Thomas Brown Research Articles

Regularity and counterfactuality in Hume's treatment of causation

Of the several theories of causation current in our days, Hume is said to be the inspiration of two of the most influential and accepted: the regularity theory, first clearly formulated by Thomas Brown in 1822, and the counterfactual theory, proposed by David Lewis in 1973. After a brief outline of the comparative merits and difficulties of these two views, I proceed to examine whether Hume's own treatment of causation actually corresponds to any of them. I will show that his first definition of cause, coupled with his rules by which to judge about causes and effects, contains elements that, properly developed, allow us to address successfully some traditional difficulties of the regularity view of causation, without resorting to the conceptual resources employed in the counterfactual approach. Therefore, we can properly classify Hume as an advocate of the conception of causation as regularity, noting however that his primary goal in his research and definitions of the concept was to provide not so much an analysis of causation as such, but of causation as we apprehend it, in the form of our ability to make causal inferences and refine them to reach the more sophisticated causal reasonings that are required in the theoretical and practical issues of life.

The Scottish Philosophy, as Contrasted with the German

It is not very difficult to recognize a Scotchman wherever you happen to meet with him. He has stout, bony limbs, and stands well upon his feet; he is canny, that is, cautious, otherwise he would not be a Scotchman; but he is considerably independent, and can resist attack, his motto being ‘Nemo me impune Iacessit;’ he is firm, not to say obstinate, especially if he is from the Highlands, whose rocks and mountains he takes as his models; he boasts that his ancestors could not be conquered even by the Romans, when they subdued all other people of Europe and western Asia-except the Arabs. He is naturally quiet and submissive to circumstances, but is capable of being roused, like the Yankee, whom he somewhat resembles, into intense enthusiasm, as has been shown in his contests with England, and generally in his fights for the independence of his country and of his church. He uses a softer, broader speech than the English, coming more from the mouth and less from the throat; and he can make his meaning clear and carry it into practical effect. I mention these things because no man can understand the Scottish philosophy without knowing the Scottish character, of which it is a reflection and a picture. I am not to dwell on its history, which dates from the second quarter of last century, when it came out of the school of Locke and of Berkeley. It started as a distinct school, with Francis Hutcheson of Glasgow (1694–1746), one of the most successful teachers of his age, and with Turnbull of Aberdeen (the teacher of Reid) (AD 1698–1748); but its true representative is Thomas Reid (1710–1796), first of Aberdeen and then of Glasgow, who gave to it its specific character. Adam Smith (1723–1790), the founder of political economy, belongs to the same school. In the succeeding ages we have Beattie the poet (1735–1802); Campbell, the author of the Philosophy of Rhetoric (1719–1796); and more influential than either, Dugald Stewart (1753–1828), who trained so many distinguished pupils, and by his wisdom and the elegance of his style did so much to introduce the philosophy into England. There followed Thomas Brown (1778–1820), who so

“Fool … Look in Thy Heart and Write”: W. B. Yeats”s Return to English Renaissance Poetry in “The Circus Animals’ Desertion”

