International Conference
The Radical Enlightenment: The Big Picture and its Details
16-17 May 2013, University Foundation, Egmontstraat 11, B-1000 Brussels
Practical Information and Book of Abstracts
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The Radical Enlightenment: The Big Picture and its Details
16-17 May 2013, University Foundation, Egmontstraat 11, B-1000 Brussels
‘The Radical Enlightenment: The Big Picture and its Details’ is organized by the Centre for Ethics and Humanism and the Centre for Logic and Philosophy of Science, which are both part of the Department of Philosophy and Moral Sciences at the Free University of Brussels (Vrije Universiteit Brussel). The conference has been made possible by funding from the Research Foundation – Flanders (Fonds voor Wetenschappelijk Onderzoek – Vlaanderen) and VisitBrussels.
Conference organizers
Steffen Ducheyne (Free University of Brussels), Jean Paul Van Bendegem (Free University of Brussels), Karl Verstrynge (Free University of Brussels), Else Walravens (Free University of Brussels)
Scientific committee
Herman De Dijn (University of Leuven), Steffen Ducheyne (Free University of Brussels), Jonathan I. Israel (Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton), Willem Lemmens (University of Antwerp), Eric Schliesser (Ghent University), Winfried Schröder (Philipps-Universität Marburg), Jean Paul Van Bendegem (Free University of Brussels), Wiep van Bunge (Erasmus University Rotterdam), Maarten Van Dyck (Ghent University), Geert Van Eekert (University of Antwerp), Karl Verstrynge (Free University of Brussels), and Else Walravens (Free University of Brussels).
Organizing committee
Patrick Allo (Free University of Brussels), Steffen Ducheyne (Free University of Brussels), Jens Ottoy (Free University of Brussels), Jean Paul Van Bendegem (Free University of Brussels), Yoni Van Den Eeden (Free University of Brussels), Stephanie Van Droogenbroeck (Free University of Brussels), Wim Van Moer (Free University of Brussels), Karl Verstrynge (Free University of Brussels), and Else Walravens (Free University of Brussels).
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Contents
Practical Information………………………………………………………………………..p. 3
Keynote Lectures: Abstracts (listed alphabetically)……………………………………….p. 6
Contributed papers: Abstracts (listed alphabetically)………………………...…………..p. 11
List of Participants…………………………………………………………………………..p. 41
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Practical information
Important venues:
The conference venue is in the building of the University Foundation (Egmontstraat/Rue d’Egmont 11, B-1000, Brussels). The conference dinner will be on Thursday 16 May at the Bozar Brasserie (Baron Hortastraat/Rue Baron Horta 3, B-1000 Brussels) at 8 p.m. For a map, see page 5.
Directions:
From Brussels Airport to railway station Brussel-Centraal/Bruxelles-Central. Participants are advised to fly into Brussels Airport ( http://www.brusselsairport.be/en/ ). The train ride from Brussels Airport to Brussel-Centraal/Bruxelles-Central takes about 17 to 20 minutes. There are on average up to 4 trains/hour (see: http://www.belgianrail.be/en/Default.aspx ; point of departure: ‘Brussel-Nat-Luchthaven [NMBS/SNCB]’). It is useful to know that the railway station at Brussels Airport is located at level -1.
Note: Some airlines fly into the airport of Charleroi, which is quite misleadingly called ‘Brussels South (Charleroi) Airport’. Ground transportation to Brussels from Charleroi is more laborious: the airport in Charleroi is at a distance of roughly 60 kilometres (or roughly 37 miles) from the centre of Brussels. There is a shuttle service from the airport of Charleroi to railway station Brussels-Zuid/Bruxelles-Midi which, depending on the traffic, takes about 60 to 90 minutes (see: http://www.charleroi-airport.com/en/passengers/acces-and-parking/brussels-city- shuttle/index.html ).
From railway station Brussel-Zuid/Bruxelles-Midi (Thalys and Eurostar terminals) to rail station Brussel-Central/Bruxelles-Central. There are up to 20 trains/hour that take you to Brussel-Central/Bruxelles-Central. The train ride takes about 3 to 5 minutes (see: http://www.belgianrail.be/en/Default.aspx ).
From railway station Brussel-Centraal/Bruxelles-Central to the conference venue (Egmontstraat/Rue d’Egmont 11, B-1000 Brussels). Brussels has an intricate public transportation network of buses, trams, and metros. On the website of the MIVB/STIB, the public transport company that exploits the Brussels metro, tram, and bus lines, you will find a journey planner ( http://www.mivb.be/reisweg-itineraire.html?l=en ; your stop of departure is ‘BRUXELLES CENTRAL’; your stop of arrival is ‘TRONE’; the trip by bus or metro takes about 9 to 13 minutes). 1 The stop ‘Troon/Trône’ is on walking distance from the conference
1 There are four alternative routes that will take you to Troon/Trône. By bus : take bus line 38 in the direction of Helden/Héros and get off at Troon/Trône or take bus line 71 in the direction of Delta, get off at Hertog/Ducale and walk to Troon/Trône. By metro : take metro line 1 in de direction of Stokkel/Stockel, get off at Kunstwet/Art-Loi (Wetstraat/Rue de la Loi), walk to Kunstwet/Art-Loi (Kunstwettunnel/Tunnel Arts-Loi), take metro line 2 in the direction of Simonis, and get off at Troon/Trône or take metro line 5 in the direction of Herrmann-Debroux, get off at Kunstwet/Art-Loi (Wetstraat/Rue de la Loi), walk to Kunstwet/Art-Loi (Kunstwettunnel/Tunnel Arts-Loi), take metro line 6 in the direction of Koning Boudewijn/Roi Baudouin, and get off at Troon/Trône. 3 venue (ca. 300 metres). A healthy alternative is to walk from Brussel-Centraal/Bruxelles-Central to Egmontstraat 11 (only 1.4 kilometres or ca. 20 minutes).
Accommodation: http://visitbrussels.be/bitc/BE_en/sleep/hotels.do http://maps.google.be/maps?um=1&ie=UTF- 8&q=hotels+brussels&fb=1&gl=be&hq=hotels&hnear=0x47c3a4ed73c76867:0xc18b3a6678730 2a7,Brussel&sa=X&ei=1C1cUc3YNOqM7AbljIHYBw&ved=0CJECELYD http://www.booking.com/
General information on Brussels: http://visitbrussels.be/bitc/front/home/display/clt/BE_en/section/visiteur.do http://www.biponline.be/?q=bip-home http://www.use-it.be/brussels/
Some things to do: http://www.shopinbrussels.be/EN http://atomium.be/?lang=en http://www.fine-arts-museum.be/site/EN/default.asp http://www.abconcerts.be/en http://www.kunstberg.com/en/49 http://www.hortamuseum.be/Welcome.htm http://www.visitbelgium.com/index.php/our-cities/brussels/brussels-highlights
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1. Brussel-Centraal/Bruxelles-Central is railway station closest to the conference venue. 2. The conference diner will be here on Thursday 16 May at 8 p.m. Address: Bozar Brasserie, Baron Hortastraat/Rue Baron Horta 3, 1000 Brussels. 3. Lunchtime suggestion: Cafetaria Musée BELvue (salad bar). Address: Paleizenplein/Place des Palais 7, B-1000 Brussels. URL: http://belvue.be/fr/infos-pratiques/belvue-food . 4. Troon/Trône is the bus and metro stop closest to the conference venue. 5. The University Foundation is the conference venue. Some keynote speakers will stay in the Hotel of the University Foundation. Address: Egmontstraat/Rue d’Egmont 11, B-1000 Brussels. 6. Some keynote speakers will spend the night here on Wednesday 15 May 2013. Address: Aqua Hotel Brussels, de Stassartstraat/Rue de Stassart 43, 1050 Brussels. URL: http://www.aqua-hotel-brussels.com . 7. Lunchtime suggestion: Le Trappiste (traditional food). Address: Gulden-Vlieslaan/Avenue de la Toison d’Or 3, B-1050 Brussels. URL: http://letrappiste.be/ . 8. Lunchtime suggestion: Exki (sandwich bar). Address: Elsensesteenweg/Chaussée d'Ixelles 12, B-1000 Brussels. 9. Lunchtime suggestion: Eat Sushi (sushi!). Address: Marsveldplein/Place du Champs de Mars 5, B-1050 Brussels. URL: http://www.eatsushi.be/ . 10. Lunchtime suggestion: Break Time (sandwich bar). Address: Marnixlaan/Avenue Marnix 14C, B-1000 Brussels. URL: http://www.snackbreaktime.be/cart.html . 11. Lunchtime suggestion: Pulp (sandwich bar). Address: Luxemburgstraat/Rue de Luxembourg 4, B-1000 Brussel. URL: www.pulp.be . 12. Lunchtime suggestion: Al dente (Italian food). Address: Troonstraat/Rue du Trône 22, B-1000 Brussels. URL: www.trattoriaaldente.be . 13. Lunchtime suggestion: El Verde (Latin American and Mediterranean food). Address: Troonstraat/Rue du Trône 39, B-1050 Brussels. URL: www.elverde.be .
The above map may be consulted online at: https://maps.google.be/maps/ms?msa=0&msid=213949261974258011548.0004d9137e6344194f899&ie=UTF8&ll= 50.84004,4.364426&spn=0.012046,0.033023&t=m&z=16&vpsrc=6 . 5
Keynote Lectures: Abstracts (listed alphabetically)
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Radical Enlightenment: Monism and the Rise of Modern Democratic Republicanism
Jonathan I. Israel
Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton
At its culminating moment, the democratic republicanism of the early part of the French Revolution before Robespierre’s totalitarian coup d’état and the onset of the Terror, i.e. the democratic republican phase (1788-93), the democrats clearly saw the danger posed by totalitarian tendencies in modern society embodied in Marat and Robespierre. The democratic republican programme most clearly formulated by Condorcet, Brissot and Paine can be characterized as follows: 1) the overriding need to enlighten the whole of society (and not just a small minority as the moderate Enlightenment of Voltaire, Hume and Montesquieu would have it) and, correspondingly, the need for a universal system of secular education; 2) severe curtailing of all religious authority; 3) the need for a new universal secular morality as the basis of civics, law, education and institutions that does not rely in any way on religion; 4) the need for full freedom of thought, conscience and expression, including full freedom of the press; 5) the idea that basic human rights have to be spelt out in a charter of human rights to protect basic freedoms; and, 6) the need for a constitution to fix the political forms which will maintain democratic freedom. Democracy was also an inherent part of the opening phase of the Radical Enlightenment, in the later seventeenth century, in the thought of Spinoza particularly. The main object of this key- note lecture will be to focus on, explain and emphasize the underlying and fundamental connection between the politics of Radical Enlightenment democracy and emancipation, on the one hand, and the monism and one-substance philosophy of the Radical Enlightenment on the other. The most important element here, I shall argue is the tendency of radical thought to eliminate the principle of religious authority as society’s main guide, and especially to undermine the idea that divine Providence guides and directs the course of human affairs together with the notion that moral truth is a code divinely revealed to men through religious authority. The political programme of modern democracy and equality resting on basic human rights can therefore be seen to rest on a metaphysical-philosophical foundation that attempted to demonstrate its logical cogency and correctness by basing itself on the findings of a purely secular science, scholarship and understanding of nature.
What does Spinoza mean by equality in the Theological-Political Treatise?
Beth Lord
University of Aberdeen
It is claimed that one of Spinoza’s contributions to the Radical Enlightenment is his endorsement of equality, usually taken in the moral or political sense. However, in the Theological-Political Treatise his appeals to equality are ambiguous. Equality appears to be both natural and artificial, both good for peace and bad for sovereignty. Our “equal right” extends from the state of nature into the civil state, and yet no one should be compelled to “serve his equal”. The Ethics
7 compounds the uncertainty over this matter. There, Spinoza’s metaphysics makes way not for the moral equality of persons, but for their profound inequality, based on a hierarchy of our natural powers. How should equality figure in politics and ethics if, as Susan James has recently argued, the Theological-Political Treatise describes the society in which the ethical and liberating purpose of the Ethics can be realized? What does Spinoza mean by equality, and what kind of equal society – if any – does Spinoza think we should aim for? In this paper I will discuss the meaning of equality in the Theological-Political Treatise , and suggest that understanding equality in economic terms, rather than moral-political ones, can help us to address these questions.
