Eric Schliesser

Margaret Cavendish is a vitalist, materialist, and monist. She holds that human beings and other natural kinds are parts of the one material entity, “nature.” While human beings may not be superior to other animals in many ways, Cavendish does think that human beings have a type of knowledge and perception that is unique to their kind, that they strive for the continuance of their being, and that they join together into societies in order to achieve a more peaceful existence. This essay considers the formation of human beings, how their perception and knowledge differ from other nonhuman animals, how human beings are individuated, and in what sense they can be immortal. Finally, the essay argues that Cavendish’s views about the social nature of human beings mirror her views about the metaphysical structure of nature. The essay shows that Cavendish embraces natural and social hierarchy alongside a form of sexual equality that the essay dubs “Platonic feminism.”

This paper argues that historians of philosophy must coin concepts that disclose the near or distant past and create a shared horizon for our philosophical future. Two concepts are introduced: “Newton’s challenge to philosophy” and “philosophic prophecy.” “Newton’s challenge to philosophy” explains that from about 1700 onward, “natural science” is increasingly taken to be authoritative in settling debates within philosophy. “Philosophic prophecy,” comprises the structured ways in which concept formation by philosophers can shape possible futures, including that of philosophy. The second half of the paper offers a fresh narrative about the shared origins of analytical philosophy and analytical history of philosophy in the anti-Spinozistic writings of George Boole and Bertrand Russell. Ernest Nagel is treated as the philosophic prophet of analytical philosophy his views are compared to those of Moritz Schlick.

This essay links Jeremy Bentham and Immanuel Kant more closely in their politics and political theory through a shared, substantially similar debt to Adam Smith’s Wealth of Nations. In particular, I argue that on some key political questions that are foundational to liberalism, they draw strikingly akin lessons from Smith and build on his ideas in a similar direction. That is, even otherwise very different strands of early liberalism find agreement on a constellation of ideas about trade, federalism, and peace. I show that these are not just preoccupations of Kant’s potentially idiosyncratic Perpetual Peace, but help define the whole political tradition.

Sophie de Grouchy (1764–1822), published her Lettres sur la Sympathie in 1798, together with her translation of Adam Smith’s The Theory of Moral Sentiments. This short text is presented as her critical commentary on Smith, but also offers original analyses of the relationship of emotional and moral development to economic, institutional, and political reform. Like Smith, Grouchy believes that sympathy is fundamental to social well-being. She improves on his theory by offering an account of its origin; and she argues it is the result of early relationships of dependence. The political conclusions Grouchy draws from her analysis are in tune with her republican views: social equality can only be the result of recognizing that we depend on each other. Deepening Smith’s position, Grouchy argues that inequality hinders the growth of sympathy and renders fruitful cooperation between the different strata of society unlikely or impossible. This new translation of the text is presented with an introduction divided into three chapters. Chapter 1 covers Sophie de Grouchy’s life, times, and sources. Chapter 2 discusses Grouchy’s work, with a special emphasis on the relationship of the Letters to Smith’s The Theory of Moral Sentiments, which the Letters were a response to, as well as a discussion of other writings by Grouchy. Chapter 3 touches on three main philosophical themes present in the Letters: political philosophy, with an emphasis on the republican aspect of Grouchy’s thought; her legal philosophy and political economy; and her aesthetics.

"This volume collects contributions from leading scholars of early modern philosophy from a wide variety of philosophical and geographic backgrounds. The distinguished contributors offer very different, competing approaches to the history of philosophy. Many chapters articulate new, detailed methods of doing history of philosophy. These present conflicting visions of the history of philosophy as an autonomous sub-discipline of professional philosophy. Several other chapters offer new approaches to integrating history into one's philosophy. These do so by re-telling the history of recent philosophy. A number of chapters explore the relationship between history of philosophy and history of science. Among the topics discussed and debated in the volume are : the status of the principle of charity ; the nature of reading texts ; the role of historiography within the history of philosophy ; the nature of establishing proper context."

