A Society for Early Modern Philosophy?

It seems to me that the trend for professional societies, when it comes to History of Modern Philosophy, is societies focused around specific figures (such as the International Hume Society, the North American Kant Society, the International Berkeley Society, to name just a few). I saw some announcement, shortly before the Pacific APA, about plans to organize a Descartes Society.

As a member of the Hume society, my experiences have been strongly positive. The annual conferences are rewarding philosophically, and have given me the chance to meet many great people. Hume Studies is a great journal and a valuable resource for Hume scholars. I could go on, but suffice it to say, I have nothing against figure-specific professional societies.

I think, though, that there might be room for something less specific, as well. I’ve noticed the success of the recently formed “Society for the Philosophy of Agency,” and I wonder if early modernists wouldn’t benefit from something similar. The SPA’s model appears to be based around i) free membership and ii) organizing group-sessions at the APA’s divisional conferences. Now, the Hume Society collects dues, which is part of what enables them to organize international conferences, run a successful journal, and so on. But SPA’s success reveals that there is a lot of low-hanging fruit in terms of benefits to people working in the field that wouldn’t require a dues paying membership, or the administrative hassles of organizing free-standing conferences.

There are two main benefits I see from having a society organized more generally around early modern philosophy, rather than only having a number of societies dedicated to individual figures. The first is that it seems like it could help foster interactions between people working on different figures, by creating more opportunities for interaction. I take it this is a relatively straightforward benefit, so I won’t dwell on it.

Second, it can help to overcome the various pressures that push towards the narrowing of the range of figures and topics that are discussed. The Hume Society’s benefits accrue, for the most part, to Hume scholars only. The North American Kant Society’s to Kant scholars. It is great that such benefits and support are available, but if the benefits that there are only accrue to people working on a small sub-set of the figures from the early modern era, the incentives wind up disfavoring work that isn’t on those figures. I could be wrong, but it seems like Hume scholars just have a vastly greater number of opportunities to present work, get feedback, and interact with other scholars compared to, say, Locke scholars. And that’s talking about Locke, who is thought of as a central figure in the early modern period; this is even more pronounced for someone working on figures like Malebranche, Cavendish, Astell, and so on.

My impression is that such a society, even with the modest aims of mostly organizing group sessions at the APA, would help capture some low-hanging fruit in the way of benefits to people working in a wide variety of areas and on a wide variety of figures. If successful, it might make sense down the line to consider expanding beyond those initial aims.

So, I figured i would share this idea with the community to see if other people have any thoughts on this, and/or whether there would be interest in such a society.

Of the several subjects of knowledge

The philpapers.org category for Thomas Hobbes has over 1,000 entries. I’m thinking about ways to introduce sub-categories — perhaps not as many as in, say, the Kant category, but still sensible ways to divide up the area. My draft list of categories is below. Does anyone have any suggestions? Things you’d like to see added? Things you’d like to see cut?

• Laws of nature
• Social contract
• Status of sovereign and subject (absolutism, rebellion, etc)
• Moral psychology (passions, egoism)
• Epistemology and method
• Mind
• Language (signification, nominalism, rhetoric, etc)
• Religion
• Liberty and necessity
• Mathematics
• Physics, optics, etc
• History
• Political context (civil war etc)
• Intellectual context

CFP: The History of Women’s Ideas

The following CFP might be of interest to our readers:

The History of Women’s Ideas

Deadline for Submissions: April 30, 2014
Advisory Editors: Karen Green , Ruth Hagengruber

The history of Western philosophy has been almost exclusively a history of the ideas of men. Occasionally women thinkers have played a minor role, often as adjuncts to men, whose key works make up the visible stepping stones taking us from the late Mediaeval mind set of Dante, through the Early Modern revolution of Montaigne, Descartes, Locke and Leibniz, to the Enlightenment of Voltaire, Kant and beyond. Recently the works of some of these adjuncts—such as Christine de Pizan, who disseminated Dante in France, Marie de Gournay, Montaigne’s editor, Elizabeth of Bohemia, Descartes’s correspondent, Damaris Masham, Locke’s friend, or Emilie du Châtelet, lover of Voltaire, to name but a few—have begun to emerge from the shadows. In this issue of The Monist we invite papers treating of the philosophical works of female participants in the intellectual history of the West. We also invite contributions addressing the broader question: do the contributions of women thinkers such as those listed above allow us to distinguish what we might think of as a history of women’s ideas?

h/t Sandrine Berges, Feminist History of Philosophy

“Six Degrees of Francis Bacon”

I imagine some of our readers will find this historical social networking project of interest:

