Pub Date : 2023-02-02DOI: 10.1080/10848770.2023.2174513
O. Harman
This book should have been called “The Penis Book.” Sure, there are a few clitorises here and there, a few vaginas, but all in all, it’s about penises. Giant penises and tiny penises, singing penises and grabbing penises. Penises and more penises and still more penises galore. It’s an entertaining book. And a beautiful one. When it comes to the male member, exacting pencil illustrations by Julie Terrazzoni (alongside lush color illustrations of the implicated animals) help readers understand through their senses just how ingenious a designer Nature is. Take for example, the four-headed penis of the echidna. A cousin of the platypus, this ancient creature combines reptilian and mammalian features, like all monotremes, and is both oviparous and lactates. When erect, two of the male’s glans draw back, allowing the remaining two engorged ones to fit perfectly into the female. As with the twisting doubleheaded penis of the Common European Adder whose females writhe during sex, the locking mechanism explains why the ensuing mating is so prolonged—30 to 180 minutes. By comparison, we humans perform the deed on average only six minutes. Or what about the two-meter-long prehensile elephant penis? Sometimes referred to as a second trunk, males can use it to scratch their bellies and pick fruit from trees. By comparison the 16.5-inch-long Argentine lake duck penis may seem diminutive, but not if you consider that the duck’s entire body is 12 inches long. That’s peanuts compared to Darwin’s favorite animal, the barnacle, whose penis is fully eight times longer than itself. Attached as it is to a rock or back of a whale or hull of a ship, immobile, that kind of length can come in handy. Trunk shaped (the elephant and tapir), corkscrew shaped (the Muscovy duck), gutter shaped (the crocodile), or otherwise shaped like a jaw (in the fish Phallostethus cuulong, as detailed in the chapter “A Literal Dickhead”), penises in nature are a veritable smorgasbord. But penises don’t just come in different shapes and sizes; they also sport different strategies. The Great Argonaut, Argonauta argo, closely related to squid and octopus, has eight tentacles, but the third on the left is actually a penis. His entire body just 1–2 centimeters long as compared to the female’s 40–50 centimeter stature, the male uses its penis wisely by detaching it once it has crawled into the female’s hatch, an ingenious
{"title":"Is There Really ‘Nothing Unnatural in Nature’?","authors":"O. Harman","doi":"10.1080/10848770.2023.2174513","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/10848770.2023.2174513","url":null,"abstract":"This book should have been called “The Penis Book.” Sure, there are a few clitorises here and there, a few vaginas, but all in all, it’s about penises. Giant penises and tiny penises, singing penises and grabbing penises. Penises and more penises and still more penises galore. It’s an entertaining book. And a beautiful one. When it comes to the male member, exacting pencil illustrations by Julie Terrazzoni (alongside lush color illustrations of the implicated animals) help readers understand through their senses just how ingenious a designer Nature is. Take for example, the four-headed penis of the echidna. A cousin of the platypus, this ancient creature combines reptilian and mammalian features, like all monotremes, and is both oviparous and lactates. When erect, two of the male’s glans draw back, allowing the remaining two engorged ones to fit perfectly into the female. As with the twisting doubleheaded penis of the Common European Adder whose females writhe during sex, the locking mechanism explains why the ensuing mating is so prolonged—30 to 180 minutes. By comparison, we humans perform the deed on average only six minutes. Or what about the two-meter-long prehensile elephant penis? Sometimes referred to as a second trunk, males can use it to scratch their bellies and pick fruit from trees. By comparison the 16.5-inch-long Argentine lake duck penis may seem diminutive, but not if you consider that the duck’s entire body is 12 inches long. That’s peanuts compared to Darwin’s favorite animal, the barnacle, whose penis is fully eight times longer than itself. Attached as it is to a rock or back of a whale or hull of a ship, immobile, that kind of length can come in handy. Trunk shaped (the elephant and tapir), corkscrew shaped (the Muscovy duck), gutter shaped (the crocodile), or otherwise shaped like a jaw (in the fish Phallostethus cuulong, as detailed in the chapter “A Literal Dickhead”), penises in nature are a veritable smorgasbord. But penises don’t just come in different shapes and sizes; they also sport different strategies. The Great Argonaut, Argonauta argo, closely related to squid and octopus, has eight tentacles, but the third on the left is actually a penis. His entire body just 1–2 centimeters long as compared to the female’s 40–50 centimeter stature, the male uses its penis wisely by detaching it once it has crawled into the female’s hatch, an ingenious","PeriodicalId":55962,"journal":{"name":"European Legacy-Toward New Paradigms","volume":"28 1","pages":"389 - 393"},"PeriodicalIF":0.2,"publicationDate":"2023-02-02","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"41415852","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2023-02-02DOI: 10.1080/10848770.2023.2174287
