Textbook Ebook Absolute Time Rifts in Early Modern British Metaphysics Emily Thomas All Chapter PDF
Textbook Ebook Absolute Time Rifts in Early Modern British Metaphysics Emily Thomas All Chapter PDF
Textbook Ebook Absolute Time Rifts in Early Modern British Metaphysics Emily Thomas All Chapter PDF
Absolute Time
OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 1/3/2018, SPi
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Absolute Time
Rifts in Early Modern
British Metaphysics
Emily Thomas
1
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3
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Contents
Abbreviations ix
Chronology of Selected Writings xi
Acknowledgements xv
Introduction 1
Existing Literature 2
Scope 4
General Theses 6
Overview 10
1. Scene Setting: Time, Philosophy, and Seventeenth-Century Britain 13
1.1 Introduction 13
1.2 A Cook’s Tour of the History of Time: From Plato to Descartes 13
1.2.1 Antiquity: Plato, Aristotle, Plotinus, and Augustine 13
1.2.2 The long Middle Ages: Averroes to Suárez 18
1.2.3 Descartes 20
1.3 Time in Early Seventeenth-Century British Philosophy 21
1.3.1 British Aristotelianism 21
1.3.2 British natural philosophy 23
1.3.3 British Platonism 24
1.3.4 British materialism 27
1.4 The Wider British Seventeenth-Century Scene 28
2. Henry More and the Development of Absolute Time 31
2.1 Introduction 31
2.2 Sketching More’s Life and Works 32
2.3 More’s Evolving Views on Time and Duration 33
2.4 More’s Evolving Views on Divine Presence in Space and Time 40
2.4.1 More on ‘nullibism’ and ‘holenmerism’ 40
2.4.2 More’s mature asymmetric account of God’s presence
in space and time 43
2.5 The Development of More’s Early Views on Time 45
2.6 Understanding More’s Mature Absolutism 51
2.7 The Influence of More’s Account of Absolute Duration 56
3. A Continental Interlude: Time in van Helmont, Gassendi,
and Charleton 58
3.1 Introduction 58
3.2 Jan Baptist van Helmont’s Platonic Time 58
3.3 Pierre Gassendi’s Space and Time Absolutism 60
3.4 Walter Charleton and the Reality of Time 63
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vi CONTENTS
CONTENTS vii
Bibliography 211
Index 229
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Abbreviations
Acknowledgements
Metaphysical theories do not spring fully formed from the ether, and nor do
books. A number of people and institutions have helped me bring this book into
existence, and I offer them my sincere thanks.
Over cups of tea and glasses of wine, I’ve especially received advice from
Christoph Jedan, Martin Lenz, Andrea Sangiacomo, Erin Wilson, Matt Duncombe,
Han Thomas Adriaenssen, Sander de Boer, Bianca Bosman, Sarah Hutton, Robin
Le Poidevin, Tim Crane, Tom Stoneham, Jeremy Dunham, Jess Leech, Ori Belkind,
Eric Schliesser, Carla Rita Palmerino, Geoff Gorham, Ed Slowik, and Andrew
Janiak.
I am also grateful for the thoughtful work of Peter Momtchiloff, and that of
the other staff at Oxford University Press, throughout the publication process.
The first people to read this manuscript as a whole were in fact two anonymous
referees for Oxford University Press, and their detailed comments on that
first (significantly rougher) draft were phenomenally helpful—you know who
you are.
Along the way, I have presented portions of this book at a variety of meetings,
seminars, and conferences, including talks at the Ghent University; University of
Cambridge; University of York; University of Groningen; Kohn Institute, Tel
Aviv; Durham University; CUNY, New York; Macalester College; University of
Alaska, Anchorage; and Leiden University. In addition, the book benefited hugely
from a full-day CHiPhi book in progress workshop, hosted in 2015 by the
University of Sheffield. I am grateful to everyone who participated in these talks.
