HoP 462 Freedom to Philosophize: Introduction to Early Modern Philosophy
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Hi, I'm Peter Adamson, and you're listening to the History of Philosophy podcast, brought to you with the support of the Philosophy Department at King's College London and the LMU in Munich, online at historyofphilosophy.net. Today's episode, Freedom to Philosophize, Introduction to Early Modern Philosophy.

I don't know about you, but the last time I wrote into a magazine, I was probably about 11 years old and trying to win some kind of contest. And by magazine, I mean comic book. Immanuel Kant had loftier ambitions. He was provoked by a comment from a contributor to the Berlin Monthly named Johann Friedrich Zöllner, who in the midst of discussing, of all things, the role of clergy in marriage ceremonies, raised the question, what is enlightenment? Was ist Aufklärung?

Being one of the most important figures of the Enlightenment, Kant presumably figured he ought to know the answer. His response was published in a 1784 issue of the same periodical. Now, Kant is not known for readable or rhetorically effective prose. I have it on good authority that Germans sometimes read his works in English translation because they find it easier to follow than the original.

But this short essay is clear and to the point, and features some genuinely quotable lines, including the first sentence: "Enlightenment is humankind's exit from its self-incurred immaturity." As Kant immediately explains, by immaturity, Unmündigkeit, he means being unable to reason without guidance from someone else. The motto of enlightenment is thus: "Have the courage to use your own reason." Notice that Kant is here describing enlightenment, not the enlightenment.

He's interested in an attitude or frame of mind, not the historical development that had been sweeping across Europe over the previous generations. He does go on to mention things we associate with the Enlightenment, like freeing one's thought from oversight by religious institutions. Allowing a church to dictate your beliefs would be a prime example of failing to use your own reason.

Still, liberation from religion, abandonment of superstition, the unconstrained exploration of the sciences, and toleration of different viewpoints are for Kant all to be understood as natural consequences of enlightenment, not as part of what enlightenment is. Among those consequences, Kant is especially interested in the last one mentioned, toleration of diverse opinions.

unlike some Enlightenment figures, Kant does not see free speech as a step towards political revolution. He says that "a revolution may, perhaps, bring about the fall of an autocratic despotism, but it can never bring about the true reform of a way of thinking." In fact, his essay strikes a politically conservative note when it says that rulers should allow free inquiry so long as it does not lead to changes that disrupt civil order, and that one should fulfill one's obligation to the state without resistance.

In the public sphere, though, there should be no limits to one's rational investigations. Hence another quotable line, which Kant credits to a political ruler he admires, Frederick the Great. Argue as much as you want and about whatever you want, but obey.

Which is not to say that enlightenment, as Kant understands it, would have no political consequences. To the contrary, he ends the essay with a rhetorically charged passage to the effect that when the seed of free thought is carefully nurtured, it gradually blossoms as a new character amongst the people, and as political principles that treat humans not as machines, but with dignity.

The word gradually is important here. As implied in that first sentence of the essay, enlightenment is a lengthy process of maturation, not something that happens overnight. The responsibility of an enlightened ruler like Frederick is simply to ensure that reasoning has space to develop, that his subjects can reach maturity on their own.

This may sound like a disappointingly negative program. As the philosopher Onora O'Neill has written with reference to Kant's essay, the central requirement of toleration is that we do nothing. It's entirely possible that someone be allowed to express controversial views while everyone else simply ignores them. As O'Neill puts it, "...toleration is the outward face of indifference."

Yet, she goes on to argue that Kant's vision is more demanding than this. If enlightenment is to have its intended effect, people need to engage with each other's views and debate them openly. Elsewhere, Kant endorsed what he called the maxim of enlarged thought, which dictates that one should "think from the standpoint of everyone else." Enlightenment means making up your own mind, especially on matters of great importance like morality and religion.

But when making up your own mind, it is of great help to discover what is going on in the minds of others. Kant's idea that enlightenment is reasoning for oneself is not a bad way into understanding the Enlightenment as a historical event. Another hero of early modern philosophy, Baruch Spinoza, had a motto of his own that went in a similar direction, Libertas Philosophandi, the freedom to philosophize.

On this telling, the defining feature of the Enlightenment was that philosophical inquiry was pursued with an unprecedented lack of constraint. Gone was the stifling thought control exercised by the medieval and Renaissance church. Gone the suffocating uniformity of scholastic thought. It was an age when people were free as never before to propose and openly debate new and radical ideas.