Spinoza and Enlightenment: Anti-Mathematics
Eric Schliesser
Ghent University
In this paper I show that Spinoza’s so-called letter on the infinite inspired and gave rise to a number eighteenth century arguments that contested the epistemic and social status of (Newtonian) mathematical sciences. I call these arguments ‘anti-mathematical’. By drawing on works by Mandeville, Hume, Buffon, Diderot, amongst others, I distinguish between two kinds of anti- mathematical strategies: (a) global arguments, by which I mean that the epistemic and social status of mathematical sciences in general is criticized; and (b) containment strategies, by which I mean that the legitimacy and (epistemic) security of the application of mathematics is granted, but limited to only very particular domains of inquiry (generally, astronomy and optics). The paper consists of three main sections. First, I articulate the anti-mathematical arguments of Spinoza’s letter on the infinite. These arguments concern the applicability of mathematics (and the use of measures more generally) and the kind of knowledge this might generate. The main argument can be captured as follows: by applying measure we create what we may call a limitation of some part of the whole that is (without complete knowledge of the whole) arbitrary. A crucial (anti-Cartesian) premise of the argument is that geometric number is not (to use an anachronistic term) isomorphic with essential features of nature. This is why Spinoza associates mathematical claims with (epistemically suspect) ‘abstraction’ (and imagination). This line of argument helps to explain Spinoza’s scattered remarks about mathematical overconfidence despite his recognition that mathematical sciences can be useful. The main focus of the second section is to offer some examples of anti-mathematics. I focus on David Hume's treatment in Treatise 1.2.4.17-33 (and 1.4.1-6) to illustrate what global mathematics looks like in the context of Newtonian claims about the reliability of mathematical natural philosophy. I argue that while Hume’s metaphysics is not Spinozistic, key features of his argument (especially where it deviates from Berkeley’s related argument in De Motu ) are similar to Spinoza’s approach. Moreover, they are both motivated to deflate ‘scientific’ cosmogenies that appeal to design. I use some arguments by Buffon and Mandeville to illuminate the nature of the containment strategies available in the eighteenth century. Buffon (echoing Locke) grants that mathematical approaches are appropriate for astronomy and optics, but only a useful subsidiary means in natural history. Similarly, Mandeville argues that applied medical research (geared to healing patients) has to be qualitative given the diversity of human nature and our lack of
8 knowledge of micro-causes. (Mandeville also introduced a further set of arguments that deployed what we might call the sociology of knowledge to deflate the status of mathematics as a signalling device in recruiting patients.) In the final section, I explore the enduring relevance of these discussion. In particular, by drawing on Niewentijt’s relatively neglected work on Spinoza, I show that debates generated by anti-mathematics encouraged the development of a new conception of the epistemic and metaphysical status of applied mathematics.
De Sade: Heir of the Radical Enlightenment?
Winfried Schröder
Philipps-Universität Marburg
One would hardly expect the Marquis de Sade among the protagonists of the Radical Enlightenment. However, de Sade – author of both pornographic novels and philosophical treatises – piqued himself of being its boldest protagonist. He regarded his attack on the philosophical and religious traditions as the most important contribution to the “ progrès des lumières” and professed his devotedness to the radical “ philosophes ” like the Baron d’Holbach (“[ je suis son ] sectateur jusqu’au martyre, s'il le fallait” ). In fact, lots of traces of their thought are present in his work, among them key elements of Jonathan Israel’s concept of the Radical Enlightenment (materialism; denial of a divine providence; atheism). As we know from the recently reconstructed catalogue of his library, he was well acquainted with the main works of the French materialists and clandestine radicals who are often quoted in his writings. On the other hand, De Sade’s aristocratism, moral nihilism and other elements of his thought don’t, of course, go with the egalitarianism, humanism, the democratic ideals and other key ideas of the Enlightenment (radical or moderate). This odd example of an 18th-century thinker, who was distinctively radical (by Jonathan Israel’s standards) in some respect and an opponent to the Enlightenment in others, raises several questions concerning the concept of Radical Enlightenment. In particular, De Sade’s thought deserves a closer analysis, because several recent critics of the Enlightenment and modernity (Lester Crocker, Charles Taylor, and, of course, Horkheimer/Adorno) indeed regard him as an heir to the Enlightenment and as a thinker, whose thought, as they put it, reveals the fatal consequences of the ‘philosophie des Lumières ’.
The Waning of the Radical Enlightenment in the Dutch Republic
Wiep van Bunge
Erasmus University Rotterdam
When, in 1784, Friedrich Jacobi wanted to know more about Dutch Spinozism, his friend and correspondent Frans Hemsterhuis sent him a copy of Abraham Cuffeler’s Specimen artis ratiocinandi . This book had been published exactly a century before and had been written by a lawyer from The Hague who must have known Spinoza personally. Cuffeler’s book was not the
9 last specimen of Dutch Spinozism, but after Frederik van Leenhoff’s Den hemel op aarden (1703), all we find in the Dutch Republic are mere – and often pretty ambiguous – traces of sympathy for Spinoza (Smeeks, Sandvoort, Tyssot de Patot, Wyermars). There is, however, no evidence for any sustained eighteenth-century ‘Dutch Spinozism’. In this lecture an attempt will be made to explain why such a movement failed to develop.
The Radicality of Johann Christian Edelmann: A Synthesis of Progressive Enlightenment, Pluralism and Spiritualism
Else Walravens
Free University of Brussels (VUB)
Both supporters and opponents frequently call Johann Christian Edelmann (1698-1767) a radical thinker. In my lecture I will consider and evaluate the reasons why he is labelled that way. I will discuss the following features of his attitude and thought: 1. his affinity with radical pietism and his later alliance with freethinking; 2. the fearlessness of his attacks and the frank and often coarse and even insulting language he uses in his writings; 3. his uncompromising criticism of ecclesiastical, religious and, to a smaller degree, political authorities; 4. his drastic criticism of the Old and the New Testament, and especially his unmasking of both orthodox and pietistic Christian belief as inhuman and misanthropic; 5. his outspoken Spinozism (criticism of religion and pantheism) and his alleged atheism; 6. his passionate plea in favour of freedom of thought and of speech. From this assessment I will characterize the genuine nature of Edelmann’s (mature) thought. It appears to be a combination of progressive Enlightenment, pluralism and spiritualism. My reading of this position is that it is not a contradictory mixture of new and outdated views, but an innovative synthesis.
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Contributed Papers: Abstracts (listed alphabetically)
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Multitude, Prophets and Philosophers, Public Opinion and State. Deconstructing and Resituating Spinoza’s Radical Political Thought in the Context of Today’s Crisis of Democracy
Emiliano Acosta
Ghent University
In this paper I explore some central elements of Spinoza’s political thought that use to be ignored by the progressive and conservative interpretations of the “radical” Spinoza such as the real (in opposition to the imaginary ) multitude, the role of the a- or anti-political social actors and of the State concerning the multitude and the administration of public opinion, and the anti/contra- revolutionary spirit of Spinoza’s reflexions on the political and the politics. My reading of Spinoza’s conception of politics and the political, based principally on his TTP and TP, aims first of all at showing that today’s dominant interpretations of the “radical Spinoza” in political philosophy focus exclusively on what Spinoza has said about the individuals, their rights, freedom and power and do not let us see the radical character of Spinoza’s reflexions on the State, which even in our days –unlike other elements of his radical thought– can be considered as radical, because of its controversial and challenging character. This paper consists of three parts. In the first part, I deconstruct the left and liberal interpretations of Spinoza’s “multitude” by showing that the real multitude in Spinoza’s political writings is not the subject of an emancipation project, but rather the object of politics understood as a theory addressed to politicians of how to conserve and increase power in order to guarantee social order. In the second part, I first reconstruct the emergence of the main social actors in the transit from the indeterminacy of the natural state to the establishment of a social and political order. Secondly, I reconstruct the dynamic of social life conceived in terms of tensions between the different social actors. Finally, I give a new interpretation of Spinoza’s mechanism of censorship arguing that it is precisely here that we can find a radical conception of social and political life that still enjoys critical potential in regard to today’s dominant discourse on social and political life. In the last and third part, I suggest as a conclusion that Spinoza’s political thought, far from articulating an emancipative (revolutionary) discourse, offers a conception of the tensions between the different social actors and the State that can be used as a theoretic dispositive to make visible both the inherent tensions between the different political and a-political actors in a democratic system, and some central aspects in today’s political crisis such as the problem of the weakness of the State and the politics in confronting today’s crisis of democracy.
Christiaan Huygens’s Cosmotheoros : A Dialogue between Science and Religion
Fabien Chareix
Université Paris-Sorbonne
It has often been said that Christiaan Huygens was merely a scientist, with nothing more in his works than a pure and positive contribution to modern physics and mathematics. However, this picture cannot account for the numerous manuscripts in which this natural philosopher deals with
12 the very question of religion, namely: predestination, God’s interference with the actual and foreseen composition of the universe, or the cosmological proof of God’s existence. In this regard, the Cosmotheoros , last and influential piece of work from the discoverer of Saturn’s rings, is worth a reappraisal. While reading it, a model for bridging science and religion can emerge, a pattern that has been used, in the context of the Enlightenment. Voltaire’s criticism of the metaphysical considerations assumed to aim at Leibniz’s optimism, in Candide and Micromegas , turns out to be a misunderstanding of key arguments found in Huygens cosmological book, further conveyed to the Enlightenment by Fontenelle’s own account on the same topics. In the light of this second look at Huygens’ set of propositions, we will see how Kant’s satire of the principles that ground Huygens and Fontenelle’s reasonings sheds some light on how cosmology brings up intimate relations between religion and science. In the context of the Enlightenment, this insight can help mapping the changes that have occurred in religion as well as in science since the publication of the Cosmotheoros .
The Role of Jan Hendrik Glazemaker in Spinoza’s Network of Radical Thinkers
Patricia Cuoto
Universidade de Lisboa
I would like to call your attention to Jan Hendrik Glazemaker (1620-1682) assumed translator of Spinoza and active member in the network composed by Mennonite, Collegiant, Cartesian and Spinozist radicals. Glazemaker, who was born into a Mennonite family, was influenced by the Collegiants, especially by the more rationalizing groups. He began translating in the 1640s and after some years, he dedicated himself to the translation of Descartes and became more and more involved in Spinoza’s network composed of radical freethinkers. Glazemaker was a professional and highly productive translator. By analysing his choice of the books he translated and the forewords he wrote, we become acquainted with his way of thinking and with his ideological evolution. Glazemaker’s aim as a translator was to educate the common public. He was engaged in emancipating the vernacular language that was the vehicle of clandestine heterodoxy. Publishing in the vernacular enabled a non-academic audience to have access to new ideas and form a critical mind. Glazemaker resorts to a common language that is simple, clear and straightforward in opposition to the rhetorical language loaded with foreign loanwords. His linguistic purism was a form of defending the common readers from another form of discourse that was ideologically dominant but that they did not control. Glazemaker was an active adherent of the “New Philosophy” and translated either works in accordance to the new scientific and philosophical paradigm or works that he could adapt according to the new model of thinking. The “New Philosophy” Glazemaker wanted to disseminate often could not be published in a direct form: therefore, he resorted to various strategies from anonymous translations, the compilation of an anonymous pamphlet to the manipulation of his translations. Another one of Glazemaker’s features that becomes clear from his Livy translation at the beginning of his career, is that he did not blindly obey his publisher’s orders. More often than not, Glazemaker decided to take control: In his translation of Boxhorn, Glazemaker restructured the examples
13 given in the source text. 2 There are still other instances in which he acts not only as a translator, but as a compiler and editor as well. The forewords written by Glazemaker are a way of extending his translations and reflecting on his intentions. This was especially the case of the passages in the forewords that were cryptic or obscure because their content was heretical and could not be put forth openly. The meanings in those passages could only be detected by insiders. From Glazemaker’s edition of an anonymous pamphlet (1673), his translations of Spinoza (published in 1677 and posthumously in 1693), from his cryptic forewords and blatant manipulation of some translations, it becomes clear that his project is that of a cultural disseminator with an ideological and political agenda, an agenda that at that moment was considered highly subversive and forbidden because his ideas came close to those of Spinoza.
