What's the good of post-analytic philosophy?

Analytic philosophy began in G.E. Moore's critique of idealist accounts of reality, implicating as dilemmatic F.H. Bradley's identification of the good with self-realization. Neither the tradition of British idealism nor the successor tradition of analytic metaethics was able to sustain the salience previously enjoyed by the concept of good. The essay's second part analyzes Alasdair MacIntyre's account of that longer tradition, and his argument that Aristotelianism's conceptual scheme provides the best solution to modern moral philosophy's dilemma about the human good.     

FROM BREXIT TO HEGEL

British idealism has led an ambiguous existence in any overview of British historical and political thought in the twentieth century. Seen partly as an alien Continental intrusion into presumably typical British priorities of empiricism, positivism, and utilitarianism, it was badly damaged by its putative associations with the military enemy of two world wars. Admir Skodo's meticulous study of British “idealist revisionists” during the postwar period 1945–1980 repairs this damage by showing the extended influence of that idealism as funneled through the “new idealism” of the interwar period represented mainly by the philosophers R. G. Collingwood and Michael Oakeshott. Skodo demonstrates how these idealist revisionists deeply influenced postwar British historiography by underscoring qualities of humanism, pluralism, and variety not characteristically associated with idealism, reinterpreted a range of important topics in British history from the Tudors through the English civil wars to the Victorian period, and came up with political theorizing that celebrated the postwar welfare state while indicating its vulnerabilities to an increasingly technologized society. Just as Skodo's protagonists negotiated the 1970s transition in Britain's turn to Europe, so his account proves stimulating for contemporary concerns regarding a post‐Brexit Britain. The final part of the essay therefore looks at some suggested models, such as the “Anglosphere” or a “Singapore in the Atlantic” for Britain, before concluding with reflections on the importance according to a Hegelian reading of the modern “rational state” of the continued influence of Oxbridge intellectuals on the evolution of British directions and goals since the Victorian age.     

Hidden footnotes: J.A. Smith,R.G. Collingwood and Croce’s conception of history

This article examines the role J.A. Smith played in introducing Croce’s conception of history into British philosophy. In particular, it examines his influence on R.G. Collingwood’s incorporation of the Italian idealist conception of history into his own philosophy. The contentions that Smith was a key popularizer of Italian idealist ideas into Britain and that he helped to shape Collingwood’s intellectual developed is not new. Yet these interrelated topics have not been explored in any great depth. Collingwood’s own reticence over his intellectual debt to Smith, a lack of interest in Smith and an unfamiliarity with his philosophy have all contributed to this neglect. This article seeks to redress this neglect through analysing how Smith nurtured Collingwood’s adoption of a Crocean conception of history. To achieve its aim, this article first analyses Smith’s own reception of Croce’s conception of history. From this, it presents a contextualist analysis of Collingwood’s development of a Crocean conception of history and the role Smith played in its adoption. Finally, this article examines why, despite Smith’s influence over his intellectual development, Collingwood failed to acknowledge the intellectual debt he owed to Smith.     

What's the good of post-analytic philosophy?

Analytic philosophy began in G.E. Moore's critique of idealist accounts of reality, implicating as dilemmatic F.H. Bradley's identification of the good with self-realization. Neither the tradition of British idealism nor the successor tradition of analytic metaethics was able to sustain the salience previously enjoyed by the concept of good. The essay's second part analyzes Alasdair MacIntyre's account of that longer tradition, and his argument that Aristotelianism's conceptual scheme provides the best solution to modern moral philosophy's dilemma about the human good.     

The Idealist Tradition in Australian Religious Thought

Although British idealism has recently undergone a minor scholarly revival, its impact on Australian intellectual life remains an underexplored area of inquiry. Such work as there is on the Australian idealists has largely focused on social and political themes despite the fact that idealism was driven by deeply religious interests. This paper explores the religious writings of five Australian intellectuals whose work was shaped by the tradition of philosophical idealism. The writers chosen include two Scottish émigrés — Charles Strong (1844–1942) and Francis Anderson (1858–1941) — and three Australian born students of Anderson — M. Scott Fletcher (1868–1947), E.H. Burgmann (1885–1965), and A.P. Elkin (1891–1979). By identifying the threads that connect these writers, along with some of their British contemporaries, the case is made that they can be understood as giving voice to a coherent, if rather loosely bound, intellectual tradition. Among much else, this tradition sought a reconciliation of religious and secular knowledge, proposed an evolutionary or developmental understanding of religious truth, and defended the idea of human personality in an increasingly scientific and mechanistic civilisation.     

