Using a new visualisation technique for word embedding data, this chapter explores the formation of complex, compound concepts in the late eighteenth century, focusing specifically on ‘political revolution’. Word embedding models offer an alternative method of understanding relationships between terms, both as a function of proximity (as in collocation) and of shared contexts (as in synonyms). By measuring the direct distance within the embedding space between two words over time in a series of aligned models, we can witness two parts of a compound idea bind together and observe which terms provide the binding force between them. Using this method, I explore the way that ‘revolution’ travels across the eighteenth century in relation to the ‘political’. Although loosely linked in the wake of the Glorious Revolution at the outset of the century, revolution becomes heavily tied to Newtonian mechanics, before being pulled back into political usage during the French Revolution. The method I introduce here reveals the hidden connections to ‘science’ in both political and revolution that undergirds their eventual merger into the idea of ‘political revolution’ that we have inherited today.

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.

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.

Grotius, Hobbes, and Pufendorf are canonical representatives of the early modern natural law tradition. In this chapter, we consider the tradition’s other two main figures: John Locke and Richard Cumberland. Locke is justly famous, of course, though more for his political philosophy and the more familiar topics in epistemology and metaphysics treated in the Essay Concerning Human Understanding than for his ethics. In his moral philosophy, however, he makes interesting connections between moral accountability and autonomy that provide an interesting point of contrast with Pufendorf. Cumberland is much less well known. However, Cumberland’s contemporaries saw him, along with Grotius and Pufendorf, as one of a “triumvirate of seventeenth-century founders of the ‘modern’ school of natural law” (Haakonssen). Moreover, Cumberland has special relevance to moral philosophy of the present day, since he was among the first to attempt to “locate” moral truths and facts in relation to, and perhaps reduce them to, those that are confirmable by the empirical sciences, a naturalist program that remains vital today. And he was also an important source of philosophical utilitarianism.

The first power of the police is their ability to use force to protect and rescue third parties. This understanding departs in a critical way from the Weberian argument that the government has a monopoly on the use of force by observing that a police officer’s ability to use force to defend others is available to all people. It is not only provided for under laws that allow all people to defend others but also as a moral prerogative that exists prior to and outside of political arrangements, democratic or otherwise. The police are distinguished from their fellow citizens by embodying a role that discharges protection and rescue as a duty, rather than a prerogative. The discharge of this duty by what Nozick would call a “dominant protective association” is a necessary requirement to demarcate the state from nature, suggesting that the police role is integral to the definition of the state and a requirement of its initial formulation. From this duty follows the role responsibility to use this force as minimally and economically as possible, and as a backstop, the police role further sanctifies life by creating the citizen’s duty to retreat from interpersonal threats when they can safely do so.

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.

The author focuses on Thomas Reid’s reference to the specific way the Christian faith requires to be related to rational arguments. From both philosophical and scientific investigations that Reid conducted, it emerges that the influence, which he argued faith is expected to have on reason, does not limit the autonomy of the rational investigation.

The author focuses on how Reformed epistemologists and John Henry Newman have criticized Locke’s view of faith and reason, a view that the author, too, rejects. The author’s argument is that their original and intellectually penetrating criticisms are only relatively satisfactory once considered from the viewpoint of what he calls the spiritual turn from mere epistemology.

This chapter critically examines some of the popular theoretical justifications that have hitherto been postulated as explanations for the existence of intellectual property rights in general and patent rights in particular. The focus here is limited to the Lockean theory, the Hegelian theory, the utilitarian theory, and the regulatory theory. The chapter is structured into four sections. Sections 2.2 and 2.3 examine the Lockean and Hegelian theories, respectively, while Sections 2.4 and 2.5 focus on the utilitarian and regulatory theories, respectively. The chapter concludes with the view that the regulatory theory of intellectual property is the only theory that adopts a broad socio-centric approach. Thus, any developing country that seeks to preserve its patent policy space and secure access to medicines for its citizens should treat intellectual property law (including patent law) as an instrument that regulates the grant of exclusive rights to creators.