Six Degrees of Francis Bacon (SDFB) is a digital reconstruction of the early modern social network (EMSN) that scholars and students from all over the world will be able to collaboratively expand, revise, curate, and critique. Historians and literary critics have long studied the way that early modern people associated with each other and participated in various kinds of formal and informal groups. Yet their scholarship, published in countless books and articles, is scattered and unsynthesized. By data-mining existing scholarship that describes relationships between early modern persons, documents, and institutions, we have created a unified, systematized representation of the way people in early modern England were connected. Unlike published prose, SDFB is extensible, collaborative, and interoperable: extensible in that actors and associations can always be added, modified, developed, or, removed; collaborative in that it synthesizes the work of many scholars; interoperable in that new work on the network is put into immediate relation to previously mapped relationships. [read more]

CFP: Conference on Berkeley and the Three Dialogues

Professor Stefan Storrie has requested that I share this CFP with our readers:

TRINITY COLLEGE DUBLIN

CONFERENCE ON BERKELEY and the THREE DIALOGUES

APRIL 4th-6th, 2014

CALL FOR PAPERS

The Department of Philosophy, in collaboration with the College’s Research Institute for the Humanities, the Long Room Hub, is pleased to announce a Conference on Berkeley and the Three Dialogues, to be held in the Long Room Hub from Friday evening to Sunday evening, April, 4th-6th 2014.

Keynote Speakers:

Lisa Downing (Ohio State University)

John Russell Roberts (Florida State University)

Tom Stoneham (University of York).

Abstracts of papers on any aspect of Berkeley’s Three Dialogues are invited.

Accepted papers may be eligible for selection for a projected Cambridge University Press volume on the Three Dialogues.

Prospective participants who would like to present a paper at the Conference should write to Vasilis Politis, Head of Philosophy (vpolitis@tcd.ie), by June 30th 2013, with a 1200 word abstract of their paper prepared for blind review (also indicating whether they would like to be included for consideration in the volume).

Toland and testimony

Thinking about a comment of Eric Schliesser’s about “Toland’s defense of book learning against the distrust of it by Moderns” reminded me of a feature of Toland’s Christianity not Mysterious [CNM] that I find a little puzzling.

Early in Christianity not Mysterious Toland seems largely to be summarizing familiar Lockean views from the Essay. Thus he tells us, for example, that “all our Knowledg is, in effect, nothing else but the Perception of the Agreement or Disagreement of our Ideas in a greater or lesser Number, whereinsoever this Agreement or Disagreement may consist. And because this Perception is immediate or mediate, our Knowledg is twofold” (CNM Sect. I, ch. ii; p.12). Toland thus echoes Locke’s claim in Essay IV.i.2 that “Knowledge then seems to me to be nothing but the perception of the connecxion and agreement, or disagreement and repugnancy of any of our Ideas“, as well as his later distinction between intuitive and demonstrative knowledge.

Toland goes on, in the next chapter, to talk a little about testimony. Now Locke has often seemed to be highly individualistic about knowledge (at least in his theoretical discussions in the Essay). Either your ideas agree or they don’t, and what other people say doesn’t have anything to do with it.[1] Toland however appears to give testimony a more central role.

Berkeley, Analogy, Matter, and God

On May 15, 1709 William King, archbishop of Dublin, preached a famous sermon (it was really more of a lecture in philosophical theology with a Scripture quotation at the beginning, but this was not too unusual in the Anglican Communion at the time) entitled “Divine Predestination and Fore-knowledg, consistent with the Freedom of Man’s Will.” The sermon was published shortly thereafter in both Dublin and London and is therefore now available on Google books. (I have written about King before.) King considers three atheistic arguments: the argument from the inconsistency of divine foreknowledge with human freedom, the argument from the inconsistency of divine predestination with human freedom, and the problem of evil. King argues that all three of these problems arise from interpreting the ascription of properties to God literally, and that when these predications are interpreted analogically, as they ought to be, the inferences in the atheistic arguments do not go through. As an added bonus, when divine predestination is understood analogically, Calvinists and Arminians can both be right, (A lot of the political problems would have been solved if King had managed to convince anyone of this last point – indeed, although it no longer plays much of a role in secular politics, this dispute is still one of the driving forces in a lot of conflicts within various Protestant denominations.)

There is, however, a problem: King does not give anything like an adequate account of how analogical predication works, or how to reason with analogical predicates. He does at one point attempt to distinguish analogy from metaphor (sect. 21), but it looks like the distinction just amounts to the fact that the use of metaphor is optional, whereas analogy is the only way we can possibly understand the things we know by means of it. Both are equally far removed from literal discourse.

