Justin E. H. Smith

What Was Race? Early Modern Science and the Birth of a Tenacious Folk Category

Abstract of a talk to be given at the CUNY Graduate Center, hosted by the Committee for Interdisciplinary Science Studies, May 6, 2013.

It is not hard for arguments in favour of racial realism to lapse into circularity: as Barbara J. Fields nicely summarizes the problem, certain characteristics are first defined as 'racial', and then these very same characteristics are adduced as evidence for the existence of race. Yet it may well be that this is how science in general proceeds in coming up with ever more adequate knowledge of where nature's proverbial joints are found. If such circularity can often be virtuous, to the extent that it serves heuristic purposes until such time as the initial folk-category is displaced by one that picks out real divisions in the natural world (as John Dupré has nicely described the history of the category 'fish'), in the case of race the folk-categories appear to have a life of their own that is entirely indifferent to what science tells us about the way genetic traits in fact cluster in populations. This indifference strongly suggests that what we are dealing with here is not even a candidate for natural kindhood, but is rather a social and historical kind, with all the attendant 'looping effects' Ian Hacking has told us to expect. And this suggests also that any adequate treatment of the concept of race will approach it genealogically, will be one that asks, namely, when and why people began speaking of the human species as if it broke down into a fixed number of real subkinds. We can precisely date the leap of the term 'race' from animal husbandry (pigeons, dogs, and horses, mostly) to talk of human social reality: it happened in the 1680s. What, though, were the conceptual problems this terminological innovation was meant to help solve? Did it in fact help to solve them? What are the reasons why this new way of talking about human diversity stuck, and remains with us several centuries later? In this talk, I would like to go some distance toward answering these difficult questions by reconstructing the context in early modern science and philosophy in which the concept of race first emerged, with particular attention to the work of François Bernier, G. W. Leibniz, and Carol Linnaeus.

The Theory of Monads as Utopian Fiction

Abstract of a paper to be presented at Bifröst University, Iceland, May 4, 2013.

In an important recent article, Antonio Nunziante has shown the importance of Cyrano de Bergerac's 1655 satirical work, Les états et empires du soleil, for some of G. W. Leibniz's philosophical reflections, in particular for his mature conceptions of corporeal substance and of nested individuality. In the Nouveaux essais sur l'entendement humain of 1704, Leibniz explicitly invokes Cyrano's story of the composite man who inhabits the surface of the sun as a model and inspiration for his own idea of the relations of domination and subordination in nested corporeal substances. What has not been emphasized as much, however, is that proto-science-fiction rêveries such as Cyrano's --alongside which we may also include Johannes Kepler's Somnium, Margaret Cavendish's Blazing World, and Gabriel Daniel's Voyage du Monde de Descartes-- themselves are rooted in a much older tradition of utopian writing, which reaches back to Thomas More's genre-defining work at the beginning of the 16th century and includes, e.g., Bacon's New Atlantis, and Campanella's City of the Sun. Cyrano, Kepler, and the others use science fiction in order to work through thought experiments about humanity's place in nature and the cosmos. These experiments could very well be seen as radical or heretical if they were not safely projected beyond the sphere of ordinary human reality and into outer space, and in this respect the authors continue the utopian tradition of couching innovative social and political thought in the guise of fiction. In this talk, I would first of all like to sketch out the important respects in which what I am calling 'proto-science fiction' should be seen as a further branching of the tradition of utopian thinking. Second, I would like to show how the continuity of tradition between these two genres helps us to make new sense both of Leibniz's debt to Cyrano in his mature metaphysics, as well of the continuity within Leibniz's own thought, between his mature metaphysics and many of his earlier, more recognizably utopian political writings, notably the Consilium Aegyptiacum of 1671.

Embodied Selves in a World of Atoms: The Case of Nyāya-Vaiśeṣika

(Forthcoming in the volume on 'Embodiment' in the Oxford Philosophical Concepts series.)

At its most capacious, 'atomism' can be taken to refer to any theory according to which the world consists in elementary units, which are not further analyzable into something more elementary. 'Units' should be understood here not to refer to particles, but to any physical or metaphysical, quantitatively or qualitatively basic principle from which the perceptible world derives. The most familiar variety of atomism, the variety that can still be called 'atomism' even in the most restricted sense, takes the basic units as elementary particles that are (i) physical; (ii) ungenerable and incorruptible; and (ii) qualitatively neutral or lacking in 'secondary' qualities, as the color, smell, etc., of compound bodies emerge from the arrangements of the atoms constituting them.

If we take atomism of this latter variety as the standard model, which we might call 'Democritean', then we may begin to construct a typology of atomisms by plotting them in relation to criteria (i)-(iii). At some remove from the Democritean model we find Leibniz's theory of monads, according to which the basic units of reality are indeed ungenerable and incorruptible, and are responsible for the qualitative variety of the phenomenal world without themselves bearing these qualities, and yet according to which, by contrast with Democritean atomism, these requisites are not the physically indivisible constituents of the phenomenal world, in the way bricks are the constituents of a house, but rather are the metaphysical requisites of the physical world. Leibniz calls them variously 'atoms of substance' or 'metaphysical atoms'. Commentators have tended to take this doctrine, and Leibniz's labels for it, as amounting to a rejection of atomism, but on a certain more capacious view of what atomism might be, we could instead take Leibniz's claim that he is committed to metaphysical rather than physical atoms as commitment to a variety of atomism.

 Quite a bit further still from the Democritean model we find the momentary quality atoms of the 7th-century CE Buddhist philosopher Dharmakīrti, or of his predecessor, the 6th-century philosopher Dignāga. These are atoms only in the sense that they are the basic units of reality, not constituted by anything else, and not comprehensible in terms of something more fundamental. Buddhist philosophers posited these as the fundamental ingredients of the world in the course of a denial of any more stable or enduring world of real individual substances.

One implication of any version of atomism might be thought to be that there can be no composite substances, which is the same thing as to say that there can be no embodied selves, and that anything composed out of atoms will remain only an arrangement of atoms, an ens per aggregatum. An important development in subsequent Indian philosophy however, as I will describe in this chapter, would be an attempt from within an orthodox school of what would later be called ‘Hindu’ philosophy to argue, against the Buddhists, that embodied selves can exist within an atomic universe. The Nyāya-Vaiśeṣika school worked out a coherent account of how the world can consist both in atoms and at the same time, in contrast to the Buddhist denial of the self, in selves that are necessarily embodied in complex arrangements of atoms.

Two principles that would seem to be incompatible with atomism are called in the Nyāya-Vaiśeṣika school of Indian philosophy avayavin or 'whole', and sāmānya or 'universal'. According to D. N. Shastri, these are the "two chief synthetic or unifying principles" at work in this school.[1] Yet the principle attainment of at least the Vaiśeṣika branch of this school was to spell out an atomistic theory of the natural world, and an important question arises as to how any atomistic doctrine could possibly accommodate real wholes, let alone universals universals. In at least this regard, the Dharmakīrtian variety of atomism is rather more coherent, or at least predictable, to the extent that it takes only dharmas or discrete moments to exist, and denies any causal connection between them or synthesis of them. Such synthesis can exist only in our thought, according to the Buddhists. Nyāya-Vaiśeṣika, by contrast, wants to have both atoms as well as real, embodied, composite substances.

Here, Leibniz's metaphysical atomism shows up as a middle road, as he evidently believes that, as a result of the perceptual activity of the simple substances from which compound bodies result, these compound bodies may be elevated to the level of corporeal substances, which is to say true unities per se, grounded metaphysically in an embodied self, or, as Leibniz puts it, something analogous to the moi. At the same time, Leibniz utterly denies the reality of universals, which by contrast Nyāya-Vaiśeṣika strongly defended. In this chapter I would like to go some distance towards illuminating the philosophical justification of the Nyāya-Vaiśeṣika defense of ‘substance atomism’, which simultaneously reduces reality to elementary particles, yet holds onto the reality of the substances, and even of the universal kinds, constituted by these particles. I would like, in particular, to show how the coherence of the Nyāya-Vaiśeṣika account of embodied wholes is grounded in, and inseparable from, this school’s parallel theory of universals—a prima facie outlandish theory according to which the universal is literally inherent in the individual whole in a manner comparable to the inherence of water in a pot.  

Both Nyāya-Vaiśeṣika atomism and Leibnizian corporeal-substance theory might be accused of seeking to have their cake and eat it too. But this accusation is wrong in both cases, since in both cases it is precisely the unifying function of the moi or soul, or Leibniz, or the mind (manas) for Nyāya-Vaiśeṣika that transforms the thing in question from a bodily aggregate to an embodied substance. This comparative approach may help us to gain insight into the parameters of, and the range of possibilities in, thinking about the problem of embodiment. Ordinarily (as in, e.g., Epicureanism, Gassendism, Buddhism, among others), atomism is taken to hold that there simply are no indissoluble, transcendent selves behind or prior to the collections of atoms. But this is not the case in the varieties of atomism we are considering here. Our examples show, in fact, that on a certain understanding of atomism, one which has emerged independently on different continents and in different centuries, the very purpose of invoking atoms as the basic ingredients of reality is not at all to explain away composite wholes, but rather to give a coherent account of the nature of their composition, an account of a reality that is analyzable down to an atomic level, but that nonetheless consists in real, complex, composite, embodied selves.

---

[1] D. N. Shastri, Critique of Indian Realism: The Philosophy of Nyāya-Vaiśeṣika and Its Conflict with the Buddhist Dignāga School, Delhi, Bharatiya Vidya Prakashan, 1997 [1964], 306.

The Criminal Trial of Animals: A Case Study in Shame and Necessity

Forthcoming in Andreas Blank (ed.), Animals: New Essays, Munich, Philosophia Verlag.

The fact that animals were for a long period of European history tried and punished as criminals is, to the extent that this is known at all, generally bracketed or dismissed as a mere curiosity, a cultural quirk. Yet as a few scholars have understood over the past two centuries or so, the topic in fact lies at the intersection of a number of fundamental questions of jurisprudence, moral philosophy, philosophical anthropology (particularly the study of ritual and sacrifice), the history of religion, and the emergence of a secular sphere. The idea that animals are suitable for trial and punishment strikes us today as so completely erroneous because our jurisprudence is fundamentally based on the idea that in order to be an appropriate target of blame and punishment, a being must be a rational, moral agent. This means in turn that in order for the trial and prosecution of animals to make sense within a given culture, that culture must be operating either with a very different conception of where the boundaries of such agency lie, or it must have a very different conception of what it is we are doing when we blame and punish. It is eminently worthwhile moreover to attempt to figure out where the difference lies, since in doing so we may hope to gain new insight into the philosophical commitments underlying our own conception of agency, or our own understanding of the purpose and justice of punishment, or both of these. 

