Justin E. H. Smith

Upcoming Talks in 2011

Colloquium Series of the School of Historical Studies, Institute for Advanced Study. “The Role of Long-Distance Cultural Exchange in the Rise of Modern Philosophy: Some Case Studies and Some Questions,” Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton, New Jersey, January 30, 2011.

Leibniz and Reality: A Symposium of the Gottfried-Wilhelm-Leibniz-Universität zu Hannover. “Perception and Appetite: From Physiology to Metaphysics,” Hannover, Germany, March 25-26, 2011.

18^th-Century Colloquium Series of the Department of History, Princeton University. “ ‘Like salt in cured ham’: Chemical Pietism and the Role of the Soul in the Body, 1700-1720,” Princeton, New Jersey, March 30, 2011.

Cultures of the Internet: Identity, Community, and Mental Health: a Workshop of the Advanced Study Institute of the Division of Social and Transcultural Psychiatry, McGill University. “Extended Minds and Prosthetic Souls: Some Implications of the Internet for the Concept of Personhood,” McGill University, Montreal, April 26-29, 2011.

Workshop on the Life Sciences in Early Modern Philosophy. “‘Between Divination and Prediction: Epistemological Problems of Medical Diagnosis in Leibniz's Directiones ad rem medicam pertinentes,” Department of Philosophy, Princeton University, May 7-8, 2011.

Colloquium Series of the Eötvös Loránd University. “Classification and the Concept of Race in Early Modern Science: A Cognitive Approach,” Budapest, Hungary, May, 2011.

L’art de lire: Un colloque de l’ENS Lyon. “Peut-on lire la Genèse comme histoire naturelle? Du figurisme jésuite au Telliamed,” Ecole Normale Supérieure, Lyon, France, May, 2011.

Ninth International Leibniz Congress. “Between Natural History and Theodicy: Leibniz on Human Racial Difference,” Gottfried-Wilhelm-Leibniz-Universität zu Hannover, Hannover, Germany, September, 2011.

Annual Lecture Series of the Center for the Philosophy of Science, University of Pittsburgh. “Towards a Science of the Past: Archaelogy, Abductive Inference, and Intellectual History,” Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, October, 2011.

A Recent Talk

Kant on Jokes

[Draft of a paper presented to the Montreal 'Reflection on Art and Aesthetics' Workshop, 9 April, 2009. To vote for a version of this essay in the 3QD Philosophy Prize Competition, go here.]

Justin E. H. Smith

 We may as well start with a joke:

Primatologist to chimpanzee: “Bongo, bring me some food.”
(Bongo brings a pile of stones instead of food, and shows a wide, teeth-bearing grin.)

Alright, perhaps not a joke, really. More a primate proto-joke. However we classify it, though, I believe this report (based on a true story), gives us everything we need to generate a theory of humour. To get there, we will have first to do some propaedeutic work, in order to determine exactly what such a theory ought to explain, as also some metatheoretical work to explain where exactly such a theory fits in relation to other, similar projects. 

1. The Funny and the Beautiful

Arthur Danto has noted that every systematic philosopher, whether a refined aesthete or a complete philistine, has at some point taken on the topic of art.  One might add that nearly every one of these has included an account of wit, humour, jokes, comedy, or laughter, or some combination of these, within his theory of art and beauty.  Why is this? Is gelastics –to borrow a neologism coined by Mary Beard from the Greek ‘gelan’: ‘to laugh’-- a subdomain of aesthetics? Let us consider some of the reasons for holding such a view.

There seems to be a great similarity between the way people talk about the ‘aesthetic stance’ and the way they conceive the ‘sense of humour’. The perception of something as a joke or as a work of art requires a certain stance or perspective. Even if it is hard to say what this will be, it seems that the explanations for the one often serve just as well as accounts for the other. For example, Edward Bullough’s criterion of psychical distance, which would account for the reluctance theatre-goers feel at the thought of getting up to save Desdemona from Othello, seems to function in the same way to provide the moral distancing that enables one to laugh at a cruel joke (and most, perhaps all, jokes are cruel, a point to which we might return later).