The great war and the British people

The “Adam Smith Problem” is the name given to an argument that arose among German scholars during the second half of the nineteenth century concerning the compatibility of the conceptions of human nature advanced in, respectively, Adam Smith's Theory of Moral Sentiments (1759) and his Wealth of Nations (1776). During the twentieth century these arguments were forgotten but the problem lived on, the consensus now being that there is no such incompatibility, and therefore no problem. Rather than rehearse the arguments for and against compatibility and incompatibility, this paper returns to the German writers of the 1850s–1890s and demonstrates that their engagement in this argument represents the foundation of modern Smith scholarship. It is shown that the “problem” was not simply a mistake best forgotten, but the first sustained scholarly effort to understand the importance of Smith's work, an effort that lacked any parallel in English commentary of the time. By the 1890s British writers, overwhelmingly ignorant of German commentary, assumed that there was little more to be said about Smith's work. Belated international familiarity with this German “Problem” played a major role in transforming Smith from a simple partisan of free trade into a theorist of commercial society and human action.     

Sentiment,Sensation and Sensibility: Adam Smith,Pierre Jean Georges Cabanis and Wilhelm von Humboldt

Summary

This article focuses on the analysis of sensibility in the works of three major late eighteenth-century philosophers: Smith, Cabanis and the young Wilhelm von Humboldt. It analyses to what extent Smith's concept of sympathy influenced Cabanis in France and Humboldt in Germany. It argues that modern anthropology, based on a specific theory of sensibility, assumes a strong connection between knowledge acquisition and life in society. This article reveals the strong links between the three authors which were made possible precisely because of their common philosophical background. It proves, for the first time, that Humboldt had access to Condillac's ideas before 1798, since in an early work on the state, the former makes numerous borrowings from speeches Cabanis wrote for Mirabeau, which were in turn strongly influenced by Condillac.     

A Sacred Space for Women: Hymnody in Emma Hale Smith's Theology

Emma Smith oversaw the compilation of the first Mormon hymnal in 1835 and then prepared a second hymnal in 1841. This article contextualises and discusses Smith's significant assignment, and considers how a woman's hymn selections influenced early Mormonism. It also considers what Smith's hymnals reveal about her own life story and what her life story reveals about her hymn selections. While Smith's first hymnal highlights the emphasis she placed on immediately establishing a city of Zion in preparation for the millennial reign of a triumphal Christ, her second hymnal underscores the need to develop and foster a personal relationship with a merciful Saviour. Smith's 1835 hymnal emphasises being a Zion people immediately, whereas her 1841 hymnal, compiled in the context of intense personal and collective trials and religious persecution, highlights the importance of striving to become a more Zion‐like people over time. The different doctrinal emphases reflects their respective Mormon cultures at the time of compilation, and captures how the church responded to and grappled with its failure to establish Zion immediately. As a compiler of hymns, Smith clearly plays a significant role in Mormon history, while also demonstrating how women could impact their particular religious communities.     

Warlords and Holymen. Scotland AD80-1000

This article compares and contrasts the work of Quentin Skinner and Jacques Derrida on power and the State. It argues that despite Skinner's explicit repudiation of Derrida's method of philosophising, he has come to advocate an approach to the history of ideas that bears important and striking similarities to Derrida's thought. I attribute this intellectual gravitation toward Derrida as the logical outcome of a shared understanding on the nature of the cosmos and man's place within it—an understanding profoundly indebted to the philosophy of Friedrich Nietzsche and the genealogical history of Michel Foucault. As a means to illustrate the narrowing intellectual gulf between Skinner and Derrida, I compare their respective thoughts on the nature of the modern and contemporary State, a State that both intellectuals see as emerging from a dominant western philosophical tradition that, at its core, is marked by the idea of fear. For both Skinner and Derrida this has profound consequences for the possibilities open to individuals and societies for free thought and political action.     

‘A belated return for Christ?’: the reception of Arnold J. Toynbee's A Study of History in a British context, 1934–1961

The negative reception of A Study of History at the hands of British historians has masked wider responses to the work in Britain which reflect major tensions within British society and wider attitudes towards the idea of civilisation, the British Empire and religion. The highly critical response to the work from the majority of professional historians reviewing the book is indicative of major debates within British history writing, including the role of empirical and idealist interpretations of history, and the increasingly academic and scholarly role of the historian. Toynbee's position as a public voice and a celebrity historian in the 1950s, whose approach to history eschewed constraints of period or region, represented antithesis to the expanding historical profession and scholarly research. Arnold Toynbee's A Study of History was a weathervane for contemporary cultural and intellectual concerns of the era.     