Based on a rather different set of historical examples, Bernard Williams attempted, in his 1993 Shame and Necessity, to reveal the rather tenuous nature of the modern moral-philosophical conviction that punishment is 'good' to the extent that it responds to an agent's freely chosen moral transgression. Drawing inspiration from Nietzsche's philological examination of classical Greek conceptions of justice, Williams returns to the ancient tragedians and poets in order to reconstruct, with sympathy, a conception of the ethical self that was not, in his view, grounded in modern illusions about the autonomy of human action. Williams remained focused almost exclusively upon Greek attempts to make moral sense of interactions between human beings. One way of deepening and strengthening his general project, as I would like to begin to do here, is to extend our focus to the history of interactions between human beings and non-human animals. The benefit here arises precisely from the fact that animals are that class of entities that in the modern period never underwent the process of autonomization of which Williams is so critical, and so to some extent may stand as vestiges of a very different, premodern way of thinking about agency and responsibility in general. To think about the history of animal trials along these lines, as we will see, not only enables us to make anthropological sense out of a cultural practice otherwise easily dismissed as 'curious'; it also helps us to understand why this practice could have no place in Western legal systems after roughly the middle of the 17th century, and in understanding this we in turn come to understand something very important about the moral-philosophical foundations of those systems. 

 

The Criminal Trial and Punishment of Animals: A Bibliography

Carlo d'Addosio, Bestie delinquenti, Naples, L. Pierro, 1892.

Émile Agnel, Curiosités judiciaires et historiques du Moyen Age: Procès contre les animaux, Paris, J. B. Dumoulin, 1858.

Karl von Amira, Thierstrafen und Thierprocesse, Mitteilungen des Instituts für österreichische Geschichtsforschung 12, Innsbruck, Wagner, 1891.

Piers Beirne, "The Law Is an Ass: Reading E. P. Evans' The Medieval Prosecution and Capital Punishment of Animals," in Society and Animals 2, 1 (1994): 27-46.

Hans Albert Berkenhoff, Tierstrafe, Tierbannung und rechtsrituelle Tiertötung im Mittelalter, Akademische Abhandlungen zur Kulturgeschichte, Reihe 7, Bonn, 1937.

Paul Schiff Berman, "Rats, Pigs, and Statues on Trial: The Creation of Cultural Narratives in the Prosecution of Animals and Inanimate Objects," in NYU Law Review 69 (1994): 288-327.

Jacques Berriat-Saint-Prix, "Rapport et recherches sur les procès et les jugements relatives aux Animaux," in Memoires de la Société Royale des Antiquaires de la France, vol. VIII, Paris, 1827, 403-450.

Augustin Chaboseau, Procès contre les animaux, Paris, 1888.

David Chauver, La personnalité juridique des animaux jugés au moyen âge, Paris, Éditions L'Harmattan, 2012.

Catherine Chêne, Juger les vers, Cahiers Lausannois d'Histoire Médiévale, vol. 14, Presses Universitaires de Lausanne, 1995.

Esther Cohen, "Law, Folklore, and Animal Lore," Past & Present 110 (1986): 6-37.

Gérard Dietrich, Les procès des animaux du Moyen-Age à nos jours, Collection Thèses françaises, Vol. 48 de l'École Nationale Vétérinaire de Lyon: Année 1961, Lyon, 1961.

Marie-Anne Dreszer, "L'animal dans les procédures religieuses du Moyen Âge," in Animal et pratiques religieuses: les manifestations matérielles. Colloque international du Compiègne, 11-13 novembre, 1988, ed. Patrice Meniel, Paris, 1989, 135-140.

E. P. Evans, "Bugs and Beasts before the Law," in Atlantic Monthly 54 (1884): 235-246.

E. P. Evans, The Criminal Prosecution and Capital Punishment of Animals, London, William Heinemann, 1906.

William Ewald, "Comparative Jurisprudence (I): What Was It Like to Try a Rat?," in University of Pennsylvania Law Review 143 (1995): 1889-2149.

William Ferrero, "Crime among Animals," in Forum 20 (1895): 492-498.

Gennaro Francioni, Processo agli animali: bestiario del giudice, Gangemi, 1996.

Jacob J. Finkelstein, "The Ox that Gored," in Transactions of the American Philosophical Society 712 (1981).

Jen Girgen, "The Historical and Contemporary Prosecution and Punishment of Animals," in Animal Law Review 9 (2003).

Walter W. Hyde, "The Prosecution and Punishment of Animals and Lifeless Things in the Middle Ages and Modern Times," University of Pennsylvania Law Review 64, 7 (1916): 696-730.  

Marilyn A. Katz, "Ox-Slaughter and Goring Oxen: Homicide, Animal Sacrifice, and Judicial Process," in Yale Journal of Law & the Humanities 4 (1992): 249-278.

Léon Ménabréa, De l'origine de la forme et de l'esprit des jugements rendus au Moyen-Age contre les animaux, Chambery, 1846.

Michel Pastoureau, "Les extravagants procès des animaux," in  L'Histoire 172 (December, 1993): 16-23.

Antonio Pertile, Gli animali in giudizio, in Atti del Reale Istituto Veneto di Scienze, Lettere, ed Arti, series XI, vol. IV, Venice, 1884-85.

E. Robert, "Procès intentés aux animaux," in Bulletin de l'Association Générale des Étudiants de Montpellier 1 (1888): 169-181. 

A. Sorel, Procès contre les animaux et insectes suivis au Moyen-Age dans la Picardie et le Valois, Compiègne, 1827.

G. Tobler, Thierprocesse in der Schweiz, Bern, 1893.

Jean Vartier, Les procès d’animaux au Moyen-Age, Paris, Hachette, 1970.

Barnabé Warée, "Procès-condamnations, excommunications contre des animaux et les cloches," in Curiosités judiciaires historiques, anecdotiques, recueillies et mises en ordre par B. Warée, Paris, Adolphe Delahays, 1859, 440-442.

Glanville L. Williams, Liability for Animals, Cambridge University Press, 1939. 

The Historical Ontology of Embodiment

Abstract for a paper forthcoming in the Oxford Philosophical Concepts series on 'Body'. 

Sometime in the 1920s, the French Catholic missionary and ethnographer Maurice Leenhardt found himself in conversation with a Melanesian acquaintance named Boesoou. Leenhardt suggested that as a result of contact with Europeans, the Kanaks of Melanesia had been introduced in their thinking to the notion of spirit. Boesoou protested: "Spirit? Bah! You didn't bring us spirit. We already knew about the existence of spirit. We always acted in accordance with spirit. What you brought is the body."[1]

Why, now, does Boesoou's observation strike us as counterintuitive? We seem to suppose that, whereas our mental faculties are something that need to be discovered through a process of reflection, undertaken only by adults, or by the learned, or by members of certain 'advanced' cultures, our embodiment is something immediate, certain, and obvious to any sentient creature, even those presumed to be incapable of reflection.

Yet it may be that the order of obviousness here is not simply dictated by our primary experience, but rather is conditioned by what we might identify as a historical ontology: the history of the way people talk about the basic elements of reality. But what, we may ask in turn, would it be like to be born into a different ontological legacy, such as the Melanesian, in which, if Boesoou is to be believed, the notion of one's own embodiment does not arise? Could it really be that under these circumstances one would not even notice one's own embodiment? Now of course there are Melanesian words for 'hand' and 'foot' and 'torso', and no one wants to say that until the missionaries came the Kanaks never noticed that they were be-torsoed, be-footed, etc. The suggestion seems to be rather that it was an imported European idea, whatever the evangelists may have wanted to teach about the immortal and saveable soul, that beings are as it were made up out of body parts integrated into a whole, physical self.

Here is not of course the place to provide any new interpretation of Melanesian ethnographic data, but by beginning with a view from outside the main tradition that will concern us in this paper, we might be in an improved position to make sense of those philosophical theories that have emerged in Western philosophy that seem outlandish or counterintuitive to most today, and that have as their core claim the idea that the body is in some way or other a result of spiritual activity, and that it is this activity that is most closely associated with the self. Embodiment, we are now well positioned to see, is not simply given. Every human being experiences him or herself as outfitted with some minimal set of parts --hands, torso, etc.--, but these can just as easily be conceptualized as flowing from spiritual activity, as the congealing of potentiality for the execution of a function, or as resulting in some other way from an ontologically more basic, non-bodily reality.

From here, in turn, we are able to gain a new perspective on the history of dualism as it developed in modern Western philosophy: what was at stake, philosophically, in its initial formulation, and what motivated the vigorous resistance to it. It may be that what was truly novel and upsetting in the initial formulations of modern dualism was not that it posited a contrast between interior and exterior aspects of self (here, in spite of a certain fashionable habit of seeing this as a recent invention, in fact the ethnographic record suggests that such a contrast is extremely widespread), but rather that it gave an unprecedented account of body as ontologically separable from an immaterial principle more correctly identified with the self. On this account, body comes to be strongly associated with matter, even if a conceptual distinction remains between the two; body is that portion of the matter available in the world that is brought together and organized in the service of some individual soul. This contrasts sharply with the understanding of body as a metaphysical principle sharply contrasting with matter, and closely associated with spirit-- where body, that is, is seen as the exterior unfolding or expression of the activity of spirit. When we come to see such an understanding as, so to speak, the default view of what constitutes a human being, and more generally a living being, we are in a position to better understand modern resistance to dualism, and to place the philosophy of a figure such as G. W. Leibniz --who precisely saw body as an expression of the activity of immaterial entities-- in its proper historical context, and to connect it back up with what may very well be the mainstream of human thinking, from Melanesia to Europe and from antiquity to the 17th century, about the nature of embodiment. 

