Explores early modern interpretations of Roman Scotland Examines an important aspect of the development of Scottish identity, a subject being brought to the fore again in recent debates surrounding Scottish independence Offers an in-depth study of a largely overlooked aspect of Scottish historiography Makes extensive use of archival and manuscript material, much of it previously unpublished Takes a broad, multidisciplinary approach Examines the influence of the Scottish Enlightenment, James Macpherson's Ossianic poems and the rise of Romanticism This book focuses on early modern attitudes towards Scotland's ancient past and looks in particular at the ways in which this past was not only misunderstood, but also manipulated in attempts to create a patriotic history for the nation. Adding a new perspective on the formation of Scotland's national identity, the book documents a century-long, often heated debate regarding the extent of Roman influence north of Hadrian's Wall. By exploring the lives and writings of antiquarians, poets and Enlightenment thinkers, it aims to uncover the political, patriotic and intellectual influences which fuelled this debate. Classical Caledonia will cast light on a rarely discussed aspect of Scotland's historiography, one which played a vital role in establishing early modern notions of 'Scottishness' at a time when Scotland was coming to terms with radical and traumatic changes to its position within Britain and the wider world.

The Enlightenment and Why It Still Matters tells nothing less than the story of how the modern, Western view of the world was born. Cultural and intellectual historian Anthony Pagden explains how, and why, the ideal of a universal, global, and cosmopolitan society became such a central part of the Western imagination in the ferment of the Enlightenment - and how these ideas have done battle with an inward-looking, tradition-oriented view of the world ever since. Cosmopolitanism is an ancient creed; but in its modern form it was a creature of the Enlightenment attempt to create a new 'science of man', based upon a vision of humanity made up of autonomous individuals, free from all the constraints imposed by custom, prejudice, and religion. As Pagden shows, this 'new science' was based not simply on 'cold, calculating reason', as its critics claimed, but on the argument that all humans are linked by what in the Enlightenment were called 'sympathetic' attachments. The conclusion was that despite the many tribes and nations into which humanity was divided there was only one 'human nature', and that the final destiny of the species could only be the creation of one universal, cosmopolitan society. This new 'human science' provided the philosophical grounding of the modern world. It has been the inspiration behind the League of Nations, the United Nations and the European Union. Without it, international law, global justice, and human rights legislation would be unthinkable. As Anthony Pagden argues passionately and persuasively in this book, it is a legacy well worth preserving - and one that might yet come to inherit the earth.

The writings gathered together in volume 73 of the Complete works were substantially written in 1771, when Voltaire was seventy-six years old. Despite periods of illness and difficulties with his failing eyesight, Voltaire maintained a literary output of astonishing energy and variety. His commitment to la philosophie, his political convictions, and his emerging passion for justice, led him to participate in crucial public debates. In the 'age of reform' which was beginning, Voltaire eagerly took up the challenge of influencing events with his writings.

Voltaire's most scathingly anti-Christian text, the "Sermon des cinquante", of which he consistently denied authorship, develops the arguments he was to use over the coming decades in a multitude of virulent texts. In the period 1758-1759, biblical questions remain prominent with the "Lettre sur le Messie" and, in a gentler tone, the "Precis de l'Ecclesiaste" and "Precis du Cantique des cantiques". These years also saw the culmination of a long-brewing quarrel over the reputation of the deceased minister Joseph Saurin, which brought Voltaire's stay in Lausanne to a close. A series of philosophical dialogues and a conte round out his literary productions of this two-year span.

Kant's philosophy is usually treated according to 'internalist' textual methodology rather than contextually according to 'externalist' methodology. Kant and the Naturalistic Turn of 18th Century Philosophy presents transcendental idealism, the metaphysics of morals, and other Kantian innovations in philosophy as a reaction to 18th century developments in the life and human sciences. It interprets Kant's metaphysics as motivated by, on one hand, anxiety over the moral dangers he perceived in the empiricism of Buffon, Hume, Smith, and certain German materialists; and, on the other, his theological scepticism. Topics treated include cosmology and the fate of the earth, the mechanical philosophy and the problems of life, mind, and matter, historical pessimism, warfare and class consciousness, and the role of women in 18th century society. This book sheds new light on all major aspects of Kant's philosophy and opens avenues for further research.

