British Intellectual Life Research Articles

Katip Çelebi ile Edward Bernard’ın Eğitim, Çalışma ve Zihni Arka Planlarına İlişkin Bir Mukayese

The comparison of Ottoman and European history can be viewed as a novel approach in historical studies. Therefore, this study adopted such an approach by focusing on two important figures of the Ottoman and British intellectual life. These two people, who are often known for their catalogue and bibliographic works, were studied with respect to their intellectual skills, educational and intellectual backgrounds. The study focused on similarities and differences, and efforts were made to uncover the reasons lying behind them. This is because, being leading figures in their own cultural contexts, Kātib Çelebī and Ed-ward Bernard are intellectuals of the Ottoman Classical Period and of the Renaissance, respectively. This study basically aimed to compare and contrast Kātib Çelebī [d. 1067/1657] and Edward Bernard [d. 1697] in terms of their educational background, studies, and mental background. It addressed how both scholars were brought up, what kind of works they produced besides why and how they produced them. Further-more, based on the data from this comparison, the study also investigated if Kātib Çelebī could be consid-ered as a Renaissance intellectual. The reader's attention was drawn to the characteristics of the period, and an overall description of a typical intellectual in the seventeenth century was provided. Thus, this was intended to paint a global picture of the mentality of the period. Therefore, it was shown that alter-native perspectives are also possible when it comes to Ottoman and European history.

Reformation Without End: Religion, Politics and the Past in Post-Revolutionary England by Robert G. Ingram

Reviewed by: Reformation Without End: Religion, Politics and the Past in Post-Revolutionary England by Robert G. Ingram William J. Bulman Robert G. Ingram, Reformation Without End: Religion, Politics and the Past in Post-Revolutionary England. Manchester, UK: Manchester, 2018. Pp. xix +362. £80. This compelling revisionist account of English intellectual, religious, and political history in the first half of the eighteenth century deserves a wide and lasting readership. It offers a pioneering description of the overwhelmingly Christian intellectual culture of the period that even scholars who have little interest in eighteenth-century Christianity cannot afford to ignore, and it also manages to provide a valuable introduction to the theological and religious politics of the era for the relatively uninitiated. This is to say nothing of the scores of useful insights and points of information it provides for specialists. There is no better single text for scholars and students interested in understanding the elite religio-political context of other topics in the history of the period, and there is no better text for students seeking an initial, but nevertheless sophisticated and original, understanding of the crucial theological and ecclesiological controversies of the era and the dominant concerns of the early eighteenth-century English elite. Reformation Without End should inspire a flurry of related scholarship and remain a standard work of reference and introduction in the decades to come. It compares favorably to superficially similar revisionist accounts of the period, including that of J.C.D. Clark. The basic claim of the work is that the first three quarters of the eighteenth century constitute the last phase of England’s “Long Reformation.” In other words, this was anything but a moment in which England’s public life became overwhelmingly Enlightened [End Page 82] or secularized in any traditional sense. English print culture was dominated by polemical divinity and other religious material. Those who engaged in that culture in defense of and in resistance to orthodoxy saw themselves as engaged in polemics—that is, in a polemos, a “warfare on earth”—in the interest of saving truths. English Protestants living in the wake of the Civil Wars and the Glorious Revolution, Ingram argues, set out unsuccessfully to resolve what were basically the same theological questions that had plagued Protestants since the Reformation, using Renaissance tools that had for some time been common currency in these internal conflicts. More specifically, they continued to grapple with the religious questions that had caused, but not been resolved by, the seventeenth-century revolutions (which were themselves Reformation conflicts) by employing the histories of both antiquity and England’s recent past against their adversaries. This book is a learned study of four important but understudied polemical divines: perhaps the central figure of early eighteenth-century English orthodox theology, Daniel Waterland; the Christian skeptic Conyers Middleton; the orthodox historian Zachary Grey; and an idiosyncratic and widely-read defender of Anglican Enlightenment, William Warburton. On this level alone the book challenges readers to reconsider the pantheon of eighteenth-century English intellectual life. Each of Ingram’s case studies has been chosen to bring out different aspects of English polemical divinity in a revealing thematic progression that has just the right balance of novelty and repetition as it unfolds. In each section, Ingram reconstructs the particular contexts of these figures’ polemical engagements in wonderful detail. He draws on an impressive body of deep and wide research in print and manuscript sources, from correspondence and sermon notes to marginalia and local church records. The contexts he reconstructs are multi-layered, incorporating everything from the patronage, political, and publishing dimensions of ecclesiastical and literary careers to the histories of education and scholarship. But the four case studies are only the starting point for appreciating the richness and value of the work. Within them, Ingram offers concise examinations of the diverse set of contemporaries and recent predecessors with whom these four men were polemically engaged and intellectually connected. Taken together, these parts serve as an excellent guide to the theological and ecclesiological spectrum of the period, from deism to sacerdotalism. Ingram deals primarily with the first half of the eighteenth century and treats it synchronically, in keeping with the book’s...

Otto Pächt, ‘Hegelian’ Exile in Cold War England

Utilizing documents from his personal Nachlass, I sketch Otto Pächt’s career in Great Britain, from his emigration in 1936 to his call back to the University of Vienna in 1963. As a member of the Vienna School of Art History, who had contributed with Hans Sedlmayr to the elaboration of a methodological viewpoint based on immanent form and real historical processes, Pächt faced difficulties in England, heightened by the rise and hegemony of neo-liberal thought. In Pächt’s case this thinking affected him directly through the institutional role that E. H. Gombrich held at the Warburg and in British intellectual life in general.