In this paper, then, I would like to argue that what we think of as the modern separation of body and soul --that is, the advent of dualism-- might be better understood as a key moment in the historical ontology of embodiment, as the moment of the rise of the body as a free-standing ontological principle, one that would come to be seen as given, as an indubitable feature of what it is to be a self at all, only as a result of this rise. Necessarily, the discussion will proceed at a high level of generality, but I would like to keep it focused by using the body theory of Leibniz as a sort of leitmotif throughout the discussion of the larger philosophical question at hand. I will argue, in particular, that what appears to us as Leibniz's deviation from everyday ways of thinking about reality is in fact only a consequence of the recent success of a creaturely ontology that can quickly appear, with just a bit of distance of the sort we are invited to take by Boesoou, both highly implausible and historically deviant. 

---

[1] Maurice Leenhardt, Do kamo. la personne et le mythe dans le monde mélanésien, Paris, Gallimard, 1947, p. 212. 

PHIL 483/609D Early Modern Utopias

Department of Philosophy, Concordia University

Thursdays 18:00-20:15, Winter, 2013

Philosophy Seminar Room (PR-100)

Professor Justin E. H. Smith

Office Hours: J 14:00-16:00, PR-402

Course Description: This will be an advanced seminar in early modern political philosophy. We will be approaching our topic through a close reading of a handful of influential works in the so-called utopian genre, that is, works that give an account of a particular vision of the social good through the fictional artifice of an imaginary society. Arguably, the first work of this sort is Plato's Republic, but at the beginning of the modern era the genre enjoyed a new life, starting with Thomas More's Utopia of 1516, in large part as a result of new, real-world encounters with previously unknown civilizations in the Americas. This genre would also feature works that project the ideal society, variously, onto the moon or some imaginary planet, and in this respect early modern utopian writing also constitutes an important precursor to science fiction. We will be considering utopian writing from a literary and historical point of view, but our primary purpose will be to seek to learn what it has to offer for our understanding of the history of political thought in early modern Europe, in particular emerging ideas about liberty, self-determination, religious tolerance, justice, and punishment. In addition, we will be interested in the role of utopian thinking in the cluster of ideas about the progress of knowledge, and about the reformation of the investigation of the natural world, that we associate with the so-called Scientific Revolution.

Prerequisites: graduate or advanced undergraduate standing.

Required Texts (available at the Concordia University Bookstore)

Susan Bruce (Ed.), Three Early Modern Utopias: Thomas More, Utopia; Francis Bacon, New Atlantis;Henry Neville, The Isle of Pines, Oxford University Press, 2008.

In addition, a packed will be made available for purchase at Copies Concordia (on Maisonneuve between Mackay and Guy), with excerpts from the following texts:

• Plato, Republic
• Tommaso Campanella, The City of the Sun (1602)
• Johann Valentin Andreae, Christianopolis (1619)
• Johannes Kepler, The Dream, or Posthumous Work on Lunar Astronomy (1638)
• Margaret Cavendish, The Blazing World (1666)

Means of Evaluation

60% Final research paper (10-12 pages for undergraduates; 15-20 pages for graduate students).

30% In-class presentation of work-in-progress.

10% Participation

Schedule of classes:

Week 1: 10 January

Introduction: The role of ideal models (or fictions) in political philosophy. Reading: Plato's Republic,Books I and II; Plato's Timaeus (excerpt).

Week 2: 17 January

'No Place': the context and origins of More's Utopia. Reading: More, Utopia, Book I.

Week 3: 24 January

The principal aims and arguments. Reading: More, Utopia, Book II, 1-4. 

Week 4: 31 January

Renaissance ethnography and the problem of human nature. Reading: More, Utopia, Book II, 5-9.

Week 5: 7 February

Utopia and Religion. Reading: Campanella, The City of the Sun

Week 6: 14 February

Utopia and Encyclopedism. Reading: Campanella, The City of the Sun (cont.)

Week 7: 21 February Mid-Term Break!!

Week 8: 28 February

Esotericism and Communism. Reading: Andreae, Christianopolis. Research-Paper Prospectus Due!!

Week 9: 7 March

Utopianism and the Transformation of Science. Reading: Bacon, New Atlantis

Week 10: 14 March

The Geography of Early Modern Science. Reading: Bacon, New Atlantis (cont.).

Week 11: 21 March

Utopia between Astronomy and Science Fiction. Reading: Kepler, Somnium

Week 12: 28 March

Natural Magic and the Irrational. Reading: Kepler, Somnium (cont.).

Week 13: 4 April

Utopia and Libertinism. Reading: Neville, The Isle of Pines

Week 14: 11 April

Experimental Philosophy and Science Fiction. Reading: Cavendish, Blazing World

Recommended Preparatory Reading:

Stephen Gaukroger, Francis Bacon and the Transformation of Early Modern Philosophy, Cambridge, 2001.

Stephen Gaukroger, The Emergence of a Scientific Culture: Science and the Shaping of Modernity, 1210-1865, Cambridge, 2001.

Stephen Greenblatt, Marvellous Possessions: The Wonder of the New World, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991.

Christopher Hill, The World Turned Upside Down: Radical Ideas During the English Revolution, London, 1972.

Frank Lestringant, Mapping the Renaissance World: The geographical imagination in the age of discovery, trans. by David Fausett, Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994.

Quentin Skinner, The Foundations of Modern Political Thought, 2 vols, vol. I: The Renaissance, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1978.

Quentin Skinner, "Sir Thomas More's Utopia and the language of Renaissance humanism," in The Languages of Political Theory in Early-Modern Europe, ed. by Anthony Pagden, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987, 123-57.

Clare Jackson and Richard Serjeantson have put together a website with very valuable resources in connection with their course 'Utopian Writing, 1516-1798' at Cambridge University:

http://www.trin.cam.ac.uk/rws1001/utopia/default.htm

PHIL 483/609D Early Modern Utopias

Department of Philosophy, Concordia University

Thursdays 18:00-20:15, Winter, 2013

Philosophy Seminar Room (PR-100)

Professor Justin E. H. Smith

Office Hours: J 14:00-16:00, PR-402

Course Description: This will be an advanced seminar in early modern political philosophy. We will be approaching our topic through a close reading of a handful of influential works in the so-called utopian genre, that is, works that give an account of a particular vision of the social good through the fictional artifice of an imaginary society. Arguably, the first work of this sort is Plato's Republic, but at the beginning of the modern era the genre enjoyed a new life, starting with Thomas More's Utopia of 1516, in large part as a result of new, real-world encounters with previously unknown civilizations in the Americas. This genre would also feature works that project the ideal society, variously, onto the moon or some imaginary planet, and in this respect early modern utopian writing also constitutes an important precursor to science fiction. We will be considering utopian writing from a literary and historical point of view, but our primary purpose will be to seek to learn what it has to offer for our understanding of the history of political thought in early modern Europe, in particular emerging ideas about liberty, self-determination, religious tolerance, justice, and punishment. In addition, we will be interested in the role of utopian thinking in the cluster of ideas about the progress of knowledge, and about the reformation of the investigation of the natural world, that we associate with the so-called Scientific Revolution.

Prerequisites: graduate or advanced undergraduate standing.

Required Texts (available at the Concordia University Bookstore)

Susan Bruce (Ed.), Three Early Modern Utopias: Thomas More, Utopia; Francis Bacon, New Atlantis; Henry Neville, The Isle of Pines, Oxford University Press, 2008.

In addition, a packed will be made available for purchase at Copies Concordia (on Maisonneuve between Mackay and Guy), with excerpts from the following texts:

• Plato, Republic
• Tommaso Campanella, The City of the Sun (1602)
• Johann Valentin Andreae, Christianopolis (1619)
• Johannes Kepler, The Dream, or Posthumous Work on Lunar Astronomy (1638)
• Margaret Cavendish, The Blazing World (1666)

Means of Evaluation

60% Final research paper (10-12 pages for undergraduates; 15-20 pages for graduate students).

30% In-class presentation of work-in-progress.

10% Participation

Schedule of classes:

Week 1: 10 January

Introduction: The role of ideal models (or fictions) in political philosophy. Reading: Plato's Republic, Books I and II; Plato's Timaeus (excerpt).

Week 2: 17 January

'No Place': the context and origins of More's Utopia. Reading: More, Utopia, Book I.

Week 3: 24 January

The principal aims and arguments. Reading: More, Utopia, Book II, 1-4. 

Week 4: 31 January

Renaissance ethnography and the problem of human nature. Reading: More, Utopia, Book II, 5-9.

Week 5: 7 February

Utopia and Religion. Reading: Campanella, The City of the Sun

Week 6: 14 February

Utopia and Encyclopedism. Reading: Campanella, The City of the Sun (cont.)

Week 7: 21 February Mid-Term Break!!

Week 8: 28 February

Esotericism and Communism. Reading: Andreae, Christianopolis. Research-Paper Prospectus Due!!

Week 9: 7 March

Utopianism and the Transformation of Science. Reading: Bacon, New Atlantis

Week 10: 14 March

The Geography of Early Modern Science. Reading: Bacon, New Atlantis (cont.).

Week 11: 21 March

Utopia between Astronomy and Science Fiction. Reading: Kepler, Somnium

Week 12: 28 March

Natural Magic and the Irrational. Reading: Kepler, Somnium (cont.).

Week 13: 4 April

Utopia and Libertinism. Reading: Neville, The Isle of Pines

Week 14: 11 April

Experimental Philosophy and Science Fiction. Reading: Cavendish, Blazing World

Recommended Preparatory Reading:

Stephen Gaukroger, Francis Bacon and the Transformation of Early Modern Philosophy, Cambridge, 2001.

Stephen Gaukroger, The Emergence of a Scientific Culture: Science and the Shaping of Modernity, 1210-1865, Cambridge, 2001.

Stephen Greenblatt, Marvellous Possessions: The Wonder of the New World, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991.

Christopher Hill, The World Turned Upside Down: Radical Ideas During the English Revolution, London, 1972.

Frank Lestringant, Mapping the Renaissance World: The geographical imagination in the age of discovery, trans. by David Fausett, Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994.

Quentin Skinner, The Foundations of Modern Political Thought, 2 vols, vol. I: The Renaissance, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1978.

Quentin Skinner, "Sir Thomas More's Utopia and the language of Renaissance humanism," in The Languages of Political Theory in Early-Modern Europe, ed. by Anthony Pagden, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987, 123-57.

