What is time? This is one of the most fundamental questions we can ask. Emily Thomas explores how a new theory of time emerged in the seventeenth century. The 'absolute' theory of time held that it is independent of material bodies or human minds, so even if nothing else existed there would be time.

From French miniature paintings to the work of Pope Pius II, this collection of essays explores the philosophical history behind medieval European art. The essays reveal how a visual vocabulary was established among French miniature painters to express the concepts of personal identity and alterity in their work and how Pope Pius II helped spread these metaphysical ideologies across the eastern Christian world. An exhaustive and articulate guide to European art in the Middle Ages, this book is essential reading for (...) art students and enthusiasts alike. (shrink)

Imagination has always been recognised as an important faculty of the human soul. As mediator between the senses and reason, it is rooted in philosophical and psychological-medical theories of human sensation and cognition. Linked to these theories was the use of the imagination in rhetoric and the arts: images had not only an epistemological role in transmitting information from the outside world to the mind's inner eye, but could also be used to manipulate the emotions of the audience. In this (...) tradition, with Cicero and Quintilian as its auctoritates, images were used to arouse and manipulate the emotions. Both traditions had to be revalued in the seventeenth century with the advent of a mechanist, Cartesian picture of human cognition and the physical world. In spite of their usual suspicion of imagination, which was commonly associated with illusions, dreams and fiction, seventeenth-century philosophers realised that the imagination also had its place in mathematical, scientific and philosophical thinking. This volume, number XII in the series Groningen Studies in Cultural Change, offers the papers presented at a workshop on imagination, organised by the editors in September 2002. It covers both the philosophical-psychological as well as the humanist-rhetorical traditions, discussing key figures such as Kilwardby, Lorenzo Valla, Leon Battista Alberti, Agricola, Gianfrancesco Pico, Erasmus, Paracelsus, Kepler, Bacon, Suarez, Descartes and Spinoza, but also treating hitherto neglected texts and writers such as Nicholas of Amsterdam and Jean Lemaire de Belges. By focusing on the ever-shifting ideas of the imagination as a philosophical and rhetorical tool, this volume not only deepens our understanding of its central theme but also sheds new light on the thought and writings of these and other authors. (shrink)

There is a general sense that the philosophy of Descartes was a dominant force in early modern thought. Since the work in the nineteenth century of French historians of Cartesian philosophy, however, there has been no fully contextualized comparative examination of the various receptions of Descartes in different portions of early modern Europe. This study addresses the need for a more current understanding of these receptions by considering the different constructions of Descartes's thought that emerged in (...) the Calvinist United Provinces and Catholic France, the two main centers for early modern Cartesianism, during the period dating from the last decades of his life to the century or so following his death in 1650. It turns out that we must speak not of a single early modern Cartesianism rigidly defined in terms of Descartes's own authorial intentions, but rather of a loose collection of early modern Cartesianisms that involve a range of different positions on various sets of issues. Though more or less rooted in Descartes's somewhat open-ended views, these Cartesianisms evolved in different ways over time in response to different intellectual and social pressures. Chapters of this study are devoted to: the early modern Catholic and Calvinist condemnations of Descartes and the incompatible Cartesian responses to these; conflicting attitudes among early modern Cartesians toward ancient thought and modernity; competing early modern attempts to combine Descartes's views with those of Augustine; the different occasionalist accounts of causation within early modern Cartesianism; and the impact of various forms of early modern Cartesianism on both Dutch medicine and French physics. (shrink)

By investigating conceptions of experience from Descartes to Kant, this book shows that one of the central questions of the early-modern period was how humans can instantiate in their actions the principles of rational moral agency, while at the same time responding with their bodies to the causal play of nature. Through the analysis of this question, the book draws attention to the bodily underpinnings of the ability to experience thoughts and feelings. It thus challenges overly subjectivist interpretations (...) that concentrate on the inner realm of the experiencing mind and because of this fail to account for the worldly dimension of being experientially responsive to the affections of the body. (shrink)

