Resilient Transcendence: Modern Philosophical Disputes on Human Nature (AP2163C)

Content

In the modern period from Descartes to WWI, western Christian theism was thought to depend on a transcendent account of human nature, which was repeatedly challenged by materialists and naturalists, in the context of successive theories of physics: this history sets the background for developments in philosophical theology in the contemporary period. This unit examines key debates between what would be considered transcendent and reductionist accounts of the human person in the 17th–19th centuries, highlighting the resilience of transcendent accounts. It includes Descartes’ arguments for an immaterial soul, Locke and ‘thinking matter’, Ralph Cudworth's coinage of ‘consciousness’ (1678), the Newtonian theologian Samuel Clarke's correspondence with the materialist Anthony Collins (1706–17), the anti-materialist philosophies of mind of the Jesuit physicist Roger Boscovich (1757), the materialist theism of Joseph Priestley (1777), and the Evangelical Christians Maxwell and Faraday, the dispute between philosophical idealist T. H. Green and the positivist and naturalist G. H. Lewes (1878–85), and ending with the expansive taxonomy of philosophies of mind in C. D. Broad's The Mind and its Place in Nature (1925). Students will also be introduced to the primary working tools of contemporary research in early modern and 19th-century philosophy.

Learning outcomes

Unit sequence

One unit of philosophy at first level

Pedagogy

Lectures, seminars, tutorials. When taught online asynchronously, the tutorial/seminar component may be replaced by guided reading exercises.

Indicative Bibliography

• Clarke, Samuel, Anthony Collins, and William Uzgalis (ed.). The Correspondence of Samuel Clarke and Anthony Collins, 1707-08. Peterborough, Ont.: Broadview Press, 2011.
• Harris, James A. Of Liberty and Necessity: The Free Will Debate in Eighteenth Century British Philosophy. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005.
• Holden, Thomas. The Architecture of Matter: Galileo to Kant. Oxford: Clarendon, 2006.
• Kargon, Robert. “William Rowan Hamilton, Michael Faraday, and the Revival of Boscovichean Atomism.” American Journal of Physics 32, no. 10 (1964): 792-795.
• La Mettrie, Julien Offray de. Man a Machine. Alpha Editions, 2022.
• Mander, W. J., ed. The Oxford Handbook of British Philosophy in the Nineteenth Century. Oxford, United Kingdom: Oxford University Press, 2014.
• Maxwell, James Clerk, and P. M. Harman. The Scientific Letters and Papers of James Clerk Maxwell. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002.
• Rivers, Isabel, and David L. Wykes. Joseph Priestley, Scientist, Philosopher, and Theologian. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008.
• Shapiro, Lisa, Marcy P. Lascano, and Michel W. Pharand, eds. Early Modern Philosophy: An Anthology. Peterborough, Ontario, Canada: Broadview Press, 2022.
• Wright, J. A. “Ruggiero Boscovich (1711–1787): Jesuit science in an enlightenment context.” In Enlightenment and Catholicism in Europe : A Transnational History, edited by Jeffrey D. Burson and Ulrich L. Lehner, 353-370. Notre Dame, Indiana: University of Notre Dame Press, 2014.

Assessment