Models of Intellectual History

Thomas Ahnert (University of Edinburgh): "The Transformation of Natural Law in the Early German Enlightenment"

In this paper I shall examine some of the key changes in German natural jurisprudence between the publication of Samuel von Pufendorf’s De Jure Naturae et Gentium in 1672 and the theory proposed by the Göttingen professor Johann Jacob Schmauss in his Systema Juris Naturae of 1740. While Pufendorf had argued that natural jurisprudence was the collection of rules imposed by God on humanity, later theorists such as Schmauss presented natural law as an analysis of psychological mechanisms, based on the passions, by which morality emerged and was enforced intemporal life. I will argue that one of the reasons for this development was the difficulty in Pufendorf’s theory of identifying the rewards and punishments attached to natural law by its divine legislator.

Frédérique Aït-touati (Université de la Sorbonne/Trinity College, Cambridge): "The Uses of Narrative Genres in Seventeenth-Century Cosmological Writing"

The attention to textual forms and genres is a new and rapidly expanding field of intellectual history, allowing historians to explore this approach in its fruitful relations to, inter alia, the history of literature and the history of the book. Recent scholarship has explored the ways in which natural philosophers made extensive use of the available literary forms and techniques. They were also striving, however, to control the use of these forms and to adapt them to their needs and aims. Rather than fiercely opposing rhetoric, metaphor or narrative, natural philosophers attempted to define a possible usage for each device or mode of writing. This paper will investigate the reasons for, and implications of, the recurrence of narrative texts within the seventeenth-century cosmological literature. These narratives departed from the formal conventions of astronomical treatises. The closed structure of the Aristotelian treatise was fully congruous with the closed geometry of the traditional universe. With the advent of the new Copernican cosmology, aprofound literary reform was needed. The repositioning of the Earth in Copernican cosmology implied a new order, which could be presented conveniently with the aid of the chronological order of narratives. I shall suggest that the narrative structure of cosmic travel became the central literary instrument for the making of a new theoretical space.  Different types, scales and functions of narrative were used in the cosmological literature in order to define this new theoretical space and to secure the credibility of stories from afar.

Roger Ariew (Department of Philosophy, University of South Florida): “René Descartes and Intellectual History: Theory versus Practice”

René Descartes, the philosopher who so famously excommunicates the past to start anew from stable foundations, is also the gentlemanly skeptic who, in his Discourse on Method, gives solid advice about the advantages of history: “reading good books is like having a conversation with the most distinguished men of past ages — indeed, a rehearsed conversation in which these authors reveal to us only the best of their thoughts. … Conversing with those of past centuries is much the same as traveling. It is good to know something of the customs of various peoples, so that we may judge our own more soundly and not think that everything contrary to our own ways is ridiculous and irrational, as those who have seen nothing of the world ordinarily do.” Descartes also writes eloquently about some of its disadvantages: “But one who spends too much time traveling eventually becomes a stranger in his own country; and one who is too curious about the practices of past ages usually remains quite ignorant about those of the present.” One would wish that all historians of philosophy would take to heart these pronouncements about their historical target being an “other,” having cultural and temporal distance from them, and providing them with a different perspective on themselves. As uplifting as these official pronouncements might be, Descartes’s actual historical practices do not seem to follow his own account of history. He shows instead some severe limitations in his knowledge of other philosophers, treating them more like his own shadows, in a reconstructive mode; ultimately he turns out to be a bad reader, projecting his biases onto other philosophers simply to reject their doctrines or to gain some rhetorical advantage. I will look at selected occasions in which Descartes’s actual historical practice is exhibited, in order to support these negative conclusions. The episodes are derived from a letter to Andreas Colvius, about Augustine’s Cogito; from another letter to Pierre Chanut about Nicholas of Cusa’s notion of infinity; from the Reply to Pierre Bourdin about novelty in philosophy, a theme that stretches through the Preface and text of the Principles, where Descartes eventually likens Aristotle’s philosophy to his; finally, from Descartes’ analysis of Jean Baptiste Morin’s Quod Deus Sit, with that text in hand, in a letter to Marin Mersenne.

Carolina Armenteros (University of Cambridge): "Education versus Instruction: National Moral Transformation and the Struggle between Rousseauians and Voltaireans during the French Revolution, 1790-1795"

 The origins of modern Western education may be traced back to the educational debates of the French Revolution. It was during the period 1790-1795 that the major principles of public education as practiced today were first broached. Yet despite the importance of the Revolutionary philosophy of education, remarkably little scholarship has until now been devoted to it. This paper understands the rise of modern educational principles as the product of political tensions between Voltairean and Rousseauian republicans in the Assembly and Convention. It argues that the unprecedented challenge of establishing a republican regime over a large territory against Enlightenment prescriptions led to a preoccupation with public ‘instruction’ (the intellectualist antithesis of the more emotional, familial ‘education’) as the major means of morally transforming a nation of monarchical subjects overwhelmingly opposed to the Revolution into a nation of virtuous citizens devoted to the Republic. Thus while the Voltaireans proposed to promote social ‘perfectioning’ and forge virtuous citizens by developing their independent reason, the Rousseauians sought to ‘perfect’ the Republic by cultivating republican emotion and enthusiasm through work, physical exercise and the celebration of national religious festivals. The paper ends by examining the political workability of these models in light of their moral theoretical foundations.

Fred W. Beuttler (U.S. House of Representatives): "Creating the 'Judeo-Christian' Tradition: Intellectuals, Institutions and Ideas in the Development of Democratic Theory"

In September 1940, less than three months after the collapse of the French Third Republic, five hundred intellectuals gathered in New York for the first Conference on Science, Philosophy, and Religion (CSPR).

In the opening address, Jewish Theological Seminary Chancellor Louis Finkelstein declared that Western Civilization had collapsed due to its intellectual disunity. The specialization of knowledge had contributed to a moral and spiritual vacuum, fatally separating scientific research from ethical reflection, leading to totalitarianism.  Intellectuals needed to be mobilized to defend democratic values against both fascism and communism, totalitarianisms of the Right and Left. The Conference organizers believed that the methods of scientific collaboration could help create a common democratic moral order. 

The Conference on Science, Philosophy, and Religion developed into an interdisciplinary working group of intellectuals, which met annually from 1940 into the 1960s, as a forum for the development of democratic ethics. Central to their reformulation was the creation of a “Judeo-Christian” tradition as a foundation for
pluralist democratic theory.

This paper will argue that these intellectuals developed an institutional response to a central methodological problem in twentieth century intellectual history-- the fragmentation of intellectual discourse into academic disciplines.  Professional associations carry on intellectual enterprise, but they are hardly “public” in a sense known to earlier intellectual historians. Professionalization fragments discourse,
for specialists debate other specialists, seeking truth through disputation within a professional subculture, but seldom if ever between subcultures.  The Conference on Science, Philosophy and Religion was established to respond to this problem, to create a forum where public disputation could shape democratic ideas in a time of crisis. The Conference was one example of an institutional effort to transcend professional boundaries, a model of intellectual response to critical problems in twentieth century history.

Francesca Billiani (Manchester University)

Translating is one of the principal ways of negotiating with the foreign in domestic cultural scenarios, while censorship is a powerful political and ideological means of articulating these representations. Drawing on these critical assumptions, this paper analyses the censorial operative patterns which regulated the vast publication in 1930s Italy of translations of foreign narrative fiction in general, providing an assessment of censorship as a means of shaping reading patterns as well as the textuality of any national culture. The main question it asks is to what extent did fascist censorship de-legitimate, or legitimate, the extensive publication of translations which, albeit of foreign origins, were ultimately perceived by Italian readers as part of their own national textual corpus?

Constance Blackwell (ISIH): "Georg Morhof’s Polyhistor Physicus 1708 and the Johann Georg Walch, De progressu ac fatis logicae 1721 and the codification of the progress of philosophy."

Both these massive annotated bibliographies were written within the tradition of historia literaria - a listing of collections texts and printed to be reference works for scholars in the seventeenth and early eighteenth century – a time substantial publishing ventures all over Europe. Morhof’s Polyhistor was so popular that it was printed as late as 1747. These annotated bibliographies have been overlooked until very recently, when the topic was studied recently in a collection of articles edited by Francoise Waquet, Mapping the world of learning : the Polyhistor of Daniel Georg Morhof , 2000.

A reading of Morhof’s Polyhistor physicus reveals that he codified the notion that the different schools of physics developed in a certain way from their early unclear beginnings among the Greeks towards the new contemporary philosophy. One might say that this text includes the first comprehensive history of physics. Johann Georg Walch, De progressu ac fatis logicae, Leipzig, 1721 is an historia literaria written in the form of the history of progress of logic. He is here developing the formula of Gassendi’s De origine et varietate logicae 1658, into a comprehensive over view of the history thought. In it he divides the eclectic tradition, those who follow or develop inductive reasoning, from the syncretistic tradition – those who try (under the cloak of Neo-Platonic concordist thought) to bring together different traditions into one unity.

This paper will identify the seventeenth century sources in logic for the concept of progress and pay particular attention to the criticism of Platonism, a philosophical tradition that both authors think not conducive to the development of the natural sciences.

Michael C. Carhart (Old Dominion University, Norfolk Virginia): "Travel Reports and Comparative Linguistics: Malayo-Polynesian"

While the conventional narrative places the origin of modern comparative linguistics in the study of Asiatic languages, particularly the Indo-European language family from which are descended the Sanskrit, Romance, Germanic, and Persian languages, much of the important work took place in the study of a separate world region, the Pacific.  Employing the same methodologies as Jones, Rask, and Bopp, linguists like William Marsden, J. C. Adelung, J. S. Vater, and Wilhelm von Humboldt investigated the relationships between the Pacific populations, attempting to discover how human beings, equipped with only the barest maritime technology, could have undertaken and survived voyages hundreds of miles into the uncharted unknown, from New Zealand to the Marquesas, Easter Island, and Hawaii.  Europeans themselves, equipped with compasses, star charts, and ships that could tack upwind, only reached these places in the 1770s.  From these Pacific investigations came the invention of another major language family, the Malayo-Polynesian, which is entirely distinct from any language originating on the Asian mainland. In the 1770s, Jones in India and Marsden in Sumatra compiled vocabulary lists and learned the grammatical construction of the languages with which they were in contact.  A generation later, Rask travelled to Iceland for the purpose of linguistic fieldwork.  But most of the linguistic theorists - including Bopp, Adelung, and Humboldt who puzzled together the major language families - never left Europe.  Instead they were dependent on the observations of world travellers, who supplied them with empirical data.  That is, men of action traveled to specific locations and later published accounts of what they saw and experienced.  Men of letters appropriated those reports, extracting particular facts from one report and reading them against facts extracted from others.  From such compilations of decontextualized data, a scientific narrative of human origins, migrations, and linguistic relationships was constructed.

