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ABSTRACT
This paper discusses how early modern materialism can be defined and delineated, before turning to a brief survey of the main philosophical resources early modern materialist theories draw on. Subsequently, I discuss competing overall narratives concerning early modern materialism, and conclude with a defence of the controversial view that material soul theories belong to materialism proper.
Acknowledgements
Previous versions of several papers of this special issue have been discussed at the conference ‘Varieties of Early Modern Materialism’ held at Johannes Gutenberg-Universität Mainz (19 June-21 June 2014). I would like to thank all participants of the conference and all contributors to this special issue, as well as the British Journal for the History of Philosophy and its editor Mike Beaney, as well as Patricia Springborg, the other guest editor of this special issue, for their contributions and their helpful criticism and comments.
Notes
1 On the development of the traditional image see Vanzo, ‘From Empirics to Empiricists’. Among the first to criticize the traditional bifurcation are Loeb, From Descartes to Hume, and Norton, ‘The Myth of British Empiricism’.
2 Key works on early modern materialism during the last decades include Yolton, Thinking Matter; Locke and French Materialism; Berman, ‘Die Debatte über die Seele’; Thomson, Bodies of Thought; Wilson, Epicureanism at the Origins of Modernity; Audidière, Matérialistes français du XVIIIe siècle; Wolfe, ‘Materialism’ Materialism; Rumore, Materia cogitans; Bloch, Le matérialisme, Matière à histoires; Benítez, La Face cachée des Lumières.
3 Mensching, ‘Le matérialisme’; see on this aspect the papers by Springborg, Wolfe and Rumore.
4 References to papers in this BJHP special issue, 24:5, have the form ‘paper by [author name]’. All papers are quoted with full titles in the bibliography of this paper.
5 Quite a few notable figures had to be omitted or could be dealt with only in brief, such as Baron d’Holbach, Joseph Priestley, Jean Meslier, John Toland, Anthony Collins or Voltaire.
6 For the problems of such labels in connection with materialism, see Thomson, Bodies of Thought, 17. An example for an anachronistic, label-sticking approach is F.A. Lange’s distinction between a ‘real’ and ‘consistent’ materialism on the one side and an ‘improper’ one on the other, where ‘consistent materialism’ is apparently a kind of eliminativism, according to Lange. ‘Improper’ materialism in terms of Lange includes the concept of ‘stuff thinking per se’, which he deems not properly material. Properly material attributes are, for Lange, just mechanical ones (Lange, Geschichte des Materialismus, 812–4).
7 Meier in fact distinguishes three kinds of materialism: psychological, cosmological and general materialism. I think it makes sense, though, to count the two latter types both as ontological ones: cosmological materialism denies that there are any immaterial substances in the created world (thus excluding God), while general materialism denies immaterial substances altogether, including God (Meier, Metaphysik, vol. 1, 142).
8 An example is d’Holbach’s claim that ‘the universe, this vast sum of all that exists, offers us everywhere just matter and motion’ (Système de la Nature, vol. 1, 12).
9 See Springborg ‘Hobbes's Challenge’ on Hobbes on a corporeal God, also the paper by Wilkins.
10 Examples would be Priestley (Disquisitions Relating to Matter and Spirit, 103–13) who is agnostic about the essence of God, or Cavendish who restricts her substance monism to the created world (see paper by Wilkins).
11 Two complementary (slightly different) accounts of the main forms of materialism have been developed by Wolfe and Thomson: Wolfe suggests a similar division but with different naming: the first forms holds ‘that everything that exists is material, or the product of interaction between or relations between material entities’; the second one puts ‘focus on relations between mind and brain’ (Wolfe, Materialism, 10; ‘Materialism’, 98; also Wolfe’s paper). Thomson (Bodies of Thought, 219) contrasts two approaches represented by Diderot on the one hand and Helvétius on the other: whereas Diderot is primarily interested in the physiological basis of thought, Helvétius focuses more on political and moral implications of materialism. Schofield (Mechanism and Materialism), on the other hand, has an unusual concept of materialism, according to which materialists believe that different natural phenomena are due to different, specific substances with specific forces, contrary to mechanists who argue that all phenomena are based on the primary particles of one, undifferentiated type of matter.
12 More, Divine Dialogues, 5–6; Cudworth, The True Intellectual System of the Universe, 187; see Bloch, Le matérialisme, 4–7; Bloch, Matière à histoires, 21–35, on the first appearances of the word materialism; see also Benítez, La Face cachée des Lumières.
13 Leibniz, ‘Reponse aux reflexions contenues’, 559 f. See the paper by Rumore and Mensching, ‘Der Materialismus’, 472. The term appears in Berkeley, too, but with an entirely different meaning, see Wolfe, ‘Materialism’.
14 An anti-metaphysical attitude is obvious from, for instance, the first pages of La Mettrie’s L’homme machine (OEuvres philosophiques, vol. 1, 285–6). See the paper by Wilson, 1016f. on the distinction between more empirically and more metaphysically oriented presentations of materialism; the paper by Wolfe for the importance of physiology and medicine. For Hißmann’s anti-metaphysical stance, see the paper by Wunderlich, 947–9.