Comments on Antonio Clericuzio

"Mechanical and Iatrochemical Theories in 17th-Century Physiology"

University of Sydney
Sydney, Australia, 20 February, 2009

In this subtle and well-argued paper, which takes up and develops some of the aspects of his  2000 book, Elements, Principles, and Corpuscles, Antonio Clericuzio seeks to challenge the traditional scholarly distinction between iatromechanism, representedmost prominently by Descartes, and iatrochemistry of the sort practiced by Paracelsus and J.-B. van Helmont.  Between the book and the numerous articles and papers that have followed, on the one hand, and on the other hand the equally forceful revisionist work of scholars such as John Henry, it seems to me however that it may be time now for scholars who do not draw a firm boundary between quantitative corpuscalarianism and qualitative chemical philosophy, but instead recognize an enormous middle ground of qualitative corpuscularianism, to stop thinking of themselves as the eternal opposition and to pronounce their historically more rigorous and adequate interpretation of the lay of the land in the 17th century instead as ‘the new tradition’. 

If we could make the two traditions distinct, if we could separate them conceptually even as we acknowledge that nowhere can they be found in their pure forms, we might say that, for an iatromechanist, living beings are ontologically of a pair with nonliving things, since their operations are peformed by particles of inert matter following the owhat Descartes calls the "minor laws" that govern the rest of nature.  Of iatrochemistry, we would say in contrast that the body is, as Clericuzio puts it, a chemical ‘laboratory’, whose most basic processes are chemical, and ultmatiely qualitative, changes.

Clericuzio surveys important moments of the chemical tradition from early Paracelsianism through Robert Boyle, (who is the terminus ad quem of Clericuzio’s story) showing how, particularly in the context of English physiological work of the second half of the 17th century, where Descartes had only very limited impact, the line between the two traditions is not nearly so distinct as we have ordinarily believed.   

Comments on Arash Abizadeh's The Oscillations of Thomas Hobbes

McGill University, 21 March, 2009

Justin E. H. Smith

Abizadeh’s Hobbes is an oscillator, not in the recent sense this term has acquired, of a measure in stable, repetitive variation around a central value, but in the original sense of the word --which makes its first appearance in English in 1658--  of something that swings unstably.  The oscillation is not around a central value, but between two poles, namely, mental inspection and linguistic convention.  The movement between these poles, Abizadeh thinks, is one that ripples throughout all of the subdomains of his vast philosophical project.   

With respect to his theory of truth, the oscillation manifests itself as one between correspondence and convention.  While most commentators have associated a correspondence theory of truth with Hobbes’s natural philosophy, and a conventionalist theory with his moral and political philosophy, Abizadeh thinks this is mistaken.  At the outset, at least, I am strongly inclined to agree with him: Hobbes had a unitary project, and to the extent that this project was seen to require a theory of truth as its foundation, he could not have risked fragmenting it by employing different theoretical accounts for different parts of it.   

It is also in part because Hobbes has a unitary philosophical project, in which the natural philosophy has consequences for the political, and vice versa, that one might have cause to fear a crippling bipolarity.  As Abizadeh explains in his elegant introduction, it is the sovereign who must be, for Hobbes, the ultimate arbiter of meaning and truth, while at the same time the fundamental truths of Hobbesian science must be true indepedently of the sovereign’s will.  Does, then, the sovereign have the authority to define words in a way that contadicts science?  Abizadeh maintains that, for Hobbes, insofar as he is  pulled toward the pole of mental inspection, the sovereign could not possibly make such science-contradicting propositions ‘stick’. The laws of nature do not morally oblige, even though they have independent evaluative standing to the extent that they point to instrumental goods that are independent of convention.  Science, as the product of mental inspection, identifies truths that limit the sovereign’s authority, while also discovering the need for an absolute sovereign, and the need to secure his absolute rule by means of convention.