The Cambridge History of Seventeenth-Century Philosophy.

Daniel Garber and Michael Ayers, eds., with the assistance of Roger Ariew and Alan Gabbey, The Cambridge History of Seventeenth-Century Philosophy 2 vols. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998. xvii + 1616 pp. [pound]105.00 / $185.00.

ISBN: 0-521-58864-2.

A first confrontation with these volumes gives one an idea of their vast undertaking: 33 contributors have produced 36 chapters, totalling 1586 pages of text, or nearly three-quarters of a million words, including a biobibliographic appendix (84 pages) and a bibliography (114 pages), to which are added two indexes (121 pages). The volume, typeset in Bembo and printed in the United States, is exceptionally readable, with only a handful of printing errors.

Unlike other histories of philosophy, such as the currently appearing Routledge History of Philosophy, this account is arranged by topics, rather than by authors. These form seven major groups: I 'The context of seventeenth-century philosophy' (93 pages); II 'Logic, Language, and Abstract Objects' (161 pages); III 'God' (159 pages); IV 'Body and the Physical World' (333 pages); V 'Spirit' (193 pages); VI 'The Understanding' (241 pages); and VII 'Will, Action, and Moral Philosophy' (201 pages). As can be seen, the largest section concerns the emergence of new doctrines of body in the seventeenth century, a complex subject, including discussions of the scholastic background of these doctrines (by Roger Ariew and Alan Gabbey), the waning occultist tradition (an impressively documented essay by Brian Copenhaver), new doctrines of motion (where Alan Gabbey makes one of several cogent contributions, blending clear exposition and sharp evaluation), the laws of nature (J. R. Milton), and the mathematical realm of na ture (an outstanding essay by Michael Mahoney). From the chapter titles alone it is evident that this volume will become essential reading for historians of science, as well as for anyone interested in the history of philosophy, logic, psychology, theology, and ethics. The standard of presentation across this spectrum is very high, as far as this reviewer could judge, and there will be few readers who will not find their knowledge extended, their curiosity satisfied or stimulated to further enquiry. The copious citation of primary and secondary literature in the footnotes (collected at the end of each essay), and the biobibliographical appendix, will certainly help readers to further study, although the latter is inadequate for some authors.

The organization by topics is well justified, as it allows a proper definition of each issue and encourages a chronological treatment. One of the great strengths of this History is its realization of the editors' wish to provide "a more historical approach to early modern philosophy" (3). Virtually every topic is traced from its genesis in the Aristotelian and/or scholastic traditions, showing once again the remarkable vitality of scholastic ideas and categories up to and including Descartes. In most essays, the topic discussed is expounded from primary sources so that the same grand procession of thinkers appears over and over again: Aristotle, Aquinas, Bacon, Galileo, Mersenne, Descartes, Hobbes, Gassendi, Huygens, Spinoza, Malebranche, Leibniz, More, Locke, Newton. Topical organization also brings out clearly the continuities and divergences as each major thinker grapples with an issue from his own point of view. Indeed, the major impression that the volume leaves is of the remarkable differences of opini on among these philosophers, who worked in close temporal proximity to each other and often shared a similar education or intellectual formation, but each of whom felt compelled to make his own fresh and individual response to the matter under discussion. One contributor refers to "the brilliant systems" of Spinoza and Leibniz, yet the same judgment could be made of at least six other thinkers discussed here; it is hard to think of any comparable period in human thought in which so many individual philosophical systems were conceived, each of which was instantly subjected to heated debate. Every participant in this process seems to have shared the state of mind described by William Blake a century later, "I must Create a System, or be enslav'd by another Man's."

Arrangement by topics does, however, have some disadvantages. It inevitably involves a degree of repetition that anyone who reads through the entire text will discover: the basic suppositions of Hobbes or Descartes, for example, are outlined a dozen times over. More seriously, defining and separating out each thinker's treatment of an individual topic obscures the relationship between these topics in each philosopher's work, the relative importance that they occupied, and the ways in which a changing emphasis over the years could redefine a thinker's whole enterprise. The one philosopher who most escapes this fragmentation is Descartes, whose ideas are copiously discussed, together with those of his many followers and critics. Even here, though, some readers may feel the need to also consult a single, unified treatment of his output.