Now, this is far too optimistic. There were in fact plenty of attempts to restrict the spread of those new ideas, with Spinoza himself being a prime target. And there was also a counter-enlightenment, which saw conservative thinkers reacting with dismay to the destabilizing and shocking things being said and done by free thinkers, republicans, libertines, and revolutionaries. Still, one can agree that quite a few thinkers of this time were at least trying to live out Spinoza's ideal of free thought.

Yet this is only one of many ways to understand the Enlightenment. A few years after the publication of Kant's essay in the Berlin Monthly, an anonymous contributor to the similarly named German Monthly listed 21 meanings of the term Enlightenment, complaining, "...no one agrees with others but rather creates his own language." And things have hardly gotten simpler since.

Recent scholars of early modernity disagree about when the Enlightenment began and ended, which region of Europe was its true home, what ideas were definitive of Enlightenment thought, and even how many Enlightenments there were. Of course, no one would deny that an enormous variety of agendas, arguments, and attitudes characterize the Enlightenment, and by extension what historians call early modern philosophy, which for our purposes is basically just going to mean philosophy in the 17th and 18th centuries.

But many specialists, and most non-experts, assume that a small number of central ideas gave this period of intellectual history its special character. Alongside the unfettered use of reason, which Kant thought puts the light in enlightenment, one might mention the rise of secularism and religious toleration, the use of empirical methods to advance the natural and social sciences, and the rationalization of political and economic life.

Against this, one of the more prominent historians to work on the Enlightenment in recent decades, J.G.A. Pocock, has argued that there is no single or unifiable phenomenon which the word Enlightenment consistently signifies. Rather, there was a diversity of Enlightenments animated by very different motives. In some figures, we find a desire to pursue reason while holding fast to religious convictions. Others were driven by political radicalism, still others were simply skeptics.

Alongside this range of intellectual approaches, there's the fact that the Enlightenment, or Enlightenments, evolved rather differently in different regions of Europe. In none of these regions was it obvious to intellectuals that they were carrying out a monolithic, pan-European project.

As we already saw, German intellectuals around the time of Kant did not agree on the meaning of what they called "Aufklärung", and corresponding words in other languages like "le siècle des lumières" in French, "illustration" in Spanish, "illuminismo" in Italian, and indeed the English term "enlightenment" emerged only retrospectively as historiographical terms.

So in speaking of "the Enlightenment", we risk labeling the thought of this former time in a way that the thinkers of the time would not recognize and might not appreciate, a worry that by the way applies to other historical categories we've met along the way, like Neoplatonism or Hinduism. Against Pocock's emphasis on the diversity of the period, it's been pointed out that "an Enlightenment so inclusive is in danger of losing any coherent, distinctive intellectual identity".

In this spirit, we might turn to a kind of compromised position that has been put forward by one of the most prolific scholars of the topic, Jonathan Israel. While he has acknowledged the Enlightenment as a single, highly integrated intellectual and cultural movement, he's also distinguished between a moderate and a radical Enlightenment.

The scandalous ideas of Spinoza made him the leading standard-bearer of the radical camp, and he is clearly the hero of the story Israel has told across numerous books, though he has also written about a huge number of other radicals, including Franciscus van den Enten, Pierre Bael, and Alberto Radigatti. Israel's mainstream moderates, meanwhile, include some of the most innovative and famous thinkers of the period, like Gottfried Leibniz and John Locke.

While hardly reluctant to put forward bold ideas, they wanted to stop well short of the radicalism of Spinoza and his defenders. Typical is Locke's famous defense of religious toleration, which pointedly denied that toleration should be extended to atheists. In fact, Israel has written that the general thrust of the British Enlightenment was predominantly conservative and intellectually insular.

This was a rebuke to scholars who have identified Britain as the engine of the Enlightenment, rather than France, Holland, or even Italy, where, as we'll be seeing, Naples became a hotbed of radicalism. Faced with this lack of scholarly consensus, maybe it would be best to start with what the Enlightenment was not. If we follow Kant's lead, we have to say that it replaced the self-incurred immaturity from which Enlightenment as an attitude provides an exit.

