The Political Thought of David Walsh: A Symposium

Abstract

David Walsh has published a trilogy of books on the ideological, political, and philosophical trajectories of modernity. He confronts the crisis of modernity and argues that modernity has the resources within itself to reestablish a collective commitment to the order of existence. This symposium offers four essays reflecting on and responding to Walsh's assessment of modernity and its prospects.     

Catholicism, Science, and Modernity: The Case of William Miles Maskell

This is a case study of William Miles Maskell, an eminent entomologist, devout Roman Catholic, and the foremost scientific critic of evolutionary theory in nineteenth-century New Zealand. Modern Western intellectual history, built on the assumption that secular, scientific modes of thought inexorably swept aside traditional metaphysical and religious ones, has generally written off such persons as ignorant reactionaries battling truth, enlightenment, and progress. But this grand narrative — of scientific light banishing religious darkness — oversimplifies and dis-torts the past. Maskell failed to prevent evolution from becoming paradigmatic in New Zealand biology, to be sure. But it is far from clear that he lost what he regarded as the more important fight — against the scientism and agnosticism he saw as characteristic of modern science. We need to develop a considerably more subtle and nuanced historiography of science-and-religion that gives the religious and philosophical critics of nineteenth century science their due. They battled modernity's scepticism and scientism more successfully than historians have generally acknowledged.     

Between Leibniz and Kant: The Political Thought of Wilhelm von Humboldt

Abstract

In his early text, The Limits of State Action, Wilhelm von Humboldt raises the Kantian question of the permissibility and legitimate extent of political and juridical coercion, as his contribution to a debate amongst Kantians launched by the publication in 1785 of Kant’s Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals. In arguing for a minimal state, concerned exclusively with internal and external security of its members but not at all with their felicity, Humboldt inflects Kantian political thought in the direction of a liberal laissez-faire state, in marked contrast to the strong interventionism that his fellow-Kantian Fichte derived from similar Kantian grounds. The article argues that the underlying conception of the individual retained by Humboldt has markedly Leibnizian traits, namely the notion of freedom as the spontaneous unfolding of a highly personal, monadic developmental trajectory toward perfection, which ought not to be impeded or homogenized by unnecessary state intervention. Humboldt thus represents not only a ‘rightist’ libertarian reading of Kant, but a particular appropriation of significant Leibnizian themes. His combination of these sources is compared with that of other contemporary theorists like Hufeland and Fichte.     

王氏父子的训诂思想和方法

清代学者在训诂方面的成就以王念孙、王引之父子最为突出,其科学的训诂思想和方法大略有以下几个方面：实事求是,不尚墨守;因声求义,不限形体;在训诂中辩证地分析词义;主张虚词不可用实义来解释;重视总结训释词义的规律。这些都值得后人借鉴。     

Razi on Reason and Political Authority: A Study in Medieval Persian Political Thought

The Philosopher of Rey, Mohammad-e Zakariya-ye Razi and his Ismaili adversaries, Abu Hatam-e Razi and Naser-e Khosrow, share a political understanding of religion according to which religion is a theologico-political system of domination. However, they are at odds over the political philosophy appraisal of religion qua a system of authority. The paper explicates the latter disagreement in part based on Razi's and his opponents' conflicting ideas about the nature of the faculty of Reason and its distribution among men. Consequently, the paper underlines a democratic implication of Razi's thesis on the makeup of the human intellect.     

Interrupting Augustine: Hermeneutics,Allegory, and Irony in El perro del hortelano

Whatever else El perro del hortelano might be, it is a deeply ironic text about the difficulties of reading. The play not only stages acts of reading and writing where irony disrupts understanding, it is itself an ironic reading of Augustine's moment of conversion that shows the difficulty of allegorical and programmatic readings.     

The Canon of the History of Political Thought: Its Critique and a Proposed Alternative

After a brief review of the origins and the nature of the received canon of the history of political thought, this article discusses the critiques that have been leveled at it over the past decades. Two major lines of critique are distinguished: 1. The democratic critique, focusing on the omission of "plebeian," non-Western, and female voices from the traditional canon, as well as the failure of the canon to discuss issues such as popular radicalism, patriarchal rule, and the politics of empire. 2. The methodological critique, in which the canon is deconstructed as an anachronistic, "Whiggish" enterprise, and its validity as history is questioned against the background of "history after the linguistic turn." The article examines the consequences of both lines of criticism for some key concepts in the history of political thought, as well as for the coherence and the structure of the traditional canon. It calls attention to the paradox that, while virtually all elements of the canon have been subjected to incisive critique, the canon itself has so far survived relatively unscathed in the major textbooks and in the way the subject is taught in universities the world over. In the final section the question is raised what a new, reconstructed overall history of political thought might look like, and some preliminary suggestions are offered towards a revision of the canon that would satisfy both the democratic and the methodological critique.