Reconciling faith and reason: T. H. Green’s theory of human agency

ABSTRACTThe Victorian age was a period in which Christian Orthodoxy was undermined by new and emerging forms of reasoned inquiry. The commonly-held view amongst historians is that the intellectual life in the era was composed of two hostile camps; those who defended Christian Orthodoxy and those who championed the new sciences. The received view is that, when faced by the new fields of reasoned inquiry, Christianity’s prominence within British intellectual life and discourse went into terminal decline. The intention of this article is to demonstrate that there was a middle ground between the two camps. In particular, this article aims to demonstrate that attempts were made to reconcile Christianity with the findings of the emerging forms of reasoned inquiry. This will be achieved through providing an examination of T. H. Green’s theory of Human Agency. Green was one of the most prominent philosophers of the Victorian age. Through his theory of human agency, Green consciously engaged in the debate that existed between theistic Christianity and the emerging forms of reason inquiry of the time.

America and the American Revolution in British Geographical Thought, c.1760–1830

Abstract This article investigates British ideas about ‘America’ in the years before and after the American Revolution. What characteristics and qualities were thought to distinguish the continent from other parts of the globe? How did the Revolution affect ideas about ‘American’ space? Existing studies tend to present the Revolution as a disruptive moment in British intellectual life. Instead, this article analyses mainstream geographical works—sources which, due to their popularity and summative nature, can help expose the longstanding, formative ideas about America circulating widely in British literate culture. Collectively, these books interpreted America both as a novel space literally and conceptually outside the ‘Old World’ and as a space defined in terms of Britain and its European neighbours. Significantly, the books’ responses to the Revolution were shaped by the same conceptual frameworks. This means that, far from signalling a comprehensive shift in British perceptions of the continent, Revolutionary events were inserted into established narratives; they were used to reinforce and amplify existing structures and terminologies for understanding America in British literate culture.

A Scottish vision of Korea and East Asia before the ‘Great Divergence - John Campbell and Early Modern European Comparative Historical Discourse -

This article explores the intellectual significance of the early modern British interest in global and comparative historical discourse. It highlights the prominent concern with the relations between East Asia and Europe as central to the dynamic patterns of world order. Early modern British intellectual life was shaped profoundly by the insights of the Scottish Enlightenment about East Asia’s importance in global history. We can see this clearly in the writings of one of the most wide-ranging but now largely neglected eighteenth-century Scottish authors: John Campbell (1708-1775). A leading contributor to the Universal History project (London, 1747-1766), Campbell wrote extensively on European settlements in the East Indies. For Campbell, the key benefit of disseminating knowledge of East Asia was the encouragement of commercial relationships that would elevate the wealth and power of Britain. His work illustrates the self-conscious realization of Europe’s peripheral status in regard to East Asian power and economy. Crucially, Campbell highlighted the central global historical dynamic of the enormous outflow of precious metals to Asia in the early modern era. His arguments contribute new details and insights to the perspective of Chinese economic historians such as Kenneth Pomeranz and Robert B. Marks who contend that the hegemony of a Western-dominated world system was both a historically contingent and very recent phenomenon.

The Dynamics of Genre: Journalism and the Practice of Literature in Mid-Victorian Britain Dictionary of Nineteenth-Century Journalism in Great Britain and Ireland

In recent years, it has become a commonplace among Victorian periodical scholars that literature and journalism emerged as distinct (and gendered) fields only in the late nineteenth century.1 This occurred during a period in which British intellectual life became more highly specialized and, in important ways, fragmented. In the mid century, by contrast, ‘men of letters’ (some of whom were women) moved fluidly across what we would today recognize as quite different genres. Dallas Liddle does not challenge this picture so far as professionalization is concerned. He argues, however, that, at the level of genre, the mid-century picture was already far messier than previously recognized. By drawing systematically on the ideas of Mikhail Bakhtin (and each chapter begins with a Bakhtinian epigraph), he argues that textual meaning cannot be separated from genre. For us as well as for the Victorians, ‘those who write professionally must choose genres appropriate for...

Mana and Mystification: Magic and Religion at the Turn of the Twentieth Century

The modern study of comparative religion emerged as a field of academic inquiry in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries as European intellectuals began to analyze the mass of new data about ritual and belief from around the globe arriving in the metropole through circuits of trade, conquest, and empire. The founding figures of this new scholarly enterprise listed among their ranks a number of strong, vivid personalities - even some armchair anthropologists constituted minor forces of nature. One of the more overlooked figures in this era, but one who proved quite formidable to her peers, was Lady Frazer, the wife of Sir James George. Sir James was prominent in British intellectual life through the early decades of the twentieth century as one of the important systematizers and popularizers of the new world of human religious diversity. While the specifics of Frazer s theories were challenged even early in his career, up to his death he was lauded by his peers for an encyclopedic knowledge of ethnographic data and affable good cheer.Lady Frazer was another matter. Like many unsung late-Victorian women, she played a major role in her husband's career, managing important aspects of his speaking schedule, regulating much of his contact with other scholars, even playing an assertive role in supervising the planning and outfitting of various expeditions to collect new ethnographic data (see Fraser 1990; Talbot 1915). Lady Frazer was preoccupied with ensuring that the young ethnographers she and her husband supported took with them the precise sorts of recording equipment that she favored, and she pressed budding anthropologists to make the pilgrimage to Cambridge so that she could personally train them to use the equipment exactly as she preferred.1 This was no idle preoccupation - control of the equipment meant control over the evidentiary record produced by the equipment, and control ofthat evidentiary record was essential, in turn, for confirming what Lady Frazer considered to be a proper understanding of primitive culture.Given her strong personality and the trepidation with which she was commonly greeted, it is little wonder that Lady Frazer and others like her during these decades were greeted with regular comments concerning their personal mana. The notion of mana came into circulation among European intellectuals from ethnographic reports concerning beliefs in impersonal supernatural power among the Melanesiane, but the concept quickly made its way into correspondence, toasts, even obituaries, as a jocular commentary on the power of personality.2 This essay explores a basic question: What exactly might we learn about Lady Frazer and her peers - about the scope of their personal power and how this sense of potency was conceived - when we hear of their mana? In answer, I hope to show that while the term serves to mystify many crucial aspects of the operations of social power, this fascination with mana ultimately reveals important fundamental tendencies among early twentieth century scholars of comparative religion, and many of those tendencies continue to shape contemporary understandings of enchantment. Like many of their peers, these early scholars were fascinated - and perturbed - by the workings of power, particularly when that power appeared to exceed the orderly bounds of the natural. The cultural logic of modernity seemed to require that the potency of religion be channeled into very narrow straits, but religion - in both its licit and illicit forms - rarely complied. Scholars searched for a vocabulary to help them recognize this excessive and pervasive potency, and mana materialized as an idiom for comprehending mysterious supernatural powers. Yet the early discussions of mana are marked by an ambiguous reluctance to confront power directly, and that same ambiguity is reflected in our current difficulties in accessing the potency and valence of contemporary enchantment. Mana thus offered an occasion to acknowledge the confluence of agency, power, and enchantment, but it also served as a vehicle for further mystification. …

