According to a widespread narrative of early modern philosophy, the early modern period was characterised by the development of Descartes’, Spinoza’s, and Leibniz’s rationalism and Locke’s, Berkeley’s, and Hume’s empiricism. The early modern period came to a close once Immanuel Kant, who was neither an empiricist nor a rationalist, combined the insights of both movements in his new Critical philosophy and inaugurated the new eras of German idealism and late modern philosophy. Several scholars have criticised this narrative for overestimating the importance of epistemological issues for early modern philosophers, portraying Kant’s Critical philosophy as a superior alternative to empiricism and rationalism and forcing most early modern thinkers prior to Kant into the empiricist or rationalist camps. Kant’s three Critiques are the first published works that explicitly contrast the terms ‘empiricism’ and ‘rationalism’. This chapter sets out Kant’s contributions to the genesis of the historiographical narrative based on the dichotomy of empiricism/rationalism and argues that Kant is not directly responsible for the biases of that narrative. Kant did not regard the empiricism/rationalism distinction as purely epistemological, did not portray most of his early modern predecessors as empiricists or rationalists, and did not place himself over and above empiricism and rationalism.

Peirce’s concept of science entails that normative judgment in science, about which types of theory or explanation or evidence, etc., are good, must depend on the evidence provided by the experience of inquiring (Chapter 2), a thesis supported by the history of science (Chapter 3). This implies a method, at once empirical and normative, which Peirce’s late sketch of a trio of ’normative sciences’ (aesthetics, ethics, logic) generalizes and rationalizes. Its generalization is supported by Peirce’s expansion of empiricism (Chapter 7), and its rationalization depends on the rediscovery of final causation (Chapter 6). Although sketchy, Peirce’s idea of normative sciences is important; for its plausibility undermines that most pernicious of dichotomies, of fact and value. This chapter explicates Peirce’s idea of normative science, traces its method from Schiller’s aesthetics through Kant’s ethics, and suggests that the rediscovery of final causation corrects what is most problematic in Kant’s metaphysics of morals, viz., its anti-naturalism.

Prior to shaping literary depictions of a nature classed both wondrous and terrible, sublime discourse addressed uplifting, transporting encounters with the written word. Nicolas Boileau’s influential French translation of Longinus’ ancient treatise On the Sublime (ca. first century CE) restyled the branch of sublime discourse dedicated to discourse itself, suggesting that sublime literature is not elevated simply because it is complex or because it is marked by a high or lofty style. Rather sublime works of verbal art carry a peculiar charge, a charge or spark relayed to audiences taking in sublime textual encounters. This emphasis on a charged sublime encounter would underwrite prominent philosophical and aesthetic accounts of sublime nature penned by Kant, Wordsworth, Burke, and Keats. Such literary representations of sublime nature are famously ambivalent, with aesthetic renderings of earthquakes, fires, or floods bearing out fraught questions of agency. Kantian and Wordsworthian models of sublime nature suggest human agencies of mind transcend vast powers of nature. Burkean and Keatsian accounts of dread nature or astounding material sublimities ultimately humble humankind.

This chapter explores a variety of philosophical engagements with Cicero in the long eighteenth century, with particular attention to the varied, and at times contradictory, purposes that Cicero might serve. Following an introductory discussion of Cicero and John Locke, the chapter proceeds thematically, turning first to Cicero and eighteenth-century ethics, then to eloquence, civil religion, and law, and finally to Cicero’s status as an exemplar of the active life. In exploring these themes, the chapter deals with the Earl of Shaftesbury Anthony Ashley-Cooper, David Hume, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Adam Smith, Montesquieu, John Adams, James Wilson, and Immanuel Kant.

The relation between Kantian transcendental philosophy and Jamesian pragmatism is both historically and systematically crucial for the conception of pragmatism and truth developed in the book. Chapter 3 first introduces the basic idea of "transcendental pragmatism" - the integration of pragmatist, or pragmatically naturalized, and Kantian-inspired transcendental arguments identifying conditions for the possibility of things we take to be actual in our practices - and then offers a critical comparison between some of Kant's and James's key ideas, especially elaborating on their pessimistic conception of the human being and suggesting that Jamesian empirical meliorism (as distinguished from both optimism and pessimism) needs to be built upon Kantian transcendental pessimism about the limits of the human condition. Based on this development of transcendental pragmatism, the relation between ethics and religion - analogous in Kant and James - is critically considered: if religion can only be based on ethics, we will have to ask whether (ethically) legitimate religious faith inevitably remains insincere.

Studies the ‘afterlife’ of the gospels into the public realm – the realm of morality and politics. According to Bader-Saye, the gospels are misunderstood if they are confined to the realm of the personal. Rather, the gospels are a summons to a moral life expressive of shared ‘deep themes’ of liberation, dispossession and love. He elaborates on this through a critical appreciation of the way these gospel themes have been taken up in modern discussions of ethics and politics from Immanuel Kant to Romand Coles.

What does Darwin’s theory have to say about human evolution? To answer this question, we turn first to philosophical discussions on the nature of rationality, specifically those of David Hume and Immanuel Kant. They both argue that the mind is preformed for thinking, with certain norms about mathematics and causality a priori for the individual human. Darwin argues that this is all a product of selection. Those proto-humans who took mathematics and causality seriously survived and reproduced, and those that did not, did not. This is Pragmatism, as we see from a brief consideration of the thinking of C. S. Peirce in the nineteenth century and Richard Rorty in the twentieth. We are not stuck in relativism, because the scientific evidence is that there is little genetic variation between humans. What we do not have, because Darwinism is within the mechanism paradigm, is any way of extracting absolute value from science and hence the natural world. Darwinian science cannot prove human superiority. This is preparing the way for existentialism.

This chapter is a study in the critical deconstruction of one of the most popular theoretical paradigms in modern international law and its basic ideological impact on international law as a discipline. The paradigm in question is voluntarist positivism, and the general thrust of its ideological impact on the discipline of international law, I am going to argue, has been to encourage within it the rise and spread of what one might call a theoretical culture of bad faith – a mix of false consciousness, self-censorship, and a “crooked attitude towards truth and knowledge”– particularly, in what concerns international law’s relationship with natural law and Christian theology.

The last two sentences use a lot of notoriously ambivalent concepts. For the prevention of doubt, let me explain briefly how I understand them in these pages.

Two root metaphors help us to interpret the world. The older, going back to the Greeks, sees the world as an organism, organicism. The younger, which came into play during the Scientific Revolution, sees the world as a machine, mechanism. The former sees the superiority of humans as part of the natural development of an organic world. The latter thinks that if science is to show humans superior, then it must show how and why. Prominent mechanists include Charles Darwin, the father of evolutionary theory through natural selection. Prominent organicists, all owing a debt to the German Romantic philosopher Friedrich Schelling, include Herbert Spencer, Henri Bergson, and Alfred North Whitehead.