Cfp: "The Eighteenth Century and the Unconscious," Tenth Annual Workshop, Center for Eighteenth-Century Studies, University of Indiana, Bloomington, May 11-13, 2011.

Eighteenth-century studies in many ways emerged from and remains beholden to "the Enlightenment"-a category often understood in terms of rationality, reason, and the exercise of conscious decision making. Reason may be celebrated (see Jonathan Israel) or it may be critiqued (see Horkheimer and Adorno): in either case, it remains central to most accounts of the period. Yet the eighteenth century was also the era of empirical psychology, sentimentalism's triumph, and the emergence of what we now call Romanticism. It may even be the era of the discovery or the invention of the unconscious (Sloterdijk). By focusing on "unconscious" eighteenth centuries, this workshop therefore asks participants to reconsider the relation of reason to un-reason and of theory to historically inclined analyses.

Any mention of the unconscious immediately invites psychoanalytic interpretation. Yet the framework and vocabulary of psychoanalysis were unknown to eighteenth-century protagonists. For the purposes of this workshop, we therefore propose a broad starting definition of the unconscious as that which is unavailable to consciousness: it may be simply invisible or it may be actively produced by some "invisibilizing" mechanism, such as repression, suppression, or forgetting. It may operate within an individual or text, or it may function throughout a culture; its effects may be social, political, legal, literary, pedagogical, or psychological. There may be structurally different forms of unavailability. While the unconscious and its effects may be analyzed in terms derived from Freud, they do not need to be-indeed, it is our hope that this workshop will provoke participants to rethink both their understandings of the eighteenth century and their accounts of conscious and unconscious processes.

We invite participants to be explicit about their methodological choices. Papers might address one or all of the following concerns:

1. Was there an unconscious according to eighteenth-century protagonists; if so, how did it emerge and what functions did it serve?
2. Can we historicize a concept or structure such as the unconscious? What would be gained from doing so? What would be lost?
3. If there is something "eighteenth-century" about current theories of the unconscious, need their origins be found in this period, broadly construed?
4. To what extent do eighteenth-century examples challenge or complicate common models of unconscious life? With its focus on oedipal dramas within the nuclear family has psychoanalysis itself blinded us to the effect of extended families, the importance of social modes of remembering and forgetting, and the emotional work of religious affiliation?

Further information may be found here: http://www.indiana.edu/~voltaire/workshop.html.

Jorgensen, Larry M. "Seventeenth Century Theories of Consciousness." STANFORD ENCYCLOPEDIA OF PHILOSOPHY July 29, 2010.

In the seventeenth century, “consciousness” began to take on a uniquely modern sense. This transition was sparked by new theories of mind and ideas, and it connected with other important issues of debate during the seventeenth century, including debates over the transparency of the mental, animal consciousness, and innate ideas. Additionally, consciousness was tied closely to moral identity, with both French and Latin lacking even a linguistic distinction between consciousness and conscience (i.e., a moral sensibility). This semantic shift marked a philosophical division between the psychological or phenomenal aspects of thought and a moral sensibility as well. The discussions on all of these topics were rich and varied in the seventeenth century—the article below provides a view from forty thousand feet. . . .

Read the rest here: http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/consciousness-17th/.

Schliesser, Eric. Review of G. A. J. Rogers, et al., eds. INSIDERS AND OUTSIDERS IN SEVENTEENTH CENTURY PHILOSOPHY. NDPR (March 2010).

Rogers, G. A. J., Tom Sorrell and Jill Kraye, eds. Insiders and Outsiders in Seventeenth-Century Philosophy. London: Routledge, 2010. Imagine a possible distant future in which the poet-philosopher, Jody Azzouni, is at the core of the undergraduate curriculum. His views on ontology are routinely taught in order to prepare students for the great questions of the day. There are, of course, pesky historians who insist that the neo-scholastic reawakening inaugurated by David Lewis should be represented in the undergraduate curriculum -- they claim persuasively that for about a century Lewis attracted far more attention than Azzouni. (In his contribution to the volume under review Robert Adams calls the focus on possible worlds and the logic of modality the "coming of age of American philosophy" (312).) In his day Lewis attracted the very best graduate students in the leading philosophy department; working out the detailed implications of the various components of his system seemed to dominate philosophy for over a century. Meanwhile, Azzouni, who was by no means unknown in his time, never attracted PhD students. His work seemed to prohibit the parceling out of projects so necessary in an age of shortened PhDs, instant publication, and the division of labor within progressive research programs. Ironically, in the twenty-first century Azzouni was better known as a quirky novelist and feminist poet before he was rediscovered as the thinker who radically transformed philosophy post-Quine. So much for fantasy; it was inspired by the volume under review. Its core insight -- to place five now canonical thinkers of the seventeenth century alongside five significant but now largely untaught and unread thinkers -- is worthy of serious reflection. The five "outsiders" (Gassendi, Digby, Gale, Cudworth, and Malebranche) receive an article each. The five "insiders" (Descartes, Hobbes, Spinoza, Locke, and Leibniz) all receive at least two articles. The volume teaches that it is very hard to say at a given time what philosopher/system will last and what the reasons are for such enduringness. Another thing taught by the volume as a whole is that philosophers can rewrite their history in various ways so that a thinker can become an insider or return to canonical status when s/he was once not. "Analytic" philosophers may need their historical "myths" (Cottingham introducing his views on Descartes, 165), but philosophy will not always be analytic and its future may require different myths or a different attitude toward history. . . . Read the whole review here: http://ndpr.nd.edu/review.cfm?id=19147.