Intellectual Life in Fifteenth-Century England

This essay analyses ways in which recent, and in particular literary, scholarship has explored sources of renewal in English intellectual life during the century that separated the beginning of the Council of Constance (1414–18) and the conclusion of the Fifth Lateran Council (1512–14). Concentrating largely on intellectual life in clerical, homosocial textual cultures, it also takes into account other ways of looking at the long fifteenth century. Beginning with a consideration of the way in which the Council of Constance is currently being written into the intellectual and literary history of this period, the essay broadens in scope to explore how interest in ecclesiastical reform acted as a channel for important currents in late medieval English intellectual life. Finally, it considers how recent critical narratives are investigating examples of clerical and secular humanism in the period, the dynamics of the latter having been notably illuminated by the comparative approach adopted in a recent study of Chaucer and Christine de Pizan. The findings of recent scholars are also compared with those of earlier generations, the latter exemplified by the contrasting approaches taken by Naomi Hurnard and Roberto Weiss, a fourth edition of whose study of humanism in England has recently appeared online.

A New Albion in New America: British Periodicals and Morris Birkbeck’s English Prairie, 1818–1824

The “English Prairie” settlements in Edwards County, Illinois attracted an inordinate amount of commentary in the post‐Napoleonic War period, providing a window into British intellectual life of the period. Morris Birkbeck, the more famous of the English Prairie’s two founders, came to personify America for British readers. Commentators ranged widely in their opinions of the English Prairie, speaking in broad terms of either superior aspects of western American society and polity or else making the new state of Illinois a foil to illustrate the ills of democracy and religious disestablishment. Three of the most prominent British reviews of the time – the Edinburgh Review, Quarterly Review, and Westminster Review – were vital participants in this debate that was really about the future of Great Britain. The periodicals created images of America suited to their understanding of the situation, as one small part of sparsely populated Illinois became a vicarious arena for competing concepts of politics and religion.

E.H. Carr vs. Idealism: The Battle Rages On

This article is an almost verbatim version of the E.H. Carr Memorial Lecture delivered at Aberystwyth on 14 October 2004. I argue that Carr’s central claims in The Twenty Years’ Crisis are still relevant today. He maintained in that classic realist work that states are the main actors in world politics and that they are deeply committed to pursuing power at each other’s expense. He also argued that British intellectual life in his day was dominated by idealists who largely ignored power politics. Despite the great changes that have taken place in the world since 1939, when The Twenty Years’ Crisis was published, states still dominate the international system and they still pay careful attention to the balance of power. Furthermore, idealists now dominate international relations scholarship in Britain, more so than they did in the late 1930s. Indeed, it is hard to find a realist theorist in the contemporary British academy, a situation that would almost surely shock Carr were he alive today. This powerful bias against realism, I argue, is intellectually foolhardy and hurts not only students but the idealist scholars who so dislike realism.

The Edwards at 300 Symposium and the Future of Jonathan Edwards Studies

The Edwards at 300 Symposium and the Future of Jonathan Edwards Studies Thomas S. Kidd (bio) Marking Jonathan Edwards's 300th birthday, specialists assembled at the Library of Congress in October 2003 to discuss their latest work and to assess the state of scholarship on Edwards. The conference came precisely 50 years after Perry Miller conceived the Works of Jonathan Edwards project. It provided an excellent opportunity to assess the renaissance in Edwards studies that has flourished since the project began. The occasion also offered an opportunity to suggest new directions in Edwards scholarship, a valuable discussion given the multitudinous studies of him and his thought in the past 50 years. The 2003 publication of George Marsden's Jonathan Edwards: A Life served as a unifying point for the conference, as Marsden's biography built upon the foundation of the past decades of Edwards scholarship. Marsden gave the keynote address for the conference and considered Edwards's uses in the twenty-first century. He believes that Edwards's Calvinism can be used to chasten America's cheery self-image and help explain the problem of human evil. Marsden contrasted Benjamin Franklin's fame with Edwards's relative lack of popular attention, and argued that wider popular knowledge of Edwards might supply America with much-needed history "in a minor key." Edwards also could provide the large American evangelical community with an exemplar devoted to the life of the mind, he argued. Attention to Edwards might give Americans a renewed appreciation of the [End Page 405] ideal of beauty, which has been discarded in favor of instrumentalism in both churches and the broader culture. Marsden's sense of the past and future usefulness of Edwards's thought was echoed in other papers and discussions. For instance, Amy Plantinga Pauw contended that Edwards's deep conviction of human and national limitations could help the United States embrace more humble and realistic narratives of its own purposes. John Saillant showed how Edwards's Calvinist typology provided significant theological resources for the first generation of African-American Christian abolitionists. Philip Gura argued that the Edwardseans exercised a great deal of mostly unrecognized influence on nineteenth-century sentimental literature. Finally,Mark Noll showed how Edwards's Freedom of the Will more profoundly influenced British intellectual life than American, but often in entirely unpredictable ways, as various thinkers, sometimes even skeptics, made use of his theory of the bound will in ways that Edwards would have found abhorrent. The national obsession with "freedom" made Edwards's view of severe human limitations intellectually unpalatable to most American observers. Some participants suggested that despite the enormous amount of writing on Edwards, we still may not know him that well. In particular, several panelists argued that scholars have yet to appreciate Edwards the biblical exegete. Douglas Sweeney and Stephen Stein both suggested that if many scholars honestly considered Edwards's utter devotion to the Bible, they might not like him as much. This selective forgetfulness about Edwards's core Calvinist beliefs goes back at least to Perry Miller. Stein noted that Edwards's biblicism committed him to justifying many brutally violent scriptural episodes. Another challenge raised by the state of Edwards studies is that of seeing the brilliant and prolific Edwards in context. To be sure, most studies of Edwards have simply sought to understand and explain Edwards's ideas, and this has been a daunting but rewarding task. However, some panelists called for more understanding of Edwards in his imperial/colonial context. Ava Chamberlain, for instance, discussed Edwards's scramble to contend with legal Anglicization and the increasingly negative view of women in adultery cases. Rachel Wheeler used Edwards's writings at Stockbridge, Massachusetts, to reveal the difficulty of joining Native American and European histories. Little work has been done on the Native American influence on Edwards's most important theological works, despite the fact that [End Page 406] he produced them while at Stockbridge. However, especially in Original Sin one can see a strange kind of egalitarianism. All nations needed forgiveness, thought Edwards, and in this sense all were equal. But the belief that all nations needed forgiveness in Christ also justified the inequalities inherent in the...