Michael J. Neth
Jeffrey Cox’s new book takes as its guiding thesis the rejection of the widely-held view of Wordsworth (1770-1850) as a poet whose only substantial work was produced from 1798 until about 1808. This account was fathered by Wordsworth’s Victorian reviver Matthew Arnold in the Preface to his edition of Wordsworth’s poems (1879) and accepted tacitly or explicitly by generations of important critics since then. Cox adduces a recent example in Kenneth Johnston’s well-known 1998 The Hidden Wordsworth: Poet, Lover, Rebel, Spy, in which we read that “Wordsworth the Romantic poet ‘died’ when he read the recently completed Prelude to Coleridge in January 1807.” The problem with this notion is that Wordsworth―the longest-lived of the major Romantic versifiers―survived another forty-two years after 1808 and continued to write new poems until eight years before his death. And, though not the focus of Cox’s book, there is the added fact that during his last four decades Wordsworth constantly, one might almost say obsessively, returned to his earlier poetry, in many instances creating multiple revisions. Posterity has not been kind to most of these, for in later years Wordsworth was given to altering the strongest poems of his “golden prime,” as Arnold called it, by diluting their religious nonconformism in sometimes painfully discursive ways. Cox aims to examine in detail many of the original poems from the later, post-1808 volumes published by Wordsworth. He contextualizes them by arguing that they contain challenges to the poetry of the writers of the so-called Cockney school (Keats, Leigh Hunt, and the critic William Hazlitt). For brevity’s sake, he also subsumes Hunt’s aristocratic friends Shelley and Byron, as well as Shelley’s friend Thomas Love Peacock, under this pejorative label coined by Tory critics to diminish the poetry of Keats and Hunt because of its working-class origins. (The Whig and even radical politics of the young aristocrats made them equally reprehensible to the Tory literary establishment.) These writers of the Secondor Younger-Generation of British Romantics (Wordsworth and Coleridge and, latterly, Blake, comprise the principal First-Generation figures) had uniformly admired Wordsworth for the fervent pro-French Revolution stance of the poetry of his Great Decade but came to despise what they perceived as his abandonment of egalitarian political ideals in the later poetry, especially his long philosophical poem, The Excursion
{"title":"English Romantic Poetry’s Clash of the Generations","authors":"Michael J. Neth","doi":"10.1080/10848770.2023.2174287","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/10848770.2023.2174287","url":null,"abstract":"Jeffrey Cox’s new book takes as its guiding thesis the rejection of the widely-held view of Wordsworth (1770-1850) as a poet whose only substantial work was produced from 1798 until about 1808. This account was fathered by Wordsworth’s Victorian reviver Matthew Arnold in the Preface to his edition of Wordsworth’s poems (1879) and accepted tacitly or explicitly by generations of important critics since then. Cox adduces a recent example in Kenneth Johnston’s well-known 1998 The Hidden Wordsworth: Poet, Lover, Rebel, Spy, in which we read that “Wordsworth the Romantic poet ‘died’ when he read the recently completed Prelude to Coleridge in January 1807.” The problem with this notion is that Wordsworth―the longest-lived of the major Romantic versifiers―survived another forty-two years after 1808 and continued to write new poems until eight years before his death. And, though not the focus of Cox’s book, there is the added fact that during his last four decades Wordsworth constantly, one might almost say obsessively, returned to his earlier poetry, in many instances creating multiple revisions. Posterity has not been kind to most of these, for in later years Wordsworth was given to altering the strongest poems of his “golden prime,” as Arnold called it, by diluting their religious nonconformism in sometimes painfully discursive ways. Cox aims to examine in detail many of the original poems from the later, post-1808 volumes published by Wordsworth. He contextualizes them by arguing that they contain challenges to the poetry of the writers of the so-called Cockney school (Keats, Leigh Hunt, and the critic William Hazlitt). For brevity’s sake, he also subsumes Hunt’s aristocratic friends Shelley and Byron, as well as Shelley’s friend Thomas Love Peacock, under this pejorative label coined by Tory critics to diminish the poetry of Keats and Hunt because of its working-class origins. (The Whig and even radical politics of the young aristocrats made them equally reprehensible to the Tory literary establishment.) These writers of the Secondor Younger-Generation of British Romantics (Wordsworth and Coleridge and, latterly, Blake, comprise the principal First-Generation figures) had uniformly admired Wordsworth for the fervent pro-French Revolution stance of the poetry of his Great Decade but came to despise what they perceived as his abandonment of egalitarian political ideals in the later poetry, especially his long philosophical poem, The Excursion","PeriodicalId":55962,"journal":{"name":"European Legacy-Toward New Paradigms","volume":"28 1","pages":"527 - 532"},"PeriodicalIF":0.2,"publicationDate":"2023-02-02","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"47785033","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2023-02-01DOI: 10.1080/10848770.2023.2174285