Puryear, Stephen. Review of Janice Thomas, THE MINDS OF THE MODERNS. NDPR (September 2009).

Thomas, Janice. The Minds of the Moderns: Rationalism, Empiricism, and Philosophy of Mind. Cheshire: Acumen, 2009. In this work Thomas surveys the contributions of (pre-Kantian) early modern philosophy to our understanding of the mind. She focuses on the six canonical figures of the period -- Descartes, Spinoza, Locke, Leibniz, Berkeley, and Hume -- and asks what each has to say about five topics within the philosophy of mind. The topics are (1) the ontological status of mind, (2) the scope and nature of self-knowledge, (3) the nature of consciousness, (4) the problem of mental causation, and (5) the nature of representation or intentionality. The overarching aim of the book is to show that the theories articulated by these thinkers are not just historical curiosities, but have much to contribute to our understanding of these topics today. . . . Read the rest here: http://ndpr.nd.edu/review.cfm?id=17545.

Reviews of Susan Neiman's MORAL CLARITY.

Neiman, Susan. Moral Clarity: a Guide for Grown-up Idealists. Boston: Houghton Mifflin-Harcourt, 2008. Gray, John. "Book of the Week: Moral Clarity, by Susan Neiman." The Independent July 10, 2009:

Moral clarity is something that everyone claims to admire, so it is always useful to find out what they mean by it. In the case of Susan Neiman, one need not look very far. In the first chapter of her "guide for grown-up idealists", discussing the crimes of the last century, she writes: "Arbitrary imprisonment, famine, and murder were not new, though the scale seen in the 20th century was. What was devastating about Soviet crimes was that they were committed in the name of principles most of us hold dear. The rebuttal to this is easy enough: Theoretically speaking, Stalin's Gulags no more undermined the legitimacy of socialist ideals than the Inquisition undermined Christian ones."

This passage, and many others like it dotted throughout the book, give the reader a pretty good idea of how Neiman understands clarity in moral thinking. She is clear that morality is a matter of having ideals, and no less clear about which ideals we are obliged to serve. "Most of us", she writes, cherish the ideals of the former Soviet Union." If post-communist Russians prefer to forget the Soviet era, the explanation is "easy enough": the Soviet state did not live up to the hopes on which it was founded.

The possibility that most Russians - along with most people in communist regimes everywhere - may never have shared these hopes does not occur to her. The 19th-century Russian anarchist Bakunin shrewdly defined Marx's ideal society as a pedantocracy, and Lenin's dreary collectivist utopia may be a pedant's idea of heaven. But for the mass of humankind - and on this point I count myself with the human majority - a world in which practically every aspect of life is yoked to a vision of progress is just a repulsive fantasy. The actuality, with all its horrors, is preferable.

The comprehensive failure of the Soviet experiment was in fact its only redeeming feature. This is something of a problem for Neiman for, despite the tens of millions it killed, she undoubtedly views communism as a progressive cause.

But it is not a problem that detains her for very long, for the solution is straightforward: we must all simply try harder. From time to time, no doubt, there may be tricky choices to be made; but Neiman is clear that anyone who does not share her ideals is obtuse, confused or else wicked. . . . (http://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/books/reviews/book-of-the-week-moral-clarity-by-susan-neiman-1739615.html)

Black, Tim. "‘We Want to Determine the World, not be Determined by It’." Spiked Review of Books 26 (July 2009):

In person, Neiman, like her writing, is spirited. Her passion for philosophy, indeed for the practical power and importance of ideas, is infectious. That Moral Clarity leaves you with a desire to read Immanuel Kant, that most rebarbative thinker from an era of highly demanding but hugely rewarding thinkers, is itself a testament to the force of her central idealist conviction: ideas matter.

