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Lévi-Strauss is a many-sided genius, so that it is still partly an open question what part of his work will survive after he crosses the Acheron. His heritage may overstep the limits of ethnology. Any description of his work focused on existing academic disciplines could miss whatever may prove to be the essence of his work. I have chosen the theme of local versus universal knowledge, because from one perspective a group's bodily and external universe is the sum of all it can know, but each group's universe differs from all others. Yet, humanity also has a common universe: some similarities are more potent than differences. This is one great question structuralism was set up to consider. It involves analysis of exacting factual data, as well as much methodological discovery, philosophical awareness and literary descriptive power. The peoples I studied, such as Mâori and Orokaiva, still perceived themselves, in 1960, as wholly enveloped in their own local system of thought. Today, their civilisations are not lost but their myths have been ordered by a new calculus, aimed at relating the core of their historical universe to another one, global in its range, contemporary in its forms, inspired by abundant objective knowledge and a metaphysical source of moral rules. As such transformations were not a field of anthropological study fifty years ago, it was only with the help of structural methods that I could hope to model the transformed relations of these plural universes, to discover by what hidden logic they took shape and how new frames were created to cope with new experiences. The reading list of structuralism begins in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries in Europe, as early as Hobbes, Montaigne, Rabelais, Cervantes, Spinoza, who were all immersed in their transition from the Middle Ages to modernity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

It was in the fifties that Lévi-Strauss explicitly focused on anthropological knowledge, at a decisive moment indeed. A deep, to many readers troubling, difference opposes The Elementary Structures of Kinship (1949a; 1969a) to a series of later, connected books beginning with The Savage Mind (1962b; 1966b). It testified to a completely new approach to ethnographic understanding. Lévi-Strauss himself confirmed the break. In between, ten years had passed, devoted to an epistemological reflection, echoed in homages paid to Mauss, Durkheim and Rousseau. Lévi-Strauss had definitely turned to a question first raised by Mauss, who left it unanswered, standing as a sealed legacy. When Lévi-Strauss came back from New York, he might have decided either to start new fieldwork in the Pacific or to pursue his theoretical research, turning to some non-elementary structures of kinship. These would have supplied a link of sorts to confront contemporary social constructions of family relations in post-war Western societies. Although he never forgot his concern for civil life, he finally chose a third option, precisely to reconsider anthropological knowledge as such. Three enigmas surfaced out of his preceding experiences. One is closely bound to structuralism, another to his Brazilian fieldwork and the third to Mauss's limited success in The Gift. All have to do with the very possibility of anthropology as a science. The uncontested achievement of The Elementary Structures of Kinship (1949a; 1969a) had come at an excessively high price. To confirm his argument and give it a decisive perspicuity, Lévi-Strauss resorted to a mathematical representation, a specific application of group theory supplied by the mathematician André Weil. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Were we to distinguish the themes purposely adopted as part of a theoretical undertaking from those imposed by an era, then undoubtedly for Lévi-Strauss 'the question of humanism' belongs to the second category. A systematic history of the 'humanist' theme in twentieth-century Europe and notably in post-war France should one day be written. It could not remain a pure history of words and ideas, but would necessarily overflow into social and political history and would encompass what one could call the competition between ecclesiastical forms (church, political parties, intellectual chapels) associated, in the same period, with an exceptionally important and manifest 'ideological' demand. This is as Michel Foucault somewhat bluntly stated in a 1981 interview: “One cannot imagine into what a moralistic pond of humanist sermons we were plunged in the post-war period. Everyone was a humanist. Camus, Sartre, Garaudy [the official philosopher of the Communist Party] were all humanists. Stalin was a humanist too . . . This does not compromise humanism, but simply allows us to understand that at that time I could no longer think in the terms of that category. (Foucault 2001: 1485-6)” In the aftermath of the Second World War, in a country where the main political parties believed that they bore a message, and where the 'intellectuals' themselves spoke in the name of all, the restoration of a certain confidence in the future of humanity had seemed a priority, just as the reconstruction of cities and economies had been from the outset. Hence, the recurrence of the question which was asked, in various ways, to whoever intended to make a contribution to intellectual life: 'As for man, what do you make of man?' [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Introduction: the open society As a philosopher, sociologist and anthropologist, Ernest Gellner was resolute in his defence of reason and objectivity as the path to truth, perceiving both the infallibility of doctrinal beliefs and the epistemic relativism of postmodern thought as the enemies of the one true path to knowledge. Gellner developed his epistemology through an extended critique of Karl Popper, although it was also the case that his debt to Popper was never in question (see Gellner 1985; 1993a: xi–xviii; 1993b; 1994b). Popper himself described epistemic relativism as ‘a betrayal of reason and of humanity’ (Gellner 1993b), and yet he also seems to have shared a core concern with at least some thinkers gathered under the umbrella term of postmodernism. In particular I am thinking of how Popper's thesis, as set out in The Open Society (1962; 1966) and The Poverty of Historicism (2002b), resonates with Foucault's argument, derived from his reading of Kant, that we should engage in a ‘permanent critique of ourselves’, and that we should be suspicious of all ideas and conceptual frameworks that promise a final emancipation (Foucault 1984). In the case of Foucault, the rationalism so dear to Popper (and Gellner) would be among such conceptual frameworks, which is where an imagined conversation between these thinkers would probably terminate. I have found no evidence of direct dialogue between Popper and Foucault, but a little book published by Gellner in 1992 brought them into an interesting, though indirect, relation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

With his exceptionally independent and uncompromising mind, Ernest Gellner was a rare breed of intellectual. Unshakable in his defence of Enlightenment, and a self-proclaimed ‘rationalist fundamentalist’ (Gellner 1992: 80), Gellner had his fair share of followers and sympathisers. Yet he never really belonged to an identifiable collectivity, whether a religion, nation, state, class or status community, or indeed an academic school of thought, paradigm or intellectual circle. Even though, on a personal level, he missed the warmth of communal bonds as they extend beyond the immediate family circle, he remained an adamant ontological individualist in his academic, political and, to a certain extent, personal life. An intellectual maverick who openly expressed disdain for fashionable philosophies and hegemonic systems of thought, it is perhaps no surprise that he found himself on the fringes of the academic mainstream. In this sense he was a true intellectual rebel: a stubborn rationalist and materialist when the Wittgenstein-inspired idealism of linguistic philosophy was in its heyday; a liberal anti-Marxist and fierce anti-communist when Marxism and socialist ideals dominated British sociology; and an unyielding positivist and anti-relativist as postmodernist and poststructuralist thought rose to prominence in the fields of anthropology and cultural studies. Yet despite, or perhaps because of, his lifelong defence of rationalism and individualism, Gellner's intellectual passion drove him to understand, to explain and to empathise with shared values, forms of life and ideological systems of belief that were otherwise alien to his own. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

