Curiosity and the Passions of Knowledge from Montaigne to Hobbes ed. by Gianni Paganini

Abstract

Reviewed by: Curiosity and the Passions of Knowledge from Montaigne to Hobbes ed. by Gianni Paganini Delphine Antoine-Mahut Gianni Paganini, editor. Curiosity and the Passions of Knowledge from Montaigne to Hobbes. Accademia Nazionale dei Lincei, Contributi del Centro Linceo "Beniamino Segre," 136. Rome: Bardi Edizioni, 2018. Pp. 391. Paper, €25.00. This trilingual volume (English, French, and Italian) brings together the papers presented at the international conference held at the Accademia dei Lincei on October 7–8, 2015. The introduction, by Gianni Paganini, clearly identifies the gap that needs to be filled in the historical study of the notion of curiosity, particularly after Blumenberg's reference work, Der Prozess der theoretischen Neugierde (Suhrkamp, 1973), which passes over two major figures: Montaigne and Hobbes. The latter can in many ways be seen as "the most important theorist of curiosity in early modern philosophy, raising it to a typical characteristic of human nature, connecting it to the sciences, culture, and the arts, and making it the basis of methodology, language and philosophy" (18). As for Montaigne, he enables us to address the moral and social dimensions of curiosity, whereas Blumenberg had mainly worked on its scientific dimension (astronomical discoveries and cosmological speculations). In that [End Page 815] respect, the author of the Essays is "modern" because he removed curiosity from the Christian and medieval catalogues of "vices," and placed it in that of the passions, with all that this implies for the dynamics of the mind (11). Highlighting these two omissions in previous research makes it possible to challenge the dominance of "admiration" as defined notably by Descartes and Spinoza, and to propose a new "narrative" of the genesis of modernity. From this perspective, it is only logical that the volume includes several contributions on Montaigne and on Hobbes. On Montaigne: Nicola Panichi sees curiosity in the Essays as two-faced: a greedy and devouring passion and an honest habitus; Philippe Desan explores the limits of "false curiosity," in particular when applied to the realms of religion and politics; Emiliano Ferrari underlines the essential role of Montaigne and Charron in the early modern process of associating curiosity with virtue and wisdom rather than with vice or sin; and Renzo Ragghianti shows how the Essays themselves can be seen as a sort of cabinet of curiosities. On Hobbes: Patricia Springborg addresses Hobbes's radical distinction between humans and animals through humans' capacity for "curious thought"; Franco Giudice, focusing on Hobbes's 1646 manuscript, A Minute or First Draught of the Optiques, explains why Hobbes defined optics as "the most curious" of all the sciences; Daniel Garber shows that though Hobbes unambiguously endorses curiosity, his treatment of novelty (for example, his account of the condemnation of Galileo) reflects a much more complex position; Sharon Lloyd describes how curiosity becomes morally problematic for Hobbes's political theory, with the result that this passion does not enjoy a privileged moral status among passions, in Hobbes's view; and Pierre-François Moreau shows that, contrary to Hobbes's conception of curiosity, which creates an absolute barrier between man and animal, Spinoza's critical conception supposes only a difference of degree between them. However, the volume includes much more than these reflections on Montaigne and Hobbes. Thierry Gontier highlights the decisive role of Bacon in the rehabilitation of intellectual curiosity in the Modern Age. John Christian Laursen shows that for Robert Burton, curiosity can both cause and cure melancholy. Jean-Charles Darmon revisits Gassendi (in particular his Vie de Pereisc) via a comparison with neo-Epicurean moralists like Saint-Evremont, and shows that these authors used Epicurism as an imperfect but fruitful way to reconcile the vastness of our curiosity with the limits of our knowledge. Yoshinori Tsuzaki shows that in Descartes, as a reader of Charron, infirmitas indicates not only an a priori limit imposed on our intellectual faculties but, above all, the possibility of misusing them. Denis Kambouchner points out that if Descartes seems to have dissolved the moral problem of curiosity, this problem strikes back forcefully with Pascal and Pierre Nicole via the three concupiscences and the Augustinian legacy, before splitting, with Malebranche, into a sound use and a vitiated one—the latter...