History of Western Philosophy

Understanding human nature is neither merely empirical nor free from normativity. Drawing the borders between humans and animals or distinguishing between different ‘types’ of human beings (e.g. in...

In Sharing Freedom, Geneviève Rousselière explores the French revolutionary tradition’s singular contributions to republicanism by focusing on its internal tensions and its exclusions. French revol...

.....الصديق الصادقي العماري، دور وسائل التواصل الاجتماعي في تعزيز قيم المواطنة الإنسانية لدى الشباب، ضمن مؤتمر أسبوع التقارب والوئام الإنساني-الرابع-، منشورات مركز السلطان قابوس العالي للثقافة والعلوم، سلطنة عمان، فبراير 2015....... ساعدت تكنولوجيا المعلومات والاتصال الرقمية على ربط التواصل بين الشعوب بمختلف توجهاتها الحضارية متجاوزة بذلك الحدود السياسية والجغرافية، وفك العزلة الحضارية التي كانت تعيشها معظم المجتمعات البشرية، إذ يشهد عالمنا المعاصر تحولات كبيرة في تكنولوجيا الاتصال، تؤثر في العلاقات السياسية والاقتصادية، وفي أنماط التفكير وأنماط العيش في المجتمعات المختلفة، وقد (...) قامت وسائل التواصل الاجتماعي الرقمية ولازالت تقوم بدور فعال في إمداد الإنسان بكثير من المعلومات والمواقف والاتجاهات، مساهمة بذلك في تشكيل وعيه وبإعداده ليكون أكثر قدرة على التأثير في الآخرين واستمالتهم، فهي تقدم تعلم اللغات وتسهم في ترجمة المعلومات من أجل تسهيل عملية التواصل بين الشباب و إزالة الفوارق الحضارية، فضلا عن تميز هذه الوسائل بعدة مميزات منها التشاركية والتفاعلية والحضور الدائم غير المادي. فقد وفر ظهور وسائل التواصل الاجتماعي فتحا ثوريا، نقل الإعلام إلى آفاق غير مسبوقة، وأعطى مستخدميه فرصا كبرى للتأثير والانتقال عبر الحدود بلا قيود ولا رقابة بشكل نسبي محدود. إذ أوجد ظهور وسائل التواصل الاجتماعي قنوات للبث المباشر من جمهورها في تطور يغير من جوهر النظريات الاتصالية المعروفة، ويوقف احتكار صناعة الرسالة الإعلامية لينقلها إلى مدى أوسع وأكثر شمولية، وبقدرة تأثيرية وتفاعلية لم يتصورها خبراء الاتصال. وأبرز حراك الشباب العربي الذي تمثل في الثورات التي شهدتها بعض الدول العربية قدرة هذا النوع من الإعلام على التأثير في تغيير ملامح المجتمعات، وإعطاء قيمة مضافة في الحياة السياسية، والتأكيد على منافسة الإعلام التقليدي. أما المواطنة فقد أصبحت، بما يترتب عليها من واجبات وحقوق للمواطنين، مقولة مركزية للديمقراطية ومقوما أساسيا من مقومات الحداثة السياسية والاجتماعية، بل إن خلو دستور أية دولة دون الإشارة إلى هذه الحقوق وضرورة صيانتها والمحافظة عليها يعد من منظور الأخلاق الديمقراطية مخالفة قانونية وسياسية وانتقاصا من مشروعية السلطة ذاتها . كما أخذت المواطنة في العصر الحديث معنى جديدا تعكسه المنزلة التي أصبح يحتلها المواطن في المجتمعات الديمقراطية الحديثة، وتحددت تحت تأثير مجموعة من التحولات طبعت المجتمعات المعاصرة خلال منتصف القرن العشرين، هذه التحولات بعضها اقتصادي أو سياسي و البعض الأخر منها أيديولوجي إلا أن أهمها هو انتصار التوجهات التي أكدت على أولوية الفرد وشرعية استقلاله تجاه المجتمع، وحقه في رعاية مطالبه ومتابعة أهدافه بكل حرية في حدود احترام القوانين وقد شهدت العقود الأخيرة تعمقا قويا لهذا المبدأ. لقد غيرت المواطنة الحديثة بعمق الصورة الكلاسيكية للمواطن؛ حيث تعد حرية التعبير والمعتقد من الأصول الأساسية التي يقوم عليها نظام الدولة القانونية الديمقراطية، كما تعتبر وسائل الإعلام بمختلف صورها من أهم وسائل التعبير عن حرية الرأي في العالم المعاصر، لكن التطورات الحاصلة في مختلف مجالات الحياة الإنسانية جعلت الأحداث والظواهر والتطورات تفقد بساطتها الأولى، باعتبار التكنولوجيا الحديثة متغير أساسي في هذا المقياس، الأمر الذي دفع باتجاه ظهور إعلام متخصص يستطيع أن يقدم معالجة نوعية تتميز بمستوى من الجدية والعمق والشمولية، وتنوع وظائف وسائل الإعلام وانتقالها من اهتماماتها الكلاسيكية من نقل الأخبار إلى معالجة الأوضاع فأصبحت من ضروريات الحياة، فهي بمثابة حلقة وصل بين كل مؤسسات ومقومات ومكونات البناء الاجتماعي، وعلى عاتقها تقوم بشرح وتقديم ما لدى كل مؤسسة اجتماعية لأخرى؛ إذ تؤدي وسائل الإعلام دور بالغ الأهمية والخطورة في تكوين الرأي العام وفي تشكيله، وفي تعبئة الجماعات وحشدها حول أفكار وأراء واتجاهات معينة. (shrink)

