Lectures in Intellectual History

The emergence of a Scottish 'school' of common sense philosophy has not yet been given the historical attention it deserves, despite the fact  that the rise of common sense philosophy was one of the most important intellectual developments in the Atlantic world during the second half of the 18th century. In this lecture, Professor Paul Wood examines the responses of common sense philosophers such...

Professor Blair Worden is an expert on early modern European history and the English Civil War period in particular. He has written numerous books, the principal of which are The Rump Parliament, 1648-1653 (1974), The Sound of Virtue: Philip Sidney's 'Arcadia' and Elizabethan Politics (1996), Roundhead Reputations: The English Civil Wars and the Passions of Posterity (2001), Literature and Politic...

This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit standrewsiih.substack.com

This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit standrewsiih.substack.com

Ever since Mary Astell was introduced as the "First English Feminist" in 1986, scholars have been perplexed by her dual commitments to natural equality and social, political, and ecclesiastical hierarchy. But any supposed "paradox" in her though is the product of a modernist conceit that treats equality and hierarchy as antonyms, assuming the former must be prior, normative, and hostile to the lat...

Recorded on February 13th 2018 at the University of St Andrews. This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit standrewsiih.substack.com

Modern cosmopolitanism traces its routes back to the Enlightenment. In its individual and collectivist strains, it has become programatically pacifist by virtue of many of its central defining features. Under such a regime of cosmopolitanism, one might imagine the Kantian goal of perpetual peace. Kant’s conception of cosmopolitanism was progressive and developmental, but also fundamentally conflic...

Why did so many European luminaries who had lived through the turmoil of the French Revolution turn to Scotland as a state that might represent a model for the future of the world? In this Inaugural Lecture, Professor Richard Whatmore explains why so many figures at the end of the eighteenth century felt that the Enlightenment had failed, and that a new beginning was necessary in politics, economi...

Are people’s characters and the values that shape them thought to be stable in terms of what we may judge to be virtuous or vicious performances across time and place? If this was the case, should we today not be able to emulate those of the past in their best practices? In this lecture, Janet Coleman charts a journey, beginning with Aristotle and ending with Hobbes, that deals with what has been...

The hallmark of Athenian democracy was equality. From at least the beginning of the 5th century, Athens was a place where there was equality in political rights. By the mid-5th century, the Athenian assembly had sovereignty in matters of decision making. The practical politics of Athens, however, required political leaders: able, often wealthy men, well-practised in rhetoric, who arose out of the...

The years between 1864 and 1867 were among the most fulfilling of Marx’s life. Not only were these the years in which he wrote up Capital, it was also the period in which he became an active and influential participant in the International Workingmen’s Association, founded in London in 1864. Almost by chance, it fell to Marx to compose the inaugural address of the Association and formulate its rul...

The issue of slavery is a constant in Maria Edgeworth's thinking about questions of government, from the beginning of her writing career until the 1820s and 30s. In this paper, Susan Manly discusses the multiple elements to this seam of thinking, and in particular examines the importance of the reformist thinker Jeremy Bentham and his French interlocutor Étienne Dumont. This is a public episode. I...

The importance of general celestial influences on the Earth in Aristotle's cosmological model enabled the art of astrology to find a large degree of acceptance in intellectual circles by the mid-twelfth century, even if throughout the late Middle Ages it continued to be haunted by the debate about determinism. Astrology - or the study of the movements and relative positions of celestial bodies in...

There is no evidence for any Roman jurist writing a treatise entitled On Natural Law, or similar. Ius naturale had a very limited place in Roman jurisprudence, and when Roman jurists want to reason about law, they pretty much always began from the standpoint of the Roman ius civile and worked outwards. There is a fundamental difference between this concentric way of reasoning about natural law, an...

William Wordworth's Sonnets Dedicated To Liberty are dominated by his personal and political connections with France, and his changing attitudes to Britain's participation in the counter-Revolutionary war effort. Wordsworth's experiments with the sonnet form in this period were clearly sustained, intensive and closely engaged with affairs of state. However, a number of the sonnets are also keenly...

In the literature of the Just War tradition there is an overdrawn association between the Just War tradition and Christian political theology. This produces a misconception that Just War is an exclusively Christian idea, and also that is an exclusively Western idea as well. In this lecture, Rory Cox argues that ideas analogous to Just War developed in Ancient Egypt, more than 2,000 years prior to...

How can you combine the so-called Cambridge School of intellectual history, which tends to shrink the focus to a particular period and particular context, with a longue durée approach which follows through themes over many centuries? In this lecture, David D’Avray attempts to resolve this argument with the help of 20th century German philosophers Niklas Luhmann and Hans-Georg Gadamer. This is a pu...

Whilst George Berkeley's visit to Livorno in 1714 may seem relatively unremarkable at first look, the content of the sermons he preached there appear significant to the attitudes and behaviours of his later life. Chief among these is Berkeley's project to establish a university or college on Bermuda, and his interest in economic reform, particularly in Ireland in the 1730s. In this paper, Tom Jone...

After the Second World War, political philosophy was dead. This changed in 1971 when John Rawls published his Theory of Justice, reviving philosophy and injecting it with normative foundations. Whilst this view has subsequently been subjected to several corrective arguments, they all implicitly confirm the view that Rawls transformed political philosophy. And they also infer that Anglo-American po...

The political thought of Jean-Jacques Rousseau is typically identified with two aspects of that of Thomas Hobbes. The first is the subject of sociability, and the similarities in their treatments of the natural state. The second is the civil state, and their joint hostility to any kind of independent religious organisation and, more broadly, any kind of factional grouping. In 1765, Rousseau’s entr...

Marxist theory has had a massive influence on medieval economic and social history. Lots of historians, even those who are not Marxist in their politics, have in a sense been historical materialist in their analyses. Marx and Engels themselves, meanwhile, were very interested in the middle ages, in part because of its importance in understanding the transition from feudalism to capitalism. In this...

Aristotle’s conception of wealth begins with the distinction he makes between two spheres of wealth: its possession (acquisition and keeping), and its use (giving and spending). In this paper, Kleanthis Mantzouranis explores the locations in which Aristotle discusses these two spheres in his corpus, namely in the first book of the Politics, which has been of interest to economists and economic his...

The best known example in the history of international law might be the so-called domestic analogy. In natural law thinking, the rights and duties of individuals were transferred to the rights and duties behind states. But metaphors are more than analogies. If there is a family, who are the parents, and who are the children? And are the parents entitled to educate the children and, sometimes, even...

In the 17th and early 18th centuries in Britain, there were no clear divisions between what we now call moral epistemology, moral metaphysics, and normative moral theory. In this talk, Aaron Garrett argues that Francis Hutcheson, in refuting the work of Mandeville, attempted to make good on this long tradition of lumping these ideas together, and that this variant of a demonstrative moral science...

What can we learn from the past, and from different traditions as they exist in the world? And how can such learning help us tackle the problems of today? In this lecture, Anthony Black asks whether, and to what extent, the histories of the West and the East are different, but complementary. Could it be that, in today's increasingly globalised (meaning Westernised) world, the West and East need ea...