Kenny Anthony. The Rise of Modern Philosophy: A New History of Western Philosophy. Volume 3

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INTRODUCTION

his is the third volume of a projected four-volume history of phil-

osophy from the beginnings to the present day. The W rst volume,

Ancient Philosophy (2004), described the early centuries of philosophy in

classical Greece and Rome. The second volume, Medieval Philosophy (2005),

took the story from the conversion of St Augustine to the humanist

Renaissance. This volume takes up the narrative from the beginning of

the sixteenth century to the beginning of the nineteenth ce ntury. A Wnal

volume is planned to cover the history of philosophy from the age of Karl

Marx and John Stuart Mill up to the present day.

The present volume has the same structure as the two previous vol-

umes. In the Wrst three chapters I oVer a chr onological survey of the

philosophical thinkers of the period. In the remaining chapters I oVer a

thematic treatment of their contribution to the discussion of particular

philosophical topics of abiding importance. Some readers are interested in

the history of philoso phy principally because of the light it sheds on the

people and societies of the past. Other readers study the great dead

philosophers in order to seek illumination on themes of current philo-

sophical inquiry. By structuring the book in this way I hope to cater for the

needs of both sets of readers. Those whose primary interest is historical

may focus on the chronological survey, referring where necessary to the

thematic sections for ampliWcation. Those whose primary interest is philo-

sophical will concentrate rather on the thematic sections of my volumes,

referring back to the chronological surveys to place particular issues in

context.

The audience at which these volumes are primarily aimed is at the level

of second- or third-year undergraduate study. However, many of those

interested in the history of philosophy are enrolled in courses that are not

necessarily philosophical. Accordingly, I try not to assume a familiarity

with contemporary philosophical techniques or terminology. Again, with

the exception of the original texts of the thinkers of the period I have not

included in the bibliography works in languages other than English.

I endeavour also to avoid jargon and to write suYciently clearly for my

history to attract those who read philosophy not for curricular purposes

but for their own enlightenment and entertainment.

This has been the easier to do since in the case of many of my historical

subjects I write of necessity as an amateur rather than as a professional. In

an age when the academic study of past philosophers has expanded

exponentially, no one person can read more than a fraction of the vast

secondary literature that has proliferated in recent years around every one

of the thinkers discussed in this volume. I have myself contributed to the

scholarly discussion of some of the great philosophers of the early modern

age, in particular Descartes; and I have published monographs on some of

the subjects covered by my thematic chapters, such as the philosophy

of mind and the philosophy of religion. But in compiling the bibliography

for the volume I was made aware how vast was the extent of material I have

not read in comparison with the amount that I am familiar with.

Any single author who attempts to cover the entire history of philoso-

phy is quickly made aware that in matters of detail he is at an enormous

disadvantage in comparison with the scholars who have made individual

philosophers their Weld of expertise. By compensation, a history written by

a single hand may be able to emphasize features of the history of philoso-

phy that are less obvious in the works of committees of specialists, just as

an aerial photograph may bring out features of a landscape that are almost

invisible to those close to the ground.

To someone approaching the early modern period of philosophy from

an ancient and medieval background the most striking feature of the age is

the absence of Aristotle from the philosophic scene. To be sure, in the

period covered by this volume the study of Aristotle continued in the

academic establishment, and at Oxford University there has never been a

time since its foundation when Aristotle was not taught. But the other

striking characteristic of our period, which marks it oV from both the

Middle Ages and the twentieth century, is that it was a time when

philosophy was most energetically pursued not within universities but

outside them. Of all the great thinkers of the seventeenth and eighteenth

centuries, none before WolV and Kant held professorships of philosophy.

Both good and evil consequences resulted when philosophy turned its

back on Aristotle. For philosophy in the broad sense—philosophy as it was

understood during most of our period, to include the physical sciences as

INTRODUCTION

xii

‘natural philosophy’—the removal of Aristotle’s dead hand was a great

boon. Aristotle’s physics was hopelessly erroneous, and had been shown to

be so as early as the sixth century of our era; the deference that was paid

to it during the Middle Ages was a great brake on scientiWc progress. But for

philosophy in the narrow sense—philosophy as it is now practised as a

distinct discipline in universities—there were losses as well as gains result-

ing from the abandonment of Aristotle.