According to Richard Cumberland, men’s natural law obligation to promote the common good does not derive from self-interest, but there is really no conflict between private and public happiness because the former is contained in the latter. The aim of this paper is to disentangle the various arguments supposed to support this claim and to focus specifically on the ‘parity of reason’ argument which draws upon the principle of treating like cases alike. I will show that Cumberland tends to confuse (...) the principle with a more substantive Golden Rule-like principle requiring that we treat others like ourselves and that he appeals to ideas of both impartiality and reciprocity in doing so. Moreover, I will argue that Cumberland’s failure to fully grasp the distinction between these three concepts derives from the way in which the overall structure of his argument integrates the perspective of human rational agents with the perspective of God. (shrink)

A memoir of J. G. A. Pocock derived from his correspondence with Quentin Skinner between 1965 and 2020. The letters follow the development of Pocock’s career from his early years in New Zealand to his move to the United States in 1966 and his long period of teaching at Johns Hopkins University. Among the topics covered are the gestation and publication of Pocock’s most famous book, The Machiavellian Moment, and the evolution of his six-volume study of Gibbon’s history, Barbarism and (...) Religion. Much new light is also cast on Pocock’s personality, family life, relations with colleagues, and political beliefs. (shrink)

The early twentieth-century American neo-realists’ approach to consciousness is historically reconstructed and critically discussed. With reference to the relevant works of Ralph Barton Perry, William Pepperrell Montague, and Edwin B. Holt, it is argued that Montague and Holt, in particular, struggled with the problem of error and disagreed strongly on their solutions to it. Finally, a line is drawn to related discussions in contemporary philosophy of mind.

This article contributes to the genealogy of the concept of academic freedom with a focus on the English universities in the middle of the seventeenth century. It argues that libertas scholastica (the corporate freedom of the universities) and libertas philosophandi (liberty of philosophizing, within and without the universities) were distinctive guiding concepts, sometimes in opposition but occasionally complementary, in debates over the universities in this period. If these two notions together constitute the antecedents of the modern concept of academic freedom, (...) their conjunction must be recognized as a much more contingent and irregular phenomenon than has been previously understood. (shrink)

This article traces the emergence and application of Max Weber’s influential concept of charisma in his “Confucianism and Taoism” (1920) and “Politics as a Vocation" (1919), two texts that have not received much attention in the discussion of charisma. Through these texts, we learn to appreciate Weber’s engagement with classical Chinese philosophy and the global composition of this key idea in the twentieth century.

This article analyzes the published testimonies of French shipwreck survivors to trace the emergence of a settler colonial ideal in nineteenth-century France. Emerging from the encounters of French survivors with the men of the Anglo-World, this ideal encouraged compassionate, paternalist authority as a solution to the ongoing conflict of paternal despotism and disorderly fraternal freedom in France. The community of sentiment imagined in shipwreck testimonies was gendered and racialized, cultivating white compassion across colonial empires. These transimperial affective ties allowed the (...) settler colonial ideal to persist in the early twentieth century, despite the abandonment of further projects for French settlement. (shrink)

A review essay on recent books considering archaeology and ethno-nationalist projection, including books by Johann Chapoutot, Jean-Paul Demoule, Ashish Avikunthak, and Raphael Greenberg and Yannis Hamilakis.