The “Intellectual Backbone to British Socialism”

eiews THE “INTELLECTUAL BACKBONE TO BRITISH SOCIALISM”1 R A. R History / McMaster U. Hamilton, , Canada   @. Royden J. Harrison. The Life and Times of Sidney and Beatrice Webb, –: the Formative Years. London, New York: Palgrave Macmillan, . Pp. xii, . .. n his significant and long-awaited first volume of the biography of the IWebbs, Royden Harrison concludes that their marital association was “the most fruitful partnership in the history of the British intellect” (p. ). This assessment is certainly persuasive by the standards of achievement Harrison has demonstrated as their legacies. His book is written with concise analysis, revelatory insights into their personalities, a finely tuned sense of irony and humour, as well as a lapidary prose style. It places in the shade all other scholarship on the Webbs up to , the cutoff year for this first volume. Unfortunately, Professor Harrison died in  before he could complete the second volume. Hence, the Passfield Trustees, who commissioned this biography, have had to find another historian to complete the work. A distinguished scholar of Victorian and twentieth-century Britain, Harrison has illuminated the Webbs’ accomplishments, and failures, by setting their lives within the context of British intellectual and political history generally. With his gifts as a political theorist as well as his prowess as a historian, we are given careful analyses of the persistent influence of Positivism in Britain, the impact, however brief, of Herbert Spencer and William Morris on British thought, the uneasy, ambivalent reception of Marxism in British intellectual life, and the roots and development of Fabian Socialism within the British Left with compelling reasons for its ultimate ascendancy over other forms of socialism in the United Kingdom. Along the way, readers are presented with fresh insights into a number of oft-studied dominant people in this time of the emergence and  The phrase is from Russell’s portrait of the Webbs (PfM, p. ). russell: the Journal of Bertrand Russell Studies n.s.  (winter –): – The Bertrand Russell Research Centre, McMaster U.  -  Reviews development of Sidney Webb and Beatrice Potter as individuals and as a partnership . Notable among those upon whom Harrison casts fresh light are Joseph Chamberlain, George Bernard Shaw, Richard Haldane and, not least, Bertrand Russell. For his part, Russell gave Harrison “the most helpful of all interviews” (p. x) of the many who provided their personal recollections of the Webbs. Professor Harrison deposited the typescript of this interview in the Russell Archives at McMaster in  when he visited the Russell Editorial Project as an historical advisor. While Harrison probes Sidney without the direct assistance of anyone else, so that A. J. P. Taylor’s verdict, that he is “a door that can never be unlocked” (p. ), is shown to be manifestly incorrect, the author uses a critical insight from Russell to “unlock” the conflicted nature of Beatrice. Harrison’s “life and times” is particularly timely, for Fabianism, and the role and values of the Webbs especially, have come under severe attack over the past  years from historians of the “New Liberalism”, notably Peter Clarke and Michael Freeden in their path-breaking studies, respectively, Liberals and Social Democrats () and The New Liberalism (). For Clarke and Freeden and those of their persuasion and following, J. A. Hobson and Leonard Hobhouse, especially, were the important thinkers and advisors of the Liberal politicians who established the social reforms between  and . They presented their ideas through books, through articles in H. W. Massingham’s The Nation, and through occasional meetings with politicians, notably David Lloyd George and Winston Churchill. Moreover, the votaries of the New Liberalism transformed Gladstonian Liberalism by advocating collectivist reforms which increased personal liberty and were informed by democratic ideals. By contrast, Clarke and Freeden saw the Webbs’ Fabian claim that the “expert” was essential to guide the masses and their emphasis on permeating existing, often Conservative, elites, as undemocratic, sometimes authoritarian. Harrison concludes that a “certain distrust of the masses” was present, as with the earlier Utilitarians and even the Positivists (p. ). But as we shall see, the Webbs had a more complex and libertarian concept of democracy than these critics have given them credit for. The “litmus test” that Liberals of the time and their historians afterwards created for determining...

