Stewart Duncan

Antarctic sympathy

While looking a little more at early modern texts that talk about sympathy, I came across this (which is apparently distinguished by being the earliest text returned in a search for ‘sympathy’ and its variants in Early English Books Online.)

Likewise néere to this Ilande is founde a kynde of fish, and also vpon the coaste of America very daungerous, also much feared and redoubted of the wilde men, for that she is a rauening fish, and as daungerous as a Lyon or a Woulfe famished: this fish is named Houperou, in their language, and eateth other fish in the water, excepting one that is as greate as a little Carpe the which foloweth him alwayes, as if there were some Sympathia or secrete loue betwene them, or else he foloweth him for to be preserued and kept sure from other fishes.

That comes from pp.117-8 of André Thevet’s The new found worlde, or Antarctike wherin is contained wonderful and strange things… (London, 1568), an English translation of his 1557 Les Singularitez de la France antarctique (EEBO-TCP record). The ‘Antarctike’ here is not the antarctic continent, but France Antarctique, a sixteenth-century French colony in Brazil.

There’s a short biography of Thevet on the English-language Wikipedia, and a rather longer one on the French-language WIkipedia, which also has an article on Les Singularitez de la France antarctique. One can also download scans of the French edition of the book from Gallica, and from a UVa site.

Swiftian sympathy

A sort of follow-up to this post on explanations that invoke sympathy. From Swift’s Tale of a Tub:

Let us therefore now conjecture how it comes to pass that none of these great prescribers do ever fail providing themselves and their notions with a number of implicit disciples, and I think the reason is easy to be assigned, for there is a peculiar string in the harmony of human understanding, which in several individuals is exactly of the same tuning. This, if you can dexterously screw up to its right key, and then strike gently upon it whenever you have the good fortune to light among those of the same pitch, they will by a secret necessary sympathy strike exactly at the same time. And in this one circumstance lies all the skill or luck of the matter; for, if you chance to jar the string among those who are either above or below your own height, instead of subscribing to your doctrine, they will tie you fast, call you mad, and feed you with bread and water. It is therefore a point of the nicest conduct to distinguish and adapt this noble talent with respect to the differences of persons and of times.

Leibniz and Burnett and Toland and Bach

Some non-expert meanderings…

Reading Eric Silbin’s The Cello Suites, a book about J.S. Bach, his cello suites, and Pablo Casals, I came across this passage: “When Bach was hired at Cöthen in 1717, the court Capelle consisted of sixteen musicians, the core of whom came from the disbanded Berlin Capelle, courtesy of rising Prussian militarism” (p.63). That was the Capelle that was in Berlin under Frederick I, and disbanded after he died in 1713. Now Frederick I had been married to Sophie Charlotte, who had died in 1705. And Sophie Charlotte is somewhat familiar from the history of modern philosophy, at least because of her connections with Leibniz.[1] Other philosophically engaged figures had connections here too. For example, John Toland travelled there, and described the court in a book, and Leibniz’s correspondent Thomas Burnett, about whom I’ve been writing, had been there too. Thus, for example, Burnett wrote to Catherine Trotter from Berlin on 5 December 1704:

I have no delight in the hearing or seeing any woman, since I came abroad, like the queen, who, never, I believe, spoke, but with satisfaction to the hearer. Her concern for me is so great, that I am ashamed therof. It hath made me many open flatterers, and it may be hidden enemies.[2]

So these philosophical types had been at the court in Berlin. And some of Bach’s musicians in Cöthen had also been at the court in Berlin. So, I wondered, were any of those musicians who moved to Cöthen in 1713 among the musicians who might have been heard by the philosophers in Berlin?

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Burnett, on maps

I’ve been thinking about the correspondence of Thomas Burnett of Kemnay, particularly his correspondence with Leibniz (thus this earlier post and indeed this one).[1] Here I’d like to think a little bit about Burnett’s travels, and the geographical distribution of the correspondence. For now I’d like to focus on correspondence with Leibniz, and on the years 1695 to 1705.[2]

Figure 1 shows what might seem to be the three most important geographical locations involved. It shows Kemnay (where Burnett was from), London (where he spent a good deal of time) and Hanover (where Leibniz was, for the most part).

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Measuring and mapping

[Cross-posted from philosophymodsquad.wordpress.com.]

I’ve been thinking about Justin Smith’s post Philosophometry, with its reference to Franco Moretti’s Graphs, Maps, Trees: Abstract Models for Literary History, and more generally to “the value of quantitative, digitally based study” of the texts one is interested in. There is, as Smith says, a good deal of such discussion of such approaches in the humanities, if not in philosophy — this is part of what goes on under the name of ‘digital humanities’. This is something by which I’ve been persistently intrigued, despite never really doing anything about it.

There is a problem — at least a practical one — with the approach Smith has in mind. One apparently needs “to compile a massive database of texts, titles, key words [and] key arguments”. But how do we do this? Generating a database in this way apparently requires a good deal of interpretation. Do we have to commit to close reading of everything, before we can do the data analysis? If the project is to map the locations of occurrence of certain views, then probably yes. But is there the same necessity in all ‘digital humanities’ approaches to history of philosophy?

One paper that has attempted an approach of this sort in the history of modern philosophy, with explicit reference to Moretti, is Shaun Nichols’ ‘The Rise of Compatibilism: A Case Study in the Quantitative History of Philosophy’ (Midwest Studies in Philosophy 31 (2007), 260-70) [pdf]. And Nichols addresses this problem:

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Automata

[Cross-posted from philosophymodsquad.]