Critical notice: The art of abduction Review of Douven’s The Art of Abduction, also known as: inference to the best explanation. Douven eschews the crucial issues what ‘an explanation’ is and what ‘the best’ explanation is, but argues that if explanations contribute to confirmatory power, and confirmatory power is cashed out in Bayesian terms as probability-rising via updating rules, then other updating rules than the Bayesian one can be considered. Douven then shows that some updating rules perform better than Bayesian one, which judgements are achieved by considering so-called scoring rules. Our criticism is that the new updating rules need not have anything to do with abduction; other criticism is levelled against the interpretation of the results some cognitive-psychological experiment, and on Douven’s claim to throw new light on skepticism. These criticisms notwithstanding, we judge the book book to be masterful, revolutionary, and a must-read for anyone in epistemology.

In this chapter, I identify a distinctive use of ‘sublime’ in Adam Smith’s philosophy of science. I show that for Smith a scientific discipline and its theories can be sublime. I trace this idea back to Malebranche. I show that in Smith it is a way to convey something about the irrational nature of the natural order lurking behind’s science’s intellectual achievements. In section 1, I diagnose and distinguish three uses of ‘sublime’ in Smith. I situate two of these in the early modern discussions of the sublime in the wake of Boileau's and William Smith’s translations of Longinus. 1 I argue that the third in which Smith treats intellectual disciplines as themselves sublime is relatively distinctive, although not wholly unique to Smith. In section 2, I put this notion in context and trace it, somewhat speculatively, back to the reception of Isaac Newton by Smith and Smith’s reading of Malebranche. In the third section I conclude with some reflections on the significance of this discussion for Smith’s conception of the nature of scientific rationality

The guiding thread of the paper is the diagnosis that the advanced division of cognitive labour (that is, intellectual specialization) engenders a set of perennial, political and epistemic challenges (Millgram 2015) that, simultaneously, also generate opportunities for philosophy. In this paper, I re-characterize the nature of synthetic philosophy as a means to advance and institutionalize philosophy. In §i, I treat Plato’s Republic as offering two models to represent philosophy’s relationship to the other sciences within the advanced division of labour. I highlight that for Plato intellectual specialization is central not just to economic but also to political life; and yet, that the very dispersion of scientific expertise, and its esoteric nature, also generates non-trivial challenges to the recognition and political utilization of knowledge. From Plato we can infer that in imperfect circumstances, philosophy’s self-constitution is, in part, a response to these challenges in political epistemology. However, how philosophy is institutionalized differs through time. In §ii, I re-introduce my conceptualization of synthetic philosophy and restate it. I use recent work by Dorst (2023) to illustrate synthetic philosophy and to identify some of the processes that give rise to the need for it. In §§ii–iii, I contrast my account with the evolving ways that Philip Kitcher has conceptualized synthetic philosophy, in order to make more precise the version promoted here. I do so not just because Kitcher and I use the same term, ‘synthetic philosophy’, but because the temptations inherent in Kitcher’s approach should be resisted.

This paper challenges Stephen Turner’s reading of Feyerabend’s Science in a Free Society. In particular, according to Turner, Feyerabend’s “critique represents a recognition that the regimes of science and expertise are ineradicably political and coercive. But if regimes of science and expertise are ineradicably political and coercive, what remains is the problem of our choice of regimes, and how to accommodate them in a democratic order.” This paper shows that by stretching the meaning of coercion so widely, Turner has misrepresented Feyerabend’s position. In fact, the paper argues that Feyerabend offers a vision of liberal politics and science that can be made uncoercive, or at least worth having. In particular, this paper offers a new reading of Feyerabend’s account of ‘free exchange’ as an immanent critique of J.S. Mill’s liberalism. The paper concludes by diagnosing some tensions in Feyerabend’s vision and thereby also criticize Turner.