The Counter Enlightenment: The Big Picture and its Details
Anthony DeSantis
University of South Florida
The paper I wish to deliver to the conference in Brussels on “The Radical Enlightenment: The Big Picture and its Details” is this: “The Counter Enlightenment: The Big Picture and its Details.” One simply cannot properly understand the Radical Enlightenment unless one also learns what the Radical Enlightenment was fighting against (I have in mind here mostly the biblical theological points of view of the Counter-Enlightenment). Indeed, in most respects, many of the teachings of the Radical Enlightenment have their origins in this very reaction. Therefore, the student of the Enlightenment who does not accurately understand Christianity and its sources will not accurately understand the Radical Enlightenment. In most books on the Enlightenment, the Big Picture of the Counter Enlightenment is usually presented in general terms ; that is, the social facts of various church officials, theologians, religious philosophers and government officials did all that they could to stop, prevent, imprison, etc. those movements, books, etc. that were deemed heretical, ungodly, or unorthodox. But the details of why they continually labored to counter the Enlightenment however have not, at least in my estimation, been made sufficiently clear. The reason why I think that this subject would be of interest to the conference is because in my review and study of the scholarly literature on the Radical Enlightenment and early modern philosophy, there is a deficiency regarding primary source explanations of the Counter-Enlightenment’s side of things; and this includes works directly on the Counter Enlightenment by such historians as Darrin McMahon’s Enemies of the Enlightenment and Jonathan Israel’s Democratic Enlightenment on the anti-philosophes. The neglect of expounding the foundations of the Radical Enlightenment’s enemy occurs, I believe, for a number of reasons, including what the Radical Enlightenment itself has caused, that is, its pervasive secularization of not only government and law, but of education, as well. In the 21 st century West, most people are educated in secular institutions of learning. Consequently, students are no longer publicly taught to believe or even to study the Bible or Church history as was the case in the early modern period. As a result, many
2 Erik de Bom, Een subtiele transformatie van Justus Lipsius’ Monita et exempla politica ? De Staatkundige vermaningen en voorbeelden van J.H. Glazemaker. De Zeventiende Eeuw, vol. 24, 2008, pp. 210-226. 14
Enlightenment scholars and historians of philosophy are simply not as educated or trained in the things of Christianity as the 17 th - and 18 th -century Enlightenment proponents and opponents were – especially regarding scripture and theology. The status of the Eucharist or the Trinity is no longer a living issue that produces social and political strife for many academics today as it most certainly was for those during much of the Enlightenment. Contemporary scholars are understandably more interested in issues closer to their field in contemporary philosophy, for instance. But how can one competently judge Hobbes’s Leviathan or Spinoza’s Theological-Political Treatise , which are literally filled with scriptural and theological argumentation, unless one knows the scriptures and theology well? I make it a point in my paper to deal with this deficit by addressing the various Counter- Enlightenments’ positions not only in general, wide-sweeping summations, but from multiple, specific, and documented sources from their own scripture, church fathers, and key theologians throughout their history up until the Radical Enlightenment.
Radical Atheism: Jean Meslier in Context
Charles Devellennes
University of Kent
In the past decade, the Radical Enlightenment has been the focus of numerous studies, most notably Israel (2001) and Onfray (2006, Vol. 4). Though at times criticised for their grand historical narratives, Israel and Onfray both open up significant areas of research on radical thinkers in the history of ideas. In this paper, I argue that Jean Meslier, an author that both Israel and Onfray include in their list of ‘radicals’ or ‘ultras’, is representative of a new position in the history of ideas: that of atheism. He is, after all, the first self-avowed atheist of modern Europe, and his place in the history of ideas needs to be revisited. Through an examination of his atheism in his Memoirs (Meslier and Shreve 2009), I argue that the country-side priest already proposes a subtle definition of atheism, with sharp boundaries against some ‘cousin’ philosophies such as deism, pantheism, and scepticism. In order to delve deeper into this crucial moment for the emergence of a particular philosophical position, it is essential to place Meslier within the intellectual context of his time. In particular, this paper shows that it is primarily through the Cartesian tradition that Meslier arrives at atheism. Having read Descartes, Fénelon, and Malebranche, he was trying to articulate a consistent atheistic position within this particular school of thought. Yet the very nature of his argument pushed him outside the Cartesian school, and he found help in the philosophies of two sceptics – Bayle and Spinoza. This eclectic mixture of sources, combined with the radical nature of Meslier’s argument, make him a prime subject of intellectual history. Meslier’s influence on later thinkers is scarcely noticed. There is relatively little that is known about how much he was read, and how deep were his influences. Partly, it is because of the nature of his work, which circulated only in clandestine circles. But the influence of the curé ’s work can be traced back, with some speculation. It is the edited publication by Voltaire of Meslier’s works that is the most famous. But these editions, from 1762 and 1768, have deep flaws within them. In Voltaire’s words, he ‘purged’ them of the ‘poison of atheism’, and it is clear that he removed about four fifths of the text. The radical nature of Meslier’s argument was
15 lost. Yet some manuscripts had circulated from the 1730s onwards, and by tracing back the influence of Meslier’s works on the French materialists of the mid-late eighteenth century, this paper proposes to offer some in-roads for its reception. In particular, it is in the works of La Mettrie, Diderot, and d’Holbach that one should start the investigation of the reception of the text in the eighteenth century.
References
Israel, Jonathan I. 2001. Radical enlightenment: philosophy and the making of modernity, 1650-1750 . Oxford/New York: Oxford University Press. Meslier, Jean, and Mike Shreve. 2009. Testament: Memoir of the thoughts and sentiments of Jean Meslier . Amherst, N.Y.: Prometheus Books. Onfray, Michel. 2006. Contre-histoire de la philosophie . 6 vols. Paris: Bernard Grasset.
Esoteric Reason and Occult Science: Seamless Pursuits in the Work and Networks of Raimondo di Sangro, The Prince of San Severo
Clorinda Donato
California State University
Raimondo Di Sangro, the Prince of San Severo (1710-1771), founder of the first masonic lodge in Naples is precisely the kind of pivotal figure whose ideas and activities may best be understood from the vantage point of the radical enlightenment. In numerous works and experiments, he pursued both esotericism and rational, scientific experiments as complementary means to arrive at the same end, that of understanding and preserving life. Di Sangro’s forays into the conjoined domains of alchemy and science co-existed with an abiding passion for primitive languages, sign systems, alternative religions, and anatomy. His experiments on the preservation of life through experimentation on cadavers and his interest in primitive languages and sign systems, in particular, the Peruvian quipus known through Madame de Graffigny's Lettres d'une Péruvienne have been immortalized in his writings, especially the Lettera apologetica, 1750 as well as popular legend, not to mention the recent recognition accorded him by anthropologists and archeologists for having preserved the quipus, the writing system of threads and knots established by the Incas, as artifact. 3 The Prince of San Severo, eighteenth-century Naples and the networks that connected him with the proponents of other enlightenments hint at a wide spread range of inquiry in which esoteric and scientific thought and experimentation were seamlessly practiced and promoted. Indeed, the cleavage between the two has been imposed by the historiography of the 18 th century, having much to do with the canonical enlightenments of France and England, which are not particularly pertinent to practices in Naples, Palermo, the German states and parts of Holland. The Prince of San Severo’s career has always suffered from the esoteric-rational divide, for he is alternately credited with galvanizing Neapolitan institutions with his support of Antonio
3 He did this by purchasing a manuscript from a Jesuit in Naples. It remained in his family until the early twentieth century, when it was sold to Italian scholars in Piedmont. Today anthropologists can study the quipus thanks to him. But there is far more material to discuss, including his book on the eternal light, a study he did for the illuminati of Bayreuth, as well as his contacts with Dutch anatomists.
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Genovesi and university reform and discredited as a dangerous and blood thirsty lunatic who terrorized those in his employ, reputed as he was, to have used their cadavers in his experiments. Yet, the well-respected astronomer, Jerôme Joseph de la Lande, visited him and wrote about him in his Voyage en Italie (1768), deploring the treatment Di Sangro had received at the hands of the ecclesiastical authorities for his experiments. The relationship between the two invites us to think about the role of esotericism in the work of Lalande, as well. Lalande was a prominent astronomer and Freemason who admired Di Sangro’s experiments. Indeed, science cohabitated with esotericism in Italian Masonic lodges, where antiquarian pursuits, alchemy, and anatomical science often formed a nexus that was exhibited and performed in Italian salon life (conversazioni) and regional academies in which any number of grand-tour ex-patriots gladly participated. This paper will make a case for considering Di Sangro as a proponent of radical enlightenment with writings and activities which lie fully within the radical enlightenment framework.
Joining the Radical Enlightenment: Johann Konrad Franz von Hatzfeld and the Importance of Belonging
J.P.T. Geerlings
Radboud University Nijmegen
In 1745, Johann Konrad Franz von Hatzfeld was arrested in The Hague for his radical work La Decouverte de la Verité . The book furiously denounced Isaac Newton, severely criticized organized religion, and reminded European potentates to listen to his advice in all matters political, or fail. In the eyes of his contemporaries, Hatzfeld was an intolerable blasphemer, an overambitious social climber and a scientific charlatan. To our modern eyes, Hatzfeld’s political radicalism, deist worldview, and highly confrontational approach to controversy identify him as a member of the Radical Enlightenment. Yet, legitimate though it may be, what does it mean when we associate Hatzeld with the Radical Enlightenment? As a concept, the Radical Enlightenment proved its great merits. It has expanded our view of the Enlightenment world and allowed us to make more sense of thinkers previously thought of as isolated curiosities, including Hatzfeld. However, recent critical responses have emphasized that in reality, the Radical Enlightenment was a highly complex and diffuse entity. It displayed an important degree of ideological diversity, with many different coteries appropriating and reinterpreting its message for various purposes during the eighteenth century. These critiques have become mantras of the Enlightenment studies community, giving force to the assertion that ‘Radical Enlightenment’ is an misleading concept which creates an entity that never really existed. Some scholars have therefore reverted to arguing that there was only one Enlightenment, others wish to pragmatically abandon the concept altogether. Yet, given the very distinct nature of radical thinking compared to the moderate wing of the Enlightenment, as well as the strong social and intellectual links between radical thinkers that various studies have shown, neither approach seems to satisfy.
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This paper will present one possible path out of this discussion. Using Hatzfeld as a test case, it will explore the merits of approaching the Radical Enlightenment from the viewpoint of radicals thinkers’ self-perception, self-styling and attitudes toward their intellectual context. How did thinkers we would qualify as radicals conceive of themselves? Did they have a sense of belonging to a larger, cohesive movement, and did membership of any societies or clubs influence this? Or was being a radical a rather more individual project? What ways of ‘belonging’ were there, and what factors influenced individual’s decisions to adopt or reject the ideas we associate with the Radical Enlightenment? If documents like the Freydencker-Lexikon by Johann Anton Trinius were regarded as imperfect attempts to survey the intellectual landscape even in their own time, what did that landscape look like for the radicals themselves? In short, this paper outlines and examines an approach to the Radical Enlightenment from the point of view of its ‘members’, and inquires specifically what this ‘membership’ entailed.
Radical Enlightenment and Revolution in 1790s Ireland: The Ideas of Theobald Wolfe Tone
Ultán Gillen
Teesside University
Theobald Wolfe Tone (1763-1798) is remembered today as the founder of the republican tradition in Ireland. His grave remains a place of annual pilgrimages for several of Ireland’s major political parties to this day. In the 1960s, the campaign for civil rights in Northern Ireland emerged in large part as a result of a re-engagement with Tone’s thought by the Republican Movement of the time. Several of his best-known phrases continue to play a prominent role in contemporary political discourse, especially his dictum about the need to establish “the unity of Protestant, Catholic and Dissenter”. Tone was the chief ideologue of the Society of United Irishmen in their early years before his exile to America and then France, where he negotiated an alliance with the Directory that saw the French mount several invasion attempts before and during the 1798 United Irish Rebellion. Captured off the coast of Ireland on a French frigate in 1798, Tone was tried as a traitor rather than treated as the French adjutant-general he also was. Sentenced to hang, he slashed his own throat rather than suffer what he considered to be a dishonourable death. This paper examines his social and political thought within the context of the Radical Enlightenment and revolutionary activism in the Atlantic world of the 1790s. A poor country riven by a history of expropriation and by religious differences, and ruled by a tiny Anglican elite dependent upon Britain and discriminatory laws for its power, Ireland presented unique challenges for revolutionaries motivated by ideas of democracy and equality. The social and political power of the Irish aristocracy, the influence and might of Britain, and the deep divisions among the people caused by sectarianism would all have to be overcome to effect a revolution. These were the problems Tone grappled with in his theory and practice during the 1790s. Tone’s writings were primarily propaganda pieces aimed at mobilising the lower and middle orders in support of his political programme at various stages in the 1790s. At bottom, his political programme consisted of Irish independence and equal political rights for all Irishmen, regardless of their religious background. Initially couched in reformist terms, his political
18 programme soon openly reflected a democratic and egalitarian republicanism, heavily influenced by France. This paper analyses how Tone deployed concepts associated with the Radical Enlightenment such as criticism of religious orthodoxies, personal freedom, opposition to war, and social equality to try and gain support for Irish independence and for democratic republican politics. It traces how Tone made his case not just in pamphlets, but also in newspapers, handbills and even in buttons he designed for his unit of Volunteers. It concludes by briefly discussing the afterlife of Tone’s ideas. Tone’s ideas and activism, and his place in Irish political culture provide a window into how the ideas of the Radical Enlightenment spread throughout Irish society and helped shape Irish politics both during and after the age of revolution.
