Nineteenth-century Philosophy Research Articles

Beyond Sinophilia and Sinophobia: Tocqueville and Mill in the Continuum of the European Reception of China

Abstract: Various approaches have been taken recently to a reinterpretation of the European reception of China and the sinophilia-sinophobia dichotomy (Hung 2003, Millar 2010, Jacobsen 2013). In the present article, a nineteenth-century approach to China is examined using Alexis de Tocqueville (1805–1859) and John Stuart Mill (1806–1873) as examples. It will be argued that this approach differs from earlier attitudes. First, the central currents will be surveyed in the European reception of China between the Jesuit missionaries and early nineteenth-century philosophies of history, introducing an interpretational framework that differentiates between various approaches to China, namely a universalistic and a progression-based approach . Then, first Tocqueville's and then Mill's depictions of China in comparison with the concepts of preceding centuries will be analyzed. It will be argued that Tocqueville and Mill's understanding of China represents a third view that I will call relation-based .

Synoptic subjects? The Scope and methods of philosophy, geography and anthropology

This article identifies the recurring expression ‘scope and method/s’ in three published lectures by Henry Sidgwick, Halford Mackinder and James George Frazer between 1885 and 1921. It tracks transdisciplinary connections between the thought and practice of late nineteenth-century philosophy, economic science and geography, and early twentieth-century anthropology, thereby illuminating shifting perceptions, and applications, of historical geographical knowledge and imaginations in a broader speculative evolutionary epistemological scheme. At a time when science and humanities subjects were thought to be diverging, it shows that metaphorical uses of optical instruments helped draw synoptic spatio-temporal frames of reference which shaped transdisciplinary and trans-institutional practices.

Anton Günther’s critique of pantheism as introduction to his philosophy of revelation

ABSTRACT The ingenious thought of Anton Günther (1783–1863) is rarely mentioned in the annals of nineteenth-century philosophy. However, in the eyes of his contemporaries, Günther belonged to the key thinkers of his age on par with Kant, Fichte, Hegel, and Schelling. Günther was an original writer yet he left many of his insights undeveloped or ambiguously formulated. As a flamboyant and popular debater, he attacked the most influential philosophers of his time. His attacks were aimed especially at what he termed the unavoidable pantheism of these thinkers, a pantheism Günther often identified with monism. Monism, semi-monism, pantheism, and semi-pantheism are recurring charges of Günther against many influential thinkers, including even Descartes, whose thought Günther considered otherwise epoch-making. Based on a reformed Cartesianism, Günther elaborated his antidote he termed dualism. Yet Güntherian dualism turns out to be a synthesis properly termed organicism. On such a basis, Günther carried out a heroic attempt to transcend the horizon of traditional views and open the vista of an I-centered philosophy built on the universal notion of revelation. By re-reading this Bohemia-born thinker, one can have a better understanding of the scope and influence of what we term Austrian Philosophy.

Andrew Humphreys’ and Olivier Kugler’s The Great Fish & Chips: Indexical pathways in illustration research

The graphic reportage of Andrew Humphreys and Olivier Kugler, specifically, their project The Great British Fish & Chips, is analysed in this article on three levels: first, in terms of their practices of graphic journalism; second, as a mechanism for navigating, through illustration and storytelling, difficult social and political currents about British national territory and sovereignty emergent in Brexit; and third, building upon critical theory already established in modern art history, as a matrix of the theoretical propositions offered by nineteenth-century philosopher Charles S. Peirce’s semiotic category of the ‘index’. Using ‘indexical strategies’ within illustrative practice, Humphreys and Kugler bring forth the ironic tensions within certain constructions of ‘British’ identity. Ultimately, consider The Great Fish & Chips as an exploratory site for the larger proposition that the indexical relation might be the primary mode of illustration itself.

Johann Friedrich Herbart: Grandfather of Analytic Philosophy by Frederick C. Beiser

