The Cambridge History of Philosophy in the Nineteenth Century (1790–1870) ed. by Allen W. Wood and Songsuk Susan Hahn (review)

Dividing history into century-size chunks is an arbitrary convention, and its artificiality tends to spawn a shadow sense of terms like “nineteenth century,” whose extension never exactly coincides with the chronological period. The parenthesis in the title of this admirable volume—the latest in a growing series of (large) collections of expert scholarly essays on the history of philosophy published by Cambridge University Press—signals this drift by staking out a span of eighty years that includes Kant’s Critique ofJudgment at one end, but excludes Frege, Nietzsche, and Peirce at the other. This is no doubt at least in part because the next book in the series, published a few months earlier and titled simply The Cambridge History of Philosophy 1870–1945, begins where this one leaves off, and so covers those figures as well as the neo-Kantians and the British Hegelians.

But while it serves as a convenient organizing principle no worse than any other, the stipulated terminal date also expresses an interpretive and editorial point of view. At the beginning of his Introduction Allen Wood writes, “Nineteenth-century philosophy witnessed the development of intellectual projects and movements for whose invention the eighteenth century deserves primary credit. It might even be said that it was largely constituted by the fruition of such projects” (1). Against the popular notion that the nineteenth was the first historically reflective century, for example, Wood cites Foucault’s claim that that honor more properly belongs to the age of Enlightenment, which self-consciously called itself that, and is still so called.

But Foucault’s example is Kant, not Diderot or d’Alembert, and he more generally marks the break between the classical and the modern age at the end, not the beginning, of the eighteenth century. Wood plausibly nominates Fichte as the “truly revolutionary figure” in his narrative (1). Like Kantianism, historicism, and Romanticism, however, Fichte was, it seems to me, no mere culmination of the classical tradition of Locke, Hume, and the philosophes.

Philippe Huneman’s excellent chapter on the “Natural Sciences” stays closer to Foucault’s schema in attributing the emergence of that category in the nineteenth century to Kant’s supplanting of the classical notions of “natural philosophy” and divine order with a modern concept of rational law governing inorganic mechanism and biological function. Essays by Laurence Dickey and Michael Forster dealing with the philosophy of history and the history of philosophy similarly have their feet planted firmly in texts and traditions post-1790. By contrast, chapters that follow the editors’ approach to the nineteenth century by getting a running start at it from earlier in the eighteenth include Gary Hatfield’s “Psychology,” which tells a continuous story from early modernity to Wundt and Brentano in the 1870s; Michael Forster’s “Language,” which (rightly) credits Herder and Hamann with the decisive break from classical thought; Jeremy Waldron’s account of “The Decline of Natural Right,” which commences with Burke and Bentham; the essays by Debra Satz and Frederick Neuhouser on political economy and the distinction between society and the state, both crediting Adam Smith with decisive significance; and John Zammito’s essay on “Philosophy of History,” which (again, rightly) takes its point of departure from Herder.

Robert Pippin kicks things off with a typically erudite and critically sophisticated account of “The Kantian Aftermath,” which is followed by papers on the social context and the idea of systematicity in philosophy by Terry Pinkard and Rolf-Peter Horstmann. Jeremy Heis and Janet Folina cover logic and mathematics. Paul Guyer and Rudolf Makkreel treat aesthetics and the human sciences. Bernard Reginster, John Skorupski, and J. B. Schneewind and Wood discuss ethics. Topics in religion are presented by Van Harvey, Stephen Crites, and James Livingston. Frederick Beiser and Pamela Edwards coauthor a chapter on “Philosophical Responses to the French Revolution,” and seven chapters...