The History of Western Philosophy of Religion brings together an international team of over 100 leading scholars to provide authoritative exposition of how history's most important philosophical thinkers - from antiquity to the present day - have sought to analyse the concepts and tenets central to Western religious belief, especially Christianity. Divided chronologically into five volumes, The History of Western Philosophy of Religion is designed to be accessible to a wide range of readers, from the scholar looking for original insight (...) and the latest research findings to the student wishing for a masterly encapsulation of a particular philosopher's views. Together these volumes provide an indispensable resource for anyone conducting research or teaching in the philosophy of religion and related fields, such as theology, religious studies, the history of philosophy, and the history of ideas. Volume 3 covers the early modern period which witnessed a revolution in science and natural philosophy that swept away two millennia of Aristotelian certainty in a human-centred universe. Covering some of the most important figures in the history of Western thought - notably Descartes, Locke, Hume and Kant - Early Modern Philosophy of Religion charts the philosophical understanding of religion at a time of intellectual and spiritual revolution. (shrink)

Introduction: Laughter as an expression of human nature in the Middle Ages and the early modern period: literary, historical, theological, philosophical, and psychological reflections -- Judith Hagen. Laughter in Procopius's wars -- Livnat Holtzman. "Does God really laugh?": appropriate and inappropriate descriptions of God in Islamic traditionalist theology -- Daniel F. Pigg. Laughter in Beowulf: ambiguity, ambivalence, and group identity formation -- Mark Burde. The parodia sacra problem and medieval comic studies -- Olga V. Trokhimenko. Women's laughter and (...) gender politics in medieval conduct discourse -- Madelon Köhler-Busch. Pushing decorum: uneasy laughter in Heinrich von Dem Türlîn's Diu crône -- Connie L. Scarborough. Laughter and the comic in a religious text -- John Sewell. The son rebelled and so the father made man alone: ridicule and boundary maintenance in The Nizzahon vetus -- Birgit Wiedl. Laughing at the beast: the judensau: anti-Jewish propaganda and humor from the Middle Ages to the early modern period -- Fabian Alfie. Yes . . . but was it funny? Cecco Angiolieri, Rustico Filippi and Giovanni Boccaccio -- Nicolino Applauso. Curses and laughter in medieval Italian comic poetry -- Feargal Béarra. Tromdhámh guaire: a context for laughter and audience in early modern Ireland -- Jean E. Jost. Humorous transgression in the non-conformist fabliaux: a Bakhtinian analysis of three comic tales -- Gretchen Mieszkowski. Chaucerian comedy: Troilus and Criseyde -- Sarah Gordon. Laughing and eating in the fabliaux -- Christine Bousquet-Labouérie. Laughter and medieval stalls -- Scott L. Taylor. Esoteric humor and the incommensurability of laughter -- Jean N. Goodrich. The function of laughter in The second shepherds' play -- Albrecht Classen. Laughing in late-medieval verse and prose narratives -- Rosa Alvarez perez. The workings of desire: Panurge and the dogs -- Elizabeth Chesney Zegura. Laughing out loud in the Heptaméron: a reassessment of Marguerite de Navarre's ambivalent humor -- Lia B. Ross. You had to be there: the elusive humor of the Sottie -- Kyle Diroberto. Sacred parody in Robert Greene's Groatsworth of wit -- Martha Moffitt Peacock. The comedy of the shrew: theorizing humor in early modern Netherlandish art -- Jessica Tvordi. The comic personas of Milton's Prolusion VI: negotiating masculine identity through self-directed humor -- John Alexander. Ridentum dicere verum (using laughter to speak the truth): laughter and the language of the early modern clown "pickelhering" in German literature of the late seventeenth century (1675-1700) -- Thomas Willard. Andreae's ludibrium: Menippean satire in The chymische hochzeit -- Diane Rudall. The comic power of illusion-allusion -- Allison P. Coudert. Laughing at credulity and superstition in the long eighteenth century. (shrink)

Feminist work in the history of philosophy has been going on for several decades. Some scholars have focused on the ways philosophical concepts are themselves gendered. Others have recovered women writers who were well known in their own time but forgotten in ours, while still others have firmly placed into a philosophical context the works of women writers long celebrated within other disciplines in the humanities. The recovery of women writers has challenged the myth that there are no women in (...) the history of philosophy, but it has not eradicated it. What, we may ask, is impeding our progress? This paper argues that so often we treat early modern women philosophers’ texts in ways that are different from, or inconsistent with, the explicit commitments of the analytic tradition, and in so doing, we may be triggering our audiences to reject these women as philosophers, and their texts as philosophical. Moreover, this is the case despite our intention to achieve precisely the opposite effect. (shrink)

