ISSN 1545-0449 |
Set ISBN 0-404-63760-4 |
Vol. 2 ISBN |
| The Bibliothèque universelle of 1686 carried an article by John Locke - "A New Method of a Common-Place-Book," later published in English in the Posthumous Works (1706). Here Locke revealed his lifelong habit of note taking and some of his views on the practice of 'commonplacing' - collecting quotations and themes under "Heads." In Renaissance education, this method was usually applied to classical and moral subjects; students and scholars compiled private commonplace books in which extracts from books were kept as aids to memory. I argue that Locke's "New Method" extends and complicates this role. His emphasis is not on memorizing material for later rhetorical use; rather, he makes the commonplace book part of a personal system for storing and retrieving a more diverse range of information. I also seek to identify some of the philosophical issues discussed in the Essay (1690), particularly the role of memory, which may relate to Locke's practice of commonplacing. For Locke, memory was weak and fragile; yet it played a crucial role in his account of how knowledge was formed from perceptions and ideas. This meant that practices such as note taking and the organization and retrieval of material were related to questions concerning the capacities of the mind, as discussed in the Essay and in Of the Conduct of the Understanding (1697). His views on memory - together with some of his discussions of the association of ideas and personal identity - imply a rationale for commonplace books. |
| On 11 November 1697 a Latin dissertation, De iure principis circa haereticos, prepared under the direction of Christian Thomasius, was delivered in the Halle law faculty by Thomasius's doctoral student Johannes Christoph Rube. Translated into German as Abhandlung vom Recht Evangelischer Fürsten gegen die Ketzer, this dissertation was published in a selection of Thomasius's works - Außerlesene und in Deutsch noch nie gedruckte Schrifften - in 1705, which provides the primary text for this English translation, On the Right of Protestant Princes regarding Heretics. This was the second dissertaion that Thomasius had dedicated to the question of the legal and civil status of heresy in that year, his An haeresis sit crimen? having been presented, again by Rube, a few months earlier, on 14 July. This work was also translated into German, as Ob Ketzery ein straffbares Verbrechen sey? (Is Heresy a Punishable Crime?), and publshed in the Außerlesene deutsche Schriften. The July dissertation had provoked several vehement attacks by Lutheran theologians who were affronted by Thomasius's strategy for undermining the theological, philosophical and legal bases of heresy prosecutions, just as it would later provoke Leibniz for similar reasons. The November dissertation on the Right regarding Heretics was a response to these critics, designed to reinforce the earlier argument against criminalization by treating heresy as a harmless belief of religious minorities stigmatized and persecuted by the members of a politically powerful "ruling religion." In developing this argument Thomasius strengthened the authority of the prince or state in relation to the Lutheran church by treating heresey as a purely legal and civil matter. Yet he simultaneously set limits to this authority, by arguing that because heresy as such has no necessary impact on social peace it falls outside the purview of civil authority, hence must be tolerated. In introducing the disputation, I argue that it cannot be understood as a defence of Lockean individual rights and should be approached instead via the distinctive mix of theology, law, and history found in early modern Protestant Staatskirchenrecht, and in terms of Thomasius's larger campaign against the Lutheran confessional state. |
| In 1732, the Irish physician and mathematician Bryan Robinson (1680-1754) wrote his Treatise of the Animal Oeconomy, a work of physiological mechanism. Past scholarly analysis has portrayed Robinson's work in the context of two intellectual influences - first, Leiden physician Hermann Boerhaave's (1668-1730) emphasis on the hydraulics of bodily fluids through the veins and arteries; and second, a 'Newtonian physiology' based on Newton's queries about ether. Despite these analyses, there has been little study of Robinson's 'chymical' theories of respiration in the Oeconomy. As a Newtonian physiologist, it is not surprising that Robinson extensively utilized Newtonian chymistry in his medical arguments, particularly Newton's Opticks (1730) and De natura acidorum (1710). However, Robinson also based his theories on older chymical theories involving the generative power of universal atmospheric acids. By the eighteenth century, suggestions for the identity of this universal acid reflected the novel preoccupatons of the phlogiston theory, the nature of combustion, pneumatic chemistry, and respiration. Robinson was a transitional figure in this intellectual tradition; he believed in a universal atmospheric acid responsible for the chymical fermentations of life, yet was making some of the first steps in understanding the part of atmospheric chemistry and had a glimmering of the role of oxygen in respiration. Hence, his Animal Oeconomy was concerned with the role of universal acid spirits in a context of Newtonian chymistry of acids and current work on respiratory physiology. We also will demonstrate that in his application of ideas of universal acids to formulate medicaments, Robinson utilized an acids-alkali theory of the humors that had its origin in the 1660s among iatrochymists of the Continent influenced by Johnann Baptista van Helmont (1579-1644). |
| This essay attempts to identify the context of David Hume's infamous footnote concerning race appended to his essay, "Of National Characters." It is difficult to make sense of idiosyncratic remarks by past thinkers under the best of conditions, but it becomes particularly difficult when issues that are very sensitive for twenty-first-century readers are broached. Over the course of this essay I attempt to provide a coherent explanation of what might have driven Hume to write this remark - although the evidence is meager and my own explanation is of necessity speculative. I argue that the footnote is interconnected with Hume's concept of a science of man. In brief, in order to make such a science practicable Hume excluded the non-white races from the class of objects suitable to scientific investigation. In order to explain why he did this, I briefly discuss the concept of 'race' as it was understood by many eighteenth-century philosophers, as well as some associated issues such as the relations between religion and race and gender versus racial difference. In conclusion, I argue that Hume's footnote helps us understand how the human sciences, even at their inception, were conceived as exclusionary on the basis of an often misguided notion of science. |
