Early Modern Intellectual History

Metaphysik im Barockscotismus. Untersuchungen zum Metaphysikwerk des Bartholomaeus Mastrius. Mit Dokumentation der Metaphysik in der scotistischen Tradition ca. 1620-1750.  August 2016.
Bochumer Studien zur Philosophie, 57; pp. xviii + 993.
Cf. https://benjamins.com/#catalog/books/bsp.57/main.

Reviews:
Thomas Marschler, in: Archivum franciscanum historicum 110, 2017: 362-366.
Rafael Ramis Barceló, in: Revista Española de Filosofía Medieval 24, 2017: 300-303.
Ulrich L. Lehner, in: Theological Studies 79, 2018: 227-228.

Does self-knowledge help? A rationalist, presumably, thinks that it does: both that self-knowledge is possible and that, if gained through appropriate channels, it is desirable. Descartes notoriously claimed that, with appropriate methods of enquiry, each of his readers could become an expert on herself or himself. In this paper I reject the widespread interpretation of Descartes which makes his dualist view of the body as negative or as pathological as that expressed by Socrates in Plato's *Phaedo*. I argue not just that the old moral cosmobiological disgust at the body is absent in Descartes, but that, positively, Descartes *requires* us to contract full intimacy with our own body and our own peculiar past. He does wish for objective knowledge in these difficult domains, but this does not render his neurological ethics a universal prescription, for such objective knowledge is nevertheless knowledge of local phenomena, of the peculiarities of idiosyncratic associations. Civilsing the body, in seeking dominion over it, is a *process*; and, I will argue, Descartes was too firmly convinced that the body constantly changes its nature to have thought consistently that the process could come to an end. My case rests first on an analysis, in the next three sections, of capacities which, according to Descartes, we share with other animals. Sections 2 and 3 argue for strongly dynamic interpretations of Descartes' views on body and on corporeal memory respectively. Then Section 4 backtracks to support more firmly the surprisingly complex form of 'automatic' responses which I attribute to Descartes' beast- and body-machines. Finally, in section 5, I reintroduce the soul and the capacities for reflection which it allows in the human compound, showing how closely Descartes thinks we must work with the body, its habits and its history, in deliberately moulding our associative responses with active mind.

Many scholars have argued that the Protestant Reformation generally departed from virtue ethics, and this claim is often accepted by Protestant ethicists. This essay argues against such discontinuity by demonstrating John Calvin’s reception of ethical concepts from Augustine and Aristotle. Calvin drew on Augustine’s concept of eudaimonia and many aspects of Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics , including concepts of choice, habit, virtue as a mean, and the specific virtues of justice and prudence. Calvin also evaluated the problem of pagan virtue in light of traditional Augustinian texts discussed in the medieval period. He interpreted the Decalogue as teaching virtue, including the cardinal virtues of justice and temperance. Calvin was not the harbinger of an entirely new ethical paradigm, but rather a participant in the mainstream of Christian thinkers who maintained a dual interest in Aristotelian and Augustinian eudaimonist virtue ethics.

I argue that the imagination was a crucial concept for the understanding of marvellous phenomena, divination and magic in general. Exploring a debate on prophecy at the turn of the seventeenth century, I show that four explanatory categories (God, demons, nature and fraud) were consistently evoked and I elucidate the role of the imagination in each of them. I introduce the term 'floating concept' to conceptualise the different understandings of the imagination and animal spirits in different discourses. I underpin my argument with a broader and less known discussion of the imagination. I argue that theories of the imagination, and particularly of the powers of the imagination, acquired negative associations and became linked with illicit magic in the Renaissance. Furthermore, I show that the relation between both animal spirits and imagination, and the power of the latter over external bodies, points to the importance of a 'history of vapours' and this suggests an adjustment to Hutchison's argument on occult qualities in mechanical philosophy. The accompanying paper gives more evidence of these claims and elaborates on the relation between the natural and the moral.

