This book is a systematic study of Descartes' theory of causation and its relation to the medieval and early modern scholastic philosophy that provides its proper historical context. The argument presented here is that even though Descartes offered a dualistic ontology that differs radically from what we find in scholasticism, his views on causation were profoundly influenced by scholastic thought on this issue. This influence is evident not only in his affirmation in the Meditations of the abstract scholastic axioms that a cause must contain the reality of its effects and that conservation does not differ in reality from creation, but also in the details of the accounts of body-body interaction in his physics, of mind-body interaction in his psychology, and of the causation that he took to be involved in free human action. In contrast to those who have read Descartes as endorsing the "occasionalist" conclusion that God is the only real cause, a central thesis of this study is that he accepted what in the context of scholastic debates regarding causation is the antipode of occasionalism, namely, the view that creatures rather than God are the causal source of natural change. What emerges from the defense of this interpretation of Descartes is a new understanding of his contribution to modern thought on causation.

This new book by Michael Slote argues that Western philosophy on the whole has overemphasized rational control and autonomy at the expense of the important countervailing value and virtue of receptivity. Recently the ideas of caring and empathy have received a great deal of philosophical and public attention, but both these notions rest on the deeper and broader value of receptivity, and in From Enlightenment to Receptivity, Slote seeks to show that we need to focus more on receptivity if we are to attain a more balanced sense and understanding of what is important to us.
Beginning with a critique of Enlightenment thinking that calls into question its denial of any central role to considerations of emotion and empathy, he goes on to show how a greater emphasis on these factors and on the receptivity that underlies them can give us a more realistic, balanced, and sensitive understanding of our core ethical and epistemological values. This means rejecting post-modernism's blanket rejection of reason and of compelling real values and recognizing, rather, that receptivity should play a major role in how we lead our lives as individuals, in how we relate to nature, in how we acquire knowledge about the world, and in how we relate morally and politically with others.

A unifying theme of Loeb's work is epistemological - that Descartes and Hume advance theories of knowledge that rely on a substantial 'naturalistic' component, adopting one or another member of a cluster of psychological properties of beliefs as the goal of inquiry and the standard for assessing belief-forming mechanisms. Thus Loeb shows a surprising affinity between the epistemologies of the two figures -- surprising because they are often thought of as polar opposites in this respect.
Descartes and Hume are unique in that their philosophical texts are accessible beyond just a narrow audience in the history of philosophy; their ideas continue to be a vital part of the field at large. This volume will thus appeal to advanced students and scholars not just in the history of early modern philosophy but in epistemology and other core areas of the discipline.

In the face of ongoing religious conflicts and unending culture wars, what are we to make of liberalism's promise that it alone can arbitrate between church and state? In this wide-ranging study, John Perry examines the roots of our thinking on religion and politics, placing the early-modern founders of liberalism in conversation with today's theologians and political philosophers.
From the story of Antigone to debates about homosexuality and bans on religious attire, it is clear that liberalism's promise to solve all theo-political conflict is a false hope. The philosophy connecting John Locke to John Rawls seeks a world free of tragic dilemmas, where there can be no Antigones. Perry rejects this as an illusion. Disputes like the culture wars cannot be adequately comprehended as border encroachments presided over by an impartial judge. Instead, theo-political conflict must be considered a contest of loyalties within each citizen and believer. Drawing on critics of Rawls ranging from Michael Sandel to Stanley Hauerwas, Perry identifies what he calls a 'turn to loyalty' by those who recognize the inadequacy of our usual thinking on the public place of religion. The Pretenses of Loyalty offers groundbreaking analysis of the overlooked early work of Locke, where liberalism's founder himself opposed toleration.
Perry discovers that Locke made a turn to loyalty analogous to that of today's communitarian critics. Liberal toleration is thus more sophisticated, more theologically subtle, and ultimately more problematic than has been supposed. It demands not only governmental neutrality (as Rawls believed) but also a reworked political theology. Yet this must remain under suspicion for Christians because it places religion in the service of the state. Perry concludes by suggesting where we might turn next, looking beyond our usual boundaries to possibilities obscured by the liberalism we have inherited.