It was partly Neiman’s desire to reclaim philosophy from the stultifying ‘scholasticism’, as she puts it, of Western academia that informed her previous book A History of Evil in Modern Thought. ‘The focus on epistemology and metaphysics [in philosophy teaching] as in “is the external world real, or is it all a dream?” is a huge diversion’, explained Neiman: ‘It is not actually the problem that these thinkers were grappling with.’ What Neiman suggested instead was that the history of philosophy was dominated far more by the kind of questions that inspire the young to study the subject in the first place, questions ‘of how to live, of the meaning of life, of the relation between morality and politics’. This is stirring stuff. Unfortunately what students find upon entering a university philosophy department is something very different: ‘an appalling distance from the real world’, according to Neiman. . . . (http://www.spiked-online.com/index.php/site/reviewofbooks_article/7214/)

O'Grady, Jane. "Right Reasoning." Guardian July 25, 2009:

Whereas those on the conservative right once proclaimed humanity too irredeemably flawed for large-scale reform, now they have coopted the Enlightenment, with its notions of freedom and perfectibility, to their cause. Meanwhile the left, disenchanted with ideals that were once expected to change the world, has junked all ideals equally, in a petulant sense of betrayal.

Moral Clarity analyses and challenges the sources of this defeatism, urging the left to reclaim the language of morality, idealism and Enlightenment. Neiman could be accused of treating these three concepts somewhat interchangeably, but she reminds us that American and European ethics are moulded from Enlightenment ideals, that America set out to be "Enlightenment made tangible" - a land "not determined by the traditions you draw from the past, but the visions you have for the future". What about the Native American Indians, slavery, Latin America, Iraq? That these ideals have been betrayed, says Neiman, does not invalidate them. Contaminated in practice though they are, they set in motion the repudiation of inherited privilege, superstition, racism, and made possible a greater equality for women and the downtrodden.

Those who uphold Enlightenment ideals over fundamentalism are often accused of themselves being "Enlightenment fundamentalists", or branded Eurocentric. But, argues Neiman, it was the Enlightenment that created the intellectual and emotional basis for challenging and destroying tyrannical certainties, including (in a perpetual self-questioning) its own. And it was the Enlightenment, in its fury for self-criticism and "its zeal to understand the rest of the world", that diagnosed and condemned Eurocentrism in the first place. . . . (http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2009/jul/25/moral-clarity-susan-neiman-reviewed)

Cottingham, John. "From Job to the Enlightenment." Standpoint (July/August 2009):

Our idea of modernity is in many ways defined by that extraordinary flowering of scientific and philosophical ideas in the 17th and 18th centuries known as the Enlightenment. Yet current attitudes to the Enlightenment are ambivalent. Many still see it as unequivocally a good thing: mankind's coming of age, learning to think freely and independently and throwing off the shackles of obedience to received authority. But there is a dissenting view that has gained new momentum in recent years — that far from heralding a new and glorious dawn, the Enlightenment was born of an overweening arrogance, grossly overestimating the power of human reason and technology to solve our ills and inaugurating a crass materialistic era that has destroyed our reverence for the world and eroded our sense of the sacred.

Susan Neiman's latest book, Moral Clarity: A Guide for Grown-up Idealists, offers a distinctive reading of the Enlightenment that attempts to recover its authentic ideals and rescue it from some of the caricatures advanced both by its defenders and its critics. An American moral philosopher who has taught at Yale and Tel Aviv and now works in Germany, Neiman is committed to promoting a broadly liberal political agenda and, as a writer, to making philosophical ideas accessible to a wide reading public. The latter aim is one in which she largely succeeds in the present book, even if at times she seems to work almost too hard to keep the reader's attention. A vast and colourful tapestry of texts and events, stretching from the 18th century back to Homer's Odyssey and the Book of Job and forwards to 9/11 and Abu Ghraib prison, certainly offers plenty to think about, but does not always make the thread of the argument as easy to follow as it might have been in a shorter presentation. . . . (http://www.standpointmag.co.uk/critique-july-09-john-cottingham-moral-clarity-susan-neiman)

Cfp: "Early Modern Dis/Locations," Northumbria University, January 15-16, 2010.

