The Philosopher in Early Modern Europe: The Nature of a Contested Identity

Description

In this groundbreaking collection of essays the history of philosophy appears in a fresh light, not as reason's progressive discovery of its universal conditions, but as a series of unreconciled disputes over the proper way to conduct oneself as a philosopher. By shifting focus from the philosopher as proxy for the universal subject of reason to the philosopher as a special persona arising from rival forms of self-cultivation, philosophy is approached in terms of the social office and intellectual deportment of the philosopher, as a personage with a definite moral physiognomy and institutional setting. In so doing, this collection of essays by leading figures in the fields of both philosophy and the history of ideas provides access to key early modern disputes over what it meant to be a philosopher, and to the institutional and larger political and religious contexts in which such disputes took place.

Conal Condren is Professor Emeritus at the University of New South Wales, and a Fellow of both the Australian Academy of the Humanities and of the Social Sciences. Stephen Gaukroger presently holds an ARC Professorial Fellowship and is a Fellow of the Australian Academy of Humanities. Ian Hunter is a Fellow of the Australian Humanities Academy and a research professor in the Centre for the History of European Discourses at the University of Queensland.

"This is a thought-provoking collection. It fits a now-familiar scholarly mold of seeing knowledge as embedded in particular societies and their histories. In this case, contributors show how what counts as 'philosophy' in any time and place depends on these local particularities, detailing the assertion, for Early Modern Europe, via arguments both of wider temporal sweep and of intricate analysis of particular figures and their writings. At the same time, and for this reader more interestingly, some of its contributors explore how those who then carried out the tasks of philosophy did so within a context of changing experiences of personhood...This work is a major contribution to such a project." Timothy J. Reiss, Metascience