Europe and the American mind∗†

Wells's The New Machiavelli (1911) offers an excellent case study of the use of anti-Machiavellian Machiavellism as both a philosophical and a rhetorical strategy. In Remington, Wells creates a protagonist who follows Machiavellian rules of behaviour and denounces those who do likewise. The novel is structured to show Remington's progress from an idealist refutation of Machiavellism, through a recognition of its necessity, to the formulation of a private and political method for the necessary pursuit of Machiavellian principles under the disguise of anti-Machiavellism, including trenchant criticisms of Fabians as anti-Machiavellian Machiavellians. These stages, culminating in complete personal and public failure, are reflected in Remington's party allegiances, and broadened by Wells into an account of British party ideologies around the turn of the twentieth century. Wells's rhetorical design for mapping and assessing anti-Machiavellian Machiavellism is paralleled by an exploration of that technique in himself, attested by the predominance of autobiographical elements in The New Machiavelli, and by similarities between Remington's and Wells's own deception of others and themselves. Far from incidental, anti-Machiavellian Machiavellism is the motif that unites the shifting party allegiances, political conceits and moral hypocrisies, and private and public failures of Wells, Remington, and of the period of British politics that they intend to encapsulate.     

Crisis in consciousness: The thought of Ernst Troeltsch

This article examines the ‘revolutionary liberal’ outlook expounded by the young Italian journalist and intellectual, Piero Gobetti, immediately following the First World War. It considers the historical evolution of his ‘agonistic’ liberalism according to which conflict rather than consensus serves as the basis of social and political renewal. The article traces the formation of Gobetti's thought from his idealist response to the crisis of the liberal state through to his endorsement of the communist revolutionaries in Turin and his denunciation of fascism as the continuation of Italy's failed tradition of compromise. Whilst Gobetti's views presently resonate with a growing interest in the agonistic dimension of politics, it is argued that his elitism and his understanding of liberalism as a ‘civic religion’ reveal challenging tensions in his thought.     

Wem gehört Adam Smith? Gedanken zur Auseinandersetzung um das geistige Erbe des schottischen Philosophen und Ökonomen

Smith's appropriation by neoliberal theorists as the progenitor of economic liberalism and capitalism has recently been challenged by a phalanx of counter‐positions. In a concerted effort ?to salvage the real Smith’?, they rediscover the enlightenment philosopher who was very critical of ostentatious display of wealth and envisioned a society based on moral concerns rather than on the pursuit of self‐interest. This article discusses recent developments in the battle over the economist's and philosopher's heritage.     

2. CAN THE CRITIQUE OF CAPITALISM BE ANTIHUMANIST?

This essay argues that to understand Foucault's attraction to neoliberalism, we must understand the elective theoretical affinities that he perceived between this current in economic thought and one of the central elements of his own philosophical project: the critique of humanism or “anthropologism” (that is, the tendency in modern thought to sift all knowledge through human knowledge). Specifically, the essay examines moments in Foucault's 1978 and 1979 lectures when Foucault clearly refers to the arguments of his earlier work, The Order of Things, the locus classicus of his philosophical antihumanism. In particular, Foucault claimed that economists of the Chicago School developed a theory of labor that escaped the limitations of the “anthropological” theory of labor associated with Adam Smith, David Ricardo, and Karl Marx. He also interpreted the notion of homo oeconomicus and Smith's idea of the market's “invisible hand” as critiques of the characteristically modern attempt to make transcendental claims on the basis of human nature. The essay concludes by asking if Foucault's philosophical antihumanism provides an adequate vantage point from which to critique contemporary capitalism.     

William Temple: Christianity and the Life of Fellowship

Abstract

William Temple is best known for his contribution to the forging of a social consensus that resulted in the foundation of the post-war British welfare state following his untimely death in 1944 after only two years as Archbishop of Canterbury. Widely regarded as the most theologically gifted holder of that office since Anselm, his pioneering contribution to the elucidation of a methodology for Christian social ethics which emphasized the role of ‘Principles’ that should inform Christian social action and reflection reinvigorated the Church of his generation in the task of bringing to bear the Christian message on social problems. What is less well appreciated is how he was not only the spokesperson for the most advanced Christian witness in the inter-war years, but that he also provided a basis for Christian ethics that brought together the strengths of the Anglican incarnational theology stemming from F. D. Maurice with the British tradition of philosophical social idealism. Often moving from the circumference to the centre, he sought to relate philosophical questions and insights to the richness of the revelation of God in the person of Jesus Christ. He was as at home in this task as he was in leading a mission on a Blackpool beach and the British public loved him for it. He was, as Winston Churchill said at the time of his elevation to Canterbury, "the half-crown article in a penny bazaar."     

