This chapter examines the attempts of Enlightenment philosophers David Hume and Adam Smith to reconcile war with their theories of progress. Both made impartiality a touchstone of enlightened judgement, and so found that the national partiality aroused by war was deeply problematic. Humes optimistic view of progress was undermined by his pessimistic account of the passions released in war, and by the evidence of the destructive waste entailed in contemporary war-making. His desire to moderate contemporary bellicosity led him, in his History of England, to emphasise medieval magnanimity in victory, in a way that was at odds with his progressive agenda. Adam Smith encountered a comparable problem. His attempts in his Theory of Moral Sentiments to provide improving models of public responses to war were at odds with his later conviction that the public was dangerously insulated from the destructive realities of war.

The section’s final chapter examines the relation between philosophy, poetry, and criticism, revisiting a number of concepts introduced in previous chapters, including the development of a historical imagination and of organicist ideas of nature and culture, the new interest in aesthetics as a moral source, and the rise of sensibility as a challenge to disembodied reason. All of these contributed to a sense of crisis inherent to Enlightenment itself. It first reads the English poets Thomas Gray and Edward Young, traditionally seen as precursors of European Romanticism, alongside Kant’s First Critique to show how the philosopher sought to save reason from Hume’s scepticism by making it the product of a shared knowledge based on nature rather than book learning. the chapter then explains how the notion of ideas as historically and linguistically mediated emerged out of Vico, Rousseau, and Kant, giving particular attention to the Genevan philosopher’s social thought. The last part examines the Kant-Herder controversy, which brought to a crisis key tensions in late-Enlightenment culture between critical reason and a direct, lyrical insight into natural causality. The latter was dismissed by Kant as a dangerous form of ‘genius-cultism’ that lent itself to revolutionary fanaticism.

Two themes have dominated philosophical discussions concerning the rationality of believing a report of a miracle. The first relies on the idea that miracles are by definition massively improbable. The second theme involves the thought that testimony is, in general, not a very reliable source of information. The result of combining these two themes is that it is very difficult – some suggest impossible – to rationally believe that a miracle has occurred on the basis of testimony: on its own, testimony is too weak to outweigh the improbability of a miracle. Both themes are addressed in Hume’s famous essay on miracles. This chapter examines each theme and critically discusses interpretations of and replies to Hume’s argument.

Generations of Christians, Janet Soskice demonstrates, once knew God and Christ by hundreds of remarkable names. These included the appellations ‘Messiah’, ‘Emmanuel’, ‘Alpha’, ‘Omega’, ‘Eternal’, ‘All-Powerful’, ‘Lamb’, ‘Lion’, ‘Goat’, ‘One’, ‘Word’, ‘Serpent’ and ‘Bridegroom’. In her much-anticipated new book, Soskice argues that contemporary understandings of divinity could be transformed by a return to a venerable analogical tradition of divine naming. These ancient titles – drawn from scripture – were chanted and sung, crafted and invoked (in polyphony and plainsong) as they were woven into the worship of the faithful. However, during the sixteenth century Descartes moved from ‘naming’ to ‘defining’ God via a series of metaphysical attributes. This made God a thing among things: a being amongst beings. For the author, reclaiming divine naming is not only overdue. It can also re-energise the relationship between philosophy and religious tradition. This path-breaking book shows just how rich and revolutionary such reclamation might be.

David Hume and Adam Smith were contemporaries, interlocutors, compatriots, and friends, who, along with Hutcheson, helped shape the remarkable period of intellectual activity in eighteenth-century Scotland known as the Scottish Enlightenment. They inherited Hutcheson’s sentimentalist approach: a form of moral empiricism that is opposed to ethical rationalism and that continues to find resonance today. Hume’s version has had the greatest influence, including in contemporary discussion.

For his part, Adam Smith is, of course, best known for his writings on economics. But Smith’s Theory of Moral Sentiments is arguably one of the greatest works on moral psychology ever written. Smith shows the ubiquity of imaginative perspective-taking in our mental moral lives, both in attributing mental states to others (and in everyday normative judgments of the fittingness, or “propriety” as Smith calls it, of attitudes to the objects they have in view). Moreover, Smith connects fellow-feeling with mutual respect and accountability. Our capacity to take on others’ perspectives and regulate our conduct toward them from an informed and impartial second-personal point of view figures centrally both in Smith’s account of justice.

Hegel intends to prove two different claims about purposive connections in his Logic: (1) that teleology is the truth of mechanism and (2) that inner purposiveness is the truth of the external reference-to-an-end. I devote this chapter to the analysis of the first of these arguments. To this end, I introduce Hegel’s concept of ‘mechanism’, whose main ingredient is the idea that mechanisms are determined as causes merely from without. This feature disqualifies mechanisms as self-sufficient explainers. I compare Hegel’s understanding of this shortcoming with Hume’s and Kant’s misgivings about the cognition of causal relations. For Hegel, mechanical causes are in themselves apparent and the relations they maintain with other causes are in themselves contingent. It is this essential contingency of the ‘necessary’ that makes Hegel judge mechanical relations to be untrue. Mechanical objects with indeterminate causal powers appear essentially as means and, hence, hypothetically subordinated to self-determining causes.