William Molyneux's question to John Locke about whether a blind man restored to sight could name the difference between a cube and a sphere without touching them shaped fundamental conflicts in philosophy, theology and science between empirical and idealist answers that are radically alien to current ways of seeing and feeling but were born of colonizing ambitions whose devastating genocidal and ecocidal consequences intensify today. This Element demonstrates how landscape paintings of unfamiliar terrains required historical and geological subject matter to supply tactile associations for empirical recognition of space, whereas idealism conferred unmediated but no less coercive sensory access. Close visual and verbal analysis using photographs of pictorial sites trace vividly different responses to the question, from those of William Hazlitt and John Ruskin in Britain to those of nineteenth-century authors and artists in the United States and Australia, including Ralph Waldo Emerson, Thomas Cole, William Haseltine, Fitz Henry Lane and Eugene von Guerard.

Kant's Critique of Pure Reason, his main work of theoretical philosophy, frequently uses metaphors from law. In this first book-length study in English of Kant's legal metaphors and their role in the first Critique, Sofie Moller shows that they are central to Kant's account of reason. Through an analysis of the legal metaphors in their entirety, she demonstrates that Kant conceives of reason as having a structure mirroring that of a legal system in a natural right framework. Her study shows that Kant's aim is to make cognisers become similar to authorized judges within such a system, by proving the legitimacy of the laws and the conditions under which valid judgments can be pronounced. These elements consolidate her conclusion that reason's systematicity is legal systematicity.

Thomas Hobbes and John Locke sit together in the canon of political thought but are rarely treated in common historical accounts. This book narrates their intertwined careers during the Restoration period, when the two men found themselves in close proximity and entangled in many of the same political conflicts. Bringing new source material to bear, In the Shadow of Leviathan establishes the influence of Hobbesian thought over Locke, particularly in relation to the preeminent question of religious toleration. Excavating Hobbes's now forgotten case for a prudent, politique toleration gifted by sovereign power, Jeffrey R. Collins argues that modern, liberal thinking about toleration was transformed by Locke's gradual emancipation from this Hobbesian mode of thought. This book investigates those landmark events - the civil war, Restoration, the popish plot, the Revolution of 1688 - which eventually forced Locke to confront the limits of politique toleration, and to devise an account of religious freedom as an inalienable right.

Freemasonry was a major cultural and social phenomenon and a key element of the Enlightenment. It was to have an international influence across the globe. This primary resource collection charts a key period in the development of organized Freemasonry culminating in the formation of a single United Grand Lodge of England. The secrecy that has surrounded Freemasonry has made it difficult to access information and documents about the organization and its adherents in the past. This collection is the result of extensive archival research and transcription and highlights the most significant themes associated with Freemasonry. The documents are drawn from masonic collections, private archives and libraries worldwide. The majority of these texts have never before been republished. Documents include rituals (some written in code), funeral services, sermons, songs, certificates, an engraved list of lodges, letters, pamphlets, theatrical prologues and epilogues, and articles from newspapers and periodicals. This collection will enable researchers to identify many key masons for the first time. It will be of interest to students of Freemasonry, the Enlightenment and researchers in eighteenth-century studies.

For philosophers of German idealism and early German romanticism, the imagination is central to issues ranging from hermeneutics to transcendental logic and from ethics to aesthetics. This volume of new essays brings together, for the first time, comprehensive and critical reflections on the significances of the imagination during this period, with essays on Kant and the imagination, the imagination in post-Kantian German idealism, and the imagination in early German romanticism. The essays explore the many and varied uses of the imagination and discuss whether they form a coherent or shared notion or whether they embody points of philosophical divergence within these traditions. They shed new light on one of the most important and enigmatic aspects of human nature, as understood in the context of a profoundly influential era of western thought.

This volume presents a selection of Robert Stern's work on the theme of Kantian ethics. It begins by focusing on the relation between Kant's account of obligation and his view of autonomy, arguing that this leaves room for Kant to be a realist about value. Stern then considers where this places Kant in relation to the question of moral scepticism, and in relation to the principle of 'ought implies can', and examines this principle in its own right. The papers then move beyond Kant himself to his wider influence and to critics of his work, including Hegel, the British Idealists, and the Danish philosopher and theologian K. E. Logstrup, while also offering a comparison with William James's arguments for freedom. The collection concludes with a consideration of a broadly Kantian critique of divine command ethics offered by Stephen Darwall, arguing that the critique does not succeed. General themes considered in this volume therefore include value, perfectionism, agency, autonomy, moral motivation, moral scepticism, and obligation, as well as the historical place of Kant's ethics and its influence on thinkers up to the present day.