The Theses LVI belong to a series of hitherto unpublished early manuscripts of the Dutch humanist and jurisconsult Hugo Grotius (1583-1645) that were acquired by the University of Leiden in 1864. It is not certain when the Theses were written, but preliminary research on the physical manuscript and the sources cited indicate two possible windows. The first is around 1602-1605, that is roughly at a time when Grotius was also working on his Commentary on the Law of Prize and Booty (De Iure Praedae Commentarius). The second dating places the genesis of the manuscrbipt around 1613-1615.
In the context of Grotius’ writings, the Theses LVI assume an important position for several reasons: They raise questions about state formation, the duty of citizens to the state and the right of political resistance in far greater detail than in any other work of the celebrated Dutch humanist. The Theses LVI also feature important reading notes that yield priceless insights into the sources that Grotius directly consulted and their influence on his ideas. The manuscript grants modern scholars a unique glimpse into the working mind of its author. Evidence points not only to the ferocious haste with which Grotius wrote his works, but also the occasional sloppiness of his reading and research habits."""

Link to full article: https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/14622459.2020.1754592

Although Philip Melanchthon did not write his memoirs, he did reflect on his ‘life and times’ in a Latin preface he wrote to the first collected edition of his works, the Operum tomi quinque (1541), at the behest of the Basel printer Johannes Herwagen. The preface is highly significant for the reflections it contains on Melanchthon’s education, scholarship, and service to the Church. In particular, it offers special insight into the perennial debate over the Wittenberg professor concerning his humanism and its relation to the Reformation. Nearly all subsequent editions of Melanchthon’s works in the early modern period became implicated in some fashion in often bitter intra-Lutheran conflicts. The fact that this preface and the edition in which it appeared predates these conflicts is another reason to investigate it. The preface is offered here in English translation, with an introduction to the text and details concerning its printing.

Zachary Purvis, Casey Carmichael & Timios Cook

Akin to the mathematical recreations, John Wilkins' Mathematicall Magick (1648) elaborates the pleasant, useful and wondrous part of practical mathematics, dealing in particular with its material culture of machines and instruments. We contextualize the Mathematicall Magick by studying its institutional setting and its place within changing conceptions of art, nature, religion and mathematics. We devote special attention to the way Wilkins inscribes mechanical innovations within a discourse of wonder. Instead of treating ‘wonder’ as a monolithic category, we present a typology, showing that wonders were not only recreative, but were meant to inspire Wilkins' readers to new mathematical inventions.

In this paper, I seek to present the range of issues involved in the efforts of sixteenth-century kabbalists to understand the nature of selfhood, and the paths prescribed for the formation of an ideal life. I reflect on the mystical writings of Moshe Cordovero, Eliyahu de Vidas, and Hayyim Vital-probing their conceptions of core identity, the polarity between body and soul, and the ethical guidance for a life well lived. In so doing, I consider the following additional themes, and their relation to the matrix of self-formation and religious identity: reincarnation and rebirth; the virtue of humility and self-effacement; the cultivation of wisdom; ideals of piety and prophetic experience; asceticism; and the spiritual transcendence of desire. In presenting this wide range of constituent themes, I argue that sixteenth-century kabbalists understood the soul to be the ultimate marker of personal identity (nuanced and complicated by the doctrine of reincarnation), and that they formulated a vision of an ideal ethics in which the human being functions as an earthly vessel for the divine presence. What is more, the preparation of that vessel required a degree of humility so extreme that the attainment of ideal personhood ultimately involved the effacement of that very identity.

This article shows how and why John Toland's Pantheisticon (1720) presents a version of Stoicism that locates Stoic ethics in terms of its 'original', naturalistic, foundation and devoid of any reconciliation with Christianity. As the article demonstrates, Toland's accountbased on Cicero's Academicastands opposed to the Christianized version of Stoicism that had dominated so much seventeenth-century discourse: in effect, Toland restores the materialism that was incompatible with neo-Stoicism. Furthermore, the article also suggests that this 'restoration' can be taken as a Spinozistic statement: Toland's 'application' of Cicero celebrates what the first critics of neo-Stoicism had deemed dangerously close to Spinozism and so a threat to established piety.

This article relates the evolving relationship between republicanism and the problem of ‘empire’ to the changing social contexts within which republican political theory emerges in the early modern period. It is argued that the initial antagonism between republicanism and empire was a politically constituted dilemma that related to the specific configuration of economic and political power characteristic of pre-capitalist societies. With the development of capitalism in England in the early modern period, the problem of empire becomes partially resolved due to the way in which the separation of economic and political power under capitalism reconstitutes the nature of empire itself. This new social context – characterized by new social, economic and political relationships specific to an emerging capitalist context – laid the foundations for the resolution of the ‘republican dilemma’ of empire and the ideological establishment of the first ‘Republican Empire’ in 18th-century America.