In other words, we would need to say that what came before the 17th century was, if not a time of irrationality, then a time in which reason was only used under the strict supervision and guidance of external authorities, especially the church. Unfortunately, and with all due respect to Kant, this way of characterizing the Enlightenment is pretty much a non-starter. For one thing, it could apply just as well to other places and times.

As it happens, I've written a whole book called "Don't Think for Yourself" about the fact that medieval cultures, and especially medieval Islamic culture, placed great value on autonomous thinking. There was even an Arabic word, "taqlid", which meant something like "uncritical acceptance of authority", and which was used as a term of abuse, with theologians and philosophers of the Islamic world accusing one another of failing to use reason autonomously.

To this Kant might reply that in that case the medieval Islamic world already had enlightenment. As I said, he's not talking about a historical phenomenon, but about an attitude that could in theory arise in other places and times. Someone who does want to apply Kant's idea to the historical phenomenon might add that the case of Europe was very different. In Europe, centralized church authority allowed for a degree of uniformity, maintained by coercion and censorship that would never have been possible in the Islamic world.

The Enlightenment can thus be conceived as the challenging and ultimate defeat of that monolithic culture of Christian thought. While this is not entirely false, the many episodes we've devoted to the 16th century have shown that it's not entirely true either. Yes, there was the Inquisition, but it was largely rather ineffective, and in any case responded to a breakdown of uniformity no less spectacular than anything the 17th and 18th centuries would have to offer, namely the Reformation.

Already in the 15th and 16th centuries, first the rise of humanism and then the rise of Protestantism put immense pressure on systems of thought inherited from the medieval period. We can see this in everything from writing style, refined Ciceronian Latin, not the barbarisms of the schoolmen, to political life, as when the Huguenots defended the legitimacy of deposing tyrannical rulers, to ideas about human knowledge and its limits, as when Montaigne and Sanchez revived forms of skepticism hardly seen since antiquity.

Which, I think, puts us closer to the right track. If we ask what was special about early modern philosophy, and more specifically, the Enlightenment, part of the answer should be that it was not scholasticism. Even this comes with a caveat, as we'll be seeing that scholasticism was surprisingly robust and managed to continue into the 17th century, but it was increasingly embattled and an ever larger number of philosophers were willing to abandon it completely.

In this sense, what we see in early modern Europe was simply the final fruition of a development that had been going on since emigres from Byzantium taught Italian humanists to read Plato and Aristotle in the original Greek back in the 15th century.

At that time, we already had figures like Lorenzo Valla polemicizing against scholasticism and insisting that it should be replaced with something else. Which is a reminder to be careful what you wish for, since what it was ultimately replaced with was, among other things, Cartesianism and Spinozism, presumably not what Valla had in mind.

For an example, let's start with something other than the questions about religious and political freedom that tend to dominate when people talk about the Enlightenment. Let's talk about giraffes. What exactly are they? Medieval philosophers broadly agreed on the answer, amidst much disagreement about the details. A giraffe is a combination of matter with what is called a substantial form, a principle of organization and order which animates the giraffe and makes it to be the kind of thing that it is.

The defining features of the giraffe, like its having four stomachs, being a vegetarian, and possessing a soul of the right kind, belong to it in virtue of its essence. That is what zoologists study when they seek to arrive at a scientific understanding of giraffes. As friend of the podcast, Robert Pasnow, has written in his magisterial study of metaphysics from the Middle Ages down to the 17th century, the later schoolmen were increasingly aware of the theory's vulnerability.

but they did not abandon it. As we can see from this nice passage, he quotes from the Coimbra commentators on Aristotle, whose textbooks were disseminated across Europe.

In all, it cannot be doubted that for each and every natural thing there is a substantial form, by which it is established, through which its degrees of excellence and perfection among physical composites is selected, on which every propagation of things depends, from which its aspect and character is stamped on each thing, and finally which marvelously distinguishes and furnishes the theatre of this admirable world in its variety and beauty.

Only a few years later, early modern thinkers were dismissing the theory of substantial forms. Descartes said he could make no sense of it, and Spinoza wrote a letter to his colleague, Heinrich Oldenburg, in which they were discussing the work of Robert Boyle, saying that he could not understand why Boyle had wasted his time on that childish and frivolous doctrine of substantial forms before giving it up. The question was, what would replace this childish doctrine?