For my Soul, I confess I have heard very much of Souls, but what they are, or whom they are for, God knows. One sympathises: it was hard not to hear much of souls in seventeenth-century England, but what they were was indeed debatable. Since antiquity, the soul (psyche) could refer both to the moving principle inherent in all living things and to the conjunction of will and intellect in humans, usually considered immortal. This chapter is mainly concerned with the second, intellective understanding of the soul, but initially it is important to disengage what were often confusing patterns of meaning. Plato had used psyche in both senses in the Timaeus, a somewhat Pythagorean dialogue that became a touchstone in Renaissance discussions. To these he added the notion of a world soul to explain the apparent coherence of creation itself. Aristotle's De anima provided seminal material for scholasticism and Reformation theology, but it seemed to have no use for a world soul, while from Epicurus and Lucretius came a notion of a material soul, the intellective soul conceived as mortal and composed of atoms. Varieties of Stoicism qualified and continued to mix theories of the psyche as principle of life, divine spark of humanity, with the psyche tou pantos, or world soul. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A product partly of Naturphilosophie and partly of the eighteenth-century tradition, a physiological psychology of the unconscious rose to prominence between 1820 and 1850. Its central idea was that there is an unconscious mind that is constituted by our physiology. Consciousness is only the tip of the psychological iceberg, as it were, whose submerged bulk, supporting and shaping the smaller conscious part, is an assemblage of drives and needs created by the physiological processes of the body. This model of the physiological unconscious is a continuation of the tradition that we have been tracing: the theory of dark ideas, the plastic imagination, the vitalistic physiology of Herder and Goethe, the Idealist and Romantic distinction between conscious and unconscious realms, the physiology of the Naturphilosophen. The relation of the unconscious to rationality is, as one might expect from its ancestry, ambivalent. The unconscious is rationality's enemy: it undermines reason's attempt to govern according to ideas. At the same time, the unconscious is a product of physiology and is therefore natural and intelligible. It exemplifies L. L. Whyte's claim that ‘the discovery of the unconscious is the recognition of a Goethean order, as much as of a Freudian disorder, in the depths of the mind’. The focus of the present chapter is on three (in other respects quite different) exponents of this form of psychology: Arthur Schopenhauer, Carl Gustav Carus, and Georg Büchner. They represent variations on the same theme. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

PSYCHOLOGY AND THE IDEALIST ‘REVOLUTION’ The two decades following the publication of Kant's Critique of Pure Reason in 1781 saw a succession of attempts to redefine the fundamentals of philosophy. To some this ‘Revolution of the Spirit’ seemed as radical as the political revolution across the Rhine: Friedrich Schlegel adventurously claimed that the French Revolution, Fichte's Wissenschaftslehre (Theory of Science) and Goethe's Wilhelm Meisters Lehrjahre (Wilhelm Meister's Apprenticeship) were ‘the greatest tendencies of the age’. Its impact on German psychology was complex. The Idealists disliked the way psychology tended to analyse concepts down to their sensuous elements and to divide the mind into discrete faculties. Either way, it denied the unity of mind and therewith the basis of ethical autonomy. The Idealists' own theories of cognition were designed expressly to make psychology redundant. Despite short-lived successes, this endeavour largely failed. For practical and institutional reasons it proved impossible for the Idealists to make a clean break with the tradition of psychology. Idealist philosophy was deeply marked by its contact with psychology: like it or not, the Idealists' theories of cognition depended in important ways on eighteenth-century psychology. Moreover, for philosophical reasons the prospect of a clean break was a chimera. In the long term the effect of Kant's attempt to eradicate psychology achieved the opposite. In attempting to drive psychology out of philosophy, Kant drove it into science, whence, now armed with the weapon of scientific method, it mounted a reinvasion of philosophy, which has had profound consequences for its subsequent history. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

DESCARTES AND LEIBNIZ It is often said that modern Western philosophy begins with Descartes. The German tradition of psychology certainly does, in both the general and a particular sense. Descartes turned Western philosophy inwards from metaphysical to epistemological questions and originated the idea of consciousness in its modern form. More specifically, the modifications made by Leibniz and Wolff to Descartes's system created the need for a philosophical psychology in Germany. In the Discourse on Method (1637), Descartes argued that the physical qualities and essences of Scholasticism could be dispensed with. Science should be mathematical. Bodies with measurable characteristics would replace qualities. By 1700, however, Descartes's influence was increasingly subject to criticism. The Cartesians, it was felt, had thrown out the qualities of Aristotle only to replace them with innate ideas. The tone of Enlightenment philosophy, set by Bayle and Locke, became anti-Cartesian. However, German philosophy continued to operate within a Cartesian framework. In Germany Wolff's popularity was at its height when Descartes was in eclipse in Britain and France. This is one of the reasons why the rise of psychology as a distinct discipline in the eighteenth century was confined to Germany. The German tradition of psychology originated from a problem in Descartes. In his efforts to fend off scepticism, Descartes gave a special role to consciousness. Even if we reject all knowledge that might plausibly be doubted, we must still admit the truth of the proposition ‘I am’, for thinking requires that there be a subject that can think. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Durkheim suggested that the sociological study of religious phenomena would bring new life to the discussion of problems that previously only philosophers debated (1912a: 12, t. 1995: 8). This suggestion indicates that he perceived the eclectic spiritualist tradition as moribund. Of course, this philosophical tradition had already begun to change considerably if we take Paul Janet as representative of the generation of eclectic spiritualists that followed Cousin. The positions Durkheim took in his philosophy lectures at the Lycée de Sens (1884a) reflect this changing tradition. On the one hand, like Cousin, he regarded psychology as the philosophical discipline that provided a foundation for logic, ethics, and metaphysics. On the other hand, however, his views on scientific method and the role of representative ideas in philosophy mirror the later eclectic spiritualism of Janet. Also, Durkheim's interpretations of major figures in the history of philosophy such as Kant reveal an eclectic spiritualist influence. The philosophical views expressed in Lalande's recently discovered notes from Durkheim's philosophy course at the Lycée de Sens suggest a new way to interpret Durkheim's career. In the Sens lectures, he was already seeking to replace the introspective psychology of his spiritualist predecessors with an empirical, hypothetico-deductive psychology as the foundation for the other three philosophical sciences. Although Durkheim shared with the spiritualists the goal of making philosophy scientific, conceptions of scientific method among French academic philosophers had shifted. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Academics sometimes trace their intellectual lineage in genealogical terms. If Cousin were to be called one of Durkheim's intellectual grandfathers, it would be because of the lineage that passes from Cousin to Durkheim through Paul Janet, who was one of the members of Durkheim's dissertation committee. Although Janet was far too young to have studied with Cousin before Cousin left teaching for administration, Janet maintained a personal relationship with Cousin for twenty-two years, beginning in 1844 when he served a year as his secretary (Janet 1885: 483–4). Janet, who held the chair in the history of philosophy at the Faculté des Lettres, was the leading representative of the eclectic spiritualist school of thought during Durkheim's early academic career (Brooks 1998: 39). He was on the committee that drafted the 1880 philosophy programme or syllabus for the lycées. His textbook, the Traité élémentaire de philosophie à l'usage des classes, covers the prescribed topics and questions in that syllabus. It was widely adopted in the lycées, went through many editions, and was even translated into Spanish. In what follows, I will be drawing my account of Janet's philosophy from this text. Durkheim appears to have used Janet's text when he taught philosophy at the Lycée de Sens in the academic year 1883–4, the class in which André Lalande took the recently discovered notes. The other main lycée philosophy text that Durkheim knew was Élie Rabier's Leçons de Philosophie. