Abstract
The “philosophical historians” and the history of philosophy
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Notes
- 1.
Cf. A. Momigliano, ‘Ancient History and the Antiquarians’, in Id., Primo contributo alla storia degli studi classici (Rome, 1955), pp. 103–104; see also C.C. Becker, ‘The New History: Philosophy Teaching by Example’, in The Heavenly City of the Eighteenth-Century Philosophers (Yale, 2003; first ed. 1932); Ph.K. Leffler, ‘The histoire raisonnée, 1660–1770: A Pre-Enlightenment Genre’, J. Hist. Ideas, XXXVII (1976), pp. 219–240.
- 2.
Cf. J. Immerwahr, ‘The Anatomist and the Painter: the Continuity of Hume’s Treatise and Essays’, Hume Studies, XVII (1991), pp. 1–14; K. Abramson, ‘Hume’s Distinction between Philosophical Anatomy and Painting’, Philosophy Compass, II (2007), pp. 680–698; T.M. Costelloe, ‘“To have lived from the Beginning of the World”. Hume on Historical Anatomy and the Lesson of Virtue’, The Modern Schoolman, LXXXIV (2007), pp. 313–336.
- 3.
He is also the author of The History of Croesus King of Lydia (Edinburgh, 1755) and The History of France, during the Reigns of Francis ii and Charles ix (London, 1769).
- 4.
Among John Gillies’s works, in addition to his translations of Aristotle, let us mention the Defence of the Study of Classical Literature (an early essay published in a review) and the History of the World (London, 1807).
- 5.
The parts dealing with the history of philosophy are included in the following volumes: vol. II, pp. 261–273 (chiefly Anaxagoras and Socrates); vol. IV, pp. 246–47 (the Socratic schools), 262–282 (Plato); Vol. v, pp. 267–307 (Aristotle, up to p. 270, and the Hellenistic schools).
- 6.
See A. Ferguson, An Essay on the History of Civil Society (Teddington: Echo Library, 2007). But his methodology seems to be contrary to that of ‘conjectural history’: “In every other instance, however, the natural historian thinks himself obliged to collect facts, not to offer conjectures” (p. 7); “We are often tempted into these boundless regions of ignorance and of conjecture, by a fancy which delights in creating rather than in merely retaining the forms which are presented before it; we are the dupes of subtlety, which promises to supply every defect of our knowledge, and, by filling up a few blanks in the story of nature, pretends to conduct our apprehension nearer to the source of existence” (p. 9).
- 7.
A more elaborate version of this lecture was published in The Philological Miscellany (London, 1761), under the title Considerations concerning the First Formation of Languages, and the Different Genius of Original and Compounded Languages. The essay was then repeatedly published in the appendix to the Lectures. I am quoting from the critical edition of the Lectures edited by J.C. Bryce (Oxford, 1983).
- 8.
Similarly, A.O. Lovejoy affirms (without naming the source): “ideas are the most migratory things in the world”; cf. ‘Reflections on the History of Ideas’, J. Hist. Ideas, I (1940), p. 4.
- 9.
Dissertation Exhibiting a General View of the Progress of Mathematical and Physical Science, ed. by J. Leslie, who initiated it, and J. Playfair, who brought it to completion (Edinburgh, 1816); Dissertation Third: Exhibiting a General View of the Progress of Chemical Philosophy, from the Early Ages to the End of the 18 th century, ed. W.Th. Brande, (London, 1817); Dissertation on the Progress of Ethical Philosophy, chiefly during the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries, ed. J. Mackintosh (Edinburgh, 1830).
- 10.
Let us recall the well-known analogy that A.O. Lovejoy uses in the preface to his most famous work between the “history of ideas” and analytic chemistry (The Great Chain of Being: A Study of the History of an Idea, Harvard, 1936, p. 4). About a century earlier, with the same purpose and in the framework of a coherent historiographical conception similar to the theory of the “history of ideas”, Dugald Stewart saw a close resemblance between the “philosophical history” of philosophy and mining. Nevertheless, none of the historical and methodological discussions written by Lovejoy make any mention of the historiographical method adopted by A. Smith, D. Stewart, or other eighteenth-century writers, not even when these writers are abundantly cited in other respects. Further, the only hint at Stewart’s “theoretical history” that appears in the official review of the historians of ideas contained in the essay by J. Romein, ‘Theoretical History’, J. Hist. Ideas, IX (1948), pp. 55–56; but Stewart’s methodology is not mentioned in this case either.