Radical Consciousness in Spinoza and the Case of C. Pamblekis in Greece
Vasiliki Grigoropoulou
University of Athens
My paper has two sections: the first focuses on consciousness in Spinoza’s system; the second concerns the relationship between Pamblekis (1733-1793), a Greek philosopher excommunicated by the Orthodox Church, and the philosophy of Spinoza. I. Following J. Israel’s interpretative approach to Radical Enlightenment and the role of Spinoza, I argue that a radical theory of consciousness emerges from the work of Spinoza, despite the fact that this crucial conception is not defined as other basic terms in his system. However, this is so because the concept of consciousness is developed over his entire Ethics , in which he arrives at the consciousness of the wise man, who is conscious of himself, of God and of things. My claim will be that two separate foundations are put forward for consciousness: first, in the ontology of the first Part of the Ethics and, second, in the theory of the emotions, which is based on the notion of conatus . The latter conveys the concept of power, which Spinoza endows with a distinctive and unique meaning. In the first Part of the Ethics consciousness appears only as the adjective “conscious” in the Appendix. There, as I argue, one finds allusions to a kind of “false” consciousness through which people reverse the order of things and of concepts based on their personal appetites and selfish designs. Spinoza’s project in his Ethics is, from the outsetg, to bring about an inversion of this inversion by introducing a rational concept of God. My hypothesis is that this concept is the primary and most basic condition for the reconstruction of consciousness. This primary grounding does not suffice, however, for consciousness to be reconstructed and reformed. There must also be a refinement of the emotions, based par excellence on the concept of conatus , or power, and pertaining both to the body and the mind. Spinoza defines the mind as an idea of the body. Just as consciousness is an idea of the idea, that is to say an adjunct of the human mind, so the human mind has an idea of every idea that comprises it. Consciousness is to be understood in terms of ideas, which are analogous to the ideas of things. Consciousness may be compared to the body, making it the spiritual cognate of the body in its immense complexity but also to its activity, an issue that links the ontology of consciousness to political praxis and practical conscience. II. The second Part of this paper draws from work in progress on Christodoulos Pamblekis, the most systematic philosopher of Modern Greek Enlightenment. Pamblekis, also a
19 distinguished mathematician, was extremely well versed in 17 th century philosophy and the 18 th century French philosophers. After his incisive critique of religion and the hypocrisy of the clergy, he was excommunicated. His teacher, E. Voulgaris, published a condemnation of his work. But his excommunication, in which he was regarded as a follower of Spinoza, did not prevent distribution and study of his work. However, to this day Pamblekis’ work has not been systematically studied by philosophers in Greece, but only fragmentarily and primarily by historians. I propose that there are common points between Pamblekis’ critique of religion and conception of God, and the Spinoza’s critique. Yet, Spinoza and Pamblekis should not be identified. For instance, it is not clear that he espouses the monism of Spinoza regarding the relation between mind and body. Instead, he elaborates a theory that draws on Descartes and Leibniz, among others. The diversity of the influences he had assimilated has contributed to the reputation he has acquired, among some scholars, of being a radical theorist. Yet others have regarded him as a moderate, even as regards questions of theology.
The Radical Enlightenment and Direct Democracy in the Haitian Revolution
Scott Henkel
Binghamton University
From 1791 to 1804, ex-slaves in the former French colony Saint Domingue rebelled against several of the Atlantic world’s great powers, eventually declaring their independence and renaming their newly founded nation Haiti. It is history’s only example of a successful national slave insurrection, one which led to the founding of a state that was not based on the privilege of a select few. As Nick Nesbitt writes in Universal Emancipation: The Haitian Revolution and the Radical Enlightenment , the Haitian Revolution scandalized the North Atlantic Enlightenment powers because it was essentially an affirmation of true democracy: the proper and logical right of anyone, absolutely anyone, to rule. The scandal of the Haitian Revolution is to have affirmed the right to rule on the part of those with absolutely no qualification beyond their human capacity to judge and act autonomously (37). This is a ground-breaking idea, and it deserves further elaboration. In my paper, I suggest that a useful way to understand this situation is by reinterpreting what Nesbitt call “true democracy” as direct democracy: situations where a demos , people, express their kratos , power, directly, without filtering that power through a representative. I do so through an examination of C. L. R. James’ history of the Haitian Revolution, The Black Jacobins , and also the later lectures that James gave about his book. In those lectures, delivered to the Institute of the Black World in 1971, James stated that, if he had the chance to rewrite the book, he would have altered his emphasis away from key figures like Toussaint L’Ouverture and Jean Jacques Dessalines and reframed the book around the actions of the ordinary men and women whom James thinks are the key protagonists of the revolution, whom he calls, in a type of shorthand, 2,000 leaders. He says, “I am concerned with the two thousand leaders who were there. That is the book I would write. […] If I were writing this book again, I would have something to say about those two thousand leaders” (108). When James wrote The Black Jacobins , he felt that he had to prove the autonomy of the ex-slaves; when he reflected back on writing the book, he indicated that he wished he had minimized the role of revolutionary leadership, assumed the autonomy of the ex-
20 slaves, and built from that foundation. This changed emphasis, I argue is a dramatic step toward an understanding of direct democracy. I suggest that the link between direct democracy and autonomy is vital, and that the implications of that link are profound: if the assumption is that there are some people who do not possess the autonomy required to rule themselves, they will need to be ruled by others. If the reverse is true, it leads to revolutionary possibilities. The history of the Haitian Revolution and its place in larger conversations about the Radical Enlightenment show how old arguments against the capacity of ex-slaves to govern themselves are analogous to current arguments against the capacity of ordinary women and men to govern their own communities, workplaces, unions, or other groups.
The Unknown Printer of Spinoza Finally Identified
R. Jagersma and G.W.H. Dijkstra
University of Amsterdam
The identity of the printer of Spinoza remained a mystery to historians for centuries. The Amsterdam based publisher Jan Rieuwertsz is often referred to as the printer of Spinoza’s works. Even though he is positively identified as Spinoza’s publisher, there is no concrete evidence that Rieuwertsz ever even owned a printing press. He appears to have been a publisher only, who outsourced the printing of his projects. In the works of Spinoza, published by Rieuwertsz, the name of the printer does not appear in the books themselves. This was not uncommon for books published by Rieuwertsz. Concerning the controversial content of Spinoza’s works, it is not surprising that the printer was reluctant to identify himself. This because being involved in the distribution of Spinoza’s ideas could result in prosecution. In a biography of Spinoza, written in 1705 by the Dutch preacher Colerus, the printer Christoffel Cunrades was mentioned as Spinoza’s printer. Cunrades had proclaimed himself as such and showed Colerus some copies of Spinoza’s work to confirm his claim. Seemingly, the question of the identity of Spinoza’s printer had been answered. However, recent findings by Johan Gerritsen have disproved Colerus’ claim. 4 Gerritsen discovered that the typographical materials from Cunrades’ printing shop did not match those used in the production of Spinoza’s works, like the Tractatus theologico-politicus (1670). Unfortunately, the typographical evidence was not sufficient for Gerritsen to identify the actual printer of Spinoza’s works. The identity of printers can be established their usage of printing types, initials and ornaments. 5 This method, otherwise known as analytical bibliography, is a state-of-the-art research method. By comparing materials of known printers to unidentified samples, anonymous works can be ascribed to a certain printer. Especially in cases where there are specific damages to the materials, the identity of anonymous printers can been established with high certainty. Seventeenth century books often use a decorated initial to start the text. This initial belongs to a certain printer and by comparing different prints of similar initials in detail, small differences can
4 Gerritsen, J. ‘Printing Spinoza - some questions.’ In: Spinoza to the letter: Studies in words, texts and books (Leiden, 2005), pp. 251-262. 5 Dijstelberge, P., De beer is los!: Ursicula: een database van typografisch materiaal uit het eerste kwart van de zeventiende eeuw als instrument voor het identificeren van drukken (Amsterdam, 2007). 21 be found. These differences can be caused by damages of the printing initial, such as small cracks. If these differences are consistent over different prints, one can claim certain works are printed by the same printer. By applying analytical bibliography we were able to identify Spinoza’s anonymous printer. This discovery is a major contribution to the research on the Radical Enlightenment, in which Spinoza played such a crucial role. This study addresses what analytical bibliography is and how this method was applied to identify Spinoza’s printer. Additionally, we will analyze the printer’s entire body of printed works in order to establish his role in the spread of the Radical Enlightenment. Spinoza’s printer has been unknown for centuries, but now his identity is finally revealed.
The German Idealist Response to the Radical Enlightenment and its Influence: From Fichte to the Frankfurt School
David James
University of Warwick
Johann Gottlieb Fichte initially adopted the kind of determinist standpoint commonly associated in Germany at the time with Spinoza’s metaphysics. This early connection with the radical Enlightenment was, however, broken as a result of Fichte’s engagement with and increasing commitment to Kant’s moral philosophy, especially its emphasis on freedom. While it would be an exaggeration to cast Fichte as a representative of counter-Enlightenment, his opposition to other recognisable features of the radical Enlightenment, such as materialism and an emphasis on utility as opposed to intrinsic meaning and value, finds clear expression in his public lecture series Grundzüge der gegenwärtigen Zeitalters , which were delivered in 1804-5 and published in 1806. In this paper I show how Fichte’s characterisation of the Enlightenment is reproduced in strikingly similar terms in the section on the Enlightenment found in Hegel’s Phänomenologie des Geistes , which was published in 1807. Rather than examining the issue of whether there is any evidence that Fichte’s lectures may have influenced Hegel’s characterisation of the Enlightenment, I intend to focus on the origins of this common German idealist understanding of the Enlightenment in Kant’s views on pure practical reason, and I ask to what notion of reason this conception of reason is meant to stand opposed. My answer to this question will turn on Fichte’s and Hegel’s emphasis on the concept of utility, as opposed to the non-instrumental form of reason that can be identified with Kant’s notion of moral duty, as a defining feature of Enlightenment reason which, on the one hand, promises to revolutionise existing social and political conditions but, on the other hand, makes self-interest into the primary source of motivation, thus subverting this same end. This will in turn allow me to explore the issue of the extent to which this understanding of the Enlightenment may have shaped the critique of the Enlightenment associated with the Frankfurt School, by focusing on the connections between Fichte’s and Hegel’s emphasis on the concept of utility and Adorno’s and Horkheimer’s emphasis on instrumental reason as a defining feature of the Enlightenment. In both cases, the radical Enlightenment is viewed as having promised much in virtue of its critical mode of thinking, but also as being dialectically unable to fulfil this promise on account of its conception of reason. Whether this view of the radical Enlightenment is true or not, I show that it was
22 integral to the German idealist understanding of the Enlightenment which in turn finds echoes in the Frankfurt School’s critique of the Enlightenment.
Radical Enlightenment, Enlightened Subversion, and the Reversal of Spinoza
Sonja Lavaert
Free University of Brussels (VUB)
In this paper I will focus on the revolutionary significance of Spinoza’s immanent ontology. I defend the thesis that the immanent view in Spinoza’s texts shows its political subversion in its analogy and familiarity with the texts of Machiavelli and at a further level Dante. Both these philosophers subverted the focus from the theological plan with its hierarchy and linear time development to the world we live in, in which human actions are contingent and forces are constantly striving to find a place in time without any support from beyond. A world that, in this view, is governed by conflicting perspectives, relativity and change. It is presupposed that all humans are equal, also in their having particular ideas, which they express in different ways. What follows is a displacement of focus from terms to relations, the procedure of the reversal as an exemplary tool, and language practice seen as a power. The immanent thought of Spinoza makes itself clear while using the Machiavellian paradigm of time. The theory of the two conflicting perspectives shows its meaning and consequences in light of the distinction between power of the multitude and the institutional power of authorities. This leads to reflections on the necessity of free thought and speech, and disobedience. I want to illustrate this thesis in three ways. First, I refer to some subversive texts written by friends of Spinoza, fellow thinkers or political allies who influenced him or who were influenced by him, political treatises/pamphlets by Van den Enden and De la Court, and dictionaries and grammars by Meyer and Koerbagh. Second, I shall refer to Spinoza’s TTP and TP with a particular attention to the matter of language. Third, I confront them with two confutations written by adversaries of Spinoza, both in Dutch, which clarify in an exemplary way the political nature of the polemics. I will confront the TP with the confutation of the Ethics (1683) by the trader/linguist/jurist Verwer who, based on the principle of independence that functions as a watershed in history of thought between two radically opposed political perspectives, with Spinoza on the same side as Machiavelli, focuses on Spinoza’s presumed atheism. Thirdly, I will confront the TTP with the confutation of the TTP (1674) by the grain trader Blyenberg (a book found in the personal library of Spinoza and, so is my hypothesis, used to sharpen his arguments in the TP ). Blyenberg wants to reverse Spinoza’s reversals, redress free will and morality, restore the fear of punishment as the basis for politics, stop the reduction of humans to animals, disconnect the reason from power and lust, and abolish the permission ‘to feel what one wants and to say what one feels’. The question then arises who benefits from one theory or the other. If my presumption is correct that the TP can be seen as Spinoza’s powerful, paradigmatic and clear answer to this confutation, then its arguments sustain an ethical political, immanent ontology.