One popular answer was corpuscularianism, that is the view that bodies like giraffes are made of microscopic bodies. The physical properties we experience, like the purple of the giraffe's tongue or its distinctive scent, arise from the arrangement and interaction of these tiny bodies. This idea was not new of course, it was a revival of ancient atomist theories that were now widely known thanks to the assiduous labours of those humanists.

A leading corpuscularian of the 17th century, Pierre Gassendi, was not coincidentally also a scholar of Epicureanism, an ancient philosophical school that espoused atomism. The theory had begun its resurgence already in the 16th century, in part because of chemical investigations carried out by Paracelsus and his followers, as we saw in episode 389.

But in the early modern period, philosophers began to think more deeply about the implications of giving up on substantial forms, and to see giraffes and other bodies as nothing more than aggregates of corpuscles. For some, science was still an investigation into the essences of things, but with a significant change. What is really out there is not a giraffe, but the more fundamental things of which the giraffe is made. This is what Boyle thought, for example.

More radical was a view adopted by, for instance, Thomas Hobbes and Anne Conway. They dropped talk of essences completely. Hobbes said that "Essences and all other abstract names are words artificial belonging to the art of logic and signify only the manner how we consider the substance itself," while Conway recognized only three essences, namely God, Christ, and what God has created. The created world is "a substance or essence that always remains the same and there is change only to its modes."

Conway's terminological distinction here between substance and mode is something we'll be seeing a lot. For now, we just need to register the dramatic implications of dispensing with the scholastic orthodoxy. No longer do our words and concepts latch onto anything metaphysically real. Instead, the building blocks of reality are invisible corpuscles or perhaps nothing we can grasp at all. As Pasnow aptly remarks, early modern philosophers were at risk of embracing metaphysical chaos.

This is only one example, of course, but it's a telling one. The same pattern repeats in other areas of philosophy. Ideas that had begun to emerge in the 16th century or even earlier now came out into the open. Without the consensus of scholastic Aristotelianism to constrain them, they were able to develop and incite heated debate right across Europe. The aforementioned challenge of skepticism would be another fine illustration.

When we read the beginning of Descartes' Meditations, which famously uses radical skepticism as a methodological tool, we should not forget that it comes close on the heels of the skeptical onslaught waged against scholasticism by Sánchez to say nothing of the more measured use of skeptical argumentation by Montaigne and Pierre Charon.

Here too, the recovery of ancient ideas by Renaissance humanists would be relevant. For instance, Montaigne was aware of ancient Greek skepticism. Yet Montaigne, and even more so the convinced Catholic apologist Charon, would have been appalled at the way skepticism was let loose against religion itself in the Enlightenment.

Together, these two developments, metaphysical challenges to the Aristotelian theory of essences and epistemological challenges to the Aristotelian theory of science, created perfect conditions for the rise of new conceptions of knowledge. Rather than investigating the universally valid properties of natural kinds, like giraffe, science would have to proceed using a different method. That method turned out to be empirical.

Here too, we shouldn't draw too stark a contrast with what came before. Aristotle himself was an accomplished empirical scientist, and though most scholastics were not, a few of them were. Aquinas' teacher Albertus Magnus comes to mind. And all of them were at least on paper committed to the idea that scientific knowledge derives from sense experience.

Still, the new science was genuinely predicated on innovative methodological ideas, not least the famous "scientific method" associated especially with English philosophers like Francis Bacon. When paired with new technologies of empirical observation, especially the telescope and microscope, this made for an enormous shift in the practice and potential of what was still called "natural philosophy."

Ironically enough, a drift towards skepticism wound up indirectly facilitating a huge expansion in the production of knowledge. Having mentioned Epicureanism and skepticism, I should perhaps mention that the third main Hellenistic school also had an impact at this time. In fact, it seems to have inspired the most notorious philosopher of the age.

Ever since he first put to paper a pen that was more dangerous than a sword, Spinoza has been seen as reviving ideas from the Stoics. Pierre Bael drew attention to this, noting Spinoza's determinism in particular as an echo of Stoic philosophy. And how did Spinoza and Bael know about Stoicism? Well, the school's doctrines had been expertly publicized by humanist scholars like Justus Lipsius. Nor was this the only connection between humanism and Spinozism. They were also linked by provocative approaches to the Bible.

16th century humanists like Erasmus had caused tremendous controversy by daring to apply their philological expertise to sacred scripture. Several generations later, Spinoza and contemporaries like Ludwig Meyer pronounced that the humanists had not gone far enough.