The notions of other peoples, cultures, and natural conditions have always been determined by the epistemology of imagination and fantasy, providing much freedom and creativity, and yet have also created much fear, anxiety, and horror. In this regard, the pre-modern world demonstrates striking parallels with our own insofar as the projections of alterity might be different by degrees, but they are fundamentally the same by content. Dreams, illusions, projections, concepts, hopes, utopias/dystopias, desires, and emotional attachments are as specific and (...) impactful as the physical environment. This volume thus sheds important light on the various lenses used by people in the Middle Ages and the early modern age as to how they came to terms with their perceptions, images, and notions. Previous scholarship focused heavily on the history of mentality and history of emotions, whereas here the history of pre-modern imagination, and fantasy assumes center position. Imaginary things are taken seriously because medieval and early modern writers and artists clearly reveal their great significance in their works and their daily lives. This approach facilitates a new deep-structure analysis of pre-modern culture. (shrink)

武士教訓の特質とは―定説化された士道・武士道論の枠組みに飛び込み、そこからの脱却をはかる意欲的論考―.

Laborie and Hessayon bring rare prophetic and millenarian texts to an international audience by presenting sources from all over Europe (broadly defined), and across the early modern period in English for the first time.

This volume provides a comprehensive historico-doctrinal analysis of the transformation of the concept of time in the transition from the medieval debate to ...

_Time and the Science of the Soul in Early Modern Philosophy_ traces the complex and productive connections established between time and the soul from late Aristotelianism to the natural and political philosophy of Thomas Hobbes and René Descartes.

The following essay is divided in three parts. First, while sharing in principle Harrison's hypothesis of an affinity between the sixteenth-century Reformation and early modern science, it questions the connection between the latter and the Weberian “disenchantment of the world.” Second, it suggests a broader group of possible actors than that envisaged by Harrison in referring to virtuoso collectors and their cabinets of curiosities who are rather marginalized in Harrison's narrative. And third, it highlights the physico-theology of the (...) second half of the seventeenth and the first half of the eighteenth century and beyond as an important temporary fusion of religion/theology and science at a time when the new science was still striving for social and religious respectability. (shrink)

The following essay is divided in three parts. First, while sharing in principle Harrison's hypothesis of an affinity between the sixteenth‐century Reformation and early modern science, it questions the connection between the latter and the Weberian “disenchantment of the world.” Second, it suggests a broader group of possible actors than that envisaged by Harrison in referring to virtuoso collectors and their cabinets of curiosities who are rather marginalized in Harrison's narrative. And third, it highlights (in agreement with Harrison) (...) the physico‐theology of the second half of the seventeenth and the first half of the eighteenth century and beyond as an important temporary fusion of religion/theology and science at a time when the new science was still striving for social and religious respectability. (shrink)

Starting from the works by Aselli on the milky veins and Harvey on the motion of the heart and the circulation of the blood, the practice of vivisection witnessed a resurgence in the early modern period. I discuss some of the most notable cases in the century spanning from Aselli’s work to the investigations of fluid pressure in plants and animals by Stephen Hales. Key figures in my study include Johannes Walaeus, Jean Pecquet, Marcello Malpighi, Reinier de Graaf, (...) Richard Lower, Anton Nuck, and Anton de Heide. Although vivisection dates from antiquity, early modern experimenters expanded the range of practices and epistemic motivations associated with it, displaying considerable technical skills and methodological awareness about the problems associated with the animals being alive and the issue of generalizing results to humans. Many practitioners expressed great discomfort at the suffering of the animals; however, many remained convinced that their investigations were not only indispensable from an epistemic standpoint but also had potential medical applications. Early modern vivisection experiments were both extensive and sophisticated and cannot be ignored in the literature of early modern experimentation or of experimentation on living organisms across time. (shrink)

_Early Modern Women and the Problem of Evil_ examines the concept of theodicy—the attempt to reconcile divine perfection with the existence of evil—through the lens of early modern female scholars. This timely volume knits together the perennial problem of defining evil with current scholarly interest in women’s roles in the evolution of religious philosophy. Accessible for those without a background in philosophy or theology, Jill Graper Hernandez’s text will be of interest to upper-level undergraduates as well as (...) graduate students and researchers. (shrink)