Although the Republic of Letters has become today a main area of interdisciplinary research, early North America has remained largely impermeable to this new body of scholarship. In this article I use the category of the Republic of Letters to overcome some of the limitations of the “Atlantic world” paradigm and to shed new light on the intellectual history of eighteenth-century America. Along with studying the means through which American savants gathered information about scholarly trends and recent publications, I also (...) bring to light the strategies they used to actively contribute to the production and organization of knowledge. (shrink)

This article examines responses from Lutheran pastors, theologians, and physicians to the arguments given by Johann Weyer in 1563 that those women who confessed to a pact with the devil suffered from melancholy and were thus not responsible for their acts. Weyer’s conception of melancholy was a medical one, yet among Lutheran pastors and theologians the concept of a spiritual form of melancholy emerged that came from religious sources. The article clarifies the difference between the concepts of medical and spiritual (...) melancholy within Lutheranism and reviews the respective roles they played in the debates over Weyer’s arguments. (shrink)

Presented in this paper are reasons to believe that Wilhelm von Humboldt’s philosophy of language and linguistics are grounded in Kant’s philosophy and in particular his problem of how the passive sensibility and the generative understanding are united in experience. Here, through a presentation of Kant’s position, along with an analysis of Humboldt’s climate of opinion and a study of his philosophy of language and linguistics, the paper shows that his answer to Kant’s quandary is to place language as the (...) creative and imaginative core at the heart of human experience. (shrink)

A number of recent papers or monographs have examined Susan Stebbing's criticisms of Arthur Eddington's scientific-philosophical writing. These papers focus on Stebbing's critique of Eddington's attempt to infer philosophical conclusions from developments in modern physics, his view that there is a discrepancy between the world of science and the world of common sense (best encapsulated by his famous ‘two tables’ metaphor), and his use of ‘inexact language’ to try and convey modern scientific insights to his readers. On November 10th 1938, (...) Eddington presented a paper at the Moral Sciences Club in Cambridge entitled “Prof. Stebbing's ‘Philosophy and the Physicists'”. Eddington did not go on to publish this paper and it is not discussed in relevant scholarship. However, the details of Eddington’s talk are outlined in the minutes of that meeting. I argue that these minutes provide new insights into both the Stebbing-Eddington debate and developments in Eddington's late philosophical views. A full transcription of the minutes is included as an Appendix to this paper. (shrink)

Scotus’ theory of identity and distinction is a unique and central aspect of his thought, as he applies it throughout his metaphysics. On Scotus’ account of identity, the indiscernibility of identicals fails – i.e. A and B can be identical but not share all the same properties. As Ockham objected, Scotus is now in the difficult position of needing to provide alternative necessary and sufficient conditions for being identical, rather than simply invoking indiscernibility. The secondary literature has argued that the (...) lack of actual or potential separation is both necessary and sufficient for identity. I argue that is incorrect and provide alternative necessary and sufficient conditions for identity and real distinction, along with an analysis of Scotus’ theory of identity and distinction more broadly. Scotus thinks instead that the lack of actual, potential, and proportional separation are necessary and sufficient conditions for identity. The deeper root of this view is that identity corresponds to a certain degree of unity, and is accompanied by a sharing of esse. (shrink)

The model-theoretic definition of logical consequence provides an account of a modal conception of logical consequence in terms of a topic-neutral conception of consequence as truth preservation in all models. I argue that Aristotle also provides an account of a modal conception of consequence in terms of the semantic and metaphysical facts that validate the moods, and so is engaged in a project comparable to the model-theoretic project. There are however notable differences between the two projects. Aristotle’s modal conception of (...) logical consequence is not our notion of classical validity. His conception of topic-neutrality does not employ notions of formality or independence from worldly features but rather relies on highly general features of the world. And finally, Aristotle’s account of logical consequence is plausible only in the presence of views in semantics, the theory of relations, and mereology, which might strike us as foreign. (shrink)

Fazang is a seminal figure for the tradition of Huayan Buddhism. Essay on the Golden Lion is the most widely translated into English of his writings. Yet systematic English-language scholarship on Fazang’s Essay is relatively sparse. Scholars agree that the central focus of the Essay is the relation between principle and thing — a relation akin to the one between emptiness and form and, according to Fazang, also akin to the relation between the golden substance of a lion statue and (...) the statue itself. Scholars disagree about what principle is. They also disagree about how Fazang conceptualizes the relation between principle and thing. This paper develops a novel interpretation for Fazang's conception of the principle-thing relation. The methodology involves situating Fazang's metaphor of the golden lion in relation to prior efforts, by Chinese Buddhists, to conceptualize the emptiness-form relation and using theoretical considerations, from some of Fazang’s other writings, to interpret various remarks Fazang makes about his metaphor of the golden lion. (shrink)

