French Eighteenth-Century Materialists and Natural Law

Summary

This article looks at the discussions of natural law by the eighteenth-century French materialists Julien Offray de La Mettre, Denis Diderot, Paul Thiry d'Holbach and Claude-Adrien Helvétius. It is particularly concerned with their discussion of moral values and their attempt to find a materialistic basis for them as part of their rejection of religion. The discussion brings out the différences between them and analyses their dialogues on this question, including the other materialists' rejection of La Mettrie's amoralism, which threatened to undermine their attempt to found a natural law taught by experience and based on human nature. Particular attention is paid to Diderot's many writings which grapple with the subject, beginning with his Encyclopédie article droit naturel, probably written in 1754. He discussed the question in many of his later writings, including in his annotations on the works of Helvétius, who based natural law on the general interest. These writings reveal a tension between Diderot's emphasis on the search for individual happiness and the interests of society as he, together with d'Holbach, attempted to provide a natural basis for morality and government from which to criticise existing institutions.     

Diderot on Nature and Pantomime

The article examines Diderot’s view of the inconstancy of nature and its corollaries, the most obvious of which is the recognition of the impossibility of philosophy and natural history. For, if everything in nature is in a state of flux, no theory can keep up with its changes, reflect on them and capture anything more than an isolated moment. Diderot’s conception of nature has important consequences for his aesthetic theory. If the goal of the fine arts is to imitate nature, and if everything in nature undergoes constant change, does it not mean that art—no less than philosophy and natural history—is also impossible? By focusing on Diderot’s novel Rameau’s Nephew (1805), I argue that the lesson of the numerous mimes its eponymous hero performs in the novel is that the dynamics of nature can perhaps only be captured by mime rather than on canvas or in stone, both of which, as Diderot puts it, can represent only a fleeting moment.     

Growing dens. On re-grounding the child–nature relationship through a new materialist approach to children’s dens

This paper contributes to the dawning disruption of the prevailing notion of the child–nature relationship through a new materialist reading of children’s dens, and proffers a re-grounded and worldly gaze on the relationship with implications for the promotion of children’s outdoor lives. The study is an ethnographical field study among 10–12-year-old boys in a Danish school. Data were generated through participant observation, and include video recordings and photographs of children’s dens. Drawing on a flat ontology and plugging in key Ingoldian concepts of meshwork and growing (Ingold 2011a, 2013), the analysis suggests that children’s relations to dens cut across taken-for-granted subject–object binaries and go beyond common notions of nature as inert materials. I find that dens are growing in an ever-becoming meshwork comprised by human and non-human intra-actions, and that agency or vitality can be ascribed broadly to the material world. Possible implications for planning are considered.     

Children who carry stones in their pockets: on autotelic material practices in everyday life

This paper is based on an ongoing empirical journey into the materiality of children's everyday life environments. The theoretical framework relies on post-humanism relational/new materialism as influenced by Deleuze and Guattari. An inherently rewarding practice, often undertaken by children as if by default – the carrying of stones – is discussed as blurring the unfortunate and artificially produced nature-culture divide.     

执两用中：经济体制改革与政治体制改革的辩证思考——恩格斯晚年书信中历史唯物主义思想的当代启示

恩格斯的晚年书信,阐释和发展了马克思主义关于经济基础与上层建筑的关系原理,重新强调了二者在社会发展中的作用,特别是上层建筑的相对独立性及其对经济基础的巨大反作用,而且驳斥了＂经济决定论＂的观点,并进而提出历史合力论。这些思想为我们正在进行的经济体制改革和政治体制改革提供了重大的理论依据和有力的现实指导。     

SIGNS OF THE TIMES: THOMAS JACKSON AND THE CONTROVERSY OVER PRODIGIES IN THE REIGN OF CHARLES I

Abstract

This article focuses on Hobbes's use of metaphor, particularly the larger structural metaphor of the artificial man in Leviathan. Hobbes claims to draw his political animal according to the figurative outlines of the natural one, despite the significant differences between these two bodies. In Part I we see the scientifically-minded Hobbes reject the old dualistic imagery of body and soul, act and will; but in Part II the politically-minded Hobbes appeals to exactly these dualistic distinctions in order to lend his radical vision of the state the numinous appeal of the medieval and Tudor formulations. An understanding of Hobbes's rhetorical strategy, and what I call his strategic use of dualism, can show how the recent linguistic turn in Hobbes studies can in fact re-open the much older debate on the overall unity of his philosophical system.     

发生学方法与历史研究

发生学方法兴起于自然科学研究领域,随后被人文社会科学研究领域所采用。唯物史观和唯物辩证法使这一方法走向科学,从而形成了具有普遍意义的科学的马克思主义发生学方法。它是对现实及其发生前提和发生过程进行研究的方法,具有科学性、革命性和实践性特征,在马克思主义的历史研究方法体系中处于支配地位。然而,这并非意味着它是历史研究的唯一方法。这对我们加深理解唯物史观与历史学理论方法之间的关系,具有重要启示意义。     

The Poison and the Spider's Web: Diderot and Eighteenth-Century French Epicureanism

This article argues that the term ‘Epicurean’ had multiple meanings in the moral and political thought of the eighteenth century. Concentrating on the reception of Epicureanism in France, it shows that some critics focused on Epicurus’ hedonistic moral psychology and labelled Epicurean those thinkers who denied natural sociability; for others, who instead focused on Epicurus’ materialist natural philosophy, to label a thinker an Epicurean was to label them an atheist. This polyvalence is presented as a salutary caution against essentialising claims about the content of eighteenth-century Epicureanism per se. Despite this sceptical stance, however, the article goes on to argue that it is nevertheless fruitful to investigate the engagement with Epicureanism by particular thinkers or in particular texts. Indeed, a comparative reading of Denis Diderot's Encyclopédie entry on ‘Epicuréisme’ and his source material in Johan Jakob Bruker and Pierre Bayle demonstrates that Diderot used his discussion of Epicureanism to intervene directly in contemporary theological controversies over the immortal soul and a providential god.     

A Response to Clayton Crockett and Jeffrey Robbins,Religion, Politics and the Earth: The New Materialism1

Crockett's and Robbins' significant and groundbreaking book falls short of a genuinely liberating future, one that can put in place alternative social and institutional forms to sustain a comprehensive freedom from structural domination. This major claim is sustained by tracing four deficiencies in the book: (a) its sanguine trust to a developmentalist sensibility that underestimates political antagonism; (b) another neglect of political antagonism in its trust to transformative powers of a “multitude” and its cooperative activity, (c) its failure to build social and political formation into its theory of emergent complexity, and (4) its failure in reflexivity, to interrogate the “we” discourse that proliferates in authors' senses of crisis and calls for transformation.