15 See paper by Springborg. On Spinozism in German materialism, see Rumore, Materia cogitans, 26–33.
16 See the papers by Wilson and Springborg; see also Lange, Geschichte des Materialismus, 235–46; Wolfe, ‘Materialism’, 96; Thomson, ‘Matérialisme et épicurisme’; Wilson, ‘Two Opponents of Epicurean Atomism’ Epicureanism at the Origins of Modernity; ‘Epicurus in the Early Modern Period’; ‘Matter, Mortality, and the Changing Ideal of Science’; Leddy and Lifschitz, Epicurus in the Enlightenment; Springborg, ‘Hobbes and Epicurean Religion’.
17 See Yolton, Thinking Matter, 3–5; Wolfe, Materialism; see papers by Dyck and Wunderlich for this aspect in German materialism. On materialism and mortalism, see Wilson, ‘Some Responses to Lucretian Mortalism’; ‘Matter, Mortality, and the Changing Ideal of Science’; Dempsey and Stoyles, ‘Comfort in Annihilation’; Dempsey, ‘A Compound Wholly Mortal’; Thiel, ‘Religion and Materialist Metaphysics’; Rumore, ‘Meiers Theorie der Unsterblichkeit’.
18 See Yolton (Thinking Matter, 5–7) on Cudworth, the paper by Dyck on Leibniz and Wolff, the paper by Audidière on Rousseau’s critical engagement with Helvétius, the paper by Rozemond on Descartes, Malebranche and Leibniz, and the paper by Wilson on Cudworth and Bayle. See also Rumore (Materia cogitans) on Thomasius, Wolff and Meier, Wilson (‘The Problem of Materialism in the New Essays’) on Leibniz, the paper by Watkins on Kant.
19 See the paper by Dyck about Johann Franz Budde and Siegmund Jakob Baumgarten, who provided detailed analyses of the supposed errors of atheism and materialism and thereby recounted the arguments from hard-to-find texts. Dyck argues that as a side effect of this, materialist claims also entered the mainstream of German Enlightenment philosophy.
20 On this aspect, see Wolfe, ‘Materialism’, 96–9; Materialism, 15; Vartanian (La Mettrie’s L’homme machine, 63) who argues that the dynamist theory of matter in La Mattrie’s L’homme machine is an indirect debt to Leibniz.
21 See Thomson (Bodies of Thought, 21) on the Traité des trois imposteurs, Wolfe (‘Materialism’, 92) on Theophrastus redivivus and L’ame materielle; see also Rumore, Materia cogitans, 33–50, and the papers by Dyck, Kaitaro and Rumore. On clandestine manuscripts more generally, see for example, Bloch, Matière à histoires; Benítez, La Face cachée des Lumières, in particular 307–99 on the very philosophy involved; Paganini, ‘Haupttendenzen der clandestinen Philosophie’; Introduzione alle filosofie clandestine; Schröder, Ursprünge des Atheismus; Mulsow, Moderne aus dem Untergrund; Haug, Geheimliteratur und Geheimbuchhandel.
22 Exponents of the old narrative include Vartanian, La Mettrie’s L’homme machine, 57–91; Lange, Geschichte des Materialismus, 210, for example. See Thomson, ‘Mechanistic Materialism vs Vitalistic Materialism?’; Bodies of Thought, 14, 44–58, 67, for critical discussion of Vartanian and Lange, as well as of other exponents like Hall, Ideas of Life and Matter, vol. 1, 257; vol. 2, 46–48; Rosenfield, From Beast-Machine to Man-Machine; Kirkinen, Les Origines de la conception moderne. For discussion of Vassails, ‘L’Encyclopédie et la physique’, and Friedrich Engels, ‘Ludwig Feuerbach und der Ausgang’, see Wolfe, Materialism, 6–10, and the paper by Kaitaro for more examples. A (surprisingly) recent version of the old narrative is Henrich, ‘Materialismus’. Yolton, on the other hand, is more ambiguous: on the one hand, he includes many elements crucial to the new narratives (such as active matter), but on the other hand he upholds the notion of mechanistic materialism, for example, concerning La Mettrie (Yolton, Thinking Matter, 195).
23 See the definition of mechanism in the paper by Wood: mechanism is defined as the view that all natural phenomena are fully explicable in terms of size, figure, motion and collision of material bodies.
24 For instance in the Leviathan: Sensible qualities ‘are in the object that causeth them but so many several motions of the matter, by which it presseth our organs diversely’ (Hobbes, Leviathan, 7).
25 See for instance, Anstey, The Philosophy of Robert Boyle pt. II; Garber and Roux, The Mechanization of Natural Philosophy.
26 See Yolton, Thinking Matter, 90–106; Thomson, ‘Mechanistic Materialism vs Vitalistic Materialism?’; Bodies of Thought, 65–95; Lange, Geschichte des Materialismus, 628–65.