This essay reconstructs the story of hidden collaborations between the Amsterdam bookseller Johannes Janssonius and the Roman Inquisition in 1660. It provides evidence that the papacy tacitly permitted the circulation of an explicitly Copernican book at a surprisingly early date and that the Protestant publisher was eager to curry favor with the Holy Office by secretly submitting texts to Catholic censorship. Building on recent scholarship that depicts Catholic censors as mediators between the Church and Italian authors, the essay argues that, in the second half of the seventeenth century, they came to play a similar role in an international, multiconfessional context. Censorship should not be construed merely as an external force, impeding the creation and communication of knowledge; it was an integral component of the European in- formation order, shaping scholarship and how it moved. The Holy Office was a node in the Republic of Letters.
https://www.journals.uchicago.edu/doi/abs/10.1086/702875
https://www.facebook.com/notes/isis-journal/interview-with-daniel-stolzenberg/2179868515453481/

Nineteenth-century Russian philology was dominated by an approach derived from German Völkerpsychologie. Language and social consciousness were viewed as embodiments of “national-popular psychology.” The shortcomings of this approach were becoming apparent at the end of the prerevolutionary period, but it was only in the 1920s that the hegemony of Völkerpsychologie was decisively challenged. Völkerpsychologie was attacked in the name of “objective psychology,” and concrete studies of the relationship between language and social structure were carried out. By the end of the 1920s, völkerpsychologische ideas were subsumed into a new and progressive form of sociological linguistics. © 2006 Wiley Periodicals, Inc.

The present article explores health as a factor in the understanding of Edo-period male sexuality. This notion was systematically propagated by a genre of health guides on 'Nurturing Life', which came to circulate widely at the time. Sexuality was seen as an integral element of a healthy life-style in these didactic texts, which aimed to instruct people on how to live a long life unharmed by disease. In order to achieve this goal, the health-seeker was to strictly control his everyday activities, including eating, drinking alcohol, sleepingor sexual intercourse. By consequence, a certain kind of sexual behaviour emerged from these works as 'healthy', while deviations from the prescribed standards are medicalized away as harmful to the body, in extreme cases even fatal. At the same time, bodily health is presented as inextricably bound up with moral 'health'. Thus, the rhetoric of control imposed on the body was extended from the purely medical to the moral, making the health-seeking individual at the same time a good (male) subject and model head of household within an ideal Confucianinspired society. The 'healthy' sexuality of writings on Nurturing Life therefore has to be situated at the crossroads of medical beliefs and moral parameters.

In his Jewish Antiquities, the Jewish historian Josephus Flavius relates a story of an advanced astronomy pursued by biblical patriarchs before the Flood. In the early modern period, Flavius’s story was often used as a clarification of the origin of astronomy. The aim of the article is to describe the gradual change in the approach of astronomers and historians of mathematical sciences to this account in the course of the 16th and 17th century. This change did not consist in a simple shift from the belief in the perfect antediluvian astronomy to the theory of progress. In fact, the belief in the existence of antediluvian astronomy survived until the end of the 17th century. A much more serious and substantial change consisted in the fact that God was no longer considered the originator of astronomy, since it started to be understood as a result of human cleverness, patience and diligence

Charles Loyseau’s Traité des ordres et simples dignitez (1610) is well known to historians for its apparent “anatomy” of France’s social hierarchy in the ancien régime. Whilst Loyseau was mostly preoccupied with the elites and their varying levels of dignity, his treatise nonetheless provides an important window on the multitudinous plebeian orders. Loyseau hesitantly stratifies four tiers of “viles personnes” (cultivators, artisans, casual workmen, and beggars). Each of these groups puts strain on his conceptual framework of dignity and order; only beggars emerge as fully vile. The plebeian multitudes of the Traité des ordres engage in menial, unstable, but in many cases still worthwhile occupations. By comparing Loyseau’s views with those of contemporaries (Louis Turquet de Mayerne and Antoine de Montchrestien) we may better understand his conception of “viles personnes” as the first stages of an emergent discourse on political economy: harnessing the economic potential of France’s poorest.

Anarchy is one of the most important concepts in international theory; Thomas Hobbes is regularly invoked to illustrate the character and the consequences of anarchy.  This article interrogates the theological aspect of Hobbes’s political philosophy in a bid to move beyond the distorting mythology that has grown-up around ‘Hobbesian’ international relations.  In doing so, it advances a positive argument that presents Hobbes as a theorist of interstate society that is made and unmade in the way that God made the universe.  The anarchy that is attributed to Hobbes is rooted in a theological dispute about the nature of God and the extent of his power, and which entails a particular way of constituting and comprehending reality.  When the implications of this dispute are taken into account it becomes evident that anarchy is neither an objective feature of a world composed of independent states nor an inescapable logical condition that follows the absence of central authority.  Rather, anarchy is an achievement of thought, born of a particular time and place, which seeks a reflection of itself in the mirror of eternity.