Theodore Christov (University of California, Los Angeles): "Reuniting Political Theory and International Relations as a Model of Intellectual History: The Case of Thomas Hobbes."

Much of what has been occurring in the development of intellectual history in the last few decades militates against the continued separation of the disciplines of Political Theory and International Relations. Pleas for the re-marriage of both fields were first made as early as the mid-1950’s, although genuine acknowledgment of their mutual neglect and the urgent need to reunite them did not occur until only a decade ago. Such an awakening to an increasing self-awareness of each other’s methodology was prompted by a serious reconsideration of intellectual history as an interdisciplinary project that began to emerge in the mid-1990’s.

This essay argues that a proper reconstruction of the recent theoretical evolution of both Political Theory and International Relations is an essential precondition for the their successful re-marriage in the prospect of creating International Political Theory as a hybrid discipline. Its viability and vitality as a unifying undertaking can be highly instructive in providing a model of disciplinary integration for intellectual history.The general conclusion I wish to drawfrom this study is that any sustained capacity for engagement with intellectual history is predicated on the recent interdisciplinary efforts advanced by the fields of Political Theory and International Relations.

Stephen Clucas (Birkbeck, University of London): "Is there a 'Western Esoteric Tradition'?"

This paper seeks to question the recent historiographical concept of the “Western Esoteric Tradition” or “ Western Esotericsm” as a valid way of explaining widely differing historical moments. A recent scholar utilising this concept characterises this tradition as “a mode of thinking that seems to have changed remarkably little from Hermes Trismegistus through Paracelsus, Jakob Boehme and Swedenborg to […] Rudolf Steiner, Madame Blavatsky and indeed many of our own contemporaries.” This paper will contend that this ahistorical conception of a timeless “esoteric” or “gnostic” tradition presents the most significant obstacle to a rigorous historical understanding of very different, and historically and culturally specific, forms of mysticism, magic or "occult philosophy". If it is the work of "traditions" to explain continuities within culture, then what legtimacy can there be for an "explanation" which sees Hermes Trismegistus and Helena Blavatsky as participating in "the same tradition"? As this historiographical approach has recently been embodied in the shape of an academic society, a journal and a number of book series the need to critically engage with this concept is urgent for those of us who wish to see the history of magic (and other related areas drawn into the orbit of "Western esotericism") placed on a rigorous historical footing. When did the term "esotericism" emerge, and does the epistemological freight of this term really help us to understand the work of figures like Boehme and Paracelsus (or even Rudolf Steiner)? The answer to this question, I shall argue, determines the illegtimacy of "Western Esotericism" as a historical concept with explanatory value.

Sorana Corneanu (University of Bucharest): "The Regulation of Assent and the Cultivation of the Self in 17 th-Century Thought"

Recent research in the intellectual history of the 17 th century has pointed out a rich line of investigation, one that seeks to understand the ‘epistemological’ concerns of the time within their historical context of ideas and motivations. Within this line, the suggestion has been formulated from various quarters that, for 17 th-century thinkers, the questions of knowledge, truth or certainty made sense more as part of a reflection on the good life and the cultivation of the intellect or the self, than as part of some pure epistemology.

This paper proposes an exploration of one aspect of this early modern integration of the moral and epistemic domains: what at the time was called the ‘regulation of assent’ will be seen not as an instance of the justification of belief problem or of the formulation of criteria of objectivity, but rather as one type of exercise meant to aid the cultivation of the mind and the improvement of the moral person. I suggest that this is indeed the function of the ‘regulation of assent’ or ‘government of opinion’, which play such an important role in the English natural philosophers’ writings on the proper conduct of inquiry, in the latter half of the century: I look mainly at the relevant texts by Glanvill, Sprat, Hooke and Boyle, and also want to show that Locke’s treatment of the issue is indebted to a similar vision. In all these authors, I propose, the good conduct of the operation of assent is presented as a means to a cure of the mind that seeks to build the cognitive and moral virtues of the inquirer.

Hannah Dawson (University of Edinburgh): "Pufendorf and Locke on Moral Entities"

Both Pufendorf and Locke argue that moral entities are constructed by man. Yet they also maintain that morality is in some senses natural. This paper will explore this apparent contradiction, and explain how artifice and nature might be compatible in early Enlightenment moral philosophy.

Karen Detlefsen (University of Pennsylvania): "Life Sciences Interrupted? The Historiographical Study of the Early Modern Doctrine of Pre-existence"

According to the doctrine of pre-existence, at the creation God created every organic body that would ever live and encased every one within the reproductive organs of the first member of its species. Historiography of the pre-existence doctrine in the early part of the twentieth century was unsympathetic. Joseph Needham, for example, writes that the “[pre-existence] doctrine was what was holding up further progress” in mid-eighteenth century life sciences, and the pre-existence theorists “took embryology on to a plane where observation became superfluous”. Jacques Roger rescued the doctrine from ignominy in the 1963 with the publication of his monumental study, Les Sciences de la vie dans la pensée française du XVIII e siècle: la génération des animaux de Descartes à l’Encyclopédie. In this book, he demonstrates that pre-existence had deep roots in the metaphysics and natural history of the early modern period. Specifically, he shows that, faced with the limitations of the nascent and unsophisticated brand of mechanism to which many seventeenth- and eighteenth-century philosophers and natural historians were committed, pre-existence was the most sensible answer to the problem of organic generation. This was part of a general transition to more sympathetic, contextualized approaches to the history of science. I do not dispute that this historiographical approach is essential for understanding the history of science. But this approach could bring with it a certain unwelcome consequence in this particular case. Specifically, it could tempt one to conclude that pre-existence represents the interruption of a scientific study of life in the seventeenth century. Indeed, one might be tempted to conclude that it is a wholly unscientific theory. Moreover, as an attempt to ‘explain’ generation given a commitment to mechanism, one might also be tempted to conclude that this interruption of a scientific study of life is a result of the mechanical philosophy. Foucault implies this when he states that the life sciences did not exist in the seventeenth century because the mechanical philosophy precluded a theory of life itself. I argue that, while pre-existence is indeed non-scientific as a theory of generation, it was put forth because its advocates were acutely aware of certain characteristics unique to living bodies. Many predecessors of the early modern mechanical philosophers share precisely the same awareness, and so I argue for a degree of continuity in the life sciences across eras that ought not to be obscured when we take a contextual approach to the history of science.

Beatriz Helena Domingues and Sonia Cristina da Fonseca Machado Lino (Universidade Federal de Juiz de Fora): "Utopia and religiosity in Oswald de Andrade"

The paper analyzes the maturation of Oswald de Andrade’s anthropological thought through two themes treated by him: the reevaluation of the influence of the Counter Reformation in Brazil’s formation and his concept of utopia. Both thematics are based on the presupposition of superiority of idleness over business (work). We argue that when Oswald de Andrade returns to anthropophagy, during the 1950s, after a Marxist militant phase in the 1930s, he constructed a less negative interpretation of the role of Iberian tradition in Brazilian culture than in the time of the strikes (1920s), and adapted revolutionary dialectics to the historical singularities of Brazil. He goes as far as to suggest that “we Brazilians, champions of racial and cultural miscegenation, are the Counter-Reformation itself, even without God or cult. We are the materialized utopia, for good or bad, facing the mercenary utilitarianism of the North”.

Oswald's notion of a “materialized utopia” connects him with the Renaissance discussions on the pre-historical societies found in the recently discovered New World. This was a privileged historical moment for the emergence of myths and oniric images of unknown lands. Oswald's utopia, however, differs from the optimistic and affirmative utopias of Morus, Bacon and Campanella, as well as from other messianic utopias whose cycle initiated with the discovery of the new continent and finished with scientific Marxism. They were all, according to him, imbued with patriarchalism, moralism, and messianic spirit, severely criticized by him. He finds his inspiration, instead, in what he calls “utopia up-side-down”, that is, in the ironic, satiric and nostalgic writings of Montaigne (especially ‘De cannibals’), Erasmus, Rabelais, and Cervantes, among whom he finds space for acceptance of the ‘primitive’ societies such as those recently discovered in the Americas. His positive evaluation of this Renaissance literature is also due to its recognition of the values of matriarchalism that runs Indians’ lives, which is inseparable from his admiration of idleness over business. The new utopia offered by the Modernists took, as its model, the matriarchal Indian society already existent: without armies, police or social hierarchy, and in harmony with the Earth, as pointed out by Montaigne.

In the fifties, Oswald referred to anthropophagy as “a philosophy of the primitive technicized”, a local culture’s ritual of resistance through “cannibalism” and “carnavalization” (Bahktin). Both concepts call for the dissolution of limits between body and spirit. Modernist cannibalism demands deglutition of scientific techniques and artistic information from the European metropolis in order to re-elaborate them with autonomy, which means the adaptation of a magic view of the ‘primitive’ world to modern techniques, and vice versa. We are not, however, talking about an attitude of pure and simple repudiation of western culture and religion, but rather of embracing the branch of European thought open at the time to new realities found in Africa, Asia or the Americas.

In religious terms, although the singular utopia of de Andrade recognizes Counter Reformation as a more tolerant attitude towards the relation between Europe and the “others”, it goes way beyond that. While trying to break with modern dichotomies such as material/spiritual, exterior/interior, rationality/irrationality, and open space in modernity for the “re-enchantment” of the world from the resilient elements of “primitive” societies (Löwy), Oswald affirms religiosity as part of human beings, civilized as well as uncivilized. It takes the form of an “orphic” feeling that allows an approximation of Olswaldian’s anthropophagy with the surrealist movement and, in the sixties, with tropicalism.

Ben Dorfman (Aalborg University, Denmark): "Crisis, Words and Memory: Occasions for a Century of Phenomenological Histories of Ideas"

This presentation will survey three landmarks it will characterize as varieties of phenomenological histories of ideas: Husserl’s The Crisis of European Sciences and Transcendental Phenomenology (Die Krisis der europäischen Wissenschaft und die transzendentale Phänomenologie, 1938), Foucault’s The Order of Things (Les Mots et les choses, 1966) and Ricoeur’s History, Memory, Forgetting (Mémoire, l’histoire, l’oubli, 2000). The purpose will be to juxtapose these works against a century in which “crisis,” “words” and “memory” have experienced moments of special significance, both in the history of ideas as well as on wider social scales.

The presentation will seek to fulfill two goals. First, it will define “phenomenological history of ideas,” and explain how the above, and admittedly diverse, works fit into that category. It will then outline points of special importance for the social play of “crisis,” “words” and “memory” qua concepts. Given those two arguments, the presentation will conclude by arguing that as a de facto set of practices, phenomenological history of ideas stands as both a unique manifestation of elements of the twentieth century Zeitgeist at the same time that it provides specific sets of insights into that Zeitgeist as a set of linked historical phenomena.

