William Wollaston Research Articles

‘An attempt to trace illusions to their physical causes’: atmospheric mirages and the performance of their demystification in the 1820s and 1830s

This article suggests that, during the 1820s and 1830s, Britain experienced a mirage moment. A greater volume of material was published on the mirage in scientific journals, treatises, travel literature and novels during these two decades than had occurred before in British history. The phenomenon was examined at the confluence of discussions about the cultural importance of illusions, the nature of the eye and the imperial project to investigate the extra-European natural world. Explanations of the mirage were put forward by such scientists and explorers as Sir David Brewster, William Wollaston and General Sir James Abbott. Their demystification paralleled the performance of unmasking scientific and magical secrets in the gallery shows of London during the period. The practice of seeing involved in viewing unfathomable phenomena whilst simultaneously considering their rational basis underwrote these different circumstances. I use this unusual mode of visuality to explore the ways the mirage and other illusions were viewed and understood in the 1820s and 1830s. Ultimately, this paper argues that the mirage exhibited the fallibility of the eyes as a tool for veridical perception in a marvellous and striking way, with consequences for the perceived trustworthiness of ocular knowledge in the period.

Laid Waste! The Culture of Exploitation in Early America. By John Lauritz Larson (Philadelphia, University of Pennsylvania Press, 2020) 299 pp. $39.95

Larson’s Laid Waste! is a freewheeling account of what he calls America’s “culture of exploitation,” the sense of entitlement to unregulated access to new territories and their natural resources. He frames the book as an exploration of the roots of contemporary resistance to government policies designed to reverse environmental degradation and mitigate climate change.Some features of the book will be vexatious to interdisciplinary readers. Larson deploys the term exploitation broadly to include not just environmental destruction but harsh treatment of slaves (the “culture of exploitation in its most visceral and brutal form”) and free industrial labor (142, 171–173). Thus, the text often reads like those narratives for which “progress” is merely a euphemism for expropriation, though Larson’s historical understanding is more nuanced.More seriously, given its objectives, the book does not provide a systematic analysis of the role of natural resources in U.S. economic growth. Chapters 5 through 8 offer relatively conventional accounts of geographical expansion, internal improvement, technological innovation, and the rise of big business. Deforestation emerges as a matter of concern at the end of the nineteenth century, but neither the nation’s early leadership in woodworking technologies nor its transition across the century from organic to fossil-fuel energy sources finds any coverage. The epilogue’s opening quotation from President Donald Trump announcing the end of the “war on beautiful clean coal” would be more powerful if mining and the use of coal had received attention in the preceding 200 pages (231). Despite its importance for U.S. economic preeminence, the minerals sector is entirely missing from the book.A more distinctive feature of the book is its attention to the perspectives of leading thinkers at various historical junctures. Larson reviews the thoughts of not only familiar figures like Adam Smith, Thomas Jefferson, and Matthew and Henry Carey but also lesser-known colonial writers like John Oldmixon, William Byrd II, and William Wollaston, and the early national geographer Jedediah Morse. Particularly relevant is the work of nineteenth-century diplomat and philologist George Perkins Marsh, often considered the country’s first environmentalist. Marsh’s Man and Nature (New York, 1864) deplored the deforestation of his native Vermont, anticipating the complex systems approach of modern ecology and sounding an urgent alarm for the nation as a whole. Appearing in wartime, Man and Nature attracted little immediate attention. But Marsh influenced John Muir and other conservationists, launching another philosophical and cultural tradition, fully as American as the laissez-faire faith lamented in Laid Waste!.That the United States suffers from its history of unregulated environmental exploitation can hardly be denied. Laid Waste! succeeds in lending “historical aid and comfort” to efforts to overcome this legacy (241). But whereas resource-based development was central to nineteenth-century economic life, it seems evident that the health and economic well-being of most Americans in the present century would be improved by moving to a more sustainable approach. The challenge is to make this new economic reality apparent to American voters.