Clare Jackson and Richard Serjeantson have put together a website with very valuable resources in connection with their course 'Utopian Writing, 1516-1798' at Cambridge University:

http://www.trin.cam.ac.uk/rws1001/utopia/default.htm

Louis Riel, Mémoire sur les Monades (Regina, Saskatchewan, 1885)

Qu'y a-t-il? Il y a Dieu. Qu'y a-t-il encore? Il y a les choses que Dieu a créées. 

Les essences des choses créées et possibles ont toujours été.

Les essences se composent de 'Monades'. Les 'Monades' sont d'une tenuité si grande qu'elles sont imperceptibles à nos sens.

Les 'Monades' sont tendres, douces et polies. Ces trois qualités combinées dans les 'Monades' sont le principe de la sensibilité.

Les 'Monades' sont de deux genres; elles sont, les unes mâles, les autres femelles.

Pour une monade mâle, il y a une monade femelle. C'est-à-dire qu'il y a dans les essences autant de monades mâles que de monades femelles.

Une monade est une électricité. Des monades sont des électricités. Le monades sont les électricités.

Une monade mâle est une électricité positive.

Une monade femelle est une électricité négative.

Les monades mâles sont plus fermes. En se touchant, leur fermeté même fait qu'elles se repoussent. C'est ce que la science a découvert, lorsqu'elle a constaté que les électricités de même nom se repoussent.

Les monades femelles sont plus douces, plus polies plus tendres. Lorsqu'elles viennent en contact les unes avec les autres, leur sensibilité se trouve tellement affectée qu'elles éprouvent d'abord un tressaillement qui se change bientôt en un frémissement. En se prolongeant le frémissement lui-même devient intolérable. C'est alors qu'entre monades femelles a lieu la répulsion.

C'est ce que la science a trouvé lorsque l'expérience lui a fait voir que les électricités négatives se repoussent.

Les monades mâles et les monades femelles s'attirent.

Parce que les monades mâles sont moins douces, moins polies, moins tendres, elles ne poussent pas à bout la sensibilité des monades femelles en les rencontrant. Les monades femelles se trouvent à l'aise è côté d'elles. C'est pour cela qu'elles recherchent les monades mâles.

Parce que les monades femelles sont moins fermes, elles ne poussent pas à bout la fermeté des monades mâles, en les touchant. Ainsi les monades mâles conservent un surcroît d'énergie, dans leur contact avec les monades femelles. Ce surcroît d'énergie ou de fermeté leur cause du bien-être. C'est ce qui fait que les monades mâles recherchent les monades femelles.

La monade mâle éprouve une première affection en touchant la monade femelle et une seconde affection en étant touchée par elle. Or entre ces deux affections, il y a une différence. La sensibilité lui fait saisir cette différence. C'est là le principe de la jouissance entre les monades mâles et femelles.

La monade mâle éprouve une première affection en touchant une autre monade mâle; et elle en éprouve une seconde, en étant touchée par elle. Or entre ces deux affections, il n'y a pas de différence. La sensibilité lui fait saisir ce manque de différence. Et comme en ce cas, la sensation reçue ne diffère pas de sa sensation propre, la monade mâle ne trouve pas de jouissance additionelle dans ses rapports avec la monade de son genre; elle ne la recherche pas.

Les monades sont lumineuses. C'est ce qui est le principe de l'intelligence.

La tenuité des monades est le principe de leur extrême mobilité. Leur mobilité est elle-même le principe de leur volonté.

Les monades sont d'égale grosseur. C'est le principe de leur liberté. 

Les monades sont tenaces des impressions, c'est ce qui constitue en elles le principe de la mémoire. 

Les monades sont de deux sortes. Les unes sont actives et les autres passives.

Les monades passives ont toutes les propriétés des monades actives mais à un degré fort inférieur.

Chaque monade active a une monade passive qui est à elle en propre. Et dont elle fait ce qu'elle veut.

Les monades actives constituent les essences actives. Les essences actives sont d'un nombre infini. Les monades actives qui composent chaque essence sont elles-même infiniment nombreuses.

Chaque monade a son éclat et celui qu'elle reçoit d'une autre monade. Or entre ces deux clartés, il y a une différence que la sensibilité  leur fait saisir. C'est le principe de la vue. 

Chaque monade vibre en agissant. Or entre sa vibration propre et celle qui lui arrive il y a une différence. La sensibilité lui fait saisir cette différence. C'est là le principe du toucher.

Chaque monade en contact avec une autre, sonne; or entre le son qu'elle rend et celui qu'elle reçoit il y a une différence que la sensibilité lui fait saisir. C'est là le principe de l'ouie.

Chaque monade a un parfum. Entre son parfum propre et celui qui lui arrive il y a une différence que la sensibilité lui fait saisir. C'est là le principe de l'odorat.

Chaque monade a une saveur. Or entre sa saveur propre et celle qui lui arrive, il y a une différence que la sensibilité lui fait saisir. C'est là le principe du goût.

Les monades ont de l'affinité les unes pour les autres. C'est le principe de l'amour.

Les essences ont les unes pour les autres une attraction dont la force est au-dessus de toutes les autres forces, c'est là l'indivisibilité.

Les essences sont mariées ensemble d'une manière si intime et en proportion parfaite. C'est ce qui fait qu'elles sont unes mais leur unité est infinie. 

Je ne touche ici qu'en effleurant, pour ainsi dire, à ce sujet des essences primordiales. Je voudrais pouvoir exposer cette révélation dans toute sa beauté!! Si Dieu dont la puissance est infini daigne venir merveilleusement à mon secours... comme j'en ai la confiance inébranlable; et si notre saint Père le Pape à qui je soumets par l'entremise de Monseigneur, tout ce que j'écris, me permet de continuer; je tâcherai avec sa sainte bénédiction, d'achever. Car ma mission est aussi d'expliquer l'existence de Dieu la création et le plan même de la création, mais l'obéissance à l'autorité de l'église ayant continuellement rapport à ma sanctification, ma mission consiste avant tout à obéir.

--Louis 'David' Riel

From The Collected Works of Louis Riel, Edmonton, University of Alberta Press, 1985, vol. 3, No. 179, pgs. 335-338. 

Philosophometry

I may have mentioned already that I am in the beginning stages of a massively ambitious, multi-year project: I have been asked to write a very long, but not nearly long enough, book called A Global History of Philosophy, to 1750. The manuscript is due in 2017.

I have been considering for the past several months the different possible ways to approach this project. One thing that is certain, and that I've made clear from the beginning, is that I don't want to write a sort of multicultural redux of Russell's History of Western Philosophy: a basically teleological how-things-led-up-to-me scenario, with some stuff about China and India tacked on to appeal to current sensibilities. As I see it, though, one is trapped between a Scylla and Charybdis however one approaches this project: either it amounts to offering one's own idiosyncratic twist on what this whole history has been about, or it amounts to a compendium of facts that aspire, within the bounds of the word-limit set by the publisher, to be genuinely comprehensive.

In the era of Wikipedia (and we will be much deeper into that era by 2017) we seriously need to rethink the purpose of presenting facts to readers at all. How can I write a book that relates the global history of philosophy, and  that provides readers something that online, collaborative information sources cannot? Again, one option is to offer the sort of idiosyncratic interpretation that one is allowed to have as the author of a book, rather than of an encyclopedia entry, but as I've already said, the Russellian danger there is one that I also wish to avoid. One possible way I've been considering to navigate a path that steers clear of both Russell and Wikipedia is what I've started thinking of as 'philosophometry' (check Google; you heard it here first!), but which might also perhaps be called 'quantitative metaphilosophy'.

I've been thinking a lot about the revolutionary work, for example, that Franco Moretti has done on the modern novel in books like Graphs, Maps, Trees. More generally, researchers in fields outside philosophy are learning the value of quantitative, digitally based study of the materials they are devoted to illuminating. The other humanities, if not yet philosophy, have come to understand the value of 'distant readings' as a complement to the sacred practice of 'close reading'. The idea, then, is to compile a massive database of texts, titles, key words key arguments from the first few millennia of philosophical activity across Eurasia, and to process these data in order to generate graphs, maps, and trees that could reveal new things about how we came to think about truth, reality, the self, etc., in the way we do.

Imagine, for example, an interactive website (or perhaps by 2017 'books' themselves will be interactive) that plots philosophical texts on a map of Eurasia, with different coloured blips indicating different doctrines defended in the texts (materialism vs. idealism, for example, or corruptibility vs. immortality of the soul). My model here is the surprisingly beautiful graphic made showing the history of nuclear explosions since World War II (replace the explosions by texts, and the nuclear states by schools of thought). Or imagine, further, the plotting of arguments or doctrines against extratextual factors like the political regimes, modes of production, population densities, and so on, that correlate with the texts. Of course, the huge problem here is compiling the database from which one could, once it's there, fairly easily generate the beautiful graphcs. This is what I have a few years to figure out how to do. Obviously I can only read a small portion of the texts myself. Equally obviously, I need some grant money.

I can already hear a certain kind of philosopher insisting that this project is futile at worst or, at best, that it contributes nothing to philosophy itself. But I am more convinced than ever that what is said by some guy who happens to be alive right now, and employed by a university to tell us what he happens to think about, e.g., whether there is a hard problem of consciousness or not, can be of next to no interest for our understanding of the philosophical question in question. The truth is I just don't think it's very grown up, intellectually, to set about actually trying to answer questions like these, at least in the way we are used to seeing philosophers try to answer them.

In this respect, I am sympathetic to the approach of experimental philosophy, even if I have not yet been able to convince any experimental philosophers that I'm on their side. Like them, I think the more sophisticated and fruitful approach to questions like, e.g., whether the mind is distinct from the body, is not try to answer them directly, but to somehow take a survey of the range of possible positions human beings take up on the question. Now, the experimental philosophers today think it is enough to survey their contemporaries, by methods borrowed mostly from psychology. I'm starting to think that what we need to do is, so to speak, to survey the past, using methods adapted from archeology, historical linguistics, and evolutionary biology, and recently applied with impressive results in unlikely fields such as comparative literature.

Again, I recognize that the philosophometric results will only be as valuable as the initial phase of data collection permits them to be, and that this collection will require the old, traditional methods of reading texts and determining what the arguments are. But still, I think this can be done as a collaborative project, and that it is the most urgent project we should be undertaking if we wish to better understand what this whole endeavor of philosophy has been all about. That I think this might, paradoxically, be an expression of my own idiosyncratic understanding of what human intellectual activity, such as philosophy, is; and that I think such an ambitious philosophometric project could actually be carried out might be a result of the fact that I'm living in an era in which the labors of scholars in the digital-huamanities are starting to bear fruit. In this respect then, I've avoided neither the Scylla of Russell nor the Charybdis of Wikipedia, but in fact have collided with and embraced both of them. 