William E. Duvall (Willamette University, Salem, Oregon):"The Dominated Intellectual: Strategies and Tactics"

Tassadit Yacine’s book, Chacal ou la ruse des dominés: aux origins du malaise culturel des intellectuals algériens (The Jackal or the Cunning of the Dominated: Toward the Origins of the Cultural Malaise of the Algerian Intellectuals) (2001) is a penetrating study in two parts: the first, an examination of the image and role of the Jackal in Kabylian story-telling; the second, an interpretation, informed by the Jackal image, of Algerian intellectuals writing under colonial rule. In brief, the Jackal serves power, the Lion, but also opposes it in allying itself with the culture of the weak. Jackal cleverly uses what power has given to it to do its work of resistance.

This paper will reflect on Yacine’s analysis of the cunning strategies and tactics of the intellectual as Jackal writing under the domination of colonialism. Then it will compare these strategies to those employed by Michel Foucault’s “specific intellectual” whose task is to make “truth” practices function differently within hegemonic fields of power. Unlike the traditional writer-intellectual who, in the fashion of Voltaire, Zola, or Sartre, attempts to stand above the dominant discursive regime to universalize as the voice of consciousness and moral guide, the Jackal and the “specific intellectual” seek both to disrupt flows of power and to combat intellectual powerlessness (the malaise of which Yacine speaks) from within the dominating structures of power.

Alek D. Epstein (The Open University of Israel): "Intellectuals’ Freedom and Intellectuals’ Accountability: Israeli Scholars’ (Mis)interpretations of History in Comparative Perspective"

In the end of the 1980s Paul Johnson published a book entitled Intellectuals, which, despite its being concise, has become probably the most detailed bill of indictment against this group of “social critics” and “social innovators”. Describing the intellectuals’ public roles, Johnson was very far from accepting a popular thesis that – citing Edward Said – “the figure of the intellectual as a being set apart, someone able to speak the truth, a courageous and angry individual for whom no worldly power is too big and imposing to be criticized”. Quite the contrary: Johnson argued that self-mobilized intellectuals, in general, and university professors, in particular, were among the most faithful adherents of some of the worst totalitarian powers; and that their attitudes towards the principles of humanism and liberalism were negative in most countries in most periods of the recent history.

Truly speaking, Paul Johnson was not the first one to draw an attention to some intellectuals’ fascination for the most dark regimes of the twentieth century. For example, in 1946 Max Weinreich published pioneer research entitled Hitler’s Professors, in which he emphasized that “German scholars, who as a rule already in the Second Reich had done their best to foster German imperialism, from the end of World War I supplied Nazism with the ideological weapons which any movement, but particularly a German movement, needs for its success”. As we all know, over the past century many influential Western intellectuals became addicted, to a greater or lesser degree, to Marxism and even to Marxism-Leninism. Why did the overwhelming majority of intellectuals all over the world become seduced by the communist fantasy? How could so many defend even Stalin himself, deny his crimes or explain them away? Political Pilgrims: Travels of Western Intellectuals to the Soviet Union, China and Cubaby Paul Hollander and A Better World. Stalinism and the American Intellectuals by William L. O’Neil provide amazing accounts of how the Western intellectuals embraced Marxist tyrants at the very moment their colleagues were rotting in prison cells, and the common people everyone claimed to be concerned for, were starving. These books report how cultural and religious leaders from the West (some of them being famous public figures), visited the Soviet Union (as well as China, Cuba, and other communist countries), and told the most appalling lies to flatter their hosts and express their contempt for Western society.

Unfortunately, no one has systematically analyzed the association of Israeli intellectuals with various totalitarian ideologies. Even Paul Johnson, the author of the highly acclaimed A History of the Jews, in the book on Intellectuals did not discuss the situation within the academic field in the Jewish state; moreover, the word “ Israel” itself did not appear in this volume. However, it seems that his (and the other aforementioned researchers’) general conclusions have been relevant in case of some Israeli prominent university intellectuals to a no lesser extent than of their Western comrades. Since such research has not been conducted yet, I would like to share with the conference participants some thoughts regarding this issue.

Andrea Falcon (Concordia University): "Aristotle and the Aristotelian Tradition in Antiquity."

Aristotle and the Aristotelian tradition are not one and the same thing. To study the formation and development of the Aristotelian tradition is to study the reception of Aristotle’s thought in antiquity. This entails a study of how this thought was transformed to give rise to a variety of different positions. It is possible to study Aristotle without studying the Aristotelian tradition, but a full understanding of Aristotle’s contribution to ancient thought involves a study of how Aristotle was understood in antiquity. I will argue that we can fully appreciate the audacity of some of Aristotle’s views only by placing these views in their most natural context, namely ancient thought.

Franz Leander Fillafer (University of Cambridge/Göttingen): "How not to write the history of the Austrian Enlightenment: Theoretical and methodical predicaments"

This paper will take the current debates on methods in intellectual history – particularly those impinging on the semantic aspects of interpretation and explanation – as point of departure to look more closely on the case of the Enlightenment in the Habsburg Monarchy. By focussing on the problems of semantic holism – analogous notions and arguments being utilised with discrepant proclivities and intentions, the relation between form and ideology – I will address the particular problem of the Enlightenment’s persistency which refutes ostensibly irreversible political caesuras. This persistency was inoculated via instructions, manuals, stylistic guidelines and patriotic catechisms. Enlightenment phraseology and Enlightenment procedures survived far into the 19 th century, but did this linguistic and practical continuity avouch a continuity of principles and aims? What if the forms of Enlightenment survived long after its ideology had perished? How may we distinguish lip service, threadbare routine and genuine convictions?

Andrew Fix (Lafayette College): "Balthasar Bekker on Comets."

The paper will deal with the interdisciplinary intersection of astronomy and theology in 17th century The Netherlands. It's title will be Balthasar Bekker on Comets. It will discuss Bekker's 1680 work on why comets are not portents of disaster in the context of 1--Dutch writings on comets in the 17th century including Puteanus, Fienus, and Fromondus from the southern Netherlands on the comets of 1618 and a detailed look at the writings of Schulerus and Graevius from the Dutch Republic on the comet of 1664; and 2--Bekker's Cartesianism as shown in his adult catechism of 1670 and his involvement in the Sabbatarian Controversy against the Voetians--and even his later more famous work on evil spirits and witchcraft from the 1690s.

The thesis of the paper will be that Bekker wrote against comet portents NOT because of the Dutch tradition of cometary writing--he was after all not an astronomer or mathematician--and NOT because of his Cartesianism in an effort to discredit the Aristotelian ideas of the Voetians, but because of his deeply felt Calvinist monotheism which made him reluctant to give to comets the power to tell the future, a power belonging only to God. He had similar motives for his later book on witchcraft and evil spirits. So it was ultimately the Calvinist theologian's desire for a proper relationship with God and not the desires of an astronomer to set the cometary record straight or the desires of a Cartesian to oppose the Voetian worldview and by extension the Voetian view of church, Bible, and state that led Bekker to speak out on comets.

Peter Forshaw (Birkbeck, University of London): ‘Magia nova, renata, seu reformata?’

This paper begins with a brief introduction to a few of the more influential theories that have dominated the academic understanding of magic and its relation to science and religion: the intellectualism of Edward Tylor and James Frazer, the functionalism of Marcel Mauss and Emil Durkeim, and approaches influenced by Lucien Lévy-Bruhl’s notion of participation. It then engages with the more recent work of Frances Yates, well-known for the arguments she advanced in her influential work Giordano Bruno and the Hermetic Tradition on the Renaissance magus as ‘the immediate ancestor of the seventeenth-century scientist’, as one who exemplified ‘that changed attitude of man to the cosmos which was the necessary preliminary to the rise of science’. The responses to the ‘Yates Thesis’, both from supporters (Peter French, Piyo Rattansi and Allen Debus) and critics (Edward Rosen, Paolo Rossi, and Charles Trinkaus) are well-known. While this paper provides a few instances of the arguments stirred up in the debate over Hermetism anticipating the Scientific Revolution, its main focus is instead backwards in time, concerning itself with what Yates considered to be the antecedents for the ‘new magic’ of the Renaissance (alongside the ‘new alchemy’ and ‘new Neoplatonism’). We shall examine her contrast between what she perceived to be the ‘new elegant magic’ of Marsilio Ficino (1433-1499) and Giovanni Pico della Mirandola (1463-1494) and the ‘old dirty magic’ and ‘barbarous techniques’ of the medieval magus and consider to what extent this ‘new magic’ was one ‘reborn’ in the Renaissance recovery of classical antiquity or one ‘reformed’ from medieval traditions like necromancy, the Solomonic texts, and the ars notoria.

Stephen Gaukroger (University of Sydney): ""Physico-theology and the construction of a new world picture, 1680-1700"

Between 1680 and 1700, Western culture underwent a profound transformation in which natural philosophy played a leading part, and from which it had emerged with a new standing by the middle of the eighteenth century. Natural philosophy was transformed from a set of theories and experimental and observational practices, of widely differing levels of abstraction and no less widely differing degrees of success, dealing with various aspects of natural processes, into something that unified knowledge and was not only fundamental to, but in some ways constitutive of, our understanding of our place in the world. A crucial player in this development was the rise of physico-theology, which offered a direct unmediated connection between natural philosophy and Christian theology, which were conceived to be part of the same enterprise, and the aim was to make their different forms of investigation converge on a shared set of fundamental truths. Such a union required two things: that natural philosophy share to some degree in the mythological structure of Christianity, which transformed natural philosophy from a set of investigations of natural processes into a world view; and that Christianity be reduced to a large degree to its cognitive content, to a set of beliefs which were on a par with any other set of beliefs, and which were subject to the same criteria of assessment.

Guido Giglioni (Warburg Institute, London): "Belief, Disbelief and Suspension of Disbelief in Early-Modern and Modern Attitudes towards Magic"

The work of such authors as Girolamo Cardano and Tommaso Campanella is exemplary because it provides an interpretative situation in which the historian cannot easily draw the line between superstitious and religious beliefs, between folk lore and metaphysical views, between magic and science. Taking its cue from Cardano's and Campanella's analysis of magic, this paper aims to contextualise the early-modern notion of magic by emphasising the role of human beliefs and their ambivalent responses (attraction and fear) towards phenomena of change and otherness in a time of radical transformations. As the very examples of Cardano and Campanella show, the complexity of human beliefs is better understood when savants work as alert ethnographers and enlightened anthropologists rather than enthusiastic believers or disenchanted epistemologists.