I frame my argument by way of Hayek's tendency to treat Hume and Smith as central articulations of the rule of law. The rest of the paper explores their defense of clientelism. First, I introduce Hume’s ideas on the utility of patronage in his essay, “Of the Independency of Parliament.” I argue that in Hume clientelism just is a feature of parliamentary business. It seems ineliminable. I then contextualize Hume’s account by comparing it to Montesquieu’s account of this system of patronage in Book XIX, chapter 27 of The Spirit of the Laws. Montesquieu primarily treats it as a species of bad corruption. However, he also sees some benefits to it. I then turn to Smith and I show that he echoes Hume’s analysis of corruption in an easily ignored passage in Wealth of Nations. I then show that for Smith one argument in favor of a kind of federal parliamentary union between Great Brittain and her American colonies lies in its ability to facilitate and make more efficient the system of patronage by the Crown. While Smith’s account of these matters is quite Humean, one can discern in Smith a distinct cost-benefit argument for the acceptance of the necessity of a system of patronage in the service of the peaceful expansion and entrenchment of the rule of law in his proposal for parliamentary union.

The introduction explain the need for how an international, inclusive discussion about the range of different methodological approaches from different traditions of philosophy can be read alongside each other and be seen in sometimes very critical conversation with each other. In addition, the introduction identifies four broad themes in the volume: the largest group of chapters advocate methods that promote history of philosophy as an unapologetic, autonomous enterprise with its own criteria within philosophy. Second, three chapters can be seen as historicizing the history of philosophy from within. Third, four chapters argue for history of philosophy as a means toward making contributions to contemporary philosophy. Finally, two chapters explore the relationship between the history of philosophy and the history of science.

Central aspects of Hume’s proposed “system of the sciences” as described in the Treatise are modeled on Newton’s Principia. But, as recent scholarship has suggested, Hume’s Treatise also bears a deeply subversive message with respect to Newtonian science. This chapter offers a revised overview of what Hume takes from Newton and what he rejects: The first part of the chapter argues that in the Treatise Hume adopts a version of Newton’s “analytic and synthetic method” for philosophy, thereby placing a distinctively Newtonian form of explanatory reduction at the center of his own philosophical method. The second part of the chapter, on the other hand, shows that many of the most important aspects of Hume’s argument in Book 1 of the Treatise can be understood as critical of core conceptual and ontological commitments of Newton’s mechanics as developed in the Principia.

The Oxford Handbook of the History of Physics brings together cutting-edge writing by more than twenty leading authorities on the history of physics from the seventeenth century to the present day. By presenting a wide diversity of studies in a single volume, it provides authoritative introductions to scholarly contributions that have tended to be dispersed in journals and books not easily accessible to the general reader. While the core thread remains the theories and experimental practices of physics, the Handbook contains chapters on other dimensions that have their place in any rounded history. These include the role of lecturing and textbooks in the communication of knowledge, the contribution of instrument-makers and instrument-making companies in providing for the needs of both research and lecture demonstrations, and the growing importance of the many interfaces between academic physics, industry, and the military.

The guiding thread of the paper is the diagnosis that the advanced division of cognitive labor (that is, intellectual specialization) engenders a set of perennial, political and epistemic challenges (Millgram 2015) that, simultaneously, also generate opportunities for philosophy. In this paper, I re-characterize the nature of synthetic philosophy as a means to advance and institutionalize philosophy. For my definition of synthetic philosophy see section 2. In section 1, I treat Plato’s Republic as offering two models to represent philosophy's relationship to the other sciences within the advanced division of labor. I highlight that for Plato intellectual specialization is central not just to economic, but also to political life. And, yet, that the very dispersion of scientific expertise, and its esoteric nature, also generates non-trivial challenges to the recognition and political utilization of knowledge. From Plato we can infer that in imperfect circumstances, philosophy’s self-constitution is, in part, a response to these challenges in political epistemology. However, how philosophy is institutionalized differs through time. In section 2, I re-introduce my conceptualization of synthetic philosophy and restate it. This makes visible that synthetic philosophy is already widely practiced in the profession as philosophy of the special sciences, PPE, formal modelling, public philosophy, etc. I use recent work by Dorst (2023) to illustrate synthetic philosophy and to identify some of the processes that give rise to the need for it. In sections 2-3, I contrast my account with the evolving ways that Philip Kitcher has conceptualized synthetic philosophy in order to make more precise the version promoted here. I do so not just because Kitcher and I use the same term, ‘synthetic philosophy,’ but because the temptations inherent in Kitcher’s approach should be resisted.