The Bible has always been a contested legacy. Form late antiquity to the Refomation, debates about the Bible took place at the center of manifold movements that defined Western civilization. In the eigtheenth century, Europe's scriptural inheritance surfaced once again at a critical moment. During the Enlightenment, scholars guided by a new vision of a post-theological age did not simply investigate the Bible, they remade it. In place of the familiar scriptural Bibles that belonged to Christian and Jewish communities, they created a new form: the academic Bible. In this book, Michael Legaspi examines the creation of the academic Bible. Beginning with the fragmentation of biblical interpretation in the centuries after the Reformation, Legaspi shows how the weakening of scriptural authority in the Western churches altered the role of biblical interpretation. In contexts shaped by skepticism and religious strife, interpreters increasingly operated on the Bible as a text to be managed by critical tools. These developments prepared the way for scholars to formalize an approach to biblical study oriented toward the statist vision of the new universities and their sponsors. Focusing on a renowned German scholar of the period, Johann David Michaelis (1717-1791), Legaspi explores the ways that critics reconceived authority of the Bible by creating an institutional framework for biblical interpretation designed to parallel-and replace-scriptural reading. This book offers a new account of the origins of biblical studies, illuminating the relation of the Bible to churchly readers, theological interpreters, academic critics, and people in between. It explains why, in an age of religious resurgence, modern biblical criticism may no longer be in a position to serve as the Bible's disciplinary gatekeeper.

The World We Want compares the future world that Enlightenment intellectuals had hoped for with our own world at present. In what respects do the two worlds differ, and why are they so different? To what extent is and isn't our world the world they wanted, and to what extent do we today still want their world? Unlike previous philosophical critiques and defenses of the Enlightenment, the present study focuses extensively on the relevant historical and empirical record first, by examining carefully what kind of future Enlightenment intellectuals actually hoped for; second, by tracking the different legacies of their central ideals over the past two centuries.
But in addition to documenting the significant gap that still exists between Enlightenment ideals and current realities, the author also attempts to show why the ideals of the Enlightenment still elude us. What does our own experience tell us about the appropriateness of these ideals? Which Enlightenment ideals do not fit with human nature? Why is meaningful support for these ideals, particularly within the US, so weak at present? Which of the means that Enlightenment intellectuals advocated for realizing their ideals are inefficacious? Which of their ideals have devolved into distorted versions of themselves when attempts have been made to realize them? How and why, after more than two centuries, have we still failed to realize the most significant Enlightenment ideals? In short, what is dead and what is living in these ideals?

Conversations with My Dog by Hannah Gold is a tale for those who love to seek new adventures and the promise of following their dreams, or nose, into the unknown. In a fast-paced world, driven by material achievement and the fear of loss; clarity can seem hard to find. Sometimes answers can come from the most surprising sources. When the author found herself confronted with challenges, she discovered, to her surprise, that wisdom came not from a philosophical master or spiritual guide, but her puppy named Monty. On the road with him, she learns to stop and ask him questions. He answers her through demonstrating the values of simplicity, fun and love of exploration. This description of the conversations that developed between them is a tale about rediscovering direction in life. It gives a light-hearted, gently thought-provoking account of the bigger journey of working out how to live. The search for the way ahead is the metaphor that illustrates the eternal bond of loyalty between a dog and its humanand makes this tale transcend normal conversation. 'Even when we are in small bodies, we have big spirits.' Writes Hannah Gold, relaying the replies of her wise four-legged friend, to her questions about life. 'The very young always know why they are here. Because they haven't forgotten. Sometimes life muddles things up with too many thoughts. But the heart is ageless.' Hannah's illustrations were created from sketches she made of Monty on their travels. These drawings provide a visual tapestry, depicting their journey together to inspire readers in finding their own path. Conversations with My Dog is an ideal companion for people considering significant change or embarking on a new direction, however uncertain, or even just searching for a little extra companionship and inspiration.

