Historical episodes
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Comenius, The Way of Light: “to plant the heavens and lay the foundations of the earth”
John Amos Comenius, The Way of Light, translated by E. T. Campagnac (The University Press of Liverpool, printed by Hodder & Stoughton (London), 1938). In Via Lucis, vestigata et vestiganda [“The Way of Light,” written in 1641 but not published until 1668], John Amos Comenius proposed to a group of scholars on its way toward becoming the Continue reading
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Encyclopédie
Philipp Blom, Enlightening the World: Encyclopédie, The Book That Changed the Course of History (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004). A bookseller named André-François Le Breton hired an Englishman named John Mills to translate Ephraim Chambers’ Cyclopedia from English into French in the early 1740s. It turns out that Mills’ fluency in French was rather limited Continue reading
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Comenius, The Labyrinth of the World and the Paradise of the Heart
Jan Amos Komensky, The Labyrinth of the World and the Paradise of the Heart, trans. Howard Louthan and Andrea Sterk (New York: Paulist Press, 1998). Originally published in 1623, but again published in 1663 with additions. Comenius writes in the person of a pilgrim who has decided to survey all the walks of life before Continue reading
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Descartes’s new operating system: the “iThink”
There is no text more commonly read in philosophy courses than Descartes’s Meditations on First Philosophy. This is astonishing, given that the work was written well over three centuries ago. To some extent, to be sure, it is so commonly assigned simply because it is so commonly assigned; that is, it is hard to imagine Continue reading
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Overcoming Babel
We all seek to capture the world with a net of language. Yet it is in the nature of nets to capture some things and let others slip away, and that goes for languages too. Our words turn experiences into objects, qualities, and actions, and we can build these into a kind of structure, a Continue reading
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Hobbes, Boyle, and the vacuum pump
Sometime in the late 1650s, Robert Boyle built an apparatus that removed the air from within a glass dome. The members of the newly-formed Royal Society promptly set about devising all manner of experiments to perform with the newfangled device. They placed candles, mercury barometers, and then – just as one might expect of unsupervised Continue reading
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The aural time traveler
Some years back my musicologist friend introduced me to the charming world of gramophones. (A brief history may be in order: before there were iPods and YouTube, there were CDs; before that, there were vinyl records, still very much in vogue among hipsters today; and before that – from roughly 1895 to 1950 – there Continue reading
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Quaere, how much do we really see?
How much of the world do we actually experience? Of course, I’m not bemoaning the shortness of human life, or the narrow range of the visual spectrum, or the insensitivities of our skins and tongues. There’s no doubt we’re missing out on a lot. But within the world of our experience – how much of Continue reading
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Leibniz’s Stepped Reckoner, and a clock to last for the next 10,000 years
In 1671, in some letters exchanged with the French mathematician Pierre de Carcavy, Leibniz mentioned his plans to create a calculating machine. Apparently, he had been inspired by a pedometer, probably thinking that if machines could count, they could then calculate. Within a couple of years, he hired a craftsman build a wooden prototype of Continue reading
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Quotes from Bréhier’s Plotinus
Émile Bréhier, The Philosophy of Plotinus, translated by Joseph Thomas (UChicago, 1958) The history of philosophy does not reveal to us ideas existing in themselves, but only the men who think. Its method, like every historical method, is nominalistic. Ideas do not, strictly speaking, exist for it. It is only concrete and active thoughts that Continue reading
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Monod, Solomon’s Secret Arts
Paul Kléber Monod, Solomon’s Secret Arts: The occult in the age of enlightenment (Yale UP 2013). In 1650, scientific thinking could not be separated from fascination for alchemy, astrology, witchcraft, spell casting, and prophecy – for short, “the occult”. By 1815, the separation was pretty definite, even if attempts to confound the two persist to this Continue reading
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Anthony Pagden, The Enlightenment and why it still matters
Anthony Pagden, The Enlightenment and why it still matters (Random House, 2013) The overall purpose of the book is to describe the Enlightenment as an intellectual phenomenon, a matter of ideas being thought and books being written, published, and read. There is little attention paid to what we might call the material conditions of history Continue reading
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Israel, A Revolution of the Mind
Jonathan Israel, A Revolution of the Mind (Princeton UP, 2010). This book is based on lectures Israel gave at Oxford in 2008 in honor of Isaiah Berlin. The overall aim is to show how modern democracy emerged from the tension between Moderate Enlightenment and Radical Enlightenment. The chief maxim of Radical Enlightenment is “that all Continue reading
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Hume and the expedition to Canada
In 1746, Hume returned to London after touring Europe as tutor and caretaker of the mad Marquess of Annendale. He was not sure what was next in his life. He was already 35 and somewhat ashamed of not having yet made a career for himself. He resolved to return to Scotland, but at the last Continue reading
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Hume falls into a bog, promises his way out
At the beginning of book three of his Treatise on Human Nature, David Hume argues that justice is something we invent. In a word, justice is unnatural. It isn’t something we just see in the world, since we only ever see what is, and nothing in what we see tells us how things ought to Continue reading
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Review of Phillipson’s Hume
Review of Nicholas Phillipson, Hume (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1989). Many people know of David Hume the great empiricist, the skeptic of causality, and the architect of a moral system based on natural sentiments. But in his own day, Hume was most famous as an historian and political analyst. This book helps us by Continue reading
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“The Metaphysician and the Hole in the Ground”
“In his middle to late thirties (over the years 1679-85), Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz spent more than three years in his visits to a silver mining region in the Harz mountains. He believed he could devise new and more efficient ways of pumping water out of the deep shafts, enabling miners to dig even deeper and Continue reading
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Sea battles, beasties in the blood, and the summer of 1665
In the summer and autumn of 1665, a German expatriate in London exchanged a series of fascinating letters with a renegade Dutch Jew. The expatriate was Henry Oldenburg, who was serving as secretary of the newly-formed Royal Society of London. The Royal Society of London for the Improvement of Natural Knowledge – which, if formed Continue reading
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Nicomachus, Introduction to Arithmetic
Nicomachus’s Introduction to Arithmetic is not merely about numbers. It is a treatise aimed at providing a mathematical metaphysics for all entities of any quantity or size whatsoever. It is said that Plato had a sign above the entryway to his academy: “Let no one enter who is ignorant of mathematics”. Nicomachus (c. 60-120 c.e.) Continue reading
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Hume and causality
(Note: I’ve decided to start posting some lectures I’ve written out, under the new category “from the old yellowed notes”.) We can examine our lives from the inside or from the outside. From the inside we jump from thought to thought, from sensation to sensation, with memories mixing in with new ideas, interrupted by our Continue reading
Huenemanniac 