HoP 463 Doctors without Borders: the Republic of Letters
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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, Doctors Without Borders, The Republic of Letters. Here's a story I read recently about some mathematicians who were chatting about numbers over a meal.

One challenged another to recite a long prime number and instantly got the answer, 2 to the power of 31 minus 1. No, said the first, I want a number where you can recite all the digits. A third mathematician who was listening said, how about 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 9, 8, 7, 6, 5, 4, 3, 2, 1. Yes, that extremely memorable number is indeed prime.

The anecdote reminds me of a more famous story about the Indian mathematician Srinivasa Ramunajan. A colleague who was visiting him had arrived by taxi, and the taxi number was 1729. When the visitor remarked, apparently struggling to make conversation, that this was rather a boring number, Ramunajan immediately shot back, "No, it is a very interesting number. It is the smallest number expressible as the sum of two cubes in two different ways."

This sort of nerdy fun has been going on since at least the 17th century, when Maron Mersenne traded mathematical challenges with his friends, for example to find two numbers that are each the sum of three squares, and whose sum is also the sum of three squares. Though there's a significant difference from modern anecdotes, Mersenne and his friends indulged their taste for mathematical puzzles by post.

Mersenne wrote a lot of letters. His surviving correspondence is published in 17 volumes and includes 146 letters he received from Descartes. In fact, Mersenne is most often thought of as a source of information about his far more famous friend, like Boswell, who wrote about the life of Samuel Johnson.

At the time, though, Marcin was celebrated in his own right. He helped to disseminate knowledge of Galileo's ideas in France by writing on his mechanics and cosmology. He contemplated such projects as writing a most perfect melody and devising a quasi-mathematical language that could be used universally, even to communicate with people who live on the moon, if there turned out to be any. He also contributed to the debate over skepticism in early 17th century France.

But Mersenne's most important role was precisely the writing and receiving of all those letters. He thought of his extensive correspondence as an attempt to create a kind of virtual academy uniting scholars across all of Europe, or at least all of France. His epistolary network included some 70 colleagues who were indeed all over Europe, for instance in Basel, Oxford, Paris, Prague, Amsterdam, and Florence, as well as various cities in France.

One contemporary said that he was like the heart of the Republic of Letters, responsible for the circulation of ideas as blood circulates through the body.

This phrase, "republic of letters," goes back to the 15th century. The Latin "res publica literarum" appeared as early as 1415, appropriately enough, in a letter, written by a Venetian humanist. Scholars of the Renaissance, notably Erasmus, already corresponded extensively with one another. But the phrase "republic of letters" is most often applied to a scholarly culture that arose in early modern Europe.

It was facilitated by the establishment of regular postal routes that were gradually introduced in the 17th century, a milestone being Henry IV's decision in 1603 to allow the French royal couriers to carry letters for the public. What they carried in their saddlebags might be elegant, rhetorically crafted epistles like those of Erasmus and other humanists. On other occasions, they were dashed off just in time for the postman and might adopt an ingratiating, cajoling, or intimate tone.

Above all, they expressed an emerging attitude towards scholarship as a joint enterprise. Inquisitive men, and occasionally women, as we'll see, used letters to pose open questions, run ideas past each other, ask favors, make introductions, and find new additions to their collections, whether what was being collected was mathematical solutions or antique coins.

Voltaire, looking back at this phenomenon from the vantage point of the mid-18th century, wrote that "a republic of letters was being gradually established in Europe, in spite of wars and different religions. Every science, every art, was mutually assisted in this way."

Another French author, writing somewhat later in 1780, spoke of "an empire that holds sway only over the mind, which we honor with the name 'republic' because it preserves a measure of independence and it is almost its essence to be free." The thought here being that the very term "republic" evokes equal citizenship among free men.

We duly find members of these networks calling each other fellow citizens, and observing that, if the commerce of letters is a true republic, as its name says, it seems that its true character must be liberty. Open communication across socioeconomic boundaries could sometimes be awkward, and lower-born scholars had to choose their words carefully when writing to members of the nobility. Yet, the republic of letters was far less hierarchical than the broader society of the period.

What distinguished a member of this republic was knowledge, not noble birth. Nor were religious divides allowed to interrupt the flow of information and ideas. When Pierre Bael founded his pioneering Journal of the Republic of Letters in 1684, he let it be known that religious affiliation would play no part in selecting the contributors who would appear in its pages.

here he proclaimed it is a question not of religion but of science we must therefore lay aside all those terms that divide men into factions and consider that point that unites them which is the quality of being an illustrious man in the republic of letters

It must be said that this conviction was sometimes undermined by sectarian bias. Ironically, Protestant scholars often assumed that Catholics could not be truly open-minded men of letters precisely because Catholics, and especially Jesuits, were themselves too prejudiced to engage in the dispassionate search for knowledge.