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John Toland’s Origines Judaicae : Speaking for Spinoza?
Ian Leask
Dublin City University
In his sweeping depiction of the early, radical, Enlightenment as being fundamentally Spinozistic, Jonathan Israel has placed John Toland within the vanguard emanating from Spinoza and in turn disseminating a largely unadulterated Spinozism across the ‘Republic of Letters’. Israel may be quite right to depict Toland as “a creative Spinozist;” but fully to appreciate the complex, variegated, nature of that creativity, we need to look beyond Israel’s own account. Accordingly, this paper will focus mainly upon one of Toland’s least known but most radical works – the Origines Judaicae (OJ), of 1709 – to try to illustrate the way in which Toland both continues and intensifies the naturalistic ‘demythologizing’ of Spinoza’s Theological-Political Treatise (TTP). As we shall see, the OJ presents an uncompromising portrayal of Moses as essentially a statesman for whom religion was an expedient political device: the OJ does not just provide a non-providential account of biblical events and personae; it is more like an anti -providential account, in which the Bible is relegated completely, and, instead, classical commentary is offered as the sole source for Mosaic history. Accordingly, with sacred narrative debarred, it seems that Moses can only be treated as ‘another historical figure’ in a pantheon of important ancient political leaders: by following Strabo, not Scripture, Toland gives us a Moses of Egyptian origin who uses religious notions for wholly political purposes, and who ‘in reality’ subscribes to a proto-Spinozistic pantheism! The reconfiguration of Moses is thus brought to a new, heightened level. However, the extent of Toland’s Spinozism is not just apparent in the detail of the case he makes here. What we also need to attend to is the main target of the OJ: Pierre-Daniel Huet (1630-1721), the renowned savant who, as standard-bearer for conservative Christianity, had devoted massive intellectual effort to an attempted refutation of the ‘Disputator Theologo- Politicus’. Determined to counter the ‘horrible’ and ‘insane’ impiety of Spinoza’s TTP, Huet had depicted Moses as the archetype of all human wisdom, and the source of all the other deities of the ancient world: any aspect of any ancient ‘belief-system’ worth any kind of attention had to be based on Mosaic foundations, Huet had tried to establish; and so Spinoza’s sacrilegious assault might be nullifed. Toland’s OJ offers itself, not solely as an anti-providential Mosaic history, but also as a critique of Huet’s critique of Spinoza: the ‘occasion’ for Toland’s text is an all-out attack on the “hugely learned” Huet and his advocacy of Moses as vir archetypus. Overall, then, when we conjoin a) what Toland’s case states and b) awareness of the opponent against whom it is stated, the overall Spinozistic ‘texture’ of OJ – and, indeed, Toland’s overall Spinozism – becomes far more apparent. The dying Spinoza’s last surviving letter makes plain his (unrealized) hope to tackle Huet himself. Toland’s OJ, it seems, offers a posthumous response on Spinoza’s behalf.
Exorcising Demons: Critiques of Religion from Hobbes and Bekker
Alissa MacMillan
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Institute for Advanced Study, Toulouse
Thomas Hobbes devotes several chapters of Leviathan to a careful critique of belief in, and the uses and abuses of, demons, ghosts, and spirits. But his broader views on religion remain one of the more contested areas of his thought. Scholars disagree over whether he engages theology authentically, whether he is concerned about religion only secondarily, or if he is actively ushering in atheism through a subtle but significant critique. In light of the disagreement about his views on religion, Hobbes’s role in the “radical enlightenment,” so some of the real force of his work on religion, remains unclear. A thoroughgoing opposition to demons and ghosts was also one of the primary objectives of Dutch theologian Balthasar Bekker, a figure whose central role in the historical narrative on atheism is well defended and accounted for in Jonathan Israel’s Radical Enlightenment (Oxford: 2002). Bekker was loudly declared an atheist of the worst sort, that is, of the Hobbesian or Spinozist sort. Although Bekker denied he had read Hobbes’s Leviathan before penning half of his famous book, The World Bewitch’d , in his time the two were often mentioned together. Unlike Hobbes, Bekker was operating from the pulpit, rooted in the Reform tradition and engaging in theological conversations within that tradition. But both Hobbes and Bekker seem to take on demons and demonology, and other claims of the kind, in a similarly critical way, both earning their reputations, at least in part, because of these engagements. But, a close analysis of their respective treatments of demons and ghosts helps to make clear several of the real differences in their work and serves as a means to clarifying some of the subtler details of Hobbes’s account of religion. This paper engages an analysis and comparison of their accounts of the uses and misuses of ghosts and demons, specifically in Leviathan and The World Bewitch’d , arguing that Hobbes’s so-called atheism, on the surface one quite similar in spirit to that of Bekker, is indeed the more “radical” when considered in light of some of his views on the human being, his epistemology and its connection to language, and his perspective on religious authority. This paper clarifies some of the real force and implication of Hobbes’s account in particular by comparing the substance of their respective epistemologies, Hobbes’s materialism and empiricism and aspects of Bekker’s Cartesian rationalism, their accounts of God, and their views on the role of the Church. This comparison will elucidate the differences between their accounts and the philosophical views underlying those accounts and, in doing so, serve to clarify and make sense of Hobbes’s own much-debated views on religion. Alongside Bekker, the innovative elements of Hobbes’s critique of religion become especially clear. An analysis of their respective work on demons and ghosts helps to elucidate the truly radical elements to Hobbes’s views on religion, elements worth reconsidering in the context of his political thought and as an important contribution to the narrative of secularization in the modern West.
Friedrich Hölderlin and the Secret Order of the Illuminati: History of a Missed Chance
Laura A. Macor
Università di Padova
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The proposed paper aims to deal with a severely neglected aspect of Friedrich Hölderlin’s involvement in his historical and intellectual period, namely, his relationship with the secret order of the Bavarian Illuminati. The society was founded in 1776 and, although it was officially banned in 1784 and 1785, continued to shape politics, philosophy and literature in the following years, since the publication in 1787 of significant confiscated documents regarding the secret activities of the organization gave rise to a fierce controversy over the very nature of the Illuminati’s political project. This public debate represented a point of no return in pre- revolutionary German thought and in some ways prepared minds for the greater event to come. There is indeed some evidence that the arguments formulated for the first time during the Illuminati controversy represent the very basis for the interpretation of the radical turn in the French Revolution which began with the September Massacres in late 1792 and the subsequent fall of the Girondins. The region Hölderlin came from (Württemberg) was one of the most active colonies of the organization, as was the Duchy of Saxe-Weimar-Eisenach, where Hölderlin lived in 1794 and 1795, as it is proved by the fact that in 1785 the Duke briefly considered offering a chair at Jena University to the Illuminati’s leader, Adam Weishaupt. The same is true of almost every other city Hölderlin happened to live in (Frankfurt am Main, Homburg vor der Höhe). It was therefore not merely coincidental that Hölderlin was personally acquainted with many Illuminati and read some important writings connected to the order; it can further be proved that he moved in clandestine circles. This enabled him to gain a fairly thorough insight into the nature, goals and limitations of this clandestine organization, which had been capturing public attention for so many years. It is, therefore, not surprising that in his novel Hyperion (1797– 1799) he entrusted a secret league with the political task of renewing society thereby permitting pre- and post-revolutionary conquests to superimpose one another. In spite of the evidence of these elements, Hölderlin scholars have not grasped the relevance of the Illuminati revival which has been taking place in historical scholarship since the 1970s, nor have they followed the major trends within closely related research fields, such as those regarding Schiller and Hegel, which likewise suggest that the legacy of the Illuminati lay at the very core of the German reception of the French Revolution. On the contrary, Hölderlin scholarship kept dealing with Hölderlin’s political theories as if nothing had happened before 1789 and in 1971 let the only voice expressing the need for such a new investigation go unheard, thus causing this plea to be reiterated no less than thirty-two years later. The proposed paper aims to trace the history of this missed chance.
Less Radical Enlightenment: A Christian Wing of the French Enlightenment
Eric Palmer
Allegheny College
Historians have recently focused upon differences between theist Enlightenment leaders (such as Locke) and deist philosophes and atheist libertines – the latter pair identified by Jonathan Israel as the moderate and radical wings of the Enlightenment. By their own lights, the latter pair did battle against what Voltaire would call l’infâme , or, as Hume characterized it more transparently, “stupidity, Christianity, and ignorance.” This presentation will sketch traces of a third Christian wing to supplement Jonathan
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Israel’s characterization of moderate and radical wings of the Enlightenment: a third wing that was a productive and prominent participant in the French Enlightenment during the second quarter of the 18 th century. The movement contained key literary leaders (Pierre Desfontaines, Claude Pierre Goujet, and the young Elie Fréron), who developed a literary culture in several journals and occasional publications. These journalists supported narrower and deeper intellectual work by the likes of Noël Pluche and Jean-Henri-Samuel Formey, two authors whose work was widely read within broad popular culture of the time. The third wing encouraged particular topics of scientific study and presented a literary culture that reflected, and sometimes promoted, Christian theology and broadly Christian and politically conservative values. These last aspects of their agenda served to motivate initial efforts at marginalization of these authors by others from within other Enlightenment wings, especially in the second half of the eighteenth century. There were differences, but this third wing played well with the moderates and radicals, as evidence from the culture of French journals shows. Initial efforts at marginalization of the third wing grew in intensity in the third quarter of the century, most particularly at the flashpoint of the Abbé de Prades controversy, and the vitality of this wing thereafter ebbed. Fréron in particular shifted to a confrontational Counter-Enlightenment strategy, to which Diderot and Voltaire responded energetically. The Encyclopédie and Buffon’s Histoire Naturelle eclipsed the earlier grand success of Pluche’s Spectacle de la Nature . Consequently, earlier Enlightenment contributions from the third wing entered the shadows as the moderate wing consolidated its hold and the divide between philosophe and Christian that Hume observed was struck. Finally, the sharp divide was read retrospectively into the history of the Enlightenment, both by participants such as Hume and, more recently, by historians. The thesis of this presentation, then, is that the French Enlightenment in the early seventeenth century was actually not so very radical; rather, it became so at mid-century, and in retrospect, it now appears more radical than it was.
Radicalism and Feminism: The Case of Poulain de la Barre
Marie-Frédérique Pellegrin
Université Jean Moulin-Lyon 3
Early modern radicalism and its criteria are described and defined in various works by Jonathan Israel. Poulain de la Barre, one of the first modern feminist thinker, is considered by Israel as being part of the so-called Radical Enlightenment, but ultimately he is, quite hesitantly, rejected as an exponent of it. In this talk I will consider the case of Poulain de la Barre as a means of questioning the coherence of Israel’s criteria for considering a thinker as being “radical”. I shall focus, more particularly, on the question of whether seventeenth-century feminism is part of the Radical Enlightenment. Three main aspects of Poulain’s thought, which Israel underscores, will be considered. First, the issue of marriage, chastity and pleasure; secondly, the theoretical matrix which underlies Poulain’s egalitarian feminism, namely his Cartesianism; and, finally, his religious views: his Christian rationalism.
