Justin E. H. Smith - Böcker

Anton Wilhelm Amo (c.1703-after 1752) was the first African philosopher in the modern period to write in the European philosophical tradition and study and teach in European universities. At the dawn of the eighteenth century, while still a small boy, he was sent from his home in present-day Ghana to Amsterdam. From there he was sent to Germany as a court attendant of Duke Anton Ulrich of Braunschweig-Wolfenbüttel, and was subsequently baptized in 1708. He matriculated at the University of Halle in 1727, where he defended a law thesis. He then studied and taught at the University of Wittenberg, before returning to Halle to teach, and later also teaching in Jena. He returned to West Africa permanently in 1747. Though much attention on and study of Amo has previously focused on his symbolic importance as a historical figure--the first African philosopher in modern Europe--Stephen Menn and Justin E. H. Smith argue for a serious engagement with Amo's work as a philosopher. In an extensive introduction, they contextualize his biography and writing within the surrounding intellectual and historical environment, and discuss and analyze his arguments in conversation with other philosophers of the time. This volume contains his two Wittenberg philosophical dissertations, On the Impassivity of the Human Mind and the Philosophical Disputation containing a Distinct Idea of those Things that Pertain either to the Mind or to our Living and Organic Body, both first published in 1734. The editors present the original Latin texts with side-by-side English translations and detailed explanatory annotations. In centering Amo's philosophical thought and making it accessible to more students and scholars, Menn and Smith establish the originality and significance of Amo's rigorous contributions to the mind-body debate of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.

This volume collects contributions from leading scholars of early modern philosophy from a wide variety of philosophical and geographic backgrounds. The distinguished contributors offer very different, competing approaches to the history of philosophy.Many chapters articulate new, detailed methods of doing history of philosophy. These present conflicting visions of the history of philosophy as an autonomous sub-discipline of professional philosophy.Several other chapters offer new approaches to integrating history into one's philosophy. These do so by re-telling the history of recent philosophy. A number of chapters explore the relationship between history of philosophy and history of science.Among the topics discussed and debated in the volume are: the status of the principle of charity; the nature of reading texts; the role of historiography within the history of philosophy; the nature of establishing proper context.

This volume collects contributions from leading scholars of early modern philosophy from a wide variety of philosophical and geographic backgrounds. The distinguished contributors offer very different, competing approaches to the history of philosophy.Many chapters articulate new, detailed methods of doing history of philosophy. These present conflicting visions of the history of philosophy as an autonomous sub-discipline of professional philosophy.Several other chapters offer new approaches to integrating history into one's philosophy. These do so by re-telling the history of recent philosophy. A number of chapters explore the relationship between history of philosophy and history of science.Among the topics discussed and debated in the volume are: the status of the principle of charity; the nature of reading texts; the role of historiography within the history of philosophy; the nature of establishing proper context.

The present volume advances a recent historiographical turn towards the intersection of early modern philosophy and the life sciences by bringing together many of its leading scholars to present the contributions of important but often neglected figures, such as Ralph Cudworth, Nehemiah Grew, Francis Glisson, Hieronymus Fabricius ab Aquapendente, Georg Ernst Stahl, Juan Gallego de la Serna, Nicholas Hartsoeker, Henry More, as well as more familiar figures such as Descartes, Spinoza, Leibniz, Malebranche, and Kant. The contributions to this volume are organized in accordance with the particular problems that living beings and living nature posed for early modern philosophy: the problem of life in general, whether it constitutes something ontologically distinct at all, or whether it can ultimately be exhaustively comprehended "in the same manner as the rest "; the problem of the structure of living beings, by which we understand not just bare anatomy but also physiological processes such as irritability, motion, digestion, and so on; the problem of generation, which might be included alongside digestion and other vital processes, were it not for the fact that it presented such an exceptional riddle to philosophers since antiquity, namely, the riddle of coming-into-being out of - apparent or real - non-being; and, finally, the problem of natural order.

Are we paying enough attention? At least since the nineteenth century, critics have alleged a widespread and profound failure of attentiveness—to others, to ourselves, to the world around us, to what is truly worthy of focus. Why is there such great anxiety over attention? What is at stake in understanding attention and the challenges it faces?This book investigates attention from a range of disciplinary perspectives, including philosophy, history, anthropology, art history, and comparative literature. Each chapter begins with a concrete scene whose protagonists are trying—and often failing—to attend. Authors examine key moments in the history of the study of attention; pose attention as a philosophical problem; explore the links between attention, culture, and technology; and consider the significance of attention for conceptualizations of human subjectivity. Readers encounter nineteenth-century experiments in boredom, ornithologists conveying sound through field notations, wearable attention-enhancing prosthetics, students using online learning platforms, and inquiries into attention as a cognitive state and moral virtue.Amid mounting concern about digital mediation of experience, the rise of “surveillance capitalism,” and the commodification of attention, Scenes of Attention deepens the thinking that is needed to protect the freedom of attention and the forms of life that make it possible.