Nature, Human Nature, and Human Difference

This is an excerpt from the Introduction to the book I am currently writing, Nature, Human Nature, and Human Difference. Comments welcome.

*

This book aims to do more than one thing. It is however, first and foremost, a work of historical ontology in Ian Hacking's sense.[1] That is, it aims to show how kinds of thing, and kinds of person, that appear to be carved out within nature itself in fact come into being in the course of human history as a result of changes in the ways human beings conceptualize the world around them. In some of his most influential work, Hacking has taken the categorization of mental illness as an illustrative case study in the generation of historical kinds, or, as he sometimes calls them, 'transient'.[2] Yet he emphasizes that transience is not the same thing as illusoriness, that at the very least it serves us well to take seriously and investigate the reasons why a culture generates new kinds from one era to another, and perhaps even, following upon our investigation, to retain them. Hacking's approach, which owes a deep debt to Michel Foucault's work on the history of sexuality and its focus on the construction in relatively recent history of the homosexual as a kind of person,[3] is certainly fruitful far beyond the study of mental illness.

I am certainly not the first to suggest that the category of race --both the particular racial categories into which we divide the human species today, as well as the very idea that the human species can be so divided-- might appropriately be seen as a case of historical ontology. Yet there has been no sustained study of the intellectual history of the period in which the categories of race as we understand them took shape. In part, this absence can be explained by the reasonable perception that the most important factors in the shaping of these categories were not 'intellectual' at all, but economic, and indeed that it might even be offensive to think of the history that left us with the horrid legacy of slavery and systemic racism as having anything intellectual about it. Accordingly, excellent and abundant scholarship has been produced on the economic and social history of slavery.[4] The things that people implicated in this history came to tell themselves and others about what kinds of people there are have been seen, also not unreasonably, as at best a posteriori rationalization or coming to terms with a world economic system that had taken shape not as a result of any innovations on the plane of ideas, but as a result of the sum total of practices out of which that economic system emerged.

This explanatory priority will not be disputed here, yet we will proceed with the conviction that there is always a complex interplay between what is said, what is believed, and what is done, and that at least part of the history of modern racism consists in accounting for the way in which early modern thinkers conceptualized and talked about race. That we are limiting ourselves to looking at thinkers here, and thus, it may be presumed, at people for whom the new categories of race were not particularly disadvantageous and who  could therefore live a comfortable life of thought, distinguishes our focus not only from those who would say that economic history tells us the deepest story, but also from those who believe, again not unreasonably, that it is the muffled voices of those whom this new way of talking about kinds of people silenced and enchained that most need to be recovered by scholars today.

But La Peyrère, Leibniz, Linnaeus, and Blumenbach were not just mouthpieces of power; they were also heirs to a scientific and philosophical tradition that made it possible to say some things, and not others, about human nature and human difference, and what exactly they were able to say made a tremendous difference for the perception of the legitimacy of the racist institutions and practices that were sustained, in part, by ontological commitments to a basic difference between us and them. How and why European authors came to say just the things they did about race in the roughly 150 years from the middle of the 17th century to the end of the 18th, will be the focus of this study.

And it will not be enough to say that they said what they did because they were, with varying degrees of immediacy and explicitness, apologists for slavery. Apology for slavery can take many different forms; in early modern Europe, it often took the form of racial realism: the belief that the distinctions we make between races map onto pre-given racial kinds, conceptualized along biological lines on analogy to species. What we want to understand here is the full intellectual background that made this realism possible in general, and that also made the particular racial distinctions between, e.g., blacks and whites, possible. It is our hypothesis that a crucial feature of the emergence of the modern race concept was the collapse of a certain universalism about human nature, sustained by a belief in the transcendent essence of the human soul, and this belief's gradual but steady replacement over the course of the early modern period by a conception of human beings as natural beings, and thus as no less susceptible to classification in terms of a naturalistic taxonomy than any other natural being, plant or animal or mineral. The peculiarly modern ontologization of human difference, then, was made possible by the rejection of human nature, and the parallel insertion of humans into nature.

*

With Foucault, I share the view that kinds of person are in no small measure artefacts of social practices, that they are, to put it somewhat crudely, written into existence through administrative practices. At the most general level, we may conjecture that the individual human being is itself such an artefact, that what it is to be an individual human in the modern world is to be registered as such, in a church registry of baptisms or in a file in the department of vital statistics. On this view, the reason why you can drive right past a dead dog on the side of the road, whereas a dead human would require you to stop, call the police, and initiate a series of steps leading to the proper closing off of a life, is that in the case of the human, unlike the dog, there is paper work to be completed, the life cannot be closed off without a notation in the vital-statistical records. In this way, it is not that a being gets the status of a legal being in recognition of its prior status as a moral being, but rather it is precisely the other way around: beings come to have a certain moral charge to them --they may not be arbitrarily killed, and if they are dead their corpses must be treated according to a set of rules, for example-- because they are classified as legal individuals.

Of course, the interplay between these two is complex, and I am emphasizing the priority of the legal over the moral for the sake of argument. In the abortion debate, opponents of abortion have a prior commitment to the moral status of fetuses, and so seek to win a legal status for these entities that would reflect the moral one. But it is quite likely, given the evidence from similar cases, that if fetuses did have a long-established legal status, many who do not in our own culture believe that abortion is a moral issue would think differently. We already do think very differently about our moral commitments to different classes of animals (pests, livestock, vermin, wildlife, zoo animals, to name a few), where clearly the only basis for distinction is a legal or social one, stemming from the position they occupy in human society, and has nothing at all to do with differences in their internal capacities, their neurophysiology, or the like.

The connection to the problem of race should be obvious: kinds of person are to no small extent administered into being, so to speak, brought into existence through record-keeping, census-taking, and, yes, bills of sale. A census form asks whether a citizen is 'white', and the possibility of answering this question affirmatively helps to bring into being a sub-kind of the human species that is by no means simply there and given, ready to be picked out, prior to the emergence of social practices such as the census. Censuses, in part, bring white people into existence, but once they are in existence they easily come to appear as if they had been there all along. This is in part what Hacking means by 'looping': human kinds, in contrast with properly natural kinds such as helium or water, come to be what they are in large part as a result of the human act of identifying them as this or that. Two millennia ago no one thought of themselves as neurotic, or ADD, or straight, or white, and nothing has changed in human biology in the meantime to explain how these categories could have come into being on their own. This is not to say that no one is neurotic, straight, white, etc., but only that how they got to be that way cannot be accounted for in the same way as, say, how birds evolved the ability to fly, or how iron oxidizes.

In some cases, such as the diagnosis of mental illness, kinds of people are looped into existence out of a desire, successful or not, to help them. Racial categories seem to have been looped into existence, by contrast, for the facilitation of the systematic exploitation of certain groups of people by others. Again, the categories are able to facilitate the exploitation in large part because of the way moral status flows from legal status. Why can the one man be enslaved, and the other not? Because the one belongs to the natural-seeming kind of people that is suitable for enslavement. But again, categories cannot be made to stick on the slightest whim of their would-be coiner. They have to build upon habits of thinking that are already in place. And this is where the history of natural science becomes crucial for understanding the history of modern racial thinking, for the latter built directly upon innovations in the former. Modern racial thinking could not have taken the form it did if it had not been able to piggy-back, so to speak, on conceptual innovations in the way science was beginning to approach the diversity of the natural world, and in particular of the living world.

This much ought to be obvious: racial thinking could not have been biologized if there were no emerging science of biology. I would like to dwell on this obvious point, however, and see what more unexpected insights might be drawn out of it. What might not be so obvious, or what seems to be ever in need of renewed pointing out, is a point that ought to be of importance for our understanding of the differing, yet ideally parallel, scope and aims of the natural and social sciences: the emergence of racial categories, of categories of kinds of human, may be best understood as an overextension of the project of biological classification which was proving so successful in the same period. We might go further, and suspect that all of the subsequent kinds of person that would emerge over the course of the 19th and 20th centuries, the kinds of central interest to Foucault and Hacking, amount to a further reaching still, an unprecedented, peculiarly modern ambition to make sense of the slightest variations within the human species as if these were themselves species differentia. Things were not always this way. In fact, they were not yet this way throughout much of the early part of the period we call 'modern'.

---

[1] See Ian Hacking, Historical Ontology, Cambridge, MA: Harvard Unversity Press, 2002.

[2] See Ian Hacking, Mad Travelers: Reflections on the Reality of Transient Mental Illness, Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1998.

[3] See Michel Foucault, Histoire de la sexualité, vols. 1-3, Paris: Gallimard, 1976-84.

[4] Obviously, we can barely begin to summarize this vast literature here, but a few representative works include Ira Berlin, Many Thousands Gone: The First Two Centuries of Slavery in North America, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1998; David Brion Davis, Inhuman Bondage: The Rise and Fall of Slavery in the New World, Oxford University Press, 2006; Patrick Manning (ed.), Slave Trades, 1500-1800: Globalization of Forced Labour, Brookfield, VT: Variorum, 1996.

Anton Wilhelm Amo: Some Early Sources

Johann Peter von Ludewig (1729):

In this very place a baptized Moor by the name of Mister Anton Wilhelm Amo, in the service of His Highness the Duke of Wolfenbüttel, spent some years for the purpose of studying. And after he had attained a proficiency in the Latin language, he showed such dedication and success in the lessons of private and public law that he became very well versed in this field. After this, with the consent of his most merciful Highness, who had supported him until know, he was permitted by the Chancellor von Ludwig to hold a public disputation under his [the Chancellor's] presidence. So that the argument of the disputation should be appropriate to his situation, the topic De iure Maurorum in Europa, or the law of Moors, was chosen. Therein it was not only shown from books and from history, that the kings of the Moors were enfeoffed by the Roman Emperor, and that every one of them had to obtain a royal patent from him, which Justinian also issued, but it was also investigated how far the freedom or servitude of Moors bought by Christians in Europe extends, according to the usual laws. 