SINCE ITS PUBLICATION in January 1939, the dominant critical interpretation ofW. B. Yeats's Circus Animals' Desertion has been tendentiously autobiographical. The story goes that this poem chronicles Yeats's struggle with his anguished perception of advancing poetic decrepitude. Witness the poem's very title and celebrated conclusion, in which the wretched speaker-Yeats-must he down where all the ladders start/In the foul rag and bone shop of the heart.1 Denis Donoghue's statement can stand as synecdoche for the sad consensus: the poem is not a willing commitment to life, but moral accountancy, balancing profit and loss.2 The circus animals have deserted Yeats; that is, he is bereft of poetic inspiration.But this and similar biographical readings overlook the extreme irony contained in Yeats's choice of vehicle for his statement about the Muses' purported desertion-a skilled and beautiful poem, that is, performative refutation of that very poem's ghastly confession. To heighten the irony, the scholarly biographers have overlooked singular biographical fact about the poet, his intellectual heritage from the English Renaissance. Circus Animals' Desertion is profound reworking, both as to form and substantive content, of Sir Philip Sidney's first sonnet in Astrophil and Stella. The abiding cleverness ofthat sonnet resides in its permitting Sidney to rid himself of the encumbrance of earlier poetic tradition, even as he skillfully exploits it. Just so, I will argue, Yeats, too, looks in his heart and writes. But, significant as the Sidney link is, it hardly exhausts Yeats's ramified connections with Renaissance poetry, and Renaissance poetics. Y eats does not only use Sidney to explore his theme; he also gains secondary support from other English Renaissance writers such as Sir Thomas Wyatt and Sir John Davies; and, more significantly, from the Renaissance acceptance of the Delphic injunction, know thyself. Far from bewailing senescent impotence, Yeats is savoring the richness of tradition that has roots not only in his own poetic life, but also in revered poetic repository, one of formidable power. In exquisitely accomplished imitation of his Renaissance predecessors, in returning to his heart, Yeats demonstrates his poetic virtuosity even as he laments his lack, or loss, of poetic talent. This is the feint of magisterial involution.That Yeats had more than passing acquaintance with the material in question is hardly contentious. In Yeats and the English Renaissance, Wayne K. Chapman established the case for Yeats's abiding interest in and formative influence by English Renaissance poetry. Yeats was an expert on Shakespeare, to lesser extent on Spenser and the Elizabethans at very young age (emphasis added)/' In A General Introduction for My Work, Yeats ecstatically confessed that he owed his very soul to Shakespeare, to Spenser and to Blake . . . and to the English language (Chapman 7). His advice to the young Thomas MacDonagh is telling: read the great old masters of English, Spenser, Ben Jonson, Sir Thomas Brown[e], perhaps Chaucer,-until you have gotten our feeble modern English out of your head.4 Yeats was, needless to say, not naive poet; he anticipated our awareness of the frighteningly charged and endlessly recessive dialectic between actual and ideal Irelands and Englands. Still and all, Yeats could unblushingly harbor ambitions for Irish Renaissance that in no way diminished his English affiliations.Renaissance influences are temporally Janus-faced, for Yeats: thus there is modernist component. Though he sometimes ostentatiously professed to esteem the poetry of Pound, Eliot, and Sitwell above his own, Yeats consistently claimed never to fully consider himself member of their assemblage. Nevertheless, in revealing rejection of the modern, Yeats claimed that he was unable to write free verse in the manner of Turner, Lawrence, and Pound because of uneasiness about losing himself in anything but (sometimes altered) traditional stanza. …

REVOLTING PASSIONS

AbstractThis article looks again at the significance of the shift from theories of passions and affections to a new scientific psychology of “emotions” in the nineteenth century. It recovers religious, moral, medical and political ideas about the pathology of the passions, and situates those ideas among the more differentiated affective typologies of earlier periods, with reference to both secular and theological writers including Seneca, Augustine, Thomas Aquinas, Francis Hutcheson, Jonathan Edwards, and Edmund Burke. The place of the emotions in the writings of nineteenth‐century figures from Thomas Brown and Charles Darwin to Oscar Wilde and G. E. Moore is explored with particular reference to transformations in ethical thought, in which emotions could be thought of as providing either a moral compass or the very goal of life. The article concludes by emphasising the reflexive relationships between social history, psychological language and emotional experience, and by asking, with reference to Martha Nussbaum's work, whether there is any place today for the ancient ideals of philosophical detachment and dispassion.

Causes as proximate events: Thomas Brown and the Positivist interpretation of Hume on causality

A neglected episode in the intellectual history of the Scottish Enlightenment, Thomas Brown’s philosophy has been recently reassessed and reconnected with the emergence of the Positivist interpretation of David Hume. In fact, aiming to defend Hume’s philosophy from the common charges of atheism and scepticism, Brown popularised an interpretation of Humean texts which was later to become the standard view on Hume. In this essay, I aim to identify Brown’s historical sources and connect his reading of Hume with the medical discussion on causality.

Mechanisms and networks of motoneuronal control during sleep: introduction.

are “What and how is the brain thinking?” To find the answers, researchers “connect the dots” and look for clues based on electrical, magnetic, biochemical and behavioral signals generated in the nervous system. Ultimately, it is the motor activity, or more generally the outcomes determined by the levels of activity in the last order neurons that control the muscles and other effector organs, which informs us about the state of the brain in health and disease. This Special Issue offers a collection of review and research articles that focus on the mechanisms and networks underlying motoneuronal control during sleep. The topic may seem paradoxical, just as one of the stages of sleep that bears this name, because the roots of Western culture associated sleep with an immobility akin to death. Indeed, the phrase “There she met Sleep, Death’s brother,” attributed to Homer in The Illiad (Homer, 2008), inspired many artists and philosophers, including Virgil (70 BC 19 BC), Ovid (43 BC AD 17/18), William Shakespeare (1564-1616), Sir Thomas Brown (1605-1682), Percy Bysshe Shelley (1792-1822), and Edgar Allen Poe (1809-1849), to see sleep and life as opposites. It was so till Charles Dickens (1812-1870) called the parallel between sleep and death a “poor hollow mockery [of sleep],” and asked: “Where, in the sharp lineaments of rigid and unsightly death, is the calm beauty of slumber, telling of rest for the waking hours that are past, and gentle hopes and loves for those which are to come? Lay death and sleep down, side by side, and say who shall find the two akin” (Dickens, 1960). This is perhaps not surprising from the man who also saw the Pickwickian syndrome for what it was -a medical condition distinctly affecting breathing during wakefulness and sleep. Thereafter, scientific foundations of the modern concepts of sleep as an active and regulated state were developed by Constantine von Economo (1876-1931) based on his analysis of brains from patients with “encephalitis lethargica” (Economo, 1930; see Triarhou, 2006 for a historical overview). This was followed by a formal description of rapid eye movement (REM) sleep, a state characterized by extremely high level of brain activity (Aserinsky and Kleitman, 1953; Jouvet and Michel, 1958; Jouvet, 1962). In this Special Issue, the readers will find ample review of early studies of motoneuronal control during REM sleep, most recent discoveries, and discussions of the phenomenology and mechanisms of motor suppression and activation during REM and non-REM sleep. Experiments testing new concepts in animal models and applications of the results to human sleep disorders such as obstructive sleep apnea syndrome, sleep bruxism and REM sleep behavior disorder are also discussed. And, yes, there Mechanisms and networks of motoneuronal control during sleep: introduction

