Travels far and near

I’ve been reading Leibniz’s correspondence with Thomas Burnett of Kemnay. Burnett is probably best known as one of the people via whom Leibniz tried to communicate with Locke. He was, more generally, a source of news for Leibniz about things published in English — his own personal book review section.

Locke’s work is indeed a repeated topic, but there are all sorts of other topics besides: a fashion for Aesop’s Fables, Dryden’s translation of Virgil, etc, etc. But this seems like a good occasion to notice an interest in travel literature.

This interest was not confined to Burnett and Leibniz. See Lewis’s post about Ippolito Desideri’s Account of Tibet. And Locke obviously had some interest in this, as shown by Essay I.iii.9, with its reference to (among others) “the voyage of Baumgarten, which is a book not every day to be met with”. But not all of the travels written about were terribly distant.

John Toland wrote a book about his travels to Berlin and Hanover — one that describes his visits to courts and meetings with philosophers, but which I remember most vividly for a passage expressing Toland’s great enthusiasm for Prussian signposts. (Toland has other relevance here as the author of Christianity not Mysterious, and also of a Life of Milton that Burnett sent to Leibniz, and which Leibniz commented on.)

Various examples of not so distant travels appear in the Leibniz-Burnett correspondence. A letter from Burnett to Leibniz in March 1699 (A1.16, N372) mentions travel books including Martin Lister’s A Journey to Paris in the Year 1698 and Martin’s  A Late Voyage to St Kilda [non-subscription version][St Kilda wiki page]. Leibniz made approving note of both of these (A1.18.N211, p382), and the second led Leibniz to ask Burnett whether the Irish language was much like the Welsh, as well as to speculate about the ways in which one linguistic example in the book resembles Greek (p388).

Early modern(ish) links

A post on Thomas Sydenham’s Tractacus de Podagra by Terry Doyle on a blog I hadn’t seen before, Early Modern at Otago (via @EarlyModernXPhi).

A post introducing videos that present some of Newton’s ‘chymistry’ (about this project).

And finally, Damon Albarn’s record/opera about John Dee

Sympathy, spirits, and strings

This post brings me back to my earlier themes of materialism and panpsychism. But it largely developed from my trying to understand one of Henry More’s examples. More believed there to be incorporeal substances, including human minds, ghosts, and a further spirit quite unlike the others, the spirit of nature. More’s central argument for the existence of a spirit of nature relied on a series of examples of phenomena that could (allegedly) only be explained with reference to such a spirit.

One such phenomenon was the sympathetic resonance of unison strings. Roughly speaking, given two strings that are tuned to the same note, if the first is sounded, the second will start to sound the note as well, even though it has not been plucked or otherwise touched itself. As More puts it, there is a power that “makes strings that be tuned Unisons (though on several Instruments) the one being touched, the other to tremble and move very sensibly, and to cast off a straw or pin or any such small thing laid upon it” (More 1659, 451).

More was far from the first philosopher to notice this phenomenon. The example occurs in such diverse places as Plotinus’s Enneads (4.4.40-4, quoted at Gouk 1999, 87), and Bacon’s Sylva Sylvarum (Bacon 1627, 72). Hume later used it to help illustrate his psychological sort of sympathy. Of most immediate relevance, however, is a discussion in Marin Mersenne’s Harmonie universelle.

Hobbes and Locke: A Difference in How Philosophical Discussions of Language are Introduced

Language is both an instrument used in human thought/reasoning, and an instrument used in communication/social interaction.  Let’s call the former the ratiocinative role of language, and the latter the communicative role of language.  In their respective discussions of language, Hobbes and Locke affirm both roles for language, but they differ in terms of how they prioritize those roles when introducing their discussions of language.

For example, Hobbes’s discussion in the first part of De Corpore starts by presenting the role of language in aiding memory and ratiocination on an individual level, and then observes that, unless one wishes their scientific discoveries to perish with them, it is useful to have some way of communicating their knowledge to others.  Hobbes takes the ratiocinative role as primary, and later acknowledges a communicative role (seemingly in service of ratiocinative goals).

Contrast this with Locke’s discussion at the outset of book three of the Essay (p. 402):

§1. GOD having designed Man for a sociable Creature, made him not only with an inclination, and under a necessity to have fellowship with those of his own kind; but furnished him also with Language, which was to be the great Instrument, and common Tye of Society.[...]

§2.  Besides articulate Sounds therefore, it was farther necessary, that he should be able to use these Sounds, as Signs of internal Conceptions; and to make them stand as marks for the Ideas within his own Mind, whereby they might be made known to others, and the Thoughts of Men’s Minds be conveyed from one to another.

Locke goes on to discuss, in later sections, the role of language in our individual reasoning, but it is clear that the communicative role of language takes priority, in his thinking.

I have a suspicion that this difference in orientation about the priority of the communicative and ratiocinative roles of language underwrites some of the differences in their respective theories of language, but at this juncture, I don’t have any specific examples to point to.