Hieselbst hat sich ein in Diensten Sr. Hochfürstl. Durchl. des regierenden Hertzogs von Wolfenbüttel stehender getaufter Mohr Namens Herr Antonius Wilhelmus Amo, einige Jahre Studirens halber aufgehalten. Und nachdem er vorhero die Lateinische Sprache zum Grund geleget hat er hier die collegis iuris priuati und publici mit solchem Fleiß und succeß getrieben, daß er in solchem studio ziemlich geübet. Solchem nach er sich mit Vorbewußt seiner gnädigsten Herrschaft welche ihn bisher allhier unterhalten bey dem Herrn Cantzler von Ludewig angegeben unter deßen praesidio sich mit einer disputation öffentlich hören zu lassen. Damit nun das argument der disputation seinem Stande gemäß seyn möchte; so ist das thema de iure mavrorum in Europa oder vom Mohrenrecht beliebet worden. Darinnen daß nicht allein ex LL und der Historie gezeuget; daß der Mohren ihr König bey dem Römischen Kayser ehedem zu Lehen gegangen und jeder von denselben ein Königs-Patent welches auch Justinianus augetheilet hohlen müssen; sondern auch vornehmlich dieses untersuchet wie weit den von Christen erkaufften Mohren in Europa ihre Freyheit oder Dienstbarkeit denen üblichen Rechten nach sich erstrecke.

From Wöchentlichen Hallischen Frage- und Anzeigungs-Nachrichten, 28 November, 1729. 

*

Johann Heinrich Zedler (1739):

Amo (Anton Wilhelm), a baptized Moor, originally from Guinea in Africa. His Highness the Elector of Braunschweig-Wolfenbüttel, at his own expense, sent Amo to study philosophy and law for some years at Halle. In the year 1729, in the month of November, he defended a dissertation in law, with the Chancellor von Ludwig presiding, entitled De jure Maurorum in Europa, or on the law of Moors. In this work he showed from laws and histories that the kings of the Moors were enfeoffed under the Roman Emperor, and that each of them had to obtain a royal patent, which Justinian also issued. After this, he investigates how far the freedom or servitude of baptized Moors in Europe extends according to the usual laws (see Ludwig's Universal-Historie, Part 5, p. 251). From this he obtained the Master's degree, and for some time gave private lessons in Halle (see Dreyhaupt's Beschreibung des Saalkreises, Part II, p. 28). He must however have subsequently visited the University of Wittenberg, since we possess from him a Disputationem philosophicam, continentem ideam distinctam eorum, quae competunt vel menti vel corpori nostro vivo & organico, which he publicly defended as praeses in Wittenberg on 29 May, 1734. In this dissertation he refers several times to another dissertation he defended, the Dissertatio de humana [sic] mentis apatheia.

From the Großes Universallexicon aller Wissenschaften und Künste, Leipzig, 1739-1750. Online version here. 

*

Abbé Henri Grégoire (1808):

Amo (Antoine-Guillaume), born in Guinea, was brought at a very young age to Amsterdam, in 1707, and given to the duke of Braunschweig-Wolfenbüttel, Anton Ulrich, who gave him to his son August Wilhelm. The latter sent him to pursue his studies to the University of Halle, in Saxony, and to the University of Wittemberg. At the former, in 1729, under the chairmanship of the Chancellor von Ludwig, he defended a thesis, and published a dissertation On the Law of Moors.

Amo was versed in astronomy, and spoke Latin, Greek, Hebrew, French, Dutch, and German. 

He so distinguished himself by his good morals and by his talents, that the rector and the council of the University of Wittemberg found it fitting, in 1733, to do him public honor through an epistle of congratulations. They recalled that Terence too was from Africa; that many martyrs, doctors, and church fathers were born in that same country, where letters flourished, and that fell back into barbarism when it lost Christianity. 

Amo successfully gave individual courses, praised in the same epistle: in a program publiched by the dean of the faculty of philosophy, it is said of this learned Negro, that having treated of the systems of the ancients and the moderns, he selected and taught what was best in them. 

Amo, having become a doctor, defended a thesis and published a dissertation in 1744 [sic] at Wittemberg on the sensations, considered as absent in the human soul, and present in the human body. In a letter written to him by the president, he is addressed as a vir nobilissime et clarissime; thus the University of Wittemberg did not have, on the basis of a difference of color, the prejudices of so many men who claim to be enlightened. The president states that he never made any changes to Amo's dissertation, since it was so well written. Indeed, the work bespeaks a mind that is well exercised in reflection. He seeks to establish the differences of phenomena between beings that exist without life, and those that have life. A stone exists, but is not alive. 

It appears that abstract discussions held a particular attraction for our author, since, having become a professor, he saw to the defense, the same year, of a thesis that was similar to the preceding one, on the distinction that is to be made between the operations of the mind and those of the senses. The Berlin court conferred upon him the title of Councillor of State, but after the death of the prince of Braunschweig, his benefactor, Amo, having fallen into a deep melancholy, resolved to leave the Europe where he had lived for thirty years, and to return to his native land in Axim, on the Gold Coast. In 1753 he received the visit of the learned voyager and physician David-Henri Gallandat, who speaks of him in the Mémoires de l'Académie de Flessingue, of which he was a member.

Amo, at that time around 50 years old, led a solitary life there. His father and sister were still alive, and his brother was a slave in Suriname. Some time later, he left Axim, and settled in Chama, at the fort of the Dutch Saint-Sebastian Company. 

I made some unfruitful research in order to discover whether Amo published other works, and when he died. 

From De la littérature des Nègres, ou, recherches sur leurs facultés intellectueles, leurs qualités morales et leur littérature: suivies des notices sur la vie et les ouvrages des Nègres qui se sont distingués dans les sciences, les lettres et les arts, Paris, 1808, pgs. 198-202. Online version here.

Anton Wilhelm Amo (c. 1703-c.1753), A Partial Bibliography

Works by Amo:

Antonius Guilelmus Amo, Dissertatio inauguralis de iure Maurorum in Europa, Halle, 1729 (lost).

Antonius Guilelmus Amo, Dissertatio inauguralis de Humanae mentis apatheia, Wittenberg, 1734.

Antonius Guilelmus Amo, Tractatus de arte sobrie et accurate philosophandi, Halle, 1738.

Johannes Theodosius Meiner, Idearum distinctam eorum quae competunt vel menti vel corpori nostro vivo et organico (with Amo as 'Praeses'), Wittenberg, 29 May, 1734.

Translations and editions of Amo:

Burchard Brentjes (Ed.), Antonius Guilelmus Amo Afer, aus Axim in Ghana: Student, Doktor der Philosophie, Magister legens an den Universitäten Halle, Witttenberg, Jena, 1727-1747. Dokumente, Autographe, Belege, Martin-Luther-Universität Halle-Wittenberg, Halle, 1968.

Anton William Amo, Treatise on the Art of Philosophising Soberly and Accurately, ed. and tr. T. Uzodinma Nwala, Nsukka, University of Nigeria Press, 1990.

Antoine Guillaume Amo, De Humanae mentis apatheia; Tractatus de arte sobrie et accurate philosophandi, ed. and tr. Simon Mougnol, Paris, Harmattan, 2010. 

Attacks on Amo:

Johann Ernst Philippi, Belustigende Poetische Schaubühne, und auf derselben I. Ein Poßirlicher Student, Hanß Dümchen aus Norden, nebst Zwölf seiner lustigen Cameraden. II. Die Academische Scheinjungfer, als ein Muster aller Cocketten. III. Herrn M. Amo, eines gelehrten Mohren, galanter Liebes-Antrag an eine schöne Brünette, Madem. Astrine. IV. Der Mademoiselle Astrine, Parodische Antwort auf solchen Antrag eines verliebten Mohren. Cöthen, in der Cörnerischen Buchhandlung, 1747.

Works about Amo (alphabetically ordered, by author):

Burchard Brentjes, "Ein afrikanischer Student der Philosophie und Medizin in Halle, Wittenberg und Jena (1727-1747)," in In memoriam Hermann Boerhaave (1668-1738), Halle, 1969.

Burchard Brentjes, "Anton Wilhelm Amo, First African Philosopher in European Universities," in Current Anthropology 16, 3 (1975): 443-444.

Burchard Brentjes, Anton Wilhelm Amo: der schwarze Philosoph in Halle, Leipzig, Koehler & Amelang, 1976.

Burchard Brentjes, "Der erste afrikanische Student in Halle," in Der Beitrag der Völker Afrikas zur Weltkultur. 32. Kongress und Tagungsberichte, Martin-Luther-Universität Halle, 1977.

Christine Damis, "Le philosophe connu pour sa peau noire: Anton Wilhelm Amo," in Rue Descartes 36, 2 (2002): 115.

Yawovi Emmanuel Edeh, Die Grundlagen der philosophischen Schriften von Amo. In welchem Verhältnis steht Amo zu Christian Wolff, dass man ihn als 'einen führnehmlichen Wolffianer' bezeichnen kann?, Essen, Die blaue Eule, 2003.

Monika Firla, Anton Wilhelm Amo (Nzema, Rep. Ghana). Kammermohr - Privatdozent für Philosophie - Wahrsager, in Tribus 51 (2002): 55-90.

Johannes Glötzner, Anton Wilhelm Amo. Ein Philosoph aus Afrika im Deutschland des 18. Jahrhunderts, Munich, Enhuber, 2002.

Johannes Glötzner, Der Mohr. Leben, Lieben und Lehren des ersten afrikanischen Doctors der Weltweisheit Anton Wilhelm Amo, Stekovics, Dössel, 2003.

Hannelore Heckmann, “Anton Wilhelm Amo (ca. 1707-ca.1756): On the Reception of a Black Philosopher,” in Lessing Yearbook 23 (1991): 149-158.

Ulrich van der Heyden, "Anton Wilhelm Amo, der afrikanische Philosoph," in Unbekannte Biographien. Afrikaner im deutschsprachigen Raum vom 18. Jahrhundert bis zum Ende des Zweiten Weltkriegs, Berlin, Homilius-Verlag, 2008.

Paulin J. Hountondji, Un philosophe africain dans l'Allemagne du XVIIIe siècle, Paris, Presses Universitaires de France, 1970.

Norbert Lochner, "Anton Wilhelm Amo. Ein Gelehrter aus Ghana im Deutschland des 18. Jahrhunderts," in Übersee-Rundschau (January, 1958): 22-25.

Jacob Emmanuel Mabe, Anton Wilhelm Amo interkulturell gelesen, Nordhausen, Traugott Bautz, 2007.