The Bible is obscure in its meaning, so to interpret it we must turn to the infallible rule of reason. As Jonathan Israel has written, Meyer himself appreciated the novelty of his project and genuinely believed that by seeking to overthrow the entire edifice of theology as traditionally conceived, he was affording mankind a vast benefit. Well put, though I'm not so sure about the novelty part.

As we only just saw in the preceding episodes, Galileo had made the same point in his clash with the church: biblical passages that may seem to show that the earth goes round the sun need to be reinterpreted in light of scientific proofs in favor of geocentrism. And I can't resist repeating that Galileo was himself adopting a position already defended by the Muslim philosopher and jurist Averroes back in the 12th century.

As we saw in episode 149, he said that the philosopher is the only one who can judge the viability of interpretations of the Quran, because philosophy gives us independent access to the truth. Averroes might have appreciated Spinoza's principle of "the freedom to philosophize" even if he would have been appalled by the way Spinoza used that freedom to depart from Aristotelian orthodoxy. That phrase brings us back to the theme of religious and political freedom that tends to dominate in our historical memory of the Enlightenment.

Yet again, we can point to precursors, in this case especially Sebastian Castelio, who had inveighed against John Calvin for consenting to the execution of a heretic in Geneva in 1533, and we covered this in episode 406. Castelio anticipated Locke by making a spirited case in favor of religious tolerance, while refusing to extend his case to cover atheists.

It must be said that his was rather a lone voice, even if his plea for toleration was echoed by Dirk Kornhert towards the end of the 16th century. Though we would be wrong to think that the ideal of religious tolerance was invented in the Enlightenment, we would not be wrong to think that it was in early modern Europe that the ideal rose to the top of the agenda, winning many adherents and forcing conservatives to devise a response. For my money, this should be understood as a long-term consequence of the Reformation.

After it proved impossible for Catholics and Protestants to settle their differences in debate or on the battlefield, many concluded that they would just have to agree to disagree. This reluctantly accepted truce then, slowly but surely, became a positively valued outcome, the freedom of thought so enthusiastically praised by Sabonosa and Kant.

It's interesting to note that for Kant, this freedom needed to be protected by a strong ruler. Much like far earlier political thinkers, he put his faith in a kind of philosopher king, in this case Frederick the Great, the most enlightened of despots. At the other end of the spectrum, in their attitudes towards autocracy, were those renegade Huguenots, who argued that tyrannicide can be justified in extreme circumstances.

In their time that was a fringe position, during the 17th century by contrast, the English actually killed their king in 1649, leaving them rather puzzled about what to do next, and the idea of popular sovereignty became mainstream. If we want to find a predecessor for this idea though, we would do best to look back not to the Huguenots, but to those embattled schoolmen.

Figures of the second scholastic like Francisco Suarez had suggested that by nature, humans have the authority to appoint rulers over themselves for the sake of ensuring order. Any political state is thus an artificial construct, one that originates in popular will. This opened the door for discussions about how the state of nature gives way to the unnatural, but possibly desirable, circumstances in which we now find ourselves.

It was Hobbes who gave the most famous answer to this question, but we can see a later figure like Jean-Jacques Rousseau as responding to the same issue. He defended a diametrically opposed view of human nature while agreeing with Hobbes and the scholastics that political institutions arise through some sort of social contract. Rousseau also disagreed with Hobbes about the acceptability of state power as he knew it, as one of many early modern thinkers who urged political reform in the direction of greater equality.

But along with many like-minded theorists, Rousseau didn't go so far as suggesting that this argument should be applied to women. The debate over the virtue and equality of women, the so-called "carrale des femmes", featured regularly in our coverage of Renaissance philosophy. It can be traced back at least as far as Costin de Pizan, who wrote in the early 15th century. So feminist discourse is another feature of early modern philosophy, with plenty of precursors. But here again we also find dramatic changes.

Humanism had opened up opportunities for women to participate in elite literary circles, they just had to learn excellent Latin. In early modern philosophy, there were further developments in the same direction, like salon culture and more generally the tendency of cutting-edge philosophy to be conducted outside the confines of male-dominated university spaces. This allowed some, almost invariably elite women, to the highest echelons of intellectual activity.