Consciousness and Common Sense: From Claude Buffier to Thomas Brown

Consciousness and Common Sense: From Claude Buffier to Thomas Brown

‘An Open Revolt against the Authority of Reid’: Thomas Brown and the Developments of Common-Sense Philosophy

‘An Open Revolt against the Authority of Reid’: Thomas Brown and the Developments of Common-Sense Philosophy

Immunology Team-Based Learning: Innate Immunity & Recognition of Antigen

OPEN ACCESSOctober 24, 2009Immunology Team-Based Learning: Innate Immunity & Recognition of Antigen Sally Litherland, PhD, Wayne McCormack, EdD, Thomas Brown, PhD Sally Litherland, PhD Burnham Institute for Medical Research Google Scholar More articles by this author , Wayne McCormack, EdD University of Florida College of Medicine Google Scholar More articles by this author , Thomas Brown, PhD University of Florida College of Dentistry Google Scholar More articles by this author https://doi.org/10.15766/mep_2374-8265.7728 SectionsAbout ToolsDownload Citations ShareFacebookTwitterEmail AbstractAbstract Introduction: This module on innate immunity and recognition of antigen is one of three developed for second-year biomedical science MS and PhD students enrolled in a semester-long immunology graduate course titled Principles in Immunology. Topics covered by the remaining modules include basic concepts of immunology and receptor diversity and antigen presentation. Methods: This module uses a team-based learning format (TBL) to help learners understand the following immunological principles and how to apply them in experimental settings: function and pathways for activation of complement, effector mechanisms of innate immunity, antibody structure, T-cell receptor structure, major histocompatibility complex, molecule structure, and the molecular basis of antigen recognition by immunoglobulin and T-cell receptors. Students arrive at class having read preassigned readings. They first complete an individual Readiness Assurance Test, before completing the same test in groups. Students then remain in these groups while they complete a series of group application exercises. Results: Student satisfaction with TBL is very high, as assessed by course evaluations over the past 3 years. Students say that TBL helps them keep up with material and prepare for exams. Student performance on high-stakes exams has revealed modest improvements in overall scores. Student performance in a graduate-level immunology course did not drop after implementation of TBL, which involved replacing nine of 42 lectures throughout the semester with TBL sessions. Graduate students enjoy TBL, and learning appears to be enhanced. Discussion: Originally developed for second-year biomedical science MS and PhD students enrolled in a semester-long immunology graduate course, this material is also appropriate for basic science courses for medical and dental students and/or for review of immunology by residents and fellows. Educational Objectives By the end of this session, learners will be able to: Evaluate immunology experimental design related to innate immunity or the recognition of antigen by B-cells and/or T-cells by identifying or providing examples of appropriate controls, justifying the use of specific methods, and assessing whether or not a given method provides a desired measure.Interpret data provided for a given experimental protocol, including drawing conclusions based on the data, recognizing results that may not fit current understandings, and discussing results in the context of current concepts of immunology.Predict experimental results given an experimental protocol and relevant background information, including deciding between alternative experimental outcomes based on current immunology concepts and justifying predicted results in the context of established immunology concepts.Design an experiment to test a hypothesis, including identifying required reagents, cell lines, animal strains, etc.; proposing appropriate assays to measure experimental outcomes; organizing a sequence of experiments; and justifying the proposed design in the context of current immunology concepts. Sign up for the latest publications from MedEdPORTAL Add your email below FILES INCLUDEDReferencesRelatedDetails FILES INCLUDED Included in this publication: Innate Immunity Recognition of Antigen.pdf To view all publication components, extract (i.e., unzip) them from the downloaded .zip file. Download editor’s noteThis publication may contain technology or a display format that is no longer in use. Copyright & Permissions© 2009 Litherland et al. This is an open-access publication distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-Share Alike license.KeywordsTeam-based LearningImmunity InnateT Cell ReceptorReceptors Antigen T-CellTBLAntigen PresentationMajor Histocompatibility ComplexImmunoglobulinsComplementAntibodyB Cells Disclosures None to report. Funding/Support None to report. Loading ...