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How much Radicality can the Enlightenment tolerate? The Case of Gabriel Wagner (Realis de Vienna) Reconsidered
Arnaud Pelletier
KU Leuven
The main justification of the term “radical Enlightenment” comes from the necessity to grasp a number of texts and authors considering that the “mainstream Enlightenment” was too moderate as regards both the criticism of traditional authorities and the promotion of new sciences. But how radical can Enlightenment be without overthrowing itself in some arrogant cynicism that abandons any pretention to Enlightenment? In other words: is not a too radical Enlightenment opposed to the very project of Enlightenment? The aim of this paper is to raise this issue by considering the case of Gabriel Wagner. Gabriel Wagner (about 1660 - about 1717) obviously shared many characteristic features with radical Enlightenment thinkers. He taught the (crypto-Spinozist) doctrine that the world itself is God and that everything happens according to pure necessity and without any consideration of the good. He rejected the belief in the soul and, as he told Leibniz, he intended to destroy the whole metaphysics and to replace the scholastic logics with the new, real sciences that inspired his pseudonym ( Realis de Vienna ). Finally, he contested the two key figures that are at the roots of German Enlightenment: on one side, he attacked Christian Thomasius in all his publications and, on the other side, he resisted Leibniz who tried to divert him from his “dangerous opinions”. This resistance is at best displayed in the written obligational dispute about six philosophical theses that he pursued with Leibniz in 1698. The manuscripts of this dispute are still partly unpublished and reveal at best how Wagner refuses to follow Leibniz’s analysis of the concepts at stake, among others the concepts of space and of world’s contingency. The investigation of Wagner’s defence of world’s necessity – as well as of other unpublished manuscripts defending that “space is the soul of the world” – will be the occasion to address the issue of his radicality: does Wagner advocate a purist form of Enlightenment that Leibniz’s Enlightenment cannot (under-) stand? Or does he display a form of arrogant cynicism – according to Z. v. Uffenbach’s expression – that goes beyond the very project of Enlightenment and ultimately amounts to a form of Counter-Enlightenment?
Hume and Spinoza on Imagination: Evaluating Ruptures in the Enlightenment
Nastassja Pugliese
University of Georgia
Jonathan Israel gave a new strength to the studies of Early modernity with his thesis of a Radical Enlightenment. The thesis main claim is that there is a distinction between a moderate enlightenment characterized, among others, by the philosophies of Kant and Hume, and a radical enlightenment that has its origin in the philosophy of Spinoza. One way of evaluating Israel’s thesis is to try to disprove it, showing the lack of evidence for the radical enlightenment. Another
28 way is to investigate whether Spinoza’s philosophy endures the test of radicalness. Since lack of evidence is a negative proof pointing to a void or an absence, this method of evaluation is insufficient as a proof strategy. Also, it disregards the thorough historical work offered by Israel in his book Radical Enlightenment . The second method is more fascinating because it allows one to check whether the philosophy of Spinoza deserves the place in the history of philosophy that Israel gives him, so this is how this investigation will proceed. In this paper I will propose a test to check whether Spinoza’s theory of knowledge is radical, that is, whether his theory is capable of a ground-breaking or paradigmatic change in the field of epistemology. In order to do that, I will compare the Hume’s and Spinoza’s concept of imagination. Hume’s theory of imagination is at the core of his mitigated scepticism and although it is rarely studied as central in his theory of knowledge, a few commentators recognize it as the “supreme Humean faculty” (Streminger, Salmon). Spinoza’s theory of imagination, on the other hand, has been commonly studied as a minor thought process that leads to error. However, few recent commentators (Aphun, Mignini) interpret imagination in Spinoza as a positive power that leads to higher kinds of knowledge and enhance human’s capacity for active emotions. In this paper, I will use Hume as a paradigmatic case of a moderate conceptualization, that is, a concept that retains most of the influence of former philosophies and is still under the umbrella of the theories of representation of the XVII and XVIII century. Afterwards, I will describe and evaluate Spinoza’s theory of imagination looking for the degrees or levels of separation between his understanding of imagination and Hume’s. This analysis is going to work as a case-study for the thesis of a radical enlightenment and the goal of the paper is to try to find out a principle of radical change in Spinoza’s theory of imagination that makes it distinct in nature from other early modern theories. The topic of imagination plays a special role in this context because it only until recently that the problem of imagination has been recognized as an important question in epistemology.
The inner-light and the Process of Religious Rationalization in the Dutch Collegiants
Rosa Ricci
Universität Leipzig
In observing the big picture of the Radical Enlightenment, the themes of tolerance, equality and rationality represent the dominants dyes. With a second and attentive look it is possible to discover the multiple nuances of these concepts and ask oneself about their provenience and development. The term Enlightenment is the consequence of a long religious debate about the idea of light and its rational and mystical implications. This term achieves its gradual secularization only in the 18 th century, while, only a century earlier, the religious field was a battleground for the formulation of the term light . In the 17 th century, the exceptional freedom and tolerance, which distinguished the United Provinces from all other European Countries and its lively religious life, generated a religious movement like the Collegiants. The intention of my speech is to focus on this particular moment of the early Enlightenment in order to grasp the first formulation of the distinction between a purely religious understanding of the light and its progressive rationalization and secularization. Catching the
29 nature of this change can be useful not only to describe the radical roots of the term Enlightenment , but also to understand which role religious movement plays in this shift. The reflection about the inner light and the blend between rational and mystical elements is present in most of Collegiants’ texts. We find mystical elements tied to rationalism in the "moderate spiritualism” of the Korte Verhandeling by Galenus Abrahamsz and in Boreel's Concatenatio aurea christiana where the author describes the rational route to follow to reach a mystical and constant union with God. The radical dispute about inner light with the Quakers changes the Collegiants' approach to this theme. The pamphlet that - more than others - forces this passage leaning in favor of the rational vision is Balling’s Het licht op den Kandelaar. In my speech, I shall analyse this pamphlet, its Cartesian and Spinozian influences, and I'll present it as an outcome of the Collegiants’ debate about rationalism and religion. This debate was both internal (with the Bredenburgsche Twisten ) and external to the movement manifesting itself in the preoccupation with discerning between an affective (sentiment of faith) and a rational conception of religion. From these discussions emerges a fundamental question about the way to consider religion: as an obedience machine that applies and develops its power on human sentiments and irrationality or as a rational moment. Deeply influenced by Descartes’ philosophy and upset by Spinoza’s consideration about religion and Bible exegesis, the Collegiants, as profoundly religious, didn't seem to will renounce to the irrationality of the faith. It results in an ambivalent and oscillating position between the spiritual and rational choice but also one of the most radical criticisms against Church organization and authority. What follows is one of the most interesting practices of horizontal organization of religious life. The history of this movement, far from being marginal, proposes an actual and pressing theme: how is it possible to reach rationality after appealing to a means that reproduces emotional impulse.
Between Spinozism and Materialism: Buddeus’ Place in the Early German Enlightenment
Paola Rumore
University of Turin
The paper focuses on the role played by the Lutheran theologian Johann Franz Buddeus (1667- 1729) in the struggle of the early German Enlightenment against the radical trends represented by Spinozists and freethinkers, paying a special attention to the question of materialism. General aim of the paper is to cast light on one aspect of the strong reaction of German early Enlightenment against radical thinking. Buddeus, one of the most influential representatives of the Thomasian eclectic, plays indeed a peculiar role within this struggle; he is one of the main pioneers of the German opposition to Spinozism (and thereby to atheism and materialism), but he is at the same time charged with patrocinium materialismi by his main philosophical opponent, i.e. Christian Wolff ( Ausführliche Nachricht , 1726, § 208). The paper aims therefore at clarifying this apparent inconsistency in two steps. 1. The first section presents very briefly Buddeus’ main criticisms against Spinozism, both to be found in his Dissertatio de Spinozismo ante Spinozam (1701) – a historical comparison between the main theses of pantheism and the bases of ancient atheism – and in the later Theses
30 theologicae de atheismo et superstitione (1717; German 1717, French 1740) – where he states that, unlike ancient atheism, Spinozism presents a systematic exposition of atheistic convictions by means of an original method. In Buddeus’ understanding, Spinozism involves a form of fatalism, which precludes any possibility of a free will, as well as an evident inclination to materialism, that he considers one of the dogmas of atheism. In this view Spinozism represents a danger, both for morality and religion. 2. The second section focuses more closely on the problem of materialism and presents Buddeus’ refutation of this philosophical position. The Theses contain the first sketch of a history of materialism in modern western philosophy – from Dicaearchus, Epicurus, Democritus and Lucretius up to Hobbes and Spinoza – even if their author doesn’t possess yet terms as “materialismus/materialista”, which will appear in the German philosophical terminology only a few years later, with Kohler’s translation of the correspondence between Leibniz and Samuel Clarke, prefaced by Wolff (1720). And it’s precisely within the harsh controversy between Wolff and the pietistic theologians of Halle that Buddeus opposes against Wolff’s fatalism, with its related certainty about the necessity of essences of things, the thesis of the impossibility to determinate their real internal constitution. Buddeus’ opinion that it is impossible to know the real essence of things comes from Locke’s Essay , and orients the debate with Wolff on the notorious hypothesis of a thinking matter . Buddeus rejects Wolff’s logical and ontological principle of sufficient reason, which is meant to be the ground of the dangerous nexus rerum fatalis , as well as the basis of the belief that a matter which thinks would constitute a contradiction in terms. On the other front, Wolff rejects Buddeus’ thesis of the impossibility of knowing the real essences of things, which implies that God could have provided matter with the capacity of thinking without falling in any contradiction.
The Transgressive Enlightenment: The Critique of the Present and the Sadeian Order
Julio Seoane-Pinilla
Universidad de Alcaná
My aim in this article is simply to situate Sade among enlightenment thinkers. To do so, I offer an “innocent” reading of his works which does not fall prey to the allure of their marginality or eccentricity but rather stakes a claim for them as one more key to understanding our past (and, perhaps, our present). In short, my aim is introduce a philosopher who, transgressor or not, provides interesting insights into our own modernity. Although Sade is an atheist and a materialist that is not why he is interesting; his interest stems from the proposals he makes on the basis of those assumptions. The fact of the matter is that if we read Sade simply, of course we notice that we are in the presence of an atheist and a materialist; but above all we are aware of someone who having rejected God and decided that our life must be simply human. That should be the point of departure for any reading of Sade, for with no place in the Cosmos and in the belief that Nature is the mere materialisation of chaos and chance, all we are left with is life—a life that is realised in the pleasure of living it, in pleasure, in so far as a life without pleasure is not worth living. That is what sex is, and that is why we are atheists: not because God prohibits sexual pleasure, but because sex is life lived in the present with no thoughts at all for what might lie beyond.
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In the present? Yes, Sade affirms that all time is present because life has only to subject itself to its current and continuous movement. The Sadean libertine’s concern to construct the tale of himself is not to unite past and future in one life but, more simply, to tell himself in the present by means of a biography which is to recount one event after another exhaustively. Time and again we have no choice but to expose ourselves to coupling (which never means synthesis) with no chance of finding repose in a definitive (auto)biography. Nonetheless, and despite everything, the subject is not erased for, on the contrary, dispersion is not just disorder and fragmentation; it is an on -going struggle to ensure that things do not cease to happen: it does not matter what those things are or what they are like as long as they happen. The Sadean narrative is tremendously human: one life cannot be composed therefrom; but we might have scope to try and tell what happens to us each time. Thus is the effort to life humanly; and that is why the Sadean hero never ceases to talk. Because Sade claim that word and action are the same thing, then libertine’s speech is the continuous life of sex.
The Emergence of the “Radical Enlightenment” in Humanist Scholarship
Frederik Stjernfelt
Aarhus University
It is often claimed humanists do not – as opposed to scientists – aim at general explanations in their scholarship (cf. the Neo-Kantian idea of ‘nomothetic’ versus ‘idiographic’ sciences). This paper takes Radical Enlightenment as a counterexample – an important general concept developed in recent humanist scholarship. The paper traces the appearance of the notion of ‘Radical Enlightenment’ as a hypostatic abstraction – an abstraction given the shape of an autonomous object of thought, referring, in turn, to a particular aspect of historical reality. It follows the rise and development of the notion of ‘Radical Enlightenment’ during the nineteenth century, finally to coalesce around the idea that it refers to a specific undercurrent of Enlightenment more broadly. Once this reference is fixed, the scene is set for further investigation of and struggle around the concept. One concerns its reference: where did it take place, when did it occur, which persons and institutions may be subsumed under the headline of Radical Enlightenment? Another concerns its meaning: which philosophical and political positions should be counted among those characteristic for Radical Enlightenment? Institutionally, such disputes cash out in terms of 1) book titles (Margaret Jacob, Jonathan Israel, etc.), 2) conferences (like the present ones), 3) new editions of central figures (Israel and Silverthorne's Tractatus edition), 4) special studies addressing individual figures now reinterpreted under the headline of Radical Enlightenment (Nadler 2000 on Spinoza, Anderson 2000 on B. Franklin, Socher 2006 on Maimon, Mulsow 2011 on Reimarus, etc.), 5) special studies addressing particular aspects of Radical Enlightenment (determinism, Spinozism, atheism, etc.), 6) the comparison of Radical Enlightenment with related or opposed currents (moderate Enlightenment, radical protestantism, philology, atheism, freemasonry, Oriental Enlightenment, radical feminism, etc.); 7) the means of spreading and communicating Radical Enlightenment (republic of letters, book studies Darnton 1995, Goldgar 1995), 7) the actualization of Radical Enlightenment with reference to our time (Bronner (2006), Reclaiming
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The Enlightenment ; Israel (2009), A Revolution of the Mind ), 8) critical Auseinandersetzungen with proposed descriptions of Radical Enlightenment (referring to the beliefs of a particular doctrine or rather to loosely-connected currents of thought with remote family resemblances only), 9) critical attacks on the very notion (Mulsow (2012) proposing the sociological notion of “Wissensprekariat” as a counter-candidate). All these important developments in our understanding of Enlightenment Age thought (and its repercussions in the understanding of Antiquity and Medieval thought as well as later intellectual history) are made possible by the initial crystallization of bundles of empirical observations into the abstract notion of ‘Radical Enlightenment’. Thus, it forms an important actual case for the relevance of abstractions in the humanities – in itself an Enlightenment standard vis-à-vis the insistence of counter-enlighteners on the terror inherent in abstract and universal concepts.