As a result, this new period will finally give us a chance to feature numerous women who were able to engage in philosophical arguments on the same terms as men. We'll see an example early on when we talk about Descartes' correspondence with Elizabeth of Bohemia, and by the end of the 18th century, we will find women authors making concrete proposals about political and educational equality for women, with Mary Wollstonecraft being just one prominent example.

Needless to say, these authors were still fighting an uphill battle, something acknowledged in passing by Kant in his essay about enlightenment. He remarks that all women refuse to reason for themselves, like most, but not all men. Such casual sexism is hardly surprising in an author of this time, any more than the casual racism that we find in plenty of enlightenment authors. David Hume and Kant himself are only two of the more prominent examples.

Even that apostle of equality, Rousseau, condemned slavery in the ancient world, but was never moved to do the same when it came to the slavery of his own day. Worse still, some heroes of the Enlightenment actually made money by investing in the slave trade. This is just one of the charges leveled against the French Enlightenment in particular by Louis Salamolin, a staunch critic of what he sees as the hypocrisy and moral bankruptcy of men who gloried in their own freedom to philosophize, even as they ignored or participated in the unfreedom of others.

Anne-Sola Moulin is certainly not alone in lamenting the tensions, or if we're honest, the obscene contradictions, between the lofty ideals of Enlightenment Europe and what these supposedly enlightened Europeans were busy doing around the world. It's a final, much more distressing example of how earlier trends were continuing. The Atlantic slave trade and early modern expansion of colonialism built on the policies adopted by Renaissance powers, especially what Portugal and Spain had been doing in Africa and in the newly contacted Americas.

Faithful listeners will already know all about those earlier depredations, and know also that at least some few philosophers, like Bartolomé de las Casas and Montaigne, had already spoken out against early colonialist practices. Unfortunately, such voices were in a minority and were utterly ineffectual, which would continue to be the case across the 17th century and most of the 18th. Should we then condemn the Enlightenment as nothing but a superficial cover for atrocities?

One man who doesn't think so is Jonathan Israel. As we saw, he interprets the Enlightenment as a unified but complex phenomenon, one that could accommodate both moderate and radical tendencies. Post-colonial and post-modernist complaints are, he thinks, often aimed at the moderate camp. When we turn to the more radical Enlightenment thinkers, we can find resources for seeing where early modern European powers went wrong.

As Israel puts it, responding to postmodern vilifiers of the Enlightenment, "This is where the answers to their partially correct, but too narrow, critique essentially lie." One might add that such answers were already being given at the time. To give just one example, the pivotal figure of the Haitian Revolution, Toussaint Louverture, critiqued colonialism and slavery by appealing to Enlightenment principles that were also invoked in the French Revolution.

This defense gains further support from another, more surprising source, Michel Foucault. If you know anything about this French thinker of the 20th century, you might expect him to have offered a nuanced and highly critical take on the Enlightenment, one that exposed its pretensions to universal knowledge and impersonal rationality as masking an attempt to exert control and power. And you'd be right.

He wrote for instance of reason as despotic enlightenment, and once said "The search for a form of morality acceptable to everybody, in the sense that everyone should submit to it, strikes me as catastrophic." Here we have a critique of the Enlightenment that is somewhat more abstract, and in a sense more fundamental.

The worry is not just that Enlightenment Europe was politically formed from Enlightened, and that its leading figures were hypocrites. Nor is it even that some of the new ideas that emerged in this period were bound up with oppression, as with Hugo Grotius's pioneering theory of international law, which helped to provide an intellectual basis for Dutch colonialism. It's that the whole notion of rationality at the core of the Enlightenment is problematic.

To view reason as a universal capacity of humankind, one that just needs to be used without constraint, as Kant demands, may seem inspiring, but it's all too easy to assume that one's own way of seeing the world is unbiased, unbounded, and rational, and that other perspectives fall short. One can put this insight together with the point about early modern colonialism and oppression,

The elite European men who dominated this period of philosophy congratulated themselves on their outstanding rationality and tended to assume that those who were not elite, not European, and not men were correspondingly defective. Yet Foucault himself adopts a more favorable position on the whole question in a piece he wrote toward the end of his life. It responds to Kant's essay and bears the same title, What is Enlightenment? He says much the same as Israel, commenting that the Enlightenment is the age of the critique,

This is a genuinely Kantian thought, given that Kant once urged, reason must in all its undertakings subject itself to criticism. It would be truly enlightened, in Kant's sense, to call attention to the hypocrisies of Europe during the Enlightenment, and to the way that reasons and ideals of rationality were instrumentalized towards political ends. In any case, says Foucault, the point is not to be for or against the Enlightenment, but to understand it as a historical phenomenon, one that still conditions our own culture.

