ISSN 1545-0449 |
Set ISBN 0-404-63760-4 |
Vol. 1 ISBN 0-404-63761-2 |
| This essay traces the development of a neglected genre of political writing that flourished from the Renaissance to the Enlightenment and sought to convey political knowledge by reporting personal observations of empirical political phenomena. The focus is on one of the "ways of knowing" politics and government. This paper traces the importance of this body of writing in shaping early modern English thought by examining publications through which the reading public acquired political information - travel accounts and instructions, diplomatic reports and natural history - arguing that they share both a common set of categories or grid for understanding governmental institutions and a preference for empirical description. These texts are empirical in that they aspire to, and purport to be based on careful and credible first hand observation or reliable second hand observation. The genres investigated are political or governmental in that they involve observations, descriptions and characterizations of states or kindgoms. Many of the texts discussed do not conform to modern disciplinary boundaries. They were often called chorographies, geographies, natural histories, or The Present State of ..., and frequently combined natural and civil topics. Widespread distribution of this material meant that the English were far more familiar with foreign countries than one might think if one concentrates on the well known political theorists or philosophers, or focuses solely on constitiutional issues. This essay suggests that empirically derived political observation was an important aspect of early modern English political culture and that this observation, organized around a familiar topical grid, was applicable to all existing states. |
| In 1693 the French Catholic bishop Jacques-Benigne, Bossuet, Europe's most articulate defender of Catholic universalism, sent to the papal court a defense of recent demands put forward by James II's Anglican supporters. To facilitate James' restoration, they had insisted that he sign a declaration promising to protect and uphold the privileges and immunities of the Church of England and to uphold the Test Acts. Bossuet's support of the Anglican position constituted an about-face on his part that requires rigorous historical contextualization. Accordingly, this essay first delineates Bossuet's place in seventeenth- century Catholic polemic and his emergence as Europe's most effective spokesman for a Catholic Christendom in order to make clear the unresolvable contradictions between his polemical works on the one hand and his defense of the Anglicans on the other. It then examines specifically Bossuet's relations with England in order to provide an exemplary instance of how his vision of infallible religious authority and international Catholic unity began to lose its cultural appeal, and shows how this process was also reflected in developments on the Continent. By providing a close reading of Bossuet's defense of the Anglicans and an analysis of the political circumstances surrounding it, the essay then attempts to demonstrate the internal collapse of Catholic militancy. Throughout, the essay emphasizes the role of religious factors in the decline of Catholic universalism in order to present a new interpretation of the intellectual upheaval known as "the crisis of Eurpoean conscience." |
| Against the backdrop of the English reception of Locke's Essay, scholars have identified a little-known philosophical dispute between two seventeenth-century women writers: Mary Astell (1666-1731) and Damaris Cudworth Masham (1659-1708). On the basis of their brief but heated exchange, Astell and Masham are typically regarded as philosophical adversaries: Astell a disciple of the occasionalist John Norris, and Masham a devout Lockean. But in this paper, I argue that, although there are many respects in which Astell and Masham are radically opposed, the two women also have a surprising amount in common. Rather than interpret their ideas solely in relation to the "cannonical" philosophies of the time -- Lockean empiricism and Malebranchean occasionalism -- I examine the ways in which Astell and Masham are influenced by the metaphysical theories of the Cambridge Platonists, Ralph Cudworth and Henry More. On this basis, I argue that a remarkably similar theological approach underlies the metaphysical and feminist arguments of Astell and Masham. |
| The terminology Hume uses for his descriptions of the sentiments characterizing belief - the "force", "vivacity" and "steadiness" of conception - is derived from the contemporary physiology of animal spirits and brain traces in the style of Malebranche. This essay shows how studying the ways those terms were used within Malebranchean physiology provides a key to Hume's usage: in particular I suggest that, as in the accounts of the motions of animal spirits, so too in Hume's descriptions of belief there is a crucial difference between "force" and "vivacity," which refer to the intensity, and "steadiness," which is connected with repeated experience and custom. I then show how Hume's phenomenological descriptions of belief in terms of force and vivacity are substantiated with vignettes from common life and sociability, and are intended simply to account for the sentimental raw materials of belief on which experience and custom exercise their stabilizing and calibrating action. |