Simon Mougnol, Amo Afer. Un Noir, professeur d'université en Allemagne au XVIIIe siècle, Paris, Harmattan, 2010. 

Marilyn Sephocle, "Anton Wilhelm Amo (Eighteenth-Century African Philosopher)" in Journal of Black Studies 23, 2 (1992): 182-187.

Wolfram Suchier, "Ein Mohr als Student und Privatdozent der Philosophie in Halle, Wittenberg und Jena," in Akademische Rundschau 4 (1916).

Wolfram Suchier, "Weiteres über den Mohren Amo," in Altsachsen: Zeitschrift des Altsachsenbundes für Heimatschutz und Heimatkunde 1-2 (1918).

Brief discussion of Amo in the following sources (chronologically ordered):

Johann Peter von Ludewig, An announcement of Amo's first disputation in Wöchentliche Hallische Frage- und Anzeigungs- Nachrichten, 28 November, 1729. Transcription and translation here.

Carl Günter Ludovici, Entwurf einer vollständigen Historie der wolffischen Philosophie, Bd. 1, Teil 3., (pages 230-232; 361-362), Leipzig, 1738.

Hamburgische Berichte von Gelehrten Sachen, 24 November, 1739, p. 781.

Johann Heinrich Zedler, "Amo (Anton Wilhelm)," in Großes Universallexicon aller Wissenschaften und Künste, Leipzig, 1739-1750. Online version here. Translation here.

Samuel Gotthold Lange, Sammlung gelehrter und freundschaftlicher Briefe, Halle, 1747.

Johann Friedrich Blumenbach, "Abschnitt von den Negern," in Magazin für das Neueste aus Physik und Naturgeschichte, Band 4, Teil 3, Gotha, 1787, 9-11.

Henri Grégoire, De la littérature des Nègres, ou, recherches sur leurs facultés intellectueles, leurs qualités morales et leur littérature: suivies des notices sur la vie et les ouvrages des Nègres qui se sont distingués dans les sciences, les lettres et les arts, Paris, 1808, pgs. 198-202. Online version here. Translation here.

"Negroes in the Field of Philosophy," in The Negro History Bulletin 2, 9 (1939): 76.

Kwame Nkrumah, Consciencism: Philosophy and Ideology for De-Colonization, New York and London, Monthly Review Press, 1970.

Robert Fikes Jr., "Black Scholars in Europe during the Renaissance and the Enlightenment," in Negro History Bulletin 43, 3 (1980): 58-60.

Paulin J. Hountondji, African Philosophy: Myth and Reality, Bloomington, University of Indiana Press, 1983. 

Leibniz Society Annual Meeting, Montreal, October 19-20, 2012

Concordia University, Montreal
October 19-20, 2012

Programme

Friday, October 19

Hall Building, Room 769

Session I, 9:00-12:00

9:00-10:00 Douglas Marshall (University of Minnesota, Winner of the 2011 LSNA Essay Prize), "Leibniz: Geometry, Physics, and Idealism"

10:00-11:00 Martine De Gaudemar (Université de Paris X-Nanterre), "Sens et enjeux de l'expression chez Leibniz"

11:00-12:00 Tzuchien Tho (Paris), "What is expressed in Motion? Leibniz's Invention of Force and the Problem of Infinitesimals"

12:00-13:00 Lunch

Session II, 13:00-17:00

13:00-14:00 Christian Barth (Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin), "Leibniz on Sensory Appearance"

14:00-15:00 Matteo Favaretti (Università Ca' Foscari Venezia), Leibniz on True and False Ideas"

15:00-16:00 Julia von Bodelschwingh (Yale University), "It seemed Best at the Time: Goodness and Monadic Teleology"

Saturday, October 20

Hall Building, Room 769

Session III, 9:00-12:00

9:00-10:00 Ohad Nachtomy (Bar Ilan University and Fordham University), "What's Infinity got to do with Life?"

10:00-11:00 Anne-Lise Rey (Université de Lille), "Le rôle des fictions dans la philosophie naturelle de Leibniz : diversité des régimes d'expérience"

11:00-12:00 Yual Chiek (Yale University and Queens University), "A Relationist Approach to Incompossibility"

12:00-13:00 Lunch

Session IV, 13:00-16:00

13:00-14:00 Richard Arthur (McMaster University), "Leibniz on the Relativity of Motion"

14:00-15:00 Edward Slowik (Winona State University), "Space and the Extension of Power in Leibniz's Monadic Metaphysics"

15:00-16:00 Markku Roinila (University of Helsinki), "Imagination, Moral Instinct and Perfection in Leibniz"

For more information, please contact Justin Smith (justin.smith@concordia.ca) or Christian Leduc (christian.leduc.1@umontreal.ca)

Tierexperimente als Erkenntnistheorie in der frühen Neuzeit

Ein Vortrag an der Niedersächsischen Landesbibliothek zu Hannover, Freitag, 29 Juni, 2012. 

Zusammenfassung. Was haben die Naturphilosophen der frühen Neuzeit gehofft, von Tieren zu lernen? Insbesondere: Was glaubten sie, konnte man dadurch erreichen, sie aufzuschneiden? In einem frühen Text mit dem Titel Directiones ad rem medicam pertinentes von 1672 legt Leibniz nahe, dass man durch Vivisektion an Tieren, in Kombination mit Untersuchungen an menschlichen Leichen, ein zusammengesetztes Bild davon erhalten kann, wie der menschliche Körper inwendig funktioniert; und diese sind von höchstem Interesse für die Philosophen der frühen Neuzeit mit ihrem entschiedenen Interesse an Gesundheit und langer Lebensdauer als Komponenten eines guten Lebens. Aber diese Vorstellung setzt eine hinlängliche Ähnlichkeit zwischen tierischen und menschlichen Körpern voraus, um Rückschlüsse von jenen auf diese zu rechtfertigen, was vielleicht so lange relativ unproblematisch ist, wie man über bloße Anatomie spricht. Aber wenn man die Aufmerksamkeit auf die Vitalprozesse und auf die Untersuchung der Sinne, der Reizung und ähnliches richtet, muss das Modell der Tier-Maschine unausweichlich in den Hintergrund treten. Weit davon entfernt, dass dieses Modell tatsächlich als Impuls und Rechtfertigung für das Aufkommen der Vivisektion in der Mitte des 17. Jahrhunderts diente, wie oft geglaubt wird, gab es in Wirklichkeit, wie ich darlegen werde, einen breiten Konsens – wie wir besonders in den theoretischen Schriften über Vivisektion von Leibniz, Richard Lower und Robert Boyle sehen –, dass es gerade die Unrichtigkeit des Modells der Tier-Maschine war, die die Vivisektion zu einem lohnenden und Erkenntnis versprechenden Unternehmen machte.

 

Review of Divine Machines in Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews

Published: April 17, 2012

Justin E. H. Smith, Divine Machines: Leibniz and the Sciences of Life, Princeton University Press, 2011, 392pp., $45.00 (hbk), ISBN 9780691141787.

Reviewed by Jeffrey K. McDonough, Harvard University

It is widely recognized that Leibniz's philosophical thought is deeply influenced by the mathematics, physics and philosophical theology of his era. Justin E. H. Smith's Divine Machines argues that many of Leibniz's most central philosophical doctrines are similarly bound up with the life sciences of his time, where the "life sciences" are understood very broadly to include fields as diverse as alchemy, medicine, taxonomy, and paleontology. Smith's groundbreaking exploration represents an important contribution to our understanding of both Leibniz's philosophy and the study of life in the early modern era. It is to be recommended to historians, philosophers, and historians of philosophy alike. Below I highlight four central topics in Smith's book, raising some reservations along the way.

To continue reading, please go here.

The Life and Mathematical Sciences in Early Modernity, University of Cincinnati, May 11-12, 2012

Sixth Annual Conference of the Leibniz Society of North America

Concordia University, Montreal
October 19-20, 2012

Provisional Programme

Friday, October 19

Hall Building, Room 769

Session I, 9:00-12:00

9:00-10:00 Douglas Marshall (University of Minnesota, Winner of the 2011 LSNA Essay Prize), "Leibniz: Geometry, Physics, and Idealism"

10:00-11:00 Martine De Gaudemar (Université de Paris X-Nanterre), "Sens et enjeux de l'expression chez Leibniz"

11:00-12:00 Tzuchien Tho (Paris), "What is expressed in Motion? Leibniz's Invention of Force and the Problem of Infinitesimals"

12:00-13:00 Lunch

Session II, 13:00-17:00

13:00-14:00 Christian Barth (Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin), "Leibniz on Sensory Appearance"

14:00-15:00 Matteo Favaretti (Università Ca' Foscari Venezia), Leibniz on True and False Ideas"

15:00-16:00 Julia von Bodelschwingh (Yale University), "It seemed Best at the Time: Goodness and Monadic Teleology"

Saturday, October 20

Hall Building, Room 769

Session III, 9:00-12:00

9:00-10:00 Ohad Nachtomy (Bar Ilan University and Fordham University), "What's Infinity got to do with Life?"

10:00-11:00 Anne-Lise Rey (Université de Lille), "Le rôle des fictions dans la philosophie naturelle de Leibniz : diversité des régimes d'expérience"

11:00-12:00 Yual Chiek (Yale University and Queens University), "A Relationist Approach to Incompossibility"

12:00-13:00 Lunch

Session IV, 13:00-16:00

13:00-14:00 Richard Arthur (McMaster University), "Leibniz on the Relativity of Motion"

14:00-15:00 Edward Slowik (Winona State University), "Space and the Extension of Power in Leibniz's Monadic Metaphysics"

15:00-16:00 Markku Roinila (University of Helsinki), "Imagination, Moral Instinct and Perfection in Leibniz"

Dedicatory Epistles to Amo's De Humanae mentis apatheia (1734)

To the benevolent reader, the Rector and the Council of the University of Wittenberg extend a cordial welcome

In the past, the veneration given to Africa was enormous, whether for its natural genius, its appreciation for learning, or its religious organization. This continent nurtured the growth of a number of men of great value, whose genius and assiduousness have made an inestimable contribution to the knowledge of human affairs and, much more, to the knowledge of divine things. From memory, no one has ever been judged better informed in matters of daily life, nor more a man of refined manners, than Terence of Carthage. Plato himself was reborn in the Socratic interventions of Apuleius of Madaurus. His discourses were so well received in centuries past that learned men were divided into two camps: that of Apuleius contended with that of Cicero for the first prize in eloquence. And in the development of Christian doctrine, how many were its promoters who came from Africa! Only to speak of the greatest of them, let us cite Tertullian, Cyprian, Arnobius, Optatus, Augustine, whose disputed with candor across the full range of the knowledge they had acquired. Monuments, facts, martyrs, councils, all proclaim the fidelity and constancy with which these African doctors labored for the preservation of the integrity of what is sacred. In fact, to suppose that the African church only ever made concessions is to do it an injustice. Even with the Arab invasion of Africa, which brought about great changes, many things did not disappear with the domination of these invaders: all of the radiance of African technical and literary genius was not at all extinguished. In fact, letters were admired among these peoples, where the liberal sciences were cultivated; as the Moors coming from Africa crossed through Spain, they brought knowledge of the ancient thinkers, while also bringing much assistance to the development of letters, which were coming out of the darkness little by little.