Tzedekah : The True Religion of Spinoza’s Tractatus
Anya Topolski
KU Leuven
It should come as no surprise that the meaning of justice is a significant source of debate amongst philosophers, politicians and activists as the word itself, at least in its Hebraic origin, ,tzedekah) צדק has quite a convoluted conceptual history. It is for this reason that the notion of tzadik, tzedek), most often translated as justice, righteousness, charity, or loving-kindness is fundamental to any initiative that seeks to investigate the ideas central to Jewish thought. In this .as the ultimate end of true religion צדק contribution, I would like to focus on Spinoza’s use of “That the worship of God and obedience to him consist only in Justice and Loving-kindness, or in the love of towards one’s neighbor” (Curley - Jan 2013: XIV, 22, 197). While several Spinoza scholars have considered the connection between justice and charity, it is only by re-connecting referred to explicitly , צדק these Latinized notions, cited 16 times in the TTP, to the Hebraic root 4 times in the TTP, that one can make proper sense of the meaning of true religion. Contrary to common readings of Spinoza that equate true religion with a purified Christian morality, I would like to firmly root the notion of true religion in terms of Jewish philosophical theology. At the ,which takes Spinoza as its Virgil , צדק same time, this exploration of the richness of the notion of ,to the wider debates on global justice צדק also has as its goal to re-introduce the Judaic notion of redistribution, charity and political action. In order to define true religion, Spinoza proposes to separate it “from philosophic speculation and reduce to those very few and very simple doctrines Christ taught his followers” (Curley - Jan 2013: XI, 22, III/158). Did Jesus teach his followers to act according to the doctrine of tzedekah or is Spinoza once again engaging in esoteric teachings? Or should we read the Tractatus charitably and interpret this claim as Spinoza’s way of telling us that he defines true religion to be tzedekah as it was understood in the time of Jesus . What this would entail is a clear separation of this term from its previous etymological roots in the Torah, as well its Judaic or Pauline interpretations so prominent in the Reformation debates on justice and charity. The whole foundation of true religion is intended to encourage one to love G-d and the other as oneself, articulating the latter by means of charity and justice, or more precisely by means of
33 tzedekah , “which is everywhere commended in the highest degree in both Testaments” (Curley - Jan 2013: 166). It is my claim that Spinoza’s true religion is inspired by the Judaic notion of tzedekah and it is thus paramount to explore the richness of this notion for a proper understanding of the TTP as well as for the notion of true religion which has a philosophical history that goes far beyond the 17 th century. ,s usage in Spinoza’s notion of true religion. According to Spinoza’ צדק In part 1, I situate provides a solid foundation for true religion because it can be easily emulated. This, as צדק chapter thirteen aims to explain, is exactly what purpose it serves; it is a model for obedience. Thus while exact knowledge of God is not shared by all, obedience, “the knowledge of his divine justice and charity [ tzedekah ]” (158), is. Obedience is thus an easily imitable non-philosophical , צדק understanding of tzedekah . In part 2, I consider the etymological and semantic roots of which will already provide us with a first connection between justice and charity. In addition, clearly connects to Spinoza’s notion of blessedness, and the notions of reward דקצ this usage of in the Second Temple Period and צדק and merit in the Torah . In part 3, I look at the usage of specifically in the book of Daniel and the Pauline hermeneutic. The major contention with regard is a relationship between humans or between humans and G-d, a צדק to this period is whether debate that later reappears in the TTP. In part 4, I consider – as it relates to Spinoza’s usage of the term, the contributions of Rashi and Rambam, contributions that have been overlooked in the Spinoza scholarship and that help connect true religion to the question of redistributive justice in the period just prior to the publication צדק and righteousness. In part 5, I look at the usage of of the TTP and specifically the controversial debates concerning indulgences that led Luther to reignite the controversy between works and faith in Paul, a controversy that centred upon a is צדק The purpose of this historical exploration of the notion of . צדק proper understanding of both to reconnect Spinoza’s notion of true religion to its Judaic root, and to re-open the door to a . צדק reconsideration of the richness of the notion of
The Temple of Jerusalem in Picture and Detail: Biblical Antiquarianism and the Construction of Radical Enlightenment in the Dutch Republic, 1670-1700
Jetze Touber
Utrecht University
Biblical criticism was part and parcel of the Radical Enlightenment. 6 Yet the biblical criticism of philosophers such as Lodewijk Meyer and Spinoza was methodologically heterogeneous, branching off in metaphysics, textual criticism and biblical history. 7 Accordingly, it provoked variegated responses in all of these areas. In this paper we explore how one seemingly harmless strand of biblical scholarship, the antiquarian investigation of the Bible, got caught up in hermeneutical debates engendered by radical critics. We follow a discussion on the Temple of
6 J. Israel, Radical enlightenment. Philosophy and the making of modernity 1650-1750 (Oxford: OUP, 2001), pp. 197-217; idem, Enlightenment contested. Philosophy, modernity, and the emancipation of man 1670-1752 (Oxford: OUP, 2006), pp. 409-435. 7 R. Bordoli, Ragione e Scrittura tra Descartes e Spinoza: saggio sulla ‘Philosophia S. Scripturae Interpres’ di Lodewijk Meyer e sulla sua recezione (Milan: FrancoAngeli, 1997); J. Samuel Preus, Spinoza and the irrelevance of biblical authority (Cambridge: CUP, 2001); S. James, Spinoza on philosophy, religion, and politics: The Theologico-political treatise (Oxford: OUP, 2012). 34
Jerusalem to illustrate how in the second half of the seventeenth century antiquarian studies had the potential to deflate the sacred status of Old Testament Israel. 8 The paper will focus on Willem Goeree (1635-1711), no cleric or academic, but a book trader and dilettante biblical antiquarian. 9 Goeree produced an impressive oeuvre of antiquarian works on the biblical Hebrew Republic, culminating a four volume work in folio on the history of the religion of the Jews of the Old Testament. 10 Goeree’s piety notwithstanding, his prolific editorial activities aroused disgruntlement among some of the Reformed shepherds of the soul. The artisan became involved in a dispute about the Temple of Solomon, initiated by two academically trained theologians. Goeree’s contribution, capitalizing on his expertise in architecture, went down badly as it seemed to deny God the design of the Temple. The reconstruction of the Temple of Jerusalem is not an obvious issue to become associated with radical biblical criticism. For Spinoza, for instance, the appearance of the temple would have been irrelevant to the salvific content of the Bible, as testified by the Tractatus Theologico-Politicus (1670). 11 However, I will show how in the final decades of the seventeenth century Reformed theologians feared that even the contextualization of the architectural reality of the Old Testament Jews would be grist to the mill of spinozists and likeminded atheists. Imprudent application of the knowledge of pagan culture would clear the way for godless propositions concerning state, church and religion. The ‘Temple-affair’ reveals that in the decades leading up to 1700, historical research into biblical materials was easily besmirched by the catch-all charge of Spinozism. My paper illustrates three aspects of biblical history and antiquarianism: (1) the ever more elaborate study of biblical history and antiquities, while stemming from the pious intent to gain better insight in the world of the Old Testament, inadvertently laid bare problems that compromised the conception of the Jews as a unique, divinely elected people; (2) delicate and controversial questions surrounding biblical history and antiquities became tainted by association
8 In the words of Jonathan Sheehan: ‘Antiquarian scholarship had the potential both to erode and to buttress the authority of Scripture and, at various times, served both functions.’, J. Sheehan, The Enlightenment Bible (Princeton, NJ, 2005), p. 23. 9 Mulder, ‘Goeree (Willem)’ in: NNBW, VII, cc. 479-480; E.O.G. Haitsma Mulier, G.A.C. van der Lem, Repertorium van geschiedschrijvers in Nederland 1500-1800 (The Hague: Nederlands Historisch Genootschap, 1990), 152-153. For his father: ‘Goeree, Hugo Willem’ in: A.J. van der Aa e.a., Biographisch woordenboek der Nederlanden (Haarlem: J.J. van Brederode, 1852-1878) VII, pp. 250-251. Willem Goeree has been studied mainly as a theorist of architecture and graphical art impressive, at the expense of his impressive production in biblical history and antiquarian studies: C. van den Heuvel, ‘Willem Goeree (1635-1711) en de ontwikkeling van een algemene architectuurtheorie in de Nederlanden’, Bulletin: bulletin van de Koninklijke Nederlandse Oudheidkundige Bond 96:5 (1997), pp. 154-176, 188; G.M. van de Roemer ‘Regulating the arts: Willem Goeree versus Samuel van Hoogstraten’ in: Eric Jorink and Bart Ramakers ed., Art and science in the early modern Netherlands = Kunst en wetenschap in de vroegmoderne Nederlanden (Zwolle: WBOOKS, 2011), pp. 184-207. For Goeree as a libertine with spinozist leanings: Inger Leemans, ‘De weg naar de hel is geplaveid met boeken over de bijbel. Vrijgeest en veelschrijver Willem Goeree (1635-1711)’, Nederlandse Letterkunde 9 (2004), pp. 255-273. 10 Petrus Cunaeus, De republyk der Hebreen, of gemeenebest der joden , trans. Hugo Willemz. Goeree, ed. Willem Goeree (Amsterdam: W. Goeree, 1682); Hugo Willemsz. Goeree, De republyk der Hebreen, of gemeenebest der joden [...] vervolgd op de drie boeken van de heer Petrus Cunaeus , ed. Willem Goeree (Amsterdam: W. Goeree, 1683); Hugo Willemsz. Goeree, Derde deel, of tweede vervolgh op de Republyk der Hebreen, of gemeenebest der joden , ed. Willem Goeree (Amsterdam: W. Goeree bookseller, 1683); Willem Goeree, Voor-bereidselen tot de bybelsche wysheid, en gebruik der heilige en kerklijke historien (Amsterdam: W. Goeree, 1690); Willem Goeree, Mosaize historie der Hebreeuwse kerke (Amsterdam: W. and D. Goeree, 1700). 11 Spinoza did repeatedly point to the charged significance of the temple for the Jews’ collective identity (e.g. Spinoza, Tractatus Theologico-Politicus (Amsterdam: J. Rieuwertsz, 1670), pp. 194, 203), but details such as the dimensions of its walls or the number of its antechambers were outside the purview of his biblical criticism. 35 with Spinoza’s historicizing approach of the Bible; (3) by the end of the seventeenth century discussions about the nature of the religion and the holy texts of the Old Testament Jews, far from being abstruse scholarly debates, were carried on in the vernacular by dilettantes, who revelled in novel and audacious approaches to Antiquity.