La médecine et la santé au Canada français : un bilan historiographique (1987-2000)

En 1987, l’historien Jacques Bernier signalait que l’histoire de la médecine et de la santé au Canada français, malgré la publication entre 1976 et 1986 de certains écrits importants, était encore au stade de l’enfance. Depuis, ce champ d’étude a connu un essor considérable. Cet article présente une recension des écrits publiés, regroupés selon les thèmes qui ont été privilégiés, au cours des années 1987 à 2002 sur l’histoire de la médecine et de la santé au Canada français, afin d’illustrer les acquis des seize dernières années. En conclusion, nous discuterons du stade d’avancement de l’histoire de la médecine et de la santé au Canada français en lien avec les différents éléments présentés par les historiens Ludmilla Jordonova et Thomas Brown pour juger de la maturité d’un champ d’étude, et identifierons certains facteurs qui en limitent la consolidation.

Keeping Philosophy in Mind : Shadworth H. Hodgson's Articulation of the Boundaries of Philosophy and Science

INTRODUCTIONShadworth H. Hodgson's (1832-1912) contributions to Victorian intellectual discourse have faded from prominence over the past century. However, despite his current anonymity, Hodgson's case is important to an understanding of the historical split between philosophy and in late nineteenth-century Britain. In particular, his example illuminates the specific role played by developing concepts of the mind in a period of deep transition in the British intellectual community. His virtual disappearance from the record, I contend, is indicative also of the disappearance of his form of philosophy as a vital social project. His ideas, rather than being rejected, were instead largely neglected - they became lost as discussion moved elsewhere, both conceptually and institutionally. However, in the inaugural volume of Mind in 1876, Hodgson's ideas initially found a prominent place in a central dialogue over the position of philosophy with respect to science. There, and throughout his career, Hodgson engaged in the defense of an intellectual tradition he regarded as under threat from psychological science. Both his particular formulation of an ongoing role for philosophy and his own uneasy position in the intellectual environment of late Victorian Britain shed significant light on an under-examined issue of the period: the fraught relationship between philosophy and as competing enterprises engaged in the study of the human mind.Philosophy and science are easily construed as partnered intellectual complexes in modern Western society. However, closer scrutiny of the historical record shows that the two terms - whether as theoretical referents or actors' categories - have often reflected divergent priorities and that transitions from philosophical to terms have been contentious. In examining the birth of natural out of natural philosophy during the Enlightenment, the historian Andrew Cunningham has emphasized how the reordering of intellectual fields created new conflictive relationships between philosophy, science, and religion.1 He reminds us that the process of scientific secularization was but one of a set of constitutive shifts among these human activities, and that the earlier natural philosophy thus played by fundamentally different rules than its successor. A similar story can be told about the late nineteenth -century transition I am considering: in a nutshell, to borrow a phrase from Cunningham, men did not start doing mental until they stopped doing moral philosophy. However, this time, philosophy already stood in competition with existing scientific institutions, sparking a more severe contest for authority. As mental began to develop along the lines of the natural disciplines, Hodgson and others feared little would remain as a distinctive domain for philosophy as such, moral or otherwise. His efforts on the part of philosophy thus represent one front in an intellectual turf war - what recent scholars have called work, shoring up the institutional positions of different intellectual enterprises competing for authority in the world.2 Gieryn's formative analysis of boundary work was based on the contemporaneous example of John Tyndall's campaign to promote scientific over religious authority in Victorian Britain, but this was much more than a two-way struggle. The early career of Mind bears witness to a closely related, but less discussed, battle for influence between philosophy and science, in which the journal itself served as a critical object, a medium for enforcement of the distinctions between these two intellectual fields.3Thomas Dixon has recently surveyed the origins of this shift. Like Cunningham, Dixon emphasizes the constitutive differences in scope and orientation of the two intellectual enterprises, salient among them the secularization of the new human sciences.4 This process - begun tentatively by Thomas Brown and brought to fruition by Bain, Spencer, and Darwin - involved wholesale shifts in the scholarly linguistic complex, from a set of several mental categories rooted in Christian categories - affections, passions, sentiments, etc. …

A Brief History of Time-Consciousness: Historical Precursors to James and Husserl

William James' Principles of Psychology , in which he made famous the "specious present" doctrine of temporal experience, and Edmund Husserl's Zur Phänomenologie des inneren Zeitbewusstseins were giant strides in the philosophical investigation of the temporality of experience. However, an important set of precursors to these works has not been adequately investigated. In this article, we undertake this investigation. Beginning with Reid's essay "Memory" in Essays on the Intellectual Powers of Man , we trace out a line of development of ideas about the temporality of experience that runs through Dugald Stewart, Thomas Brown, William Hamilton, and finally the work of Shadworth Hodgson and Robert Kelly, both of whom were immediate influences on James (though James pseudonymously cites the latter as 'E.R. Clay'). Furthermore, we argue that Hodgson, especially his Metaphysic of Experience (1898), was a significant influence on Husserl.

