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2253Kant's political thought in the Prussian enlightenmentIn Elisabeth Ellis (ed.), Kant's Political Theory: Interpretations and Applications, Pennsylvania State University Press. 2012.This article provides an historical account of Kant's political, legal, and religious thought in the context of the Prussian Enlightenment.
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550The history of theoryCritical Inquiry 33 (1): 78-112. 2006.Do you see now why it feels so good to be a critical mind? Why critique, this most ambiguous pharmakon, has become such a potent euphoric drug? You are always right! When naïve believers are clinging forcefully to their objects... you can turn all of those attachments into so many fetishes and humiliate all the believers by showing that it is nothing but their own projection, that you, yes you alone, can see. But as soon as naïve believers are thus inflated by some belief in their own importance…Read more
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333The history of philosophy and the persona of the philosopherModern Intellectual History 4 (3): 571-600. 2007.Although history is the pre-eminent part of the gallant sciences, philosophers advise against it from fear that it might completely destroy the kingdom of darkness—that is, scholastic philosophy—which previously has been wrongly held to be a necessary instrument of theology.
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239Spirituality and Philosophy in Post-Structuralist TheoryHistory of European Ideas 35 (1): 265-275. 2009.This paper discusses the role of a particular form of philosophical spirituality in the emergence of post-structuralist theory. Initially elaborated in the post-Kantian metaphysics of Husserl and Heidegger, and focused in recondite acts of intellectual self-transformation, this form of spirituality was transposed into a literary hermeneutics that permitted its wider dissemination in the Anglo-american humanities academy. Post-structuralist theory is the result of this historical transformation
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162Christian Thomasius and the Desacralization of PhilosophyJournal of the History of Ideas 61 (4): 595-616. 2000.Despite his significance in early modern Germany, where he was well-known as a political and moral philosopher, jurist, lay-theologian, social and educational reformer, Christian Thomasius (1655-1728) is little known in the world of Anglophone scholarship. 1 Unlike those of his mentor, Samuel Pufendorf, none of Thomasius's works was translated into English, when, at the end of the seventeenth century, English thinkers were searching for a final settlement to the religious question. None has been…Read more
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90Kant's religion and Prussian religious policyModern Intellectual History 2 (1): 1-27. 2005.Since Dilthey’s template study of 1890, the Prussian state’s attempt to censor Kant’s religious writings has typically been seen as the work of a reactionary politics bent on imposing religious orthodoxy as a bulwark against the spread of Aufklärung. This paper offers a revisionist interpretation, arguing that the attempted censoring was a by-product of a set of a longstanding Religionspolitik designed to achieve religious toleration through a system of regulated public confessions. Reaffirmed i…Read more
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71Heideggerian mathematics: Badiou's Being and EventRepresentations 134 116-156. 2016.The combination of Heideggerian metaphysics and advanced mathematics in Alain Badiou’s Being and Event presents a unique challenge to modern commentary. Badiou’s metaphysical axe-grinding makes his work uninteresting to mathematical logicians, while the humanities scholars who wield his axes often have little grasp of the mathematics on which they are supposed to have been honed. This lacuna helps to explain why Being and Event has been dismissed by some as ‘fashionable nonsense’ and praised by …Read more
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65Kant and Vattel in Context: Cosmopolitan Philosophy and Diplomatic CasuistryHistory of European Ideas 39 (4): 477-502. 2013.Summary A good deal of the late-twentieth-century commentary on Kant's ‘Perpetual Peace’ essay accepted its author's view that his conception of cosmopolitan justice had superseded the law of nations, some of whose leading exponents—Grotius, Pufendorf, and Vattel—Kant characterised as ‘miserable comforters’. Focusing on the case of Vattel, in this paper I begin to subject Kant's claim to an historical investigation, asking whether his ‘Perpetual Peace’ did indeed supersede Vattel's Law of Nation…Read more
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62Charles Taylor's A Secular Age and secularization in early modern GermanyModern Intellectual History 8 (3): 621-646. 2011.In this essay I discuss the historical adequacy of Charles Taylor's philosophical history of secularization, as presented in his A Secular Age . I do so by situating it in relation to the contextual historiography of secularization in early modern Europe, with a particular focus on developments in the German Empire. Considering how profoundly conceptions of secularization have been bound to competing religious and political programmes, we must begin our discussion by entertaining the possibility…Read more