Thomas C. Vinci aims to reveal and assess the structure of Kant's argument in the Critique of Pure Reason called the "Transcendental Deduction of the Categories." At the end of the first part of the Deduction in the B-edition Kant states that his purpose is achieved: to show that all intuitions in general are subject to the categories. On the standard reading, this means that all of our mental representations, including those originating in sense-experience, are structured by conceptualization. But this reading encounters an exegetical problem: Kant states in the second part of the Deduction that a major part of what remains to be shown is that empirical intuitions are subject to the categories. How can this be if it has already been shown that intuitions in general are subject to the categories? Vinci calls this the Triviality Problem, and he argues that solving it requires denying the standard reading. In its place he proposes that intuitions in general and empirical intuitions constitute disjoint classes and that, while all intuitions for Kant are unified, there are two kinds of unification: logical unification vs. aesthetic unification. Only the former is due to the categories. A second major theme of the book is that Kant's Idealism comes in two versions-for laws of nature and for objects of empirical intuition-and that demonstrating these versions is the ultimate goal of the Deduction of the Categories and the similarly structured Deduction of the Concepts of Space, respectively. Vinci shows that the Deductions have the argument structure of an inference to the best explanation for correlated domains of explananda, each arrived at by independent applications of Kantian epistemic and geometrical methods.

We have long been taught that the Enlightenment was an attempt to free the world from the clutches of Christian civilization and make it safe for philosophy. The lesson has been well learned--in today's culture wars, both liberals and their conservative enemies, inside and outside the academy, rest their claims about the present on the notion that the Enlightenment was a secularist movement of philosophically-driven emancipation. Historians have had doubts about the accuracy of this portrait for some time, but they have never managed to furnish a viable alternative to it--for themselves, for scholars interested in matters of church and state, or for the public at large. In this book, William J. Bulman and Robert Ingram bring together recent scholarship from distinguished experts in history, theology, and literature to make clear that God not only survived the Enlightenment, but thrived within it as well. The Enlightenment was not a radical break from the past in which Europeans jettisoned their intellectual and institutional inheritance. It was, to be sure, a moment of great change, but one in which the characteristic convictions and traditions of the Renaissance and Reformation were perpetuated to the point of transformation, in the wake of the Wars of Religion and during the early phases of globalization. Its primary imperatives were not freedom and irreligion but peace and prosperity. As a result, it could be Christian, communitarian, or authoritarian as easily as it could be atheist, individualist, or libertarian. Honing in on the intellectual crisis of late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries while moving everywhere from Spinoza to Kant and from India to Peru, God in the Enlightenment offers a spectral view of the age of lights.

Surmontant une opposition souvent outree entre les deux auteurs, ce volume reevalue l'heritage de la pensee de Locke chez Rousseau, dans tous les domaines de sa philosophie (identite personnelle, epistemologie, medecine, morale, pedagogie, economie, politique). Au-dela de l'histoire intellectuelle, l'ouvrage met en lumiere le dialogue critique fecond que Rousseau entretient avec Locke, quitte a identifier les distorsions que le Citoyen de Geneve fait subir a son predecesseur. Tout en etablissant la dette de l'auteur d'Emile a l'egard du 'sage Locke', le volume discerne la pertinence des objections que Rousseau lui adresse en operant un retour a la lettre de la philosophie de Locke. En quel sens Rousseau a-t-il etabli sa philosophie sur des 'principes communs' a ceux de Locke ? Quelle subversion fait-il subir a l'Essai concernant l'entendement humain ou aux Pensees sur l'education ? Quels sont les points aveugles de la philosophie de Locke que la critique rousseauiste permet de mettre en lumiere et, a l'inverse, les limites de la critique rousseauiste de Locke ? Tels sont les axes de cet ouvrage qui reunit des specialistes, en philosophie et en litterature, de Rousseau et de Locke. -- Transcending an often outraged opposition between the two authors, this volume reassesses the legacy of Locke's thought in that of Rousseau, in all the areas of his philosophy (personal identity, epistemology, medicine, morality, pedagogy, economics, politics). Beyond an intellectual history, this collected volume highlights the fruitful critical dialogue that Rousseau maintains with Locke, while identifying the ways in which the Citizen of Geneva distorted his predecessor's thought. While establishing the author of Emile's debt to the 'sage Locke', the volume also discerns the relevance of Rousseau's objections to Lockian philosophy. In what sense did Rousseau establish his own philosophy on 'common principles' to those of Locke? How does he subvert the Essay Concerning Human Understanding or the Thoughts Concerning Education? What are the blind spots in Locke's philosophy that Rousseau highlights and, conversely, the limits of Rousseau's criticism of Locke? These are the main aspects of this volume, which brings together scholars in philosophy and literature, on Rousseau and Locke.