Our period is dominated by two philosophical giants, one at its begin-

ning and one at its end, Descartes and Kant. Descartes was a standard-

bearer for the rebellion against Aristotle. In metaphysics he rejected the

notions of potentiality and actuality, and in philosophical psychology he

substituted consciousness for rationality as the mark of the mental. Hobbes

and Locke founded a school of British empiricism in reaction to Cartesian

rationalism, but the assumptions they shared with Descartes were more

important than the issues that separated them. It took the genius of Kant

to bring together, in the philosophy of human understanding, the diVerent

contributions of the senses and the intellect that had been divided and

distorted by both empiricists and rationalists.

The hallmark of Cartesian dualism was the separation between mind

and matter, conceived as the separation of consciousness from clockwork.

This opened an abyss that hampered the metaphysical enterprise during

the period of this volume. On the one hand, speculative thinkers erected

systems that placed ever greater strains on the credulity of the common

reader. Whatever may be the defects of Aristotle’s hylomorphism, his

substances—things like cats and cabbages—did at least have the advantage

of undoubted existence in the ever yday world, unlike unknowable sub-

strata, monads, noumena, and the Absolute. On the other hand, thinkers

of a more sceptical turn deconstructed not only Aristotelian substantial

forms, but primary and secondary qualities, material substances, and

eventually the human mind itself.

In the introduction to his lectures on the history of philosophy Hegel

warns against dull histories in which the succession of systems are repre-

sented simply as a number of opinons, errors, and freaks of thought. In

such works, he says, ‘the whole of the history of Philosophy becomes a

battleWeld covered with the bones of the dead; it is a kingdom not merely

formed of dead and lifeless individuals, but of refuted and spiritually dead

systems, since each has killed and buried the other’ (LHP, 17).

INTRODUCTION

xiii

Though I try to record faithfully the opinions of the successive philo-

sophers of my period, I hope that this volume will not fall under Hegel’s

censure. I believe that despite handicapping themselves by throwing away

some of the most valuable tools that philosophy had forged for itself in

Antiquity and in the Middle Ages, the philosophers of this period made

many contributions of permanent value, which are identiWed and described

in the thematic chapters. In the course of the book I hope to trace the

graph of both the gains and the losses. There is much to be learnt, I believe,

from studying even the vagaries of those whom Hegel calls ‘heroes of

thought’. Great philosophers in every age have engendered great errors: it

is no disrespect to them to try to expose some of the confusions to which

they appear to have succumbed.

The division into themes in this volume diVers from that in the previous

volumes in two ways. First, there is no special chapter devoted to logic and

language, since philosophers in our period made no contribution in these

areas at all comparable to that of the Middle Ages or that of the nineteenth

and twentieth centuries. (It is true that the period contains one logician of

genius, Leibniz; but his logical work had little impact until the nineteenth

century.) Second, there is for the Wrst time a chapter devoted to political

philosophy. It is only from the time of Machiavelli and More that the

political institutions of the age begin to bear suYcient similarity to those

under which we live now for the insights of political philosophers to be

relevant to contemporary discussions. The chapter on physics is briefer

than in previous volumes, because with Newton the history of physics

becomes part of the history of science rather than the history of philoso-

phy, leaving to philosophers , for a while at least, the abstract treatment of

the notions of space and time.

I am indebted to Peter MomtchiloV and his colleagues at Oxford

University Press, and to three anonymous readers for improving an earlier

draft of this volume.