Occultism remains the largest blind spot in the historiography of Islamicate philosophy-science, a casualty of persistent scholarly positivism, even whiggish triumphalism.  Such occultophobia notwithstanding, the present article conducts a survey of the Islamicate encyclopedic tradition from the 4th-11th/10th-17th centuries, with emphasis on Persian classifications of the sciences (sg. taṣnīf al-ʿulūm), to demonstrate the ascent to philosophically mainstream status of various occult sciences (ʿulūm ġarība) throughout the post-Mongol Persianate world.  Most significantly, in Persian encyclopedias, but not in Arabic, and beginning with Faḫr al-Dīn Rāzī, certain occult sciences (astrology, lettrism and geomancy) were gradually but definitively shifted from the natural to the mathematical sciences as a means of reasserting their scientific legitimacy in the face of four centuries of anti-occultist polemic, from Ibn Sīnā to Ibn Ḫaldūn; they were simultaneously reclassified as the sciences of walāya, moreover, which alone explains the massive increase in patronage of professional occultists at the Safavid, Mughal and Ottoman courts in the runup to the Islamic millennium (1592 CE).  I argue that the mathematicalization, neopythagoreanization and sanctification of occultism in Ilkhanid-Timurid-Aqquyunlu Iran is the immediate intellectual and sociopolitical context for both the celebrated mathematization of astronomy by the members of the Samarkand Observatory in the 9th/15th century and the resurgence of neoplatonic-neopythagorean philosophy in Safavid Iran in the 10th/16th and 11th/17th, whereby Ibn Sīnā himself was transformed into a neopythagorean-occultist—processes which have heretofore been studied in atomistic isolation.

During the early 1620’s, England went through a period of intense economic disorders which sparked the interest of many in economic reasoning. The decade witnessed the emergence of the most relevant pieces of economic literature of the early Stuart era, but the debate was not restricted to the abstract confrontation of economic writers. The fundamental issue at stake in the controversies between Malynes, Misselden, and Mun – the integration of money and international trade in a coherent explanation of economic phenomena – was also the subject of much care in the political arena at large. The 1621 parliamentary session, in particular, put in evidence not only the fundamental relevance of the matter for understanding England’s economic maladies, but also the great difficulties involved in its investigation. By bringing all these elements together, the paper seeks to articulate a more dense and meaningful portrait of the prevailing state of economic ideas in early 17th century England.

In the Huguenot refugee community in The Netherlands, known as a hotbed of the early Enlightenment, literary interest in Judaism was ubiquitous, yet actual Dutch Jews were relegated to a marginal position in the exchange of ideas. It is this paradoxical experience of cultural participation and social exclusion that a major unpublished source allows to depict. The ex-converso Abraham Gómez Silveyra (1651-1741), a merchant endowed with rabbinic education and proficiency in French, composed eight manuscript volumes of theological reflections in Spanish literary prose and poetry. This huge clandestine series, which survives in three copies, shows the author's insatiable curiosity for Christian thought. While rebutting Isaac Jacquelot's missionary activity, he fraternizes with Pierre Jurieu's millenarianism, Jacques Basnage's historiography, and Pierre Bayle's plea for religious freedom. Gómez Silveyra, however, being painfully aware of his voicelessness in the public sphere, enacts Bayle's utopian project as a closed performance for a Jewish audience.