What, if anything, changes between Hume's moral theory as presented in the Treatise of Human Nature and then in the Enquiry concerning the Principles of Morals? This question has received increased attention, especially focused on Hume's presentation of sympathy and humanity, and the connection of those principles to Hume's account of moral sentiments. While there is a strong consensus that Hume is making important stylistic changes to the presentation of his views, scholars are divided on the question of whether there (...) are also substantive changes to the views. This paper sides with those who hold that there are substantive changes, offering new evidence for that position. I argue that Hume revised his Treatise account of sympathy to better accommodate cases of affective difference and incapacity. After presenting these cases, I show that Hume's Treatise account of the sympathy mechanism and its role in the production of moral sentiments is more seriously threatened by the problem of affective difference and incapacity than the corresponding account in the second Enquiry. This gives us persuasive evidence in support of the interpretations that hold that there are substantive changes in the second Enquiry, while also helping to explain Hume's motivation for such changes. (shrink)

The standard interpretation of Avicenna's correspondence theory of truth posits that propositions either correspond to what exists extramentally or otherwise their truthmaker is mental existence. An influential post-Avicennian philosopher, Naṣīr al-Dīn Ṭūsī (d. 1274) points to the insufficiency of the above division of propositions and their respective truthmakers. He mentions the possibility of conceiving false propositions, such as ‘One is not half of two’ and postulates the necessity of the existence of another truthmaking domain for their true counterparts which he (...) calls nafs al-amr. It is where objective and timeless entities, such as mathematical propositions, are located. While some claim that Ṭūsī's identification of this domain with the first Separate Intellect is a testimony to his Avicennian convictions, Ṭūsī's solution is a conspicuous departure from Avicenna that not only helps him remedy the insufficiency of Avicenna's theory of truth but is consistent with his critique of Avicenna's theory of God’s knowledge. (shrink)

Volume 32, Issue 6, December 2024, Page 1508-1512.

I argue for a substantive interpretation of Carlos Vaz Ferreira’s account of intellectual flourishing as intellectual liberation. For Vaz Ferreira, I argue, there is an inescapable master-slave dynamic between language and language users, so that flourishing intellectually essentially involves a type of mastery of language that frees up thinking from enslaving linguistic/conceptual confusions and thus facilitates the acquisition of truth. Central to this project are Vaz Ferreira’s most interesting, and radical, views on the nature of language signification and thus on (...) human’s ability to accurately describe and know reality, for failing to keep these linguistic limitations in mind, Vaz Ferreira argues, is a central way for language to enslave humans to confused thinking and thus prevent their intellectual flourishing. (shrink)

This contribution deals with a number of challenges faced by translation historians of the French Revolution. First, the challenge of extending the translation category by including a range of transfer modalities that gravitate around translation. Second, the challenge of finding a balance between two historians’ viewpoints: those who want to know what the Revolution has meant for translation and those who want to know what translation has meant for the Revolution. Third, the challenge of relating the different scales of translators’ (...) activities taking simultaneously or successively place in local, national and transnational settings. (shrink)

Isaiah Berlin’s “Two Concepts of Liberty” lecture was the iconic statement of Cold War liberalism, an expression of all its insights and limitations. It divided critics then and now: was it a stimulating restatement of classical liberalism with revitalising potential for post-war democracy or a conservative retreat from politics that paralysed liberalism as both a social and political force? This article approaches the debate from a side angle. It looks at how the Freedom anarchist group addressed the problems raised by (...) the lecture. Of all ideologies, anarchism most elevated liberty as the highest good. At the same time, it considered itself a social movement for the advance of liberty. As such, the tension highlighted by “Two Concepts”, between the intrinsic value of liberty and the pursuit of liberty, had long preoccupied generations of anarchist thinkers but never more so than after the War, where inherited assumptions about revolution and social change became implausible. Although Berlin identified anarchism with the fullest realisation of positive liberty, the movement was more philosophically diverse than he recognised. The Freedom group’s responses to his dilemma of liberty demonstrates this. At the same time, their efforts to think beyond the impasse and experiment with new forms of political practice – as exemplified by Anarchy, Freedom’s sister publication – outstripped those of the liberals casting fresh light on the limits and possibilities of freedom in a Cold War world. (shrink)

This is a highly specialized monograph that nonetheless contains an abundance of arresting observations on a variety of topics related to the Enlightenment. The main subject is the ancient Greek my...