Wollaston's Early Critics

Some of the most forceful objections to William Wollaston's moral theory come from his early critics, namely, Thomas Bott (1688–1754), Francis Hutcheson (1694–1746), and John Clarke of Hull (1687–1734). These objections are little known, while the inferior objections of Hume, Bentham, and later prominent critics are familiar. This fact is regrettable. For instance, it impedes a robust understanding of eighteenth-century British ethics; also, it fosters a questionable view as to why Wollaston's theory, although at first well received, soon faded in esteem among philosophers. This paper gives Wollaston's early critics some of the attention they deserve. It reconstructs some of their objections to Wollaston's philosophy, addresses replies to those objections, and shows that despite some minor flaws, the objections succeed. A fact that becomes clear is that Wollaston's philosophy had suffered devastating criticism years before Hume wrote anything against it.

Birefringent neutron prisms for spin echo scattering angle measurement

In the first decade of the 19th century, an English chemist, William Wollaston, invented an arrangement of birefringent prisms that splits a beam of light into two spatially separated beams with orthogonal polarizations. We have constructed similar devices for neutrons using triangular cross-section solenoids and employed them for Spin Echo Scattering Angle Measurement (SESAME). A key difference between birefringent neutron prisms and their optical analogues is that it is hard to embed the former in a medium which has absolutely no birefringence because this implies the removal of all magnetic fields. We have overcome this problem by using the symmetry properties of the Wollaston neutron prisms and of the overall spin echo arrangement. These symmetries cause a cancellation of Larmor phase aberrations and provide robust coding of neutron scattering angles with simple equipment.

Teaching & Learning Guide for: Moral Rationalism Vs. Moral Sentimentalism: Is Morality More Like Math or Beauty?

Teaching & Learning Guide for: Moral Rationalism Vs. Moral Sentimentalism: Is Morality More Like Math or Beauty?

Judaism and Natural Religion in the Philosophy of William Wollaston

Judaism and Natural Religion in the Philosophy of William Wollaston

Thomas Gainsborough

Reviewed by: Thomas Gainsborough, and: Angels and Urchins, The Fancy Picture in Eighteenth-Century British Art Amal Asfour and Paul Williamson Thomas Gainsborough, Palazzo dei Diamanti, Ferrara, 7 June-30 August 1998; Angels and Urchins, The Fancy Picture in Eighteenth-Century British Art, Djanogly Art Gallery, University of Nottingham, 28 March-4 May 1998; Kenwood House, London, 14 May-9 August 1998. The unsuspecting visitor to Ferrara in the summer of 1998 might have been surprised to find Thomas Gainsborough inaugurating an imaginative series of exhibitions devoted to British art in the Palazzo dei Diamanti. Interest in the subject certainly seemed great enough to warrant the enterprise, and the first show was presented with a generous amount of Italian flair, as well as with the clarity and authority one expects of its curator, John Hayes. A series of twelve rooms contained Hayes’s selection of eighty-eight works, including examples of Gainsborough’s early portraits, Bath- and London-period portraits, an equivalent range of landscapes, and a large selection of drawings. Though the idea behind the arrangement could not have been called adventurous, the novelty of the location perhaps justified a conservative approach. There was certainly much to admire in the endeavor and many pictorial rewards to be gained, not least in the opportunity to juxtapose the works of Gainsborough (so often perceived as quintessentially English to the point of insularity) alongside the contents of the adjacent Pinacoteca Nazionale, also housed in the Palazzo. These visual pleasures, however, were largely incidental to the exhibition’s curatorial scheme. The latter was disappointing, primarily because it failed to reflect the current vigor and diversity of scholarly approaches to the history of British art. The bibliographies included in the catalogue entries are capricious at best, with startling omissions—Edgar Wind on Gainsborough’s self-portraits (nos. 7, 27); Ronald Paulson on Diana and Actaeon, the Watering Place, and the portrait of William Wollaston (nos. 85–87, 40, 6); Marcia Pointon on the portrait of George Colman (no. 18); Ann Bermingham on the Landscape with Figures outside a Cottage (no. 42); and John Barrell on several pictures included in the show. These are names to conjure within the study of British art, and it is a shame that the opportunity was not taken to point those new to the subject in their direction. Hayes is doubtless the foremost expert on the Gainsborough canon, particularly with regard to the landscapes and drawings, where he has established the oeuvre and provided a chronology that places all scholars firmly in his debt. His visual expertise is unrivaled and was especially notable here in the selection of drawings. Yet the way in which the wall panels, [End Page 391] labels, exhibition guide, and catalogue sought to conduct the viewer through the material on show all revealed flaws in his historiography. This could only be called pre-Baxandall, a fact that was evident in the tendency to chart a developmental line through Gainsborough’s career using three or four basic art-historical mileposts. The Gainsborough who progressively emerged in these textual aids was the familiar observer of nature, who was enchanted by the rococo, swept off his feet by Rubens and Van Dyck, and later anticipated the moods of Romanticism. The words “naturalism” and “influence” (which, in a Euro-pun worthy of Joyce, translates into Italian as “influenza”) are fundamental to Hayes’s introductory essay and catalogue entries, and they characterize an agenda that was often implemented at the expense of the visual evidence. This was perhaps most obvious in the fancy pictures where the approach was clearly inadequate to explain such message-dominated images. One presumed that an Italian eye would immediately have read the iconography of, say, The Woodman (no. 51) in a way that undermined the view that the picture is, in any uncomplicated sense, a portrait of a beggar chanced upon in the street. It also failed to question inherent tensions, for example when the “influence” of Salvator Rosa, Claude Lorrain, Gaspard Dughet, and Burke’s theory of the sublime jostled uneasily with the idea that certain later landscapes might represent a record of particular scenes in the Lake District (cf. no. 44). At first...