Introduction: Science and National Identity

Next article No AccessIntroduction: Science and National IdentityCarol E. Harrison and Ann JohnsonCarol E. Harrison Search for more articles by this author and Ann Johnson*Department of History, University of South Carolina, Gambrell Hall, Columbia, SC 29208; [email protected] and [email protected].We would like to thank Kathryn Olesko and two anonymous reviewers for their comments on earlier drafts. Special thanks to Thomas Brown and Holly Groover for careful and constructive readings of this chapter. Participants at the 2007 workshop on Science, Technology, and National Identity in Columbia, South Carolina, especially Michael Adas and John Krige, offered thoughtful and spirited discussion. The University of South Carolina, through the College of Arts and Sciences, the Walker Institute for International and Area Studies, and the Departments of History and Philosophy, provided critical fi nancial and logistical support for that workshop. Search for more articles by this author PDFPDF PLUSFull Text Add to favoritesDownload CitationTrack CitationsPermissionsReprints Share onFacebookTwitterLinkedInRedditEmail SectionsMoreDetailsFiguresReferencesCited by Osiris Volume 24, Number 12009Science and National Identity Published for the History of Science Society Article DOIhttps://doi.org/10.1086/605966 Views: 375Total views on this site Citations: 18Citations are reported from Crossref © 2009 by The History of Science Society. All rights reserved.PDF download Crossref reports the following articles citing this article:Mirko Tasic Discordant World of ‘Unknown Nations’: The Problem of Ethicization of National Identity, International Studies 58, no.33 (Jul 2021): 283–301.https://doi.org/10.1177/00208817211027445Shana Lee Hirsch Governing technological zones, making national renewable energy futures, Futures 124 (Dec 2020): 102648.https://doi.org/10.1016/j.futures.2020.102648Dimitrios Stroikos China, India, and the social construction of technology in international society: The English School meets Science and Technology Studies, Review of International Studies 46, no.55 (Sep 2020): 713–731.https://doi.org/10.1017/S0260210520000273Tricia M. Ross Surveying science and the state, Metascience 29, no.11 (Feb 2020): 87–93.https://doi.org/10.1007/s11016-020-00495-2John Gascoigne Science and the State, 76 (Mar 2019).https://doi.org/10.1017/9781316659120Leo Corry, Raya Leviathan Concluding Remarks: WEIZAC as a Zionist Success Story, (Aug 2019): 83–94.https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-25734-7_4Daphne Rozenblatt Scientific expertise and the politics of emotions in the 1902 trial of Giuseppe Musolino, History of the Human Sciences 30, no.33 (Jul 2017): 25–49.https://doi.org/10.1177/0952695117702083Laura Valls Plana , Centaurus 58, no.33 ( 2016): 185.https://doi.org/10.1111/1600-0498.12124Oliver Hochadel The Fossils of Atapuerca: Scientific Nationalism and the New Beginning of Spanish History, Studies in Ethnicity and Nationalism 15, no.33 (Dec 2015): 389–410.https://doi.org/10.1111/sena.12157Kuo-Hui Chang Technological construction as identity formation: building Taiwan's high-speed rail during the 1990s state transformation, Engineering Studies 7, no.11 (Mar 2015): 1–27.https://doi.org/10.1080/19378629.2014.1001397José Ramón Bertomeu-Sánchez Beyond Borders in the History of Science Education, (Jan 2015): 159–173.https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-14553-2_11Chandra Mukerji The cultural power of tacit knowledge: Inarticulacy and Bourdieu’s habitus, American Journal of Cultural Sociology 2, no.33 (Oct 2014): 348–375.https://doi.org/10.1057/ajcs.2014.8Kyonghee Han, Gary Lee Downey Engineers for Korea, Synthesis Lectures on Global Engineering 3, no.11 (Jul 2014): 1–197.https://doi.org/10.2200/S00582ED1V01Y201406GES005Kyonghee Han, Gary Lee Downey What Are Korean Engineers For?, (Jan 2014): 1–22.https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-02128-2_1John Krige, Angelina Long Callahan, Ashok Maharaj An Overview of NASA-India Relations, (Jan 2013): 211–234.https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137340931_11Manyong Moon Becoming a Biologist in Colonial Korea: Cultural Nationalism in a Teacher-Cum-Biologist, East Asian Science, Technology and Society: An International Journal 6, no.11 (Oct 2020): 65–82.https://doi.org/10.1215/18752160-1507117Hiromi Mizuno Introduction, East Asian Science, Technology and Society: An International Journal 6, no.11 (Oct 2020): 1–8.https://doi.org/10.1215/18752160-1547412Warwick Anderson, Hans Pols Scientific Patriotism: Medical Science and National Self-Fashioning in Southeast Asia, Comparative Studies in Society and History 54, no.11 (Jan 2012): 93–113.https://doi.org/10.1017/S0010417511000600