The work of women philosophers in the early modern period has traditionally been overlooked, yet their writing on topics such as reality, time, mind and matter holds valuable lessons for our understanding of metaphysics and its history. This volume of new essays explores the work of nine key female figures: Bathsua Makin, Anna Maria van Schurman, Elisabeth of Bohemia, Margaret Cavendish, Anne Conway, Damaris Cudworth Masham, Mary Astell, Catharine Trotter Cockburn, and Émilie Du Châtelet. Investigating issues from eternity (...) to free will and from body to natural laws, the essays uncover long-neglected perspectives and demonstrate their importance for philosophical debates, both then and now. Combining careful philosophical analysis with discussion of the intellectual and historical context of each thinker, they will set the agenda for future enquiry and will appeal to scholars and students of the history of metaphysics, science, religion and feminism. (shrink)

It is a challenge in teaching early modern philosophy to balance historical faithfulness to the arguments and concerns of early modern philosophers and interpreting them as relevant to the kinds of thinking that contemporary undergraduate students find plausible. Early modern philosophy is unique, however, in applying modern scientific method directly to problems concerning nonphysical aspects of reality that our contemporary scientific thought, and with it mainstream contemporary culture, no longer find amenable in their (...) own, independent right to reliable reasoned approaches. At the same time, early modern philosophy often also takes seriously purely conceptual or logically consequential thought in the investigation of these topics, as our mainstream contemporary culture does not. This kind of thought, we argue, is distinctive of philosophy in general and appropriate to nonphysical aspects of reality. Early modern philosophy, then, offers a bridge between the kind of reasoned, objective thought our mainstream culture finds plausible and thought about nonphysical reality or, in general, the thought that characterizes philosophy. (shrink)

There are many reasons to include texts written by women in early modern philosophy courses. The most obvious one is accuracy: women helped to shape the philosophical landscape of the time. Thus, to craft a syllabus that wholly excludes women is to give students an inaccurate picture of the early modern period. Since it seems safe to assume that we all aim for accuracy, this should be reason enough to include women writers in our courses. This (...) article nonetheless offers an additional reason: when students are exposed to philosophical texts written by women, they learn that women have been, are, and can be philosophers. Given how underrepresented women are in philosophy, this finding is significant. If we aim to change the face of philosophy—so that it includes more women—we must include texts written by women in our syllabi. The article considers various obstacles faced by those who work to respond to this call to action. (shrink)

In early modern medicine, both green sickness and hysteria were understood to be gendered diseases, diseases of women. Green sickness, a disease of young women, was considered so serious that John Graunt, the father of English statistics, thought that in his time dozens of women died of it in London every year. One of the symptoms of hysteria was that women fell unconscious. The force of etymology and medical tradition was so strong that in one instance the gender (...) of the patient seems to have been changed by the recorder to make the case fit medical theory. (shrink)

Early Modern German Philosophy (1690-1750) makes some of the key texts of early German thought available in English, in most cases for the first time. The translations range from texts by the most important figures of the period, including Christian Thomasius, Christian Wolff, Christian August Crusius, and Georg Friedrich Meier, as well as texts by consequential but less familiar thinkers such as Dorothea Christiane Erxleben, Theodor Ludwig Lau, Friedrich Wilhelm Stosch, and Joachim Lange. The topics covered range (...) across a number of areas of theoretical philosophy, including metaphysics (the immortality of the soul, materialism and its refutation, the pre-established harmony), epistemology (the principle of sufficient reason, the limits of reason with respect to matters of faith), and logic (the role of prejudices in cognition and the doctrine of truth). (shrink)

This edited collection contains eleven essays on philosophers and political thinkers from the sixteenth to the eighteenth century who wrote on skepticism and toleration. Essays on such well-known philosophers as Descartes, Hobbes, Spinoza, and Locke are combined with treatments of Montaigne, the libertins erudits, the Levellers, Bayle, Diderot, Voltaire, and others to produce a broad consideration of the thought of the early modern period. The editor outlines the themes of the volume in an introductory essay that explains why (...) arguments for toleration derived from skepticism made by early modern writers should be of contemporary interest. Levine argues that traditional arguments for toleration are no longer as convincing as they used to be. For example, the traditional liberal argument based on natural rights has been severely weakened by challenges to the status of those rights, which no longer seem so self-evident to philosophers, at least. Due to the contemporary confusion over the basis for toleration, Levine and his contributors turn to the early modern period, when the issue of principled toleration arose in reaction to the religious and political turmoil of the time, for insights that will accord with our own skeptical times. (shrink)