The Problem of Circularity in Wollaston's Moral Philosophy

The Problem of Circularity in Wollaston's Moral Philosophy OLIN JOYNTON WILLIAMWOLLASTON'S(t660-- 17~4) moral theory enjoyed much acclaim at its first appearance (in The Religion of Nature Delineated, 17~2), then fell into desuetude as a result of hostile criticism from some of the leading philosophical figures of the day. However, long-neglected theories have a way of attracting fresh notice, either because objections once thought devastating themselves come to be found wanting or because contemporary discussions turn back to issues on which they once shed light. Both of these considerations have prompted recent work on Wollaston by Stanley Tweyman and Joel Feinberg.' Neither Tweyman nor Feinberg intends to effect a full-scale revival of Wollaston's views, but each uncovers serious flaws in the facile refutations of Wollaston. Feinberg even acknowledges the WoUastonian character of his views on the expressive functions of punishment set out in Doing and Deserving. In the same rehabilitative spirit I shall address a problem of apparent circularity that has troubled Wollaston's critics, generous and ungenerous alike, and show that his theory must be interpreted in a way that removes the force of this objection. Various versions of the circularity objection have been given, but all center on Wollaston's quite uncommon way of connecting right and wrong with truth and falsity. This connection is established through a two-step argument in The Religion of Nature Delineated. First, Wollaston sets forth a theory of declarative actions: "I lay this down as a fundamental maxim that whosoever acts as if things were so, or not so, doth by his acts declare that they are so, or not so.''2 A declarative action is any action in the performing ' Stanley Tweyman, "Truth, Happiness, and Obligation: The Moral Philosophyof William Wollaston,"Philosophy51 0976): 35-46; Joel Feinberg, "Wollastonand his Critics,"TheJournal oftheHistoryofIdeas38 (1977): 345-52. WilliamWollaston, The ReligionofNatureDelineated,ed. StanleyTweyman (Delmar, New York: Scholars' Facsimilesand Reprints, 1974), 13. [435] 436 JOURNAL OF THE HISTORY OF PHILOSOPHY ~2:4 OCT t984 of which the agent makes a declaration, and in his book Wollaston provides some thirty-odd examples of actions he considers declarative. 3 One of his dearer cases is the breaking of a promise: if I promise to do X and then ignore my vow, I act as if I had never promised to do X, and in so doing declare as much. Firing on a body of troops is a declaration of war, practicing charity is a statement about human needs, and behaving gratefully eloquendy acknowledges benefits received from others. Wollaston does not consider all actions declarative, only those which have either (what he calls) a "natural" significance or those which have a clear meaning for observers in the particular culture in which they are performed. In the second state of his argument Wollaston advances the view that morally right actions are declarative of true propositions, while morally wrong actions are declarative of false propositions: "No act (whether word or deed) of any being, to whom moral good and evil are imputable, that interferes with any true proposition, or denies anything to be as it is, can be right. TM Though no advocate of apatheia, Wallaston instructs us to achieve a stoic-like harmony with nature by treating things as what they are, which for him consists of making sure that our declarative actions accord with the truth. The wrongness of treating another human being inhumanely is signaled by the way in which the agent, in so acting, "declares" the abused person not to be human and so "interferes" with the fact of the matter. The first response of many to Wollaston's theory is that it is circular, for among the truths a person may violate are moral truths. To treat a human being inhumanely, certain truths about how human beings ought not to .be treated must be presupposed, and it may be just these truths which an immoral action violates. Thus Wollaston appears to have defined immorality with referene to totality (viz., all truths), which includes some truths about immorality: hence the circularity. To this it may be replied that the definition is not viciously circular but harmlessly impredicative. 5 Understanding...