Peter Harrison (Manchester College, Oxford):"Intellectual History and the History of 'Religion'"

The past three decades have witnessed some important shifts in our understanding of specific disciplines that fall within the scope of intellectual history. The notion that philosophy, from its inception in ancient Greece, is to be identified with ideas and arguments, has been seriously challenged by some who claim that this is a peculiarly modern conception of philosophy. Prior to the modern period, it is asserted, philosophy was less about doctrines and more about ‘a way of life’. We also increasingly encounter the contention that ‘science’, as we currently understand it, did not predate the nineteenth century. Strictly, for much of Western history we ought to speak of ‘natural philosophy’ (and a range of other disciplines). And natural philosophy—as a branch of philosophy—is different in crucial ways from modern science. Finally, ‘religion’, too, has been identified as a modern concept. Religio, understood in the middle ages as a virtue akin to ‘piety’, was reified in the modern period into the now familiar ‘set of beliefs and practices’. As yet, there have been few attempts to link these new revisionist disciplinary histories, even though on the face of it, there should be important connections between them. This paper will explore some of the ways in which these distinct historiographical developments might be creatively linked and interrelated, and will suggest how this might inform our understanding of the history of religion.

Rajesh Heynickx (University of Leuven): "Linking epistemology and cultural criticism: a concept for writing the history of twentieth- century aesthetics"

In the first half of the twentieth century, aesthetics - the philosophical reflection on art - became an autonomous discipline with its own methods and infrastructure (periodicals, congresses and encyclopaedia). In the past, this process has been primarily unravelled by looking at the clash of different thinking methods and their underlying epistemology. For example: debates of the interwar decades on the question whether empirical data, and therefore the art object, or the aesthetical experience, and therefore the contemplator (the subject) had to be the central angle of aesthetic reflection, have been studied extensively.

This paper challenges this sort of historiography that is limited to an internal perspective on aesthetics. Aesthetics was not only driven by the (re)formulation of domain specific needs. The conceptual debates were also intimately related to a specific context: in a world punctuated by urbanisation and secularisation, aesthetics offered opportunities to propel a vehement cultural criticism. Departing from their personal denomination, aestheticians explained the meaning of art. Inspired by their personal ideological opinions, they promoted in their aesthetical theories values which were, according to them, endangered by modernization.

This paper discusses a double sized process: on the one hand it looks at how formal aesthetical theories could support a cultural diagnosis and on the other hand it detects how broad changes in society, such as political radicalism, influenced the development of aesthetical epistemologies. Both sides will be illuminated by developing a revealing case study: the art philosophy of Victor Basch (1863-1944), a Hungarian-French Jewish aesthetician and politician. Basch was a leading Dreyfusard and president of the Human Rights league, but from 1913 on, he also held the newly created chair of aesthetics at the Sorbonne in Paris (1913). He was the co-ordinator of the first international congresses on aesthetics (1913 in Berlin; 1937 in Paris), but became most known for his efforts to promote the principles of legal and social justice – a mission which lead to his assassination by the Nazis. Most researchers, blinded by his political martyrdom, labelled Basch’s aesthetics as a sideline of his political discourse. Yet, his aesthetical discourse should be rather seen as a lab for his political ideas which creates an opportunity to study the political culture of the interwar from a different angle.

By exploring the case of Basch, this paper opens a new perspective on writing the history of 20 th century aesthetics. It shows that such history can only be written when an analysis of epistemological debates is constantly combined with a dissection of the aestheticians will to counterbalance a disenchanted world. The methodological core of such project, has to be a history of ideas that focuses on the genesis, (re)articulation and appropriation of aesthetical concepts. Such history of ideas can correct the historiography on 20 th century aesthetics that has been dominated by a pure philosophical approach that looked at concepts as sterile products derived from their context.

Howard Hotson (St. Anne's College Oxford): "Intellectual geography: territorial fragmentation and intellectual activity in the Holy Roman Empire, 1495-1806"

From the emergence of intellectual history as a distinct field of study, its practitioners have sought to interrelate ideas from different academic disciplines. More recently, they have also grown proficient at relating the ideas of individuals and groups to concrete local circumstances of time and place. It is less clear, however, that intellectual historians have fully grasped the consequences of the geographical organisation of intellectual activity over broader expanses of space for the development of intellectual traditions over longer periods of time. This paper will

attempt briefly to illustrate this approach by reflecting on the implications of one of early modern Europe's most extraordinary forms of political organisation for a range of distinctive intellectual and cultural traditions.

Ian Hunter (Centre for the History of European Discourses, University of Queensland):"The Hidden History of Contextualism"

Contextualist intellectual history, particularly as practised by the Cambridge school, is usually discussed in terms of the philosophical problems that it poses: typically problems associated with the mutually intelligibility of different intellectual contexts. This paper heads in a different direction, discussing contextualism in terms of its own intellectual history. Particular attention is paid to the early modern historicisation of metaphysics and theology — in “histories of heresy” and “narratives of civil government” — as models for the suspension of truth and turn to politics that we find in modern contextualist historiography.

Dana Jalobeanu (Western University “Vasile Goldiş”, Arad, Romania): "Bacon’s reformation in context and its seventeenth century readers"

During his lifetime, Francis Bacon was deeply involved in several projects aiming towards a general reformation of knowledge. The common theme of such projects was the idea of an advancement of learning, a result both of general providence (providential history) and the collaborative efforts of an allegedly new kind of intellectual community. Various names have been used for the enterprise: The Interpretation of Nature, The Advancement of learning or Instauratio Magna. In general terms, what Bacon had in mind was the attempt to replace most of the existing knowledge with a different kind of attitude towards the investigation of the secrets of Nature. The production and validation of knowledge, its organisation and, most of all, the people involved in the enterprise are, in Bacon’s vision, entirely different from those involved in the two inherited models of knowledge: the Scholastic model and the hermetic knowledge of the Alchemists. So different, in fact, that their author was subsequently hailed as the herald of modern science, of a modern intellectual community and even of a modern way of life. Recent scholarship has shown how deeply misleading are such interpretations. In order to understand the purpose, extent and meaning of Bacon’s projects for the reformation of knowledge, one has to read them in the context of similar attempts which were very popular in the first half of the seventeenth century. Various manifestoes, several of the new philosophers and a whole bunch of religious reformers working at the and of the sixteenth century and at the beginning of the seventeenth century were similarly engaged in claiming the beginning of a new era for humankind and the possibility of a general reformation of knowledge, morals and religious beliefs. Only by reading Bacon in this proper context we can understand what is new in his way of interpreting the general reformation of knowledge. My attempt in this paper is to further explore this direction of study by reading Bacon in connection with some of his contemporaries involved in similar projects. I will show that, in many respects, Bacon’s advancement of learning and its details were not “new” between the contemporaries. They bear traces of influences coming from Sydney circle, striking similarities with Bruno’s Italian dialogues, they have sceptical and Stoic elements, combined with a strong millenarian and potentially apocalyptic theology. The cement used in putting together such different trends of thought is a generally spread humanist belief in the perfectibility of human being and the importance of moral reform.

In this paper I will try to show that the resulting synthesis, organised at various levels for various categories of readers, was widely read and extremely popular during the seventeenth century mainly because of these reasons and not because some of its secondary elements found their way into the “new sciences”. As such, it constituted a widely spread intellectual model whose popularity extended beyond the first half of the seventeenth century. Bacon’s writings were useful for two categories of reformers: the social enthusiasts of the English revolution and the founders and defenders of the Royal Society. By examining the writings of several such Baconians, I will show that what they found really useful in the Baconian programme pertained more to a conservative and well structured traditional programme for a reformation of knowledge than to any radical novelty Bacon’s writings might have had possessed.

Social vs. Intellectual History of the Viennese Buergertum: How to conceptualise the reception of Greek Antiquity

Douglas Jesseph (North Carolina State University): “Hobbes, History, and Scientia”

There has been a good deal of recent scholarly activity devoted to the topic of Hobbes and history.  The interest is natural, since Hobbes had a keen interest in history and authored several historical texts, most notably his translation of Thucydides’ Pelopennesian War and his own Behemoth, which is a history of the English Civil War. Any account of Hobbes and history must take account of his contrast between scientia and prudentia. The former is the province of absolutely certain knowledge, founded on demonstrations and incapable of refutation. The latter (which includes history) is concerned with fallible inferences from experience and lacks the necessity and certainty characteristic of true scientia. The purpose of this paper is to consider the role that historical considerations play in Hobbes’s mathematical writings. Although Hobbes conceived of mathematics as the demonstrative science par excellence, he was familiar with the history of the subject.  In addition, he argued on historical and philological grounds that his own principles were not far removed from those of ancient authorities, provided that their doctrines were interpreted correctly.  Hobbes’s recourse to this sort of historical argumentation in support of his mathematics might seem puzzling, as the historical origin of the concepts of a true scientia should have no bearing on the validity of its claims.  I argue that Hobbes saw the role of history in this case as part of a broader polemical strategy.  Desiring to convince the reading public that his controversial materialist program for mathematics was correct, and seeking to blunt the criticisms of his enemies, Hobbes used intellectual history as a way of preparing his readers’ minds to accept his much-contested first principles of mathematics. In the end, it seems that Hobbes conceived of intellectual history more as a weapon to be used in the course of dispute than as an autonomous realm of knowledge that is valuable for its own sake.

Lauren Kassell (HPS, University of Cambridge): “‘Ceremonial, Superstitious Trash’: Thomas Vaughan’s Alchemy and the Reform of Ritual Magic in Seventeenth Century England”

In the 1650s Thomas Vaughan published several works on alchemy. Until William Newman redeemed these as expositions of Sendivogian alchemy read through the lens of Agrippa, they had been largely dismissed as theosophical musings and Rosicrucian apologies. This paper considers Vaughan’s argument that true, Christian alchemy is reformed ritual magic. It does so through a close reading of a digression in Magic Adamica (1650) on the history of sacrifice. Here Vaughan asserts that the meaning of sacrifice consists ‘in the Thing signified, and not in the Signe it self’, and in so doing explicates a conventional, as opposed to a natural, theory of language. By understanding Vaughan's theory of language, we can then understand his alchemical writing. The key to Christian alchemy, Vaughan explains, is that ‘salt is no salt’. To attempt to write a history of alchemy without a history of magic, Vaughan confirms, is foolish.

Michael Lang (University of Maine): “Civilization and Globe in Toynbee”

The paper traces in the early Toynbee the transformation of the concept “civilization.” In his wartime writings, Toynbee drew a crucial proposition from the Fabian Graham Wallas: national governance had entered into a contradiction with the worldwide scale of industrial society. Toynbee would maintain this axiom for the next sixty years.