In 1710 the deist Anthony Collins published (anonymously) a critique of King’s sermon under the title A Vindication of the Divine Attributes. (This one doesn’t seem to be on Google; you can get it from Eighteenth Century Collections Online if your institution is subscribed.) Collins’ central objection is that King has rendered divine attribute language inferentially inert: one cannot infer from any possible set of premises to the claim that God is wise, nor can one infer anything at all from the claim that God is wise. Thus King radically undermines the project of natural theology, and also makes it a matter of indifference whether God is wise or not, since nothing of interest (and, indeed, nothing at all) would follow from God’s being wise.

In a 1710 letter to Percival (L&J 8:32), Berkeley endorses Collins’ objection to King. (I don’t have that volume handy, but if I remember correctly King is mentioned by name but Collins is not.) There is also evidence of a personal conflict between Berkeley and King in this period.

In Alciphron IV, Berkeley discusses the doctrine of analogy at length, and again repeats Collins’ objection. The attribution to Collins is clearer in this case: the argument is attributed to ‘Diagoras’ and elsewhere in Alciphron views attributed to Diagoras are given citations to Collins’ works. Crito, one of Berkeley’s protagonists, describes King’s strategy as a “method of growing in expression, and dwindling in notion, of clearing up doubts by nonsense, and avoiding difficulties by running into affected contradictions” (sect. 19).

All this by way of background. (For more details, see sect. 4 of this paper; unfortunately, most of this material is expected to be cut from the published version for reasons of length.)

This afternoon, I was reading Berkeley’s Three Dialogues for the umpteenth time (at least), and noticed something I hadn’t before: the dispute about matter in the first two dialogues parallels the argument about religious language I have just reviewed. In the first dialog, Hylas’s various notions of matter are all shown to be contradictory. This parallels the atheistic arguments to which King was responding. In the middle of the second dialog, Hylas gives up on trying to give a consistent definition of matter and instead endorses what in theology is known as ‘apophaticism’: the view that besides saying that matter (God) is in general a being, all we can truly and literally say of it is what it is not (L&J, pp. 221-222). King endorses this view about God. Philonous complains that according to this last proposal ‘matter’ is “‘something in general’, which being interpreted proves ‘nothing’” (L&J, p. 223). A little later, Hylas claims that Philonous has not shown matter (on the ‘apophatic’ conception) to be impossible. In response, Philonous insists that he has proved matter to be impossible in “the only proper genuine received sense” of the word ‘matter’ (L&J, p. 225). As for the ‘apophatic’ sense, it is absolutely immune to refutation, since “where there are no ideas, there no repugnancy can be demonstrated between ideas” and there are no ideas involved in the ‘apophatic’ sense of ‘matter’ (ibid.). (Berkeley has to be careful here, since a lot of reasoning doesn’t involve ideas on his view, but that’s another story for another day.) In essence, Hylas’s last proposal insulates matter from contradiction by emptying the notion of matter of all content. This is the substance of Collins’ objection to King.

Now, it should be noted that the same line of argument appears in the Principles (sects. 79-80); I do not know when exactly Berkeley made his last round of revisions on the Principles (though it appears from Berkeley’s correspondence with Percival that the book was published in June; see Keynes’s Bibliography, p. 15), nor when exactly Berkeley read Collins, so it is possible that Berkeley and Collins developed this line of argument independently. In any event, the letter to Percival attests that Berkeley did endorse the God version as well as the matter version in 1710, and in Alciphron (1732) Berkeley attributes that argument to Collins.

Noticing this parallel sheds interesting light on the famous ‘Parity Argument’ of the second dialog (L&J, pp. 231ff.). Berkeley must reject King’s account of our theological concepts: if it’s not good enough to give meaning to ‘matter’ talk, it’s not good enough to give meaning to ‘God’ talk. And this, in fact, Berkeley does, insisting that “all the notion I have of God is obtained by reflecting on my own soul, heightening its powers, and removing its imperfections” (ibid.). The only ‘analogy’ involved, according to Berkeley’s view in Alciphron is mathematical analogy, i.e. ratios: God’s wisdom is to our wisdom as the infinite to the finite. ‘Wise’ has precisely the same meaning in ‘God is wise’ as it does in ‘Socrates is wise,’ although the difference in degree between the two cases is infinite. The theologically controversial thesis that some substantive predicates apply univocally to God and creatures thus plays a central role in Philonous’s response to Hylas’s Parity Argument.

(Cross-posted at blog.kennypearce.net)