This book forms part of a larger project that was supported throughout by a
Netherlands Research Council (NWO) Veni grant. It was written and revised
across my time as a postdoc at the University of Groningen; as a visiting fellow at
Christ’s College, Cambridge; and as a lecturer at Durham University. I am
extremely grateful to all four of these institutions for their support. Appropri-
ately, this book’s cover image is taken from an early eighteenth-century manu-
script authored by a Dutchman.
Two chapters of the book are partly based on material that has already been
published. Chapter 2 makes use of my paper ‘Henry More on the Development of
Absolute Time’ (2015, Studies in the History and Philosophy of Science 54: 11–19).
Chapter VII makes use of my paper ‘On the “Evolution” of Locke’s Space and
Time Metaphysics’ (2016, History of Philosophy of Quarterly 33: 305–326). I am
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xvi ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
grateful to both of these journals for providing me with the appropriate permis-
sions, and to their anonymous referees for improving both the articles and the
requisite parts of the monograph.
Finally, I’d like to thank my wonderful family, with a special mention to CT
and FR. This book is dedicated to them.
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Introduction
As Shakespeare so baroquely describes, our lives take place in time. We are nursed
in it, and ultimately we die in it. Philosophers have long asked, What is time?
Traditionally, it has been answered that time is a product of the human mind, or
the motion of celestial bodies. In the seventeenth century, another answer emerged:
time is ‘absolute’, something that is independent of human minds and material
bodies. Absolutism comes in many varieties, and some absolutists considered time
to be a barely real being, whilst others identified it with God’s eternity.
This study explores the development of absolute time during one of Britain’s
richest and most creative metaphysical periods, from the 1640s to the 1730s. It
features an interconnected set of main characters—Henry More, Walter Charleton,
Isaac Barrow, Isaac Newton, John Locke, Samuel Clarke, and John Jackson—
alongside a large and varied supporting cast, whose metaphysics are all read in
their historical context and given a place in the seventeenth- and eighteenth-
century development of thought on time. Although Newton and Locke are by
some distance the most familiar of the main cast, it will be seen that they are parts
of a much larger British network.
This wedge of philosophical history is interesting for several reasons. One is
that absolutism raises many further important philosophical questions. What
kinds of things exist? How are things created? How do they change? Is God
present in time? If so, how? Another reason is that, as we shall see, the meta-
physics of time together with space was one of the defining metaphysical issues of
the period, discussed by philosophers of all stripes. Further, going beyond the
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INTRODUCTION
Existing Literature
The existing literature dealing with absolute time or space in the early modern
period can be roughly categorized into four groups. The first comprises general
overviews of the history of philosophy of time, from antiquity onwards. As one
would expect, these overviews are extremely selective, and they usually restrict
themselves to relatively brief comments on some pick of the early modern
philosophical giants: Descartes, Hobbes, Spinoza, Locke, Newton, or Leibniz.
To give a relatively recent example, Adrian Bardon’s 2013 A Brief History of
the Philosophy of Time runs from the pre-Socratics to the present day, and selects
a small group of early modern time theorists, including Locke, Newton, and
Leibniz.1 In contrast, the present study deals with a much larger number of
thinkers, many of whom are not well known.
The second group lies at the other extreme: focused, specialist literature
dealing with the work of just one early modern thinker, including their views
on time or space. This literature may take the form of individual journal articles,
such as Geoffrey Gorham and Edward’s Slowik’s 2014 paper on Locke’s absolut-
ism; or monographs, such as Antonia LoLordo’s 2007 Pierre Gassendi and the
Birth of Early Modern Philosophy. Whilst valuable in themselves, these specialist
studies are not generally concerned with the wider development of time or space
in this period. That said, Jasper Reid’s 2012 The Metaphysics of Henry More
constitutes an important exception to this rule.
The third group relates to an ongoing, multifaceted debate that draws
directly on the conceptual frameworks developed during our period. One of
the most famous set pieces of early modern metaphysics is a series of letters that
passed between Samuel Clarke, who is sometimes read as acting as Newton’s
mouthpiece, and Leibniz. As detailed in Chapter IX, Clarke defends ‘absolutism’,
and Leibniz appears to defend ‘relationism’, on which time and space are
identified with the temporal and spatial relations holding between bodies.
