The Edinburgh Critical History of Early Modern and Enlightenment Philosophy
Edited by Stephen Howard, Jack Stetter
Critical essays on topics and figures central to early modern and Enlightenment philosophy
- Essays from 25 leading international scholars are organised around topics, concepts or problems distinctive to the early modern and Enlightenment period
- Examines the intersection of politics and philosophy in the period including women’s rights, race and racism, slavery, and war
- Contributions reinvigorate debates in the field by expanding discussions to neglected topics and authors
- Rethinks traditional historiographical perspectives
- Interacts with the analytic and continental traditions, history of philosophy and science, and historiography
Written by a team of leading international scholars, this book examines a crucial period of philosophy from the perspective of themes and lines of thought that cut across authorial, disciplinary and national boundaries. Its fresh approach opens up new ways for specialists and students to conceptualise the history of early modern and Enlightenment thought within philosophy, politics, religious studies and literature.
This critical reference work takes a problem-based approach to the history of philosophy, highlighting the continued richness and relevance of sixteenth- to eighteenth-century philosophy. The five sections of the book explore: historiography and broader structures of thought in the period; the intersection of philosophy and politics; life and the metaphysics of bodies; theories of knowledge, with a special emphasis on social epistemology; and themes that stretch the boundaries of cognition (art, cosmology, the infinite and religion).
General Editors’ Preface
Howard Caygill and David Webb
Introduction: Canons, Methods, and the Critical History of Philosophy
Stephen Howard and Jack Stetter
I. Frameworks
1. Geohistory and Philosophy in the Age of the Enlightenment
Stefanie Buchenau and Stephen Gaukroger†
2. European Philosophy
Delphine Antoine-Mahut and Catherine König-Pralong
3. The Shifting Tides of Baconianism: A History (and Philosophy) of Historiographic Categories
Dana Jalobeanu
4. Transcendental Unity in Suárez’s Metaphysical Disputations I-IV
Howard Caygill
II. Philosophy as a Battlefield
5. The Philosophical Foundations of Women’s Rights: Nobility and Dignity
Jacqueline Broad and Marguerite Deslauriers
6. Race to Racism: A Lockean How
Dwight K. Lewis Jr.
7. Debates about Slavery in Early Modern Philosophy: Natural Slavery, Circumstantial Slavery, Transatlantic Slavery
Julia Jorati
8. Spinoza as a Theorist of Repressive Empowerment
Julie R. Klein
9. Spinoza and Kant on War and Peace
Jack Stetter
III. Life and Bodies
10. The Anatomy of the Vegetative Soul: Early Modern Studies of Vegetation and Plant Life
Fabrizio Baldassarri
11. Eliminating Life: From the Early Modern Ontology of Life to Enlightenment Proto-Biology
Charles T. Wolfe
12. Dominion without Domination: Modernizing Parental Authority in Hobbes and Locke
Meghan Wood Robison
13. English Alternatives to Dualism: Hobbes, Cavendish, Conway
Tad M. Schmaltz
IV. Paradigms of Knowledge
14. Aspects of the Early Modern Common Notion: Herbert, Digby, Culverwell
Mogens Lærke
15. Experience as a Foundation of Enlightened Thought
Anik Waldow
16. The Epistemology of Testimony: Locke and His Critics
Kenneth L. Pearce
17. Self-Cognition and Ideas
Vili Lähteenmäki
V. Reason’s Frontiers
18. Before and After: The Origin of Aesthetics
J. Colin McQuillan
19. The Individual and the Cosmos: Bruno, Leibniz, Kant
Laura E. Herrera Castillo and Stephen Howard
20. Mos Geometricus and the Genetic Infinite
Tzuchien Tho
21. Rationalising Religion in the Enlightenment: The Legacy of Spinoza
Anna Tomaszewska
Notes on Contributors
Index
Over the last years, the history of philosophy has changed rapidly, embracing new figures, new questions, and approaching texts old and new in novel ways. In this book, the editors have collected a series of essays written by the scholars who are leading the history of philosophy in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries in these exciting new directions. The past has never looked so fresh.
The Edinburgh Critical History of Early Modern and Enlightenment Philosophy takes us into new terrain. It opens up, extends, and transcends the traditional canon of texts and historiographical paradigms. Whether it be slavery, the philosophy of race, the early history of women’s rights, or alternatives to the tired historiographical categories we were once taught … this volume, broad in sweep and refreshing in its contents, reassures us that the study of early modern philosophy is on the move and in competent hands.
A truly impressive collection of studies of modern European philosophy, The Edinburgh Critical History of Early Modern and Enlightenment Philosophy is a substantial contribution to current scholarship and an excellent entry point for the general public.
Currently, the most fertile period of study in the history of philosophy is Early Modern Philosophy because scholars in the field have shown an eager excitement to broaden the canon and to study non-European figures. Scholars are looking at early modern thinkers to re-open debates about the reception and content of earlier ages, and to ask questions of the distinctions and assumptions taken for granted at our own fractured research-frontier. In the selection of their contributors, Howard & Stetter have done an excellent job at capturing the richness of these debates, and to nudge them to advance them in fresh directions.
