“Enthusiasm” has been described as the intellectual opposite of the Enlightenment, its “anti-self”. It stood for a religion of the “heart” rather than the “head”, and was associated with the extreme, millenarian sects on the fringes of established Protestantism. The relationship between religious enthusiasm and enlightened philosophy, however, could be closer than is often thought. Here I focus on the example of the jurist and philosopher Christian Thomasius (1655–1728), who is considered to be one of the first and most influential representatives of the early Enlightenment in Protestant Germany. Usually, Thomasius is described as a sort of classical enlightened thinker who separated the question of religious truth from the pursuit of secular philosophy, and it is implied that the interpretation of Thomasius's religious beliefs contributes little, if anything, to the understanding of his philosophical views. His religious views, however, not only were regarded by contemporaries as an example of religious “enthusiasm”. These “enthusiastic” religious beliefs were also more important to his philosophy than is often argued. They were part of a programme for religious and intellectual renewal and reform which, Thomasius believed, would prepare the reform of Lutheran philosophy from the obsolete, “scholastic” intellectual traditions it had inherited from the papal church. This essay examines the often complex development of Thomasius's religious views in their historical context and their significance for his wider “enlightened” intellectual interests.

The founder of Russian socialism, Alexander Herzen, was also an original moral and social philosopher, anticipating much twentieth-century thought in his attack on “grand narratives” that endow history with a rational direction and a final goal. The critique of radical utopianism which he based on his observations of the French revolution of 1848 did not (contrary to the common view) deprive him of any further role as a revolutionary intellectual. Rather, it forced him to redefine this role. The key influences on him in this respect were the thought and the activity of Pierre-Joseph Proudhon. He saw Proudhon's attack on the anthropotheism of Feuerbach's “religion of humanity” as completing the demystification of the world begun by the Left Hegelians' critique of religious alienation, and interpreted Proudhon's unpopularity with the French Left as confirmation of his role as a forerunner who had articulated a vision of freedom from transcendent authorities and systems much in advance of his time. During his subsequent involvement in the Russian political scene Herzen modelled himself to a significant degree on Proudhon, attacking systematizers on all sides, urging a pragmatic approach to the problem of political reform, and accepting his loss of influence among Russian radicals as the price for unmasking the authoritarianism hidden in the ideologies of the Left: a notable instance of cross-cultural influences at work in the history of nineteenth-century revolutionary thought.

W. V. Quine is widely regarded as one of the most important and influential philosophers of the twentieth century. Quine wrote and lectured on logic, philosophy of language, and epistemology throughout his long career, and was one of the American figures who did most to establish the analytic tradition of philosophy in the United States. Until recently, the historical development of both Quine's philosophy and the analytic tradition of which it is a part remained unexamined by historians and philosophers alike. In the last decade or so, however, analytic philosophers have begun to assess the history of their enterprise, and Quine's place within it. Building on this welcome development with the tools of intellectual history, this essay examines Quine's philosophical apprenticeship in the late 1920s and 1930s.

The basic tenets of Quine's mature thought set in early in his studies. Most notably, he displayed in his student writings a commitment to science as the primary theory of the world within which philosophical inquiry should take place. Yet he found the uncertain direction of interwar American philosophy uncongenial to his views. During a year of postdoctoral research in Europe, Quine encountered the work of analytic philosophers and logicians such as Rudolf Carnap and Alfred Tarski. Their scientific program for philosophy captivated Quine, who returned to Harvard a champion of their work. For the rest of the 1930s, Quine was an indefatigable advocate of the analytic tradition; he brought news of European logic and scientific philosophy to American universities. His purpose in doing so was to move American philosophy towards science and away from what he saw as its metaphysical entanglements. The reception and transformation of analytic philosophy in the United States is shown to have involved a complex dynamic between foreign and domestic conceptions of philosophy.