In his classic account, Michel Foucault presented biopolitics as the powers and controls associated with the management and regulation of populations. According to Foucault, these were made possibl...

The most important democratic newspaper of the Cisalpine Republic, the Termometro politico della Lombardia, published in March 1798 an anonymous article entitled ‘To the translators from French, a friend of the good Italian language’. It was a particularly critical moment in Milan's political life, as the treaty of alliance imposed by the Paris Directory had caused much discontent in democratic circles. The article certainly arises also from this situation; in fact it condemns the will of the French authorities to impose (...) their language in political, cultural and social life and criticizes those who corrupted the purity of the Italian language by using in their translations a language modelled on French both in terms of vocabulary and syntax. The author gives in particular the example of the translation of Diderot's Religieuse published in Milan in 1797 by the Genoese Gaspare Sauli. The patriots, determined to create a unitary republic in the peninsula, despite their democratic background took sides against French politics, which were not favourable to Italian unity. Their political programme was defeated, but they passed on to the age of the Risorgimento the cult of language as the main foundation of national consciousness. (shrink)

This essay argues for the significance of visual sources in intellectual history, using a case study on the central importance of snuffboxes in eighteenth-century debates regarding politeness, commerce, virtue, and manners. It highlights the authors, artists and advertisers who celebrated snuff-taking in both verbal and visual texts as a positive symbol of elegance, sociability and the transformative effects of polite commerce. And it analyses the highly sophisticated texts of London satirists who challenged this practice as symbolising the corruption associated with (...) luxury and commerce. Challenges to this practice, which involved some of the century’s most brilliant pens, from Sir John Vanburgh to William Hogarth and James Gillray, have been neglected by intellectual historians because of a tendency to treat visual sources as illustrations, rather than as significant contributions to political theory and debate. This essay argues that such an approach has resulted in an impoverished intellectual history and that images – and even snuffboxes themselves, used in highly articulated ritual performances of politeness and satirised in highly gendered terms – should be regarded as ‘texts’ and ‘idioms’ in the politics of politeness and patronage. It highlights Cambridge school contextualism as a method by which such texts may be read productively. (shrink)

This article presents the first detailed analysis of the ways in which border-crossing author and balladeer John Jones (pseudonym ‘Jac Glan-y-Gors’) remodelled a range of Thomas Paine’s writings into Welsh republican pamphlets by translating key passages, interpolating culturally relevant indigenous material, and consolidating Paine’s anti-monarchical core vocabulary. In doing so, the article provides a blueprint for examining the operation of intellectual networks who transferred ideas and cultural artefacts to smaller or non-hegemonic cultures and the process of embedding them. Jones’s work (...) is analysed against the history of an early modern Welsh ‘translation culture’ that enabled a substantial expansion of radical translation activity, in tandem with the democratisation of the English press in the wake of the French Revolution of 1789, transferring Enlightenment and revolutionary artefacts, formats and ideas to Wales and the Welsh language. Using publishing networks that linked metropolitan London to rural Wales, an indigenous Welsh intelligentsia combined English models with indigenous cultural forms to produce a radical print culture in their own language. Jones’s republican pamphlets, the only substantial reception of Paine’s writings in Welsh, are read in the context of these processes. (shrink)

I need hardly say – but shall do so anyway – that is an extraordinary honour to have my work discussed by four scholars whom I have for so long admired. My gratitude to them for their comments on m...

Alexis karpouzos is a visioner in the development of post-history sense of cosmic unity and the integral consciousness. For him, spirituality is not just about personal enlightenment but is deeply connected to moral action. He view ethical living as a natural outgrowth of spiritual awareness. In his worldview, the divine is not something distant or abstract but is present in every human being, and this awareness should lead to moral behavior that reflects love, justice, and equality. In many of his (...) writings, Alexis karpouzos calls for the realization of a moral society, one that is based on mutual respect, compassion, and the recognition of the divine essence in all people. His commitment to social reform, education, and the improvement of human welfare can be seen as an extension of his spiritual values, grounded in the belief that the divine resides within every person, regardless of their social or economic status. Alexis karpouzos believe that the process of spiritual growth was a deeply personal journey. He often spoke of the importance of inner freedom and self-realization. For him, true liberation was not something that could be granted from outside, but a state of consciousness that could only be attained through deep self-awareness and connection to the universe. This self-realization, however, did not mean renouncing the social and historical world; rather, it involved seeing the universal consciousness in all aspects of life and acting in alignment with it. (shrink)