The Philomathian Society and political debate in late Eighteenth Century England

The present article deals with several vicissitudes of British intellectual life in the late Eighteenth Century. This time, of great political upheaval, saw the creation of many societies, pleading for important reforms such as the ones implemented in France after the Revolution. The paper reveals different aspects of the political and social life of such notable characters as Sheridan, Fox, Godwin, Burke, Priestley, Wollstonecraft or Alexander Jardine himself, whose relationship with them is used as the linking nexus of the whole paper. These political reforms needed to be accompanied by some social changes such as a new and more active role for women, and their right for independence, education and the vote.

Freelance Writers and the Changing Terrain of Intellectual Life in Britain, 1880–1980

The terrain of British intellectual life in the twentieth century was dominated by two major features: freelance writers and university scholars. At the elite level, as Noel Annan showed, the two types—independent thinkers and academics—can be treated as one class, linked by personal connections and by common attitudes arising largely from the old school tie. However, when intellectuals beyond the elite stratum are surveyed, it becomes clear that the fortunes of these two features of the intellectual landscape differed sharply. The university teachers grew rapidly in number and made themselves into what Harold Perkin calls “the key profession.” But as John Gross has contended, freelance writers, despite a rich heritage from the nineteenth century, seemed, especially in their own eyes, to form an old and decaying mountain range. From 1880 to 1980 freelance writers experienced a pervasive and intensifying sense of crisis in their trade and in their cultural role. John Wain, a successful novelist and critic, stated the matter plainly in 1973: contemplation of the difficulties of “being an author,” he said, always threw him into “a black depression in which I could slash my wrists.”How can one explain the pessimism of freelance writers, their sense of being increasingly marginalized? Were their complaints simply habitual expressions of a writerly pose common since the romantic period? After all, many of the broad social and cultural trends in Britain between 1880 and 1980 should have been advantageous to independent writers.

Breeches and Metaphysics: Thackeray's German Discourse by S. S. Prawer (review)

TheTransmission ofCulture in Western Europe, 1750-1850: Papers Celebrating theBicentenary of theFoundation of the 'Bibliotheque britannique' (1796-I815) in Geneva.Ed. by DAVID BICKERTON and JUDITH PROUD. Bern, Berlin and Bruxelles: Peter Lang. 1999. 264 pp. 25. In their preface, David Bickertonand Judith Proud acknowledge that this volume cannot aspireto exhaust the field of culturaltransmissionin WesternEurope in the hundred-yearperiod they have chosen. However, by using as their central focus a literaryperiodicalwhich set out underthe direction of CharlesPictet to provide for Continental readers a wide-ranging account of British intellectual life, they have opened up many different channels of investigation, and the fourteen articles presented here duly offer us a varied and fascinating case-study. Bickerton's introduction sketches the history of the Bibliotheque britannique, indicating its significance and the fact that it did not limit its coverage to British culture alone. The papers themselves include three articleson the transmissionof Rousseau, one on Bernardin de Saint-Pierreand Newton, one on the Bibliotheque's adaptation of Prideand Prejudice and another on its role in the dissemination of Bentham's Utilitarianismin which CyprianBlamiresshowsthat culturaltransmissioninvolves a process of re-writing that can actually make obscure authors more intelligible. Ann Thomson's analysis of the diffusion of English free thought indicates that, despite their reputationfor being slow to identifysignificanttrends,literaryreviews could actually be very advanced in their preoccupations. That they could also communicate scientific knowledge swiftly is demonstrated by Barbara TraxlerBrown 's fascinating examination of the way in which a new means of bleaching textilesmade itsway from a Frenchtreatiseto implementationin Ireland.Although Suzan van Dijk remindsus again that many eighteenth-centuryauthorstook a dim view of the intellectual capacities of women, Katherine Astbury notes that the suggestionsof female authorsof recommended readinglistsforyoung women were highly cosmopolitan in nature. Daniel Hall's exploration of the fate of TheMonkin variousliteraturescombineswit and eruditionto considerableeffect.Judith Proud's article on issues of copyrightprovides a useful summaryof an importantand often overlookedlegal aspectof culturaltransmission.All in all, theseproceedingsofferus captivating illustrations of cultural transmission at work, while raising time and again the question of the nature of translationin the period. As the editors note in their preface, this is a matter that deserves ongoing attention. This book makes an extremelyusefulcontributionto thatprocess. UNIVERSITY OF LEEDS PAUL ROWE Breeches andMetaphysics: Thackeray's German Discourse.By S. S. PRAWER. (Studiesin ComparativeLiterature,I) Oxford:Legenda. I997. xiii + 529 PP. ?35. Afterhaving examined theJews andJudaism in the writingsof WilliamMakepeace Thackeray in Israelat Vanity Fair(Leiden:Brill, I992), S. S. Prawerhas undertaken to present German elements in Thackeray'sceuvrein this scrupulouslyresearched monograph. Thackeray's importation of a multi-faceted web of German culture to Britain began in I830, when the author firstvisited Germany and Weimar. This journey marked a turning point in his life, for in his decision to finish his education by travellingafterthe completion of his Cambridgedegree he was defyinghis family's plans for his future and laying the foundations for a literaryas opposed to a legal career. In Weimar Thackeray also encountered Goethe and his reminiscences of TheTransmission ofCulture in Western Europe, 1750-1850: Papers Celebrating theBicentenary of theFoundation of the 'Bibliotheque britannique' (1796-I815) in Geneva.Ed. by DAVID BICKERTON and JUDITH PROUD. Bern, Berlin and Bruxelles: Peter Lang. 1999. 264 pp. 25. In their preface, David Bickertonand Judith Proud acknowledge that this volume cannot aspireto exhaust the field of culturaltransmissionin WesternEurope in the hundred-yearperiod they have chosen. However, by using as their central focus a literaryperiodicalwhich set out underthe direction of CharlesPictet to provide for Continental readers a wide-ranging account of British intellectual life, they have opened up many different channels of investigation, and the fourteen articles presented here duly offer us a varied and fascinating case-study. Bickerton's introduction sketches the history of the Bibliotheque britannique, indicating its significance and the fact that it did not limit its coverage to British culture alone. The papers themselves include three articleson the transmissionof Rousseau, one on Bernardin de Saint-Pierreand Newton, one on the Bibliotheque's adaptation of Prideand Prejudice and another on its role in the dissemination of Bentham's Utilitarianismin which CyprianBlamiresshowsthat culturaltransmissioninvolves a process of re-writing that can actually make obscure authors more intelligible. Ann Thomson's analysis of...

