Lectures in Intellectual History

Copyright: © Institute of Intellectual History at the University of St Andrews 2014-15. Lectures are not to be cited without permission of the author.

Latest Episodes:

Laszlo Kontler - The Enlightenment Narrative in the Age of Liberal Reform: William Robertson in Hungary Apr 05, 2016

Show notes

Was there a family resemblance between the 1707 Act of Union between England and Scotland and the constitutional compromise which followed the Hungarian rebellion led by Ferenc Rakoczi II against the Habsburgs between 1703 and 1711? In both cases, the settlement took into account the resilience as well as the vulnerability of the junior partner and in the longer run offered it the possibility of participating in a process of empire building and civilization. But such a union did not ensue in the Hungarian case, and a genuine age of improvement had not set in until the two decades preceding the revolution of 1848, whose defeat inaugurated yet another period of national frustration. In this lecture, Laszlo Kontler accounts for the role of the long Enlightenment in the age of reform in Hungary in the 1830s and 40s, and in particular argues that William Robertson's view of progress was tailor made to the preferences of the contemporary Hungarian public and intellectual science.
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Mark Elliott - The contribution of the history of exegesis to the history of ideas Mar 08, 2016

Show notes

As Protestantism entered the modern world its biblical spirituality, on the one hand, inspired a puritan mission to restore the world to its paradisal integrity through trade and science, and yet on the other hand promoted an increasingly adversarial stance towards the world of politics and institutional religion. Either way, the biblical text appeared to be historical narrative with one literal sense, which mediated the divine action of a time gone by, so as to demand obedient correspondent action from God's present day covenanted partners, free from the bounds of socio-political structure as much as they could be. How did the interpretation of the Bible change in the course of the seventeenth century? How was it used to promote notions of political authority? And what relevance does this history of exegesis have for modern-day intellectual history scholarship? In this paper, Mark Elliott answers these and other questions.
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Béla Kapossy - Liberty before neo-Roman republicanism: Haller’s restoration of political science Feb 02, 2016

Show notes

For many Jacobins, Rousseau was a saintly figure who provided the blueprint for society. In light of the intensity in which his political ideas were discussed, it seemed inevitable that Rousseau would bear the brunt of the anti-revolutionary backlash. In Germany and Switzerland, where perspectives on the French Revolution were marked by its propensity to export revolution beyond its borders, the first two decades of the 19th century saw an explosion of political writing. Those advocating constitutional reforms and unification were left with the task of untangling Rousseau's more cryptic or unpractical ideas about the general will, and of providing his theory of the state with a coherent and workable theory of representation. In this lecture, Béla Kapossy (Lausanne) elaborates on the German-speaking reception of Rousseau by focusing on the influential text of the self-taught Jurist Karl Ludwig von Haller, who was given the title 'anti-Rousseau'.
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Dimitris Kastritsis - The Alexander Romance and the Birth of the Ottoman Empire Jan 26, 2016

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During the period that saw the creation of the classical Ottoman Empire, the Alexander of pseudo-Callisthenes functioned as a familiar if contested cultural currency. Across the boundaries of Christianity and Islam, legends about the ancient conqueror took on new relevance in light of contemporary political aspirations, which were closely intertwined with religious and social turmoil, and the ensuing eschatological expectations. In this paper, Dimitris Kastritsis examines the fate of the Alexander Romance, both Greek and Islamic, in the period that saw the Ottoman state grow in to a global empire.
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Christian Maurer - The Forgotten Range of Defences of Sociability: Hutcheson and Campbell on Hobbes Dec 02, 2015

Show notes

Most philosophers think that, as a matter of fact, most human beings live in some sort of society, but what brings human beings to live in society rather than in solitude? Do we need to invoke some sort of natural sociability to explain this fact? In De Cive, Thomas Hobbes argued that man was not a creature born fit for society, but rather made fit for society by education. But what then are the causes for us coming together? And why are many accounts of sociability so difficult to make sense of? In this lecture, Christian Maurer investigates responses to Hobbes made by two Scottish moral philosophers: the rather well-known Frances Hutcheson, and the relatively unknown Archibald Campbell.
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Jane Judge - Ce que nous allons devenir. Belgian national identity in eighteenth-century revolution Nov 10, 2015