INTRODUCTION

xiv

Sixteenth-Century Philosophy

Humanism and Reform

he decade beginning in 1511 can well be regarded as the high point of

the Renaissance. In the Vatican Raphael was frescoing the walls of the

papal apartments, while Michelangelo covered the ceiling of the Sistine

Chapel with his paintings. In Florence the Medici family, exiled since the

time of the reformer Savonarola, returned to power and patronage. One of

the oYcers of the former republic, Niccolo

Machiavelli, now under house

arrest, used his enforced leisure to produce a classic text of political

philosophy, The Prince, which oVered rulers frank advice on the acquisition

and retention of power. Renaissance art and Renaissance ideas travelled

northward as far as Germany and England. A colleague of Michelangelo’s

designed Henry VII’s tomb in Westminster Abbey and the foremost scholar

of the age, the Dutchman Desiderius Erasmus, lectured at Cambridge early

in the reign of his son Henry VIII. Erasmus was a frequent guest at the house

of Thomas More, a lawyer about to begin a politi cal career that would

make him, brieXy, the most powerful man in England after the king.

Erasmus and More and their friends propounded in Northern Europe

the humanist ideas that had taken root in Italy in the previous century.

‘Humanism’ at that time did not mean a desire to replace religious values

with secular human ones: Erasmus was a priest who wrote best-selling

works of piety, and More was later martyred for his religious beliefs.

Humanists, rather, were people who believed in the educational value of

the ‘humane letters’ (literae humaniores) of the Greek and Latin classics. They

studied and imitated the style of classical authors, many of whose texts had

been recently rediscovered and were being published thanks to the newly

developed art of printing. They believed that their scholarship, applied to

ancient pagan texts, would restore to Europe long-neglected arts and

sciences, and, applied to the Bible and to ancient Church writers, would

help Christendom to a purer and more authentic understanding of Chris-

tian truth.

Humanists valued grammar, philology, and rhetoric more highly than

the technical philosophical studies that had preoccupied scholars during

the Middle Ages. They despised the Latin that had been the lingua franca of

medieval universities, far removed in style from the works of Cicero and

Livy. Erasmus had been unhappy studying at the Sorbonne, and More

mocked the logic he had been taught at Oxford. In philosophy, both of

them looked back to Plato rather than to Aristotle and his many medieval

admirers.

More paid a compliment to Plato by publishing, in 1516, a Wctional

blueprint for an ideal commonwealth. In More’s Utopia, as in Plato’s

Republic, property is held in common and women serve alongside men in

the army. More, writing in an age of exploration and discovery, pretended

that his state actually existed on an island across the ocean. Like Plato,

however, he was using the description of a Wctional nation as a vehicle for

theoretical political philo sophy and for criticism of contemporary society.1

Erasmus was more sceptical about Plato as a guide to politics. In the

teasing Praise of Folly that he dedicated to More in 1511 he mocks Plato’s

claim that the happiest state will be ruled by philosopher kings. History

tells us, he says, ‘that no state has been so plagued by its rulers as when

power has fallen into the hands of some dabbler in philosophy’ (M, 100).

But when, in the same year as Utopia, he published his Instruction to a Christian

Prince, he did little but repeat ideas to be found in Plato and Aristotle. For

this reason his treatise of political philosophy has never achieved the

renown of Machiavelli’s or of More’s.

Erasmus was more interested in divinity than in philosophy, and he

cared more for biblical studies than for speculative theology. Scholastics

like Scotus and Ockham, he complained, merely choked with brambles

paths that had been made plain by earlier thinkers. Among the great

Christian teachers of the past his favourite was St Jerome, who had

translated the Bible from Hebrew and Greek into Latin. Erasmus worked

1 The political philosophy of Machiavelli and More is discussed at length in Ch. 9 below.

SIXTEENTH-CENTURY PHILOSOPHY

Desiderius Erasmus in Holbein’s portrait in the Louvre

SIXTEENTH-CENTURY PHILOSOPHY

for some years annotating the Latin New Testament, and then decided to

produce a Latin version of his own to amend corruptions which had crept

into the accepted text (‘the Vulgate’) and, where necessary, to improve on

Jerome himself. In 1516 he published his new Latin version along with his

annotations, and almost as an appendix, he added a Greek text of the New

Testament—the W rst one ever to be printed. In his Latin version, in striving

for Wdelity to the Greek original, he did not hesitate to alter even the most

beloved and solemn texts. The Wrst words of the fourth Gospel, In principio

erat verbum, became In principio erat sermo: what was in the beginning was not

‘the Word’ but ‘the Saying’.