1
See also Gunn (1929), Heath (1936), Whitrow (1988), Turetzky (1998), and Jammer (2006).
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INTRODUCTION
2
‘Substantivalism’ is a twentieth-century term of art for a position which is usually taken to be
closely related to absolutism. Sklar (1977, 162) characterizes substantivalism as the view that space
or spacetime has an ‘independent reality . . . a kind of substance’. Dainton (2001, 2) writes that
substantivalists would include space and time in their inventory of the world, and provides a handy
pictorial representation of space as a container. Belot (2011, 2) writes that substantivalists maintain
that space consists of parts and that the geometric relations between bodies are derivative on the
relations between the parts of space they occupy.
3
See also Sklar (1977), Barbour (1989; 1999), Jammer (1993), and Dainton (2001).
4
If readers are wondering why I do not place Michael Edwards’ excellent 2013 Time and the
Science of the Soul in Early Modern Philosophy in this group, it is because Edwards explicitly tracks
the Aristotelian tradition through this period, and absolutism is an anti-Aristotelian position.
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INTRODUCTION
with the present volume: it considers the developmental history of space and time
in English philosophy, and its choice of figures partly overlaps with my own.
Nonetheless, there are differences. One is that Baker is concerned with English
theories generally, not absolutism in particular. Another is that the present study
enters significantly further into the period, discussing a far broader selection of
figures and views. Additionally, it is worth noting that on many issues this study
disagrees with Baker’s; for example, Baker reads Barrow, Locke, and Newton as
absolutists in the style of More, and I reject such readings. Nonetheless, this study
owes a great debt to Baker’s work, and to many, many other works of scholarship.
Scope
This section explains the scope of this study with regard to geography, historical
period, and topic.
Geographically, I take ‘British’ in the early modern sense, to cover the Stuart
kingdoms of England, Scotland, and Ireland, and the principality Wales. It will be
seen that all the main figures of this study and many (though certainly not all) of
the supporting cast are English. As Sarah Hutton (2015, 4) explains in her landmark
British Philosophy in the Seventeenth Century, it is a matter of historical record that in
the seventeenth century, England produced more philosophers of note than the rest
of the Stuart kingdoms put together. Although Scotland had emerged as a philo-
sophical power by the mid-eighteenth century, this study will not take us quite so far.
An advantage of this geographic focus is that it allows us to study an inter-
connected network of philosophers, many of whom were personally acquainted.
In addition to personal friendships, these philosophers came into contact
through correspondence, and by reading one another’s books. To provide a few
illustrations, Newton read More and Charleton closely, and engaged personally
with More and Barrow at Cambridge; Newton and Clarke became close friends
and were later neighbours in London; Locke read More, and developed a
friendship with Newton; Clarke exchanged letters on philosophy with Jackson,
which in turn led to a friendship; and Jackson made use of Locke’s texts. It is no
coincidence that these figures are so closely linked; on the contrary, I have selected
them precisely because of it. The process of tracing intellectual connections has led
me to figures far outside of the canon, with the aim of more accurately sketching
the development of absolute time in early modern British metaphysics.
Although this study focuses on a tightly connected core of British figures, they
were not working in a geographic vacuum from the rest of Europe. As we will
see, in addition to reading books authored by philosophers living on the Con-
tinent, British philosophers sometimes corresponded through letter with their
Continental contemporaries, or met them through travel. To give a few examples,
Another random document with
no related content on Scribd:
saved. If, as we have a right to suppose, Aetius had no direct part in
this achievement, both he and Marcian were probably indirectly
responsible for it and in fact had far more to do with it than Leo.
Were the Roman armies nothing, then, or the Byzantine threat
against Attila’s communications only a dream?
Not so. Attila retreated because like another Barbarian he “could
do no other,” and even so he dared not retrace his way over the
Julian Alps, for Marcian was already in Moesia, and ready and
anxious to meet and to punish him. He retreated instead upon that
Verona which he had ruined, crossed the Alps there, and after
pillaging Augsburg, was lost, as it proved for ever, in the storm of the
north and the darkness of his Barbary.