In this chapter, I explore the topic of the economic rights of non-citizens through the lens of the history of philosophy. I make two different but interconnected arguments in this chapter. In the first part of the chapter, I examine the claims made by John Locke, Adam Smith, and Friedrich von Hayek that a well-regulated market, supplemented by robust government support, is necessary for the realization of basic economic rights. Though the views of Locke, Smith, and Hayek are important in understanding how economic rights can be realized and the role the state should play in this, they do not directly address what this might mean for non-citizens. I suggest in the next part that their views must be supplemented by the work of Hannah Arendt and her concept of the right to have rights. I suggest that her argument that the right to have rights is more fundamental than human rights can be extended to economic rights. Non-citizens need a right to have economic rights, that is, a right to belong to an economic community. I conclude by discussing the example of refugees in the Global South and some ways that we might support a right to have economic rights.

In Grotius, Cumberland, and Locke we see the basic elements of the theological version of morality as legislation. Grotius used a framework of evaluating the consequences of different possible rules for fallible, biased people as a way of determining what ought to be done. Cumberland provided a theory of right in which all the content of all divine laws could be traced back to one divine attribute, benevolence. Locke, while less systematically consequentialist than Cumberland, had a hedonistic theory of the good, an account of God that also emphasized benevolence, and (most interestingly) a willingness to press very hard on the legislative metaphor in order to establish the correct content of natural law when it was in dispute. Locke imagines God as a legislator using precisely the structure of rationality that a human legislator would use in contemplating which law to pass, including problems of biased and fallible execution of the law. Locke’s use is clearly counterfactual. It is probably not a coincidence that both Locke and Cumberland were strong supporters of new scientific theories that sought to understand nature by means of natural laws.

This chapter studies Locke’s critique of scholastic language, but since this “learned gibberish” is, for Locke, only one form of insignificant speech, the chapter then proceeds to discuss his views about the requirements for significant speech and the remedies proposed in case these requirements are not met. Locke’s answer contains elements that, at first sight, cannot be reconciled with each other so easily: his linguistic thesis according to which words as arbitrary signs are imposed by the mind on its ideas has a mentalistic and even solipsistic ring to it, yet communication is a social activity, governed by rules, customs, and conventions. The chapter therefore ends by looking in more detail at the social dimension of language to see how the social world shapes our apparently private minds. It concludes that for Locke the mind is a social entity, embedded in social and linguistic practices that shape our views of the world and give expression to them. The social world is built on the ideas we receive and construct, and common linguistic usage, for all its imperfections, is essential in framing and conveying these ideas.

This chapter deals again with the influence of law on philosophy, now with regard to a substantive issue. Under the influence of the Roman jurists, for whom private property was an important topic, the ‘Roman’ Stoics followed suit, and awarded private property a novel, central place in thinking about justice, a place which would have a decisive influence on modern, Western political thought.

In eighteenth-century Britain, philosophy was a broader subject than it is today and included many subjects covered elsewhere in this book, such as science, political theory, and theology. This chapter focuses chiefly on those eighteenth-century topics in philosophy that have most shaped present-day philosophical discussion. The first of these is epistemology or the theory of knowledge: the study of what we know and how we know. John Locke, David Hume, and Thomas Reid called this the study of the human mind or understanding. We will also consider another area where the contributions of eighteenth-century British philosophers are widely recognized today: the work in moral and ethical philosophy of a group of thinkers commonly called the ‘British moralists’. From the ancient Greeks and Romans, eighteenth-century thinkers inherited an understanding of philosophy as a way of life and a guide to living well. On what basis do we arrive at moral principles of right and wrong, and what motivates us to follow those principles in our actions: our reason or our feelings? These questions concerned such thinkers as Samuel Clarke, the earl of Shaftesbury, Francis Hutcheson, and Adam Smith.