In Enlightenment Europe, a new form of pantomime ballet emerged, through the dual channels of theorization in print and experimentation onstage. Emphasizing eighteenth-century ballet's construction through print culture, Theories of Ballet in the Age of the Encyclopedie follows two parallel paths-standalone treatises on ballet and dance and encyclopedias-to examine the shifting definition of ballet over the second half of the eighteenth century. Bringing together the Encyclopedie and its Supplement, the Encyclopedie methodique, and the Encyclopedie d'Yverdon with the works of Jean-Georges Noverre, Louis de Cahusac, and Charles Compan, it traces how the recycling and recombining of discourses about dance, theatre, and movement arts directly affected the process of defining ballet. At the same time, it emphasizes the role of textual borrowing and compilation in disseminating knowledge during the Enlightenment, examining the differences between placing borrowed texts into encyclopedias of various types as well as into journal format, arguing that context has the potential to play a role equally important to content in shaping a reader's understanding, and that the Encyclopedie methodique presented ballet in a way that diverged radically from both the Encyclopedie and Noverre's Lettres sur la danse.

Examining the birth and development of early modern atheism from Spinoza's Tractatus theologico-politicus (1670) to d'Holbach's Systeme de la nature (1770), this study considers Spinoza, Hobbes, Cudworth, Bayle, Meslier, Boulainviller, Du Marsais, Freret, Toland, Collins, Hume, Diderot, Voltaire, and d'Holbach and positions them in a general interpretive scheme, based on the idea that early modern atheism is itself an unwanted fruit of early modern metaphysics and theology. Breaking with a long-standing tradition, Descartes claimed that it was possible to have a "clear and distinct" idea of God, indeed that the idea of God was the "clearest and most distinct" of all ideas accessible to the human mind. Humans could thus obtain a scientific knowledge of God's nature and attributes. But as soon as God became an object of science, He also became the object of a thoroughgoing scientific analysis and criticism. The effortlessness with which early modern atheists managed to turn round their adversaries' arguments to their own favour is a sign that the new doctrines of God which emerged in the seventeenth-century, each based in its own way on principles and dogmas related to the new science of nature, were plunging headfirst towards the precipice under their own steam.

Genealogy and Social Status in the Enlightenment is at the crossroads of the history of science and the social history of cultural practices, and suggests the need for a new approach on the significance of genealogies in the Age of Enlightenment. While their importance has been fully recognised and extensively studied in early modern Britain and in the Victorian period, the long eighteenth century has been too often presented as a black hole regarding genealogy. Enlightened values and urban sociability have been presented as inimical to the praise of ancestry and birth. In contrast, however, various studies on the continental or in the American colonies, have shed light on the many uses of genealogies, even beyond the landed elite. Whether it be in the publishing industry, in the urban corporations, in the scientific discourses, genealogy was used, not only as a resilient social practice, but also as a form of reasoning, a language and a tool to include newcomers, organise scientific and historical knowledge or to express various emotions. This volume aims to reconsider the flexibility of genealogical practices and their perpetual reconfiguration to meet renewed expectations in the period. Far from slowly vanishing under the blows of rationalism that would have delegitimized an ancient world based on various forms of hereditary determinism, the different contributions to this collective work demonstrate that genealogy is a pervasive tool to make sense of a fast-changing society.

Since the 5th century BCE Persia has played a significant part in representing the "Other" against which European identity has been constructed. What makes the case of Persia unique in this process of identity formation is the ambivalent attitude that Europe has shown in its imaginary about Persia. Persia is arguably the nation of "the Orient" most referred to in Early Modern European writings, frequently mentioned in various discourses of the Enlightenment including theology, literature, and political theory. What was the appeal of Persia to such a diverse intellectual population in Enlightenment Europe? How did intellectuals engage with the 'facts' about Persia? In what ways did utilizing Persia contribute to the development of modern European identities? In this volume, an international group of scholars with diverse academic backgrounds has tackled these and other questions related to the Enlightenment's engagement with Persia. In doing so, Persia and the Enlightenment questions reductionist assessments of Modern Europe's encounter with the Middle East, where a complex engagement is simplified to a confrontation between liberalism and Islam, or an exaggerated Orientalism. By carefully studying Persia in the Enlightenment narratives, this volume throws new light on the complexity of intercultural encounters and their impact on the shaping of collective identities.