The Great Debate on Miracles From Joseph Glanvill to David Hume (review)

BOOK REVieWS 239 R. M. Burns, The Great Debate on Miracles From Joseph Glanvill to David Hume. London and Toronto: Associated University Presses; Lewisburg: Buckneli University Press, 1981. Pp. 3o5 . NP. From time to time there appears a work in the history of ideas which treats its subject definitively, depriving other scholars of any excuse for covering the same ground again. R. M. Burns's The Great Debate on Miracles is such a work. It tells us all that we will need or care to know about a controversy that preoccupied English intellectuals in the last quarter of the seventeenth century and the first half of the eighteenth. Dr. Burns has read not only the religious apologists and polemicists of the period, but also the natural scientists and philosophers. He has some instructive things to say to historians and philosophers of science as well as to theologians and historians of religion. His account of the early modern history of probability judgements and theory o| induction is interesting and informative. His concluding chapter, which comprises the most thorough modern critique of Hume's essay "Of Miracles" that I am acquainted with, raises some profoundly troubling questions about Hume's empiricism , particularly about what is now called his nomological-deductive model of explanation. However these questions are to be answered finally, it is to Burns's credit to have shown that a debate which has subsided into the recesses of history involves the central issues which today engage and divide our leading episternologists and philosophers of science. His book not only closes the record on a great debate which languished before it was decided, but it also opens the way to reappraising the basic principles upon which Hume relied to discredit all testimony to miracles. Burns corrects the usual view that Hume initiated the great debate with an original treatment of the subject by showing that when "Of Miracles" first appeared in print interest in the topic was already flagging and 1-1ume's piece was mainly derivative . He amply documents his case that Part 1 of Hume's essay was largely drawn from earlier work presenting a priori arguments against the intrinsic credibility of miracles, William Wollaston's Religion of Nature Delineated of 1722 having provided a primary source. The Deists who preceded Hume in attempting to discredit miracles, particularly those related in the New Testament, were bent upon showing that natural religion sufficed and revealed religion was unsuitable for rational men in an enlightened age. They were less concerned with denying the possibility of miracles occurring than with declaring them to be an unsatisfactory foundation i~)r religious belief, ttume's main conclusion on the subject, "that no human testimony can have such force as to prove a miracle, and make it a just foundation for any such system of religion," bad been anticipated many times by his deist predecessors, and the secorul part of his essay "in fact," Burns says, "'functions as a fairly compendious summary of all but one of the major types o| these [a postcriori] arguments as presented by the Deists..." (72). Burns's handling of Antony Flew's challenge to the classical interpretation of Hume's essay provides an instructive lesson in the complexities of philosophical interpretation . On the traditional view, by his a priori argument in Part I Hume removed the theoretical possibility of rational belief in miracles. On Flew's reading, Hume 24 ~ JOURNAL OF THE HISTORY OF PHILOSOPHY 22:2 APR 1984 allowed the possibility of miracles, but, because of their intrinsic improbability, required testimony of a high order of reliability to warrant belief in any one of them. The chief advantage of Ftew's interpretation is that it reserves a relevant point to be made in Part ~, where Hume advances a posteriori arguments to prove that no alleged miracle has ever been reported by witnesses who satisfy the required standard of credibility. On the alternative reading, Part 9 is redundant; If Hume had shown at the first stage of the argument that no testimony could possibly be compelling enough to prove a miracle, then he would have had no need to go on to show that all such testimony is in...

