This chapter sets out the origins of the traditional historiography of early modern philosophy based on the dichotomy of empiricism and rationalism. After reconstructing the spread of the notions of empiricism and rationalism in Germany during the 1780s, we argue that the first outline of a history of metaphysics that displays the Kantian, epistemological, and classificatory biases can be found in Karl Leonhard Reinhold’s works from the early 1790s. Two early Kantian historians, Wilhelm Gottlieb Tennemann and Johann Gottlieb Buhle, turned Reinhold’s outline into fully fledged histories of early modern thought. Tennemann, who became a Kantian after reading Reinhold’s works, developed Reinhold’s historical sketches into a detailed, nuanced, and comprehensive account of seventeenth- and eighteenth-century philosophy that revolves around the empiricism/rationalism distinction and displays the biases of the traditional historiography. Thus, in Germany, the decline of experimental philosophy and the eclipse of the experimental/speculative distinction went hand in hand with the rise of Kantianism and the development of a historiography based on the empiricism/rationalism distinction.

After summarising our findings in the preceding chapters, the Conclusion assesses the relative merits of experimental philosophy and empiricism as historiographical categories, and in the process we respond to some of our critics. We examine the historicity of both notions, their disciplinary and chronological scope, their contrast classes, namely, speculative philosophy and rationalism, and their explanatory power. Through an examination of the anti-hypotheticalism so prevalent in the early modern period and Margaret Cavendish’s published critique of experimental philosophy, we argue that experimental philosophy, together with the experimental/speculative distinction, have more explanatory power than the rationalism/empiricism distinction.

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.

This chapter continues the earlier one's project of outlining Hegel's critique of metaphysics, and distinguishing it from Kant's own. It does so by considering Hegel's relationship to Kant's Transcnendental Dialectic and its three main divisions: paralogisms, antinomies and Ideal. It explains the distinction between finite and infinite categories in Hegel, as well as its bearing on his dispute with Kant. It also finishes the task, begun in Chapter 2, of reconstructing Hegel's ontological proof and response to Kant's critique of this form of argument.

Thinking as a way of coping with the situations in which we find ourselves. Internal dialogue and gestures. Situations calling for thought. Thinking and rational deliberation. Actions and plans for actions as having entirely different ontological status. In the seventeenth century the mechanical worldview separated bodies from minds, and thinking thereby became a disembodied process. The body was instead equated with “the passions.” As a result, movements such as the ballet came to be regarded only as aesthetic objects. Eighteenth-century theories of the origin of language buttressed this claim. The ridiculousness of ballets d’action. Ballet dancers now became sex workers, and the theater became a location where rational, disembodied, human beings keep their emotions.

Modern philosophy of music emerged from the revival of ancient philosophy of music in the Renaissance and music took its place among the fine arts. Old views about the music of the cosmos persisted but debated centred on music’s relationship to emotion. Rationalists believed that the soul responds with sympathetic vibration to musical harmonies. Empiricists, beginning with the Florentine Camerata, revived the resemblance theory of musical expressiveness and held that music resembles human expressive behaviour. Both schools waned in the eighteenth century, and formalism emerged. Writers discussed include Gioseffo Zarlino, Franchino Gaffurio, Johannes Kepler, Heinrich Glarean, Athanasius Kircher, Joachim Burmeister, René Descartes, Marin Mersenne, Jean-Pierre de Crousaz, Johann Philipp Kirnberger, Johann Gottfried Herder, Johann David Heinichen, Yves-Marie André, Francis Hutcheson, Jean-Philippe Rameau, Charles Batteux, Jean-Baptiste Du Bos, Rousseau, Denis Diderot, Heinrich Christoph Koch, Kant, Johann Mattheson, Johann Gottfried Herder, Christian Gottfried Körner, Alexander Malcolm, Charles Avison, Charley Burney, James Beattie, Thomas Reid, Thomas Robertson and Adam Smith.

This chapter explains Hegel's critique of pre-Kantian metaphysics, distinguishing it from Kant's own. The shortcomings of "the former metaphysics" are due not to going beyond the bounds of reason but to an uncritical relationship to traditional logic. Hence its lack of self-criticism is analogous to that exhibited by Kant, meaning that the former metaphysics and its most famous idealist critic commit the same mistake.

The main contribution of this book lies in narrowing the existing research gap on the accountability of transnational corporations from emerging and developing states. In addition, it provides a new perspective on the widely documented poor track record of EU Member States in terms of holding ‘their’ corporate nationals, which are directly competing with these corporations for the same ‘share of wallet’ in the globalised marketplace, accountable. Any legal study of a level playing field requires the study of mandatory requirements as a matter of regulatory compliance. This book thus needs to study ‘hard law obligations’ in business and human rights. It assesses how regulation (in laws and trade agreements) and civil judicial remediation in the EU and its Member States function in relation to corporations from emerging and developing states in our globalised world. This book relies on two models of international law-making: constructivism and rationalism.