The study of natural law theories is presently one of the most fruitful areas of research in the studies of early modern intellectual history, and moral and political theory. Likewise the historical significance of the Enlightenment for the development of `modernisation' in many different forms continues to be the subject of controversy. This collection therefore offers a timely opportunity to re-examine both the coherence of the concept of an `early Enlightenment', and the specific contribution of natural law (...) theories to its formation. The works of major thinkers such as Grotius, Hobbes, Locke, Malebranche, Pufendorf and Thomasius are reassessed, and the appeal and importance of the discourse of natural jurisprudence both to those working inside conventional educational and political structures and to those outside - such as in the Huguenot diaspora - is evaluated. This volume will therefore be of importance to all those readers concerned to study the character of the debates in the period 1650-1750 surrounding moral and political agency, sovereignty and obligation, and the legitimation of religious toleration in the divergent states and patriotic contexts of Europe. (shrink)

Equity in Early Modern Legal Scholarship takes the reader through the vast amount of legal writings on equity that were published in continental Europe in early modern times. The book offers the first comprehensive overview of the development of the legal concept of equity through the sixteenth and seventeenth century. During this time, equity scholarship broke with its medieval past and entered a lively debate on the nature and function of the concept. Lorenzo Maniscalco links (...) these developments to the early modern identification of equity with Aristotelian epieikeia, a conceptual shift that brought down the barrier that divided theological and legal writings on equity and led to its development as a tool for the interpretation and amendment of legal rules. (shrink)

In the Early Modern time, moral philosophy underwent substantial changes. The most important among them were growing opposition to the theonomous understand...

This article investigates the early modern history of dog labor in small-scale industrial production in Europe and the Americas as a paradigmatic example of the history of animal labor. The turnspit dog was the “product” of material conditions of production as they were forced to labor in butter-churning, knife-grinding, water-raising, sewing, and food industries. Furthermore, their bodies and labor tried to be “perfected” by selective breeding and violent methods of training, mechanical dressage, and labor discipline. The incorporation of (...) dog labor into mechanized industrial production developed hand-in-hand with certain ideas, ideologies, and mentalities, such as the mechanistic interpretation of bodies deprived of soul, mind, and sentience. (shrink)

Nazariyat, Journal for the History of Islamic Philosophy and Sciences, issued twice a year in English and Turkish (Nazariyat İslam Felsefe ve Bilim Tarihi Araştırmaları Dergisi), is a refereed international journal. It publishes original studies, critical editions of classical texts and book reviews on Islamic philosophy, kalām, theoretical aspects of Sufism and the history of sciences. The goal of Nazariyat is to contribute to the discovery, examination and reinterpretation of the theoretical traditions in the history of Islamic thought, by giving (...) special attention to the post-classical period of it. **ISSN: 2148-8088 E-ISBN: 2547-9415**. (shrink)