In preparing to talk about Descartes on machines and animals and human beings the other day, I set out looking for information about seventeenth-century automata.

One really interesting thing is Jessica Riskin’s article “Machines in the Garden” in Republics of Letters. This has a lot of information about “lifelike machines” of two sorts: religious ones – “the muttering Christs, the horn-playing angels, the eye-rolling devils, the teeth-chattering heads” – and a great variety of hydraulic machinery in the gardens of the rich and powerful.

There are also multiple online versions of Salomon de Caus’s 1615 book, Les raisons des forces mouvantes, avec diverses machines tant utiles que plaisantes, auxquelles sont adjoints plusieurs dessings de grotes & fontaines. The image below is one example of the machines illustrated, and is described as a machine “Pour faire representer le chant d’un oyseau en son naturel, par le moyen de l’eau”.

One online version of the book is at http://cnum.cnam.fr/SYN/FDA1.html. For another version, and more description of the book’s contents, see http://architectura.cesr.univ-tours.fr/traite/Notice/Caus1615.asp?param=en. Or alternatively, for just the illustrations, see http://gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/btv1b2100042f/f1.planchecontact.

Hobbes’s arguments for nominalism in De Corpore

[Cross-posted from philosophymodsquad.wordpress.com.]

(Following up on my earlier post on an argument for nominalism in the Elements of Law.)

In chapter 2 of De Corpore Hobbes offers two further arguments for the view that names are the only universals.

(1) The first involves the way in which common names denote.

However a common name, as it is the name of several things taken one by one, but not however of all the things together at the same time (as ‘man’ is not the name of human kind but of Peter, John, and the other men separately) is called for that reason universal. So the name ‘universal’ is not the name of some thing existing in rerum natura, and not the name of an idea, or some phantasm formed in the soul, but is always the name of some vox or name (DeCo 2.9).

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Hobbes’s argument for nominalism in the Elements of Law

[Cross-posted from philosophymodsquadwordpress.com.]

Hobbes was a nominalist, in that he believed that “there is nothing universal but names” (EL 5.6), so there are neither universal things nor universal ideas. But why did he believe this?

In chapter 5 of the Elements of Law, having introduced names, Hobbes distinguishes between universal and singular names: singular names name one thing, while universal names name more than one thing. As an example of a universal name he gives ‘man’, which is a name given “to every particular of mankind” (EL 5.5), that is, to every individual man.

Having distinguished the two sorts of name, Hobbes goes on to note that the universality of certain names has lead some to think that there are also universal things (EL 5.6). On this view

besides Peter and John, and all the rest of the men that are, have been, or shall be in the world, there is yet somewhat else that we call man, (viz.) man in general, deceiving themselves by taking the universal, or general appellation, for the thing it signifieth (EL 5.6).

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Leibniz, Locke, and ‘books aiming to prove the truth of religion’

[Cross-posted from philosophymodsquad.wordpress.com.]

At a recent conference I gave a paper on Leibniz’s correspondence with Thomas Burnett of Kemnay. Among my questions was how Locke appeared to Leibniz. Did he look like a Socinian, or similar sort of religiously dubious character? In answering that, it would be good to have some idea of how Leibniz thought about Locke’s Reasonableness of Christianity. But Leibniz said relatively little explicitly about that text. There is, however, an argument in Leibniz’s correspondence with Burnett that seems to bear on the issue.

It seems to me that too many books aiming to prove the truth of religion are written in your country. That’s a bad sign, and is something that doesn’t always have a good effect … I have often thought, and others have come to agree with me, that preachers should usually avoid this issue, because instead of relieving doubts, they give rise to them. Books in vernacular languages have this effect most often … I’d prefer that we concentrated on making the wisdom of God known through physics and mathematics, by revealing more and more of the wonders of nature. That’s the real way to convince the profane, and should be the goal of philosophy (Leibniz to Burnett, 18 July 1701, A 1.20.185, pp.286-7).

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Travels far and near

[Cross-posted from Modsquad]

I’ve been reading Leibniz’s correspondence with Thomas Burnett of Kemnay. Burnett is probably best known as one of the people via whom Leibniz tried to communicate with Locke. He was, more generally, a source of news for Leibniz about things published in English — his own personal book review section.

Locke’s work is indeed a repeated topic, but there are all sorts of other topics besides: a fashion for Aesop’s Fables, Dryden’s translation of Virgil, etc, etc. But this seems like a good occasion to notice an interest in travel literature.

This interest was not confined to Burnett and Leibniz. See Lewis’s post about Ippolito Desideri’s Account of Tibet. And Locke obviously had some interest in this, as shown by Essay I.iii.9, with its reference to (among others) “the voyage of Baumgarten, which is a book not every day to be met with”. But not all of the travels written about were terribly distant.

John Toland wrote a book about his travels to Berlin and Hanover — one that describes his visits to courts and meetings with philosophers, but which I remember most vividly for a passage expressing Toland’s great enthusiasm for Prussian signposts. (Toland has other relevance here as the author of Christianity not Mysterious, and also of a Life of Milton that Burnett sent to Leibniz, and which Leibniz commented on.)

Various examples of not so distant travels appear in the Leibniz-Burnett correspondence. A letter from Burnett to Leibniz in March 1699 (A1.16, N372) mentions travel books including Martin Lister’s A Journey to Paris in the Year 1698 and Martin’s A Late Voyage to St Kilda [non-subscription version][St Kilda wiki page]. Leibniz made approving note of both of these (A1.18.N211, p382), and the second led Leibniz to ask Burnett whether the Irish language was much like the Welsh, as well as to speculate about the ways in which one linguistic example in the book resembles Greek (p388).