David Bickerton , Judith Proud (review)

TheTransmission ofCulture in Western Europe, 1750-1850: Papers Celebrating theBicentenary of theFoundation of the 'Bibliotheque britannique' (1796-I815) in Geneva.Ed. by DAVID BICKERTON and JUDITH PROUD. Bern, Berlin and Bruxelles: Peter Lang. 1999. 264 pp. 25. In their preface, David Bickertonand Judith Proud acknowledge that this volume cannot aspireto exhaust the field of culturaltransmissionin WesternEurope in the hundred-yearperiod they have chosen. However, by using as their central focus a literaryperiodicalwhich set out underthe direction of CharlesPictet to provide for Continental readers a wide-ranging account of British intellectual life, they have opened up many different channels of investigation, and the fourteen articles presented here duly offer us a varied and fascinating case-study. Bickerton's introduction sketches the history of the Bibliotheque britannique, indicating its significance and the fact that it did not limit its coverage to British culture alone. The papers themselves include three articleson the transmissionof Rousseau, one on Bernardin de Saint-Pierreand Newton, one on the Bibliotheque's adaptation of Prideand Prejudice and another on its role in the dissemination of Bentham's Utilitarianismin which CyprianBlamiresshowsthat culturaltransmissioninvolves a process of re-writing that can actually make obscure authors more intelligible. Ann Thomson's analysis of the diffusion of English free thought indicates that, despite their reputationfor being slow to identifysignificanttrends,literaryreviews could actually be very advanced in their preoccupations. That they could also communicate scientific knowledge swiftly is demonstrated by Barbara TraxlerBrown 's fascinating examination of the way in which a new means of bleaching textilesmade itsway from a Frenchtreatiseto implementationin Ireland.Although Suzan van Dijk remindsus again that many eighteenth-centuryauthorstook a dim view of the intellectual capacities of women, Katherine Astbury notes that the suggestionsof female authorsof recommended readinglistsforyoung women were highly cosmopolitan in nature. Daniel Hall's exploration of the fate of TheMonkin variousliteraturescombineswit and eruditionto considerableeffect.Judith Proud's article on issues of copyrightprovides a useful summaryof an importantand often overlookedlegal aspectof culturaltransmission.All in all, theseproceedingsofferus captivating illustrations of cultural transmission at work, while raising time and again the question of the nature of translationin the period. As the editors note in their preface, this is a matter that deserves ongoing attention. This book makes an extremelyusefulcontributionto thatprocess. UNIVERSITY OF LEEDS PAUL ROWE Breeches andMetaphysics: Thackeray's German Discourse.By S. S. PRAWER. (Studiesin ComparativeLiterature,I) Oxford:Legenda. I997. xiii + 529 PP. ?35. Afterhaving examined theJews andJudaism in the writingsof WilliamMakepeace Thackeray in Israelat Vanity Fair(Leiden:Brill, I992), S. S. Prawerhas undertaken to present German elements in Thackeray'sceuvrein this scrupulouslyresearched monograph. Thackeray's importation of a multi-faceted web of German culture to Britain began in I830, when the author firstvisited Germany and Weimar. This journey marked a turning point in his life, for in his decision to finish his education by travellingafterthe completion of his Cambridgedegree he was defyinghis family's plans for his future and laying the foundations for a literaryas opposed to a legal career. In Weimar Thackeray also encountered Goethe and his reminiscences of TheTransmission ofCulture in Western Europe, 1750-1850: Papers Celebrating theBicentenary of theFoundation of the 'Bibliotheque britannique' (1796-I815) in Geneva.Ed. by DAVID BICKERTON and JUDITH PROUD. Bern, Berlin and Bruxelles: Peter Lang. 1999. 264 pp. 25. In their preface, David Bickertonand Judith Proud acknowledge that this volume cannot aspireto exhaust the field of culturaltransmissionin WesternEurope in the hundred-yearperiod they have chosen. However, by using as their central focus a literaryperiodicalwhich set out underthe direction of CharlesPictet to provide for Continental readers a wide-ranging account of British intellectual life, they have opened up many different channels of investigation, and the fourteen articles presented here duly offer us a varied and fascinating case-study. Bickerton's introduction sketches the history of the Bibliotheque britannique, indicating its significance and the fact that it did not limit its coverage to British culture alone. The papers themselves include three articleson the transmissionof Rousseau, one on Bernardin de Saint-Pierreand Newton, one on the Bibliotheque's adaptation of Prideand Prejudice and another on its role in the dissemination of Bentham's Utilitarianismin which CyprianBlamiresshowsthat culturaltransmissioninvolves a process of re-writing that can actually make obscure authors more intelligible. Ann Thomson's analysis of...