This book is a study of the philosophy of the early 18th century Irish philosopher George Berkeley in the intellectual context of his times, with a particular focus on how, for Berkeley, mind is related to its ideas. It does not assume that thinkers like Descartes, Malebranche, or Locke define for Berkeley the context in which he develops his own thought. Instead, he indicates how Berkeley draws on a tradition that informed his early training and that challenges (...) much of the early modern thought with which he is often associated. Specifically, the book indicates how Berkeley's distinctive treatment of mind (as the activity whereby objects are differentiated and related to one another) highlights how mind neither precedes the existence of objects nor exists independently of them. This distinctive way of understanding the relation of mind and objects allows Berkeley to appropriate ideas from his contemporaries in a manner that transforms the issues with which he is engaged. The resulting insights--for example, about how God creates the minds that perceive objects--are only now starting to be fully appreciated. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Philosophy and Rhetoric 34.4 (2001) 308-321 [Access article in PDF] Early Modern Emotion and the Economy of Scarcity 1 - [PDF] Daniel M. Gross Where do we get the idea that emotion is kind of excess, something housed in our nature aching for expression? In part, I argue, from The Passions of the Soul (1649), wherein Descartes proposed the reductive psychophysiology of emotion that informs both romantic (...) expressivism and latter-day psychology. Indeed, one goal of this article is simply to recall that we do not just naturally express emotions generated in our amygdala or wherever, but rather that we are first constituted as expressive agents by what the philosophers of the Scottish Enlightenment called "social passions." Contrary, however, to these largely optimistic philosophers, such as Hutcheson and Smith, who anchored social passions in a moral sense equally shared by all, I argue that the constitutive power of emotion derives from their unequal distribution. In what follows I work primarily with Aristotle's Rhetoric and Thomas Hobbes to outline a "political economy" wherein passions are (1) constituted as differences in power and (2) conditioned not by their excess but by their scarcity. Though we may reject the political conclusions reached by Aristotle and Hobbes, their analysis of emotion allows us to address important political questions neutralized in the Cartesian paradigm. 1. Descartes If you are tickled to learn that Aztec culture located passions in the liver, here is something at least as quaint from Descartes: "The ultimate and most proximate cause of the passions of the soul is none other than the agitation with which the spirits move the little gland which is in the middle of the [End Page 308] brain," that is, the pineal gland. Or so Descartes proposes in his 1649 treatise on the passions composed for Princess Elizabeth of Bohemia. Now compare this to Aristotle's Rhetoric, where for instance anger is defined as "desire, accompanied by distress, for conspicuous retaliation because of a conspicuous slight that was directed, without justification, against oneself or those near to one" (1378a 31-33). For Aristotle anger may indeed be accompanied by physical distress, as in the boiling of blood expressed in crimson cheeks, but its proximate cause is anything but that little gland in the middle of the head. Anger is a deeply social passion provoked by perceived slightsunjustified, and it presupposes a public stage where social status is always subject to performative infelicities.Indeed, we can learn a good deal about the rhetoric of human nature in early-modern Europe simply by asking what passions were. When we do, we find not only that their descriptions disagree, but also that the things described as passions seem incommensurable. Are passions tangible "things" residing in the soul, or are they dispositions of the heart or beliefs of the mind? Is passion a matter of personal expression, or is it something essentially social that a person performs? Do they come from our interior, or from the things we perceive? Can they be measured and manipulated--their causes controlled--or do passions elude control by their very nature? Are they divine, diabolical, or human, and can we distinguish them according to the status of their origin? Are they the enabling condition of virtue or its enemy? Are they necessary or disposable? What is their number and what do they do? Exasperated by endless wrangling over such questions, Descartes complains: There is nothing in which the defective nature of the sciences which we have received from the ancients appears more clearly than in what they have written on the passions; for although this is a matter which has at all times been the object of much investigation, and though it would not appear to be one of the most difficult, inasmuch as since everyone has experience of the passions within himself, there is no necessity to borrow one's observations from elsewhere in order to discover their nature. (331) 2With this preliminary remark Descartes renders human nature in its quintessential modern form: it is something housed in a body subject to the self-evidence... (shrink)

This chapter contains sections titled: Introduction Religious Knowledge: Skepticism, Fideism, Reasonableness Atheism and Deism Science and Religion Biblical Criticism and the History of Religion Materialism and Immaterialism God, Space, and Time Creation, Freedom, and Laws of Nature Works cited.

Through close analysis of texts, cultural and civic communities, and intellectual history, the papers in this collection for the first time, propose a dynamic relationship between rhetoric and medicine as discourses and disciplines of cure in early modern Europe. Although the range of theoretical approaches and methodologies represented here is diverse, the essays explore various ways in which the interventionist disciplines and practices of medicine, moral philosophy and rhetoric were thought consanguine in early modernity.