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Introduction of Kantian Philosophy into France Kant first came to the attention of the French as a moral philosopher during their Revolution. Many regarded him as a supporter of Republican ideals and a proponent of skepticism and atheism (Boas 1925: 165ff.; Vallois 1924: 34). The critical philosophy was only slowly introduced into France due to the difficulty of Kant's work and the fact that few French philosophers read German. Imbued with the French spirit of clarity and precision, many were simply discouraged by the obscurity of Kantian terminology from even trying to read Kant's works. The first French translation of the Critique of Pure Reason, by C.-J. Tissot, did not appear until 1835. F. G. Born's Latin translation of this work was published in 1796 and was quickly followed by his translations of the Critique of Practical Reason, the Critique of Judgment, the Prolegomena, and other important books, constituting a four-volume Latin edition of Kant's works. However, this Latin edition was not widely cited by French philosophers at the time (Vallois 1924: 42–8). For their knowledge of Kant's philosophy, the French at first relied on essays published in French by the Berlin Academy in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, written by Christian Gottlieb Selle (1748–1800), Johann Jakob Engel (1741–1802), Louis-Frédéric Ancillon (1744–1814), and his son Jean-Pierre-Frédéric Ancillon (1767–1837). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the preceding chapters I have shown that in arguing for the social causes and functions of the categories, Durkheim was responding to the way that the Kantian categories were understood in the eclectic spiritualist tradition. Kant's logically necessary conditions of experience were understood as psychologically necessary conditions, which led to the subjectivist reading of the critical philosophy according to which it was unable to explain or justify the application of the categories to our experience of the external world. The eclectic spiritualists then sought an epistemological grounding of the categories in an empirical apperception of the mind's activity, rather than in Kant's transcendental deduction of the categories, in which the transcendental apperception of the unity of consciousness plays a central role. Among the early eclectic spiritualists, the theory of the categories was thus thought to belong to a foundational introspective psychology. During the late nineteenth century in France, however, psychology increasingly came to be seen as an empirical, hypothetico-deductive science. Durkheim's purpose was to show that a theory of the categories should rightfully belong to an empirical sociology instead. To make sense of his arguments, however, we have had to introduce a distinction between the categories and their collective representations. With this distinction in mind, we can then extract two different theses from his sociology of knowledge: (1) that there is a set of categories that is found in all human cultures because they are necessary to the moral rules and obligations that hold individuals together in a society; and (2) that a person's ways of thinking and communicating about these concepts are acquired from his or her culture. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Around the turn of the twentieth century, Émile Durkheim (1858–1917) and Marcel Mauss (1872–1950) proposed that the most basic categories of thought, including space, time, class, and causality, are social in character. Their thesis — that language and experience are structured by categories that are social in character — had a profound impact on twentieth-century thought, especially in the social sciences. Among sociologists and anthropologists in particular, it was a major source of inspiration for the popular and heady doctrine that people construct culturally specific perceptual realities through the use of culturally variable sets of categories. For these social scientists, the term “category” took on a very different signification than the original meanings we find in either Aristotle or Immanuel Kant (1724–1804). They treated the categories as belonging to some sort of conceptual scheme or framework through which we perceive the world, rather than as Aristotle's highest predicables or Kant's concepts that are logically presupposed by experience. To understand how this change in the conception of a category came about, we have to consider how Kant was interpreted in the nineteenth-century philosophical tradition from which Durkheim's sociological theory of the categories emerged. That is the purpose of this book. In arguing for the social causes and origins of the categories, Durkheim was responding to the way in which Kant's philosophy was understood in the Third Republic. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The history of philosophical theories of the categories is nearly coextensive with the history of philosophy itself. Even if I were able to, I would not want to tell all of this history, but only those parts of it that are relevant to making sense of the sociological theories of the categories that arose in France at the turn of the twentieth century. As I mentioned in Chapter 1 and will explain more fully in the following chapters, Durkheim's theory of the categories was proposed in response to a French academic philosophical tradition in which theories of the origins and causes of the categories played a fundamental role. To appreciate Durkheim's arguments for reestablishing philosophy on the basis of a sociological theory of the categories, we need to understand this tradition. But to understand the tradition that Durkheim was rejecting, it would help first to survey briefly the prior history of philosophical accounts of the categories. Our history should start with Aristotle. Not only did Aristotle dominate philosophical thinking about the categories until Kant, but Durkheim and Mauss themselves suggested that this is where we ought to begin. As we saw in Chapter 1, Durkheim in The Elementary Forms of Religious Life traced the concept of the categories back to Aristotle: “There exist, at the root of our judgments, a certain number of essential notions that dominate all of our intellectual life; these are those that the philosophers, since Aristotle, call the categories of the understanding” (1912a: 12–13, t. 1995: 8). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Our aim in this chapter is to consider how what we now know of the nervous system may account for understanding human behavior. Rather than the early view of animal spirits and surrogates for them, our view of the nervous system is that it is composed of neurons, with a mechanism of axoplasmic transport in them as schematized for a peripheral neuron in Figure 16.1. The same axonal mechanism is present as well in all neurons in the central nervous system. An example is that of cortical neurons crossing from one hemisphere to the other via the callosal tract. In addition to components required to maintain the viability of fibers and to provide the neurotransmitters acting at synaptic junctions. Other molecular signals are transported between neurons to establish and maintain the networks responsible for the integrated behavior of the organism. Networks formed in the brain under genetic control are responsible for perception, cognition and memory and are not permanently fixed. They are modified in the course of learning (Chapter 15). The broader theoretical issues relate to the degree of innateness of sensory and perceptual processes and how change is brought about. Up through most of the latter century, the concept of reflexes was held as the key to understanding behavior. In his great book on reflexes of the nervous system, Sherrington wrote, The reflex-arc is the unit mechanism of the nervous system when that system is regarded in its integrative function. The unit reaction in nervous integration is the reflex, because every reflex is an integrative action and no nervous action short of a reflex is a complete act of integration. […] [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In delineating the culture of market society in a previous chapter, I proposed that the market-form projects a distinctive sense of reality and, with it, certain clear epistemological standards, strategies, and forms of knowing that are intrinsic to it. These new protocols of knowing suffuse the whole social and mental order where that order has shed much of its traditional, precapitalist moral and political constraints. One aspect of the market-form's uniqueness lies in the character of its time-sense or the individual and collective experience of temporality. As in the concept of relativity in physics, market society weakens the concept of a singular, collective historical time. Public time exists, but only by segmenting the day strictly into work-time, leisure-or consumption-time, by the opening and closing bells of various activities, like the school-day or the operations of a bourse. Temporal segmentation lays over the lived experience of duration an abstract time-scheme that regulates the form and content of daily routines. Premodern forms of time-reckoning were tied more intimately to natural, environmental processes, like the rising and setting of the sun, the changing of the