Francois Hemsterhuis and the Writing of Philosophy

Daniel Whistler is Professor of Philosophy at Royal Holloway, University of London. He is author and editor of numerous volumes on eighteenth and nineteenth-century philosophy, including the three-volume Edinburgh Edition of the Complete Philosophical Works of François Hemsterhuis, The Schelling-Eschenmayer Controversy, 1801: Nature and Identity (EUP, 2020), The Edinburgh Critical History of Nineteenth-Century Christian Theology, The Schelling Reader (Bloomsbury, 2020) and the forthcoming Oxford Handbook of Modern French Philosophy (Oxford University Press, 2022).

In this lucid, erudite, and brilliant study, Whistler makes a compelling case for Hemsterhuis as a philosopher who—like Bruno, Kierkegaard, and Nietzsche—demands a reckoning, one whose thought is ripe for reappraisal: poetic and rigorous, speculative and scientific, untimely and thus a challenge and stimulus for the present.

• Preface: Reasons to Read HemsterhuisPart One: Preliminaries§1 Philosophy and Poetry§2 RupturePart Two: Untimely DemandsChapter One: Socrates and Newton§3 ‘Born Greek’ §4 Geometrical Method§5 A System of TimesChapter Two: Analysis and Poetry§6 ‘Poet-Philosophers’ and ‘Humble’ Analysts§7 Sentimental Certainty§8 The Platonic Sublime§9 The Myth of PrometheusPart Three: A History of OrgansChapter Three: Organs, Instruments and Insects§10 Insectification§11 The Plasticity of Philosophy§12 Perfectibility§13 The Analogy to Morality§14 Organology and StyleChapter Four: Writing after Materialism §15 Diderot Reads Hemsterhuis§16 Hemsterhuis Reads Diderot§17 Palingenesis and the Subversion of Materialism§18 Post-Bonnetian StylePart Four: Time-ImagesChapter Five: The Past and the Present§19 The Optimum§20 Epistolary Style§21 Genealogy§22 Irony and AnachronismChapter Six: The Archaic and the Prophetic§23 Dreams and Shadows§24 In the Style of HopeConclusion: Four Characters in Search of a Philosophy