Lora Sigler
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Pub Date : 2023-02-01DOI: 10.1080/10848770.2023.2170027
André Furlani
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Pub Date : 2023-01-30DOI: 10.1080/10848770.2023.2174286
Lora Sigler
system of interconnected propositional attitudes. Hence to explain the origins of religious beliefs, Levy suggests that they must have emerged from stories. In this view, narrative is the substratum of human consciousness, and indeed predates any individual human mind, hence stories are the primordial soup out of which religious belief emerged. Is this a “cognitive theory of religion” as the subtitle promises? To this reviewer it feels more like a philosophical theory of cognition in which religion tags along for the ride. But perhaps that is the point: anomalous monism can and should be applied to everything. What happens next in the book is hard to describe. Having established that religion is just a kind of story-telling in which primitive information is imbued with communal meanings, Levy is apparently exempted—much like the scientists and humanists he criticizes—from attending to the things we call religion as human beings experience them. Ostensibly, Chapters 4, 5, and 6 are about ancient texts, especially the Hebrew Sefer Yetzirah on Jewish mysticism; modern information technology and the cult of celebrity; and intimacy (sexual and otherwise) as a space of intersubjectivity. The reasons for these choices are more or less opaque to this reader. But even if that opacity is my fault rather than the author’s, which is entirely possible, the content of each chapter is wildly heterogenous and Deleuzian, more akin to a journey through the author’s own mind, bookshelf, and Netflix queue than a series of case studies. Perhaps this is intentional, as it was for Deleuze, a subtle and clever meta-example of anomalous monism. But that does not make it any more clarifying as a “cognitive theory of religion” when long discussions of the films Fight Club and Arrival and Joe Rogan’s podcasts rub elbows with Mount Rushmore, theories of laughter, the Chauvet Cave, the evolutionary origins of life, mixed martial arts, and erotic sculpture, just to name a few. As an exercise in intersubjectivity, its success depends upon the recognition of the reader. So I invite you to read this interesting, unique, and challenging book and decide for yourself.
{"title":"Gerhard Richter: Painting after the Subject of History","authors":"Lora Sigler","doi":"10.1080/10848770.2023.2174286","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/10848770.2023.2174286","url":null,"abstract":"system of interconnected propositional attitudes. Hence to explain the origins of religious beliefs, Levy suggests that they must have emerged from stories. In this view, narrative is the substratum of human consciousness, and indeed predates any individual human mind, hence stories are the primordial soup out of which religious belief emerged. Is this a “cognitive theory of religion” as the subtitle promises? To this reviewer it feels more like a philosophical theory of cognition in which religion tags along for the ride. But perhaps that is the point: anomalous monism can and should be applied to everything. What happens next in the book is hard to describe. Having established that religion is just a kind of story-telling in which primitive information is imbued with communal meanings, Levy is apparently exempted—much like the scientists and humanists he criticizes—from attending to the things we call religion as human beings experience them. Ostensibly, Chapters 4, 5, and 6 are about ancient texts, especially the Hebrew Sefer Yetzirah on Jewish mysticism; modern information technology and the cult of celebrity; and intimacy (sexual and otherwise) as a space of intersubjectivity. The reasons for these choices are more or less opaque to this reader. But even if that opacity is my fault rather than the author’s, which is entirely possible, the content of each chapter is wildly heterogenous and Deleuzian, more akin to a journey through the author’s own mind, bookshelf, and Netflix queue than a series of case studies. Perhaps this is intentional, as it was for Deleuze, a subtle and clever meta-example of anomalous monism. But that does not make it any more clarifying as a “cognitive theory of religion” when long discussions of the films Fight Club and Arrival and Joe Rogan’s podcasts rub elbows with Mount Rushmore, theories of laughter, the Chauvet Cave, the evolutionary origins of life, mixed martial arts, and erotic sculpture, just to name a few. As an exercise in intersubjectivity, its success depends upon the recognition of the reader. So I invite you to read this interesting, unique, and challenging book and decide for yourself.","PeriodicalId":55962,"journal":{"name":"European Legacy-Toward New Paradigms","volume":"28 1","pages":"434 - 435"},"PeriodicalIF":0.2,"publicationDate":"2023-01-30","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"46833168","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2023-01-26DOI: 10.1080/10848770.2023.2170029