In general, though, the point holds. The exchange of ideas by letter was remarkably egalitarian and opened up opportunities for friendships based on shared intellectual interests rather than class, nation, or religious conviction. As the mathematician and philosopher d'Alembert remarked, the man of letters should deal only with those whom he can treat and regard in all security as his equals and his friends.

One man who was widely appreciated as epitomizing these values was Nicolas-Claude-Fabry de Perrec. Born in 1580, he enjoyed an education in Italy, Montpellier, and Aix, served in Parlement, and got a view of court life, but then spent the last 15 years of his life in Provence, away from the center of the action in Paris. It helped that he lived in Marseille, a way station between Paris and Italy, which meant that travelers could stop off to see him.

But mostly he stayed in touch by writing, even with colleagues who lived in the Ottoman Empire. A collection of painted portraits at his house displayed his pen pals, including such luminaries as Joseph Skaliger, Isaac Cazabon, Justus Lipsius, Grotius, Peter Paul Rubens, a self-portrait, and Galileo. Perek tried to exploit his connections by interceding with a high-ranking cardinal to help Galileo when he was on trial, warning that this persecution was making the astronomer into another Socrates.

Pérec also organized such initiatives as a multi-city observation of a lunar eclipse, intended to help establish the longitude of the cities in question. He was himself a practicing astronomer, in fact, the first person to see a nebula through a telescope. We know all this in part because of his letters, more than 10,000 of which survived, and in part thanks to a biography written by the French philosopher Pierre Gossandie.

Given that Gassendi's name is now far better remembered than Perek's, this may seem as if Johnson had written a biography of Boswell instead of vice versa. But Gassendi enjoyed a close friendship with Perek. Meursin said that they were one heart and one soul. In another comparison involving Socrates, Gassendi admired Perek as being, like that great Athenian, a citizen of the whole world.

Perek won the respect of Ghassandi and others in part through his even temperament and fortitude in the face of adversity, manifestations of the virtue of constancy. Humanist scholars like Justus Lipsius had made this central to their revival of Stoic ethics. As you might remember, Lipsius' most important work was in fact called On Constancy. According to Ghassandi, Perek adopted constancy as his goal in life after witnessing a battle between a flea and a louse under a microscope.

The sight of the blood pumping furiously through the body of the louse made him reflect on the effects of anger on his own body. Perhaps it also led him to see disputes between humans as being no less trivial in the grand scheme of things. Following this ideal, Perek advised Mersenne to be sparing and gentle with criticism of others, and avowed that "time and the maxims I have practiced" had helped him to preserve equanimity despite a series of illnesses.

All this was pretty typical for the Republic of Letters, whose name also suggests a parallel to pre-imperial Rome, when Stoicism was an ascendant ethical worldview. Another of Perrec's friends, Gabriel Naudet, recommended the works of Seneca, Marcus Aurelius, Montaigne, and Charon for their Stoicizing instruction. Another key virtue for the citizens of this republic was loyalty, or at least dependability.

A study by Anne Goldgar has emphasized the way that collaborations and correspondences were held together by communal standards and elaborate codes of certainty. Scholars were expected to be generous with their time and expertise, so that a request for information might be introduced as follows, I am availing myself of the privileges accorded in the Republic of Letters, which authorize one to seek out the help one needs.

In one astounding story told by Golgar, the French humanist Jean Leclerc agreed to drop his project of editing a text by Aristotle's student Theophrastus when he learned that a British colleague was at work on it too. Leclerc even sent his colleague all the notes he had assembled for his own intended edition. Such generosity and friendship was tested by another fundamental commitment of the Republic, namely honesty.

Citizens of the Republic often pass judgment on each other's work, for instance in the pages of Bale's influential Journal of the Republic of Letters. The just-mentioned Leclerc was not too thrilled about this, deriding Bale as the illustrious author of the Republic of Letters who has set himself up as universal judge of all the books which will appear from now on. Reviewers were meant to give their sincere opinions, a tricky task if one were reviewing a book by a friend or a benefactor.

Authors occasionally reviewed their own books, though this came to be seen as stretching the expectation for honesty a bit too far. Though if any journal out there would like me to review any of my own books, then just get in touch. Goldgar concludes from her survey of these attitudes that it was above all ethics and not scientific advancement that held together the Republic of Letters. Brilliance was an asset, but politeness and civility were absolutely crucial.

