Lectures in Intellectual History 5h54x

Henry Sidgwick was already something of an enigma in Cambridge less than six years after his death, and recent interest in his work has tended to compound this by re-inventing him as a modern moral philosopher. The Moral Sciences Tripos that Sidgwick led as Knightbridge Professor from 1883 had been reshaped in 1860 by John Grote, the successor in the chair to William Whewell; and so to understand the Tripos as Sidgwick first encountered it in the 1860s we need to understand quite what Grote had in mind – and Grote himself is an important figure, having in 1862 composed a running critique of John Stuart Mill’s utilitarianism. Furthermore, until the foundation of the Economics Tripos in 1903 the teaching of political economy in Cambridge was directed almost entirely to the Moral Sciences Tripos. Alfred Marshall’s strenuous efforts to detach the teaching of economics from the Moral Sciences Tripos have tended to distort subsequent understanding of “Cambridge Economics” from Marshall, through Pigou, to Maynard Keynes. In any case, Marshall’s own economics developed from his studies of John Stuart Mill. In this lecture, Keith Tribe examines the nexus between utilitarianism, ethics and political economy, to the construction of which Mill, Grote and Sidgwick made important contributions.

Jeremy Bentham has two very strong commitments in his thought: one is to the principle of utility, or the greatest happiness principle, as the fundamental principle of morality; the other is to truth, as indicated, for instance, in his opposition to falsehood and fiction in the law. How, then, did Bentham view the relationship between utility and truth? Did he think that utility and truth simply coincided, and hence that falsehood necessarily led to a diminution in happiness, and conversely truth led to an increase in happiness? In this lecture, Philip Schofield resolves these questions through analysis of two bodies of material: the first consists of Bentham’s writings on religion under the heading of ‘Juggernaut’ and dating from 1811 to 1821; and the second consists of the writings on judicial evidence dating from 1803 to 1812 and which appeared in his Rationale of Judicial Evidence.

What kind of narrative order can be imposed on the intellectual development of David Hume, a man demonstrably interested in so many different things? The history of Hume scholarship suggests this question has been found hard to answer, not least because of the variety of Hume's concerns, but also because one of Hume's concerns was philosophy. What makes the case for Hume particularly difficult is two-fold: first, his Treatise of Human Nature speaks directly to philosophers in a way other eighteenth-century books do not. Second, philosophers since the 19th century have regarded the problems that they work on as completely different in kind to the problems Hume explored in his subsequent works, such as in the Political Discourses and in the History of England. Hume, philosophers think, was both one of us and, at the same time, very obviously not one of us. In this lecture James Harris explains how previous approaches to Hume's intellectual developments have been attempted, and argues that such approaches are largely anachronistic. In their place, he suggests a new way of viewing Hume, which relocates him in his eighteenth-century context as a man of letters.

What is the nature of the relationship between intellectual history and the study of historiography, and where is this relationship going? Where might it go? Or, perhaps more importantly, where should it go? In this paper, Michael Bentley expertly navigates the foundations of intellectual history and the ways both it and the study of historiography have developed and responded to criticisms over the past century, before arguing that whilst the relationship between the two subjects is extremely important and rich, it is also a relationship that is nuanced and oblique.

It's a common saying that early modern England was a personal monarchy, but this era was also a conciliar age, with a polity saturated in counsel. The persistence and prevalence of counsel rested on entrenched assumptions about the nature of good rule, and of theories of the soul and man which divided reason from will. Counsel was the reason that made imperfect human will serve the common good. It made kingship function as monarchy, not tyranny. In this paper, Jacqueline Rose dissects the dual problem of political counsel: how to approach the phenomenon historically, and how it was a problem at the time. In doing so, she demonstrates that counsel is far more interesting and complex than it has previously been seen, and that, as a discourse, it was fraught with ambiguity and tension.

With the decline of Scholasticism, virtually all of the would-be reformers of philosophy resorted to some kind of unexplained activity in matter. Occult qualities, or mysterious hidden forces or powers in matter or in bodies which were responsible for the actions of bodies and their interactions with others, were invoked by nearly all the new philsophers in their theories of matter or bodies. Why was the turn to the Occult so ubiquitous? In this paper, John Henry explores these and other fundamental questions of early modern natural philosophy.

To bring women into the purview of intellectual history is not just to shine a spotlight into dark corners to reveal women that have been overlooked. There are many more historiographical issues to be faced, not least the fact that in order to instate women into the received picture, that picture has to change. In this lecture, Sarah Hutton explores the ways in which attention has been refocused on the intellectual history of women over the past 25 years, and highlights in particular the work of recovery that has been necessary in the course of this research.