Nicholas Mithen
ABSTRACT This essay proposes a bifurcation within the concept of moderation in early modern Europe. To draw this out it reconstructs an “encounter” between two citizens of the scholarly Republic of Letters in the years around 1700—Lodovico Antonio Muratori and Jean Le Clerc—and the concept of moderation each maintained. It proposes that the former maintained an ideal of moderation which was “hard” principally about self-regulation, while the latter maintained an ideal of moderation which was “soft” and principally about (religious) toleration. It then attaches this “encounter” to an analogous conflict between uses of moderation in late seventeenth- and early eighteenth-century England. It concludes by proposing that this bifurcation, while occurring within scholarly and theological debates, has enduring significance for our interpretation of the Enlightenment, and for the passage of political moderation into the modern world.
{"title":"Two Concepts of Moderation in the Early Enlightenment","authors":"Nicholas Mithen","doi":"10.1080/10848770.2023.2170029","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/10848770.2023.2170029","url":null,"abstract":"ABSTRACT This essay proposes a bifurcation within the concept of moderation in early modern Europe. To draw this out it reconstructs an “encounter” between two citizens of the scholarly Republic of Letters in the years around 1700—Lodovico Antonio Muratori and Jean Le Clerc—and the concept of moderation each maintained. It proposes that the former maintained an ideal of moderation which was “hard” principally about self-regulation, while the latter maintained an ideal of moderation which was “soft” and principally about (religious) toleration. It then attaches this “encounter” to an analogous conflict between uses of moderation in late seventeenth- and early eighteenth-century England. It concludes by proposing that this bifurcation, while occurring within scholarly and theological debates, has enduring significance for our interpretation of the Enlightenment, and for the passage of political moderation into the modern world.","PeriodicalId":55962,"journal":{"name":"European Legacy-Toward New Paradigms","volume":"28 1","pages":"274 - 293"},"PeriodicalIF":0.2,"publicationDate":"2023-01-26","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"44644253","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2023-01-19DOI: 10.1080/10848770.2023.2170025
E. Shagan
tend to view humans as “digital units integrated into networks and technical formats” (77), a phenomenon ever replicating itself globally. With this order imposed on the international community, nation states become progressively unable to meet societal needs and human identity is distorted, if not repressed, by the varied hallmarks of contemporary globalization. In this surrealist scenario, humans emerge as victims of a perversion of reality caught between a defense of their integrity and rights and their potential recourse to insurrection. Currently, and in future, the field of battle paradigm “encompasses and penetrates everything, from the molecular scales of genetic engineering and nanotechnology to the sites, spaces and experiences of everyday urban life to the planetary spheres of tangible space and the global scope of immaterial cyberspace” (78). By way of dissent, Rodrígez wisely advocates a return to the timeless normative features of civilized coexistence: morality, ethics, international law, and diplomacy, among others, that harmonize the clash of political wills, shifts in the configurations of power, and that restrain extremist types of power and their attendant systems. While these are persuasively illustrated and analyzed, this reviewer feels more attention could have been devoted to an updated assessment of diplomacy’s ever evolving patterns of adjudication and reconciliation that even now are systematically consolidated on a global scale in creative new ways. Indeed, these challenging innovations, designed to productively monitor and re-integrate the variant spatial/temporal dimensions of transregional power-relationships, also have within their purview the very planetary transhumanism and calamitous impacts on our modern world the author so deplores. This omission tends to render his work out of step conceptually with current International Relation scholarship. Many of the passages in Field of Battle draw on Rodrígez’s earlier book The Femicide Machine: sections are either adapted or expanded with new insights, interpretations, and conclusions, thus making the book more relevant to contemporary conditions and needs. The translation, from the Spanish, is highly readable and the end of chapter notes are informative but, alas, there is no bibliography or an index. In sum, Field of Battle, is an important, original work, that cuts across conventional scholarly parameters and casts important, clarifying light on highly disturbing, if not ominous, realities within the current global order.