Certainly, letter writing could be the vehicle for intellectual projects of the highest standard. We see this from the participation of such figures as Mersenne and Descartes, and one might also mention Leibniz, who did us the favor of keeping draft copies of the many letters he wrote, along with the ones he received. The resulting archive contains some 15,000 letters, and has been the object of a long-standing editorial project here in Germany.

If you go to the bonus episodes section on the podcast website, you'll find my interview with Michael Carhart, author of a recent study of Leibniz's attempt to investigate the history of languages around the world, all without leaving his office. Leibniz's idea was that the prehistoric movement of peoples across the earth can be tracked by noting similarities between different languages.

He thus anticipated the later discovery that languages from Greek and Latin to Persian and Sanskrit are all part of a single Indo-European family. Seeking to prove his theory, Lagnes dispatched numerous missives requesting word lists from different languages along with translations of the Lord's Prayer. His inquiries went as far as China, since he hoped that Jesuit missionaries there could help him reveal the place of the Chinese language within his overall scheme.

One of these letters encourages his recipient to help by speaking of a commerce of light that we could give all of a sudden to the works of the Chinese of several thousands of years, and to bring their works to our own and to double, so to speak, our true riches on both sides. This is something greater than one can imagine.

Plenty of ambition and brilliance on show here, then. But many participants in the Republic of Letters were focused on less theoretical matters. Again, Perek is a good example. His astronomical and other scientific interests notwithstanding, he was above all an antiquarian, whose historical interests included ancient weights and measures.

The leading expert on him, Peter N. Miller, thus admits that Perek was no philosopher, though he adds that his scholarly practice, and by extension that of his admirers, made him philosophical. Perek admitted that his collection of antiquities might seem trivial or dilettante-ish to some, but distinguished between his own scholarly pursuits and the merely decorative collections of certain wealthy contemporaries.

He quoted with agreement a friend who said that letting antiquities fall into the hands of such men is not much better than throwing them into the sea. One modern scholar of the Republic of Letters has nonetheless observed that Perek and his like had a "style of polite, encyclopedic learning perhaps more marked by curiosity than science." The so-called "philosophe of the Enlightenment" would have agreed. Erudition could be acquired through nothing more than wide reading. What they were after was bold and original insight,

It's an attitude well summed up in Voltaire's poem The Temple of Taste, which puts the following remark into the mouths of the so-called erudites: "We are in the habit of editing constantly and exactly what has been thought, but we don't think ourselves." This might suggest a smooth progression from Erasmian humanism in the 16th century to genteel collaborative scholarship in the 17th century Republic of Letters, and finally to the free-thinking and provocative enlightenment thought of the 18th century.

But, just as the 17th century already saw the roots of the Enlightenment, so the 18th century had its fair share of socially conservative antiquarians. Take for instance, Esprit-Claude François Calvet. He is an outstanding example of the survival of the Republic into the late 18th century and beyond given that he died only in 1810.

In a study of the circle of correspondence gathered around Calvé, LWB Brockless argues that the Enlightenment itself was actually, to use a phrase that is rather apt in this context, part and parcel of the Republic of Letters. Radical freethinking was, to change the metaphor, only one strand within the complex tapestry of intellectual exchange in this period.

Cahvée and his friends continued to uphold the neo-Stoic moral code focused on the virtues of fortitude, self-control, and generosity. Failing to respond to a request was both lapse of etiquette and failure to advance the cause of knowledge. Like Pérec before him, Cahvée was a collector, albeit one whose taste ran not to history but to natural specimens like fossils and crystals.

He and his circle used the language of "enlightenment" to describe their activities, even if these included the hobby of a bishop who was a "noted collector of dried fish." Enlightened these men may have been, but they did not entertain radical political motions. Calvet was imprisoned during the French Revolution for being an extremely pronounced aristocrat, and when he was released, offered medical services to the revolutionary army, but only to stay out of trouble.

So, Calvet would probably have found the Republic of Letters as it existed back in the time of Mersenne quite familiar. But there had been some key changes, in the form of new organizations and contexts of discussion that emerged throughout the 17th and 18th centuries. Though scholars never stopped writing to one another, the context and purpose of their messages was radically transformed by these institutional developments. For one thing, there was an increasingly blurry boundary between private correspondence and public dissemination.

We see this from the career of the British literary maven Samuel Hartlib, whom a friend called the "hub of the Axel tree of knowledge," because not unlike Mersenne in France, he connected together scholars and shared their discoveries by making them more widely available. Hartlib, in fact, had the habit of printing works sent to him without asking the author's permission,

When he helped the Anglo-Irish religious reformer Dorothy Moore by sending her writing to the press on his own initiative, she reacted furiously, in a letter of course, writing, Notice though that her objection was not to the publicity as such, it was because the published text was still an unpolished draft.