Confirmed Plenary Speakers include: Tim Cresswell (Royal Holloway, University of London) Patricia Fumerton (University of California, Santa Barbara) Lisa Hopkins (Sheffield Hallam University) Bernhard Klein (University of Kent) Greg Walker (University of Edinburgh) The organisers invite scholars and students working in literary and cultural studies, history, geography, philosophy, and related disciplines to submit 200 word abstracts for 20-25 minute papers relating to any of the following themes and questions by July 31st 2009 (please note this is an extended deadline). Contributors are free to interpret and address these as broadly as they deem appropriate:

• What were the significant locations for and of early modern cultures, and why?
• How might we re-think and problematise constructions of court, city (or particular cities, real and imagined), 'suburbs', 'country', the 'nation', the 'home', 'private', 'public', the marketplace, the streets, 'landscape', colonies and plantations?
• To what extent were locations conceived and constructed as gendered, rank-specific, desirable, or disgusting?
• How were all such locations experienced (and by whom), and represented in literature, art, and philosophy?
• In what ways did locations condition, inhibit, or compel political agency and cultural production and consumption?
• How were locations demarcated, policed, transgressed and jeopardised in the period?
• How was dislocation caused, theorized and represented in the period?
• What were the realities and representations of placelessness, homelessness, and dispossession?
• Where, how and why did 'mobilities' occur, and in what forms?
• How have early modern cultural products and locations - like The Globe -been relocated into and appropriated by later historical and cultural positions?
• How can modern theories of 'space', 'place', and 'placelessness' develop our understanding of early modern locations and dislocations?

Please submit 200 word abstracts for 20-25 minute papers by email to Dr Adam Hansen (adam.hansen@northumbria.ac.uk) by July 31st 2009.

Strange Maps: John Bull Bombarding France with Bum-Boats

Unusual, to say the least. See the map here: http://strangemaps.wordpress.com/2007/09/03/171-john-bull-bombarding-france-with-bum-boats/.

Harris, James A. "Review of Knud Haakonssen, ed. Cambridge History of Eighteenth-Century Philosophy." NDPR July 12, 2007

Knud Haakonssen's long-awaited Cambridge History of Eighteenth-Century Philosophy is an achievement equal in importance and stature to its illustrious predecessors in the Cambridge History of Philosophy series. It is impossible to imagine this book being superseded for years to come. It comprises thirty-six chapters collected under five headings: 'The Concept of Eighteenth-Century Philosophy', 'The Science of Human Nature', 'Philosophy and Theology', 'Natural Philosophy', and 'Moral Philosophy'. Immediately striking is the fact that the chapters are devoted to topics and problems, and not to individual philosophers or particular philosophical schools. This is exactly as it should be. A history of eighteenth-century philosophy that restricted itself to chapters on canonical figures, using standard means of categorisation, could do little or nothing to refashion our understanding of the period. It would merely give us again the eighteenth-century that subsequent philosophers and their epigoni have constructed as a means of making sense of and legitimating their own particular projects and agendas. Haakonnssen's book, by contrast, while of course returning again and again to Locke and Hume, Wolff and Kant, Condillac and d'Alembert, puts the familiar in the company of many of their rather less well known contemporaries. Hume's 'Of Miracles' is set by M. A. Stewart in the context of a debate about the rational basis of revealed religion carried by, amongst others, John Toland, Anthony Collins, Matthew Tindal, Thomas Woolston, Peter Annet, Arthur Sykes and Conyers Middleton. Udo Thiel describes reactions to Locke on personal identity from, not only Butler and Reid, but also Samuel Clarke, Berkeley, Collins, Edmund Law and Condillac. The result is untidy and distinctly unfriendly to the notion of the history of philosophy as linear and progressive. Old ideas and arguments refuse to die and disappear; new ones are by turns ignored, misunderstood, and traduced. . . . More at http://ndpr.nd.edu/review.cfm?id=10404.

Uzgalis, William. "Review of Conal Condren, et al, eds. The Philosopher in Early Modern Europe." NDPR July 17, 2007

The editors claim that "[v]iewed from a post-Kantian vantage, the landscape of sixteenth- and seventeenth-century philosophy appears as a foreign country" (5). They tell us that in order to recover "understandings of philosophy not easily assimilated to the current self-understandings of the discipline", their volume "argues for a more thoroughly historical approach to the history of early modern philosophy." To do this, the volume focuses on "the complementary phenomena of the contested character of philosophy, and the persona necessary for its practice, that is, the purpose built 'self' whose cognitive capacities and moral bearing are cultivated for the sake of a knowledge deemed philosophical." (p. 7). . . . More at http://ndpr.nd.edu/review.cfm?id=10463