Or should I say, understand it as several historical phenomena? By this, I don't mean to raise again the question of whether there were multiple intellectual dimensions to the Enlightenment. I mean to return to the question of geographical diversity. How strongly did the Enlightenment, and early modern philosophy more generally, take on a special character in each region of Europe? Israel has something to say about this as well.

Nothing could be more mistaken than to suppose that national arenas evolved in relative isolation from each other, or that national contexts were decisive in shaping the broad pattern of intellectual development. Yet he admits that regionality did make a difference, giving the example of the great philosopher of history Gian Battista Vico, who had mastery of classical languages, but claimed not to read any works in any modern language apart from Italian.

And we've already seen Israel associating a specific national character with the British Enlightenment, namely a tendency towards conservativism. Personally, I think there is something to be said for a regional approach, for instance that it allows us to follow more easily how ideas were evolving in response to events in each nation. Besides, with this much material to cover, one has to break it into manageable chunks somehow. So over the many episodes to come, this is how I'm going to proceed.

As I did with philosophy in Renaissance and the Reformation, I will divide things up geographically. Thus, in a first series, I'll be covering philosophy in France and the Netherlands, with a briefer excursion to Italy and Spain. This series will take us up to the late 18th century and the eve of the French Revolution. We'll then turn to the British Isles for a second series on early modern philosophy. And finally, move on to Germany, bringing things full circle by coming back to Kant.

And in that last series on German philosophy, I'll also look at developments in Scandinavia and Eastern Europe. Now, when I say many episodes, I mean it. I would expect this coverage of 17th and 18th century philosophy to extend across at least 250 installments, meaning that it will take a number of years to complete, optimistically assuming that I manage to keep producing the podcast for that long.

As always, along the way there will be interviews with expert colleagues, some of whom have already been giving me advice on tackling this exciting, but daunting, new challenge. While I think a geographical approach does make sense, I would admit that it has drawbacks. Consider, for example, that Leibniz, being a German thinker, will be covered more than 100 episodes later than French and Dutch contemporaries, like Spinoza.

Since Leibniz was obviously a very influential author, I'll occasionally have to refer to him and sketch some of his ideas even before having given him proper treatment. But, given how much was happening in this period right across Europe, this sort of thing would happen with pretty well any organization of the material. Another problem is that our philosophers tend to move around from one place to another. The aforementioned Alberto Radicati is a good example.

Born in 1698 in Piedmont, he served at a court in Turin and then lived in France and in England, where his cheerfully titled treatise, Philosophical Dissertation on Death, was published in 1732, before he finally died in the Netherlands. For a guy named Radikati, he sure was rootless. That one is for all you humanists out there.

Another example I've already mentioned would be Pierre Bael, whose physical journeys were brought on by spiritual ones. He was born a Protestant in southern France, converted to Catholicism, and fled to Calvinist Geneva after relapsing. He then returned to France, only to go on to the Netherlands to escape the unfavorable conditions for Protestants under Louis XIV. That's how this French thinker wound up being known as the "Philosopher of Rotterdam." Philosophers could also cross borders in their minds without moving house.

As far as I know, the major woman philosopher, Émilie du Chatelet, was always based in France, but she engaged deeply with the physics of Isaac Newton in her work and produced a translation of his Principia. So again, I'll have to anticipate at least a few points about Newtonianism when I get to du Chatelet and other French thinkers who took an interest in his thought.

Because cross-border movement of ideas is such an important feature of early modern philosophy, and one that my overall scheme will tend to obscure, I want to focus briefly on the phenomenon before we launch into this first series on French and Dutch philosophy. I'll do this by looking at the so-called Republic of Letters, a term that refers to the learned communications that united intellectuals across Europe, and occasionally even further afield.

I've already mentioned a nice example of this in passing, with the case of the Dutch-Portuguese Spinoza writing a letter to the German Oldenburg about the Englishman Boyle. And there's a lot more where that came from. So join me next time for an episode that really will be something to write home about, here on the History of Philosophy Without Any Gaps.