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Philosophy as Descartes Found It

Practice and Theory

Brian Copenhaver

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© Brian Copenhaver 2024

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DOI: 10.1093/9780198920083.001.0001

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Created on: 30 November 2024 at 4:34 a.m.

Dedication

For Nicolas Berggruen, a teacher of philosophy by example and the founder of the Berggruen Institute, in gratitude and admiration

Contents

List of Figures and Tables

Introduction

Part 1. Mostly Practice

1. Meditations

1 Logic and the Classics

2 From Petrarch to Descartes

3 His Own Ignorance

4 Scholastics without Humanists

5 Barbarians and Fools

6 Theologians v. Humanists

7 Rules for Directing the Soul

2. Methods

1 Clermont, La Flèche and Harvard

2 Ramus

3 Agricola

4 Dialectic and Dichotomies

5 Burgersdijck’s Logic

6 As Descartes Found It

3. Cartesian Tennis in Thirteen Sets

1 Questions about Technology

2 Talking, Writing and Picturing

3 Might Pictures Help?

4 Players and Spectators

5 Pictures Gone Missing

6 Benjamin’s Disruptions

7 Epoptic Coherence

8 Feats of Picturing

9 An Old Order of Picturing

10 Disruptive Creations

11 Size, Scale and Magnification

12 Cartesian Statuary

13 “A Paper Kingdom”