While the resonance of Giambattista Vico's hermeneutics for postcolonialism has long been recognised, a rupture has been perceived between his intercultural sensibility and the actual content of his philological investigations, which have often been criticised as being Eurocentric and philologically spurious. China is a case in point. In his magnum opus New Science, Vico portrays China as backward and philosophically primitive compared to Europe. In this first study dedicated to China in Vico's thought, Daniel Canaris shows that scholars have been beguiled by Vico's value judgements of China without considering the function of these value judgements in his theory of divine providence. This monograph illustrates that Vico's image of China is best appreciated within the contemporary theological controversies surrounding the Jesuit accommodation of Confucianism. Through close examination of Vico's sources and intellectual context, Canaris argues that by refusing to consider Confucius as a "filosofo", Vico dismantles the rationalist premises of the theological accommodation proposed by the Jesuits and proposes a new functionalist valorisation of non-Christian religion that anticipates post-colonial critiques of the Enlightenment.

Le Levite d'Ephraim, Rousseau's re-imagining of the final chapters of the Book of Judges, contains major themes of Rousseau's oeuvre and lays forth central concerns of his intellectual projects. Among the themes highlighted in the concentrated narrative are: the nature of signs and symbols and their relationship to the individual and society that produce them; the role of hospitality in constituting civil society; the textually-displayed moral disorder as foreshadowing political revolution; and finally, the role of violence in creating a unified polity. In Le Levite d'Ephraim, Rousseau explores the psychological and communal implications of violence and, through them, the social and political context of society. The incarnation of violence on the bodies of the women in this story highlights the centrality of women in Rousseau's thought. Women are systematically dismembered, both literally and figuratively, and this draws the reader's attention to the significance of these women as they are perennially re-membered inside and outside the text. This study of these themes in Le Levite d'Ephraim places it in relation to the biblical text at its origins and to Rousseau's own writings and larger cultural concerns as he grapples with the challenges of modernity.

In a speech delivered in 1794, roughly one year after the execution of Louis XVI, Robespierre boldly declared Terror to be an 'emanation of virtue'. In adapting the concept of virtue to Republican ends, Robespierre was drawing on traditions associated with ancient Greece and Rome. But Republican tradition formed only one of many strands in debates concerning virtue in France and elsewhere in Europe, from 1680 to the Revolution. This collection focuses on moral-philosophical and classical-republican uses of 'virtue' in this period - one that is often associated with a 'crisis of the European mind'. It also considers in what ways debates concerning virtue involved gendered perspectives. The texts discussed are drawn from a range of genres, from plays and novels to treatises, memoirs, and libertine literature. They include texts by authors such as Diderot, Laclos, and Madame de Stael, plus other, lesser-known texts that broaden the volume's perspective. Collectively, the contributors to the volume highlight the central importance of virtue for an understanding of an era in which, as Daniel Brewer argues in the closing chapter, 'the political could not be thought outside its moral dimension, and morality could not be separated from inevitable political consequences'.

Digitizing Enlightenment explores how a set of inter-related digital projects are transforming our vision of the Enlightenment. The featured projects are some of the best known, well-funded and longest established research initiatives in the emerging area of 'digital humanities', a field that has, particularly since 2010, been attracting a rising tide of interest from professional academics, the media, funding councils, and the general public worldwide. Advocates and practitioners of the digital humanities argue that computational methods can fundamentally transform our ability to answer some of the 'big questions' that drive humanities research, allowing us to see patterns and relationships that were hitherto hard to discern, and to pinpoint, visualise, and analyse relevant data in efficient and powerful new ways. In the book's opening section, leading scholars outline their own projects' institutional and intellectual histories, the techniques and methodologies they specifically developed, the sometimes-painful lessons learned in the process, future trajectories for their research, and how their findings are revising previous understandings. A second section features chapters from early career scholars working at the intersection of digital methods and Enlightenment studies, an intellectual space largely forged by the projects featured in part one. Highlighting current and future research methods and directions for digital eighteenth-century studies, the book offers a monument to the current state of digital work, an overview of current findings, and a vision statement for future research. Featuring contributions from Keith Michael Baker, Elizabeth Andrews Bond, Robert M. Bond, Simon Burrows, Catherine Nicole Coleman, Melanie Conroy, Charles Cooney, Nicholas Cronk, Dan Edelstein, Chloe Summers Edmondson, the late Richard Frautschi, Clovis Gladstone, Howard Hotson, Angus Martin, Katherine McDonough, Alicia C. Montoya, Robert Morrissey, Laure Philip, Jeffrey S. Ravel, Glenn Roe, and Sean Takats.