Reviewed by: Johann Friedrich Herbart: Grandfather of Analytic Philosophy by Frederick C. Beiser Nabeel Hamid BEISER, Frederick C. Johann Friedrich Herbart: Grandfather of Analytic Philosophy. New York: Oxford University Press, 2022. xii + 321 pp. Cloth, $85.00 This volume is the newest installment in Frederick Beiser's emerging series of intellectual biographies of nineteenth-century German figures who are relatively little known in the Anglophone world. Following monographs on Hermann Cohen (2018) and David Friedrich Strauß (2020), Beiser's latest subject is Johann Friedrich Herbart (1776–1841), a contemporary of Schelling and Hegel best known in his century as a founder of scientific psychology and an educational theorist. Beiser's motive for presenting Herbart to today's Anglophone readers, however, has to do with neither of those dimensions of his legacy. His claim on Herbart's behalf is bold: that he was the one who "first outlined . . . our modern conception of the purpose and method of philosophy." According to Beiser, Herbart was the first to advance the idea that "philosophy is primarily an analysis of concepts, that it is a second-order logical enterprise that examines concepts rather than a first-order empirical discipline (physics, biology) that uses them." Thus, he bestows upon Herbart the moniker indicated in the book's subtitle: "If Russell and Frege are the fathers of analytical philosophy, Herbart is its grandfather." Beiser supports his central genealogical thesis with several specific claims that would draw Herbart into the orbit of contemporary philosophical naturalism: that Herbart conceived philosophy as an examination of the logic of the sciences; that Frege borrowed Herbart's slogan, "reworking of concepts" (Bearbeitung der Begriffe) to describe the business of philosophy; that Herbart upheld a sharp fact/value [End Page 543] distinction; and that he formulated a "method of relations" for the analysis of concepts derived strictly from the given. Most importantly, perhaps, given the received story of the origins of analytic philosophy as a reaction to (British) German Idealism, Beiser frames Herbart as an early opponent of the speculative systems of Fichte and Schelling, and as the source of an alternative development of transcendental idealism that anticipated the later neo-Kantian movement. Whether Herbart's claim to ancestry is convincing remains for his putative descendants to judge. To specialists in the history of nineteenth-century philosophy, Beiser's pitch to analytic philosophers risks appearing reductive. Indeed, a striking feature of Herbart's reception is its ambivalence. During the time when he was widely read, authors as varied in their intellectual orientations as Wilhelm Dilthey, Ernst Mach, and Matthias Jakob Schleiden contended with Herbart as, in turn, a progenitor of psychologism, a pioneer of the application of mathematics to mental phenomena, and a dogmatic scholastic, all before Frege leaned on Herbart to propose conceptual analysis as the distinctive task of philosophy that would save it from irrelevance in the face of the forward march of the positive sciences. Meanwhile, Herbart's most compelling claim to distinction, that he initiated (along with Jakob Friedrich Fries) a naturalistic alternative to the Fichte-Schelling-Hegel school of post-Kantian philosophy, has been defended previously, including in Anglophone scholarship (notably by Gary Hatfield in The Natural and the Normative). Beiser's attempt to give Herbart a place in the genealogy of analytic philosophy comes at the inevitable cost of evading some of the tensions in Herbart's work that account for his complex influence. Beiser's story—told in the lucid, engaging style we have come to expect from him—spans the length of Herbart's life and career. It also provides a clear overview of all major aspects of his teaching—from metaphysics and psychology, to pedagogy, ethics, and aesthetics. The narrative is divided into thirteen chapters. The first four cover Herbart's childhood in Oldenburg, student years in Jena, and his time in Interlaken as private tutor to an aristocratic Swiss family, which proved crucial for his lifelong interest in pedagogical theory. The next three turn to Herbart's first academic post in Göttingen and his decisive break with his teacher, Fichte, which led to his early efforts to formulate an alternative metaphysics and ethics, the latter notably infused with a Romantic idea of...

Introduction and Response to Special Issue

Introduction and Response to Special Issue

Whewell’s Hylomorphism as a Metaphorical Explanation for How Mind and World Merge

William Whewell’s nineteenth century philosophy of science is sometimes glossed over as a footnote to Kant. There is however a key feature of Whewell’s account worth noting. This is his appeal to Aristotle’s form/matter hylomorphism as a metaphor to explain how mind and world merge in successful scientific inquiry. Whewell’s hylomorphism suggests a middle way between rationalism and empiricism reminiscent of experience pragmatists like Steven Levine’s view that mind and world are entwined in experience. I argue however that Levine does not adequately explain exactly how mind and world entwine. He could nonetheless do so if he appealed to Whewell’s hylomorphic metaphor. We may prefer a reductive metaphysical explanation, but I suggest that pragmatists only have recourse to metaphor in this case. Both reductive and metaphorical explanations can enjoy great explanatory power if they exhibit a suitable measure of what I will call semantic distance. Semantic distance measures how close or how far apart explanandum and explanans are from each other in meaning. Metaphorical explanation, as evident in Whewell’s hylomorphism and as detailed via the notion of semantic distance, presents a valuable new explanatory tool to those who hold that mind and world are entwined sans recourse to metaphysics.

