Political History and Political Philosophy: Making Sense of the West

Abstract

The old Western synthesis, the coming together of self-government, the Christian proposition, modern equality, and the commitment to relieving man's estate, appears to be unraveling. In the European context, it is being replaced by a “pure democracy” that cannot do justice to the continuity of Western civilization. Rejecting the twin temptations of Progress and Decline, Pierre Manent recovers the perspective of the human agent. While the polis or classical city is no longer available to us, the self-government of free human beings remains at the heart of the Western enterprise. Manent shows that the Christian notion of conscience preserved the classical analogy between the soul and the political association and is at the hear of Western liberty. The West as a whole rests on the synthetic and mediating notion of conscience.     

Science and the Fate of the Human Soul in Tom Wolfe

Abstract

This article investigates Tom Wolfe's assessment of the age-old debate between nature and nurture, the Cartesian mind–body problem, and the tensions between science, politics, and morality that result from the human struggle to explain what the components of a human being are. I begin with Wolfe's own study of what evolution and neuroscience tell us about the “Human Beast.” Wolfe is not certain that evolution tells the whole story of how human beings came to be who and what they are in the twenty-first century. Evolution got us to the point of speech but Wolfe is persuaded that at that point, evolution ended and speech took over. Speech, according to Wolfe, made the development of reason and ingenuity and the creation of culture possible. And it is culture, the shared set of human behavior, knowledge, and beliefs, manners, and mores, and, above all for Wolfe, status, which then informs human motivation and actions. Wolfe is open to the idea that neuroscience might eventually be able to explain every detail of how and why the human brain functions as it does but he is skeptical that it will be able to explain away completely the idea that each of us is an individual, striving for honor and success within our status sphere.     

Politics and Public Policy

Abstract

In the figure of Judge Holden, Cormac McCarthy has crafted perhaps the most haunting character in all of American literature. The antagonist of McCarthy's Blood Meridian, Holden is a richly composed portrait of human evil responsible for a litany of wicked deeds. This essay attempts to expound the character of judge Holden, to the end of clarifying McCarthy's definition of evil. It argues that McCarthy, with the judge, lays bare the contours of soul of the evil man, focusing especially on the tension between his ambitious repudiation of justice, on the one hand, and his steadfast, if unwitting, adherence to it, on the other. It is the evil man's conception of the purpose of knowledge, together with his desire to acquire boundless knowledge, that is the key to this tension in his soul.     

Engineering as a Source of Scientific Ideas

Abstract

Engineering has discovered some laws of nature as limits to what can be done, from which have developed the sciences of thermodynamics, information theory and cybernetics. Considered as a science, engineering lies between physics and biology, because its machines have physical structures and properties but biological organizations and functions. The old idea of the living body as an engine retains its power in modern biology; and the reconsideration of various natural non-biological processes in terms of engineering and biological concept reveals inadequacies in modern physical theory.     

Introduction

Abstract

This paper examines mechanical drawings made between 1811 and 1835 by Cesar Nicolas Leblanc, draftsman and engraver for the Conservatoire des Arts et Metiers, for publication by the French patent ministry. It compares Leblanc's engravings with the original drawings of the same machines, drawings which mechanics and inventors had submitted with their patent applications and upon which Leblanc based his published copies. The paper further compares Leblanc's patent engravings with his engravings of other machines, ones of proven utility. Leblanc developed a visual vocabulary to accompany Conservatoire Director Gerard‐Joseph Christian's philosophy of industrial mechanics, and used it to expose a crucial ambiguity in French patenting practice. Patented machines were unproven machines, Leblanc's patent engravings argued, while his other engravings endorsed machines of known value.     

Making Italians out of rocks: Mussolini's shadows on Italian mountains

In this article I use the case of mountains to explore the ways in which the Fascist regime articulated its vision of nature/human relationships. I will show how mountains were considered as creative environments which could produce a special type of people: the montanari (mountaineers), meaning with this word mountain villagers rather than mountain climbers. The Fascist regime praised people from the mountains – especially from the Alps - as the true and better stock of Italians; that environment made them strong, healthy, pure, and disciplined, as the rhetoric of the Great War had supported. The Fascist regime celebrated the virtues of montanari by birth, those who were born and raised in the mountains, but it also aimed at employing the creative power of nature in its plan to shape the new Italian. In the article I show how the regime employed mountains in its discourses and practices of ‘bonifica umana’ (human reclamation) which involved both body and soul. In the Fascist narratives, mountains were the open air gymnasium for building a stronger man, a living archive of ruralism for reproducing the true Italian, and the secular church of the collective memory for the making of national subjects. The blend of nature, culture, and politics in the Fascist discourse on mountains and people is at the core of this article.     

