Mary Shepherd’s Essays on the Perception of an External Universe

Abstract

A very welcome addition to the Oxford New Histories of Philosophy, this new edition of Shepherd’s 1827 book comprises the lengthy ‘Essay on the Academical or Sceptical Philosophy’ and fourteen short essays, as well as ‘Lady Mary Shepherd’s Metaphysics’ from 1832. Much of the Essays on the Perception of an External Universe depends on the case made in Shepherd’s 1824 Essay on the Relation of Cause and Effect (forthcoming in the series) for the principles that nothing can begin its own existence and that precisely similar effects must have precisely similar causes. Here Shepherd uses them against both Hume and Berkeley to argue that we have knowledge derived from reason of a continuously existing, external, and independent, world. This is the first modern scholarly edition of either of Shepherd’s books, and Antonia LoLordo provides a very helpful explanatory apparatus for approaching the extremely rich, often daunting text. She marks Shepherd’s citations of her earlier writing, tracks down many of Shepherd’s allusions and identifies likely channels for the reception of Kant. Lolordo’s crisply efficient introduction sketches the context for Shepherd’s thought, and takes up her take-no-prisoners critiques of contemporaries and predecessors; her arguments about the existence of the external world, distinguishing dreams from waking experience, and the existence of God; her conceptions of mind, body and the relation between the two; and her understanding of mathematics as a branch of physics, albeit one able to isolate exact similarities for tracing causal necessity. Lolordo points out that it is easy tomake a case for including Shepherd when we seek to expand our philosophical offerings, and she provides several thoughtful suggestions for incorporating the essays into standard classes and discussions. It is true that Shepherd addresses familiar questions in familiarly argumentative ways and against familiar figures. But she offers unexpected constellations of views: while claiming we have absolute consciousness only of our ‘sensations’, she understands them as irregular effects arising from the union of real, necessary, independent and certain causes. She examines, almost phenomenologically, our perceptions of motion and of our bodily limits, of the coordination of our perceptions with others, and of the way our temporal expectations shape our perceptions, but understands them to draw out necessary relations contained in our sensations.We see in Lolordo’s edition just how little Shepherd fits into the usual narratives of philosophy’s history—and just how fruitfully she challenges them.