The languages of sentiment

Click to increase image sizeClick to decrease image size Notes 1. Laurence Sterne, A Sentimental Journey (New York: Oxford UP, 1984), p. 117. 2. Laurence Sterne, The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman (New York: Oxford UP, 1998), p. 522. 3. The importance of ‘order’ in the book is signalled in the very first sentence, produced in medias res: ‘– They order, said I, this matter better in France –’ (SJ, 3). The fact of the interruptive dash without a sense of what it is interrupting, and of the pronoun without a referent, performs a problem of ‘order’ in itself. 4. See my ‘Moving Accidents: The Emergence of Sentimental Probability’ in The Age of Cultural Revolutions: Britain and France, 1750–1820. ed. Colin Jones and Dror Wahrman (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002). 5. Douglas Lane Patey, Probability and Literary Form (New York: Cambridge UP, 1984), pp. 221–3. 6. Daniel Garber, John Henry, Lynn Joy and Alan Gabbey, ‘New Doctrines of Body and its Powers, Place and Space’, The Cambridge History of Seventeenth-Century Philosophy, ed. Daniel Garber and Michael Ayers (New York: Cambridge UP, 2003), p. 581. 7. Henry More, Immortality of the Soul [1659], later quoted in Benjamin Camfield, A Theological Discourse of Angels and their Ministries (London: printed by R. E. for H. Brome, 1678), p. 16. 8. Archibald Cockburn, A Philosophical Essay Concerning the Intermediate State of Blessed Souls (London: printed for Bernard Lintot, 1722), p. 26. 9. Margaret Cavendish, The Description of a New World Called The Blazing World [1666] (Whitefish, MT: Kessinger Publishing, 2004), p. 56–7. 10. Thomas Brown, The Reasons of Mr. Bays's Changing his Religion (London, T. Bennet, 1690), p. 43. 11. Abraham Tucker, The Light of Nature Pursued, vol. 4 (London: printed by T. Jones; sold by T. Payne, 1768), p. 12. 12. Mary Hays, Memoirs of Emma Courtney, vol. 1 (London: printed for G. G. and J. Robinson, 1796), pp. 177–8. 13. The Sentimental Magazine, March (1773), p. 5. 14. Gilles Deleuze, Cinema, Vol. 1: The Movement-Image, trans. Hugh Tomlinson and Barbara Habberjam (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota, 1986); Jean Epstein, Esprit de Cinema (Genève: Jeheber, 1955). 15. Gilles Deleuze, A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, trans. Brian Massumi (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1987), pp. 167–91.

Thomas Brown [alias Thomas Moore], Censorship and Regency Cryptography

The aim of this essay is to consider the inscription of censorship in Thomas Moore’s pseudonymous satire, Intercepted Letters; or the Twopenny Post‐Bag (1813). The essay proposes that the character of Thomas Brown the Younger, the poem’s pseudonymous editor, plays a crucial role in establishing the political liberty of the text. The argument demonstrates that Intercepted Letters establishes a series of allegiances—both explicit and implicit—with the defendants of contemporary libel trials such as John and Leigh Hunt, and suggests that Moore used the persona of Thomas Brown to create a form of Regency counter‐intelligence or cryptography in which the political conditions of speech and writing become a persistent and polemical subject.

Diogenes the Cynic in the Dialogues of the Dead of Thomas Brown, Lord Lyttleton, and William Blake

Diogenes the Cynic in the Dialogues of the Dead of Thomas Brown, Lord Lyttleton, and William Blake