Usually, Hartlib's colleagues forgave such indiscretions because his imprimatur on a piece of writing was a vote of confidence and a sign of quality. Hartlib himself never wrote anything, but was proud that he could connect authors to one another and to the public. Explaining the value of this service, he said, "...it is certainly quite impossible for each individual, and especially those burdened with other business, by personal observation and experience of all things, to obtain certain knowledge."

The Republic of Letters was itself intimately connected to further changes at the institutional level. As we'll be seeing in episodes to come, much science and philosophy was done in the context of learned societies and in the more informal setting of the Salon. In both cases, letters remained important. Henry Oldenburg, the secretary of the Royal Society, used the post to stay in touch with scientists across Europe.

He introduced researchers to people who could provide the information they needed, as when he wrote to Boyle passing on a request from a correspondent who had been asking about the waters at Bath. He not judging himself to be philosophical enough to devise matter of his own. The Salon was another way to bring together people who were learned, or at least witty. In this case, the meetings were in person, of course, but it was common at these gatherings to read out letters from those who were not present.

Finally, I should mention again the appearance of journals, like the one founded by Bale, which soon found many imitators. These put the sort of material previously found in private letters before the public. Journals were an important tool for joining together the forces of scattered scholars and could disseminate knowledge far more widely than the personal letter.

Some journals were intended to acquaint readers of French with what was happening elsewhere in Europe, like the Bibliothèque Germanique, Bibliothèque Angloise, and Bibliothèque Italique, which published scholarship from Germany, England, and Italy, respectively. This brings me back to my motivation for addressing this whole topic here at the beginning of our coverage of early modern philosophy.

As I said last time, that coverage will be organized geographically, which could obscure the extent to which scholars and their ideas crossed borders. One point of the name "Republic of Letters" was that it was indeed just one republic, a kind of quasi-state spanning across real political divides. This was not just wishful thinking, as we can see from the fact that correspondence continued between scholars even when their respective nations were at war.

Voltaire was right to say that the Republic was established in spite of wars and different religions. Yet, national pride often threatened to rise above the surface. The citizens of the Republic were not above the occasional prejudice, as when one of them wrote that from German scholars, one can expect solidity, exactness, judgment and erudition, but not subtlety, brilliance and delicacy. For that, you really need to look to the French.

As if in response, Friedrich Gottlieb Klopstock's 1774 work "Gelehrtenrepublik" championed the German intellectual tradition, comparing Leibniz favorably to Newton. Another equally predictable prejudice ran across gender lines. As with the more literal political systems of the time, one requirement for full citizenship in the Republic of Letters was being a man.

Actually, many of the leading male figures of the Republic did correspond with women, but tellingly were less likely to keep copies in such cases. Nonetheless, letters were a vital outlet for women's intellectual interests. For men, written correspondence could complement journeys to meet other experts in person, but for women who were discouraged from traveling away from home, writing was a precious window onto a wider world.

You might recall the epistolary exchange between Marie de Grenay, the adoptive daughter of Montaigne, and Grenay's own spiritual daughter, Anna Maria von Schurmann. Well, Grenay was only one of Schurmann's many literary friends. They also included the aforementioned Dorothy Moore, whose thoughts were published without warning by Samuel Hartlib. Another member of this circle was Princess Elizabeth of Bohemia, perhaps the most famous woman philosophical correspondent of the 17th century, thanks to her exchanges with Descartes.

Indeed, learning about the Republic of Letters, as we just have, makes for a good introduction to Descartes as well as to early modern philosophy as a whole.

He too belonged to the band of brothers and sisters that made up the Republic, as shown by his ample surviving correspondence with Elizabeth, Mersenne, and others. So it's rather appropriate that one of the last letters to Richeperic before his death in 1637, sent by the great Dutch legal theorist Grotius, mentions an interesting book Grotius has just come across about physics and mathematics. Grotius reports the name of the author as "Cartesius Gallus," that is, Descartes from France.

to whom we'll finally be addressing our attention soon, because a whole mini-series on René Descartes is just on the horizon. But let's not put the horse before Descartes, because first I'd like you to join me for an interview with a leading citizen in today's Republic of Letters, Howard Hodgson. He'll tell us about the extent to which early modern Europe was a union, intellectually speaking, next time here on The History of Philosophy Without Any Gaps. The History of Philosophy Without Any Gaps