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60Bringing the state to England: Andrew Tooke's translation of Samuel Pufendorf's 'De officio hominis et civis'History of Political Thought 24 (2): 218-234. 2003.Andrew Tooke's 1691 English translation of Samuel Pufendorf's De officio hominis et civis, published as The Whole Duty of Man According to the Law of Nature, brought Pufendorf's manual fo statist natural law into English politics at a moment of temporary equilibrium in the unfinished contest between Crown and Parliament for the rights and powers of sovereignty. Drawing on the authors' re-edition of The Whole Duty of Man, this article describes and analyses a telling instance of how--by translati…Read more
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50The Morals of Metaphysics: Kant’s Groundwork as Intellectual PaideiaCritical Inquiry 28 (4): 908-929. 2002.To approach philosophy as a way of working on the self means to begin not with the experience it clarifies and the subject it discovers, but with the acts of self‐transformation it requires and the subjectivity it seeks to fashion. Commenting on the variety of spiritual exercises to be found in the ancient schools, Pierre Hadot remarks that: Some, like Plutarch’s ethismoi, designed to curb curiosity, anger or gossip, were only practices intended to ensure good moral habits. Others, particularly …Read more
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48The invention of autonomy: A history of modern moral philosophyPhilosophical Review 109 (3): 444-447. 2000.With this work J. B. Schneewind has provided the most comprehensive history of modern moral philosophy available in English. Beginning with the moral theology of the Reformation and ending with Kant, Schneewind’s book offers a panorama of moral philosophy that includes the early modern natural lawyers and their metaphysical critics, the British sentimentalists and their rationalist opponents, and a whole series of eighteenth-century attempts to develop a secular moral philosophy grounded in auto…Read more
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42Natural Law as Political PhilosophyIn Desmond M. Clarke & Catherine Wilson (eds.), The Oxford Handbook of Philosophy in Early Modern Europe, Oxford University Press. pp. 475-499. 2011.Rather than a history of seventeenth-century natural law, then, this chapter offers an outline of several different contextual uses of the language of natural law, as it was used in formulating the intellectual architecture for rival constructions of political and religious authority.
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42Conflicting obligations: Pufendorf, Leibniz and Barbeyrac on civil authorityHistory of Political Thought 25 (4): 670-699. 2004.Barbeyrac's republication of and commentary on Leibniz' attack on Pufendorf's natural-law doctrine is often seen as symptomatic of the failure of all three early moderns to solve a particular moral-philosophical problem: that of the relationship between civil authority and morality. Making use of the first English translation of Barbeyrac's work, this article departs from the usual view by arguing that here we are confronted by three conflicting constructions of civil obligation, arising not fro…Read more
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37Lessons from the 'Literatory': How to Historicise AuthorshipCritical Inquiry 17 (3): 479-509. 1991.Authorship has proven a magnetic topic for literary studies and is now identified as an index of the current state of literary history and theory. The significance of this topic stems from a characteristic that literary criticism shared with the other human sciences: its drive to adopt a reflexive and self-critical posture towards its own central objects and concepts. By reflecting on authorship, criticism aspires not just to describe a literary phenomenon; it also wishes to bring to light the c…Read more
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37The Invention of Autonomy: A History of Modern Moral PhilosophyPhilosophical Review 109 (3): 444. 2000.With this work J. B. Schneewind has provided the most comprehensive history of modern moral philosophy available in English. Beginning with the moral theology of the Reformation and ending with Kant, Schneewind’s book offers a panorama of moral philosophy that includes the early modern natural lawyers and their metaphysical critics, the British sentimentalists and their rationalist opponents, and a whole series of eighteenth-century attempts to develop a secular moral philosophy grounded in auto…Read more