In the Netflix series, Geralt of Rivia is portrayed, at first glance, as a stoic role model full of humility, courage, and trustworthiness. The chapter explores the contrast between Geralt's Kantian outlook and Yennefer's egoism. The Kantian view is the ideal philosophical frame to help us make sense of what a duty to be a friend of humanity means, even though Geralt himself has much to learn about becoming a true friend of humanity.

This special issue is a collective effort to respond to a growing debate in many fields over the way in which the global and transnational approaches can change our study of the past. Over the last...

This article presents some previously unpublished evidence of Isaac Casaubon’s studies of Islamic coins preserved in his notebooks. The notes show Casaubon’s attempts to decipher the coins, as well as the European-wide efforts of a group of scholars, including Nicolas-Claude Fabri de Peiresc in France, Thomas Erpenius in the Netherlands and John Selden in England, to make sense of Arabic epigraphic inscriptions, attributions and titles on coinage; and it reveals the contribution to these efforts of a former enslaved person and (...) dragoman of the Republic of Venice, two Lebanese Maronites, a Turkish diplomat and an enslaved Moroccan at the port of Marseille. In particular, this study analyses Casaubon’s attempts to read, translate and decipher a group of Islamic coins, including a Norman coin, an Abbasid coin, an Ottoman coin, a stone seal amulet, an Artuqid coin and a contemporary Moroccan coin. It provides annotated Latin texts and modern English translations of Casaubon’s notes, along with Archbishop James Ussher’s comments on them; and it offers a potential identification of the coins. The article demonstrates that the coins were treated more as vehicles for the inscriptions they bore than as artefacts in their own right and confirms that the earliest approaches to understanding Islamic material culture in Europe were mediated through the Arabic language. Casaubon’s notes on Arabic and Turkish coins are among the first and most comprehensive studies of Islamic material culture of the early modern period. (shrink)

Bernard de Lavinheta is commonly recognised as a seminal figure in Renaissance and early modern encyclopedism. A Spanish Franciscan and close colleague of Jacques Lefèvre d’Étaples, Charles de Bovelles and the Fabrist circle in Paris, he published his Practica compendiosa in 1523, marking a major milestone in the Lullist tradition. Yet the focus on Lavinheta as a pioneer of early modern method has often served to obscure his connection to a long medieval tradition of encyclopedism. Drawing out his links to (...) the Franciscan and Lullist traditions and to Nicholas of Cusa, this article seeks to reveal Lavinheta as pursuing an exemplarist encyclopedism in which logic, metaphysics and mathematics all cohere in Christ and demonstrate a pronounced Trinitarian dynamic. In doing so, it reveals an important spiritual and transformative dimension to the early modern encyclopedia, recontextualising the roots of universal reform in a long Franciscan tradition. (shrink)

Giovanni Antonio Ranza’s Italian newspaper Monitore italiano politico e letterario is an ideal case for understanding the diffusion of revolutionary ideas not as a circulation or a transfer, but as an entanglement, through which revolutionary values grow in the process of their own reinterpretation and application onto the pragmatism of cultural and political struggle. Published from January to June 1793 in Nice, this periodical was conceived as a tool to explain the developments of the French Revolution and to radicalize the (...) Italian people. Translating many of the newest and most radical documents produced by the constitutional debates and military decrees in France, Ranza helped to shape a mature political understanding of the Italian democratic radicalism, which would bloom after the Napoleonic campaign of 1796–1797. (shrink)

When Theobald Wolfe Tone arrived in France in February 1796, intent on securing French help to win Irish independence from England and to establish a republic in Ireland, his greatest challenge was not to convince the Directory to launch an expedition to Ireland, but in persuading them that the Irish were mature enough to become republicans and were not mere Chouans. Was Tone deluded and did he embellish the revolutionary potential of the Irish, especially the secret society of the Defenders, (...) as the dominant (revisionist) historiography claims? A close look at the available sources, and a new reading against the grain, or under a ‘satanic light’, of the available sources, allows us to better delineate what could have been an Irish republic or, at least, to situate the Defenders within an Atlantic context of popular politicisation – the ‘Atlantic Republic’. (shrink)