During the war, Toynbee’s post-nationalism applied an Enlightenment “civilization” geopolitically to propose a revised “Concert of Europe” and to measure against itself the “barbaric areas” of the world. “Civilization” likewise became for Toynbee the basis of historical knowledge, irreducible to national categories.

Toynbee’s postwar diplomatic work in Turkey, however, refocused his conception of civilization. Turkey was a border-zone, a point of “contact” between overlapping civilizations; further, it could not be measured by a single standard of civility. It inhabited “distinctive traditions” and therefore “differentiations of consciousness.” Wallas’ spatial contradiction was now supplemented by temporal disjuncture.

The Enlightenment universal could suffice under such terms no better than Spengler’s recent civilizational solipsism. A Study of History set out to historicize the contemporary threshold of global integration. But this was not merely a topic; it was the methodological abstraction used to manage conceptually the displacement between the West and the “souls” of others.

Sven-Eric Liedman (Göteborgs Universitet, Sweden): "Continuity and Discontinuity in Intellectual History: An Example"

In the last decades, Begriffsgeschichte (history of concepts) has played a central part as a possible model of intellectual history. In a discussion held in Washington DC in the mind-nineties and collected in a small volume entitled The Meaning of Historical Terms and Concepts (Ed. H. Lehman and M. Richter, 1996), two positions can be singled out. On the one hand, Begriffsgeschichte is seen as a valuable tool in order to understand complicated intellectual schemes in the past. On the other hand, it is attacked as unduly constructing a continuity in the history of thought, presupposing some conceptual unity in terms and expressions over centuries and millennia.

In order to shed some light on these problems, in my paper I will pick up a central historical example, namely the Aristotelian form-and-matter terminology. This terminology has been reshaped and reinterpreted innumerable times in history. It has been dismissed as notoriously confusing. Still, in new disguises it is still with us both in our everyday talk and in philosophy and science. And how come? I will give an tentative answer pointing at an underlying problem in all human endeavours to organize a complicated visual and intellectual field.

Ann E. Moyer (Department of History, University of Pennsylvania): "Ficino’s Florentine Legacy"

Thanks to the writings and career of Marsilio Ficino, his home town of Florence has been closely associated with Platonic thought in the eyes of many modern scholars. Ficino’s reputation and readership remained strong throughout sixteenth century Europe; his writings and translations went through many European editions. But in fact his legacy in Florence has been much less clear. This talk will assess that legacy. Ficino’s Florentine influence extended into many fields, including aesthetic thought, religion, and visual vocabulary, although we would characterize few of these Florentines as strongly Platonic or as close followers of Ficino. I will conclude by suggesting that one significant assumption or model in intellectual history—that it makes sense to identify thinkers of this era as systematic followers of one or another philosophical school—needs to be re-assessed.

Frances Nethercott (University of St Andrews): "Russians Writing History 1755-2005"

 With the collapse of the Soviet Union official historiography was rapidly discredited. Accounts of Stalinism and the post-war era quickly became marginalized by popular memory, and histories charting the more distant origins of revolution were deleted from compulsory reading lists. If, in the early Yel’tsin years, sponsored rewrites of history (and the school curriculum) produced works of uneven quality, including some rather tendentious ad persona studies that were hardly fit for purpose, since the mid-nineties the profession has begun to recover its bearings. Experimenting with the tools of post-structuralism, gender, cultural history (which, it should be stressed, does not necessarily attest a growing interdependence with Western scholarship) historical research in recent years has unquestionably become more interesting.

My own project, an overview of which will form the topic of my paper, is to a large extent prompted by the quest in present-day Russia to cope with its legacy of mass ‘historical amnesia’ that afflicted many establishment historians and, of course, their public. To my mind, however, we can re-evaluate, and perhaps relativise, the impact of ideology and science on Soviet and post-Soviet historiography by engaging with the values and assumptions, and authorities (political and/or scientific) that have informed historical writing in Russia in a much longer time frame beginning with the eighteenth century when the subject first entered the Academy of Sciences. While, on the one hand, trends in Russian historical writing over the past two hundred years (Enlightenment historiography, historicism, positivism, Marxism, and neo-Kantianism) mirrored the changes in Western scholarship and are therefore quite familiar to us, a persistent absence of university autonomy, censorship, and the interventions of ideology into the realm of scholarship generally may help to explain emphases in Russian establishment historiography that one might not find elsewhere. In addition, these external pressures inadvertently fostered an alternative but highly influential ‘philosophical historical discourse’ outside the walls of academia, which came to expression in the periodical press and fiction.

Ann T. Orlando (Weston Jesuit School of Theology): "Pierre Gassendi and the Void: An example of the use of intellectual history to support seventeenth century physics"

This paper explores how Pierre Gassendi argued for the existence of a vacuum in nature. His intellectual model placed nearly equal weight on experimentation and the history of philosophy; thus he supported developments in physics by using the techniques of both the empiricist and the humanist. These techniques were part of his overall project to replace Aristotelianism with Epicureanism as the foundational philosophy in physics and ethics. This paper examines how Gassendi combined experimentation and ancient philosophy in support of the notion of a vacuum. The idea of a vacuum was disputed by the Aristotelian physics that had dominated European physics since the Middle Ages. In the Pars Physica of his Syntagma Philosophicum, Gassendi combined new experimental data from Torricelli and Pascal with his own detailed commentary on ancient authors. This paper describes Gassendi’s use of Scripture and Patristic authors in his efforts to substantiate an Epicurean notion of a void. The paper will briefly give other examples from Gassendi’s physics (atomic theory, theory of inertia, and cosmology) in which he used the same intellectual model. The paper concludes by noting that Gassendi’s attempt to build a philosophy that combined empiricism and humanism did not long survive him. The importance of intellectual history in physics was quickly left behind; with the rise of empiricism dominating later seventeenth century physics.

Heiko Pollmeier (Technische Universität Braunschweig): "The French Debate on Smallpox Inoculation (1754–1774) in a multidisciplinary Light"

Smallpox was raging in the eighteenth century. It affected everybody and was contained only late in the century when, in 1796, Edmund Jenner discovered vaccination by cowpox. Before, there was inoculation, the artificial introduction into the body of the human smallpox virus. Inoculation was known for centuries in the Far and Near East, and was already in use in England in the first half of the eighteenth century. Everywhere in Europe it aroused a lot of controversy – most of all in France. After 1750, every major French philosopher had an opinion on the subject. The vivid public French debate lasted over two decades, resulted in more than 1000 texts of all genres and involved a great many authors, not only the famous 'philosophes', but hundreds of lesser known figures from all kinds of professions: physicians, theologians, scientists, journalists and also non-specialists.

What seems to be a matter of the history of medicine, actually was a subject of much broader interest, since it reflected also social, religious, institutional, scientific, philosophical, and ethical issues. People feared death and disfigurement, but also feared for their soul; mathematicians and demographers tried to prove by statistics the pros and cons of the operation; the philosophes wanted to free the individual from the yoke of Providence and of a fear avoidable by simple means; Princes discovered 'public health' (e.g. as a means of increasing the work force and the number of soldiers). The debate on inoculation is not something we can comprehend along the lines of 'enlightenment' vs 'counter-enlightenment'.

The various disciplines of intellectual history involved here are: social history (participants in the debate), cultural history, esp. the histoire des mentalités (groups and development of arguments and the culture of learned quarrels), the history of science (development of statistics), the history of institutions (the involvement of the pro-inoculation Académie royale des Sciences and the two rival factions within the Faculté de Médecine de Paris) and the history of communication (the role of the book market and the emerging press for the vulgarization, popularization and distribution of medical knowledge), to name but a few. It is difficult to draw a line between these disciplines.

In discussing some aspects of a larger study (my doctoral thesis just completed), I will concentrate on some of these different modes of intellectual history and show what they can contribute to the understanding the debate about smallpox inoculation in eighteenth century France.

Sandra Pott (King’s College London): "How to understand the future?"

Competition rules the world - so it seems. Albeit the enormous relevance of the term intellectual history as well as historical epistemology have little to say about it. What is more: no philosophical dictionary gives an explanation of this powerful term. Therefore, this paper aims at sketching a history of the concept of competition relating it to its current use and contesting its value for an epistemology of intellectual history. In order to present a first and decisive use of the concept of competition the paper will primarily deal with early 20th-century sources (early Chicago school, Ordoliberalism) but also go back to the 18th century (Cameralism).

John Potts (Macquarie University): "Toward a Refigured History of Ideas"

Previous exercises in the history of ideas, particularly as practised by A.O. Lovejoy, emphasised the unchanging continuity of ideas over long historical spans. Such an approach has been severely criticised for its abstraction of ideas from their social formation, while intellectual historians have questioned the value of the idea as a unit of inquiry. From another perspective, critical thought under the influence of Foucault and Kuhn has rejected the longue durie in favour of epistemological breaks or 'ruptures' in the history of thought.

This paper proposes a reconstructed history of ideas, drawing on both historical continuity and discontinuity in intellectual history. This theoretical model entails the possibility of tracing the history of certain ideas from their ancient origins to their present expression, while acknowledging alterations in meaning determined by changing social and cultural contexts. This model is attentive both to the endurance of certain ideas across long durations, and to breaks and shifts in meaning over time.

Jose-Javier Beneitez Prudencio (Universidad de Castilla-La Mancha): "Museumazing Imagination and Old Rearticulated Nationalism"

The museum illuminated nationalism’s style of thinking from its beginning; consequently the National Museum’s formula proliferated in all state-nations since the nineteenth century. Nowadays when it is so common for a liberal education and cross-cultural tendencies in good societies to insist on the nationalistic politicization of issues would engender confrontation and tension.

In Spain, the Basque quasi-federal government and Sabino Arana Foundation inaugurated twelve years ago The Basque Nationalism Museum at Artea (Vizcaya). The Museum is organized to exhibit artifacts and documents, and offers accounts of the Basque National Party (PNV) into the last Century Basque history (PNV was founded by Sabino Arana in 1894 and governs in Basque region for the last thrirty years). The organization of this public institution, the cultural practises, ideological underpinnings, and the images physically presented in it reveal important dimensions enables us to examine features of ethnocentric intention, although do not lend thenselves so easily to accusation of racism.

Similar to this, several thousand ‘museum-plantation sites’ across the US South are organizated to exhibit artifacts and offer accounts of the history of slavery and Southern society. The primary intent of such institutions is not to be racist, not to denigrate African Americans, but the reliable intention is to tell a partial aspect of the history to recapture the splendor and glory of the past, in the same way to The Basque Nationalism Museum. Thus the content of narratives (the key images and language used, the moral assumptions made, and the framework of thinking which are encouraged) is, respectively, marginalization of the African American presence in the American South in general and slavery in particular, and the Spanish people (maketos) in the Basque country. This is accomplished not by outright bigotry, or by simple lies; rather it is achieved via distortion and exaggeration, silence and erasure.