- 11.
The Correspondence, p. 168: “As I have left the care of all my literary papers to you, I must tell you that except those which I carry along with me there are none worth the publishing, but a fragment of a great work which contains a history of the Astronomical Systems that were successively in fashion down to the time of Des Cartes. Whether that might not be published as a fragment of an intended juvenile work, I leave entirely to your judgement […]” (letter of 16th April, 1773).
- 12.
A. Smith, An Inquiry Into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations, R.H. Campbell and A.S. Skinner eds, textual ed. W.B. Todd (Oxford, 1976), v.i.f. 24; see also v.i.f. 19–31; v.i.f. 23.
- 13.
Stewart, Dissertation […] (Edinburgh and London, 1854), p. 4: “Of this sort of conjectural or theoretical history, the most unexceptionable specimens which have yet appeared are indisputably the fragments in Mr. Smith’s posthumous work on the History of Astronomy and on that of the Ancient Systems of Physics and Metaphysics”; Id., Account of […] A. Smith, pp. 292–293.
- 14.
Monboddo ironically comments on the confusion between physics and metaphysics characterizing the philosophy of his time: “Those […] who ridicule the noblest of all sciences, under the name of metaphysics, not only do not know the nature of the sciences, but appear to me not to understand even the title of Aristotle’s books which treat of it, but to imagine that it has some connection with we call in English physics” (Ant. Metaph., I, p. 5).
- 15.
Numerous scholars have viewed this doctrine as an anticipation of Darwin’s theory of evolution. However Charles Darwin did not seem to know Monboddo’s works and mentions only Buffon as his forerunner.
- 16.
Dissertation. p. 6: “In this part of Bacon’s logic, it must, at the same time, be owned, that there is something peculiarly captivating to the fancy; and accordingly, it has united in its favour the suffrages of almost all the succeeding authors who have treated of the same subject”.
- 17.
Dissertation, p. 107: “The preceding remarks lead me, by a natural connexion of ideas (to which I am here much more inclined to attend than to the order of dates) to another writer of the seventeenth century, whose influence over the literary and philosophical taste of France has been far greater than seems to be commonly imagined”.
- 18.
Dissertation., pp. 14–15: “How much remains to be previously done for the improvement of that part of logic, whose province it is to fix the limits by which contiguous departments of study are defined and separated! And how many unsuspected affinities may be reasonably presumed to exist among sciences, which, to our circumscribed views, appear at present the most alien from each other! The abstract geometry of Apollonius and Archimedes was found, after an interval of two thousand years, to furnish a torch to the physical inquiries of Newton; while, in the farther progress of knowledge, the Etymology of Languages has been happily employed to fill up the chasms of Ancient History; and the conclusions of Comparative Anatomy, to illustrate the Theory of the Earth”.
- 19.
Among the studies which offered ‘comparisons’ between Eastern and Western philosophy, of whose existence Stewart was certainly aware, cf. William Jones, Dissertation on the Gods of Greece, Italy, and India, in Dissertations […] (London, 1792); John Ogilvie, The Theology of Plato compared with the Principles of Oriental and Grecian Philosophers (London, 1793). As regards the ‘Romantic’ outcomes of these tendencies, see F. Baldensperger, ‘1793–1794: Climateric Times for ‘Romantic Tendencies in English Ideology’, J. Hist. Ideas, V (1944), pp. 3–20; A.O. Lovejoy, ‘The Chinese Origin of a Romanticism’, in Id., Essays in the History of Ideas (New York, 1955), pp. 99–135.
- 20.
Dissertation., pp. 253–254: “[…] the opinion of Leibnitz concerning the origin of our knowledge […] although expressed in a different phraseology, […] agrees in the most essential points with the innate ideas of the Cartesians; but it approaches still more nearly to some of the mystical speculations of Plato. The very exact coincidence between the language of Leibnitz on this question, and that of his contemporary Cudworth, whose mind, like his own, was deeply tinctured with the Platonic Metaphysics, is not unworthy of notice here, as an historical fact”.
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Bottin, F. (2015). The Scottish Enlightenment and “Philosophical History”. In: Piaia, G., Santinello, G. (eds) Models of the History of Philosophy. International Archives of the History of Ideas Archives internationales d'histoire des idées, vol 216. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-017-9966-9_7
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