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In 1787 Joseph II decreed a series of administrative reforms for his Belgian provinces, essentially undoing their independence. Thus began a resistance, mounted by the estates, guilds and corporations, and then a revolution. In June 1789, Joseph had declared the Joyeuse Entrée annulled, creating a whole new branch of revolutionaries. In this lecture, Jane Judge documents the different strands of both conservative and democratic revolutionary thought which emerged in the Belgian provinces at this time, and argues that this is the first instance of people thinking of themselves as Belgian in what is modern day Belgium.
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John Dunn - Why We Need a Global History of Political Thought Nov 04, 2015

Show notes

Political thinking anywhere in the world today, as always, is irretrievably contextual. It takes its coordinates from the setting in which it finds itself. Today that setting is ever more, and unmistakably global. Whilst human populations have never been fully insulated from each other in our epoch, all of them have for some time been undergoing a process of at best, semi-voluntary de-insulation which still appears to be accelerating. However clumsily or dishonestly it may do so, contemporary political reflection has no option but to register that de-insulation as best it can and try to judge what it means. In this lecture, John Dunn argues that we now face a pressing need for a global history of political thought, and that our need is increasingly urgent and not mainly academic, and that we must recognise it promptly and frankly and set ourselves vigorously to learn how to satisfy it better.
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Ian Hunter - The History of Dialectical History: The Case of International Law Oct 30, 2015

Show notes

There are presently two main ways of writing the history of international law, one using the methods of dialectical philosophical history, and the other approach using the methods of contextual history and legal humanism. The central difference between these historiographies is that dialectical history treat norms as formal or ideal entities that govern the unfolding of history through their dialectical interaction with facts. Whereas contextual histories view the norms of international law as contigent historical facts, that is as products of particular treaty regimes, and hence incapable of orientating history towards any particular goal, such as a cosmopolitan legal community. In this lecture, Professor Hunter clarifies this relation by sketching an outline of the history of the dialectical history of international law, beginning with a brief discussion of the most eloquent and erudite of the modern dialectical historians, Martti Koskenniemi, before offering an account of the first emergence of dialectical histories of international law in 1840s Germany.
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David Allan - Reading and Remembering: Intellectual History and the Commonplace Book in the Long Eighteenth Century Sep 29, 2015

Show notes

A commonplace book, as eighteenth-century British people generally understood the term, was a handwritten document within which memories of various kinds could be captured and reused. But what was the purpose of this mnemonic exercise, and in what context were they created? Was there a contemporary fashion for maintaining records of this type? And what can we, as historians, do with the resulting artefacts, which survive in significant numbers? In this lecture, David Allan answers these and other questions, and demonstrates how aspects of the past experiences of literate human lives can be recovered.
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Nick Phillipson - Hume, Smith and the Science of Man in Scotland Sep 15, 2015

Show notes

It is fairly conventional now to think of the 'science of man' as possibly the signal intellectual achievement of the Enlightenment in Scotland. David Hume coined the phrase and attached it to his Treatise of Human Nature, in which he placed the study of human nature on empirical (or experimental) foundations. On this basis Hume was to develop a powerful theory of justice, political obligation, morality, beauty, and natural religion - all of it held together as the functions of what Hume calls, in the common way, sympathy. Adam Smith was an early and acute reader of Hume's Treatise, and his theories about language, property and progress can be seen to complete the Humean project and create the science of man that Hume had promised. In time, it was to be sustained by Smith's own theory of sentiment and socialibilty, based on Humean premises, but significantly different from our own. In this lecture, Nick Phillipson challenges these reasonable inferences about Hume and Smith, and asks whether we really want to think of Hume as the author of a "projet manqué", and whether we want to think of Smith as someone who was simply tweaking Humean language?
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