| The complete text of lectures of the only course on Hume that Quine taught. |
| The young Genevan, Abraham Trembley (1710-1784), while a tutor to the sons of Count Bentinck in Holland engaged in studies of the freshwater hydra or "polyp," studies that produced dramatic results. The discovery of regeneration, grafting and asexual reproduction or "budding" in animals brought him international repute. Whereas most attention has been focused on the regeneration studies, our paper emhasizes the special excellence and significance of his experiments proving that animal reproduction could take place without gametes. Instrumental in bringing Trembley's work from the Continent to England was Martin Folkes, President of the Royal Society. Folkes guided Trembley's admission to membership in the Society and the award of its Copley Medal to him. The intense and excited correspondence between Folkes and Trembley portrays Folkes far differently than do either the early negative histories or the recent revisionist studies on the Society, which ignore Folkes's relationship with Trembley and focus heavily on Folkes's contemporary detractors. We explain Trembley's good fortune in selecting the hydra as his major research animal and touch upon reactions to his findings. Finally we consider Trembley's superb Memoires and his legacy to science. |
| The focus of this paper is a debate between university professors and a court Fool, staged in 1737 by Friedrich Wilhelm I of Prussia. What is reason and what is folly, asked the Fool; and then, what is truth? I examine the thirty-seven theses put forward by the Fool for the public debate at Frankfurt-Oder, as well as some contemporary accounts of the event. I align this with my earlier work on professionalization. Then, I put the debate in the context of contemporary controversies such as those sparked by Spinoza on the nature of truth, and of Shaftesbury's views of the relations between laughter and truth. I offer this as a contribution to a wider project about the difficult search for usable definitions of truth in the Enlightenment, in which notions of scientific truth were sharpened. |
| The main preoccupation of eighteenth-century Spanish political economy was the identification of the causes of national decline. The discipline developed in full awareness that European discourse scathingly critical of things Spanish had already framed the debate. Spanish intellectuals dismissed foreign observations, claiming that they alone were capable of being objective on the subject. Patriotism, however, narrowed the choices available to political economists to theories that explained decline in terms of luxury and emasculation. Many intellecutals found the virile and humanist culture of the Spanish Renaissance (Siglo de Oro) an alternative to the new French forms of courtly and public sociability introduced by the Bourbons. But traditional theories regarding the negative effects of luxury on national prosperity had to confront the record left behind by some Arbitristas. As eighteenth-century Spanish political economists realized that traditional paradigms could further damage the economy, they engaged in endless debates over causes of economic decline, the identification of which became a patriotic crusade. Two clear positions emerged from this debate. The first was that the causes of decline were already well known, and advised immediate reform along lines suggested by the much-maligned foreign observers. The second advocated historical research, on the view that previous shallow theorizing had led Spain astray, causing more economic damage than stability. Advocates of this second position maintained that instead of speculative theorizing in political economy, careful archival research into the historical process of decline was necessary. Political economoy in Spain developed along these two mutually exclusive tracks. |
| No single theory of time dominated the historical writing of pre-Revolutionary France; contra J. B. Bury's view, neither the idea of progress nor any other meta-historical narrative enjoyed a hegemonic influence over French historians in the eighteenth century. Instead, the historical literature of this era reflected the fierce rivalry between several philosophies of history. Competition between various meta-historical narratives served to accelerate the development of intellectual rigor in historical studies, helping to transform history from a topic to a discipline. |
| Conventionally the Spinoza "renaissance" has been connected with the Pantheism Controversy circa 1785. What concerns me is not the "renaissance" after 1785, but the one already in place and unexpectedly uncovered in 1785. My claim is that a great deal of this productive clarification of positions had taken place already, starting in the 1750s, though it only came to light in the 1780s. I offer two thick descriptions. The first is a cultural-historical description of the impulses animating Lessing and Mendelssohn to their pathbreaking project of "vindicating" Spinoza in the early 1750s. The second is a brief intellectual-historical sketch of the metaphysical and scientific impulses galvanizing in the young Johann Gottfried Herder a new vitalist sense of Nature. |
Book Reviews by Peter Anstey, Katherine Bradfield, John Gascoigne, Anita Guerrini, Bruce Kuklick, John Robertson, Jacob Soll, and Brian W. Young.Review Essay by J. G. A. Pocock
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