seasons, and the like. These natural processes persist, but today they have slipped into the domain of rhetoric as powerfully nostalgic metaphors. Other experiences of communal time have also withered away altogether or run aground within religious sects or in the varieties of fundamentalism we find lodged awkwardly in modern societies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Biology is a science; there is no argument about this statement, or is there? Doubts about this claim have been suggested by important differences among various widely accepted definitions of science. A comprehensive, pragmatic definition of science might be “Science is the human endeavor to achieve a better understanding of the world by observation, comparison, experiment, analysis, synthesis, and conceptualization.” Another definition might be “Science is a body of facts (‘knowledge’) and the concepts that permit explaining these facts,” and there are numerous others. In a recent book (Mayr 1997:24–44) I have devoted a twenty-page chapter to a discussion of the question, “What is science?” Difficulties arise because the term science also has been used for so many human activities beyond the natural sciences, such as the social sciences, political science, military science, and more distant areas such as Marxist science, Western science, feminist science, and even Christian Science and Creationist Science. In all these combinations, the word science is used in a misleadingly inclusive sense. Equally misleading, however, is the opposite extreme, the decision of some physicists and physicalist philosophers to restrict the word science to mathematically based physics. A vast literature shows how difficult, indeed impossible, it seems to be to draw a line between incontrovertible science and adjacent fields. This diversity is a heritage of history. One can claim that science originated in preliterary times when people began to ask “how?” and “why?” questions about the world. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

It took more than two hundred years and the occurrence of three sets of events before a separate science of the living world – biology – was recognized. As I will show, one can assign these events to three different sets: (A) the refutation of certain erroneous principles, (B) the demonstration that certain basic principles of physics cannot be applied to biology, and (C) the realization of the uniqueness of certain basic principles of biology that are not applicable to the inanimate world. This chapter is devoted to an analysis of these three sets of developments. This has to be done before one can accept the view of an autonomy of biology. For an earlier support of the autonomy of biology see Ayala (1968). The refutation of certain erroneous basic assumptions Under this heading, I deal with the support for certain basic ontological principles that later were shown to be erroneous. Biology could not be recognized as a science of the same rank as physics as long as most biologists accepted certain basic explanatory principles not supported by the laws of the physical sciences and eventually found to be invalid. The two major principles here involved are vitalism and a belief in cosmic teleology. As soon as it had been demonstrated that these two principles are invalid and, more broadly, that none of the phenomena of the living world is in conflict with the natural laws of the physicalists, there was no longer any reason for not recognizing biology as a legitimate autonomous science equivalent to physics. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

At the end of the nineteenth century, the question of man's place in the natural order was paramount. Evolutionary thinking had revolutionalized long-standing conceptions concerning the origin of species and their interrelation. In so doing, man's relation to his ancestry appeared in a new light. Questions concerning the nature of inheritance, memory, instincts, life, and energy were critical issues in the sciences of the body – biology, ethology, physiology, zoology – as well as in the attempts to form a new scientific psychology. Proponents of the new scientific psychology called their field “physiological psychology” to differentiate it from the older philosophical psychology, and to associate it with the contemporary revolutions in the sciences of the body. They sought to replace the static mind of the philosophical tradition with a mind that had evolved, and was adapted to the environment. For psychologists, the critical issue was one of linking their field with developments in the sciences of the body, while maintaining the disciplinary autonomy of psychology. One means by which this was effected was through the concept of the unconscious. This provided a new formulation of the relation between the soul and the body. Conceptions of life, memory, and instincts became transfigured by the unconscious. This in turn became a new touchstone of self-knowledge, which came to signify knowledge of what was unconscious, in some shape or form, to the self. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Our entire history is only the history of waking men; no one has yet thought of a history of sleeping men. Dream cultures While dreaming is seen to be a universal phenomenon, conceptions of dreams vary in different cultures and at different times. Several decades of historical and anthropological inquiry have indicated that in any given culture, conceptions of dreams are intimately linked with their place in cosmologies; theological, medical, aesthetic, and philosophical theories about them; individual, therapeutic, and ritual practices accompanying them; and with conceptions of individuality and language. They have also indicated that it is impossible to dissociate dreams from their particular dream cultures. By contrast, contemporary psychological and neuroscientific theories claim to be in a position to determine the universal essence of the dream as an unchanging entity. At the same time, such theories, while purporting to be independent of their surrounding dream cultures, have been a powerful force in the creation of new dream subcultures. The dream has been utilized to generate new configurations of the personality and the brain, together with new rituals of dream recording, sharing, and retrospective divination, which have been adopted by large social groupings. In modern Western societies, the cultural location of dreams has been decisively shaped by Freud and Jung. This has taken place through the utilization of dreams in psychotherapy as an interpretative practice, and through the dissemination of Freudian and Jungian dream theories in intellectual circles and popular culture. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Charles Webster has noted that, unlike Descartes, Bacon wrote nothing that could be translated into textbook form; but Bacon's contribution was not really the kind of thing that could have been encapsulated in such a form. Even his account of inductive procedures is so geared to the particular problems faced in pursuing the matter theory of his time that, although some insights are undeniably generalisable, unlike the theories of method of nineteenth- and twentieth-century philosophy of science the attractiveness of his account lies primarily in the attention to detailed problems facing the isolation of particular properties of matter, a detail which was gradually superseded as the discipline became transformed and its role in physical inquiry rethought. Bacon's main contribution is not one to be described as lasting so much as irreversible. He inaugurated the transformation of philosophy into science, and philosophers into scientists, for even though the ideas of ‘science’ and ‘scientists’ in the modern sense are only really established in the nineteenth century, their genealogy goes back to Bacon's attempt to effect a fundamental reform of philosophy from a contemplative discipline exemplified in the individual persona of the moral philosopher, to a communal, if ultimately centrally directed, enterprise exemplified in the persona of the experimental natural philosopher. In turn, observation and experiment are lifted out of the purview of the arcane and the esoteric, and planted firmly in the public realm. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

