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  • The Cambridge Companion to Early Modern Philosophy
  • Lodi Nauta
Donald Rutherford , ed. The Cambridge Companion to Early Modern Philosophy. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006. xvi + 422 pp. index. illus. bibl. $29.99. ISBN: 978–0–521–52962–4.

For a long time, study of early modern philosophy was limited to the canonical works of Descartes, Hobbes, Spinoza, Leibniz, Locke, Hume, and Kant, and reflected contemporary concerns of a predominantly analytical slant. It focused on epistemology and metaphysics to the neglect of aesthetics and moral and political philosophy. Thinkers were neatly divided into two camps, rationalism versus empiricism. It was quite common to find historians saying that they were only interested in the logic of some piece of argument, preferably those parts which were amenable to what Richard Rorty called "rational reconstruction." In the last few decades historians have taken a much broader interest, looking also at religious, institutional, social, and cultural developments. The scientific and philosophical innovation is no longer treated as a phenomenon on the scale of Athena springing from Zeus's head fully grown, but one with roots in medieval scholasticism and various strands of Renaissance thinking, including the rediscovery of ancient systems such as Stoicism, Epicureanism, Platonism, and skepticism. The temporary crown of this historically more sensitive approach is the wonderful Cambridge History of Seventeenth-Century Philosophy (1998), weighing in at over 1,500 pages.

On a much smaller scale, this Companion successfully reflects and embraces these wider perspectives, and as such carries an ambitious character. In a way it is even more ambitious than the History, since the Companion had apparently to cover the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, while the History only the seventeenth. (There is another History, published in 2006, on the eighteenth century.) This should have provoked some reflection on the concept of early modern, but this is not undertaken here. The period is conveniently defined as roughly 1600–1800, [End Page 1422] or "Montaigne through Kant" (xiii). On the one end of the spectrum the volume works with a rather strict demarcation between Renaissance and early modern, as hardly any Renaissance thinker comes in for discussion. At the other end, the line is fuzzier: Kant is apparently modern, not early modern, since his philosophy, apart from his conception of Enlightenment, is not discussed, but Hume's status is less clear: his moral philosophy is treated but not his epistemology. The French philosophes (De Lamettrie, Condillac, Voltaire, and Diderot, with the exception of Holbach), are wholly absent, and so is Vico and Herder. The discipline of aesthetics, gaining a prominent place in French thinking of the period, is not discussed at all. Early modern, then, seems to be especially a seventeenth-century phenomenon.

But this is all very understandable, and we should be grateful for what the book does contain. In a series of twelve authoritative essays the reader is guided through the vast and complicated world of early modern debates on a host of issues. The old canon is well-represented but many other figures make a more than fleeting appearance too, such as Michel de Montaigne, Francisco Suárez, Hugo Grotius, Pierre Gassendi, Nicholas Malebranche, Pierre Bayle, Samuel Pufendorf, and Thomas Reid. There are essays on epistemology, natural philosophy, and science (S. Gaukroger and D. Des Chene), metaphysics (N. Jolley), the science of mind (T. Schmaltz), language and logic (M. Losonsky), moral philosophy (S. James, S. Darwall), political philosophy (A. J. Simmons), philosophy and religion (T. Lennon, D. Rutherford), the scholastic traditions (M. Stone), and on the concept of Enlightenment up to Kant (J. Schneewind). Short biographies and a full index complement the volume.

Together the essays testify to the immense vitality and innovation of early modern philosophy. The scholastic world of substantial forms, formal and final causes, sensible and intelligible species, and all the rest was gradually replaced by a world of matter in motion, to be described in the language of mathematics. But the word gradually must be emphasized, for the language of the early modern philosophers continued to be indebted to earlier traditions, just when trees are turned into telegraph poles, the grain of the wood remaining visible (to borrow an apt phrase from John North). This...

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