Cynthia M. Pyle (New York University): "History as Science?"

Nowadays, history is often, even usually, called a social science, but can we call history a science, thinking in terms of the natural sciences? The question is still valid, if not in the way it was conceived by the positivists following Comte. No longer do we believe that either science or history is an objective study. We admit to uncertainty in both domains. Expanding on ideas in a recent article (in Building the Past, eds. R. Suntrup, J. R. Veenstra, Peter Lang [Medieval to Early Modern Culture, 7], 2006), this paper investigates a different idea of history as science, relying on comparisons with other fields of science, including the biological sciences. As in the author’s discussion of “Art as Science” (Endeavour 24, 2000, 69-75), the methodologies of these two undertakings will be examined, adducing especially developments in the 15th and early 16th centuries in the West, and making use of recent developments in the philosophy of history and in the philosophy of what we now call science.

Andrea Ragusa (Università di Siena): "History of language: a model for history of intellectuals?"

In a very large historiographical literature, built in particular since the end of the second post war – when democratic culture, institutions and politics were rebuilt – the role of intellectuals in their relationship with society and politics, has been focused and analysed from a various and different points of view: as a solitary one, from the perspective of their engagement in politics and political parties, for example.

Most recently historiography has directed attention to new perspectives of analysis, focusing in particular on the role of language as a vehicle of representation and interpretation of the world and society.

The aim of my intervention is to try to point out the problem of the relationship between intellectuals and language, andtp offer some elements of an answer to the question: can the history of language act as a model for the study the history of intellectuals and the role of intellectuals in the history of contemporary society?

I’ll try to point out and consider some aspects and problems:

Mariana Saad (Sussex and Centre François Viète, Nantes): "When language, philosophy and politics meet science"

In this paper, based on my current research, I will argue that intellectual history and historical epistemology cannot ignore each other. Through the analysis of the idea of sympathy in Smith, Cabanis and Wilhelm von Humboldt, I will first show how theory of knowledge, medical science and politics are inextricably linked in the anthropologies they propose. But to say that the reflection of a philosopher or a scientist is nourished by the writings of the others and the experiments carried out by the others, arise the question of the nature of this link. In the second part of my paper, I will discuss the definition of context, as well as the notions of influence and meaning.

José Tomás Velasco Sánchez (Universidad de Zaragoza): "Intellectual History and their models in the Anglo-Saxon World from a Spanish historiographical perspective"

Intellectual History has two main models or currents: Social Intellectual History and PoststructuralistIntellectual History represented principally by the historian Hayden White. Opposite Hayden Whyte and his PoststructuralistIntellectual History, the Social Intellectual History has developed their own models in the fields of the history of the ideas, the history of the historical ideas or historiography, the history of the literary and artistic tastes, the history of the intellectuals and the history of science, all of them writen by philosophers and historians like John Bagnell Bury, György Lukács, Georg G. Iggers, Fritz K. Ringer, Carl E. Schorske and Anthony Pagden. Everyone has created, in fact, one model of Intellectual History with their own characteristics. The consequence is that: there are so many models of Intellectual History like philosophers, historians and other authors who come to other fields.

In Continental Europe, the History of the Culture and the the Mentalities, writen by Lucien Febvre and the French School of the Annales (his third generation of historians), is the most similar to the Intellectual History. In Spain, during the last twenty years, Intellectual History has been introduced through the history of the historiography in contact with the history of the ideas and others models of Intellectual History.

Wilhelm Schmidt-Biggemann (Freie Universität, Berlin): "Was ist wahr an der Hermeneutik?/ What is true in hermeneutics?"

Abstract to follow.

Elinor Shaffer (Institute of Romance and Germanic Studies, London)

Dr Shaffer will present an account of the Research Project and Series of volumes on The Reception of British and Irish Authors in Europe, of which twelve volumes have so far appeared, with a view to highlighting the advantages and the disadvantages of a modern reception studies approach (as initiated by Jauss and Iser and others in the 1970s) for the purposes of intellectual history. This will lead into the specific studies presented by others in the group.

Ulrich Johannes Schneider (Universitätsbibliothek Leipzig): "Writing Intellectual History in the biographical Mode – Dictionaries of Scientific Biography"

Ever since the existence of printed books there have been dictionaries, histories, and other forms of syntheses of the scholarly world, some arranged by disciplines (historia literaria), others by the names of famous authors. Conrad Gesner's Bibliotheca universalis (1545) is an early example, later ones include Paul Freher's Theatrum virorum eruditione clarorum (1688) or Christian Gottlieb Jöchers Compendiöses Gelehrten-Lexicon (1751), to name just a few. Early on, authors like Morhof and Bayle, Moréri and Diderot have contributed to this genre of encyclopedic literature which served and still serves all kinds of audiences. In the departementalized world of academia today, dictionaries "of scientific biography" (to quote the title of Gilliespie's 18 volume work compiled between 1970 and 1981) are still around and regain interest as models of writing intellectual history in the biographical mode. The panel is open to historical and theoretical examinations of biographical dictionaries devoted to scholars or scientists from 1500 to the present time, including online publications.

Ulrich Johannes Schneider (Universitätsbibliothek Leipzig): "Presentation  of the International Dictionary of Intellectual Historians (IDIH)"

The International Dictionary of Intellectual Historians (IDIH) aims to create a database with biographical articles for more than 800 intellectual historians who published influential works between 1900 and 1970. These authors have, through their narratives, shaped the way we look at ourselves and our history. By providing information on intellectual historians from all over the world, the IDIH acts as a counterbalance to national, regional, or disciplinary 'master narratives'.   Recently moved to a new software platform, the IDIH will soon use the familiar look-and-feel of MediaWiki software, used by Wikipedia and numerous other encyclopedia projects. This means that anybody will be able to search or browse articles by names, country of origin, main works, and others. On top of that, qualified scholars can request an account that lets them easily add, edit and discuss articles on historians listed in the database.   The IDIH is now actively searching for potential contributors. Visit the presentation to find out how you can participate!   The IDIH project is now online at www.idih.org (The new look-and-feel will be available mid-April)

Anna Seregina (Russian Academy of Science, Moscow) : "Changing the canon? Catholics and the history of political ideas."

Till 19 80 s the post-Reformation English Catholics were not considered as an integral part of national history. Catholics had a separate existence; if they were present in the national history, then only as few conspirators, retrogrades destined to fail as they were fighting against the spread of 'progressive' Protestantism in the country. The history of Catholics therefore was studied by Catholic historians and existed within the tradition of political and hagiographical history. Approaches determined by these traditions are very much alive these days. The last decades however saw a new development: Catholics being written back into history – political and social history to start with, as well as the history of religion. Some Catholic names have found their way into the English literary canon.

The present paper is focused on Catholic authors – theologians, historians and political pamphleteers – well-known to their contemporaries and all but ignored by later scholars. It would be shown how they have being incorporated into the history of English political and historical thought of the 16- early 17 th cc. since the mid-20 th c.

Richard Serjeantson (California Institute of Technology): "The Origins of the Enlightenment Science of Human Nature"

Historians who have turned their attention to the human sciences of the eighteenth century have tended to be united in their assessment of the origins of these sciences. They have agreed that these lie in the seventeenth-century natural law tradition above all: a tradition that is held to have its source in Hugo Grotius’s On the Laws of War and Peace (1625) and which was consolidated by Samuel Pufendorf in his On the Law of Nature and Nations (1672). This paper, by contrast, proposes an alternative genealogy for the eighteenth-century science of man. This genealogy turns on the existence in the seventeenth century of a distinct and clearly defined inquiry into ‘the nature of man’ (de natura hominis). This science was grounded not in treatises on the law of nature and nations, but in post-Aristotelian accounts of the science of the soul. It was in fact from this tradition that the natural lawyers began their own investigations of the nature of man, and it is this tradition that we need to understand if we are fully to grasp the significance of the Enlightenment ‘science of human nature’, as it was formulated by David Hume above all.

Marco Sgarbi (Università di Verona): "History of Problems and the Future of Intellectual History"

The aim of my paper is to show the limits of both history of ideas and history of concepts and to propose a new methodology based on the history of problems.  The history of problems has a strong metaphysical foundation. Problems have always been, and many ways to solve them can be found in history. Following Ulrich Johannes Schneider's suggestions, I demonstrate that the history of the problems can be a perfect integration to the work of intellectual historians. The history of the problems has two main characteristics: interdisciplinary approaches and theoretical perspectives. Owing to these two characteristics, the history of problems promotes the dialogue between various cultures and disciplines. The last part of paper is dedicated to the presentation of a European project on the history of problems.

Elinor Shaffer (Institute of Germanic and Romance Studies, School of Advanced Study, University of London): "The problems of reception as an intellectual approach: The Reception of British and Irish Authors in Europe Research Project"

Dr Shaffer will present an account of the Research Project and Series of volumes on The Reception of British and Irish Authors in Europe, of which twelve volumes have so far appeared, with a view to highlighting the advantages and the disadvantages of a modern reception studies approach (as initiated by Jauss and Iser and others in the 1970s) for the purposes of intellectual history. This will lead into the specific studies presented by others in the group.

Jane Shaw (New College, University of Oxford): "Intellectual history and Lived Religion"

In what ways can we - should we - connect lived religion to intellectual history? An older model of enlightenment and secularisation suggested that sceptical, elite ideas trickled down to the larger populace, which led to a decrease in religious belief and thus a decline in religious practices in the modern era in Britain and Western Europe. This view has been challenged in the last two or three decades by social historians and sociologists re-thinking the secularisation thesis and by intellectual historians analysing how 'the Enlightenment' (as an intellectual movement) was, especially in Britain, religious in many of its forms, concepts and debates. But few historians have attempted to think through the relationship between religious belief and religious practice in modernity, or indeed in otherperiods (though there are examples - e.g. in the work of Peter Brown and Robert Wilken on early Christianity). One way of re-thinking this relationship is to ask how we might look at the circulation of ideas amongst groups of different social status in society, and thus the engagement by religious practitioners of all sorts with prevaling ideas; another is to look at the ways in which religious practices may in fact have influenced ideas, thus reversing the relationship between belief and practice that is usually assumed by intellectual historians. I will look at the ways in which this was the case in the Enlightenment in England, drawing on my recently published work on miracles as well as other forms of lived religion, such as prophecy, and will then turn to late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century British examples, including prophecy, spiritualism, mysticism and millennarianism.