Part 2. Mostly Theory

4. How Philosophy Changes

1 Philosophy in Bondage to History

2 A Normative Historiography for Philosophy

3 Insides and Outsides

4 A Parable for Casuists: The Rope

5 Stories: Macro-, Meso- and Micro-

6 Meso-Stories around 1525

7 A Micro-Story around 1675: The pga

8 Cartesiana

9 Dying Like a Mathematician

5. Bring Out Your Dead!

1 Data for a Typology

2 Ambiguity, Incompleteness and Oblivion

3 Four Types of Oblivion

4 Forgetting Resentment

5 Forgetting Care

6 Philosophy as a Mindful Way of Life

7 Memory, History and Names

6. Conclusion: Who Was That Masked Woman?

Bibliography

Index

Figures and Tables

Figures

1.1 La Flèche, Étienne Martellange, SJ, 1612, Bibliothèque Nationale de France 34

2.1 A Ramist Table of Tumors, Alexander Reid, 1635 53

3.1 A Tennis Ball, Descartes, 1637 69

3.2 Not a Field of Vision, Wittgenstein, 1922 85

3.3 A Field of Vision, Detail, Descartes, 1637 86

3.4 The Earth as a Lodestone, Descartes, 1644 91

3.5 Squares, Plato, before 1100, Österreichische Nationalbibliothek 94

3.6 Infinite Baseball, the Author, 2021 96

3.7 Sticks, Descartes, 1637 99

3.8 The Tub, Descartes, 1637 99

3.9 An Ambiguous Head, Detail, Descartes, 1637 102

3.10 Tennis in Leiden, Crispijn van de Passe, 1612 105

3.11 Reflections Abstracted, Descartes, 1637 108

3.12 Eccentrics and an Epicycle, Copernicus, 1543 132

3.13 Atoms, Bruno, 1591 132

3.14 An Imperfect Moon, Galileo, 1610 133

3.15 An Exploded View, Leonardo, 1478, Biblioteca Ambrosiana 135

3.16 A Cutaway, Giocondo, 1511 136

3.17 Ruins in a Fantasy, Colonna, 1499 137

3.18 A Transparent House, 2021, Alamy 139

3.19 A Transparent Engine, 2021, Vectorstock 140

3.20 Publisher’s Logo, detail 1, 1641 141

3.21 Publisher’s Logo, detail 2, 1641 142

3.22 Publisher’s Logo, detail 3, 1641 143

3.23 Medieval Machinery, Villard d’Honnecourt, before 1250, Alamy 148

3.24 A Virtuous Medieval Ant, Fior di Virtù, after 1350, Biblioteca Nazionale Centrale, Florence 149

3.25 Peonies, Martin Schongauer, c.1472, ArtStor 150

3.26 Ladders in a Triangle, Tractato d’Abacho, 1480–1, Biblioteca Medicea Laurenziana, Florence 152

3.27 Triangle, Oresme, 1500, Biblioteca Nazionale Centrale, Florence 152

3.28 Wild Spikenard, Leonhart Fuchs, 1542 155

3.29 Artists Picturing a Plant, Leonhart Fuchs, 1542 157

3.30 Descartes, Frans Van Schooten, 1644 158

3.31 Socrates, Hartman Schedel, 1493 160

3.32 Hermes Trismegistus, Hartman Schedel, 1493 160

3.33 Dissecting a Hand, Vesalius, 1543 163

3.34 Pregnant Sow Prepared for Vivisection, 1543 165

3.35 Disruptive Eyes, Van Meurs and Bartholin, 1655 167

3.36 Yorick, Vesalius, 1543 167

3.37 Skull, Casseri, 1645 167

3.38 Skeleton Woodcut, Richard Helain, 1493, Bayerische Staatsbibliothek 169

3.39 Miners Above a Tunnel and Below, Agricola, 1556 171

3.40 Mining Machinery Disassembled, Agricola, 1556 172

3.41 Simple Lens Machinery, Descartes, 1637 173

3.42 Complicated Lens Machinery, Descartes, 1637 173

3.43 A Flush Toilet, Harington, 1596 174

3.44 Cutaways Through Artifice and Nature, Jacques Besson, 1578 176

3.45 A Clockwork Apple, Heinrich Zeising and Others, 1614 178

3.46 Detail of Figure 3.45 178

3.47 Details of Insects 1, Jacob Hoefnagel, 1592 179

3.48 Detail of Insects 2, Jacob Hoefnagel, 1592 179

3.49 Eyeglasses, Pieter Brueghel the Elder, 1566, ArtStor 180

3.50 Three Bees for a Pope, Francesco Stelluti, 1625, Scottish Beekeepers Association 181

3.51 Chameleon, Gesner, 1554 185

3.52 Scraggy Horse Crab, Aldrovandi, 1605 186

3.53 Heart-Shaped Crab, Aldrovandi after Rondelet, 1605 187

3.54 A Mechanical Human, Descartes, 1664 188

3.55 An Alchemical Human, Paracelsus, 1605 188

3.56 An Automated Fountain, Jacques Besson, 1578 189

3.57 The Burning of William Gardiner, 1641 194

3.58 The Tomb of Admiral Chabot, 17th Century, Bibliothèque Nationale de France 196

3.59 Fencing in Leiden, Willem Swanenburgh and others, c.1610 198

3.60 Algebraic Geometry, Descartes, 1637 200

3.61 The Bookish Robert Burton, 1632 207

4.1 The Pineal Gland in Situ, Descartes, 1662 238

5.1 Loading a Plague Cart, Nathaniel Parr after Samuel Wale, 1747 250

5.2 The Phlegmatic Gin-Soaked Dutch, Detail, The Barge, John Trusler 276

6.1 Comic Mask, Terracotta, c.100 bce, British Museum 278

6.2 Opportunity, Alciato, 1531 282

6.3 Three Bad Boys Sent to Hell, David and Galle, 1603 285

6.4 Jesus Bleeding, David and Galle, 1603 286

6.5 Bad Boys Mocking Time, David and Galle, 1603 288

6.6 Bad Boys Mocking Opportunity, David and Galle, 1603 289

Tables

4.1 The Publishing History of Peter of Spain’s Logic 230

5.1 Types of Oblivion 255

5.2 Some of Our Dishonored Dead 273

Introduction

Eats first, morals later.

Brecht¹

This book about the history of philosophy has two parts. The first takes a new look at philosophy in Europe before Descartes was born in 1596—near the end of the ‘renaissance’—and shows how achievements of the first post-medieval centuries prepared Descartes to change the course of philosophy.