{"title":"Beyond Heaven and Earth: A Cognitive Theory of Religion","authors":"E. Shagan","doi":"10.1080/10848770.2023.2170025","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/10848770.2023.2170025","url":null,"abstract":"tend to view humans as “digital units integrated into networks and technical formats” (77), a phenomenon ever replicating itself globally. With this order imposed on the international community, nation states become progressively unable to meet societal needs and human identity is distorted, if not repressed, by the varied hallmarks of contemporary globalization. In this surrealist scenario, humans emerge as victims of a perversion of reality caught between a defense of their integrity and rights and their potential recourse to insurrection. Currently, and in future, the field of battle paradigm “encompasses and penetrates everything, from the molecular scales of genetic engineering and nanotechnology to the sites, spaces and experiences of everyday urban life to the planetary spheres of tangible space and the global scope of immaterial cyberspace” (78). By way of dissent, Rodrígez wisely advocates a return to the timeless normative features of civilized coexistence: morality, ethics, international law, and diplomacy, among others, that harmonize the clash of political wills, shifts in the configurations of power, and that restrain extremist types of power and their attendant systems. While these are persuasively illustrated and analyzed, this reviewer feels more attention could have been devoted to an updated assessment of diplomacy’s ever evolving patterns of adjudication and reconciliation that even now are systematically consolidated on a global scale in creative new ways. Indeed, these challenging innovations, designed to productively monitor and re-integrate the variant spatial/temporal dimensions of transregional power-relationships, also have within their purview the very planetary transhumanism and calamitous impacts on our modern world the author so deplores. This omission tends to render his work out of step conceptually with current International Relation scholarship. Many of the passages in Field of Battle draw on Rodrígez’s earlier book The Femicide Machine: sections are either adapted or expanded with new insights, interpretations, and conclusions, thus making the book more relevant to contemporary conditions and needs. The translation, from the Spanish, is highly readable and the end of chapter notes are informative but, alas, there is no bibliography or an index. In sum, Field of Battle, is an important, original work, that cuts across conventional scholarly parameters and casts important, clarifying light on highly disturbing, if not ominous, realities within the current global order.","PeriodicalId":55962,"journal":{"name":"European Legacy-Toward New Paradigms","volume":"28 1","pages":"432 - 434"},"PeriodicalIF":0.2,"publicationDate":"2023-01-19","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"48110765","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2023-01-17DOI: 10.1080/10848770.2023.2164951
G. Havers
Spinoza once remarked in a letter to his friend Hugo Boxel: “To me the authority of Plato, Aristotle, and Socrates is not worth much.” The clarity of this statement has not deterred even experienced readers of Spinoza’s works from associating his philosophy with the philosophers of classical antiquity. Steven Nadler, in his latest study of Spinoza, cogently shows that the theme of freedom ties together Spinoza’s major works on metaphysics, ethics, and politics. He brings forth valuable insights that help readers comprehend and appreciate the unique contribution of Spinoza towards a metaphysical, moral, psychological, and political understanding of a truly free, happy, and rational existence, one that celebrates life over death. However, the core premise of Nadler’s argument, that Spinoza is indebted to pagan philosophy (especially Stoicism), seriously undermines the coherence of his study. Although Nadler is certain that “Spinoza fits well in this broad eudaimonistic tradition” represented by Socrates, Plato, Aristotle, and the Stoics, he provides no substantive evidence for this thesis (10). What Nadler’s insights sometimes demonstrate, despite his intent, is the utterly biblical foundation of Spinoza’s philosophy of freedom and life. Although Spinoza is typically read as a defender of a naturalistic determinism that disallows freedom, Nadler persuasively outlines the paradox that Spinoza’s articulation of this necessity does not contradict his robust conceptualization of freedom. Spinoza’s rejection of free will—the superstitious belief that the faculty of the will enables human beings to freely ignore the psychological causes (e.g., passions) that determine their actions—is not a repudiation of true freedom. Rather, the authentic practice of the free life requires the recognition of the necessary truth that one cannot be free unless one lives according to reason. A life dedicated to reason, in turn, does not and cannot willfully extinguish the existence of the passions. What a rational understanding of freedom can enable is active control of one’s passions, as opposed to a surrender to them. As Nadler explains through his analyses of both Spinoza’s Ethics and Treatise on the Emendation of the Intellect, the free person “acts rather than reacts. He will certainly do what he wishes, but what he wishes—and thus his behavior—is guided from within, by knowledge rather than by imagination, sentiment, or feeling” (12; author’s emphasis).