Yvonne Sherwood (University of Glasgow): "Paradoxes and Legacies of the Early Modern ‘Liberal (Whig) Bible’"

One of the areas that remains relatively untouched in cultural histories of the Bible is analysis of the changing weight of the Bible in political and legal discourse and, relatedly, the complex relationships between the Bible and the many different trajectories of ‘secularization’. This paper attempts to begin such a project by looking at the early modern rise of the ‘Whig’ or ‘Liberal’ Bible—most famously expressed in Locke’s Two Treatises of Civil Government but represented in many other political-theological works of the 1680’s— and still very much in evidence on the ‘Western’ theological-political stage. In contrast to its nemesis, the Absolute Monarchists’ Bible (represented by figures such as Filmer, Johnston and Wilson), the Liberal Bible set itself up in opposition to exceptional supra-legal power as practised by sovereigns, human and divine. It defined true scripture as ethical, rational and legal. By adjusting the meaning of Genesis 1.26 from a coronation moment for the first King Adam to a declaration of the ‘rights’ of man enforced by scriptural divine charter, this Bible strategically repositioned absolute monarchy and transcendent theocracy as a fall from the original truth of proto-democratic rights. It endorsed Bible as a source of infallible religious truth but emphatically not as a source of a credible political anthropology. Thus it effected a shift from Bible as what I’m calling a ‘hard universal’ (a source of universal truth that operated symbolically and pragmatically) to Bible as a ‘soft universal’: the assumed foundation of the just commonwealth that the ‘Author of Liberty’ and his Scripture can be assumed to more loosely stand behind. Under the terms and conditions of the Liberal Bible, the Bible could still ‘govern’, at least metaphorically, but it was not expected to put its transcendental foot into legal or political orders too directly— and indeed desisting from such transcendent acts was part of its redefined understanding of the nature of true divine and kingly/presidential power. If, as Carl Schmitt argues, the state as ‘secularised theological concept’ has been defined by a crucial move from ‘a nominalist model of the singular transcendent God to a kind of secularized deism, in which God is immanent in the world’s lawfulness’, the Liberal Bible has been a key factor in facilitating this transition. Changes within the Bible, and particularly in the understanding of the true politics of the Bible, paradoxically created the conditions for the Bible’s gradual disappearance or its retraction to ‘immanent’ symbolic ‘power’.

Justin E. H. Smith (Concordia University): "Was there ‘Life’ in the 17 th Century? Foucault and the Limits of Historical Ontology"

One important respect in which the study of early modern ‘biology’ and its relation to philosophy must differ from the study of early modern physics is that biology did not, strictly speaking, exist. There was no independent science of the phenomena of life. Michel Foucault famously argued that the science of life could not exist in an historical epoch dominated by a mechanistic understanding of nature, and in this respect inadvertently sanctioned the general historiographical prejudice of both English and French scholarship on early modern science in favor of mechanics, with relatively scarce attention to what would in the 19 th century come to be thought of as ‘biology’. But if biology was nowhere, I wish to argue, this is in a sense because it was everywhere. That is, contrary to Foucault’s claim, no independent science of the phenomena of life could exist not because mechanical explanations were seen as exhaustively covering all of nature’s ontological domains, but rather because to a great extent biological explanations were themselves deployed in the service of mechanics. This is the case not just for so-called ‘vitalists’ such as Ralph Cudworth or Francis Glisson, but also for the large majority of self-proclaimed adherents of the mechanical philosophy (at least in its late-17 th-century trajectory). I will illustrate this in some detail on the example of Leibniz’s mechanics. While Leibniz’s biological physics is by now well known, what has not been adequately acknowledged is that this approach was not seen by any of his contemporaries as the introduction into one distinct and autonomous science of principles borrowed from another. Rather, it was one and the same science that studied passive and active forces, inert bodies and those imbued with the capacity for self-motion, growth and development. Some denied that there were forces of the latter sort inherent in bodies, while others maintained that all bodies have their own internal principle of activity. But no one saw the study of active and passive bodies, respectively, as belonging to two separate domains of inquiry.

Certainly, an important shift does occur in the early modern period: in antiquity, organic growth, driven by the internal active principle of a substance, was itself the model of natural change in general, while in the 17 th century many shifted their focus to the study of the motion of intrinsically inert matter and of the way in which motion is imparted from one body to another. But whether they thought all motion could be explained in this way or not, it was animals and plants that stood out as the natural entities most in need of explanation, and not projectiles or billiard balls. The hope was alive that every sub-domain of nature might be explained by one unified science of nature: but the living stood out as the greatest challenge, and possibly the greatest stumbling block, to the emergence of such a science. Animals and plants were not overshadowed by billiard balls, even if some dreamed of explaining the former in terms of the latter. It is a caricature of the period, moreover, to maintain that all or most natural philosophers held such a dream. Many saw things the other way around: it was not physics, but biology, that was to be foundational.

That Foucault could have got the question of ‘life’ in the 17 th century so wrong shows not just the limitations of his knowledge of the period, but also the dangers inherent in attempting to say what could and could not have been thought in such and such historical epoch, that is, in overemphasizing the determinative role of some episteme. By way of conclusion, I will seek to address some of the philosophical presuppositions that may have guided Foucault’s interpretation of the early modern concept of life in Les mots et les choses, and I will offer some suggestions, partially inspired by Ian Hacking, as to how to remain sensitive to the historical contexts of ontological questions while avoiding attributing a greater role than the evidence permits to the conceptual constraints binding those who think and write in a certain time and place.

Tom Sorell (University of Birmingham): "Analytic Philosophy and History of Philosophy Again"

Why should historians of philosophy, even those who work in departments dominated by analytic philosophy, care what their problem-solving colleagues think of the history of philosophy? Why, in particular, should they worry if those colleagues look down on history of philosophy, regarding it as an optional extra in a philosophical education? Jerry Schneewind has wondered whether the main reason to care is that the problem-solvers hold the power, and hire and fire. My own view is that history of philosophy does not count as a branch of philosophy if it studies texts only as documents illustrative of the thinking of their place and time. The question of whether what a text says is true or defensible should never entirely be displaced by the questions of what a text means and how what it means is a product of context –not if history of philosophy contributes to a philosophical education or to a philosophical exchange. In particular, canonical texts in the history of philosophy are never merely historical documents. This paper amplifies arguments early put forward in the collection I co-edited with John Rogers in 2005, Analytic Philosophy and History of Philosophy ( Oxford).

Carlos Spoerhase (Humboldt Universität, Berlin): "The Concept of Precursorship in Intellectual History"

From the perspective of a history oriented towards the present day, the ‘winners’ in the history of science and the history of ideas are always those who can be linked to the present in a genealogical line, as the forerunners of the current state of research. The relevance of predecessors for the construction of a discipline’s history is manifold. The concept of precursorship not only facilitates the retrospective construction of historical continuity: The line of continuity derived from the concept of a precursor can, on the one hand, be used to ‘modernize’ that very predecessor; on the other hand, it can just as well endow the ‘successor discipline,’ which has been searching for forerunners, with a fine tradition of eminent precursors. In other words, in the analysis of a discipline’s history, the concept of precursorship functions not only by providing retrospective continuity; it may also furnish legitimacy. This raises the suspicion that the concept of precursorship could be a rather dubious contract between two parties in which the precursor becomes a “pillar of support” for an emerging discipline through “hagiographical anachronism,” and consequently the protagonists of the new field may secure a long and ‘heroic’ previous history. The procedure of describing and judging a precursor’s achievements only with regard to what they have contributed to the formation and development of the current state of the art seems particularly problematic when the retrospectively constructed and plotted development lines are backdated offhand as teleologies, and so interpreted as anticipations. Even if a forerunner of a particular discipline is not used as a retrospective anticipatory figure in order to furnish a field’s identity and legitimacy, the problem remains that the precursor as precursor is only perceived in relation to the particular characteristics which permit the construction of a continuous line to the present. Consequently, the precursor’s other, ‘non-teleological’ characteristics are disregarded. This systematic loss of perception can cause a narrowing of the historiographical vision even with unproblematic types of precursors. In a history of science shaped by precursor figures, that which cannot be conceived as part of a continuous line to the present is excluded, including the (putative) losers in the history of science and the history of ideas. My paper will center on a reconstruction of the concept of precursorship as articulated in recent intellectual history and in the french branch of historical epistemology. My conclusion will be that almost all central aspects of the concept of precursorship have already been thoroughly analyzed and criticized in the methodology of textual interpretation and that the focus of the debate on precursorship should therefore be shifted to hermeneutics.

Siep Stuurman (Erasmus University, Rotterdam): "Intellectual History as Global History"

In a Journal of the History of Ideas forum on globalization (2005), Donald Kelley proposed “to assemble a sort of multicultural agenda, or encyclopedia, of topics, questions, and practices concerning intellectual aspects of local, national and global history.”

This paper seeks to explore what formats and models of intellectual history such a global agenda might develop, and what pitfalls it should avoid. Both temporally and geographically, “world” or “global” history is vast and heterogeneous, encompassing a wide range of socio-political settings, intellectual contexts and types of discourse. This compels us to rethink the methodological assumptions of intellectual history as we have come to understand and practice it since the linguistic turn.

Using examples from my ongoing project on the world history of cross-cultural “equality” (i. a., my essay “Herodotus and Sima Qian: History and the Anthropological Turn in Ancient Greece and Han China,” forthcoming in Journal of World History, 2007, no. 4), the paper discusses four dimensions of a future global intellectual history:

1. It should work with analogies and meta-concepts rather than with concepts as its basic units of analysis, to avoid a narrow text-cum-context approach that would hamper rather than assist broad comparisons across time and space.

2. It has to include notions of temporality, to discriminate between the different “time regimes” in world history, and to avoid the implicit adoption of post-Enlightenment developmental time.

3. In line with William McNeill and Jerry Bentley’s focus on the high salience of the interfaces between cultures and civilizations in world history, it must take frontiers, both real and imagined ones, as major settings for the gestation and articulation of new discourses.

4. It should look for parallels, similarities and common ground between intellectual trends in different civilizations, and it should distance itself from the one-sided emphasis on “othering” found in much recent intellectual history of cross-cultural discourses.

Agnieszka Steczowicz (Queen Mary and Westfield, University of London): " New Genres in the Early Modern Period: The Case of Paradox"

 One avenue that has not been sufficiently explored by intellectual historians and which lends itself particularly well to comparative and interdisciplinary research is the study of genre. Studies dealing with genre in the early modern period have tended to concentrate almost exclusively on highly codified literary or fictional forms. Yet there is scope for further research on lesser-known genres in a variety of disciplines, as is demonstrated by William Eamon’s work on books of secrets in medicine, Ann Blair’s investigation of ‘theatres’ and problemata in natural philosophy, or Quentin Skinner’s account of the mirror-for-princes tradition in political discourse. Drawing on these approaches, this paper will examine one particular genre which rises to prominence and thrives in the early modern period. In the sixteenth century alone, there are over a hundred works – in fields as varied as theology, law, medicine, practical and natural philosophy – characterized as ‘paradoxes’ in their titles. Writings designated by that title tend to be controversial works aimed at defying received opinions and authorities which hold sway in their respective sphere of knowledge. I propose to examine how this genre evolves over time and how it is used as a tool for expressing new and dissident opinions in a period of intellectual upheaval, a time when authorities and accepted ways of thinking were increasingly being challenged.