African learning thus had, in the most ancient times, something to be well received. This is no less true for us, to whom it is reported that that part of the earth has at its disposition other things richer still than the wealth of books and the applications of the technical arts, as is attested by the example given by the Master in philosophy and in the liberal arts, the very brilliant Anton Wilhelm AMO, an African from Guinea. He first saw the light of day in the most distant region of West Africa, and came to Europe as a small boy. He was introduced to sacred things at Halae Juliae. The most serene princes, dukes of Braunschweig-Wolfenbüttel, August Wilhelm and Ludwig Rudolph, deployed their goodness so that he should not suffer, in his education, from the absence of a father's assistance. After having demonstrated his genius, he was brought to Halle in Saxony: there he was initiated into diverse sciences, after which he came to us. As he showed an equal spirit [in philosophy], he rallied the entire department in his favor, and all of his masters unanimously accorded to him the degree of Doctor in Philosophy.

These encomia took on greater weight still, from the praises he received thanks to his genius, to his rank, and to his admirable sense of honor; to his industry, to the knowledge he demonstrated on the occasion of public or private performances. In conducting himself thus, he brought upon himself the affection of the best men, and of the most learned, surpassing others of his generation by a head. Strengthened by the fascination that he inspired in them, he was at home in explaining philosophy to a number of them, commenting on the positions of the ancients as well as of the moderns, always choosing the clearest explanation and giving the reasons for this choice swiftly and with precision. In so doing, he clearly demonstrated his ability to understand and to teach, indicating by this that he had everything needed to obtain, soon, a post in a university, and also that this would be in line with his natural penchant. It being understood that he has not disappointed us, this is why we cannot refrain from according to him the public judgment that he is right to hope for our appreciation. We place much hope in him, and we are convinced that he is worthy of the Prince whom he piously venerates, and whom he praises in all of his statements. We pray to God to pemit him to benefit for a long time from such happiness as this, and for him to achieve his goals for the glory of the very good and mighty PRINCE LUDWIG RUDOLPH.

We pray to God for the propserity of the whole House of Braunschweig-Wolfenbüttel, so reputed in all of Germany in view of its great merits.

Written publicly and marked with the seal of the University, this 24th of May, 1733

Johannes Gottfried Kraus, current Rector of the University

**

The President solemnly salutes the brilliant author of this thesis

We publicly declare that Africa, and Guinea, one of its countries, so far from us, are your homeland. In view of its reserves of gold, this Guinea was previously called Côte d'Or by the Europeans, and was justly celebrated like a mother who bears natural goods and treasures in her womb, as also, still more, men of very great genius and of very great inventiveness. You count among these latter, very noble and very renowned Sir, with your badge of talent, of which fecundity and merit, as well as vigor and elegance, stand out among your intellectual attainments. All this led to your promotion in our university, with the unanimous applause of men of quality. No less, this thesis is today proof of all this. Because you have elegantly and knowledgeably composed it, I return it to you in its entirety and without any modifications, so tha your genius will radiate from it with that much more force. To conclude, I congratulate you with all my heart for this measure of the excellence of your erudition, but know that my esteem is still more affectionate than the words with which I express it. Permit me to sollicit, humbly and with all of my devotion, the grace of God and of the very great and very good prince, LUDWIG RUDOLPH, for whose salvation I shall never tire of calling upon Divine Majesty.

Composed at Wittenberg in Saxony, April, the year of our Lord 1734.

 

Atoms, Aggregates, and Universals in Nyāya-Vaiśeṣika

[This is the introduction to an article I am currently preparing for submission. Comments welcome]

At its most capacious, 'atomism' can be taken to refer to any theory according to which the world consists in elementary units, which are not further analyzable into something more elementary. 'Units' should be understood here not to refer to particles, but to any physical or metaphysical, quantitatively or qualitatively basic principle from which the perceptible world derives. The most familiar variety of atomism, the variety that can still be called 'atomism' even in the most restricted sense, takes the basic units as elementary particles that are (i) physical; (ii) ungenerable and incorruptible; and (ii) qualitatively neutral or lacking in 'secondary' qualities, as the color, smell, etc., of compound bodies emerge from the arrangements of the atoms constituting them.

If we take atomism of this latter variety as the standard model, which we might call 'Democritean', then we may begin to construct a typology of atomisms by plotting them in relation to criteria (i)-(iii). At some remove from the Democritean model we find Leibniz's theory of monads, according to which the basic units of reality are indeed ungenerable and incorruptible, and are responsible for the qualitative variety of the phenomenal world without themselves bearing these qualities, and yet according to which, by contrast with Democritean atomism, these requisites are not the physically indivisible constituents of the phenomenal world, in the way bricks are the constituents of a house, but rather are the metaphysical requisites of the physical world. Leibniz calls them variously 'atoms of substance' or 'metaphysical atoms'. Commentators have tended to take this doctrine, and Leibniz's labels for it, as amounting to a rejection of atomism, but on a certain more capacious view of what atomism might be, we could instead take Leibniz's claim that he is committed to metaphysical rather than physical atoms as commitment to a variety of atomism.

 Quite a bit further still from the Democritean model we find the momentary quality atoms of the 7th-century CE Buddhist philosopher Dharmakīrti, or of his predecessor, the 6th-century philosopher Dignāga. These are atoms only in the sense that they are the basic units of reality, not constituted by anything else, and not comprehensible in terms of something more fundamental.

We may represent the distinctions made so far as follows:

	Atoms are physical	Atoms are ungenerable and incorruptible	Atoms are qualitatively neutral
Democritus	Yes	Yes	Yes
Leibniz	No	Yes	Yes
Dignāga-Dharmakīrti	No	No	?

 The different varieties of atomism preserve their differences when we turn to a consideration of the composite entities or pseudo-entities that arise from the atoms. Whereas Democritean atomism gives us non-substantial physical aggregates, Dharmakīrtian atomism yields something closer to property clusters. A Leibnizian metaphysical atomism gives us what can be called entia per aggregatum, but again this aggregation does not build up composite bodies out of parts; rather, bodies result at the phenomenal level from the perceptual activity of the metaphysical atoms.

One implication of any version of atomism might be thought to be that there can be no composite substances, that anything composed out of atoms will remain only an arrangement of atoms, and nothing over and above this arrangement. A possible corollary of this point is that atomism seems to push in favor of nominalism: if aggregate entities are nothing over and above the arrangement of atoms that constitute them, then surely they cannot be the instantiation of some universal or other.

The two principles that would seem to be incompatible with atomism are called in the Nyāya-Vaiśeṣika school of Indian philosophy avayavin or 'whole', and sāmānya or 'universal'. According to D. N. Shastri, these are the "two chief synthetic or unifying principles" at work in this school (Shastri 1997, 306). Yet the principle attainment of at least the Vaiśeṣika branch of this school was to spell out an atomistic theory of the natural world, and an important question arises as to how any atomistic doctrine could possibly accommodate real wholes or universals. In at least this regard, the Dharmakīrtian variety of atomism is rather more coherent, or at least predictable, to the extent that it takes only dharmas or discrete moments to exist, and denies any causal connection between them or synthesis of them. Such synthesis can exist only in our thought. Here, Leibniz's metaphysical atomism shows as a middle road, as he evidently believes that, as a result of the perceptual activity of the simple substances from which compound bodies result, these compound bodies may be elevated to the level of corporeal substances, which is to say true unities per se. At the same time, Leibniz utterly denies the reality of universals.

We can represent the distinctions of the previous paragraph as follows:

	Atoms (physical, metaphysical, or temporal)	Wholes	Universals
Dignāga-Dharmakīrti	Yes	No	No
Leibniz	Yes	Yes	No
Nyāya-Vaiśeṣika	Yes	Yes	Yes

 In this article I would like to go some distance towards illuminating the philosophical justification of the Nyāya-Vaiśeṣika defense of 'realist atomism', which simultaneously reduces reality to elementary particles, yet holds onto the reality of the substances, and even of the kinds, constituted by these particles. I would like to do so by considering this school's account, first of all, through the lens of recent scholarship by B. K. Matilal and others, who have argued that the universal in the Nyāya-Vaiśeṣika tradition must be understood as something rather more like a mass term in the Western sense. Having established this, I would like to go on to consider Nyāya-Vaiśeṣika's realist atomism through the lens of Leibniz's corporeal-substance metaphysics, an aspect of his philosophy which many scholars have thought impossible, because incompatible with his basic monadological metaphysics. Both Nyāya-Vaiśeṣika atomism and Leibnizian corporeal-substance theory might be accused of seeking to have their cake and eat it too. But this accusation is wrong in both cases, as I'll proceed to show.

*

Bimal Krishna Matilal, The Navya-Nyāya Doctrine of Negation: The Semantics and Ontology of Negative Statements in Navya-Nyāya Philosophy, Harvard University Press, 1968.

---- ---- ---- ----, The Character of Logic in India, SUNY Press, 1998.

D. N. Shastri, Critique of Indian Realism: The Philosophy of Nyāya-Vaiśeṣika and Its Conflict with the Buddhist Dignāga School, Delhi, Bharatiya Vidya Prakashan, 1997 [1964].

Fedor Ippolitovich Shcherbatskoï, Teoriia poznaniia i logika po ucheniiu pozdneïshikh buddistov, Saint Petersburg, Izdatel’stvo Asta-Press, 1995.