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Citizenship and Culture in Early Modern EuropePeter N. MillerCharlotte Wells, Law and Citizenship in Early Modern France (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1995), xviii, 198p.Paula Findlen, Possessing Nature: Museums, Collecting, and Scientific Culture in Early Modern Italy (Berkeley, Los Angeles, and London: University of California Press, 1994), xviii, 449p.Steven Shapin, The Social History of Truth: Civility and Science in Seventeenth-Century England (Chicago (...) and London: University of Chicago Press, 1994), xxiv, 483p.Anne Goldgar, Impolite Learning: Conduct and Community in the Republic of Letters 1680–1775 (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1995), xv, 395p.Lawrence Klein, Shaftesbury and the Culture of Politeness: Moral Discourse and Cultural Politics in Early Eighteenth-Century England (Cambridge, U.K., 1994), xiii, 217p.Daniel Gordon, Citizens Without Sovereignty: Equality and Sociability in French Thought, 1670–1789 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1994), viii, 270p.Dena Goodman, The Republic of Letters: A Cultural History of the French Enlightenment (Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 1994), xiii, 338p.E. J. Hundert, The Enlightenment’s “Fable”: Bernard Mandeville and the Discovery of Society (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), xii, 284p.The pre-modern political world was broken and remade in the two centuries that separate Montaigne from Jefferson. The long agony of the mixed constitution that began in the civil wars which raged in Iberia, France, the Low Countries, and England and seemed settled by the widespread adoption of the maxims of reason of state, revived at the end of the period, with revolution in Poland, Denmark, Sweden, Geneva, and, more famously, [End Page 725] British North America and France. The problem, classically, turned on the location of sovereignty, or supreme authority, in political systems designed to balance and diffuse rather than concentrate power. When budget deficits and fratricidal culture wars raised the cry of “necessity”—with the knowledge, of course, that necessity knew no law—estates and kings across Europe found themselves at daggers drawn. The claim that the ruler, who naturally was wholly committed to the common good, had therefore the ability to take emergency action was used both by those accustomed to rule and those newly attained to it by force. The pursuit of an “interest” that was identified with the nation’s effectively marginalized discussions of right and law while still serving an essentially constitutional, justificatory role in political debate. But if unchecked authority was necessary in order to meet the challenge of a world characterized by change and chance and thus had to reside somewhere, was there anything that made its exercise by one body more appropriate than another? This was the question that lay behind the late eighteenth-century repudiation of the reason of state “solution” to the problem of the mixed constitution. The answer, which clearly underpinned the establishment in fact of what had first been theorized already a century earlier, was that only consent could legitimate the exercise of sovereignty in time of necessity.1Representation, in one form or another, was the acknowledged solution to the problem formulated by Hobbes: “the name of Tyranny, signifieth nothing more, nor less, than the name of Sovereignty, be it in one, or many men, saving that they that use the former word are understood to be angry with them they call Tyrants.” But representation also acknowledged the reality behind the charged category of “citizenship”: most people in most places could not be said to live the life of the active citizen celebrated in Roman republican literature. Hence Hobbes’s attack on recourse to classical exempla in general, and the Libertas of Lucca in particular. The idea of civis as law-abiding subject was as radical a redrawing of the terms of debate as the identification of human nature with unsociability. Insofar as politics, classically, justified itself as the means for individual self-perfection, the practice of the ancient citizen could be conceived of as the practice of that best life speculated upon by philosophers. For the represented citizen, however, politics necessarily occupied a more subsidiary position. What, then, defined the best life to which he could aspire?There is no simple answer to this question, and the early modern ambivalence has persisted into our own time... (shrink)

The Avali Silūk (The Ultimate Song) and the Kāfir Bodh (The Wisdom of the Infidels) are lesser-known yogic granths, or treatises, in the early modern North Hindustani Nāth literary tradition. Erased from the modern literary canon in the mid-twentieth century, these multilingual teachings are crucial to understanding how the Nāth Yogīs conceptualized their complex relationships with Muslim communities around the time of the Nāth sampradāy’s foundation. Although the better-known Sabadī (The Sacred Utterances) attributed to Guru Gorakhnāth frequently (...) speaks of the porous religious identity of early modern North Hindustani Nāth Yogīs, the Avali Silūk and the Kāfir Bodh are the only two known discourses that highlight Nāth Yogī engagement with Islamic publics from a Nāth point of view. This article examines these teachings, explores possible motives for their erasure in the modern printed canon, and reconsiders how the Nāth Yogīs expressed their identity and relationship with Muslim publics in early modern Hindustan. (shrink)

In The Early Modern Subject, Udo Thiel explores early modern writings spanning approximately the seventeenth century to the first half of the eighteenth century on two topics of self consciousness, the human subject’s ‘awareness or consciousness of one’s own self’, and personal identity, the human subject’s tendency to regard one’s own self as the same identical self or person that persists through time (p. 1). The aim of the book is twofold. First, to provide an account (...) of the development of self-consciousness and personal identity covering prominent French, British, and German thinkers such as Descartes, Locke, Leibniz, Wolff, and Hume, as well as their critics, their followers, and to ‘critically evaluate their contributions’ (p. 3). The second aim is to situate the contributions of these philosophers within their historical context. In this review I summarize and evaluate The Early Modern Subject. (shrink)