Resilient Transcendence: Modern Philosophical Disputes on Human Nature (AP9163C)

Content

Religious thought depends on a transcendent account of human nature, which has been challenged repeatedly by materialists and naturalists, in the context of successive theories of physics. This unit examines key debates between 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) 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 the philosophy 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 e.g.: AP8000C or AP8002C

Pedagogy

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

Indicative Bibliography

• Harman, P. M. The Natural Philosophy of James Clerk Maxwell. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998.
• 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.
• Mander, William, and M. Dimova-Cookson, eds. T. H. Green: Ethics, Metaphysics and Political Philosophy. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006.
• Mijuskovic, Ben L. The Achilles of Rationalist Arguments. The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1974.
• Whyte, Lancelot Law. Roger Joseph Boscovich, S.J., F.R.S., 1711-1787: studies of his life and work on the 250th anniversary of his birth. London: Allen and Unwin, 1961.
• Yolton, John. Thinking Matter: Materialism in Eighteenth Century Britain. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1983.

Assessment