The article deals with the transformations of visual representations of power of the last
hetman of Cossack Ukraine Kyrylo Rozumovskyi (1750-1764). The traditional elements of the ruling
elite’s representation included the court of the ruler with its hierarchy, system of political roles,
staff, etiquette and ceremonial, capital and numerous residences. Among the hetman, various
groups of nobles, courtiers, attendants, representatives of the social strata took part in the
performative actions. Political representational acts, including elections, inagurations, investitures,
as well as religious and personal celebrations of rulers, such as, hunting and banquet, were the
most common. Each action had its own ceremonial scenario that was full of explicit or hidden
meanings. Rozumovskyi radically changed the ideology and forms of the external representation of
the Hetman's power. Old clothing, churches and fortresses were replaced by the European
cosmopolitan and secular courtly culture. Hetman preferred to look like a European nobleman. The
cult of the head of the Cossack Troops, as the first knight among equals, transformed into the
image of an enlightened ruler and protector of the Little Russian (Malorossia) country. The way of
life of the Hetman's court changed significantly. While the traditional banquets and hunts
preserved, the new artistic entertainments, such as concerts, spectacles, balls and masquerades,
appeared. A renewed hetman’s capital in Baturin with its exquisite palace and park, university,
state institutions and factories, reflected this new concept of power.The political aspect of symbols
and ceremonials was especially important field of semantic changes. Being a relative of the ruling
dynasty and possesing a hetman's title, Rozumovskyi placed himself outside the existing ruling
hierarchies both in the Russian Empire and in the Hetmanate. As plans for the establishment of
hereditary hetmanhood in Ukraine were made, the visual symbols of the future political project
were formed. They combined a symbolism of the "Little Russian (Malorossian) nation" with the
Rozumovskyi’s personal coat of arms and monograms. This symbiosis clearly reflected the political
ambitions of the Hetman who wanted to see himself as a half-sovereign ruler

This essay traces the history, current state, and potential future of comparative literature. The great expansions have coincided with aspirations for international understanding. The term first emerged after the Napoleonic wars. The field soared in the late 19th century, became a discipline after the Second World War, and experienced its most vigorous growth (of departments and programs) in the U.S. during the Vietnam War.

Comparative literature has always worried its supporters as well as its skeptics. At the same time it has experienced a constant crisis within. In each episode it has responded by enlarging its purview and self-definition. Thus in the late 20th century it transcended the European literatures that had long been its bedrock to embrace East-West literary and cultural relations in ever-broader outward orbits, encompassing eventually first Edward Said's orientalism, then Homi Bhabha's deconstructivist postcolonialism, and finally Gayatri Spivak's eclecticism. The models that served during the extended pax americana seem poorly suited to terrorism, war, and globalization. Supranationalism cannot be lightly readjusted to fit transnationalism. But comparative literature can and will survive, so long as balances persist between theory and practice, so long as interdisciplinarity does not come at the cost of disciplinarity, and so long as the indivisible relationships uniting humanism, humanities, and humaneness are not forgotten. While comparative literature retains its emphases on language-training and critical skills, and while it satisfies desires of students to transcend boundaries culturally, interpretatively, and otherwise, it will not only always remain alive but even often thrive.

This essay demonstrates how the early Enlightenment salonnière madame de Lambert advanced a novel feminist intellectual synthesis favoring women's taste and cognition, which hybridized Cartesian (specifically Malebranchian) and honnête thought. Disputing recent interpretations of Enlightenment salonnières that emphasize the constraints of honnêteté on their thought, and those that see Lambert's feminism as misguided in emphasizing gendered sensibility, I analyze Lambert's approach as best serving her needs as an aristocratic woman within elite salon society, and show through contextualized analysis how she deployed honnêteté towards feminist ends. Additionally, the analysis of Malebranche's, Poulain de la Barre's, and Lambert's arguments about the female mind's gendered embodiment illustrates that misrepresenting Cartesianism as necessarily liberatory for women, by reducing it to a rigid substance dualism, erases from view its more complex implications for gender politics in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries, especially in the honnête environment of the salons.

On the basis of the autobiography of the orthodox Calvinist minister Abraham Trommius (1633-1719), this article argues that the Republic of Letters created its own cultures of memory. The very use of the word ‘Republic’ begs the question whether there was some kind of early modern ‘state building’ at play within the networks of learned men and women. Although sentiments of religious and political alliance cannot be ruled out in the practices of learned memories, the identity arising from these cultures aimed at stressing learning, friendship and communication. Its acts of memory were localized instances of learned identity formation across borders, serving travelling students regardless of their political and confessional affiliations. This article argues that memories of learning or learned memories present a new logical, although hitherto ignored, line of research, to complement well-studied political and confessional memories. Trommius draws particular attention to Erasmus and to Joseph Scaliger and his father Julius Caesar Scaliger. The article also discusses the broader memory of these towering figures to exemplify the study of early modern learned identity formation by means of cultures of memory.