Once again, the United States is at war. Just as in the 1960s and 1970s, the battlefield is halfway around the globe in a third world country. The deployment of military force is again justified partly in terms of national interest, but also in terms of bringing modernity, freedom and prosperity to a people whose society can be described in terms such as “traditional,” “despotic,” “backward,” “undemocratic,” and/or “underdeveloped.” The exact meaning of the polar opposition signaled by the words “modern” and “traditional” is, like all politically charged terms, subject to debate and far from stable, but the polarity has figured importantly in international affairs ever since the end of World War II, and its salience was sharply heightened by the suicidal attack on New York's World Trade Center in September, 2001. That tragedy, together with the erratic bellicosity of the American response—directed not solely at the perpetrator, Al Quaeda, but also at Saddam Hussein's cruel dictatorship in Iraq—put modernization back in the headlines for the first time since 1975, when the United States pulled out of Vietnam in defeat. With the return of modernization comes the vexing problem of what to make of differences between “us” and “them.” What ethical obligations do scholars have in a world increasingly crowded with people who are eager to sacrifice lives—their own or others'—for the sake either of preserving tradition, or of hastening the triumph of modernity? Most pressing of all, given the potentially civilizational scale of the conflict, is another integrally related question: what does the future hold for ethnocentrism?

Mi Gyung Kim, Affinity, That Elusive Dream: A Genealogy of the Chemical Revolution (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2003)

Guiliano Pancaldi, Volta: Science and Culture in the Age of Enlightenment (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2003)

To challenge the presumed isolation of the scientific method from social concerns and forces, to question the inevitability of progress, to explore the ideological and polemical aspects of science—all these are by now goals commonly stated in historical studies of science. In the quest for these desiderata over the past twenty years or so, historians of science have in many cases distanced themselves from intellectual history in its idealist, disembodied form. However, in spite of salutary moves to analyze instruments, laboratory practices, visual representations, instituions and politics, a great deal of the raw material for the history of science remains textual, very often in the form of print. And, as the existence of this journal attests, intellectual history has retooled to take seriously the contexts for ideas and intellectual movements. At the present moment, when intellectual historians and historians of science are allied in the game of contextualizing our subjects, it is worth considering how current scholarship is working to define multi-layered contexts for scientific ideas and the texts in which they appear.

William James, The Varieties of Religious Experience: A Study in Human Nature, centenary edition, foreword Micky James, intro. Eugene Taylor and Jeremy Carrette (Routledge, 2002)

Charles Taylor, Varieties of Religion Today: William James Revisited (Harvard University Press, 2002)

William James and a Science of Religions, ed. Wayne Proudfoot (Columbia University Press, 2004)

William James has a secure reputation as a pioneer psychologist and as a founding father of the philosophy of pragmatism. In his own time, however, he was best known and most popular among the laity for “The Will to Believe” (1895) and for The Varieties of Religious Experience: A Study in Human Nature (1902), which were defenses erected on behalf of religion in an increasingly secular world. Religious liberals treated the Bible as one human document among others and Christian faith as one tradition among many, but they “sought to salvage what they could of traditional belief, piety, and ethic.” James was part of this movement that took science, empiricism, and modern philosophy as a point of departure, but his contribution to it was distinctive, original, and (in his own idiom) unusually “tough-minded.”

Mark Lilla, The Reckless Mind: Intellectuals in Politics (New York: New York Review of Books, 2001)

Eric Hobsbawm, Interesting Times: A Twentieth-Century Life (New York: Pantheon, 2002)

“Great writers are either husbands or lovers,” Susan Sontag explained in a 1963 essay on Camus. “Some writers supply the solid virtues of a husband: reliability, intelligibility, generosity, decency. There are other writers in whom one prizes the gifts of a lover, gifts of temperament rather than of moral goodness. Notoriously, women tolerate qualities in a lover—moodiness, selfishness, unreliability, brutality—that they never countenance in a husband, in return for excitement, an infusion of intense feeling. In the same way, readers put up with unintelligibility, obsessiveness, painful truths, lies, bad grammar—if, in compensation, the writer allows them to savor rare emotions, and dangerous sensations.” Camus was “the ideal husband of contemporary letters,” she opined, but “as in life, so in art both are necessary, husband and lovers. It's a great pity when one is forced to choose between them.”