Erasmus’ Latin version was not generally adopted, though passages of it

can still be read in the chapel windows of King’s College Cambridge.

However, the Greek text he published was the foundation for the great

vernacular testaments of the sixteenth century, beginning with the monu-

mental German version published in 1522 by Martin Luther.

Luther was an Augustinian monk, as Erasmu s had been until released by

papal dispensation from his monastic commitments. Like Erasmus, Luther

had made a close study of St Paul’s Epistle to the Romans. This had made

him question fundamentally the ethos of Renaissance Catholicism. The year

after the publication of Erasmus’ New Testament Luther issued, in the

University of Wittenberg, a public denunciation of abuses of papal authority,

in particular of a scandalously promoted oVer of an indulgence (remission of

punishment due to sin) in return for contributions to the building of the

great new church of St Peter’s in Rome.

Erasmus and More shared Luther’s concern about the corruption of

many of the higher clergy: they had both denounced it in print, Erasmus

pungently in a satire on Pope Julius II, More with ironic circumspection in

Utopia. But both were alienated when Luther went on to denounce large

parts of the Catholic sacramental system and to teach that the one thing

needful for salvation is faith, or trust in the merits of Christ. In 1520 Pope

Leo X condemned forty-one articles taken from Luther’s teaching, and

followed this up with an excommunication after Luther had burnt the Bull

of Condemnation. King Henry VIII, with some help from More, published

an Assertion of the Seven Sacraments, which earned him the papal title ‘Defender

of the Faith’.

Erasmus strove in vain to dampen down the controversy. He tried to

persuade Luther to moderate his language, and to submit his opinions for

SIXTEENTH-CENTURY PHILOSOPHY

judgement to an impartial jury of scholars. On the other hand, he ques-

tioned the authenticity of the papal bull of condemnation and he

persuaded the emperor Charles V to give Luther a hearing at the Diet of

Worms in 1521. But Luther refused to recant and was placed under the ban

of the empire. Pope Leo died and was succeeded by a Dutch schoolfriend of

Erasmus, who took the name Adrian VI. The new pope urged Erasmus to

take up his pen against the reformers. Very reluctantly, Erasmus agreed,

but his book against Luther did not appear until 1524, by which time Pope

Adrian was dead.

Sin, Grace, and Freedom

The ground Erasmus chose for battle was Luther’s position on the freedom

of the will. This had been the subject of one of the theses which had been

nailed to the door at Wittenberg in 1517. Among the propositions con-

demned by Leo X was ‘freewill after sin is merely an empty title’. In

response, Luther reinforced his assertion. ‘Free will is really a Wction and

a label without reality, because it is in no man’s power to plan any evil or

good’ (WA VII.91).

In his Diatribe de Libero Arbitrio Erasmus piles up texts from the Old and

New Testament and from Church doctors and decrees to show that

human beings have free will. His constant theme is that all the exhort-

ations, promises, commands, threats, reproaches, and curses to be found in

the Scriptures would lose all point if it was necessity, and not free will, that

determined good or evil acts. Questions of Bible interpretation dominate

both Erasmus’ book and Luther’s much longer reply, De Servo Arbitrio.

Philosophically, Erasmus is unsubtle. He refers to, but does not improve

upon, Valla’s dialogue on free will. He repeats commonplaces of centuries

of scholastic debate which are inadequate responses to the problem of

reconciling divine foreknowledge with human freedom—he insists, for

instance, that even humans know many things that will happen in the

future, such as eclipses of the sun. A theory of free will that leaves us no

freer than the stars in their courses is not a very robust answer to Luther.

But Erasmus is anxious to avoid philosophical complications. It is a piece of

irreligious curiosity to inquire, as the scholastics did, whether God’s

foreknowledge is contingent or necessary.

SIXTEENTH-CENTURY PHILOSOPHY