Philosophy, Dissent and Nonconformity: 1689-1920 (review)

In his characteristically blunt manner, the distinguished Oxford philosopher Gilbert Ryle once observed that "no neglected philosopher is ever unjustly neglected." Although this judgment reveals much about the intellectual self-assurance—if not self-absorption—of Oxford philosophy in the 1950s and 1960s, it also serves as evidence of the predisposition among philosophers, when writing the history of their discipline, to treat the origins of their own immediate preoccupations as if they were the history of the discipline and to write out of consideration any doctrine, thinker, or argument not currently fashionable among practicing philosophers.

Although not offered as a direct challenge to the Ryles of this world, Alan P. F. Sell's Philosophy, Dissent and Nonconformity: 1689–1920 aims to rescue a series of unknown philosopher theologians who, because of their confessional loyalties, flourished professionally outside Oxford, Cambridge, and the Anglican theological colleges. As Sell is quick to acknowledge, their names—such as that of the Baptists James Acworth and Robert Aspland, the Presbyterians Henry Grove and Joseph Hallett, and the Congregationalists Thomas Jackson and Ralph Wardlaw—are unknown even to specialists in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century British philosophy. Nor are their arguments any better appreciated by the cognoscenti.

Importantly, Sell does not claim that these thinkers had anything philosophically innovative or even distinctive to say; he is not arguing that these neglected—indeed, wholly overlooked and quite forgotten—thinkers have ideas with which contemporary philosophers ought to engage. Nor does he maintain that they were important to developments in their own time—none, for example, either influenced or were engaged by David Hume or John Stuart Mill, John McTaggart Ellis McTaggart or G. E. Moore—or that they need to be reentered into the narrative of the history of British philosophy in the two-and-a-half centuries after the Glorious Revolution. Nor does he wish to remind us of the more prosaic point that most philosophy is not written by the discipline's giants, and that most philosophical work—then and now—is largely pedestrian and utterly forgettable.

Rather, Sell's book seeks to recapture the rich denominational life of the over one hundred Dissenting academies and Nonconformist theological colleges that thrived in the years from 1689 to 1914. Although the existence of these institutions has long been recognized, the precise nature of their teaching of philosophy and theology—the set texts, the names of lecturers, the response of initiates to the larger philosophical and theological currents swirling around them—has not been much appreciated. And the strength of Sell's book is that he at once uncovers these academies, identifies their teachers and describes their teachings, and traces the influence of these writings and teachings on their own students—virtually all of whom became workaday pastors and ministers across Britain.

Within its narrow, self-imposed limits, Philosophy, Dissent and Nonconformity is full of insights and tells a little-known story about the study of moral philosophy and theology in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Britain. Although the account cries out for a comparative perspective—with what Anglican theologians were writing at the same time, or with the increasing secularization and professionalization of philosophical writing and teaching over the nineteenth century—Sell does not do more than nod toward such matters. Rather than leave such important comparisons for others to explore, perhaps he will pursue them himself in future work.