The Partisan Nature of Race and Imperialism: Dadabhai Naoroji,M. M. Bhownaggree and the Late Nineteenth-Century British Politics of Indian Nationalism

This article examines Dadabhai Naoroji's and Mancherjee Merwanjee Bhownaggree's contribution to politically partisan ideologies on Indian empire as London MPs and reform advocates late in the nineteenth century. Exploring politically nuanced, cultural definitions of racial difference, this article reveals how their participation in British parliamentary and press debate on Indian nationalism adhered to distinct liberal and conservative imperial political conceptions of race and governance during this period. Beyond an analysis of Naoroji and the Indian National Congress's relationship with British liberalism, this essay explores Bhownaggree's contribution to a sustained conservative imperial tradition. This article postulates that Edmund Burke's separation from a liberal imperial rationality and a British Tory critique of liberalism informed a nineteenth-century conservative governing justification in India predicated on conciliating organic national racial difference. As Naoroji's devotion, as a Liberal MP for Central Finsbury (1892–95), to a liberal civilising mission informed an advocacy of political self-governance in Britain and India, Bhownaggree's pursuit of female and technical education reform while Conservative MP for Bethnal Green N.E. (1895–1905) represented a conservative espousal of racial difference.     

The Unfolding of Unreason: Javad Tabatabai's Idea of Political Decline in Iran

Javad Tabatabai, a leading theorist and historian of political thought in Iran, has presented a controversial theory regarding the causes of the decline of political thought and society in Iran over the last few centuries. His ideas on Iranian decline have affected the intellectual debates on modernity and democracy currently underway in Iran. Tabatabai's career-long research has revolved around this question: “What conditions made modernity possible in Europe and led to its abnegation in Iran?” He answers this question by adopting a “Hegelian approach” that privileges a philosophical reading of history on the assumption that philosophical thought is the foundation and essence of any political community and the basis for any critical analysis of it as well. This article critically engages with Tabatabai's ideas of “crisis,” and “decline” by challenging his exposition of the Persian tradition.     

Theorising the anti-nation: George Woodcock,anarchism, and Canadian nationalism

George Woodcock was anarchism's most influential historian and an important public intellectual in Canada. This article focuses on his engagement with Canadian nationalism in the 1960s and 1970s. It argues that a ‘philosophical anarchism’ was at the heart of his intellectual project, and this informed his reading of Canadian cultural development and subsequent political challenge to Pierre Elliott Trudeau's civic nationalism. Woodcock decoupled the concepts of ‘nation’ and ‘state’ in order to develop a radically different model for Canada—the ‘anti-nation’—defined by regionalism, federalism and direct democracy. His reading of Canada's cultural history supporting this position was therefore part of a strategy to repurpose nationalist rhetoric towards anti-state ends.     

Kierkegaard's alternative metaphysical theology

This article uses Jeremy Bentham's notion of disambiguation, which links language to power and ‘sinister interest’, to analyse criticisms of the Royal Academy of Arts by Benthamites and Philosophic Radicals at the Select Committee on Arts and Manufactures of 1835/6. This practice of disambiguation aimed to produce a distinction between the Royal Academy of Arts and the publicly funded art school. I situate this activity within the linguistic turn taken by Bentham's ethics, and its relevance to a dilemma of pedagogy in commercial society framed by Adam Smith. Smith's dilemma turns on the conflict between the requirement for a pedagogy that conforms to the principle of free trade, and an equally binding requirement for a virtue ethical model of pedagogy that offers a remedy for the corrupting effects of commerce on character. Adam Smith's support for private academies of art asserted a hierarchy of virtue ethics over utility, thus safeguarding autonomous ethical reasoning within capitalist forms of social life. Bentham's thought, in contrast, eschews the link between ethics and character, and places ethics itself within normative rules of language and cognition.     

Ruskin's Modern Painters and the Visual Language of Reality

Abstract

Ruskin, the most influential mid-Victorian aesthetician, has typically been affiliated by critics with one of two incongruous regimes of thought; late English romanticism or an emerging counter-paradigm of factual science. Unwilling to refine this opposition, criticism has failed so far to address the relationship Ruskin bears to a native British intellectual tradition of sceptical empiricism. Beginning by arguing that his early writing on aesthetics ought to be distanced from the cultural legacies of romanticism (intuitive psychology, transcendental order, mysticism), this article offers a re-examination of Modern Painters (1843–60) as a work that intersects instead with the associationist tradition represented in the mid-century by writers like Alexander Bain and G. H. Lewes. Ruskin's realism, I argue, can be rethought in these terms as it dramatises a similar model of subjectivity to that found in their key psychological works; a model whereby the self must paradoxically be sacrificed before the object it seeks to know while also authenticating art's truthfulness through the testimonies of perspective and personality. Discussion ranges from visual art, including Turner and Canaletto, to the psychological theory of Lewes and Bain, to detailed analysis of the form and meaning of Modern Painters itself, uncovering the powerful critique of mimesis that its surprising philosophical inheritance implies.