Keywords: locations of knowledge,  learned identity,  material memory,  Grand Tour,  Erasmus,  Scaliger

This book poses the question: before the Enlightenment, and before the imperialism of the later 18th century, how did European readers find out about the varied cultures of Asia? The book presents a history of Oriental studies in 17th-century France (c.1643–1715), mapping the place within the intellectual culture of the period that was given to studies of Arabic, Persian, Turkish, and Chinese texts, as well as writings on Mughal India. The Orientalist writers studied here, such as Melchisédech Thévenot, François Bernier, and Barthélemy D'Herbelot, produced books that would become the sources used throughout the 18th century. They are here placed in their own context as members of the ‘republic of letters’ in the age of the scientific revolution and the early Enlightenment."

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Contents

Introduction: Baroque Orientalism

1 Barthélemy d'Herbelot and the Place of Oriental Learning

2 "Toutes les Curiosités du Monde": The Geographic Projects of Melchisédech Thévenot

3 The Double Eclipse: François Bernier's Geography of Knowledge

4 The Making of d'Herbelot's Bibliothèque orientale

5 Printing Confucius in Paris

Epilogue

Bibliography

Index

Jean Gagnier’s De vita, et rebus gestis Mohammedis (1723) was the first substantial biography of the Prophet Muhammad translated by a European author directly from an authentic Muslim source. Familiar to Edward Gibbon and Voltaire, Gagnier’s work significantly shaped European understandings of the origins of Islam well into the nineteenth century. Yet Gagnier’s scholarship has not been examined in any depth since it was closely read by his contemporaries. This article provides an analysis of Gagnier’s strategies and competencies as a translator and reconstructs his attempt to exploit the Arabic manuscripts then available to an Oxford scholar. It argues that the case of Gagnier is a cautionary reminder that philological approaches to the study of the Muslim past did not necessarily occasion sympathy for Islam. Old prejudices continued to influence Gagnier’s decisions as a translator and were passed on in new forms to later readers. Moreover, aspects of the Muslim historiographical tradition discovered by Gagnier did not necessarily incline his readers to a more positive view of Islam. The increased accessibility of Islamic historical texts could just as easily serve the Christian polemicist as the Enlightened historian.

This article provides a reappraisal of the political and intellectual uses of the memory of the rump Habsburg Monarchy in eighteenth-century Spain. Drawing on newly discovered archival material, this article recovers the impact of Habsburg Spain on the political imaginary of early eighteenth-century Spanish reformers and political economists, and unearths the legal debates of the 1741 Imperial Diet Election concerning Philip V’s claim to the Austrian Habsburg throne. This reconsideration sheds light on the origins of the early Spanish Enlightenment, and emphasises the centrality of the debates of those political economists, jurists, ministers, who propelled Enlightenment reforms in early eighteenth-century Spain.

This article explores the writings of Ludwig Heinrich Jakob and Johann Benjamin Erhard, two young Kantians who produced original defences of resistance and revolution during the 1790's. Comparing these two neglected philosophers reveals a crucial divergence in the liberal theory of revolution between a perspective that emphasises resistance by the individual and another that emphasises revolution by the nation. The
article seeks to contribute to a more nuanced view of the political theory of the German Enlightenment, which has often been presented as excessively obedient to authority.

By focusing on the historian and antiquarian, Sir James Ware (1594–1666), this essay looks at potentially new ways book history can be analyzed. In so doing, it challenges preconceived ideas that the various groupings in Ireland were diametrically opposed to supporting any kind of common endeavour.

The article examines Old English claims to catholic ‘liberty of conscience’ and the way in which this engendered a discussion of English liberties in Ireland.  Old English representatives sought to ground their claims to ‘liberty of conscience’ in established practice, custom and law.  Their claims to ‘liberty of conscience’ also brought into play the vocabulary of corporate and parliamentary liberty.  In response, New English protestants turned to ideas of duty and citizenship, which were equally embedded in conceptions of English liberties.  They argued that a catholic ‘conscience’ sat in opposition to ideas of duty to the king and the commonwealth.  In doing so, the New English questioned both the basis and extent of the liberties possessed by the Old English.  Such an exchange, this article argues, is illustrative of the way in which an English pairing of liberties, with ideas of duty and active citizenship, opened up an area of dispute involving a shared set of political concepts and vocabulary.