As the pre-eminent Enlightenment philosopher, Kant famously calls on all humans to make up their own minds, independently from the constraints imposed on them by others. Kant's focus, however, is on universal human reason, and he tells us little about what makes us individual persons. In this book, Katharina T. Kraus explores Kant's distinctive account of psychological personhood by unfolding how, according to Kant, we come to know ourselves as such persons. Drawing on Kant's Critical works and on his Lectures and Reflections, Kraus develops the first textually comprehensive and systematically coherent account of our capacity for what Kant calls 'inner experience'. The novel view of self-knowledge and self-formation in Kant that she offers addresses present-day issues in philosophy of mind and will be relevant for contemporary philosophical debates. It will be of interest to scholars of the history of philosophy, as well as of philosophy of mind and psychology.

Spontaneity - understood as an action of the mind or will that is not determined by a prior external stimulus - is a theme that resonates throughout Immanuel Kant's theoretical and practical philosophy. Though spontaneity and the concomitant notion of freedom lie at the foundation of many of Kant's most pivotal theses and arguments regarding cognition, judgment, and moral action, spontaneity and freedom themselves often remain cloaked in mystery, or accessible only via transcendental argument. This volume brings together a distinguished group of scholars who explore the nature of freedom and spontaneity, the arguments Kant offers surrounding these concepts, and their place in Kant's larger philosophical system. The collection will be of interest to scholars interested in any aspect of Kant's philosophy, especially those who hope to gain a deeper insight into these fundamental Kantian ideas.

What Socrates's greatest failure says about a 2,000-year-old question: is it possible to teach ourselves and others to become better people? Can we make ourselves into better human beings? Can we help others do the same? And can we get the leaders of our society to care that humanity prospers, not just economically, but also spiritually? These questions have been asked for over two millennia and attempting to answer them is crucial if we want to live a better life and build a more just society. How to Be Good uses the story of Socrates and Alcibiades and examples from Aristotle, Marcus Aurelius and Machiavelli, alongside modern interpretations to explore what philosophy can teach us about the quest for virtue today. Whether we are statesmen or ordinary individuals Pigliucci argues that with a little work day by day we all have the power to pursue the timely and timeless art of living well.

Although indisputably one of the most important thinkers in the Western intellectual tradition, Rousseau's actual place within that tradition, and the legacy of his thought, remains hotly disputed. Thinking with Rousseau reconsiders his contribution to this tradition through a series of essays exploring the relationship between Rousseau and other 'great thinkers'. Ranging from 'Rousseau and Machiavelli' to 'Rousseau and Schmitt', this volume focuses on the kind of intricate work that intellectuals do when they read each other and grapple with one another's ideas. This approach is very helpful in explaining how old ideas are transformed and/or transmitted and new ones are generated. Rousseau himself was a master at appropriating the ideas of others, while simultaneously subverting them, and as the essays in this volume vividly demonstrate, the resulting ambivalences and paradoxes in his thought were creatively mined by others.

Fenelon is arguably one of the most neglected major philosophers of early modernity. His political masterwork was the most-read book in eighteenth-century France after the Bible, and yet today even specialists rarely engage his work directly. This problem is particularly acute in the Anglophone world, where only a small fraction of Fenelon's vast and influential corpus has appeared in modern English translation. This collection of new translations of Fenelon's moral and political writings renders one of the leading voices of early modern philosophy accessible to English-language audiences. Reflecting the impressive breadth of Fenelon's thought, the volume includes work on topics ranging from education to literature to religion and statecraft. In the realm of political philosophy and ethics, Fenelon was an uncompromising critic of Louis XIV and absolutism, committed to reforming France's social, political and economic institutions. In the Enlightenment, he came to be celebrated as a pioneering theorist of education and rhetoric, a prescient student of economics and international relations, and a key voice in the philosophical debates among the heirs of Descartes - not to mention his fame as one of the seventeenth-century's most preeminent theologians and spiritualists and masters of French prose. With an extensive introduction to Fenelon's life and work, this volume is a critical resource for students and scholars of French history, political philosophy, economics, education, literature, and religion.

This book is the first translation into English of the Reflections which Kant wrote whilst formulating his ideas in political philosophy: the preparatory drafts for Theory and Practice, Toward Perpetual Peace, the Doctrine of Right, and Conflict of the Faculties; and the only surviving student transcription of his course on Natural Right. Through these texts one can trace the development of his political thought, from his first exposure to Rousseau in the mid 1760s through to his last musings in the late 1790s after his final system of Right was published. The material covers such topics as the central role of freedom, the social contract, the nature of sovereignty, the means for achieving international peace, property rights in relation to the very possibility of human agency, the general prohibition of rebellion, and Kant's philosophical defense of the French Revolution.