Louis Agassiz and the Platonist Story of Creation at Harvard, 1795-1846

Louis Agassiz and the Platonist Story of Creation at Harvard, 1795-1846 David K. Nartonis In 1846, naturalist Louis Agassiz took Harvard College by storm with his idealist approach to nature. In his initial lectures, repeated in New York the following year, Agassiz announced, "We have that within ourselves which assures us of participation in the Divine Nature and it is a particular characteristic of man to be able to rise in that way above material Nature, and to understand intellectual existences." He then made it clear that by intellectual existences he meant a divine plan of creation. "What naturalists intend when they speak of what they call 'types' . . . may be easily understood by comparison. We all know that architects construct our dwellings according to plans conceived by them before the erection of the edifice."1 There is no doubt that Agassiz valued the careful collection of observational data. "It has only been step by step that man has acquired an insight into this plan."2 But his empiricism, if that is the right term, was entirely subordinate to apprehension of divine ideas, which alone deserved to be called science. In one recent account, The Metaphysical Club, which contains an excellent discussion of Agassiz's American career, author Louis Menand accurately describes this dual emphasis on observation and intuition. But Menand leaves unstated the problem of [End Page 437] Agassiz's welcome at Harvard, attributing his instant popularity to force of character.3 A fuller explanation of Agassiz's welcome is to be found in the Scottish textbooks that dominated the Harvard philosophy curriculum prior to his arrival.4 Like Agassiz, textbook authors Thomas Reid, Dugald Stewart, and Thomas Brown recognized observation and intuition as twin sources of human knowledge. According to them, we observe our own moral tendencies and interpret them in the light of intuited ethical principles that even God must obey. Similarly, we observe nature and interpret its workings with the aid of intuited principles of common sense.5 There is no doubt that this dual emphasis on observation and intuition was entirely consistent with Agassiz's idealist biology. But his definition of species and genera as intellectual existences in the divine mind was not to be found in the official Scottish texts. In fact, Dugald Stewart, who governed the philosophy curriculum after 1820, insisted that there are "no existences in nature corresponding to general terms, and the objects of our attention in all our general speculations are not ideas but words."6 This was "long misunderstood by philosophers, who imagined that a generic word expresses an actual existence distinct from the individuals of which the genus is composed."7 Similarly, Thomas Brown lamented, "One fundamental error . . . as long as it retained its hold of the understanding, must have rendered all its energies ineffectual, by wasting them in search of objects, which had no real existence . . . I allude to . . . the various orders of universals."8 In this one respect, Stewart and Brown were in agreement with Alexander Pope when he counseled his many American readers "presume not God to scan" and ridiculed those who would "soar with Plato to th' empyreal sphere."9 But Harvard students and faculty were also reading books that promoted the intellectual existences that Agassiz saw behind nature and the Scots did [End Page 438] not. Chief among these books were Plato's Works (ca. 360 BCE), Philo's De Opificio Mundi (20 BCE to 50 CE), Ralph Cudworth's The True Intellectual System of the World (1678), and John Norris's An Essay towards the Theory of the Ideal or Intellectual World (1701–04). These combined with such widely popular literature as John Milton's Paradise Lost (1668) and the prose works of Samuel Coleridge to form a kind of unofficial curriculum that ultimately made Agassiz's idealist view of nature especially welcome at Harvard.10 Modest at first, Harvard interest in intellectual existences bloomed with the appearance of books by Romantic writers on campus. In order to illustrate this long development, I will bolster my explanation with data from Harvard College library borrowing records—handwritten lists of the books borrowed by each library user during a one- or two-year period...

From Passions to Emotions: The Creation of a Secular Psychological Category (review)