The choice of topics, as the brief listing above has shown, is commendably wide, including such unhackneyed subjects as "European philosophical responses to non-European culture: China," a useful essay by D. E. Mungello, and the interlocking issues of "Individuation" and "Personal identity," both handled by Udo Thiel. One major topic is missing, though, despite the inclusion of the word "Language" in the the title of section 2, and the editors confess that "our efforts to achieve a systematic treatment of seventeenth-century linguistic theory ... proved abortive'"(3). Several scholars come to mind as possible authors of such a chapter -- Vivian Salmon, for instance, or Marie-Luise Demonet, author of the definitive work on Renaissance language theories (Les Voix du signe. Nature et origine du langage la Renaissance (1480-1580), Paris and Geneva: Slatkin, 1992), who has announced a sequel covering the period to 1640. The absence of any informed discussion of language theory is particularly regrettable in this period, as linguistic issues were central to many discussions. Although Aristotle's laconic treatment of language in the Peri hermeneias is not explicitly acknowledged by any of the authors discussed here, it was one of the first texts in the Organon studied by every undergraduate, and, as we know from Demonet's study, his four-fold scheme (reality:: concepts :: spoken words :: written words) was the dominant model in all Renaissance discussions, one accepted without demur by Bacon, Hobbes, Locke, and most other thinkers, as several quotations and discussions here will show (e. g., 160, 182ff, 193ff, 204, 774, 968, 974, 1020-21, 1035). The call for clarity in philosophical terminology, rejecting both the occultists' obscurity and the scholastics' reification of abstract qualities, was inaugurated by Francis Bacon -- who receives no credit for it here - and was a major preoccupation of Descartes (e. g., 522, 527, 689): the need for clarity, too, was a long-established topic in linguistic theory. Other major li nguistic issues inadequately discussed here include the vogue for natural languages (briefly touched on by D. E. Mungello from the viewpoint of Chinese, 93-94), and the rejection of occult obscurity (briefly mentioned by Brian Copenhaver, 474 and 477). Along the same lines, one could have hoped for a separate discussion of rhetoric, which continued to be a major formative influence on the ways in which arguments were presented and received, and played no little part in the thought of several philosophers, including Bacon, Hobbes (as Quentin Skinner has shown), Pascal, and Locke. Richard Tuck, in his well-informed account of "the institutional setting," points out that the humanists' belief "that philosophy could not be understood nor taught in isolation from rhetoric" caused many colleges and universities to introduce courses combining the two disciplines, curriculum changes that persisted throughout the seventeenth century (16-22). Historians have yet to take account of the role that rhetoric played in formi ng attitudes to, and competence in, thinking, writing and reading.

The treatment by topics, as I have mentioned, results in the major philosophers receiving several separate discussions, all of which are well-informed and well-documented, so far as I can judge, with one exception: Francis Bacon, who is both overlooked and misrepresented. He is not mentioned in Richard Tuck's list of philosophers who published in Latin (10), nor in Nicholas Jolley's history of the arguments calling for a separation of theology and philosophy, in order to overcome the Church's veto on "forbidden knowledge," an issue on which Bacon's utterances influenced many, including Hobbes, whose views are discussed here. Bacon is not included in Brian Copenhaver's survey of English critics of the occult (480), nor in Michael Mahoney's account of the the new interest that natural philosophers took in practical knowledge, such as that acquired by tradesmen, for which credit is given to Robert Boyle (750). John Henry thinks that Bacon's interest in atomism "was minor and fleeting" (564), but Benedino Gemelli recently devoted a four hundred-page book to this topic (Aspetti dell'atomismo classico nella filosofia di Francis Bacon e nel seicento, Florence: Olschki, 1996). The late Gabriel Nuchelmans, who contributed three lucid sections on seventeenth-century logic, failed to see that Bacon's prime objection to the syllogism as a tool of scientific method (132) was that it depended on purely verbal manipulations.