The Idea of a Pseudo-Problem in Mach, Hertz, and Boltzmann

Identifications, diagnoses, and treatments of pseudo-problems form a family of classic methodologies in later nineteenth century philosophy and at least partly, I shall argue, in the philosophy of science. They were devised, not by academic philosophers, but by three of the greatest philosopher-scientists. Here I show how Ernst Mach, Heinrich Hertz and Ludwig Boltzmann each deployed methods of this general kind, how they identified different pseudo-problems, gave different diagnoses of such problems, and suggested quite different treatments for them. I argue that it was Mach who really first developed the idea of a pseudo-problem, that he did so in a relatively focussed way on the basis of two kinds of examples. Hertz’s contribution was much more limited, identifying two specific pseudo-problems concerning physics, and suggesting a way in which they might be treated. Boltzmann’s conception of pseudo-problems, though, was far less focussed, being applied to a very wide range of problems in philosophy and physics. However, his conception was certainly more influential, and perhaps ultimately more fruitful and suggestive. I argue for the originality and continuing interest of such approaches, and I try to dissociate them from any problematic ‘positivism’.

Cultural Practice of Natural Theology and Environmental Ethics in the Vedas

Vedic texts have established the cult of worshipping natural phenomena, which from the surface understanding is the process of personification, but in real, Vedic hymns show on how the Vedic people have understood the underlying power of nature. Vedas, Rig Veda, Sama Veda, Yajur Veda and Atharva Veda, have joined the human culture with the philosophy of nature in the mode of natural theology. The culture of sacrifice taught through Vedic hymns has conveyed the knowledge of mutual dependence of man, God and nature. Vedas have proven the natural theological notion of nature-God relation with the hymns devoted to nature phenomena as the metaphors of power, creativity, essence and purity in the forms of deities. Vedas have pertained ecocentrism as the cultural practice of nature eminence. They have further addressed the idea of environmental ethics through the Vedic view of cosmological and ontological unity in nature, and the ethics of natural law in the form of rita, dharma and karma. With the examination of Vedic priority to nature, especially from the Rig Veda, this study anticipates to link Vedic natural religion with the nineteenth century philosophy of natural theology and late twentieth century ecological study of environmental ethics.

Jeremy Bentham et le plaisir de la fiction

Nineteenth-century philosophers, including J.S. Mill, Karl Marx, and Friedrich Nietzsche, criticized Jeremy Bentham for his supposed aesthetic insensibility to the arts, especially literature. Through analysis of Bentham’s manuscript comments on novelists, both negative (Samuel Richardson, Henry Fielding, Tobias Smollett, and C.M. Wieland) and positive (Laurence Sterne, Charlotte Smith, Frances Burney, and William Beckford), this essay analyzes the pleasure Bentham took in fictional narratives in the context of his advocacy for sexual and gender minorities, disabled persons, colonized and enslaved persons, children, and animals. Drawing from a wide range of Bentham’s papers, the author then focuses on a vivid manuscript proposing ‘a new and improved Drama,’ in which Bentham examines the desire to be immersed in an interactive dramatic experience of one’s favorite works of fiction.

“The Bet” against Nihilism: The Intellectual Journey in Chekhov’s Short Fiction

Abstract Anton Chekhov’s “The Bet” (1889) may be considered a latter-day conte- philosophique, as a symbolic engagement with the philosophical challenges presented by nihilism and anarchism that reverberated through Russia since the 1860s. Occasionally assigned in literature classes and alluded to by political pundits, the story nonetheless has not been recognized by critics as a masterpiece of irony and existential inquiry, influenced by countervailing currents of nineteenth-century philosophy. Considered in this article in the broader context of the Chekhovian intellectual journey, the fascinating yet unsettling quest for wisdom described in “The Bet” reflects a pivotal era of the Russian elite, suspended between bourgeois indifference and philosophical recognition.

Varia: The Enduring Power of the Classical World View

For the poet, prophet, and politician, as for the lover, the king, and the anthropologist, the human is the measure of all things. Philosophers and psychologists define us as a perceiving consciousness, an object determined by the environment, a subject not only capable of heroic individualism but also of esoteric understanding. For some, our measure is beyond things and our true worth lies not only in the here and now but rather in our freedom to transcend the bounds of self and prevail beyond the limits of temporality. For the artist, whose creative consciousness aims to redeem the human image from the constraints of brute anonymity, the questions about our status must be asked if not finally answered. The article considers the role that the classical world view plays in the process of artistic redemption. It looks at the Judeo-Christian and Classical legacies and their interpretations. Nineteenth-century Russian literature and religious philosophy are then analysed. The article winds up with a reading of select poems by Osip Mandelstam as special attention is paid to the ethical stance of the poet when confronted with the dictates of totalitarian power.