Thought, Word and Deed

Why does Cleopatra have the messenger whipped ? I put this highly concrete question first because the matters of vital importance that are in question here are of such wide scope. The scope is displayed in three familiar sentences: 'In the beginning was the Word' (St John the Evangelist). 'In the beginning was the Deed' (Goethe). 'Words are also deeds' (Wittgenstein). That Thought belongs to a trinity with Word and Deed is well shown by William Wollaston, whose Religion of Nature Delineated (1722) (Third Edition 1725) has been too quickly dismissed by modern readers--especially by those who have not read it. Even such a sympathetic reader and broad-minded thinker as Donald MacKinnon shares Bishop Butler's suspicion that Wollaston has 'made of morality and of immorality things so rarefied that they seem to have become kinds of construction which we compel the actual complexity of our human nature to accept in order that the laws of that nature shall be exhibited as one with the laws of logic' (A Study in Ethical Theory, p. 176). When other historians and philosophers refer to Wollaston at all, it is to note that he was the target of the supposedly decisive attacks of Hume and Butler on the bloodless rationalism that would derive moral distinctions from reason rather than

William Wollaston, John Johnson and Colombian alluvial platina: A study in restricted industrial enterprise

Summary In 1800 William Hyde Wollaston and Smithson Tennant entered into financial partnership primarily for the production of malleable platina. Each man had the capital, training and determination requisite for the successful execution of such an enterprise, and both profited substantially as a result. The growth of the enterprise was limited initially by process problems, then by market limitations and finally by supplies of crude platina. The agent who supplied the entrepreneurs with most of their platina is identified as John Johnson, a London assayer who occasionally worked closely with Wollaston on the fabrication of platinum objects. The restrictions on the size of the enterprise allowed Wollaston to maintain full control of the production process, and the resulting business gave him exactly what he wished of it, a vehicle for scientific and technological expression, the respect and approbation of his peers, and an environment of financial security in which to pursue his many scientific interests.

Truth, Happiness and Obligation: the Moral Philosophy of William Wollaston

William Wollaston, a leading British moral philosopher of the eighteenth century, has fallen into obscurity primarily, I believe, for two reasons. In the first place, it is usually supposed that Wollaston's moral theory was refuted by Hume in the opening section of the third book of the Treatise of Human Nature. Secondly, Wollaston's theory, or parts thereof, have been assigned pejorative labels such as ‘odd’ and ‘strange’, which create the impression that it is not a moral philosophy which can be taken seriously. In this paper I attempt to deal with the second of these reasons by setting forth what I take to be Wollaston's meaning in certain key sections of his work, The Religion of Nature Delineated, especially in so far as they help to shed light on his theories of truth and happiness, and the relation of these to his theory of obligation. Wollaston will be found to be a moral philosopher with important things to say, and therefore to be a moral philosopher with a theory worth taking seriously. If I am correct in my interpretation of Wollaston, then it can also be established that Hume has not refuted Wollaston in the opening section of Book III of the Treatise. But here my attention will be confined entirely to Wollaston's own moral theory.

Studies in Religious Philosophy and Mysticism

Introduction 1. Delphic Maxim in Medieval Islam and Judaism 2. The Ladder of Ascension 3. Ibn Bajja on Man's Ultimate Felicity 4. Essence and Existence in Maimonides 5. A Note on the Rabbinic Doctrine of Creation 6. Saadya's Theory of Revelation: It's Origin and Background 7. Eleazar of Worms' Symbol of the Merkabah 8. Motif of the Shells in Azriel of Gerona 9. Moses Narboni's Epistle on Shi ur Qoma 10. William Wollaston: English Deist and Rabbinic Scholar 11. Moses Mendelssohn on Leibniz and Spinoza 12. Franz Rosenzweig on History