Since not many philosophers in English-speaking places have worked on this period, few have had reason to think of Erasmus, Ignatius of Loyola, Montaigne or Peter Ramus not just as preceding Descartes but also as preparing him to revolutionize meditation and method. Others who came before him—Copernicus, Galileo, Vesalius and the less-celebrated Leonhart Fuchs, Richard Helain and Heinrich Zeising—showed Descartes how to use explanatory picturing by mechanized means for philosophical purposes, an innovation noticed even less in contemporary Anglophonia than post-medieval developments in method and meditation.

These three cases—meditation, method and mechanized explanatory picturing—are parts in practice of my story about philosophy. The second, theoretical division of my book generalizes to diagnose a disease that I call ‘oblivion’ while asking historians of philosophy to help cure it.

When did philosophy become modern in Europe? Around 1640, judging by the practice of Anglophone philosophers today. Descartes published his Discourse in 1637 and his Meditations in 1641—books that transformed philosophy.

Philosophers were slower to achieve modernity than innovators in accounting (Pacioli), anatomy (Vesalius), architecture (Brunelleschi), astronomy (Copernicus), autobiography (Cellini), botany (Fuchs), drama (Marlowe), engineering (Leonardo), poetry (Petrarch), navigation (Columbus), painting (Giotto), philology (Poliziano), political theory (Machiavelli), sculpture (Donatello), statecraft (Elizabeth I), zoology (Gesner) and the making of books (Gutenberg): pioneers in these fields and others broke new ground before Descartes was born.

In the midst of all this enterprise, what took philosophers so long? Were they exceptionally averse to change? Maybe so. Many were academics obligated to an ecclesiastical establishment that executed a non-conforming philosopher, Giordano Bruno, in 1600. Other philosophers dissented less fatally about religion and defended dogmas enforced by conformists. In an age of religious war, Christians kept some fundamentals of faith above the fray. They fought about when, not whether to baptize. Almost everyone agreed that the one God was also three and ratified core teachings about the Trinity while disputing the metaphysics. For Protestants and Catholics alike, the cost was high for getting such doctrines wrong.

In 1553 Calvinists burned Michael Servetus and his writings for a rare and egregious crime: denying the Trinity outright. Servetus, educated in philosophy, law and medicine, had made advances in human physiology while Fuchs and Vesalius were making the life sciences visible for the first time to large numbers of people in printed books. Their pictorial biology was innovative though not yet very practical: the art of medicine lagged the latest science. Practice made progress elsewhere, however: accounting, architecture, engineering, navigation and the printing of books, for example. Thousands of books, mass-produced by new technologies, showed how-it-works pictures to hundreds of thousands of people who were not experts on the novelties that they saw. The educational power of printing with pictures was enormous.

At this moment—between the executions of Servetus and Bruno—philosophy was making neither pictorial progress in the way of anatomy nor practical gains in the way of navigation. Chances of practical success or failure didn’t come up for philosophers as they did for builders and sailors of ships. Palpable rewards were immense when vessels carrying treasure made it back across the Atlantic, and bodily losses were grave when they sank at sea. Designers, captains and crews of ships adapted to events, while owners, even far from dockside, could evaluate maritime innovations by looking at pictures of ships in printed books. But pictorial appraising of philosophy’s practical results—negligible except in moral theology and casuistry—was on no one’s agenda during the half-century that began with the killing of Servetus and ended with Bruno’s burning. Bruno himself, as usual, was a flamboyant exception.

During the same period, pictorial studies of anatomy, architecture, biology, cosmology and engineering flourished, supported by advances in drawing, painting and sculpture. Leonardo, Michelangelo, Raphael and lesser artists helped Europe make progress not only in arts of picturing but also in technology, science, industry and commerce. Many now accept that the sum of such changes was a conclusive transition to modernity, ending the middle or medieval period of Europe’s history that followed antiquity. When later Europeans reflected on their past, they came to think of their strides through time as ancient, medieval and modern—the grand amm sequence that’s still with us.