Scepticism and Reasonable Doubt: The British Naturalist Tradition in Wilkins, Hume, Reid, and Newman by M. Jamie Ferreira

BOOK REVIEWS 531 topic which makes these weaknesses stand out. They detract from the beauty of the work as a whole. Nonetheless, the work is an opus magnum meriting serious scholarly attention and applause. PETER A. REDPATH St. Johns' University Staten Island, New York Scepticism and Reasonable Doubt: The British Naturalist Tradition in Wilkins, Hume, Reid, and Newman. By M. JAMIE FERREIRA. Oxford : Clarendon Press, 1986. Pp. xii+ 255. Professor M. Jamie Ferreira has written a major contribution to our knowledge and understanding of scepticism within British intellectual life from the late seventeenth century to the late nineteenth. Her cast of characters is at first sight an unusual, even an eclectic one: John Wilkins, an Anglican bishop and founder of the Royal Society; David Hume, himself often regarded as the chief of sceptics; Thomas Reid, the Scottish philosopher of common sense; and John Henry Newman, the most famous Viotorian convert to Roman Catholicism. In Ferreira's analysis what holds this group together is their varied attempts to re· fute scepticism through an appeal " to ' the natural '-to how we are constituted, to what we, as human beings, are and do in the arena of believing " (p. vii). In other words, the refutation of intellectually derived scepticism lies in an examination of practically lived human ex· perience. Ferreira seeks to describe three distinct modes of naturalism. The first is sceptical naturalism such as found in the clearly sceptical pass· ages of Hume. The other forms of naturalism constitute replies to this sceptical position. These anti-sceptical positions are reasonable doubt scepticism and justifying naturalism. Advocates of the former contend there is no reasonable basis for doubt about fundamental beliefs of human nature. They contend that these fundamental lieliefs are more basic than other beliefs rthart are subject to justification. They are indeed the basis of our juslf:ification of other matters. For persons of ithis outlook, rationality and justification are mallters of practice. By contrast justifying naturalism does seek to provide some kind of justification that links what is natural with what can be justified. In effect, justifying naturalism rejects the argument that only one mode of justification can be regarded as legitimate. Reasonable doubt naturalism and justifying naturalism often closely approach each other, but the latter may reject scepticism on grounds other than those of practice. 53~ BOOK REVIEWS Fundamental to Ferreira's argument is her interpretation of the position of John Locke in the anti-sceptical tradition. In contrast to Henry Van Leeuwen, she asserts that rather than standing as the culmination of an earlier liberal Anglican tradition associated with John Wilkins, Locke actually departed from that anti-sceptical position which had based itself largely on the concept of moral certainty. Locke based his rejection of scepticism on a distinction between kinds of certainty rather than upon human nature itself. Whereas Wilkins and others had seen a close and sometimes identical relationship between the highest probability and certainty, Locke distinguished ,the two. For him, cel'tainty had to achieve more than probability. Locke distinguished kinds of evidence from degrees of evidence. He also proposed categories of probability and demonstrated certainty hut no category of proof. This issue is crucial for Ferreira's interpretation of Hume. She contends that Hume understood this distinction in Locke and that he looked to the earlier anti-sceptical tradition. She argues that Hume thought it possible to offer a response to his own sceptical position that actually went beyond simply unavoidably accepting certain beliefs. Hume introduced a category of proof between Locke's categories of certainty and probability. According to Ferreira, he based this category on the previous seventeenth-century distinction between reasonable and unreasonable doubt. Ferreira does not claim a single unified interpretation of Hume, but urges the presence of tension in his thought that allows for the presence at least some of the time of a naturalist approach to scepticism. Thomas Reid was regarded in his day and during most of the nineteenth century as the major critic of Hume. However, Ferreira examines that critique largely in terms of shared concerns. Reid sought to distinguish degrees of certainty in both demonstrative and probabilistic reasoning. His key metaphor was found in the suggestion...

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe: One Hundred and Fifty Years of Continuing Vitality (review)

Robert Spaethling 345 Johann Wolfgang von Goedie: One Hundred and Fifty Years of Continuing Vitality, edited by Ulrich Goebel and Wolodymyr T. ZyIa. Lubbock, Texas: Texas Tech Press, 1984. The ten essays gathered in diis volume, representing the proceedings of the Fifteenth Comparative Literature Symposium at Texas Tech University, are rich and varied testimony to the continuing vitality of both Goethe and American Goethe scholarship. The topics cover influences, translations, narrative techniques, Goethe's relationship to music and to literary theory. Stuart Atidns leads off by sharing his thoughts "On Translating Faust," a subject that has occupied this distinguished Goethean for fifty fruitful years. He begins with a brief history of Faust translations, quoting from Morgan, Fairley, Taylor, Hayward, MacNeice, Jarrell, Passage, Arndt, and others. The survey is thoughtful, often humorous, and concentrated on two issues: the perennial problems of translating Faust into English and Atidns' own most recent efforts in this direction: his new translation of both parts oÃ- Faust for die Suhrkamp/Insel Goethe edition in English. Atkins emphasizes metered verse over rhyme, linguistic accuracy over euphonious effects, preserving thereby the drama's important metrical variety while rendering it into idiomatic English. Wolodymyr T. ZyIa presents a related topic. By delineating Goethe's impact on Ivan Franko (1856-1916), "Goethe's Translator and Interpreter" in the Ukraine, he addresses problems concerning the art of translating as well as die Goethean presence in die creative world of one Ukrainian writer and in Ukrainian culture. The translation of foreign poetry, wrote Ivan Franko, is like building a "golden bridge" of understanding between distant cultures. In this presentation ZyIa himseff contributes greatly to such an understanding. David Delaura discusses the reception of Goethe's concept of "self-development "—Bildung—in nineteendi-century England. The term became a criterion for judging Goethe as an artist and tiiinker in the British Isles as well as in New England, and it served as a catalyst for such timely topics as individuaUty and ethics, "heroic egotism" and social responsibUity. Major contributors to the debate were Thomas Carlyle, John Stuart MiU, G.H. Lewes, Ralph Waldo Emerson, and Margret Fuller. By examining previously unexplored materials (e.g. monthlies) DeLaura is able to demonstrate that Goethe's influence on English intellectual life was much more pervasive than is generaUy assumed. Two essays in the volume are on narrative structures in the Meister novels. Hans-Jürgen Schings gives a fascinating account of Goethe's use of archetypal tales ("Urgeschichten") as leitmotivic devices in Wilhelm Meisters Lehrjahre. Thematically and structurally the tales (e.g. the story of the aUing prince and his cure) support the central symbolism of the novel, a "Symbolik des Glücks," by conveying images of growtii, pain, and happy resolution. In contrast to the Lehrjahre, says Alexander GeUey, Goethe's late novel, Wilhelm Meisters Wanderjahre, has no diematic or formal cohesiveness, no teleological purpose or progression. It is a loose assemblage of narratives whose meaning derives from intertextual dynamics. GeUey points to Mikhail Baldwin's definition of die 346 GOETHE SOCIETY OF NORTH AMERICA "dialogue novel" as a poetological reference point for the Wanderjahre, dius offering us a structuralist's refinement of the traditional view diat Goethe's late prose is based on a dialectical interplay of content and form. Two articles on the subject of Goedie and music widen our horizon in this often misjudged area of Goethean interest. John Neubauer deserves the gratitude of aU who seek objective and useful information about Goethe's theoretical knowledge of music. By pointing to die poet's annotations to his translation of Diderot's Le neveu de Rameau and to his fragmentary Tonlehre (intended as a pendant to his Farbenlehre), he draws our attention to significant sources for understanding Goedie's perception of "absolute" (instrumental) and "affective" (representational) music. Goethe's adopted creed that major and minor scales in music develop from one single "Tonmonade" is completely in accord widi his general view of totaUty based on archetypal polarities. Meredith McClain iUuminates Goedie's musical vitality in a more practical way. She examines one of die Mignon poems, "Nur wer die Sehnsucht kennt," and traces it through seven different musical settings (notes included in the...