Napoleon's biographers often note his fondness for theatre, but as we approach the bicentenary of the Emperor's death, little remains known about the nature of theatre at the time. This is particularly the case for tragedy, the genre in which France considered itself to surpass its neighbours. Based on extensive archival research, this first sustained study of tragedy under Napoleon examines how a variety of agents used tragedy and its rewriting of history to make an impact on French politics, culture and society, and to help reconstruct the French nation after the Revolution. This volume covers not just Napoleon's efforts, but also those of other individuals in government, the theatrical world, and the wider population. Similarly, it uncovers a public demand for tragedy, be it the return of Corneille, Racine, and Voltaire to the Comedie-Francaise, or new hits like Les Templiers (1805) and Hector (1809). This research also sheds new light on Napoleonic propaganda and censorship, exposing their incoherencies and illustrating how audiences reacted to these processes. In short, Tragedy and Nation in the Age of Napoleon argues that Napoleonic tragedy was not simply tired and derivative; it engaged its audiences, by chomping at the poetic bit, allowing for a retrial of the Revolution, and offering a vision of the new French nation.

Following his opposition to the establishment of a theatre in Geneva, Jean-Jacques Rousseau is often considered an enemy of the stage. Yet he was fascinated by drama: he was a keen theatre-goer, his earliest writings were operas and comedies, his admiration for Italian lyric theatre ran through his career, he wrote one of the most successful operas of the day, Le Devin du village, and with his Pygmalion, he invented a new theatrical genre, the Scene lyrique ('melodrama'). Through multi-faceted analyses of Rousseau's theatrical and musical works, authors re-evaluate his practical and theoretical involvement with and influence on the dramatic arts, as well as his presence in modern theatre histories. New readings of the Lettre a d'Alembert highlight its political underpinnings, positioning it as an act of resistance to external bourgeois domination of Geneva's cultural sphere, and demonstrate the work's influence on theatrical reform after Rousseau's death. Fresh analyses of his theory of voice, developed in the Essai sur l'origine des langues, highlight the unique prestige of Italian opera for Rousseau. His ambition to rethink the nature and function of stage works, seen in Le Devin du village and then, more radically, in Pygmalion, give rise to several different discussions in the volume, as do his complex relations with Gluck. Together, contributors shed new light on the writer's relationship to the stage, and argue for a more nuanced approach to his theatrical and operatic works, theories and legacy.

During the long eighteenth century the moral and socio-political dimensions of family life and gender were hotly debated by intellectuals across Europe. John Millar, a Scottish law professor and philosopher, was a pioneer in making gendered and familial practice a critical parameter of cultural difference. His work was widely disseminated at home and abroad, translated into French and German and closely read by philosophers such as Denis Diderot and Johann Gottfried Herder. Taking Millar's writings as his basis, Nicholas B. Miller explores the role of the family in Scottish Enlightenment political thought and traces its wider resonances across the Enlightenment world. John Millar's organisation of cultural, gendered and social difference into a progressive narrative of authority relations provided the first extended world history of the family. Over five chapters that address the historical and comparative models developed by the thinker, Nicholas B. Miller examines contemporary responses and Enlightenment-era debates on polygamy, matriarchy, the Amazon legend, changes in national character and the possible futures of the family in commercial society. He traces how Enlightenment thinkers developed new standards of evidence and crafted new understandings of historical time in order to tackle the global diversity of family life and gender practice. By reconstituting these theories and discussions, Nicholas B. Miller uncovers hitherto unexplored aspects of the Scottish contribution to European debates on the role of the family in history, society and politics.