Antti Tahvanainen (University of Helsinki):"Interest theory and rhetoric in the political writings of Marchamont Nedham and James Harrington"

Rhetoric can be viewed as conducive to republican values and ideals, yet it has also been condemned as the art of sedition and treachery, undermining political order and rational decision-making. In context of these negative views, modern scholars have often asserted that for such mid-seventeenth century republican thinkers as Marchamont Nedham and James Harrington, the theory or language of interests presented the means to advance an objective and independent view of politics, distinct from the ambiguous and potentially dangerous nature of rhetorically laden politics.

My paper will re-examine this relationship between interest theory and rhetoric for Nedham and Harrington through the following questions: whether the amorality of interest theory could be reconciled with the moral doctrines of republicanism; second, whether the theory as such prevented rhetorically based treatment of, or acting on political topics; third, whether interest theory could have been viewed simply as a topic of deliberative oratory, e.g. what is advantageous.

In addition, the study of the relationship between interest theory and rhetoric for Nedham and Harrington gives an opportunity to reflect on the role of rhetoric in their political thought in general – a role which is arguably crucial, yet hitherto largely unexamined.

Derya Gurses Tarbuck (University of Mersin, Turkey): "Nine Muses of Edinburgh in the Eighteenth Century: New approaches to Enlightenment Sociabilities"

The notions of the institutions of the Enlightenment and of Enlightenment sociability have been popular subjects among scholars dealing with the eighteenth century, but the ways in which they manifested themselves could still benefit from new approaches. The institutions of Enlightenment, universities, societies and clubs being among them, are obvious places to look for sociability. Societies and clubs in general are certainly worth considering, as providing certain challenges to more formal spaces that offered intellectual activity, such as universities. The Fair Intellectual Club, which was founded in 1719 in Edinburgh by women, is perhaps especially worth looking at. Not only does it offer the possibility of yet another vehicle for Enlightenment ideas, but also it might prompt a rethinking of the Enlightenment as a masculine enterprise. That study of this club has been neglected could be symptomatic of certain blind spots in current scholarship.

Joanne Waugh (University of South Florida): " Philosophia and historie "

Philosophia and historie, like muthos, are ancient Greek cultural genres before they give their names to ways of thinking and writing and story-telling that we sometimes speak of as if they were putative cultural universals. It is now commonplace to refer to the myths and philosophy and history of societies and cultures and civilizations far removed in space and time from the Greek city-states of the fifth and fourth centuries BCE. That ‘philosophy’, ‘history’, and ‘myth’ now mean something different from what was meant by their ancient Greek cognates is not in itself a problem. But a problem does arise when we take these contemporary conceptions of philosophy, history, and myth as descriptive of the ancient Greek genres of philosophia, historie, and muthos. This is not just an instance of anachronism, although for intellectual historians this is surely problem enough. I hope to show that mistaking contemporary conceptions for ancient ones is antithetical to the very idea of an historical ‘consciousness’ that we see exemplified in Herodotus; viz., the notion that one's recording as yet unrecorded traditions and events belonging to other cultures in addition to one’s own, must be based on historie, i.e., research. Historie permits comparison between Greek nomos and ethos and the laws and customs of non-Greeks, and continues the criticism of Greek muthoi that began with Herodotus's predecessors, Xenophanes and Hecataeus. Unlike Homer and Hesiod whose muthoi come from the Muses and tell of a very distant past, Herodotus records events and traditions that occur more recently, and in so doing, distinguishes between what he witnesses firsthand, his own research, as it were, and what he learns from others which is less reliable. Historie should be as much a part of Greek paideia as muthos. "The Greek historian," Arnaldo Momigliano wrote, "almost invariably thinks that the past events he tells have some relevance to the future. These events would not be important if they did not teach something to those who read about them." The Greek philosopher also sets out to teach his audience, and like the historian, is critical of the authority granted to the muthoi found in Homer and Hesiod. Philosophical paideia evaluates laws and customs not by comparing traditions from different societies but through the discovery of conceptual, abstract standards by the dialectical exercise of reason. Still, this dialectical exercise of reason is both the means for and the substance of a way of living in a world that is as concrete as abstract, and thus a world, as we see depicted in the dialogues of Plato, in which the ironies discovered by the historian, combine with the practice of philosophia, to supplant the authority of muthos with the power of logos.

Charles T. Wolfe (University of Sydney): “The Return of Vitalism in Post-War France: Metabiology in Canguilhem, Simondon and Roger”

The eminent French biologist and historian of biology, François Jacob, once notoriously declared “On n’interroge plus la vie dans les laboratoires”: laboratory research no longer inquires into the notion of ‘Life’. Nowadays, as the philosopher of biology David Hull puts it, “both scientists and philosophers take ontological reduction for granted… Organisms are ‘nothing but’ atoms, and that is that.” In the mid-twentieth century, in a period running from the immediate post-war period to the late 1960s, philosophers such as Georges Canguilhem and Gilbert Simondon returned to Jacob’s statement with an odd kind of pathos: they were determined to reverse course. Not by imposing a different kind of research program in laboratories, but by an unusual combination of historical and philosophical inquiry into the foundations of the life sciences (particularly medicine, physiology and the cluster of activities that were termed ‘biology’ in the early 1800s). Even in as straightforwardly ‘scholarly’ a work as La formation du concept de réflexe aux XVII e et XVIII e siècles (1955), Canguilhem speaks in odd terms of “defending vitalist biology,” and declares that Life cannot be grasped by logic (or at least, “la vie déconcerte la logique”). A similar goal to put the life sciences back at center stage, presented strictly as intellectual history, i.e., without Canguilhem’s lapses into normative language, can be seen in Jacques Roger’s ‘classic’ Les sciences de la vie dans la pensée française au XVIII e siècle (1962). So what was going in Canguilhem’s rediscovery of vitalism, Simondon’s ‘biophilosophy’, and Roger’s anti-Cartesian re-reading of the history of the life sciences? Were they simply translating the old metaphysical tenets of Lebensphilosophie into French – after all, the language of Bergson – in one of the various reactions against the Scientific Revolution that seem to occur throughout the twentieth (and indeed, the twenty-first) century? Was all this historical and philosophical work merely a reassertion of ‘mysterian’, magical vitalism? I will try to address these questions, which also means achieving some perspective, both on Canguilhem’s ‘vitalism’ (notably with respect to Kurt Goldstein), Simondon’s meta-biological theory of individuation, and the uniquely ‘vital’ features of the early modern theories discussed and, some might say, ‘promoted’ by Roger.

Sergey Zenkin (Russian Academy of Sciences, Moscow): "What is a historical idea?"

Intellectual history must consider an idea as an historical event, and this is a paradoxical object. Retaining a hereditary tie with the Platonic ideas as general and permanent entities, which were supposed to remain not in historical coming-to-be but in the fixed heavens of mind, it is nevertheless dated and signed like a historical document, and thereby situated in a temporal development. Using a Neo-Platonic vocabulary, one might speak of a “fallen” idea, an intellectual being bogged down in the contingency of historical utterances.

This double status of the historical ideas implies some particular features of there relationship to us, the historians of ideas:

- a historical idea is not logical: it does not originate from purely intellectual operations with semantic unities, but from mixed, both theoretical and practical combinations and decisions of the human mind; the historical intellect is not deducible from itself;

- a historical idea is not alethic: just as a myth or a literary fiction, it has no necessary relationship with truth (from whence our duty to study not only the history of discoveries but also the history of errors, illusions, and “ideologies”);

- a historical idea is not actual: after having be articulated, it has lost its general and a-temporal character which its author supposed it to have, it belongs to the past, and henceforth in a sense it does not concern us any more.

In other words, historicizing ideas implies their formalizing: an idea seized by the history turns into a formal structure, an intellectual “myth” passing from one chronological and/or discursive field to another and taking various conceptual definitions and practical applications. The formal identity of ideas permits to maintain their general character required by their Platonic heredity, and this general character is displayed in two dimensions: “vertically”, as a relative independence of ideas from the temporal development, and “horizontally”, as their capacity to transgress discursive and disciplinary boundaries. Such an idea may be described as a “light” nomadic pattern, without temporal and disciplinary fixation and investing various fields of intellectual culture. Its history should be reconstituted in terms of migration rather than in terms of evolution, and its inner structure may be envisaged rather as a narrative or a gesture than as a conceptual entity. In this way, the intellectual history reveals its affinity with the literary history…

The “formalist” definition of historical idea should be added to (and not substituted for) the traditional “substantialist” definition. It seems to be especially promising in some particular historical conditions, for instance if we want to interpret the progress of nineteenth- and twentieth-century philosophy and social sciences (some examples will be given).

Fabiola Zurlini (Studio Firmano for the History of Medicine and Science): "Models of Intellectual History: History of Bibliography and Early Modern Medicine"

The aim of the paper is to illustrate the relationships between the development of bibliography and Early Modern Medicine, especially in the Seventeenth Century. The history of bibliography is usually considered as a research field linked directly to the history of book and history of the libraries and less to the history of ideas. According to the new theories of the most famous Italian historian of bibliography Alfredo Serrai, the paper means to demonstrate as history of bibliography is a kind of “Intellectual Map” of the main ideas that influenced the scientific development of the different fields of knowledge. This is particularly evident in the study of the relationships between Medical Knowledge and Bibliography in the Seventeenth century. During this century many important medical bibliographies were published as the “material documents”and results of the valid development of medical knowledge in relationships with the application of the scientific method. So Early Modern Medicine is a privilegiate field to understand that the history of bibliography is like a mirror where the history of ideas and of transmission of knowledge are perfectly reflected.

Vera Zvereva (Russian Academy of Sciences, Moscow): "Models of Natural History"

My paper deals with different intellectual traditions in natural history narratives (c. 1550-1780). "Natural history" is examined as a kind of scholarly text as well as an "instrument" of knowledge production. What sort of knowledge of the natural world could be received owing to use of this "instrument"? Attitudes towards the definition of the subject of "Natural history" changed with the transformation of the concepts "history" and "nature". This paper discusses the "rhetorical" tradition of natural description (Gessner, Aldrovandi), and treats adaptations of these narratives to the requirements of experimental science (Jonston, Plot), and debates about the model of "Natural history" as ideal taxonomy (Ray, Buffon, Linnaeus).