27 The first clear narrative along these lines has been provided by Ann Thomson, see her ‘Mechanistic Materialism vs Vitalistic Materialism?’, and Bodies of Thought, see also Osler, Divine Will and the Mechanical Philosophy, 171–9; Yolton, Thinking Matter, 3, for the systematic connection between mechanism and dualism.
28 On Diderot and active matter, see the papers by Wolfe and Kaitaro. Wilson, in her paper (1004–5), argues that Hume defended a ‘cautious affirmation’ of vital materialism, in the sense of a doctrine that ascribes to matter forces with the capacity to produce the phenomena of life and sentience.
29 Toland, Letters to Serena, 163–239; d’Holbach, Système de la nature, vol. 1, 38–48. For Toland, see Duncan, ‘Toland, Leibniz, and Active Matter’.
30 Priestley, Disquisitions Relating to Matter and Spirit, 1–23. This is why Yolton (Thinking Matter, 107–26) discusses Priestley as a key example in this regard: Priestley’s conception of matter as fundamentally constituted by forces provides a consistent grounding for activity on the basic level of material elements.
31 Although Thomson (‘Mechanistic Materialism vs Vitalistic Materialism?’) is to some extent critical of the notion of ‘vitalistic materialism’, while Wolfe (‘Materialism’, Materialism) puts a lot of emphasis on it, they do not seem to fundamentally disagree: What Thomson in fact criticizes is that materialism is often divided into vitalism and mechanism. Thus, Thomson mainly takes issue with the ‘old narrative’ here and is in agreement with Wolfe about the crucial significance of active matter for (almost) all early modern materialists. See the paper by Wolfe (977f.) on another distinction concerning the role of the brain: between ‘more plastic, culturally embedded models of the brain’ like in Diderot and ‘more formal, mechanistic models’ like in Toland, Collins and Priestley. The paper by Wilkins shows how Cavendish conceived of the shortcomings of both mechanism and vitalism.
32 La Mettrie, OEuvres philosophiques, vol. 1, 345; see Thomson, Bodies of Thought, 68–79, 175–89; Kaitaro, ‘Eighteenth-century French Materialism’.
33 See Collins in Clarke, The Works of Samuel Clarke, 751, 769, for example, and Rozemond, ‘Can Matter Think?’. On Knoblauch on emergentism and Hupel’s critical discussion, see the paper by Wunderlich.
34 Diderot, for instance, discusses whether thought inheres in the smallest particles of matter or emerges from a particular organization, mostly opting for the first version, see Thomson, Bodies of Thought, 220 f.
35 Locke, An Essay Concerning Human Understanding, 541. There is a long-lasting controversy in Locke scholarship about how exactly superaddition is supposed to work. The paper by Wood contributes to this debate.
36 ‘The story of the thinking matter controversy in eighteenth-century Britain is largely the story of reactions to Locke’s suggestion. While Hobbes and Spinoza are routinely cited as the arch materialists, it is to Locke’s suggestion that most of the reactions were directed.’ Yolton, Thinking Matter, xi, see also 90. Also Berman (‘Die Debatte über die Seele’) argues that Locke’s Essay is the foundation of most of the materialism debate in Great Britain.
37 Recently, Jolley (Locke's Touchy Subjects) has argued that Locke seeks to defend a ‘weak materialism’ compatible with property dualism, whereas the more common view is that Locke wanted to merely establish materialism as an epistemic possibility; see Wilson, ‘Matter, Mortality, and the Changing Ideal of Science’; Stuart, Locke’s Metaphysics, 265–6, and the paper by Wood.
38 Yolton (Thinking Matter, 201) mentions that according to Albrecht von Haller, matter possesses no qualities of its own at all that have not been designated by God. This includes the power of irritability many materialists appreciated, so one might argue that Haller introduces it in a superaddition-like fashion.
39 Kaitaro (‘Brain-mind Identities in Dualism and Materialism’) shows that dualists surprisingly proposed partial mind–brain identities more enthusiastically than materialists.
40 Thomson (‘Introduction’, xiii) distinguishes two forms of materialist explanation in a very similar fashion. For Epicurus’ concept of soul, see for instance, the letter to Herodotus, 63–7 (Long and Sedley, The Hellenistic philosophers, 65–6). The papers by Wilkins and Springborg discuss the notion of subtle matter in connection with Hobbes and Cavendish.
41 I would like to thank an anonymous reviewer of my other paper in this special issue for emphasizing this difficulty.
42 Accordingly, Johann Samuel Traugott Gehler in his widely used Physikalisches Wörterbuch (vol. 1, 83) calls the ether ‘a subtle matter that is distributed through space and the intermediate spaces within the bodies’. Theories of electricity around the mid-eigthteenth century, for instance, unanimously assumed a subtle kind of matter to explain electrostatic phenomena; see Wunderlich (‘Johann Georg Sulzers Widerlegung’, 46–51) for this phenomenon in Germany.