Certain Philosophical Questions: Newton's Trinity Notebook (review)

412 JOURNAL OF THE HISTORY OF PHILOSOPHY 24:3 JULY ~986 fend wie vage. Die Ursachen dieses Klimawechsels h~itten griindlicherer Kl~rung bedurft; leider l~il3tBell neuere Erklirungsan~tze unberiicksichfigt, die die Spinozarenaissance u. a. mit der Erschiitterung des christlichen Offenbarungsglaubens durch die von Lessing edierten WoOllier Fragtaentt in Zusammenhang bringen (vgl. H. Timm, Gott und die Fr~, 1974). Eine erschtpfende und vollauf befriedigende Darstellung der Spinozarezeption yon ihren Anf~ngen bis zur Goethezeit ist angesichts der eingangs angedeuteten Schwierigkeiten in n~iherer Zukunft wohl kaum zu erwarten. Nicht allein deshalb ist Bells Arbeit, die (besonders zu Herders intellektueller Entwicklung) reichhaltige Informationen in ldarer Form darbietet, yon Nutzen. WINFRIED SCHRODER Ruhr-Universit~t Bochura J. E. McGuire and Martin Tamny, Certain Philosophical Questions: Newton's Trinity Notebook. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983. Pp. xii + 519. $84.5o. Roughly one fourth of the present volume (329-465) offers a transcription and expansion of the bulk of Isaac Newton's earliest known student notebook, produced between early 1664 and mid-1665, along with editor's notes identifying the most likely textual sources or stimuli for Newton's comments. Another small portion (46689 ) reproduces another set of related notes, "of Colours," written out roughly a year after the condusion of the first notebook; and there is a handy short glossary to help the neophyte recognize special technical terms and terms used idiosyncratically by Newton. The vast bulk of the book, however, consists of a commentary by J. E. McGuire and Martin Tamny intended to prepare the reader of Newton's notebook to understand the content, context, and longer term significance of Newton's earliest approaches to a series of central problems in natural philosophy. The Questions quaedam philosophicae, as Newton tided them, are well worth the attention, not only of Newton scholars--for whom they provide major insights into the origins of Newton's work on the foundations of mathematics, matter theory, and optics---but of anyone concerned with the history of early modern philosophy or English intellectual life. In particular, they point up the key role played by scholarly editions of Sextus Empiricus and Diogenes Laertius's Lives of the Philosophersin stimulating discussions of the nature of space, time, matter, and of mathematical concepts. Newton's personal copy of Diogenes is extensively dog-eared to mark specific places on a number of pages where statements about infinity, the nature of the cosmos, the void, and minima appear. These opinions are taken up in the Question~ at their appropriate places. Though Newton's copy of Sextus (16~ 1 Paris edition) is now lost, it is certainly the source of Newton's rather extensive discussions concerning atoms of time (~a-2~, 353-54, 418). It will surprise almost no one to find the young Newton deeply engaged in trying to sort out aspects of Cartesian natural philosophy--though I was surprised to see him adopting substantial aspects of vortex Cosmology until--if McGuire and Tamny are correct--well into the 168os. Also among the expected are BOOK REVIEWS 413 Newton's fascination with Robert Boyle's E~er/.~/s Touching Colours and with Walter Charleton's presentation of Gassendist atomism. Much more interesting and surprising is the well documented claim made here that Newton's fascination with optics emerged initially out of his interest in Thomas Hobbes' physiological analysis of vision to which the authors dedicate a full chapter of their commentary. And it is interesting to note that Newton had initiated work on "Newton's rings" before becoming acquainted with Hooke's Micrographia. Finally, though there are a few indications here of what would become Newton's intense and often unorthodox religious positions, there is no hint at all of any alchemical or Hermetic interests. In a small number of places I was disturbed by the authors' tendency to use speculation based on rational reconstructions to fill in what they view to be lacunae in Newton's comments on topics of interest. Thus, where Newton is dealing with how to judge the swiftness or slowness of motions they write: "Unfortunately he does not give an answer, but it can be conjectured..." (89); and where Newton writes of beams of white light giving...