This chapter shows that early modern metaphysics was far more important for Pufendorf’s moral philosophy than has often been thought. In particular, it is essential to understanding Pufendorf’s theory of moral entities. This theory is often regarded as voluntarist and anti-metaphysical. Opposed to this, it has been argued, was a rationalist belief in objective and eternal moral values that was exemplified by philosophers like Leibniz. However, the main distinction for Pufendorf was not between voluntarism and rationalism, but between moral rules that were specific to a certain society because they were merely conventional, and others that were universal because they were natural, in the sense of being grounded in the physical characteristics of human nature as it had been created by God. The latter, according to Pufendorf, were necessarily true, though their necessity was hypothetical rather than absolute. Pufendorf’s intention was to turn moral philosophy into a science, which would supersede traditional Aristotelian-scholastic views that morality was concerned with the contingent circumstances of actions, and therefore incapable of ‘scientific’, that is syllogistic proof. Pufendorf’s theory of moral entities was central to this project of a moral science, which required him to provide a metaphysical foundation for these entities.

The intellectual excitement of nineteenth-century Germany was reflected by the Romantic and Existential movements, although both had international aspects as well. Both movements were to some extent reactions against the dominant idealism of rationalism, coming primarily from Kant’s views on the active mind, constructing reality. Fichte, von Schelling, and Hegel explored the implication of Kant’s philosophy, with Hegel coming to dominate the age. Romanticism found its roots in Jean-Jacques Rousseau, and exerted tremendous influence in art, literature as well as philosophy, particularly in the first half of the nineteenth century. Recognizing the complexities of human experience, particularly in the dimensions of emotions, passions and desires, romanticism explored those aspects not readily explained by rational, intellectual processes. Existentialism was a direct reaction against rationalism and found initial expression in the nineteenth century by Kierkegaard, in Theology, and Dilthey, in psychology. Further, the Kantian notions of the strivings of the will and the unconscious were explored more fully by Schopenhauer and von Hartmann.

This chapter addresses what Heidegger considers one of the basic problems of philosophy, that is, the alleged incompatibility between the notion of Being, our thinking, and logic. To begin with, it discusses how Heideggerians have dealt with this incompatibility by discussing what Casati calls an irrationalist and rationalist interpretation of Heidegger’s philosophy. Then, the chapter argues that both of these interpretations face exegetical and philosophical problems. To conclude, it defends an alternative way of addressing the incompatibility between our thinking, logic, and the notion of Being. In this connection Casati notes Heidegger’s suggestion, in some of his late works, that the real problem lies in the philosophical illusion that we can actually assess the limits of our thinking and, thereby, our logic. Heidegger’s philosophy aims, the chapter submits, at freeing us from such a philosophical illusion by delivering an experience that reminds us that we can never look at our thinking, as it were, from “on high,” i.e., from a standpoint that would enable us to grasp its limits or determine that it has no limits whatsoever.

In this chapter, Ryan Patrick Hanley surveys some of the best-known Enlightenment sources of Alexis de Tocqueville’s political philosophy. He considers in particular the respective influences of René Descartes, Montesquieu, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, and Blaise Pascal on the arguments and methodology of Democracy in America. Rather than conceiving of Tocqueville as either pro- or anti-Enlightenment, Hanley argues that we should instead understand Tocqueville as an example of a “Moderate Enlightenment” that eschews the rationalism and materialism of the “Radical Enlightenment.” By way of illustration, Hanley identifies specific affinities between Tocqueville and the moderate Scottish Enlightenment thinker Adam Smith.

Chapter 8 treats the Russian writer Fyodor Dostoevsky and provides a close reading of his work Notes from Underground. While Dostoevsky was never one of Hegel’s students in Berlin, he was influenced by Hegel’s thought and fits well with the general trajectory of European thinking in the nineteenth century that the present work traces. The underground man is portrayed as suffering from the disease of reflection, which is characteristic of the modern age. He offers a criticism of the modern scientific worldview, specifically rationalism and materialism. The influence of Hegel can be seen in the fact that the underground man’s relations to others can be characterized as based on the need for recognition. The underground man plays the role of the slave with some and the master with others. The theme of self-alienation is also very much present. The underground man knows full well that he is a coward and a morally depraved person, and in his moments of transparency he admits this. He can be seen as a symbol of modern alienation.

In this chapter, I argue that the local paths of reception of proportionality by French and English lawyers in the field of the convention are shaped by local patterns of cultural change. In the monist and rationalist French system, proportionality and European human rights standards have been received as already inherent in domestic concepts and methods. In contrast, English dualism and analytical formalism long impeded the application of proportionality as a human rights principle in common law cases. Differences in domestic lawyers’ reactions to proportionality affect the ways in which proportionality deploys its acculturation dynamic in the field of convention rights. In France, the institutional/procedural aspect of proportionality has generally been neglected by domestic lawyers. The employment of proportionality as a European standard in judicial reasoning is residual and accomplishes a rather symbolic function. Since its reception under the HRA, on the contrary, proportionality has systematically served the fulfilment of the UK’s international obligations. Proportionality as a European principle generates an important cultural shift in English public law.

Léon Walras is often assumed, at least implicitly, to be a welfarist on the grounds that his work is generally considered to be the origin of the first social welfare theorems and therefore a forerunner of Pareto optimality. This chapter argues that such a view contradicts the basic foundations of Walras’s economic and social philosophy and especially his conceptions of society and of individuals. If we take seriously Walras’s distinction between “general social conditions” (“conditions sociales générales”) and “specific personal positions” (“positions personnelles particulières”), we can develop an alternative interpretation of his views on welfare, which leads in turn to a different, non-welfarist, conception of the Walrasian view of the state.