{"title":"Was Spinoza a Pagan?","authors":"G. Havers","doi":"10.1080/10848770.2023.2164951","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/10848770.2023.2164951","url":null,"abstract":"Spinoza once remarked in a letter to his friend Hugo Boxel: “To me the authority of Plato, Aristotle, and Socrates is not worth much.” The clarity of this statement has not deterred even experienced readers of Spinoza’s works from associating his philosophy with the philosophers of classical antiquity. Steven Nadler, in his latest study of Spinoza, cogently shows that the theme of freedom ties together Spinoza’s major works on metaphysics, ethics, and politics. He brings forth valuable insights that help readers comprehend and appreciate the unique contribution of Spinoza towards a metaphysical, moral, psychological, and political understanding of a truly free, happy, and rational existence, one that celebrates life over death. However, the core premise of Nadler’s argument, that Spinoza is indebted to pagan philosophy (especially Stoicism), seriously undermines the coherence of his study. Although Nadler is certain that “Spinoza fits well in this broad eudaimonistic tradition” represented by Socrates, Plato, Aristotle, and the Stoics, he provides no substantive evidence for this thesis (10). What Nadler’s insights sometimes demonstrate, despite his intent, is the utterly biblical foundation of Spinoza’s philosophy of freedom and life. Although Spinoza is typically read as a defender of a naturalistic determinism that disallows freedom, Nadler persuasively outlines the paradox that Spinoza’s articulation of this necessity does not contradict his robust conceptualization of freedom. Spinoza’s rejection of free will—the superstitious belief that the faculty of the will enables human beings to freely ignore the psychological causes (e.g., passions) that determine their actions—is not a repudiation of true freedom. Rather, the authentic practice of the free life requires the recognition of the necessary truth that one cannot be free unless one lives according to reason. A life dedicated to reason, in turn, does not and cannot willfully extinguish the existence of the passions. What a rational understanding of freedom can enable is active control of one’s passions, as opposed to a surrender to them. As Nadler explains through his analyses of both Spinoza’s Ethics and Treatise on the Emendation of the Intellect, the free person “acts rather than reacts. He will certainly do what he wishes, but what he wishes—and thus his behavior—is guided from within, by knowledge rather than by imagination, sentiment, or feeling” (12; author’s emphasis).","PeriodicalId":55962,"journal":{"name":"European Legacy-Toward New Paradigms","volume":"28 1","pages":"394 - 399"},"PeriodicalIF":0.2,"publicationDate":"2023-01-17","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"47891564","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2023-01-17DOI: 10.1080/10848770.2023.2165480
Andrew R. Murphy
ABSTRACT In this article, I explore the relationship between moderation and toleration in early modern England by focusing on William Penn’s 1685 A Perswasive to Moderation. This work, published by Penn in support of James II’s campaign to implement toleration in England by royal decree, explicitly linked moderation and the campaign for liberty of conscience in which Penn had participated for nearly two decades, in both England and America. More broadly, I show how Penn’s Perswasive entered into an ongoing debate over the concept of moderation itself: during the 1680s, a number of authors explored the meanings and limits of moderation, tying it to contested debates in ecclesiastical affairs, civil and religious liberty, and ethical discourse. Yet the aspirations of James II to secure liberty of conscience for the realm’s dissenters failed spectacularly in the Revolution of 1688, and Penn suffered deep public embarrassment (along with significant legal jeopardy) due to his association with that effort. The article closes with some specific reflections on Penn’s Perswasive as well as more general comments on the importance of attending to the practical, historically contingent ways in which moderation discourses unfold.
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