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36The philosopher in early modern Europe: the nature of a contested identity (edited book)Cambridge University Press. 2006.In this groundbreaking collection of essays the history of philosophy appears in a new light, not as reason's progressive discovery of its universal conditions, but as a series of unreconciled disputes over the proper way to conduct oneself as a philosopher. By shifting focus from the philosopher as proxy for the universal subject of reason to the philosopher as a special persona arising from rival forms of self-cultivation, philosophy is approached in terms of the social office and intellectual…Read more
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35Vattel's Law of Nations: Diplomatic Casuistry for the Protestant NationGrotiana 31 (1): 108-140. 2010.This paper argues that Vattel's Droit des gens cannot be adequately interpreted as based on a philosophical principle, whether of universal justice or of raison d'état. Rather, Vattel unfolds his law of nations within a casuistical discourse where inconsistent principles are deployed strategically. This forms an ethical space in which universal justice can be continuously adapted to the exigencies of national self-interest as interpreted by the diplomat of a Protestant republican nation
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35The Mythos, Ethos, and Pathos of the HumanitiesHistory of European Ideas 40 (1): 1-26. 2014.Summary Justifications of the humanities often employ a mythos that exceeds their historical dispositions and reach. This applies to justifications that appeal to an ?idea? of the humanities grounded in the cultivation of reason for its own sake. But the same problem affects more recent accounts that seek to shatter this idea by admitting an ?event? capable of dissolving and refounding the humanities in ?being?. In offering a sketch of the emergence of the modern humanities from early modern hum…Read more
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32The Figure of Man and the Territorialisation of Justice in 'Enlightenment' Natural Law: Pufendorf and VattelIntellectual History Review 23 (3): 289-307. 2013.Discussions of early modern philosophical anthropology in postcolonial studies often treat it as tied to Eurocentric conceptions of civilisational supremacism and to the ideologies of imperialism and colonialism served by these conceptions. In discussing the conceptions of man contained in two key early modern doctrines of the law of nature and nations ? those of Samuel Pufendorf and Emer de Vattel ? this paper casts a sceptical eye on the postcolonial accounts. The anthropologies deployed by Pu…Read more
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30Walks of Life: Mauss on the Human GymnasiumBody and Society 1 (2): 65-81. 1995.This paper discusses Marcel Mauss's paper on body techniques. It argues that Mauss's account of the acquisition of bodily capacities and deportments makes it unnecessary to think of the body as any kind of unity, for example, by opposing it to 'mind' or 'spirit', which have their own techniques.
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25Giorgio Agamben's Form of lifePolitics, Religion and Ideology 18 (2): 135-156. 2017.Giorgio Agamben’s discourse on Franciscan monasticism is generally received in accordance with his presentation of it: as a genealogy or archaeology of the way in which the Franciscans were the first to embody an exemplary form of life. This paper offers a different view, arguing that Agamben’s account of the Franciscans is actually an allegory whose underlying structure and meaning is supplied by Heideggerian metaphysics. One of the striking features of Agamben’s discourse is that it treats act…Read more
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20Book review: The invention of autonomy: A history of modern moral philosophy (review)Philosophical Review 109 (3): 444-447. 2000.With this work J. B. Schneewind has provided the most comprehensive history of modern moral philosophy available in English. Beginning with the moral theology of the Reformation and ending with Kant, Schneewind’s book offers a panorama of moral philosophy that includes the early modern natural lawyers and their metaphysical critics, the British sentimentalists and their rationalist opponents, and a whole series of eighteenth-century attempts to develop a secular moral philosophy grounded in auto…Read more
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19Public Law and the Limits of Philosophy: German Idealism and the Religious ConstitutionCritical Inquiry 44 (3): 528-553. 2018.
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18Secularisation: process, program, and historiographyIntellectual History Review 27 (1): 7-29. 2017.
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17The paper examines how the Religious Edict, seen as a public-law instrument for the management of religious peace, might provide a new context for Kant's theology, now seen as an unsettling public intervention in a concrete religious and political culture. I shall begin by outlining a revisionist account of the Religious Edict as a representative instance of Prussian 'enlightened absolutist' Religionspolitik ; then move on to a sketch of Kant's philosophical theology as a rational religious inte…Read more
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