Update on the Women Historians of Philosophy file

We’ve finally incorporated all the information we received (and we received A LOT of information!). Thanks very much to everyone who responded. And a big thanks to Dave Gaber, who did all the dirty work of organizing and updating the file. The updated document can be found here. One of my colleagues is going to be turning this into a web based searchable database. I’ll be back in touch when that is set up (she anticipates it be user-ready in about a month). Please send any corrections, additions (including self-additions), etc… to womenhistoriansofphilosophy@gmail.com

Apologies for posting the same note everywhere, but, so it goes. I did want to let people know that their suggestions are being incorporated even though we aren’t replying to the emails. The next update, taking account the feedback that results from these posts, will appear in the web-interface version.

Small online resources?

I’m thinking about what it makes sense to post online. I’ve been posting papers and drafts for years (almost 10, indeed). I have stuff up about classes, though it’s largely either password-protected or hidden away on UF’s Sakai site. And I have the occasional blog post here. But I’m wondering about posting other stuff — call them very small web resources.

Here’s an example. I’ve been doing some work on Margaret Cavendish’s Philosophical Letters (not entirely shameless self promotion: here’s a paper). As part of working on this, I’ve made myself a list of all the letters in the Philosophical Letters, together with a very brief note of their contents, and the texts they discuss. It’s pretty rough, but it seems like someone might find it useful. So I wonder whether it’s worth doing the work to tidy this up and put it online, and indeed how much work I should be before posting something like that. It would only take me 5 minutes to copy and paste the file into a blog post and press publish, but that doesn’t look like the best approach. Checking some things and filling some gaps would be useful, but is a project that could expand and expand.

(The other example I have in mind is a sort of equivalent file of the published correspondence of Thomas Burnett of Kemnay, correspondent of Leibniz and Locke and Trotter.)

One could make this sound grander than it is by connecting it to talk of the digital humanities. (My notes for a post about history of philosophy and digital humanities might actually yield a post at some point.) Less grandly, I suppose I’m worrying about publishing rough but possibly useful stuff. Useful thoughts?

An Interesting Analogy in Treatise 1.4.3

David Hume opens Treatise 1.4.3, “Of the Antient Philosophy”, with a curious analogy, intended to explain why it is that he is about to investigate questions about various “unreasonable and capricious” categories prominent in what Hume is calling “antient” philosophy:

Several moralists have recommended it as an excellent method of becoming acquainted with our own hearts, and knowing our progress in virtue, to recollect our dreams in a morning, and examine them with the same rigour, that we wou’d our most serious and deliberate actions.  Our character is the same throughout, say they, and appears best where artifice, fear, and policy have no place, and men can neither be hypocrites to themselves nor others. The generosity, or baseness of our temper, our meekness or cruelty, our courage or pusilanimity, influences the fictions of the imagination with the most unbounded liberty, and discover themselves in the most flaring colours.  In like manner, I am persuaded, there might be several useful discoveries made from a criticism of the fictions of the antient philosophy, concerning substances, and substantial forms, and accidents, and occult qualities; which, however unreasonable and capricious, have a very intimate connexion with the principles of human nature.

Here, Hume is pre-emptively answering the question: “What is the point of spending time talking about the categories substance, substantial form, etc., if it is clear that they are false, unreasonable, fictions?”  While Hume’s talk of “useful discoveries” might initially suggest something like a position where the antient philosophy has some truth mixed in with its falsehood, and so, investigation of the antient philosophy will help us extract those truths (cf. what Pasnau calls the “high-road” response to the progress dilemma), I think the rest of 1.4.3 makes it clear that what Hume is really after, in investigating these philosophical fictions, is to learn about the basis in human nature for positing them.  In other words, we’re studying the fictions of false philosophy in order to learn about the minds that posit it, rather than about the subjects it attempts to explain.  And that this is Hume’s answer should not surprise us; Hume frequently directs us to change our inquiry from object- or world- oriented questions and focus instead on thinker- or mind- oriented questions.  In 1.4.2, for instance,  we are told it would be in vain to ask ”whether there be body, or not?”, but can more profitably ask “what causes induce us to believe in the existence of body?”.  So, Hume’s view of what we can hope to get out of investigating antient philosophy is straightforward, and it coheres well with Hume’s strategy in the Treatise.

What remains curious, however, is the analogy Hume offers.  I can see the proposed parallel here: The “moralists” Hume references are saying that dreams, despite not being a good guide to reality, can be very informative about the person who has them, just as these false philosophical categories, despite not being a good guide to the structure of the world, can be very informative about the nature of the minds that find them so appealing.  When I first started writing this post, I wasn’t especially sympathetic to the view that Hume attributes to “several moralists”, and so I thought the analogy was curious insofar as it seemed to be invoking a weird view to explain a fairly straightforward one.  Actually articulating the proposed parallel has softened me some towards the view (and thus the analogy), but I am still left with a question:  For the case of looking to dreams to learn about someone’s character, it is supposed to be the absence of “artifice, fear, and policy” in the dreams that renders them so informative about the character of the dreamer; is there something similar to be said about for the case of antient philosophy?  In other words, how strong is the analogy supposed to be?  Does it simply rest at the parallel of using products of the mind to learn about the thinker that produces them, or is there something further to the analogy, that explains why the fictions of antient philosophy are especially good sources of information about human nature?