Religion, Evolution and Scottish Philosophy

This paper explores developments in the defence of theism within Scottish philosophy following Hume's Dialogues and the advent of Darwinian evolutionary biology. By examining the writings of two nineteenth-century Scottish philosophers, it aims to show that far from Darwinian biology completing Hume's destruction of natural theology, it prompted a new direction for the defence of philosophical theism. Henry Calderwood and Andrew Seth Pringle-Pattison occupied, respectively, the Chairs of Moral Philosophy and Logic and Metaphysics at the University of Edinburgh in the late nineteenth century. Their books reveal that the challenge of articulating new grounds for philosophical theism was not motivated by a conservative desire to see off a new intellectual threat, but by a desire for a proper understanding of evolutionary biology.

Useful Untruths: A Plea for the Necessity of Pluralism in Child Analysis

ABSTRACT The late nineteenth century philosopher Hans Vaihinger and the preeminent contemporary philosopher, Kwame Anthony Appiah contend that in order to see a more complete picture of the world, we need a plurality of pictures with which to view it, not just one. This truth comes with epistemological burdens and with the inconvenient fact that the human mind is unable to juggle more than one picture or theory simultaneously. Thus, psychoanalytic clinicians tend to select one theory as a guide when treating patients. In this paper, I will offer ways to think about this conundrum as it appears in the child psychoanalytic setting and whether it is possible to shift from one’s usual theoretical point of view to include alternate theoretical perspectives – and thus, to gain a more complete “truth”, as Vaihinger and Appiah suggest we should aspire to – as the clinical situation allows.

Beauty in the Age of Empire: Japan, Egypt, and the Global History of Aesthetic Education by Raja Adal

Reviewed by: Beauty in the Age of Empire: Japan, Egypt, and the Global History of Aesthetic Education by Raja Adal Eriko Tomizawa-Kay (bio) Beauty in the Age of Empire: Japan, Egypt, and the Global History of Aesthetic Education. By Raja Adal. Columbia University Press, New York, 2019. xviii, 268 pages. $65.00, cloth; $64.99, E-book. Raja Adal's Beauty in the Age of Empire: Japan, Egypt, and the Global History of Aesthetic Education is a historically grounded critique of aesthetic education provided in Japanese and Egyptian primary schools from the early 1870s to the early 1940s. It is drawn from what the author terms the "global archive" of curricula, textbooks, and educational manuals. Using these resources, Adal has endeavored to put a global group of educators in dialogue with one another to examine the similarities in the priorities of educators worldwide at the end of the nineteenth century and then to consider the independent responses to art education by the societies on the receiving end of Western expansion. This book presents an important transnational approach and highlights indirect connections that can be identified between Japan and Egypt during the period of modernization. Adal's approach is refreshing because it avoids the usual trope of an uncritical West-to-East transfer of knowledge, when, in reality, it has always been more complicated than that. Comparing Egypt and Japan gives insights into this complexity. The importance of this book lies in Adal's commitment to write a global history that extends not from the West out toward its colonies but rather from the perspective of those nations seeking to define themselves in opposition to the West. To do this, he turns to aesthetic education, an often-neglected [End Page 232] aspect of nation building. "What happens," he asks, "if for a moment we allow wealth and military power to recede to a backdrop and bring aesthetics to the fore? In so doing, not only are we adopting a different perspective, but we are giving voice to a different set of historical actors" (pp. 15–16). This is the crux of Adal's study. By examining ways in which Japanese and Egyptian educational policymakers turned to music, writing, and drawing as tools for cultivating the sensibilities of the young and shaping their ideas of nationhood, he shows how countries threatened by the imperialist West turned to aesthetics as a form of resistance. The first half of the book examines the educational trajectories of the subjects of art education in question. After an introduction to the importation of primary curricula from Western nations at the turn of the twentieth century, chapter 2 focuses on music education. By the end of the nineteenth century, educators in both Japan and Egypt had largely abandoned indigenous musical traditions in favor of Western music. In terms of curriculum, Japan incorporated music education from 1886, while Egyptian schools would lag behind by more than four decades, possibly a consequence of the less pervasive state control of education. By the late 1920s to 1930s, however, the situation was being re-evaluated and both countries began to turn to their indigenous traditions. Adal nonetheless highlights differences between their respective conceptions of traditional music: Japan celebrated local musical forms such as the courtly gagaku, its continued existence distinguishing Japan from other East Asian nations that witnessed the erasure of their ancient indigenous music, whereas Egyptian educators embraced a wider Arabic canon of "Eastern beauty." Yet the embrace of nativist traditions was highly significant in both countries. Late nineteenth-century philosophies of music posited musical sensibility as the most primal sensory experience of the individual. If music had such privileged access to hearts and minds, it followed that traditional forms of music had the power to cultivate not just humanist sensibilities, but nationalist ones. The intervention of music in the aesthetic economy surrounding children was thus a crucial tool of nation building. As Adal explains in a later chapter (the second "Interlude"), this, in turn, encouraged the adoption of national anthems. While anthems were colonial imports, they used patriotic lyrics to appropriate the emotional impact of rousing melodies for a national cause. Chapter 3 explores the evolution of writing pedagogies...