FOOTNOTES:
[13] See my “Ravenna; a Study” (Dent), 1912.
[14] So Jornandes who asserts that Aquileia was so utterly
destroyed “ita ut vix ejus vestigia ut appareant reliquerint.”
IX
ATTILA’S HOME-COMING
Such was the return, such was the failure of Attila. He had looked
to hold the world in fee; he returned for the last time across the
Danube his desire unaccomplished, his hopes dead. He had struck
first the East and perhaps ruined it, but he had failed to take
Constantinople. He had struck Gaul and left its cities shambles, but
he had not destroyed the armies of Aetius. He had desired Rome for
his plunder and his pride, but Leo had turned him back before he
crossed the Po. Every attack had ended in a long retreat; if he
brought ruin to a hundred Imperial cities, at last he but achieved his
own. He returned to his wooden stockade in the heart of Hungary
with all his hopes unfulfilled, all his achievements undone, a ruined
man.
That he did not realise his failure is but to emphasise the fact that
he was a Barbarian. To him, doubtless, destruction and booty, ruin
and loot seemed the end of war, he had not even in this his last hour
begun to understand what the Empire was. And so if we ask
ourselves what in reality the enormous energy of the Hunnish
onslaught achieved in the first half of the fifth century, we are
compelled to answer, nothing; nothing, that is, consciously and
directly. Unconsciously and indirectly, however, the restless brutality
of Roua and of Attila brought to pass these two great and even
fundamental things; it was the cause of the passing of Britain into
England, and it founded the republics of the lagoons which were to
produce Venice the Queen of the Adriatic.
Of all this, of his failure as of those strange achievements, Attila
was wholly unaware. He came home like a conqueror to his wooden
palace in the midst of a great feast prepared for him, to be greeted
as Priscus describes he had been greeted before, on his return from
the ruin of the East and his failure to reach Constantinople. He had
made the West his tributary; he was laden with the gold and the spoil
of northern Italy. It was enough for him, and so he made ready with
joy to marry yet another wife, to add yet one more to his concubines;
not that Honoria who would have been the sign of his victory, but one
rather a prey than a prize, pitiful in her youth and helpless beauty,
Ildico, or as the German legends call her Hildegrude, perhaps a
Frankish or a Burgundian princess.
It is said, we know not with how much truth, that upon that long
and last retreat as he crossed the river Lech by Augsburg an old
woman with streaming hair, a witch or a sorceress, cried out to him
thrice as he passed, “Retro Attila!” It is part of the legend which
makes so much of his history.
Upon the night of his last orgy or wedding he had feasted and
drunk beyond his wont and he was full of wine and of sleep when he
sought the bed of the beautiful and reluctant Ildico, the last of his
sacrifices and his loot. What passed in that brutal nuptial chamber
we shall never know. In the morning there was only silence, and
when his attendants at last broke into the room they found Attila
dead in a sea of blood, whether murdered by his victim or struck
down by apoplexy cannot be known. It is said that Ildico had much to
avenge—the murder of her parents and her brothers as well as her
own honour.
From that dreadful, characteristic chamber the Huns bore the body
of their King, singing their doleful uncouth songs, to bury him in a
secret place prepared by slaves who were duly murdered when their
work was accomplished. Jornandes has preserved or invented for us
the great funeral dirge which accompanied the last Barbarian rite. It
celebrated Attila’s triumphs over Scythia and Germany which bore
his yoke so meekly, and over the two Emperors who paid him tribute.
He left no memorial but his terror written in the fire and smoke of
burning cities, and that tradition of “frightfulness” to which Kaiser
Wilhelm II first appealed to his troops on their departure for China,
and which he is practising upon the body of Europe to-day. For upon
his death Attila’s vast and barbaric hegemony fell to pieces.
Enormous revolts broke it in sunder, and e’er many years had
passed the very memory of it was forgotten.
I
AMMIANI MARCELLINI RERUM GESTARUM LIBER XXXI