Are we paying enough attention? At least since the nineteenth century, critics have alleged a widespread and profound failure of attentiveness—to others, to ourselves, to the world around us, to what is truly worthy of focus. Why is there such great anxiety over attention? What is at stake in understanding attention and the challenges it faces?This book investigates attention from a range of disciplinary perspectives, including philosophy, history, anthropology, art history, and comparative literature. Each chapter begins with a concrete scene whose protagonists are trying—and often failing—to attend. Authors examine key moments in the history of the study of attention; pose attention as a philosophical problem; explore the links between attention, culture, and technology; and consider the significance of attention for conceptualizations of human subjectivity. Readers encounter nineteenth-century experiments in boredom, ornithologists conveying sound through field notations, wearable attention-enhancing prosthetics, students using online learning platforms, and inquiries into attention as a cognitive state and moral virtue.Amid mounting concern about digital mediation of experience, the rise of “surveillance capitalism,” and the commodification of attention, Scenes of Attention deepens the thinking that is needed to protect the freedom of attention and the forms of life that make it possible.

In this volume Smith examines the early modern science of generation, which included the study of animal conception, heredity, and fetal development. Analyzing how it influenced the contemporary treatment of traditional philosophical questions, it also demonstrates how philosophical pre-suppositions about mechanism, substance, and cause informed the interpretations offered by those conducting empirical research on animal reproduction. Composed of essays written by an international team of leading scholars, the book offers a fresh perspective on some of the basic problems in early modern philosophy. It also considers how these basic problems manifested themselves within an area of scientific inquiry that had not previously received much consideration by historians of philosophy.

In this volume Smith examines the early modern science of generation, which included the study of animal conception, heredity, and fetal development. Analyzing how it influenced the contemporary treatment of traditional philosophical questions, it also demonstrates how philosophical pre-suppositions about mechanism, substance, and cause informed the interpretations offered by those conducting empirical research on animal reproduction. Composed of essays written by an international team of leading scholars, the book offers a fresh perspective on some of the basic problems in early modern philosophy. It also considers how these basic problems manifested themselves within an area of scientific inquiry that had not previously received much consideration by historians of philosophy.

This volume draws a balanced picture of the Rationalists by bringing their intellectual contexts, sources and full range of interests into sharper focus, without neglecting their core commitment to the epistemological doctrine that earned them their traditional label. The collection of original essays addresses topics ranging from theodicy and early modern music theory to Spinoza’s anti-humanism, often critically revising important aspects of the received picture of the Rationalists. Another important contribution of the volume is that it brings out aspects of Rationalist philosophers and their legacies that are not ordinarily associated with them, such as the project of a Cartesian ethics. Finally, a strong emphasis is placed on the connection of the Rationalists’ philosophy to their interests in empirical science, to their engagement in the political life of their era, and to the religious background of many of their philosophical commitments.

In recent decades, there has been much scholarly controversy as to the basic ontological commitments of the philosopher Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz (1646-1716). The old picture of his thought as strictly idealistic, or committed to the ultimate reduction of bodies to the activity of mind, has come under attack, but Leibniz's precise conceptualization of bodies, and the role they play in his system as a whole, is still the subject of much controversy. One thing that has become clear is that in order to understand the nature of body in Leibniz, and the role body plays in his philosophy, it is crucial to pay attention to the related concepts of organism and of corporeal substance, the former being Leibniz's account of the structure of living bodies (which turn out, for him, to be the only sort of bodies there are), and the latter being an inheritance from the Aristotelian hylomorphic tradition which Leibniz appropriates for his own ends.This volume brings together papers from many of the leading scholars of Leibniz's thought, all of which deal with the cluster of questions surrounding Leibniz's philosophy of body.

This volume draws a balanced picture of the Rationalists by bringing their intellectual contexts, sources and full range of interests into sharper focus, without neglecting their core commitment to the epistemological doctrine that earned them their traditional label. The collection of original essays addresses topics ranging from theodicy and early modern music theory to Spinoza’s anti-humanism, often critically revising important aspects of the received picture of the Rationalists. Another important contribution of the volume is that it brings out aspects of Rationalist philosophers and their legacies that are not ordinarily associated with them, such as the project of a Cartesian ethics. Finally, a strong emphasis is placed on the connection of the Rationalists’ philosophy to their interests in empirical science, to their engagement in the political life of their era, and to the religious background of many of their philosophical commitments.