More serious deficiencies concern Bacon's contribution to the reform of natural philosophy. Stephen Menn, outlining the intellectual setting, claims that Bacon passively followed the practice of "humanist compilations" in wanting to "assemble everything that has been learned of each particular topic" and then sifting through this data "to induce general laws of cause and effect" (72). But Bacon constantly urged that the collection of data should not be random but made according to planned and controlled experiments, a practice he named experientia literata. Peter Dear, discussing "Method and the study of nature," also claims that Bacon's method derived from humanist commonplace books, and quotes Bacon's metaphor of "teaching experience to 'read and write'" (154), without understanding the method it describes. J. R. Milton provides a helpful survey of the newly emerging concept of the laws of nature and rightly gives Bacon credit for formulating both the idea "of a single law of nature and of a plurality of pa rticular laws" (685-86). Unfortunately, he does not know the key work in which Bacon first formulated these conceptions, A Confession of Faith (ca. 1603), which describes how God "created heaven and earth, and ... gave unto them constant and everlasting laws, which we call Nature" (cf. Brian Vickers, ed., Francis Bacon. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996, pp. 108, 563-4). Michael Ayers receives brownie points for translating Bacon's famous diagnosis of the four idola to which human consciousness is prone as "illusions" rather than "idols," but then describes this critique as "a polemic aimed at philosophical and religious enemies rather than a general history of human unreasonableness and cognitive failure" (1044), when the opposite seems to be the case. Still, Ayers does recognize that Bacon's attack on the linguistic confusion endemic to much natural philosophy influenced Descartes, Hobbes, Locke and others (1045).

I am sorry if these remarks should bring to mind the old joke about the person who had just read the Encyclopedia Britannica and found it "very good, apart from the subjects I knew something about." But the collective treatment of Bacon's philosophy here seems seriously out of date, unaware of both the major revaluations it has recently received (most notably by Antonio Perez-Ramos, in Francis Bacon's Idea of Science and the Maker's Knowledge Tradition, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1988), and of the documentation of its enormous influence right down the century provided by such scholars as R. F. Jones (1936), Charles Webster (1975), Thomas Kuhn (1976), Graham Rees and Marta Fattori (forthcoming). With this exception, there are very few areas in which one can fault this History and many in which one can only express gratitude and, indeed, awe at the amount of exact knowledge, culled freshly from a stupendously thorough examination of primary texts, that it brings together. These texts include all the major and many minor works of the chief philosophers, including such extremely difficult material as Leibniz's Nachlass. Nuchelmans appositely quoted Jennifer Ashworth's reminder that "the textbook writers and schoolteachers of a period may be as important as the leading intellectuals, since it is by these minor figures that all innovations are accepted, altered, and made into the new commonplace" (143). Accordingly, several contributors have consulted the most widely diffused textbooks of the period, those huge Latin tomes produced by an Alsted or a Burgersdicius, which embalm received knowledge in double-column Folios running to hundreds of pages. Nuchelmans followed his own advice by examining the university logic manuals (105ff), as did Peter Dear (149), Roger Ariew and Alan Gabbey in reconstructing the scholastic background, with its enormous compendia (e. g., 448-50). Jill Kraye (who, along with Brian Copenhaver, contributed to the preceding volume, The Cambridge History of Renaissance Philosophy), in her wi de-ranging and crisply-written "Conceptions of moral philosophy", notes that despite the decline in popularity of Aristotelian commentaries during the seventeenth century "decreasing numbers were matched by increasing bulk" (1281), notably in the massive two-volume commentary on the Nicomachean Ethics by Tarquinio Galluzzi, a Jesuit professor at the Collegio Romano, which runs to almost 1,900 double-columned pages. (Kraye drily observes that "the vastness of Galluzzi's erudition almost justifies the size of his commentary".) Most contributors are kept busy enough by the printed material, but Richard Popkin, in his lively survey of the religious background, valuably reminds us how many texts by Hartlib, Dury, Locke, and Newton survive in yet-unpublished manuscripts, resting in public libraries and private collections in Amsterdam, Oxford, Sheffield, Stockholm, and Zurich.