The story of philosophy usually told today in Anglophonia has kept to the amm pattern. Philosophers teach courses and write articles about ancient, medieval and modern philosophy. Sometimes they add other parts to the main sequence—not just modern philosophy but also early modern and post-modern. Authorities in other fields—architecture, literature, painting, poetry, religion, sculpture and so on—have done the same. Everyone recognizes the nomenclature when what comes next, after the medieval period but before fully modern times, is ‘renaissance’ architecture, ‘renaissance’ music or ‘renaissance’ poetry.

Name a great renaissance poet—canonical like Dante and a peer of Milton, Racine and Goethe. Petrarch fills the bill. Now name a great renaissance painter. Will anyone bicker about Leonardo, Michelangelo or Raphael? Answers also come quickly for renaissance anatomists (Vesalius), astronomers (Copernicus), autobiographers (Cellini) and so on. What about philosophers? Ockham, Petrarch’s contemporary, was a great thinker, but people don’t see him as a modern or renaissance figure. He died in 1347. Postponing philosophical modernity for nearly three hundred years, until Descartes went public in 1637, fits the usual amm sequence only if the medieval/modern boundary is negotiable and deferred.

But terms can’t be too flexible when the bargaining is about a renaissance at the m/m boundary of amm. Shakespeare, the greatest renaissance playwright, came late in that era. But he was gone by 1616, more than twenty years before Descartes finished his Discourse. Bruno had been executed in 1600. Vesalius died in 1564, Copernicus in 1543, Leonardo in 1519, Columbus in 1506, Brunelleschi in 1446. If philosophy needs a script for a renaissance, it won’t be easy to find a cast of characters who lived long enough to have read the first book that Descartes published.

The internet describes the renaissance as “a period in European history marking the transition from the Middle Ages to modernity and covering the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries”—before Descartes was a schoolboy.² This is a familiar framework in Anglophonia. Italians have extended the chronology to 1639 in order to cover the lifetime of Tommaso Campanella—who gets little attention from philosophers writing in English. The French have made a similar accommodation for different reasons. Their hero at the trailing edge of this transformation is Descartes, not Campanella, and their story goes ‘from Petrarch to Descartes’—a partition of history discussed in the first chapter of this book.

Jules Michelet, a French historian and political activist, applied the term ‘renaissance’ to Europe’s past in 1855. Jacob Burckhardt, a Swiss connoisseur of art who wrote in German, adopted and adapted Michelet’s construct in 1860. Explorations of cultural history guided by this chronology of rebirth left Anglophone philosophers cold after World War I, as they narrowed their questions in quest of greater depth. As things stand today, students in Australia, Ireland, New Zealand, North America and the United Kingdom, where philosophy’s presence in universities is large, approach the past of this subject through the usual amm sequence—and seldom with reference to a philosophical renaissance.

The neglect might be justified by facts if it were actually hard to name a great philosopher from the three centuries between Ockham and Descartes. Compare previous centuries back through the twelfth. Abelard, a great philosopher by recognized standards, died in 1142. Aquinas, great by all accounts, died in 1274, Scotus in 1308, Ockham in 1347. Additional nominations for greatness—John of Salisbury (1180), Henry of Ghent (1293), Jean Buridan (1358)—might be less compelling.