| Quite soon after submitting the text of Quine's "1946 Lectures on David Hume's Philosophy" to the printer, some few additional materials pertinent to that course were discovered among Quine's papers. The present essay constitutes an addendum to that text, including the texts of most and descriptions of all of these newly discovered manuscript elements. This auxilary portion of his manuscript includes Quine's preparatory notes which provide some indication of the genesis of the course, details of paper assignments to students and variants of parts of the lectures as evidently presented in the 1946 course that are absent from the primary portion of the lectures manuscript. |
| Polignac's didactic poem Anti-Lucretius (1747) is a Catholic polemic against the Roman poet, aiming at combating the rising popularity of Epicurean atomism and ethics among contemporary Christians. This study focuses on Polignac's exposure of Lucretius's anti-religious stance and analyzes his methodology of refuting the Epicurean Theeory of Pleasure as the only way to liberate humanity from the widespread fear of divine retribution. Polignac's strategy is to portray Religion as superior to Pleasure in all respects and especially in its ability to promote tranquility and happiness, which constitute the essence of the Epicurean summum bonum. Through an inversion of Lucretian argumentation, Polignac shows the Epicurean idea of Pleasure as it was commonly interpreted to have a catastrophic effect on civilized society. |
| Andreas Sigismund Marggraf's (1709-1782) distillation of formic acid from ants was one of innumerable pieces of new scientific knowledge created in the eighteenth century. This paper is a case study in how formic acid was constructed as new knowledge and acquired meaning as it passed through a variety of teaching institutions in the German states, Britain, and France. It will reevaluate and problematize the concept of dissemination of scientific ideas during the Enlightenment, in order to show that the dissemination of this new knowledge was an active, dynamic process. Some university professors, in their teaching and in the textbooks they wrote, integrated Marggraf's discovery into a collective project of giving meaning and significance to novelty, which they defined as new and useful information in their disciplines. Such cases as this suggest that dynamic dissemination can therefore sometimes be usefully considered a mark of an 'Enlightenment university.' |
| The soul was the subject of widespread philosophical debate in the Scottish Enlightenment. David Hume's refusal to consider it anything other than a "fiction" was the exception rather than the rule. In this article I explore debates about the soul in eighteenth-century Scottish thought and their broader implications. Discussion of the soul formed part of a branch of philosophy, 'pneumatology' or 'pneumatics,' which was defined as the science of all spiritual being. Pneumatics was closely related to natural religion, because it provided philosophical arguments for the continued existence of the soul after the death of the body. I also show that pneumatology was of some significance for moral philosophy. In the mid-eighteenth century pneumatological theories about the soul were associated with a group of orthodox, traditionalist thinkers in the Presbyterian church, which included John Witherspoon, George Anderson and James Balfour. Their arguments for the immortality of the soul in particular were however criticized by "Moderate" or 'enlightened' philosophers and theologians such as Hugh Blair, Adam Smith and Lord Kames. I argue that this critique was not based upon a greater emphasis on reason and a deeper scepticism towards revealed religion than is found in orthodox writings, although these authors' reputation as 'progressive' thinkers might suggest this. The differences between the 'orthodox' and the "Moderate" or 'enlightened' authors discussed here reflect differences between two varieties of natural religion and, paradoxically, it is the 'enlightened' theorists who are more sceptical about the usefulness of reason in religious argument. |
| As an antidote to adverse and undiscriminating verdicts entered against the Enlightenment, a calm and measured attempt is here made to show that if, for example, we carefully examine the writings of representative eighteenth-century English Dissenters of various theological persuasions, we shall find that blanket denunciations of the Enlightenment are certainly unsubtle and possibly anachronistic, and that a more balanced view is called for. The textual evidence to be adduced will show that while the moral critique of doctrine which the Enlightenment stimulated was much needed, the individualistic turn accruing from both the emphasis upon the right of private judgment and the Evangelical Revival's emphasis upon personal experience bequeathed ecclesiological problems which beset us to this day. |
| Kant has often been criticized for presenting an abstract view of human cognition that overlooks the variations among individuals in their cognitive abilities and achievements. In this paper I show that this criticism of Kant is misdirected, since both in his critical philosophical works and in his later work, Anthropology from a Pragmatic Point of View, he indicates that the transcendental faculties of human cognition do not, and cannot, operate by themselves as a separate and complete system of cognition. Instead, these transcendental faculties are expressed through a corresponding set of empirical faculties of cognition in human beings, which vary in the effectiveness of their operation from one individual to another. I begin by examining Kant's analysis of the cognitive faculty as consisting in the understanding, judgment and reason, and his distinction between the transcendental and empirical activities of these powers. I then show that this distinction is especially apparent in the Anthropology, in which he considers the variations in the empirical activities of cognition in human individuals, as they appear, first in the deficiencies and disorders, and then in the talents of human cognition. Kant's analysis of cognition thus includes both a theory of the transcendental principles of cognition, which are universal conditions for the possibility of experience; and an empirical cognitive psychology, which examines the variations among human individuals in their cognitive activities and achievements. |
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