“In a higher world it is otherwise; but here below to live is to change, and to be perfect is to have changed often.” John Henry Newman's celebrated dictum still has the power to startle, coming as it does from a dedicated opponent of liberal Christianity. Newman's conception of Christianity as a “great idea” enabled him to contemplate its interaction with history as a living thing, constantly changing in order to retain its identity. The daring model of Christianity as an “idea,” that is, an impression made upon the imagination, proved incomprehensible to the neo-scholastic mind, which treated the imagination as vastly inferior to the discursive intellect and which saw no reason at all to wrestle with the seemingly intractable problem of how doctrine could preserve its identity as it passed through the cultural vagaries of historical existence. Neo-scholastic ultramontanism saw itself as charged with the custodianship of a fixed and unchangeable deposit; it described the philosophy on which it drew for cognitive self-expression as perennis – that is, valid in and applicable to all ages. The conflict between the concept of Christian doctrines as immutable and perennially valid, on the one hand, and, on the other, as culturally limited expressions of truths which are antecedent to their formulation constitutes the theological core of the Modernist crisis which occurred in the Roman Catholic Church between c. 1890 and 1914. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The title of Malebranche's first, longest, and most important work might well have been Discourse on Method, for method is what The Search After Truth is most obviously about. Its subtitle adumbrates the centrality of method: wherein are treated the nature of man's mind and the use he must make of it to avoid error in the sciences. The importance of finding a method to avoid error is expressed in the first sentence of the Search's first book: “error is the cause of men's misery” for from it comes the evil that upsets human happiness. Each of the five major occasions of error is detailed by the first five books of the work, and the last book, on method, indicates “the paths leading to knowledge of the truth ” [Search VI.I.i, OC 2:245; LO 408). The method that Malebranche proposes is, like his vision of all things in God, a highly original result of correcting Descartes in light of the Christianized Platonism that he received from Augustine. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The main theses of Malebranche's philosophy are well-known today. The theory of vision in God of ideas, the doctrine of occasionalism, the philosophy of will, the function of intelligible extension, as well as the relationship of Malebranche's thought to Descartes' or Leibniz's have all been carefully studied. Very little work, however, in either France or the United States, has explicitly investigated the status and the function of metaphysics in the work of the Oratorian. The question of the definition and the role of a Malebranchian metaphysics gives rise to two distinct but inseparable lines of investigation. First, is it legitimate to search for a definition and systematic use of the word metaphysique in Malebranche? [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Locke's failures are sometimes as significant as his successes. His views on morality are a case in point. He published little on the subject, and what little he did publish raised more problems for his readers than it solved. Some of the difficulties contemporaries perceived in Locke's ethics are indicated in a retort by a critic, who was piqued by Locke's suggestion that the critic was part of a plot against him: 'As to the Storm you speak of, preparing against you, I know nothing of it . . .; yet I can blame none that desire such Principles of Humane Understanding as may give them Proofs and Security against such a System as this, Cogitant Matter, a Mortal Soul, a Manichean God (or a God without Moral Attributes,) and an Arbitrary Law of Good and Evil. . . . The ready way to prevent any such Storm, is to give such a plain Explication of your Principles, without Art or Chicane, as may cure and remove any Fears of this Nature.' (Burnet 1697: 11) [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

John Locke is the most influential philosopher of modern times. His Essay initiated the vigorous and lasting philosophical tradition that is known as British empiricism, but Locke's importance reaches far beyond the limits of what has since his time become recognized as the professional discipline of philosophy. His influence in the history of thought, on the way we think about ourselves and our relations to the world we live in, to God, nature and society, has been immense. His great message was to set us free from the burden of tradition and authority, both in theology and knowledge, by showing that the entire grounds of our right conduct in the world can be secured by the experience we may gain by the innate faculties and powers we are born with. God “commands what reason does” (W VII: n ) are the words that best reveal the tenor and unity of Locke's thought. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The topics to be covered in this chapter are as follows: (I) Locke's acceptance of Descartes's view that there is a radical separation, a perhaps unbridgeable gap, between the world's mental and its physical aspects; Locke's view of (II) the cognitive aspects and (III) the conative aspects of the mind; (IV) what Locke said about the possibility that “ matter thinks” that is, that the things that take up space are also the ones that have mental states; (V) the question whether all thought could be entirely caused by changes in the physical world; (VI and VII) what it is for a single mind to last through time; and (VIII) what it is for a mind to exist at a time when it is not doing anything. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The contributors to this volume are philosophers, historians, and political theorists from Great Britain, Canada, the United States, Australia, France, and Germany. In spite of the diversity of disciplines and national traditions, their contributions show a remarkable convergence on three themes: changes in the modes of moral education in early modern Europe, the emergence of new relations between conscience and law (particularly the law of the state), and the shared continuities and discontinuities of both Roman Catholic and Protestant moral culture in relation to their medieval past. The late nineteenth-century American historian Henry Charles Lea saw the history of conscience in early modern Europe as the liberation of conscience in Protestant lands from the authority of priests and casuists, who had built their power upon ‘the weakness of those unable to bear their burdens, unable to trust themselves’. A number of contributors to this volume, however, question whether the early modern period did see the emergence of new practices and ideas which ‘freed’ the individual conscience from social and political control. In the first chapter James Tully argues that a new practice of governing conduct was formed in the early modern era which was a direct attack upon conscience, its aim being the creation of habits that would replace conscience as a governing element of action. He relies largely, but by no means exclusively, on a wide variety of works by John Locke to describe the new constellation of moral ideas and practices, which he calls ‘penal’. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Introduction Studies of the Spanish labour movement prior to the Second Republic, established in 1931, have tended to concentrate on the Anarchists. This is unremarkable, given the enormous strength and influence of Spanish Anarchism until its repression during the three-year civil war which destroyed the Republic. The war was marked by an unstated, unholy – and wholly unlikely – community of purpose between Francoists and Communists. Their mutual hatred barely masked a common desire: the stamping out of Anarchist revolutionary initiatives unleashed by the collapse of the Republic. The Second Republic itself, though, was intimately associated with the Spanish Socialists: its creation was above all their triumph, its collapse their tragedy (some argue, their fault). As the largest political party of the Left, the Partido Socialista Obrero Español (PSOE) played a pivotal role, both in government and in opposition, during the Republic's all too brief five-year existence. For this reason, historians of Spanish Socialism have properly focussed their attention mainly on the PSOE's turbulent experiences between 1931 and 1936. Indeed, in recent years a lively historiographical debate has developed over the role of the PSOE's internal divisions in the polarisation of politics during the Second Republic. However, the strength of Spanish Anarchism before 1931 and the centrality of the PSOE in the Republic have combined to obscure the fact that organised Socialism goes back a long way in Spain. In fact, the PSOE was originally founded in 1879, making it one of the oldest Socialist parties in Europe. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

INTRODUCTION: IDEAS OF A UNIVERSITY The subject of this chapter is the history of the ‘idea of a university’, or rather, it is the history of the idea that a university derives its identity from an idea. The subject is puzzling. Why does a university require an ‘idea’? Quite simply, it does not. The historical answer, however, is more interesting. Whether or not a university needs an ‘idea’, it has been assigned one, more than one, in fact. For two centuries a particular kind of debate has gone on, revived in every generation, concerning the role and purpose of a university and the education it provides. The debate has been inconclusive. Yet what is significant about the history of the idea of a university is the search for one, the striving after an ideal that must satisfy two conditions: it must be pure, like a platonic ideal, and it must be lasting, superior to all apparent transformations. By ‘idea’, then, is meant an inherent purpose, embedded, as it were, into the university and possibly its history – but this is not always clear from debate. An ‘idea’ is also a genetic code that dictates the subsequent development of a university; but like all such inheritances, the signals are not always recognised. Metaphors such as these come readily to mind, for the history of the idea of the idea of a university lacks precision. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