This paper argues that according to Adam Smith the workings of (anything but extremely simple) sympathetic judgment (s) presuppose and crucially depend on counterfactual causal reasoning in the sympathetic process. In particular it argues for four related claims: (i) that according to Smith that the sympathetic process depends on a type of causal reasoning that goes well beyond the kind of simulationist theory standardly attributed to him; (ii) that the Smithian imagination in the sympathetic process works by way of counterfactual reasoning and that even the feelings we ought to feel as a consequence of the sympathetic process need not be actual, but counterfactual; (iii) that Smithian agents are non-trivially understood as belonging to the causal order of nature; (iv) that Smitian judgments of propriety are intrinsically judgments about the proportionality of causal relations.

This chapter explains how the rise of the Mechanical philosophy during the seventeenth century contributed to the transformation of the traditional, Aristotelian schema of four causes into the dominance of efficient causation as the paradigmatic cause by the time of David Hume. But the chapter simultaneously shows that the mechanical philosophy also gave rise to a number of problems internal to it, as diagnosed by Newton and Newtonian natural philosophers, that facilitated more careful analysis of the nature of causation.

This paper shows that Locke anticipates key features of Hume's more celebrated analysis of convention. It does so by developing Lenz's account of Lockean (linguistic) convention and its normativity, as presented in Socializing Minds. Locke's account of linguistic convention shares structural features also visible in Locke's treatment of the convention of money and property. The paper shows that Locke's ‘Humean' account of convention responds to a lacuna in Pufendorf’s treatment of linguistic convention that Lenz argues is significant to Locke.

The need for fair and just AI is often related to the possibility of understanding AI itself, in other words, of turning an opaque box into a glass box, as inspectable as possible. Transparency and explainability, however, pertain to the technical domain and to philosophy of science, thus leaving the ethics and epistemology of AI largely disconnected. To remedy this, we propose an integrated approach premised on the idea that a glass-box epistemology should explicitly consider how to incorporate values and other normative considerations, such as intersectoral vulnerabilities, at critical stages of the whole process from design and implementation to use and assessment. To connect ethics and epistemology of AI, we perform a double shift of focus. First, we move from trusting the output of an AI system to trusting the process that leads to the outcome. Second, we move from expert assessment to more inclusive assessment strategies, aiming to facilitate expert and non-expert assessment. Together, these two moves yield a framework usable for experts and non-experts when they inquire into relevant epistemological and ethical aspects of AI systems. We dub our framework ‘epistemology-cum-ethics’ to signal the equal importance of both aspects. We develop it from the vantage point of the designers: how to create the conditions to internalize values into the whole process of design, implementation, use, and assessment of an AI system, in which values (epistemic and non-epistemic) are explicitly considered at each stage and inspectable by every salient actor involved at any moment.

This collection of specially commissioned essays by leading scholars presents research on Isaac Newton and his main philosophical interlocutors and critics. The essays analyze Newton's relation to his contemporaries, especially Barrow, Descartes, Leibniz and Locke and discuss the ways in which a broad range of figures, including Hume, Maclaurin, Maupertuis and Kant, reacted to his thought. The wide range of topics discussed includes the laws of nature, the notion of force, the relation of mathematics to nature, Newton's argument for universal gravitation, his attitude toward philosophical empiricism, his use of 'fluxions', his approach toward measurement problems and his concept of absolute motion, together with new interpretations of Newton's matter theory. The volume concludes with an extended essay that analyzes the changes in physics wrought by Newton's Principia. A substantial introduction and bibliography provide essential reference guides.