This article argues that early modern philosophy should be seen as an integrated enterprise of moral and natural philosophy. Consequently, early modern moral and natural philosophy should be taught as intellectual enterprises that developed hand in hand. Further, the article argues that the unity of these two fields can be best introduced through methodological ideas. It illustrates these theses through a case study on Scottish Newtonianism, starting with visions concerning the unity of philosophy and then turning to a discussion of how methodological ideas figure in those visions. Finally, the article argues that methodological considerations can serve as good starting points to introduce and discuss central topics and canonical figures of the early modern period.

The catharsis produced by the early 1620’s trade crisis had a significant impact on the way economic themes were regarded by public opinion in England. As a result, those who analyze the ideas put forward in the documents written during that period – be they printed pamphlets or official memoranda – are left with the impression that an adequate supply of money was the undisputed primary concern as regards economic administration. However, as already stressed by Barry Supple, monetary administration only occupied a prominent position in the political agenda of early 17th
century England during times of crisis – that is, when the kingdom was faced with a perceived threat of demonetization. This paper tries to show that, during the first two decades of the 17th century, concern with an inflow of bullion and a positive balance of trade was only of secondary importance, being normally overshadowed by a more fundamental aim: promoting a well-ordered structure for the economic relations of the kingdom, according to specific views of what constituted proper trade management. This approach encompassed both foreign and domestic activities, and found its most evident manifestation in the debates about free trade and monopolies which permeated the whole of James I’s reign.

The article offers a case study in the nature of uses of the European past in East Asia at a time when the search for the knowledge of the West was not yet motivated primarily by any sense of its civilizational, moral, or technological superiority. In the course of the later eighteenth century, as Dutch philological expertise gradually became another available tool – alongside the long-established Sinological erudition – for generating knowledge about the world, commentators around the Japanese archipelago began to turn not only to the medical and astronomical manuals of the occidentals but also to their histories. The translation-cum-commentary Miscellanea from the western seas by Yamamura Saisuke (1801) is a case in point. The text became effectively a crossroads of two philological and historiographical bodies of knowledge that intersected in unexpected ways as the European past was subjected to a reinterpretation in terms of the classical Chinese precedent, while the product of that reinterpretation informed a different understanding of the recent and contemporary historical trajectory of a Japan now exposed to the dynamics of the global European presence.

This paper proposes to approach the economic ideas which prevailed in England during the early 17th century by moving beyond the historical and analytical exegesis of the printed pamphlets of the time, and focusing instead on the intellectual perspectives brought to bear upon economic matters by three of the most prominent public figures of late Jacobean England: Lionel Cranfield, Francis Bacon, and Edward Coke. As civil servants, all three of them were directly involved in the formulation of public policies aimed at economic regulation. Bacon and Coke, however, approached this problem as part of a larger system of public policy whose purpose was to promote order and stability in the commonwealth at large. Cranfield, on the other hand, brought a mercantile perspective to bear on the matter, emphasizing the importance of a favorable balance of trade, and stressing the usefulness of quantitative data in the assessment of economic phenomena. It is concluded that while Tudor political and social philosophy still dominated the way in which the English crown dealt with problems of an economic nature, the new perspective introduced by Cranfield exerted a perceptible influence within official circles.