In such a wide-ranging work it would be invidious to single out individual contributions, given the uniformly high level of discussion throughout. But it is interesting to note some of the new attitudes which emerged in this period out of a dialectical engagement with existing ideas, often in a spirit of dissatisfaction. (The least helpful essay, by Stephen Menn, treats "new philosophy" in an altogether too diffuse manner, including in it such figures as Lipsius and Patrizi.) Peter Dear's survey of ideas on method shows that Galileo's advocacy of geometrical analysis derived from Pappus of Alexandria's Collectiones mathematicae, published in Latin in 1589 (151); Alan Gabbey's account of 'new doctrines of motion' brings out well Galileo's individual development of Peripatetic theories (651-52), while Michael Mahoney acutely shows both the advantages and limitations of Galileo's inheritance from Archimedean mechanics and scholastic kinematics (706-14). Mahoney also documents the ongoing fruits of the Italian h umanists' recovery of Greek mathematical texts in the previous century, most notably in the work of the great French mathematician, Francois Viete. In a number of books published between 1591 and 1615, Viete drew on Pappus's Mathematical Collections and other works by Euclid, Theon, and Apollonius, to formulate new conceptions of analysis and synthesis, combining Greek mathematics with Arabic algebra. In his Geometrie (1637) Descartes, although objecting to the "barbarous" notation of Arabic algebraists, followed Viete (who, surprisingly, is omitted from this History's biobibliographical index) and extended his analytic programme, drawing on Apollonius's Conics, as did Pierre de Fermat in his roughly contemporary work on plane and solid loci (726-30). These new techniques of geometrical-algebraic analysis opened the way for the great breakthrough of Leibniz's calculus, and it is significant that in a letter written to Huygens in 1691 Leibniz admitted the debt that contemporary mathematicians owed to the Greek tradition, describing his calculus as "giving us all the advantages over Archimedes that Viete and Descartes have given us over Apollonius" (738).

These developments in mathematics accompanied what Mahoney describes as "perhaps the foremost change wrought on natural philosophy by the scientific revolution," a change that nobody in the sixteenth century could have envisioned, the "reduction of physics -- that is, of nature as motion and change -- to mathematics" (702). Nor could any of the earlier humanists have predicted the "new conception of moral philosophy" which gradually emerged during the seventeenth century. As Jill Kraye shows, it was a shift from a discipline based on authority, classical or Christian, to "a systematic science, grounded on logically rigorous deductions from self-evident principles" (1279). Kraye documents the emergence of "geometrical conceptions of moral philosophy," adopting the axiomatic method of geometry, in the work of Descartes, Malebranche, Hobbes, and Spinoza (1300-08). (Francis Bacon was a pioneer, here unacknowledged, for he explicitly described his scientific method -- organizing individual observations so as to p roduce axioms of increasing generality -- as being applicable to ethics: Novum Organum, I 27.) Susan James traces the parallel change in conceptions of the passions, from the humanistic treatments by Cicero, Augustine, and Aquinas, to the new mechanistic explanations of those four modern philosophers (916-35). The last of these epoch-making changes in seventeenth-century philosophy that I can mention here concerns the concept of probability, which, as Lorraine Daston shows in a marvellously lucid and wide-ranging essay, "shifted its meaning from an opinion warranted by authority to a degree of belief (or of certainty) proportioned to evidence" (1109). Before the late seventeenth century insurers never "collected statistics on shipwrecks and other casualties." An "anti-statistical attitude" was also found in attitudes towards mortality; burial registers did not record people's age at death (1115). Daston traces the emergence of what she calls a "new brand of rationality," as "seventeenth-century writers fashio ned first a philosophical and, eventually, a mathematical theory of probability" (1116), in the work of Pascal, Fermat, Huygens, Locke, Leibniz, and the brothers Jakob and Nicholas Bernoulli. In this development we note again that interplay between mathematics and philosophy which definitively distinguished seventeenth-century thinkers from their predecessors. According to the QED, the word "interdisciplinary" was not coined until 1937 (fleetingly, achieving circulation in the 1950s): its fruitful existence is one of many topics much clarified in this volume.

In sum, all concerned with this enterprise (first conceived by Jeremy Mynott of Cambridge University Press, early in 1982), are to be congratulated on bringing it to fruition over a long period. The editors describe some of the difficulties they encountered, most of which have been overcome. Some deficiencies remain. Although scientific diagrams occasionally appear, in several places an illustration of the synoptic tables from early printed books described in the text would have been helpful. Some contributors give cross-references to relevant discussions in other essays, but more vigorous editorial intervention would have been desirable. For instance, in Lorraine Daston's essay we find a brief and unexplained reference to "Pascal's wager, in which libertines are ... asked to take a gamble on Christianity" (1122). The term "libertine" or "libirtin" occurs in several other essays without any gloss (e. g., 306-07, 326, 466, 473, 475, 570, 773), but it is not until page 1153 that a proper description is provide d of this 'group of thinkers', whom Rene Pintard christened "libertins erudits" in 1943. An alert editor could have sign-posted this and other technical terms at their first occurrence. But these are small failings in what seems destined to become the standard work in this field for many years to come.