Otto of Freising, uncle of Emperor Frederick of Barbarossa, belonged to the highest circles of German nobility, but he was also one of the most philosophical historians of the Middle Ages. In this lecture, David Luscombe discusses the historical method in Otto of Freising's two works of history, his Chronicle or History of the Two Cities (written between 1143 and 1147), and his Deeds of Emperor Frederick (written between 1156 and 1158).

Vital themes in Europe's Enlightenment project included a new cosmopolitanism rooted in a growing awareness of other world cultures, an interest in forms of natural religion, and efforts to find a new foundation for social ethics apart from the moral laws and teachings of Christianity. In this lecture, S.J. Brown argues that Europe's growing awareness of China, and especially of Confucian thought, played a significant role in shaping the early European Enlightenment

In this wonderfully rich talk, Norman Vance explains how three interpretations of the Irish hymn 'The Breastplate of St Patrick', from Catholic, Episcopalian, and Presbyterian perspectives, are a pathway to studying the wider context of Irish intellectual history, taking in aspects of literary history, musicology, and theology.

One of the themes of recent historiography in Enlightenment Studies focuses on how political economy gathers up so many of the key themes of the philosophers and reformers of the age into a discourse that crosses boundaries, national, institutional and linguistic. In this lecture Tim Hochstrasser examines this notion critically and re-assesses the claim that political economy is the defining and unifying discourse of the European Enlightenment. Brief case studies illustrate the intellectual transfer of key aspects of political economic doctrines between countries within Europe and beyond, including Latin America and India.

At the end of the seventeenth century, corpuscularianism, the mechanical philosophy, and mechanics (as a branch of applied mathematics) were all rising in importance. In this paper, John Milton provides a definitive of these three concepts, how they relate to each other, and explains why they became popular.

The political theorist James Harrington transformed and deployed many aspects of ancient thinking about the ethical character of the state in his political thought. In this paper, Rachel Foxley analyses Harrington's use of the correspondence between the city and the soul, arguing that this is a crucial mechanism enabling Harrington to attribute virtue to his ideal polity.

Thomas Reid, the philosopher and founder of the Scottish School of Common Sense, did not publish much on politics, but his manuscripts reveal that he was deeply concerned with social, political and economic issues throughout his career. In this talk, Knud Haakonssen presents an analysis of Reid's hitherto unpublished Glasgow lecture notes, and shows that Reid was an acute commentator on contemporary politics and that his theoretical ideas framed solutions to some of the practical political and economic problems of his day.

How has the concept of exile permeated the life and work of the political theorist Judith N. Shklar? In this talk, Andreas Hess discusses the subject of his recent book 'Exile from Exile'.

Why is journal publication so important in the history of science, and how are they responsible for the making of scientific knowledge? In this lecture, Aileen Fyfe reveals the story behind the pages of the oldest scientific journal in existence, the Philosophic Transactions of the Royal Society.

So much has been written about the harm principle central to John Stuart Mill's classic work On Liberty that any attempt to supplement seems superfluous. However, an anomaly in s of one aspect of the text requires rectifying. In this lecture, Greg Claeys emphasises the Malthusian context of Mill's treatment of marriage, and argues that in On Liberty Mill regards the family, not the individual, as the foundational unit in society, and the right to bear children as conditional upon the recognition of the basic duty to maintain them. His Malthusian proposal to restrict this right is the strongest instance of his application of paternalism to adults in a civilised society, but is in Mill's view entirely commensurate with the principle of liberty.

Historians of economics have always been attracted to the political economy of empire because it tells us so much about how serious economic thinking has been shaped by colonial themes. In this lecture, Donald Winch explores this importance of colonies, arguing that whilst the political economy of empire was eventually a theory of capitalist imperialism, it still owed a great deal to those who formulated a case for colonisation as a remedy to some of Britain's problems as a mature economy in the 1820s and 1830s.

In this inaugural lecture of the Institute of Intellectual History at the University of St Andrews, Professor John Robertson asks how we can explain the concentration of interest, among the moral and political philosophers and historians of the Enlightenment, in the study of the formation and development of societies.

According to Reinhart Koselleck, the eighteenth century witnessed the gradual and permanent separation of concepts of "civil war" and "revolution". Placing these ideas in a longer perspective – a longue durée that goes back to republican Rome and comes forward to our own times – challenges this narrative by showing that civil war was the genus of which revolution was only a species. This argument presented by David Armitage can help us to rethink the late eighteenth-century "Age of Revolutions"; it can also explain the confusion as we attempt to understand political violence in places like Egypt and Syria today.