The Cooper in Liverpool

Abstract

This report assesses the efficiency in timing and layout of the mass-production system at the Portsmouth Dockyard block mill in the early 1800s. It is based on study of the extant buildings and machines as well as pictorial and written evidence from the past. Early output figures for some of the block-making machines reveal 8 to 17 per cent discrepancies from perfect coordination in timing. This difficulty was apparently offset by use of duplicate machines and by short-term stacking up of semi-finished parts between machine processes. An old line shafting diagram implies that the three sets of machines for making pulley-block shells of different sizes were arranged on one shop floor in a hollow rectangle, each set in its own production sequence. Although not ideal, the machinery's coordination and layout showed a greater rationality of design for efficient production 'flow' than has heretofore been documented for it.     

No Angst and All Play: Postmodernism and the Humanities

Abstract

There is widespread disagreement about Tocqueville's conception of human nature, some going so far as to say that Tocqueville possessed no unified conception of human nature at all. In this paper, I aim to provide the essential principles of Tocqueville's conception of human nature through an examination of the way in which he describes the power of human circumstances, such as physical environment, social state, and religion, to shape human character by extracting the principles underlying these transformations. There is no “natural man” or man “in the state of nature” but instead a set of psychic operations that reveal a picture of human nature in which human freedom, or the ability to initiate action in pursuit of important objects, lies at the heart of human life.     

The philosophical systems of Francesco Patrizi and Henry More

ABSTRACT

This paper presents a comparison of the philosophical systems of Francesco Patrizi and Henry More. The point, however, is not to demonstrate Patrizi’s influence on More but rather to see how, with respect to some particular subjects, they both tried to offer a modern interpretation of Neoplatonism. The main axis of the analysis follows the topics of space, light, and soul. While to More, light is of merely marginal interest, it is demonstrated that space and soul are of crucial importance and play a similar role in both authors’ systems. They function as intermediary entities that link the higher and the lower reality and form a sort of canvas upon which the material world unfolds. Yet, in comparison with Patrizi, More’s system is both constrained by a much stricter, dualistic classification and at the same time veers dangerously close to immanentism and pantheism (which More tries to avoid).     

Circean transformation and the poetics of Milton’s Masque

ABSTRACT

Circe’s presence in A Masque Presented at Ludlow Castle (Comus) invites readers to read both Milton’s Circe and Milton’s own poetic activity through long and intertwined traditions of theology and literary commentary. Stretching from Augustine and Aquinas to the commentaries and translations of Homer and Ovid by Sponde, Sandys, and Chapman, these traditions use Circe to explore and conflate the possibility, the permanence, and the experience of both human and literary transformation. Taken up by Townshend and Jones in their Caroline court masque Tempe Restored, they become essential intertexts for Milton’s Masque. Milton embeds this discourse in his masque – a genre that places metamorphosis at the heart of its poetics – to examine the nature of Renaissance intertextuality and the authorial self and interrogate his own use of Renaissance practices of imitatio and aemulatio. In Comus’ wood, Circean transformation becomes a touchstone for the virtuous soul and the virtuous poet alike.     

Zum astronomischen papyrus‐fragment pap.osl.73

The Phaedrus is taken to be a portrayal of how individual souls struggle for their own salvation. Generally overlooked, however, is the fact that Plato here invites us to explore soul not as a principle of individuality, but of community and of an identity over and above individuality. The article argues for the presence and importance of non-individuality of soul in the Phaedrus by considering the roles in the text of erôs, the structure of the myth, arguments concerning soul as mover, tripartition of soul, the motif of Hestia, and central dramatic and rhetorical features.     

Technology and ocean‐scape: Defining the deep sea in mid‐nineteenth century

The ocean's profound inaccessibility makes it impossible to comprehend except through the mediation of technology. The first investigators to explore the great depths were hydrographers whose work was animated by mid‐nineteenth century growth of political, economic, and cultural interest in the oceans. While submarine telegraphy certainly boosted ocean science, interest in this field derived first from commercial concerns related to whaling and shipping as well as the intellectual pursuits of physical geography and questions about the existence of life at great depths. Hydrographers’ developing conception of the oceanic environment never represented a clear translation from technology. Dramatic changes in the understanding of the shape of the deep‐sea floor testified to the complexity of interaction between sounding machines, methods, and interpretations of depth. The shifting image of the sea floor not only reflected increasingly accurate measurements, but also mirrored shifting human motivations for studying this unexplored territory.     

Ethics Ex Machina: popular culture and the plural futures of politics

ABSTRACT

The articulation of ethical responsibility can be conceived as a condition of ethical practice that brings into being a human subject to whom we owe consideration, and the reverse must also hold: we are brought into being – subjectified – through these relational connections. But can these connections exist between human and non-human subjects? In this short paper, we analyse the representation of artificially intelligent machines in the popular television series Westworld and the movie Ex Machina and elaborate on the boundary between human and non-human as a complex and contested ethical space. We argue that taking popular cultural representations of machine learning seriously can offer significant insight into how futures of human subjectivity and ethicopolitical responsibility might unfold. (117 words)     

Captivating thoughts: nocturnal pollution,imagination and the sleeping mind in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries

ABSTRACT

Medieval attempts to understand nocturnal emissions – involuntary bodily excretions during sleep which were identified as morally ambiguous – became extensive explorations of the unique and problematic features of sleep and the mental state it produced. During the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, nocturnal pollutions became the object of an intensive scrutiny of sleep as a site of moral concern. Causal explanations often centred on human psychology, in particular the unusual status of the sleeping mind, in an attempt to understand the intricate ways in which mind, body and soul were uniquely bound together in sleep. The mental states before, during and after sleep were understood to interact with one another in complex ways which centred on questions of culpability and its lack. A comparison of medical, natural-philosophical, theological and canon law materials discussing nocturnal pollution reveals a preoccupation with the sleeper’s mind as exceptional, uncontrollable and problematic.     

