{"id":1463,"date":"2011-08-29T09:00:14","date_gmt":"2011-08-28T21:00:14","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/blogs.otago.ac.nz\/emxphi\/?p=1463"},"modified":"2012-09-25T02:10:55","modified_gmt":"2012-09-24T14:10:55","slug":"origins-historiographical-paradigm","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blogs.otago.ac.nz\/emxphi\/origins-historiographical-paradigm\/","title":{"rendered":"On the Origins of a Historiographical Paradigm"},"content":{"rendered":"

Alberto Vanzo writes…<\/strong><\/p>\n

    It came to pass that the earth was without form, and void, and darkness covered the face of the earth. And the creator saw that the darkness was evil, and he spoke out in the darkness, saying “Let there be light” and there was light, and he called the light “Renaissance”. But still the creator was not pleased, for there remained darkness, and hence he took from the Renaissance a rib, with which to fashion greater light. But the strain of his power broke the rib, and there did grow up two false lights, one Bacon, whose name meanteh “Father of the British Empiricists”, and one Descartes, whose name meaneth “Father of the Continental Rationalists”.<\/em> […] <\/p>\n

    And thus it was that Bacon begat Hobbes, and Hobbes begat Locke, and Locke begat Berkeley, and Berkeley begat Hume. And thus it was that Descartes begat Spinoza, and Spinoza begat Leibniz, and Leibniz begat Wolff. And then it was that there arose the great sage of K\u00f6nigsberg, the great Immanuel, Immanuel Kant, who, though neither empiricist nor rationalist, was like unto both.<\/em> […]<\/p>\n

    And this too the creator saw, and he saw that it was good<\/em> […]<\/ol>\n

    In this parody, David Fate Norton<\/a> has summarized a familiar account of the history of early modern philosophy — an account based on the antagonism of empiricism and rationalism. It has dominated histories of philosophy for most of the twentieth century, including Russell’s<\/a> and Copleston’s histories.<\/p>\n

    In an earlier post, I argued that the distinction between empiricism and rationalism was fleshed out into a fully-fledged history of philosophy by the Kantian historian Wilhelm Gottlieb Tennemann<\/a> at the beginning of the nineteenth century. (To be sure, two other historians made use of the distinction roughly at the same time as Tennemann, but his hisory was by far the most influential.)<\/p>\n

    The question I’d like to discuss in this post is: how do we get from Tennemann to Copleston and Russell? At some point between the 1820s and 1940s, the account of early modern philosophy that can be found in Tennemann must have been exported from Germany to the English-speaking world. When and how did this happen?<\/p>\n

    Here are three hypotheses.<\/p>\n

    1. British philosophers around the 1830s?<\/strong><\/p>\n

    The first English translation of Tennemann’s Manual<\/em> was published in 1832. At that time, three British philosophers were interested in the history of philosophy: William Hamilton, Samuel Coleridge, and Dugald Stewart. None of them produced any substantial writing that made use of the rationalism-empiricism distinction. Thomas Morell had published in 1827 a History of Philosophy<\/em> that would be reprinted many times, but he did not distinguish early modern philosophers into empiricists and rationalists. He split them into four groups:<\/p>\n