Browsing by Subject "Enlightenment"
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Item Open Access Force, Cause, and Explanation: Euler and the Metaphysics of Science(2024) Veldman, MichaelEuler is a centrally important figure in the history of modern philosophy, having indelibly shaped the metaphysics and epistemology of Enlightenment science. Yet Euler, best known for his many fundamental contributions to mathematics and physics, is little discussed in the philosophical scholarship. This dissertation demonstrates Euler’s importance to philosophy. I reveal and assess Euler’s contributions to major debates on causation and force, body and substance, the relation of metaphysics to science, and teleology, and argue that Euler’s interventions have major repercussions for the dominant philosophical traditions of his day – Cartesian, Leibnizian, and Newtonian.In Chapter 1, I open the question as to why he deserves the attention of philosophers, before reviewing the extant literature in philosophy and history of science and describing my own approach. Throughout this dissertation, I employ contextual philosophical analysis of the works of Euler and other figures connected to him, aiming to move beyond traditional historiographical categories that tend to slot figures into pre-fashioned molds. I also provide a brief historical survey of the early 18th century problem context surrounding force, causation, and explanation in physical theory, discussing the views of the three main figures mentioned above – Descartes, Leibniz, and Newton – and of key contemporaries of Euler’s. Chapter 2 treats Euler’s intervention into the complex, 18th century debates on force and causation in physics. I argue that Euler seeks to accomplish two things by conceptually engineering the physical notion of ‘force’. One is to resolve confusions in mechanical theory deriving from ambiguities persisting in physical theory following Newton and Leibniz. Second, he seeks to screen off mechanical theory from the reach of metaphysics, which improperly uses notions of ‘force’ for widely disparate explanatory aims. He dealt a blow both to the ‘Leibnizian-Wolffian’ as well as ‘Newtonian’ ontologies, and both philosophers and scientists through the course of the 18th century adapted themselves to his new picture of ‘force’ in science and metaphysics. Chapter 3 offers a new exposition and analysis of Euler’s foundations for physical theory. Euler intended to give a fundamental ontology of material body sufficient to ground mechanics, ostensibly a priori, since it was based on conceptual analysis, first principles, and definitions. Through close reconstruction, I ultimately find that Euler’s fundamental ontology did not succeed in providing an a priori basis of mechanics. However, I correct misinterpretations of the basis of his ontology, argue that his attempt succeeded to a greater extent than critics have given him credit for, and that he provided a major clarification of the logical structure of classical mechanics. In Chapter 4, I turn to final causation, or teleology, in relation to the principle of least action (PLA). Euler and Maupertuis based the PLA on ideas of the “economy” or “simplicity” of Nature and offered it as a foundation for physical theory alternative to the “mechanical” laws of motion descended from Newton. Some scholars have taken the PLA to evidence teleology’s survival into Enlightenment physics. Others claim that PLA-based teleology was refuted by philosophical attacks on the very concept of final causation. I argue that no narratives currently on offer fully capture the philosophical interest of the demise of PLA-based teleology. I show how that teleological metaphysics came to be refuted because it could not be coherently modeled in the mathematics. Hence, the metaphysics built on the back of the PLA was refuted directly through mathematization, and not by philosophical argument or empirical test, representing a radical reshuffling of epistemic authority regarding questions of basic ontology. Chapter 5 concludes and discusses directions for future work.
Item Open Access John Wesley's Precedent for Theological Engagement with the Natural Sciences(Wesleyan Theological Journal, 2009-03-01) Maddox, RLItem Open Access Oceans, Gardens, and Jungles: World Politics and the Planet(Duke Global Working Paper Series, 2022-04-27) Duara, PrasenjitItem Embargo Romantic Humility: Literature, Ethico-Politics, and Emotion, 1780-1820(2023) Lee, Catherine Ji WonWhat we now call “liberal individualism”—that is, the belief in the inalienable rights and freedom of the individual—first emerged in the Enlightenment and Romantic periods in Europe, and continues to be a defining feature of Western democracies. The liberal valorization of freedom as the sovereign moral concept was a consequence of Enlightenment philosophy, scientific progress, and secularization, which led to the view that human life is self-contained and without an externally defined purpose, and that human relations can be understood by considering society simply as an aggregate of individuals who are each driven by desire and self-interest. Values previously safeguarded by divine authority devolved into matters of choice by the individual will, and many observers have suggested that this change resulted in a moral lassitude that, paradoxically, made it more difficult to realize the Enlightenment ideals of universal liberty, rights, and justice. Arguments grounded in premises of natural freedom and rights often end up rationalizing absolute authoritarian power, as we see, for example, in the philosophy of Thomas Hobbes.
This dissertation examines how British writers of the Romantic period such as Olaudah Equiano, William Godwin, and Mary Shelley responded to this moral dilemma of liberal individualism by developing a new understanding of humility in their works. The meaning of humility in the West has been fundamentally shaped by the Jewish and Christian traditions that view humility as a spiritual quality that disposes an individual toward reverence for and submission to God. As a quality that goes against the Enlightenment emphasis on human reason and agency, humility underwent a steady devaluation in the eighteenth century and onward, perceived, for example, as a “monkish kind of virtue” by David Hume and a “slave morality” by Friedrich Nietzsche. This study argues that instead of returning to the religiously infused concept of humility, British Romantic authors developed a new form of humility for the secular age, one that not only preserves human agency but also emphasizes the need for human action for collective good. This humility does not focus on self-abasement but on a selfless mood, predicated on an immanent framework derived from Stoicism and the philosophy of Baruch Spinoza, which were influential in the eighteenth century. In three chapters, this study shows how Equiano, Godwin, and Shelley’s instantiations of Romantic humility respectively illuminate Romantic humility as it informs human relations, historical progress, and human-nonhuman relations. In so doing, this study shows that Romanticism cannot be viewed simply as an extension of Enlightenment individualism but also as an era of collectivist humility.
Item Open Access The Bourbon Ideology: Civic Eudaemonism in Habsburg and Bourbon Spain, 1600-1800(2021) Costa, ElsaThe intellectual historian Gabriel Paquette has identified the propaganda language of the eighteenth-century Spanish Bourbon monarchy with a “pliable rhetoric of public happiness” of which the monarchy claimed to be “linchpin.” In a process beginning in the sixteenth century, by the late eighteenth century, the phrase “public happiness” had substantially replaced the “common good” in Spanish political thought. This project excavates the emergence of Spanish civic eudaemonism from Renaissance debates on reason of state, demonstrating the historical processes by which it repeatedly changed hands in subsequent centuries. Civic eudaemonism allowed Renaissance authors to allude to reason of state without instrumentalizing virtue, thereby putting the needs of the State over the doctrinal demands of the Church. The result was a new emphasis on the absolute sovereignty of the monarch, on whose shoulders rested the secular happiness of Spain. There was no consensual definition of public happiness. At the turn of the seventeenth century the sum of justice, security and civic virtue was meant. Later in the century the definition of mercantile success appeared, and by 1750 justice and virtue were disappearing. After 1780 mercantile definitions gave way to the personal industry of individual subjects, independent of regal influence and taken collectively. Public happiness, although associated with regalism throughout Europe, appeared earliest in Italy and Spain; in Spain it took longest to defeat the individual otherworldly happiness promised in Christianity. In Spain, as elsewhere, the alliance with regalism collapsed as soon as Christianity was purged from political writing.