This volume collects contributions from leading scholars of early modern philosophy from a wide variety of philosophical and geographic backgrounds. The distinguished contributors offer very different, competing approaches to the history of philosophy.Many chapters articulate new, detailed methods of doing history of philosophy. These present conflicting visions of the history of philosophy as an autonomous sub-discipline of professional philosophy. Several other chapters offer new approaches to integrating history into one's philosophy by re-telling the history of recent philosophy. A number of chapters explore the relationship between history of philosophy and history of science.Among the topics discussed and debated in the volume are: the status of the principle of charity; the nature of reading texts; the role of historiography within the history of philosophy; the nature of establishing proper context.

This chapter demonstrates how Sophie de Grouchy (1764–1822) anticipates the famous modern-day distinction between positive and negative liberty in her late eighteenth-century writings. It is argued that, on these grounds, De Grouchy deserves a rightful place in the history of the liberal tradition, a tradition that is typically depicted as the exclusive province of men. To support this claim, this chapter examines De Grouchy’s ideas in comparison with Rousseau’s and Adam Smith’s views on justice and property rights. This sets the context in which De Grouchy introduces her distinction between positive and negative rights, a distinction that maps onto the modern-day divide between negative and positive liberty. It is shown how, in her writings, political issues of rights and justice intersect with moral issues to do with virtue and with the proper education of virtuous citizens who are also free.

This chapter presents the reception of Leo Strauss by analytic philosophers after Strauss’s emigration to the United States. It gives a brief survey of the polemics against Strauss and his school by analytic philosophers, which aided in the self-constitution of analytic philosophy as a rival school of thought in philosophy. But most of the chapter is devoted to recovering the significance and influence of a criticism of Strauss by Ernest Nagel. The chapter argues that this response is of intrinsic interest because it involves the relationship between science and values. Nagel’s response was foundational to Felix Oppenheim’s political philosophy or what Oppenheim called his project of ‘conceptual reconstruction.’ Lurking in Oppenheim’s response to Strauss are questions about the role of the principle of sufficient reason in philosophy. Rge chapter argues that an opportunity was missed to clarify questions pertaining to the inductive risk of philosophy more than a half century before these issues became fashionable again.

This paper analyzes two episodes of Foucault’s reading(s) of Hume’s philosophy. In both cases Hume is important to Foucault’s overall argument and aims. In particular, in both Foucault takes a fairly conventional philosophical description of Hume -- as a ‘skeptic’ and ‘empiricist’ -- for granted and shows that these disguise a world-historical significance. In section 1, the paper explores Hume's role in Foucault’s (1966) *The Order of Things*. The paper argues Hume stands in for the hidden role of similarity in the human sciences of the so-called ‘classical period.’ The paper examines Hume’s account of relations which do not fully support Foucault’s claims about Hume. It is proposed that Foucault's reading is motivated by the role Hume plays in Husserl’s philosophy. In section 2, Foucault's treatment of Hume on March 28, 1979, during the eleventh lecture of the series known as *Birth of Biopolitics*, is analyzed. There Foucault ascribes to Hume’s account of the subject the key building blocks that allowed for the development of Benthamite radicalism and homo economicus. The paper situates Foucault’s later analysis of Hume in Foucault’s larger account of the development of the so-called radical (Benthamite) strain of liberalism that, on Foucault's telling, runs through Chicago economics. While Foucault’s account of Hume is anachronistic, this anachronism illuminates the building blocks of modern liberalism.

Spinoza's more fundamental criticism is that the open‐ended pursuit of wealth is a species of madness. This chapter focuses on Spinoza's intervention in the debate over luxury – a topic central to early modern debates over the new economy. It argues that Spinoza's diagnosis of the problem of luxury and corruption is important to his political philosophy. In the early modern period, the debate over the political dangers of luxury was re‐opened. Spinoza addresses the question of luxury and corruption throughout his works. Spinoza explains the connection between the Hebraic religion and their economic prosperity in a celebrated passage that has, naturally, attracted attention from those with an interest in egalitarianism and debt jubilees. The chapter illustrates Spinoza's interest in mechanism design and shows how this sheds light on how he tackles the problem of corruption.