The two cultures and Renaissance humanism

Abstract

C. P. Snow's 'two cultures' distinction between scientific and humanistic thought is perennial. It may be said to correspond to empirical and metaphorical bents in human nature. Since antiquity, attempts have been made by some to bridge the gap. The natural bridge of scientific (in the broad sense) scholarship has been largely overlooked, but the development in the West of philological and historical methods by fifteenth and early sixteenth century humanists (in the technical sense) exhibits numerous criteria and examples of a scientific approach to the world around us, as does such scholarship today.     

Author response

In 1783, Louis XVI founded the first public repository of machines in the very premises Vaucanson had set up his workshops the Hôtel de Mortagne. A record, found among the archives of the Conservatoire des arts et métiers, enables us to identify specimens which have been collected up to 1791 by this fairly unknown institution.

While the existence of the public repository, established six months after Vaucanson's death, was attested to through the royal decree of August 2, 1783, the exact list of the machines and tools left by the engineer remained unknown. Furthermore, documents giving information on the activities of this institution, which was to be at the origin of the Conservatoire des arts et métiers, were rare. The inventory of the Hôtel de Mortagne sheds light on these two points. It is the second part of this hitherto unpublished document which appears below, following the summary of the text which preceeded the first part published in the previous issue of this journal.     

Descartes and the pineal gland in animals: A frequent misinterpretation

Abstract

Rene Descartes presented a number of reasons for his choice of the pineal gland as a logical place for the soul to interact with the physical machinery of the body. It is often stated that one of his reasons was that be believed animals do not have pineal glands, whereas humans alone possess a soul and this small structure. This is a misinterpretation of Descartes. The philosopher knew that barnyard and other animals possess pineal glands, having seen this with his own eyes. His point was that the pineal is unique in humans only because of a special function — acting as the seat for the rational soul.     

The Interplanetary Dialectic: Freedom and Equality in Ursula Le Guin's The Dispossessed

In his most recent work, Homeless and at Home in America, Peter Lawler diagnoses our country's twin intellectual impulses, libertarianism and Darwinism, as expressions of the modern, disjunctive soul; torn between the desire to conquer nature for the sake of individual autonomy and the inclination to scientifically deprivilege ourselves as merely another part of nature, many Americans have managed to incoherently embrace a kind of libertarian sociobiology. Lawler attempts to demonstrate that each perspective promises only a partial view of the truth and that a deeper anthropology that properly includes both our natural inclinations and our eros to transcend nature can be accounted for by what he calls a "Thomistic Realism." The theoretical crux of this Thomistic realism is a "science of theology" that articulates the relation between reason and revelation, navigating between the mutual exclusivity espoused by Leo Strauss or any decisive theoretical synthesis. The purpose of this article is to fully explain the meaning of Lawler's science of theology and the extent to which it is influenced by but ultimately departs from Strauss's view.     

Archibald Campbell and the Committee for Purity of Doctrine on Natural Reason,Natural Religion,and Revelation

Summary

This article discusses Archibald Campbell's (1691–1756) early writings on religion, and the reactions they provoked from conservative orthodox Presbyterians. Purportedly against the Deist Matthew Tindal, Campbell crucially argued for two claims, namely (i) for the reality of immutable moral laws of nature, and (ii) for the incapacity of natural reason, or the light of nature, to discover the fundamental truths of religion, in particular the existence and perfections of God, and the immortality of the soul. In an episode that had its peak in 1735 and 1736, a Committee for Purity of Doctrine of the Church of Scotland scrutinised Campbell's writings. It attacked the second claim as contradicting Calvinist doctrines concerning the universal guilt of mankind after the Fall, and the first claim as contradicting doctrines concerning justification and salvation, and as supporting Deism. The study of this episode reveals new aspects of how the struggle to define orthodoxy crystallised in philosophical and theological debates in Scotland at the dawn of the Enlightenment, and before the rise of the Moderates.     

Poesis and Immediacy: A Reply to Davis

Abstract

It is argued here that the Christian doctrines of Trinity and creation make imperative the notion of "mediation" as God's mode of existing in himself and toward us, as well as our mode of existence in God's grace. This is the case in Saint Thomas's account of grace, and it is also the basic configuration of Sergei Bulgakov's sophiology. Josh Davis's understanding of grace, by opting for immediacy as our mode of dependence on God, ultimately fails to give a full account of human cooperation, and in so doing establishes a competitive relation between human and divine agency.