Marked Subjectivities, Or the View from Somewhere
Marc Van den Bossche
Free University of Brussels (VUB)
The reception of Immanuel Kant’s Beantwortung der Frage: Was ist Aufklärung? by Michel Foucault in his Qu'est-ce que les Lumières? is remarkable for several reasons. Given Foucault’s criticisms of the Enlightenment in general and his criticism of Kant in particular, it is surprising that he, in the aforementioned essay, seems to want to inscribe himself into a Kantian tradition. First, I will consider the problems that Foucault’s interpretation of the Enlightenment engender. Second, I focus on what elements from the Enlightenment tradition Foucault wants to preserve and how he intends to apply them in a positive way. In a third step, I wish to criticize the interpretation of Foucault’s work as such from a contemporary feminist perspective. This will lead me to a conception of radical Enlightenment that starts from the idea of ‘a view from somewhere’. 1. Michel Foucault distinguishes two forms of Kantian criticism. The first he sees present in the three Critiques, and he regards it as an analytics of truth. The perspective here is transcendental and looks for universal structures of knowledge or of moral action. The question here, as is well-known, is which limits cannot be surpassed in this quest. In short: Foucault rejects the possibility of universal claims to truth and universal values. 2. The second form of Kantian critique Foucault describes as an ontology of the present or an ontology of the self. It is about a search for possible transformations in the present. Foucault sees Kant as the first philosopher who views the present as a philosophical problem and who questions, from there on, the role of the philosopher. Foucault, then, problematizes the contingency of how we became who we are, in other words, how we have become subjectified. He goes on to demand the possibility of a different thinking and acting and a different conception of subjectivity. This I’d like to describe as a radical form of Enlightenment and as a sharpening of Kants Sapere aude . 3. Feminists like Nancy Hartsock review some of the criticisms of Foucault of a particular interpretation of the Enlightenment. They also consider the ‘God-trick’ as problematic, i.e., the idea that there exists a view from nowhere, and they formulate a critique of the idea that there is a conception of reason that could, except for being disembedded, also be disembodied, and that could lead us to objective knowledge. Even though this is a criticism that Foucault would endorse wholeheartedly, he would not have gone far enough according to this feminist perspective. Or at least: he would have had no alternative. His criticism of the idea that one can see everything from nowhere makes him decide that there is nothing to see at all. His attitude, like that of Rorty, is described by Hartsock as satiric and parodic. Foucault sees knowledge as a product of power and as a way of subjectifying. Ultimately this means, however, that Foucault keeps holding on to one form of epistemology, especially the masculine and Eurocentric version
36 thereof. Hartsock, on the contrary, argues for a plurality of epistemologies that depart from marked subjectivities, and strives for local forms of emancipation. From this I wish to conclude that this view, which takes into account minority views of all kinds, is consistently in line with a radical Enlightenment thinking, in which the critical questioning of the ontology of actuality takes central stage.
Enlightenment Discourses of Natural Equality and Racial Classification
Devin Vartija
Max Planck Institute for Human Development
This paper explores the tension between the development of the modern racial classificatory system and the notion of universal, natural equality during the eighteenth-century Enlightenment. It traces these ideas in four encyclopedias: Ephraim Chambers’ 1728 Cyclopaedia published in London, the 1753 Supplement to Chambers’ work, Denis Diderot and Jean le Rond d’Alembert’s Encyclopédie (1751-1772) published in Paris and Neuchâtel, and Bartolomeo De Felice’s Encyclopédie d’Yverdon (1770-1780) published in the Swiss town of Yverdon. These encyclopedias were closely linked and contributed significantly to the cross-national communication of knowledge in the burgeoning eighteenth-century Republic of Letters. Comparing these works chronologically reveals that the ‘science of racial classification’ flourished toward the end of the eighteenth century, as European naturalists such as Buffon and Blumenbach applied the systematic classificatory methodology of natural history to humanity. This discourse was often imbued with notions of the superiority of Europeans and the inferiority of all others. However, the growth of the idea of universal, natural equality, as well as the widespread idea of the influence of climate on racial differences prevented the development of a rigid and immutable racial hierarchy in these influential eighteenth-century encyclopedias. To manage the immense size of the primary sources consulted, this paper focuses on European conceptions of Africans and Americans in particular. The tension between the development of modern ‘racial thinking’ and the secular notion of natural equality is placed centre-stage. Articles on specific groups of indigenous peoples in Africa and the Americas are given significant attention, as well as articles such as ‘Humanité,’ ‘Égalité naturelle,’ and ‘Droit humaine.’ Entries on slavery and the slave-trade, where issues of race and equality were particularly pertinent, are also thoroughly analysed. The ways in which notions of equality (and therefore inequality) informed the discourse on non-European societies and peoples inform the present analysis. Each encyclopedia stemmed from a distinct religious or philosophical position, and thus this research allows for an investigation of the influence of ‘Radical’ and ‘Moderate’ Enlightenment views on understandings of race and equality in the eighteenth century. This affords an additional contribution of the present paper to contemporary debates among Enlightenment studies scholars. Ephraim Chambers’ Cyclopaedia and Supplement favoured deism, Diderot’s Encyclopédie had an atheistic philosophical core, and De Felice’s encyclopaedia gave prominence to liberal Protestant theology. Some historians, such as Jonathan Israel, argue that the eighteenth century anti-colonial, anti-racist critique could only be coherently derived from philosophers committed to a monist (Spinozist), atheistic philosophy.
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Others, on the contrary, argue that the collapse of a Genesis-inspired anthropology during the Enlightenment fuelled the growth of ‘philosophically respectable’ racial theories amongst atheist materialists. In contrast to these historians, the present findings demonstrate that religious and philosophical beliefs and viewpoints did not correspond to a particular racial worldview in any simple or direct way, although considerations of doctrinal preferences were nonetheless important. This systematic investigation of modern discourses of equality and race adds a new perspective on the political and philosophical legacies of the Enlightenment.
Modern Greek Enlightenment: Radical Enlightenment per se
George N. Vlahakis
Open Hellenic University
During the so called long eighteenth century Greek scholars formed gradually an intellectual movement with particular strength and influence among the populations of South-eastern Europe. This movement arose as a response to an imperative need for the revival of the humanities and the sciences in the region which was still under the political administration of the Ottoman Empire. During the twentieth century pronounced historians of ideas called this movement as Modern Greek or Neo-Hellenic Enlightenment (M.G.E.). More recent studies have been proved that M.G.E. was not uniform and isotropic but was consisted by several currents with distinctive characteristics. Nevertheless a central aim of the scholars who played a significant role in the context of M.G.E. was the construction, somehow from its very beginning, of a Greek or better a Hellenic national identity among the Orthodox Christian and Greek speaking populations of South Eastern Europe. In addition, several social, philosophical and ideological problems became subject of discussion, sometimes leading to interesting and ardent debates. Debates which took place not only between members of the M.G.E. but also between Greek Enlighteners and those who defended more conservative or even counter-enlightenment positions and were mainly high rank clerics or people closely connected with them. This situation was, among others, a factor for the formation of what we define as Radical Modern Greek Enlightenment (R.M.G.E.), Radical having the connotation given to the word if connected to the Enlightenment by Jonathan I. Israel in his relevant publications. In our study we aim to give a rough but adequate picture of R.M.G.E and its role compared to the mainstream M.G.E. Of particular interest would be to see the arguments of its members on subjects related with science and religion, especially if we have in mind that religion, expressed mainly by the Greek Orthodox Church, had a completely different role in the life of the people than that in Europe. Radical Greek Enlighteners on the one hand criticized severely religion in philosophical and social terms and on the other supported strongly the materialistic character of science. Naturally their sources were the works of European materialists for this reason they were accused by the official cleric circles as heretics or even atheists. Two case studies will be examined the works of Iossipos Moissiodax (1730-1800) and Christodoulos Pamplekis (1733-1793). They are characterized of a polemic writing against the rotten and vicious past and present of the society and declare the need for a continuous fight for a better future. Usually, the radicals loose the battle and the Greek radical enlighteners failed to be the exception to the rule. But how could be winners when even the moderate mainstream Enlightenment defeated as well?In any case
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Radical Modern Greek Enlightenment did not condemn to oblivion, though this was the intention of its rivals. It played a significant role in the context of the Modern Greek Enlightenment and still it is considered as one powerful pool of alternative philosophical and ideological ideas even after the establishment of the independent Greek State.
Late enlightenment materialism in Germany. The case of Christoph Meiners and Michael Hißmann
Falk Wunderlich
Johannes Gutenberg-Universität Mainz
The paper deals with two German materialist philosophers, Christoph Meiners (1747-1810) and Michael Hißmann (1752-1784) who have hardly been studied in detail so far. Unusual for materialists, they were able to obtain academic positions, both at the Georgia Augusta university in Göttingen where Hißmann was first a student of Meiners and closely collaborated with him later. The image of Meiners has somewhat been distorted by the fact that he became a conservative or reactionary in later years and also returned to substance dualism in his 1786 Grundriß der Seelenlehre . But this is not true of his earlier years as his 1776 article “Psychologisches Fragment über die Verschiedenheiten des innern Bewustseyns“ demonstrates. Here, he criticizes the common refutations of materialism as well as dualistic understandings of the identity of persons. Hißmann, however, advances his materialism more straightforwardly and systematically. In his Psychologische Versuche (1777), he states: “According to the experiences I rely on I believe I have to assume that our brain is endowed with the power of thought.” (p. 252) His rhetoric is more radical as well, for instance regarding the “silly claims of ignorant church fathers” enlightened Europe has sucessfully overcome (ibid., p. 14). The paper will briefly address the question of how materialism was possible at a university and then concentrate on determining the nature of Meiners’ and Hißmann’s materialism. Despite radical rhetoric, this materialism is restricted to an empiricist basis (common among most 18th century materialists). Hißmann, for instance, states that we have no direct experiential access to the mind, and that there can be no demonstrations regarding its nature but we can only weigh probabilities. With these reservations, though, Hißmann and Meiners do think that the materialist option is the more probable one. I will proceed to argue that Meiners’ and Hißmann’s materialism is a moderate one in the sense that they explicitly hold that materialism does not necessarily deny the immortality of the soul. They consider it possible that there is a material soul separate from the body (and independent of it to some extent). Hißmann argues that God could superadd immortality to such a material soul similar to how he could super-add thought to matter (as Locke had famously argued). Göttingen materialism, thus, is also restricted to the mind-body relationship and not extended to a general materialistic monism: Whereas the soul is probably material, there seem to be no doubt for Meiners and Hißmann that God exists as an almighty, immaterial being. These considerations suggest that Meiners and Hißmann ally themselves more with British materialism than with the French one that is often accompanied with atheism. Numerous reviews both published, as well as Hißmann’s correspondence (where he explicitly subscribes to Socinianism), support this claim and show that Priestley was the most influential philosopher for them, while at
39 the same time they had a rather low opinion on the author of the Système de la nature , still unknown by then.
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List of Participants
Name Affiliation E-mail Page n° Acosta , Emiliano Ghent University [email protected] 12 Chareix , Fabien Université Paris- [email protected] 12 Sorbonne Couto , Patricia Universidade de [email protected] 13 Lisboa DeSantis , Anthony University of South [email protected] 14 Florida Devellennes , University of Kent [email protected] 15 Charles Dijkstra , G.W.H. University of [email protected] 21 Amsterdam Donato , Clorinda California State [email protected] 16 University Ducheyne , Steffen Free University of [email protected] - Brussels (VUB) Geerlings , J.P.T. Radboud University [email protected] 17 Nijmegen Gillen , Ultán Teesside University [email protected] 18 Grigoropoulou , University of Athens [email protected] 19 Vasiliki Henkel , Scott Binghamton [email protected] 20 University Israel , Jonathan I. Institute for Advanced [email protected] 7 Study, Princeton Jagersma , R. University of [email protected] 21 Amsterdam James , David University of [email protected] 22 Warwick Lavaert , Sonja Free University of [email protected] 23 Brussels (VUB) Leask , Ian Dublin City [email protected] 24 University Lord , Beth University of [email protected] 7 Aberdeen MacMillan , Alissa Institute for Advanced [email protected] 24 Study, Toulouse
Macor , Laura A. Università di Padova [email protected] 25 Palmer , Eric Allegheny College [email protected] 26 Pellegrin , Marie- Université Jean [email protected] 27 Frédérique Moulin-Lyon 3 Pelletier , Arnaud KU Leuven [email protected] 28
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Pugliese , Nastassja University of Georgia [email protected] 28 Ricci , Rosa Universität Leipzig [email protected] 29 Rumore , Paola University of Turin [email protected] 30
Schliesser , Eric Ghent University [email protected] 8 Schröder , Winfried Philipps-Universität [email protected] 9 Marburg
Seoane -Pinilla , Universidad de Alcalá [email protected] 31 Julio
Stjernfelt , Frederik Aarhus University [email protected] 32 Topolski , Anya KU Leuven [email protected] 33 Touber , Jetze Utrecht University [email protected] 34 Van Bendegem , Free University of [email protected] - Jean Paul Brussels (VUB) Van Bunge , Wiep Erasmus University [email protected] 9 Rotterdam
Van den Bossche , Free University of [email protected] 36 Marc Brussels (VUB) Vartija , Devin Max Planck Institute [email protected] 37 for Human Development Verstrynge , Karl Free University of [email protected] - Brussels (VUB) Vlahakis , George Hellenic Open [email protected] 38 N. University
Walravens , Else Free University of [email protected] 10 Brussels (VUB) Wunderlich , Falk Johannes Gutenberg- wunder@mpiwg-berlin.mpg.de 39 Universität Mainz
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