Two early essays from the year 1765 set the scene for Herder’s lifelong engagement with the topic of patriotism. Both are focused on the question of modern patriotism. Reading them side-by-side one is nevertheless struck by their contrasting tenor. An earlier unfinished essay, How Philosophy Can Become More Universal and Useful for the Benefit of the People, is highly critical of modern society and politics, while Do We Still Have the Public and Fatherland of the Ancients celebrates modern developments, including luxury and modern freedom. In an effort to explain these differences, this chapter argues that these essays represent an important intersection between two kinds of debates on Rousseau’s moral and political thought in German-speaking countries. Herder entered the debate as a self-avowed ‘Rousseauian’, while he soon also became aware of economic and political debates that were originally shaped by Montesquieu. In these debates, Rousseau had come to be seen as a defender of austere democratic republicanism modelled on early Greek societies. This was not the Rousseau Herder wished to associate himself with. The second essay is thus replete with implicit references to Abbt, Hume and Hamann. The same orientation was shared by the local elites in Riga.

In the last decades, scholars have carved out Herder’s original and interconnected ideas about epistemology, metaphysics, philosophical anthropology, language, and aesthetics, situating his thinking in various strands of Enlightenment philosophy, natural history and hermeneutics. Several recent studies have also dissected Herder’s moral and political ideas. However, Herder’s views on modern European politics and the evolution of his political thought have remained largely unexplored. In particular, his self-avowed ‘German patriotism has not been studied at any depth. At the same time, a debate on Herder’s relationship to nationalism still lingers on. This study proposes that reconstructing Herder’s serial contributions to eighteenth-century discussions on the moral psychological foundations of, and the possible reforms in, modern societies provides a key to understanding the evolution of his political thought, including his relationship to nationalism. In engaging with thinkers such as Rousseau, Montesquieu, Möser, Ferguson, and Kant, Herder addressed questions on how to close the gap between moral principles and action, as well as law and ethics, in contemporary societies.

This chapter considers how Jacobi’s philosophy of mind distinguishes itself by ascribing a resolutely realist intuition to sensibility, the intellect, and reason. The key to this difference is Jacobi’s personalism, or self-feeling – an awareness of the finite nature of one’s existence – which reveals itself as an unmediated, pre-discursive, non-sensuous actuality.

Chapter 3 examines adherent beauty or partly conceptual beauty. How are beauty and the good related? Like Johann Georg Sulzer and David Hume, Kant distinguishes between free beauty and purpose-based beauty, or the kind grounded in the purposes or aims of the object or artwork. Even in his early aesthetics, Kant holds that beauty and goodness are distinct concepts yet can be conjoined. Purpose-based beauty is central to Kant’s early aesthetics, and he calls it “self-standing.” This kind of beauty is retained in the third Critique in the form of adherent beauty, yet a fundamental shift occurs: he there calls free beauty “self-standing.”

Chapter 1 surveys philosophers from the German and British aesthetic and intellectual traditions with which Kant directly engages in the third Critique and pre-Critical materials. What is the role of rules in his early aesthetics? Laying the foundation for some of the book’s later analyses, the chapter shows how the early Kant synthesizes ideas from his German and British predecessors.

Chapter 7 explores ugliness and disgust (Ekel). In providing an overview of the third Critique position, the chapter argues that there cannot be pure aesthetic judgments of the ugly. In his early accounts, Kant views the responses to ugliness and disgust as unpleasant and therefore as (what Kant would call) “interested.” He typically discusses ugliness and disgust in connection with a teleological perspective of the whole of nature and of natural purposes. The ugly is disagreeable, since it is dysfunctional or asymmetrical (or both). A version of this view carries over into the third Critique. The ugly, if and when it is judged by the principle of nature’s purposiveness, would be contrapurposive and therefore disagreeable.

The relative freedom and political stability of seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Britain produced an intellectual milieu amenable to advances in the natural sciences and philosophy. The major theme of British psychological thought was empirical, emphasizing knowledge acquired through sensation. The mechanism of this acquisition process was association. Founded by Hobbes but fully articulated by Locke, British empiricism retained the necessity of the mind construct while underlining the importance of sensations. Berkeley, Hume, and Hartley evolved skeptical positions concerning the reality of matter and mind that could have left the British movement in the same sterile position as French sensationalism. In addition, James Mill, although he was somewhat salvaged by the utilitarian influence, reduced associations to mental compounding. However, the Scottish common sense writers succeeded in restoring empiricism to a more flexible and open-ended position that recognized complex and integrative psychological phenomena. Thus, the later empiricism of John Stuart Mill, while adhering to scientific inductive methods, adopted a broadly based model of psychology that viewed mental operations and physiological processes as complementary and necessary dimensions of psychological inquiry. By the nineteenth century British philosophy was providing strong support for the study of psychology.