Machine Learning and Feature Selection for Authorship Attribution: The Case of Mill, Taylor Mill and Taylor, in the Nineteenth Century

In this article we revisit a dividing issue as regards the corpus of one of the most famous nineteenth-century philosophers: John Stuart Mill. He was the author of two iconic texts in the history of political philosophy: On Liberty and The Subjection of Women . However, Mill attributed the first to collaboration with Harriet Taylor Mill, his wife, and characterized the second as a work of three minds: his own, his wife’s and her daughter, Helen Taylor. Experts disagree on this issue. Most think Mill was too generous sharing authorship credit. We use a training set consisted in manuscripts of the three above mentioned authors, to train a four-class problem (three authors and joint productions). For every manuscript in the training set we extract a set of features that are widely used in text analytics and classification. Then, we apply some pre-processing techniques to normalize the data and to reduce the number of features. Finally, we train three classifiers, namely k-nearest neighbours (k-NNs) with k = 1 and k = 2, support vector machines (SVMs), and decision trees (DTs) to attribute the texts of “disputed” authorship to one of the four potential authors. We routinely run the experiments using different feature sets every time, in order to identify the optimal combination of features that yield the best results on the test set. The best results are achieved with the SVMs, having as input the bigrams features and their principal components. The mean detection rate for all four classes is 100%. Similar results are achieved with the models built with the k-NNs (k = 1) and the DTs. The only classifier that consistently is returning significantly lower results is the k-NN with k = 2. All of the instances in the test set are attributed to John Stuart Mill.

Vienna Circle's Reception of Nietzsche

Friedrich Nietzsche was among the figures from the history of nineteenth-century philosophy that, perhaps surprisingly, some of the Vienna Circle’s members had presented as one of their predecessors. While, primarily for political reasons, most Anglophone figures in the history of analytic philosophy had taken a dim view of Nietzsche, the Vienna Circle’s leader Moritz Schlick admired and praised Nietzsche, rejecting what he saw as a misinterpretation of Nietzsche as a militarist or proto-fascist. Schlick, Frank, Neurath, and Carnap were in different ways committed to the view that Nietzsche made a significant contribution to the overcoming of metaphysics. Some of these philosophers praised the intimate connection Nietzsche drew between his philosophical outlook and empirical studies in psychology and physiology. In his 1912 lectures on Nietzsche, Schlick maintained that Nietzsche overcame an initial Schopenhauerian metaphysical-artistic phase in his thinking, and subsequently remained a positivist until his last writings. Frank and Neurath made the weaker claim that Nietzsche contributed to the development of a positivistic or scientific conception of the world. Schlick and Frank took a further step in seeing the mature Nietzsche as an Enlightenment thinker.

Dread

Abstract Reinterpreting nineteenth-century philosopher Søren Kierkegaard’s theory of “dread,” this essay situates the fear surrounding COVID-19 within a larger historical framework to consider the affective dimension of the virus’s emergence for African Americans.

Painful Subjects

Painful Subjects

The ‘empowered king’ of French spiritualism: Théodore Jouffroy

ABSTRACT There is a paradox in the fate of nineteenth-century French philosophy: the ‘eclecticism' or ‘spiritualism' that was university philosophy, championed by Victor Cousin – ‘the king of the philosophers' – and commander of a ‘regiment' of other teacher-philosophers who docilely disseminated his doctrine, is almost entirely absent from today’s canon. Between the familiar figures of Maine de Biran and Bergson, the work of Comte or Tocqueville might be taught and studied but Cousin's work and the work of his followers is ignored. This article turns back to the regiment. By showing how certain spiritualists attempted to philosophically distinguish themselves from their commander, this article views spiritualism as a school developing a programme rather than as a school of (one track) thought. From this perspective, the case of Théodore Jouffroy is of particular interest – initially he and the young Cousin shared a philosophical programme which aimed to scientifically found new forms of psychology. However, Jouffroy evolved in a radically different direction to Cousin. By looking at Jouffroy as an ‘emancipated king of philosophy’, I intend to return to the philosophical rather than simply political meaning of ‘French spiritualism’.