Reviewed by: From Passions to Emotions: The Creation of a Secular Psychological Category Max Rosenkrantz Thomas Dixon . From Passions to Emotions: The Creation of a Secular Psychological Category. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2003. Pp. x + 287. Cloth, $60.00 Thomas Dixon's From Passions to Emotions defends a provocative set of theses. (1) The concept of "emotion" is of relatively recent vintage, having been designed by secular Scottish writers in the first half of the nineteenth century. (2) That concept embraces a range of phenomena that earlier Christian writers such as Augustine and Aquinas understood in terms of a manifold of concepts such as "appetites," "passions," "affections," and "sentiments." (3) The concept of "emotion" is too crude an instrument for understanding human psychology. Further, (4) today the secular conceptual framework has completely displaced the religious one. This has nothing to do with the former's greater proximity to the truth, as is shown by the persistence of cogent Christian theories in the second half of the nineteenth century, the period of secularism's triumph; and (5) The opposition between reason and emotion arises only when theorists begin to think of "emotions" rather than "appetites," "passions," "affections," and "sentiments." Christian writers did not see the passions as simply the enemies of reason. The basis for Dixon's argument is his interpretation of nineteenth-century psychological theory in the English speaking world. Specifically he argues that the concept of "emotion" was invented by the Scottish thinker Thomas Brown (1778-1820). Brown's innovation was then appropriated and developed by Spencer, Darwin, and William James. The foil for this story is the Christian tradition represented most compellingly by Augustine and Aquinas and carried on by a host of lesser nineteenth-century figures. In my judgment, the story thus told cannot bear the weight Dixon places upon it. The centerpiece of Dixon's argument is his claim that Brown "invents" (109) the emotions and thereby initiates a conceptual revolution in western thought. While Dixon may be right in asserting that Brown is the first to use the word 'emotion' in a systematic fashion, this achievement is merely terminological. Brown deploys the term to develop a mechanistic account of human nature, one in which the springs of action are located not in the will and reason, but in the emotions. Replace 'emotion' in the preceding sentence with 'passion' and one gets a concise characterization of Hobbes's view. Dixon is aware that Brown and others work within a Hobbesian framework (250) but does not attend to that framework. Thus his claims for the significance of the developments he describes fail to convince. The real innovation in psychological theory—as in so much else—took place in the seventeenth century. Just as Dixon overestimates the importance and originality of the Scottish writers he discusses, so too he overestimates the intellectual importance of Augustine and Aquinas. His presentation of their views (26-62) is accurate, but he does not note that they take over the Platonic-Aristotelian view of the soul according to which reason can and should penetrate, educate and direct the passions. Thus the guiding thought that structures the work—the nineteenth century witnesses an ultimately successful revolt against Christian psychology—must be rejected. The revolt is against ancient, pre-Christian modes of thought and is undertaken and largely won in the seventeenth century. The events Dixon describes are skirmishes in that larger campaign. The rest of the theses Dixon defends can be dispatched with more quickly. The idea that the modern concept of "emotion" is insufficiently subtle is averted to frequently, but never adequately defended. At no point does Dixon demonstrate, or even claim to demonstrate, that Christian thinkers recognized something secular thinkers miss. Roughly the same can be said for his claims about the persistence of Christian psychology in the nineteenth century. What Dixon means is not just that such thinkers exist, but that their thought remains vibrant. Again I see no argument for such a verdict. Finally, there is the matter of the opposition between reason and passion. To his credit Dixon rejects the view according to which almost all Western thought is hostile to the passions. As he shows, this...

Effects of PCB 126 on Primary Immune Organs and Thymocyte Apoptosis in Chicken Embryos

2,3,7,8-Tetrachlorodibenzo-p-dioxin (TCDD) and polychlorinated biphenyl (PCB) 126 produce thymic atrophy and immunosuppression. This study explored the hypothesis that the thymic atrophy produced by developmental exposure to PCB 126 is associated with an increase in apoptotic thymocytes at the end of incubation in chicken embryos. Eggs were injected via the air cell with PCB 126 (0.05, 0.13, 0.32, 0.64, and 0.80 ng/g egg) on d 0 of incubation, and tissues were collected on d 20. Controls included noninjected and vehicle-injected (sunflower oil) eggs. Thymocytes were cultured for 6 h and analyzed by flow cytometry for decreased DNA content (propidium iodide staining) and cell size (forward scatter), which indicate apoptosis. PCB 126 induced dose-dependent mortality with an LD50 of 1.01 ng/g and lowest-observed-effect concentration (LOEC) of 0.32 ng/g. Teratogenic effects commonly associated with TCDD and planar PCBs, including cranial and foot deformities and subcutaneous edema, tended to increase with dose of PCB 126. PCB 126 reduced thymus mass by approximately 20% at 0.64 and 0.8 ng/g, the number of viable thymocytes by approximately 20–24% at and above 0.13 ng/g, and the number of bursal lymphoid cells by 57% at 0.64 ng/g. The percentage of apoptotic thymocytes increased with dose, reaching levels 2 times greater than controls at 0.8 ng/g. Electrophoresis of low-molecular-weight DNA from thymocytes of all doses demonstrated fragments in multiples of 180 bp. This DNA laddering is a hallmark of apoptosis. At all doses, thymocytes exhibited caspase-3 activation, another indicator of apoptosis. The results of this experiment supported the hypothesis that the thymic atrophy produced by developmental exposure to PCB 126 in chicken embryos is associated with an increase in apoptotic thymocytes on embryonic d 20.This project was supported by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (GR825216-01-0) and the Biomedical Sciences PhD Program at Wright State University. E. Lavoie, R. Garrett, A. Handy, and E. Reaves helped with laboratory work. Drs. Nancy Bigley, Thomas Brown, G. Allen Burton, and Robert Grubbs provided technical assistance and reviewed earlier drafts of this article.

From Passions to Emotions: The creation of a secular psychological category

Acknowledgments 1. Introduction: from passions and affections to emotions 2. Passions and affections in Augustine and Aquinas 3. From movements to mechanisms: passions, sentiments and affections in the Age of Reason 4. The Scottish creation of 'the emotions': David Hume, Thomas Brown, Thomas Chalmers 5. The physicalist appropriation of Brownian emotions: Alexander Bain, Herbert Spencer, Charles Darwin 6. Christian and theistic responses to the physicalist emotions paradigm 7. What was an emotion in 1884? William James and his critics 8. Conclusions: how history can help us think about 'the emotions' Bibliography Index.