""In his « little Treatise in English» on Human nature (1640), and, later, in Leviathan (1647 – 1650), Thomas Hobbes examines and redefines the passions. Basing his argument upon the concept of motion, he conceives them as thoughts: passions are nothing but perceptions, which transit through the brain, and then move towards the heart. There they cause various sensations of pleasure or pain, by helping or hindering « vital motion ».
Anger, Hobbes claims, is a break-through in front of a sudden opposition, not the response to an outrage, as the Ancients had erroneously claimed. « Courage, in a large signification, is the absence of fear in the presence of any evil whatsoever; but in a stricter and more common meaning, it is contempt of wounds and death, when they oppose a man in the way to his end. Anger (or sudden courage) is nothing but the appetite or desire of overcoming present opposition. It hath been commonly defined to be grief proceeding from an opinion of contempt; which is confuted by the often experience we have of being moved to anger by things inanimate and without sense, and consequently incapable of contemning us. » (Leviathan, I, 6, 1-2.  Cf. Human Nature, VII, 1-2).
The definition of 'orge', as the grief for an undeserved slight, joined to the wish to retaliate, comes from Aristotle’s 'Rhetoric', a text Hobbes not only knew, but also translated. Anger was, for Aristotle, the political passion par excellence. It is because we are insulted that we revolt, and that our revolt is justified. It is in anger that we commit tyrannicide. Be it a tumultuous explosion or a long lasting grudge, ire is by definition the reasoned answer of a social actor, who suffers in his body as well as in the social image that he has  created for herself, and on behalf of justice: one does not recognize this person for that which he wishes to be considered. The gender mark is intended, given the heroic context. This criticism might appear to be just a minor detail, confined to Hobbes’ typology of the passions.  But since the new description of anger disconnects the emotion from any justification (thus from justice), refuting Aristotle was crucial for the consistency of Hobbes’ theory of the state. Leviathan must have zero tolerance for any form of social violence, from sedition (his sickness) to civil war (his death). Therefore the celebration of the noble killing of a king (conveniently labeled “tyrant”), has no place in modern politics. Those who come to treat a sovereign as an obstacle in their way understand nothing of the nature of the state, which is artificial and vulnerable, always threatened by a return to the state of nature.
    Furthermore, to object to Aristotle on anger was consistent with Hobbes’ profound weariness with classical political theory. One of the most insidious causes of the dangerous misunderstanding of the state, Hobbes argues, was ideological. People learned to cultivate dissent and glamorize discontent from subversive, poisonous political theories: those of the Ancients. « From the reading, I say, of such books, men have undertaken to kill their Kings, because the Greek and Latin writers, in their books and discourses of Policy, make it lawful and laudable, for any man so to do ; provided, before he do it, he call him tyrant. For they say not regicide, that is, killing a king, but tyrannicide, that is, killing of a tyrant is lawful » ('De Corpore Politico', XXVII,  10).  No learning of a language, Hobbes dryly comments, has ever been paid with so much blood, as that of Greek and Latin (Ibidem, 150).
In the transition from a theory of man as a political animal, naturally inclined to sociability (Aristotle), to a vision of human nature, made up of movement and competition, Hobbes rethought the anthropological underpinnings of politics. This required the simplification of the passions, and the rejection of that interlacing of rights, habits and body, which framed the complexity of the emotions in the classical past. The demystification of anger was critical.
 

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The article contributes to recent debates about the use of " profane learning " by humanist scholars in the sixteenth century in their sermons and religious polemic. It does this by surveying the use of references in such texts to the braggart soldier " Thraso " from the ancient Roman comedy Eunuchus, by Terence. The article situates the surprising number of references to this morally dubious figure – in sermons, polemic, and wider religious writing – within a Renaissance pedagogy that stressed the character's usefulness for the moral and political imagination. Identifying differences between the rhetorical contexts of sermons and polemic, it surveys and analyses a range of references to Thraso, and argues that even evocations of such a resolutely hateful figure as Thraso could vary in comic tone. In addition, such evocations were not only simple quotations or epithets; they could also be attempts to channel whole scenes from Terence's play.

A focal point of twentieth-century commentary on Hobbes has been the few paragraphs in chapter 15 of Leviathan where Hobbes presents the objections of someone he calls the Foole and then sets out to meet these objections. The Foole maintains that it is reasonable to break ...

This paper focusses on John Toland's influential Hypatia (1720), an account of the neo-Platonist philosopher and mathematician murdered in ancient Alexandria; it also considers segments of his Letters to Serena (1704), and suggests various conjunctions between the two texts which confirm Toland's genuine and sustained feminist commitment. As I try to establish, Toland's concern is as much about contemporaneous events as it is about 'disinterested' history: by promoting Hypatia as the representative of philosophy in its perennial struggle with superstition and priestcraft, Toland is able to underscore the wider case for an inclusive and capacious conception of 'enlightenment'.

Pierre Bayle's Dictionnaire Historique et Critique, a landmark in intellectual history, is a curious text. Originally intended as a collection of all errors, it became an encyclopedia of everything, enfolding rampantly growing footnotes that commented on every imaginable topic. Instead of looking at Bayle's theoretical statements in the Dictionnaire, I explore Bayle's writing practice, his critical method and his practice of forming judgments. A close study of the textual, paratextual and contextual characteristics of the first entry of the Dictionnaire (the entry "Abaris") allows me to find out how Bayle made up his mind at every stage during a contemporaneous controversy on divination. In this way, we are able to see Bayle's mind in action while he is judging the contradictory information he receives and the to-and-fro movement of changing opinions he is confronted with. Th is examination yields new insights to Bayle's practical attitudes towards key issues in his oeuvre, including scepticism, rationalism, superstition and tolerance. At the same time, the article clarifies how Bayle was involved in the Republic of Letters and how he related to his local context in Rotterdam.