Spinoza's Political Treatise constitutes the very last stage in the development of his thought, as he left the manuscript incomplete at the time of his death in 1677. On several crucial issues - for example, the new conception of the 'free multitude' - the work goes well beyond his Theological Political Treatise (1670), and arguably presents ideas that were not fully developed even in his Ethics. This volume of newly commissioned essays on the Political Treatise is the first collection in English to be dedicated specifically to the work, ranging over topics including political explanation, national religion, the civil state, vengeance, aristocratic government, and political luck. It will be a major resource for scholars who are interested in this important but still neglected work, and in Spinoza's political philosophy more generally.

Through a detailed study of Herder's Enlightenment thought, especially his philosophy of literature, Kristin Gjesdal offers a new and sometimes provocative reading of the historical origins and contemporary challenges of modern hermeneutics. She shows that hermeneutic philosophy grew out of a historical, anthropological, and poetic discourse in the mid-eighteenth century and argues that, as such, it represents a rich, stimulating, and relevant engagement with the potentials and limits of human meaning and understanding. Gjesdal's study broadens our conception of hermeneutic philosophy - the issues it raises and the answers it offers - and underlines the importance of Herder's contribution to the development of this discipline. Her book will be highly valuable for students and scholars of eighteenth-century thought, especially those working in the fields of hermeneutics, aesthetics, and European philosophy.

Johann Nikolaus Tetens Philosophische Versuche uber die menschliche Natur und ihre Entwickelung (1777) zahlt zu den bedeutendsten Veroffentlichungen der Philosophie der Spataufklarung. In insgesamt 14 umfangreichen Essays versucht Tetens die Grundprobleme der Aufklarungsphilosophie zu losen. Der Band bietet die erste vollstandige und kommentierte Ausgabe dieses opus magnum der empiristischen Spataufklarung seit der Erstpublikation."

Historians of ideas have traditionally discussed the significance of the French Revolution through the prism of several major interpretations, including the commentaries of Burke, Tocqueville and Marx. This book argues that the Scottish Enlightenment offered an alternative and equally powerful interpretative framework for the Revolution, which focused on the transformation of the polite, civilised moeurs that had defined the 'modernity' analysed by Hume and Smith in the eighteenth century. The Scots observed what they understood as a military- and democracy-led transformation of European modern morals and concluded that the real historical significance of the Revolution lay in the transformation of warfare, national feelings and relations between states, war and commerce that characterised the post-revolutionary international order. This book recovers the Scottish philosophers' powerful discussion of the nature of post-revolutionary modernity and shows that it is essential to our understanding of nineteenth-century political thought.

The second edition of this Companion presents a philosophical perspective on an eighteenth-century phenomenon that has had a profound influence on Western culture. A distinguished team of contributors examines the writings of David Hume, Adam Smith, Thomas Reid, Adam Ferguson and other Scottish thinkers. Their subjects range across philosophy, natural theology, economics, anthropology, natural science, and law and the arts, and in addition, they relate the Scottish Enlightenment to its historical context and assess its impact and legacy. The result is a comprehensive and accessible volume that illuminates the richness, the intellectual variety and the underlying unity of this important movement. This volume contains five entirely new chapters on morality, the human mind, aesthetics, sentimentalism and political economy, and eleven other chapters have been significantly revised and updated. The book will be of interest to a wide range of readers in philosophy, theology, literature and the history of ideas.

In this book, Arthur gives fresh interpretations of Gottfried Leibniz's theories of time, space, and the relativity of motion, based on a thorough examination of Leibniz's manuscripts as well as his published papers. These are analysed in historical context, but also with an eye to their contemporary relevance. Leibniz's views on relativity have been extremely influential, first on Mach, and then on Einstein, while his novel approach to geometry in his analysis situs inspired many later developments in geometry. Arthur expounds the latter in some detail, explaining its relationship to Leibniz's metaphysics of space and the grounding of motion, and defending Leibniz's views on the relativity of motion against charges of inconsistency. The brilliance of his work on time, though, has not been so well appreciated, and Arthur attempts to remedy this through a detailed discussion of Leibniz's relational theory of time, showing how it underpins his theory of possible worlds, his complex account of contingency, and his highly original treatment of the continuity of time, providing formal treatments in an appendix. In other appendices, Arthur provides translations of previously untranslated writings by Leibniz on analysis situs and on Copernicanism, as well as an essay on Leibniz's philosophy of relations. In his introductory chapter he explains how the framework for the book is provided by the interpretation of Leibniz's metaphysics he defended in his earlier Monads, Composition, and Force (OUP 2018, winner of the 2019 annual JHP Book Prize for best book in the history of philosophy published in 2018).