne understood Locke's Essay to be an experimental history of the understanding. This paper argues that Sterne's novel should be understood in the context of the writing of experimental histories of man that extended from Locke to Sterne. It is also argued that this is the context in which Sterne's exploitation of the association of ideas should be understood. Sterne's novel was no doubt influenced by developments within the tradition of writing experimental histories of the understanding, but much of what we find in Tristram Shandy shows the direct influence of Locke. |
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| Hume appears to have sometimes taken religion to be founded on reason, at other times to have taken it to be founded on faith, and at yet other times to be based on authority. All of these views can be found in the different pieces collected together in the second volume of his Essays and Treatises on Several Subjects. By means of an analysis of what Hume meant by "genuine religion," "true religion," and "rational religion," I uncover a consistent, sincere view that Hume sustained throughout his published works. This view is atheistic. |
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| This paper argues that, far from having been killed off by Locke, innateness is close to the center of British philosophy throughout the 'long' eighteenth century. The second half of the century is examined in particular detail, with an account given first of defenses of innateness on the part of philosophers such as James Harris, Richard Price, Lord Monboddo, Thomas Reid, and Dugald Stewart, and then of wholesale rejections of innateness by Hartleyan philosophers such as Joseph Priestley, Erasmus Darwin, and John Horne Tooke. The debate about innateness, it is argued, suggests that it is far from clear what it means to call Locke, in the manner of Leslie Stephen, the "intellectual ruler" of the eighteenth century. |
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| Thomas Paine was not a religious zealot. He was by all accounts not even a devout believer in a Christian God, and his notoriety as an opponent of religious dogma is well documented. Paine was, however, acutely aware of the powers that religious categories, ideas, narratives, and systems of thought had in framing the understandings of many in his time. Paine himself, even while challenging religious conventions and tradition, often structured his arguments in ways that were schematically and thematically akin to religious discourses. Beyond stylistic parallels and narrative similarities, Paine directly and explicitly appealed to a particular set of idioms stemming from the dissenting Protestant tradition in colonial America. Despite a well documented record of questioning revealed religious authority, Paine fundamentally grounded his theoretical and practical opposition to British control of the American colonies on the authority of Scripture and the concept of divine sovereignty within the context of the mythical history of dissenting Protestantism. In his pamphlet Common Sense (1776), Paine advances readily available radical dissenting idioms, questioning worldly authority and holding that ultimate authority rests in the people--under God. By appropriating theological concepts and translating sovereign authority from the religious to the civil sphere, Paine helped to facilitate a conceptual shift in the political discourse from the common law tradition to a natural rights paradigm. In identifying this new locus of political authority within the theological premiss of divine sovereignty, Paine was able to rekindle a historical contest with roots stemming back to the radical dissenters of the English Civil War. That he returned to this ideology may reveal more about the thought of his target audience than it does about Paine's personal ideas. Always the astute observer of political trends and beliefs, he likely recognized that the foundations of a new political and social system must remain comprehensible within the prevailing Protestant Christian civil--religious culture of the colonies. Common Sense was not only comprehensible to common people, but also helped them to shape oppositional identities in the face of British cultural hegemony. |
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| This essay surveys the eighteenth-century debate about the identity of Paul's ambiguous 'creature' (ktisis) of Romans 8, to which he promises deliverance from suffering and corruption. Controversial from the start, Romans 8 provokes a particularly heated dispute among various Christians in Britain beginning during the radical uprising of the mid seventeenth century. The possibility of animal ascension becomes a fierce point of contention. Given its multiple meanings in the period, 'creature' and 'all creation' can be understood to represent a variety of groups: a particular set of humans, all humans, animals alone, and every created thing. Thus the passage seems to imperil a system of simple divisions between kinds of humans and between humans and everything else. For some readers, the identification of Paul's 'creature' as an animal has subversive political implications, while for others, that identification can be managed in such a way as to protect existing hierarchies. Given the suffering and longing of the 'creature' in Romans 8, commentaries often expose assumptions about animal minds and emotion as they make their argument for including or excluding them from paradise. The debate about Romans 8 reflects a range of beliefs among eighteenth-century British Christians about the value inherent in the nonhuman world. |
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| This article illuminates the potential cynicism of enlightenment, distinguished from the classical Cynicism of Diogenes and his followers, through an examination of Rousseau's critique of the Enlightenment in Emile alongside Diderot's dialogue, Rameau's Nephew. It demonstrates that the cynical character of the nephew effectively represents Rousseau's worst fears about the consequences of Enlightenment, articulated from a standpoint which hews closer to the classical Cynics. Emile emerges as a kind of anti-nephew, the product of an education designed precisely to combat the production of Enlightenment cynicism. Finally, however, although the article rejects characterizations of Rousseau as a cynic, it does allow that his solitary tendencies, depicted in the Reveries of the Solitary Walker, may share with cynicism a potentially anti-political form of resignation. |
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| By the mid twentieth century Lewis Namier, his followers, and their distinctive techniques, dominated mid eighteenth-century British historiography to a point of near monopoly which, today, requires a leap of imagination to appreciate. There were many reasons, as much social and cultural as intellectual and scholarly, for the subsequent decline of Namier's influence beginning, more or less, in the 1960s. His command of the field was first challenged directly, however, by Herbert Butterfield in his polemical work of historiography, George III and the Historians (1957). This essay revisits that controversy and locates it within the distinctive ideological (or more accurately, perhaps, anti-ideological) contexts of 1950s Cold War British culture. Although first published in 1929, Namier's great book, The Structure of Politics at the Accession of George III, really achieved canonical status (and a paperback edition) in that decade--a decade which also witnessed the rise of what Butterfield called the Namier, or sometimes, suggestively, the 'modern' school of history. The 1760s as seen from the 1950s thus provides a classic example, to borrow from the title of the journal established in 1952, of the dialogue between past and present. |
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| Mark Goldie, "The Present State of Locke Biography" |
| on |
| Roger Woolhouse, Locke: A Biography |
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