During the eighteenth century natural philosophy - or fisica, physique, physica, Naturlehre - broke loose from the place in the organization of knowledge that it had occupied since antiquity. The scientific revolutionaries of the seventeenth century, however much they altered the principles and doctrines of physics, had left it with the purpose, method and coverage assigned to it by Aristotle. Eighteenth-century ferments decomposed and recombined it, drove off old parts, fixed new ones, and restructured its bonds with the body of knowledge. We do not find an answering ferment among historians of eighteenth-century physics. That is not because they are few or idle. Perhaps as many as one historian of science in ten works on eighteenthcentury physics. Almost 10 per cent of the articles published during the past twenty years in the leading general journals - Isis and Revue d'histoire des sciences - concern the subject. About one half of these articles relate to experimental physics and the making of instruments. These figures are representative. Over the past fifty years the moderate but sustained investigation of eighteenth-century experimental physics has produced over 300 books and papers that are noticed in the Isis lists or in the bibliographies in the Dictionary of Scientific Biography. This literature contains much information of great value. But it offers little in the way of helpful generalization or periodization. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The globe as subject With few exceptions, historians of science have paid little attention to a major branch of natural philosophy in the eighteenth century: the science of the system of the earth and its products. Distinguished general surveys, such as those of Dampier, Singer, Hall, Gillispie and Taton, have no connected analysis of the sciences of the terraqueous globe. The volume Natural Philosophy through the Eighteenth Century barely mentions the physical environment. Most historians of science are still writing (sometimes Whiggish) ‘tunnel histories’, tracing the progress of modern scientific disciplines, rather than exploring the cognitive landscapes of the past. And much scholarship in this field remains stubbornly biographical rather than problem-oriented. Why has there been this neglect of the sciences of the physical environment, of the earth as such? It is partly a reflection of the focusing down of science itself, where formerly dominant all-embracing frameworks, like the Great Chain of Being, have splintered into specialties like palaeobotany and seismology. It is partly also a response to persuasive philosophies of science. Ever since the influential classifications of natural knowledge by Comte, J. S. Mill and Jevons, leading philosophers have argued that the ideal science is one of universal categories, amenable to abstraction and quantification. Thus physics rather than the ‘extensive’ environmental sciences becomes their model. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Only connect … In the history of Western medicine, from the school of Salerno to that of Freud, the content and structure of its four principal ingredients - its conception of the nature of man, its technical capacity to do medical research and to give treatment, its sense of religion, and the social structure of medical aid - have changed continually; but the exclusive concern of pathology with the physical side of man's being has not disappeared or changed. If one poses, for a science such as theoretical physics or organic chemistry, the problem of its relations with the political and economic structure of society, doesn't one pose a problem which is too complicated? Isn't the threshold of possible explanation placed too high? If, on the other hand, one takes a knowledge [savoir] such as psychiatry, won't the question be much easier to resolve, since psychiatry has a low epistemological profile, and since psychiatric practice is tied to a whole series of institutions, immediate economic exigencies and urgent political pressures for social regulation? Cannot the interrelation of effects of knowledge and power be more securely grasped in the case of a science as ‘doubtful’ as psychiatry? It is this same question that I wanted to pose, in The Birth of the Clinic apropos of medicine: it certainly has a much stronger scientific structure than psychiatry, but it is also very deeply involved in the social structures. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Historiography Social conditions It is fashionable these days to link intellectual movements with social conditions, political issues and even economic developments. But while one acknowledges the importance of these matters it is extraordinarily difficult to establish what the links could be. Economic determinism is altogether too naive a point of view. More sophisticated theories based on conceptions such as that of ‘ideology’ remain vague as to the nature of the relations that obtain between the various interacting factors from which an author's thoughts and their acceptance or rejection by his contemporaries spring. It is far from clear that the invention of doctrines on the one hand, and their reception on the other, are determined by the same influences. Yet it would be folly to ignore the fact that Locke was deeply involved in politics, or that Diderot and d'Alembert played an important part in the promulgation of middle-class values in pre-Revolutionary France. Nor should it be forgotten that Hume's history outraged both Catholics and Protestants; nor that Priestley's house was burnt by a Tory mob. But how all these matters flow together into the controversies about the limits of knowledge I am quite in despair to understand. I began work on this chapter fully convinced that a strong case for an ‘externalist’ treatment was possible. But as the work proceeded I felt more and more inclined to submit to the judgement of Peter Gay, that one's vague sense of a relation between social conditions in England and France and the intellectual movements that accompanied them cannot be realized in detailed accounts of specific paths of influence from the one to the other. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

I believe that I have succeeded in discovering the force (Kraft), also the law of the effect of this force, that makes possible the coexistence of the human race and that governs inexorably the progress of mankind. And just as the discoveries of Copernicus have made it possible to determine the paths of the planets for any future time, I believe that my discoveries enable me to point out to any man with unfailing certainty the path he must follow in order to accomplish the purpose of his life. The truth is, most persons, not excepting professional economists, are satisfied with very hazy notions. How few scholars of the literary and historical type retain from their study of mechanics an adequate notion of force!” Most people with some academic training in economics are aware that the rise of the theory that commands the greatest allegiance in the United States (which we shall call neoclassical economics) was located in the 1870s in several European countries. A little more familiarity with the conventional histories of economic thought will foster the impression that neoclassical theory was “simultaneously discovered” by an Englishman (William Stanley Jevons), a Frenchman (Leon Walras), and an Austrian (Carl Menger), and that after its improvement by a host of others, it eventually displaced all other competing schools of thought in those countries. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The “invariance” character of the theory of the conservation of energy is responsible for the frequent feeling that the theory is incomprehensible, even after it has been explained. We naturally expect an explanation in terms of a substance and its modifications. If we have instead an invariance law and don't realize it, then we keep looking for the substance and do not find it. One who sees the essence of historical development solely in the discovery of fixed scientific truths is badly misled. The denizen of the late twentieth century who fills his automobile with gasoline, covers himself with suntan lotion to block out the ultraviolet, turns on his VCR by means of a remote control device and worries about the nuclear power plant just down the river probably feels himself to be quite at home with the concept of energy. Depending upon his education, he may or may not be aware that there are some cryptic mathematical equations behind it all, but on the whole he is content to turn the switches on and off and let someone else worry about the details. I daresay the reader, even if he or she is an economist, more or less falls into this category. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Immediate reactions to Laberthonnière's philippic Prominent amongst those expressing approval of Positivisme et catholicisme were Blondel himself and, also from the academic world of philosophy, Delbos and Boutroux. Blondel, whatever his earlier reservations about his friend's sharp separation in ‘L'Eglise et l'Etat' between the respective interests of Church and State, thought very highly of Positivisme et catholicisme: thus the book's spirit was ‘ardently Christian’, and the author's standpoint was both ‘very orthodox’ and ‘very evangelic’. This reaction was scarcely surprising inasmuch as Positivisme et catholicisme was the culmination of a joint effort against what they took to be misconceived theology and the political abuse of Christian religion. Also, in the ecclesiastical climate of the time – the closing years of Pius X's pontificate–the book's publication was on the part of the Oratorian priest a deed of no mean courage, and, as such, it had Blondel's admiration. Courage too was the quality that struck most Delbos – who had known Laberthonnière for some fifteen years – and within two weeks after the book's publication he was warmly complimenting its author: it was ‘an interesting and vigorous book’, and, more impressive still, it was ‘an act of courage which is greatly to your honour’. Delbos expressed the hope that its publication would not cause too much trouble for Laberthonnière himself. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Sangnier's rhetorical dilemma In the late 1890s, Georges Deherme was a leading figure in the co-operative movement and, having abandoned anarchism, he was becoming increasingly known for his Positivism. In 1898, he founded, under the name of the Coopération des Idées pour l'Enseignement Ethique-social du Peuple, the first and perhaps the best known of the working-class ‘people's universities’ that sprang up so abundantly in Paris at about the turn of the century. There was a ready supply of teachers from Desjardins's Union pour l'Action Morale, in whose activities Deherme himself played a conspicuous part. Thus he served on the editorial board of the Bulletin de l'Union pour l'action morale, as did two others of Positivist persuasions who were actively concerned with the betterment of labour conditions, namely Arthur Fontaine, destined to play a major rôle in the creation of the International Labour Organization in 1919, and Auguste Keufer, secretary-general of the great printing workers' union, the Fédération du Livre, from 1884 to 1920. By 1904, however, Deherme's educational establishment faced an internal crisis, due to a conflict between Deherme and one of his lecturers who had rented, since the previous year, a villa in the Bois de Boulogne as a sort of maison du peuple for the workers enrolled at the Coopération des Idées and their families. Deherme's jaundiced view was that this pleasantly situated residence had become a centre for mere pleasure rather than for virtuous self-improvement. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Three key writings There are three works of Maurras that hold an important place in his published writings and that, when taken together, indicate both the rôle in his political doctrine of his criticism of individualism and his notion of the desirability of a political alliance between Positivists and Catholics. All three were published at about the turn of the century, and, with another book, Le Dilemme de Marc Sangnier, they were to be the essential texts in the debate in which Blondel and Laberthonnière took part. The three works are Trois idées politiques (1898), to which attention has already been drawn; the article ‘Idées françaises ou idées suisses’, published as part of ‘Les Monod’ in L'Action française of 15 October 1899; and the book L'Avenir de l'Intelligence (1905). Trois idées politiques: Chateaubriand, Michelet, Sainte-Beuve, to give this small book of about eighty pages its full title, was a response to the public speeches and writings in 1898 occasioned by the fiftieth anniversary of the death of Chateaubriand, the centenary of the birth of Michelet, and the erection of a bust of Sainte-Beuve in the Luxembourg Gardens. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In his cultural-political treatises from the years 1916 to 1923, Schmitt attempts to formulate a critique of modernity that properly apprehends technology's role within it, without either aesthetically valorizing or fearfully fleeing from it – responses characteristic of many of his contemporaries. His first effort at this, in his commentary on the poem “Northern Lights” in 1916, is followed by another socioliterary study from 1919, Political Romanticism. He then takes up this task more rigorously in Roman Catholicism and Political Form in 1923. Schmitt confronts the problem that modernity seems to have two opposite intellectual poles: the one, economic-technical thought, the abstractly formal rationality associated with economics, technology, and positivism; the other, the many strands of romanticism, the highly subjective and aesthetic enrapture with specifically concrete objects. For the early Schmitt, the task of a rationality not beholden to either one of these particular opposites of modernity would be one that understands their interrelatedness in the specific historical moment of the present and attempts to move beyond them in practice, as we will see, in a particular understanding of political practice. It is noteworthy that in the same year as the publication of Roman Catholicism and Political Form, the centerpiece of Schmitt's early cultural-political confrontation with technology, Georg Lukács published History and Class Consciousness, a Marxian attempt to deal with much the same problem. Yet the relationship between the two works and the two authors themselves is generally overlooked. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Even had Locke held unwaveringly that moral obligation consists in a conclusive motive for moral action raised through self-determining practical thought, he would still have been committed to the proposition that the requisite motive can lie only in divinely established supernatural sanction. Finite intellectual nature and the power of self-determination may obligate an agent to her own happiness, but only when combined with supernatural sanctions can these obligate to morality, since only then is a coincidence ensured between rational motive and duty. From the perspective of Cudworth and the Cambridge Platonists, this amounted to the very denial of morality. “Laws [that can] no otherwise operate or seize upon [agents] than by taking hold of their animal selfish passions” can create no “obligation truly moral” Cudworth had written. A system that “will allow of no other moral obligation than this, utterly destroys morality.” Morality purports to obligate in itself, and this is possible only if there are distinctively moral reasons that can decisively guide the practical reasoning of self-determining moral agents. The Cambridge Platonists did not think this requires a source of motivation independent of the agent's good. Rather, their idea was that morally good motives and conduct expressing them are intrinsically beneficial for those who have them. At the start of the eighteenth century (over a generation later), the Platonists were followed in these ideas by Anthony Ashley Cooper, the third Earl of Shaftesbury. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

For Hobbes and Cumberland, the rationale for the internal turn was philosophical naturalism. If ethics is simply the study of “consequences from the passions of men,” and if “the Whole of moral Philosophy” is to be “resolv'd into … conclusions of true Natural Philosophy” then there may seem nothing plausible for morality's normative grip to be other than its motive power, viewed from the perspective of a rational human agent. From an agent's point of view, empirical truths to which an observer is indifferent can present themselves as demands – as matters of practical, rather than merely natural, necessity. To the agent for whom self-preservation is an inescapable end, for example, facts about the natural necessities of survival have an unavoidable practical force; they present themselves as what ought to or must be done. Empirical naturalist internalism of this sort exercised a continuing attraction throughout the early modern period, as it has, indeed, to the present day. At the same time, a second, quite different, internalist line of thought developed alongside it: an autonomist internalism or internalism of practical reason. We encountered elements of this line, in early form, in Culverwell's notion that only a being capable of “moral government” can be subject to obligation. We shall return to it again in Locke's Essay thesis that moral government must involve self-government. Neither Culverwell nor Locke (at least in his earlier writings) proposed, however, that obligation itself be understood to consist in the motives of a self-determining agent, and so neither was an autonomist internalist. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Part one is an analysis of Locke's concept of natural and civil liberty in the Two treatises. His account of liberty in the Essay is interpreted within the framework laid down in the Two treatises. I continue to believe that this early interpretation of natural and civil liberty is substantially correct and crucially important for understanding the formation of the concept of civil society or ‘public sphere’ in which citizens actively judge the policies of government in light of the public good. Whereas Hobbes and the absolutists argue that citizens alienate their independent political judgement as a condition of subjection, civic humanists uphold independent political judgement but tend to restrict its exercise to those directly engaged in government. Locke, in contrast to both, grants to citizens not in government the right to discuss and judge their governors in public, to dissent, and, if necessary, resist, when they transgress the public good. However, as I worked on chapter 6 I came to see that the interpretation of Locke's natural law as ‘rationalist’ rather than ‘voluntarist’ was mistaken. I took Hobbes' extreme form of moral and legal voluntarism as a benchmark and assumed that any theory short of that was rationalist. But it became clear that Locke developed his theory of natural law within an intellectual context set by Pufendorf of ‘mitigated’ voluntarism in which the creation of the world is purely contingent, as in all forms of voluntarism, yet once it is created certain unalterable and rational rules of human conduct follow that god ordinarily binds himself to obey, as in rationalism. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Many of the great thinkers of the European Enlightenment advanced two closely related beliefs. The first was that the societies in which they lived possessed or were about to possess properties that made them different from all other societies in history and thus distinctively ‘modern’. The second was that these modern features gave rise in turn to a second equally distinctive aspect of their societies: their ‘progressive’ nature. Two hundred years later we continue to believe that we live in societies that are ‘modern’ in roughly the sense given to this word during the Enlightenment. However, we tend to doubt and in fact to be highly sceptical of the belief that modern societies are progressive. Four deeply troubling characteristics of our century are standardly said to have provided good reason for the rise of scepticism and disillusionment with respect to progress. The horrors of two world wars shattered the belief advanced by Adam Smith (1723–90), Immanuel Kant (1724–1804), Marie-Jean Condorcet (1743–94), and Jeremy Bentham (1748–1832) that modern societies tend to peace. Our experience with war and militarism since 1945 has, if anything, increased scepticism. Over 30 million have died in the hundreds of wars since 1945; enough nuclear, biological, chemical, and conventional weapons have been built and deployed to exterminate most forms of life on the planet many times over; and our militarized international relations sustain an ever-increasing arms trade. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Hartley and Priestley Politics and religion provided Coleridge's introduction to science. In December 1795 he had published a sonnet to Joseph Priestley, whose sympathy for the French Revolution had wrought the mob to drive him out of Birmingham. Priestley was a Socinian, and thus congenial to Coleridge, then a Unitarian and a Democrat. And Priestley had recently crossed the Atlantic in search of freedom from persecution. In his Experiments and Observations on Different Kinds of Air, he had stated his creed as a natural philosopher: This rapid process of knowledge, which, like the progress of a wave of the sea, of sound, or of light from the sun, extends itself not this way or that way only, but in all directions, will, I doubt not, be the means, under God, of extirpating all error and prejudice, and of putting an end to all undue and usurped authority in the business of religion, as well as of science; and all the efforts of the interested friends of corrupt establishments of all kinds, will be ineffectual for their support in this enlightened age; though, by retarding their downfall, they may make the final ruin of them more complete and glorious. It was ill policy in Leo X. to patronize polite literature. He was cherishing an enemy in disguise. And the English hierarchy (if there be anything unsound in its constitution) has equal reason to tremble even at an air pump, or an electrical machine. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Unity in multeity: the need for a method In 1803, Coleridge jotted down a note for a “Poem on Spirit – or on Spinoza – I would make a pilgrimage to the Deserts of Arabia to find the man who could make understand how the one can be many! Eternal universal mystery! It seems as if it were impossible; yet it is – & it is every where!” Multeity was everywhere. The empiricist tradition in science emphasized it – indeed, for Coleridge, presented nature as made up exclusively of a world of little things. This was intellectually and emotionally unsatisfying. “I can contemplate nothing but parts, & parts are all little –! – My mind feels as if it ached to behold & know something great – something one & indivisible – and it is only in the faith of this that rocks or waterfalls, mountains or caverns give me the sense of sublimity or majesty! – But in this faith all things counterfeit infinity!” The observer, faced by the vast richness of the world of the manifold, sought and needed to appreciate its minute beauties while grasping its unity. At one level, this synthetic function was carried out by the understanding, which brought together a multitude of impressions into a unity by identifying something common to them all. But this was limited by the extent of the observer's experience. The understanding was not enough, and a different approach was needed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A world of little things Coleridge's objections to mechanism were all interdependent, but the imputation of atheism came to be the fundamental objection, just as theological preoccupations filled his later notebooks. At every state, he sought to keep his interpretation of nature, his philosophy, and his theology in step with one another. The tripartite organization of his first educational schemes was maintained over the years. “True Philosophy,” he wrote in 1817, “… takes it's root in Science in order to blossom into Religion.” Science in itself was morally neutral, but it provided materials for the construction of philosophy, which in turn supported and was transcended by theology. Atheism, in contrast, meant for Coleridge the end of reason and purpose in nature, the end of any possibility of rational knowledge or purposeful action. In an early note, Coleridge proposed to introduce into a poem “a dissection of Atheism – particularly the Godwinian System of Pride Proud of what? An outcast of blind Nature ruled by a fatal Necessity.” He believed that blind Nature and fatal Necessity followed inevitably from atheism and materialism, and he indentified two kinds of materialists and atheists. The first kind assumed that everything was material, that the atoms of matter were endowed with the passive attributes of figure and movability, and that thought and sensation arose from the accidental organization of atoms. The second kind added the active properties of self-movement and life to atoms and derived thought not from the mere arrangement of atoms, but from the aggregation of the properties essential to atoms. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Hume and Smith on sympathy Turning from Hume's major philosophical work, the Treatise, to that of Smith, The Theory of Moral Sentiments, is a somewhat confusing experience. On the one hand there are all the similarities in the problems dealt with and the theories proposed, in the criticisms and alignments of predecessors, and there are the recurring, more or less clear references to Hume himself. On the other hand there is a significant change in the tone and style of the discourse. While one could say that Hume is constructing an abstract theory with its own language, and trying to accommodate common experiences and their linguistic expressions within it, Smith is trying to accommodate an abstract theory within the conceptual framework of ordinary language – or at least with a minimal stretching of it. And this is presumably one of the reasons why Hume scholars find it difficult to see much profundity in Smith, and why Smith scholars may tend to think that Hume's profundity was bought at the cost of empirical content and relevance. Nor is the difference confined to language and style. For it is precisely Smith's complaint against Hume that his theory of morals was a philosopher's construction which did not catch human morality as it is – a complaint which we shall have occasion for returning to in the present chapter. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]