What about the near-great and non-great? A manual of Philosophy in the Middle Ages published in 2003 listed 138 names, mostly from after 1100. Bibliographies for these entries showed that living philosophers had studied the dead philosophers. Another such list, numbering 137 and likewise annotated, had already appeared in a reference work titled Renaissance Philosophy in 1988. In fact, after the Black Death that probably killed Ockham, philosophers kept on philosophizing, and European populations recovered from the plague within a century or so—during a renaissance. Considering the demography, philosophers today should expect to find names worth remembering not only from the 250 years before 1347 but also from the next 249 before Descartes was born. And yet few Anglophone philosophers—very few until late in the last millennium—have explored the renaissance that transformed those first post-medieval centuries.³

Could it be that great renaissance philosophers—not just the middling kind—have also been undercounted? Was Bruno a great philosopher? Some Italians think so. Machiavelli? No book of political philosophy has had more readers than The Prince. What about Montaigne? His patient dissection of scepticism taught Descartes how to doubt like a philosopher, and the French rank him with Bacon and Shakespeare. Other breakers and makers of paradigms were Italian—Marsilio Ficino, Pico della Mirandola and Lorenzo Valla—but their innovations have interested few philosophers in contemporary Anglophonia.

Nonetheless, this is a fact of history: Europeans taught, learned, debated and wrote philosophy just as much—maybe more—during the renaissance as during the previous medieval centuries. Philosophy as Descartes found it, the topic of this book, was a product of this renaissance. My book’s first three chapters focus on this period and are more practice than theory; the next two are more theory than practice—heeding Berthold Brecht’s advice in the epigraph. Hence the title, Philosophy as Descartes Found It: Practice and Theory.

The first three chapters trace the roots of Cartesian meditation, method and explanatory picturing back from 1637 through three centuries, more or less—sometimes even farther back than 1341, when medieval Romans made Petrarch their poet laureate. Does digging so deep make me guilty of anachronism—letting stories about Descartes control stories about a remote past largely unknown to him? Or have I made the opposite mistake, submerging Descartes in history and leaching philosophy out of his story? I hope I’ve avoided these pitfalls while showing that the Descartes who repudiated history also reconstructed philosophy with tools fashioned in his recent and less recent past.

My story introduces names from this past that few philosophers today will recognize—from Jacques Besson, Jerónimo Nadal and Hartman Schedel through Noel Béda, Giovanni Giocondo and Villard d’Honnecourt. Some thinkers eminent in their own day—Rudolf Agricola, Franco Burgersdijck and Ramus—come into the story but have small standing now in Anglophonia. Meditation and method, examined in the first two chapters, have been much discussed (an understatement) by contemporary authorities on Descartes. But not many have considered mechanized explanatory picturing, another Cartesian breakthrough and the topic of my third chapter.

My fourth and fifth chapters show why historians of philosophy should learn new names, read unfamiliar books and look at pictures printed in them: these two chapters theorize about the practice of the previous three. Although Anglophone interest in Descartes has been durable, intense and widespread, it can’t be well enough informed until today’s philosophers bring out their dishonored dead—dishonored by oblivion—and learn more from them about the deep past of their subject. The same goes for other canonical and uncanonical figures, before and after Descartes, whose ways of philosophizing differed from ways now in favor.

Chapter 1 presents the period ‘from Petrarch to Descartes’ as the locus of a non-Anglophone canon. Petrarch’s invective On his Own Ignorance spared ‘scholastics’ while assailing ‘Aristotelians’ and never mentioning the ‘humanists’ who now star in textbook accounts of the renaissance. Erasmus updated the name-calling in his Antibarbarians, where he promoted the classics and attacked theologians for bad dogma—but not philosophers for bad arguments. Theology was also his target in the Praise of Folly, which Christianized Plato’s pagan program of meditation—a regimen that practiced death by isolating the soul from the body. Ignatius and the early Jesuits made meditation methodical and taught it in their schools and colleges—eventually hundreds of them—like La Flèche, where Descartes spent most of his boyhood.

Chapter 2 describes a medieval system of logic that dominated higher education in Europe for three centuries and then collapsed in the 1520s, when the founder of the Jesuits went to study in Paris. A re-engineered logic, culminating in an omnicompetent ‘method,’ eclipsed the old logic for more than a hundred years. These new procedures were the brainchild of Peter Ramus, who took his ingredients from less digestible recipes by Rudolf Agricola that had circulated in print after 1515. The ‘dialectic’ that Ramus compressed into very few pages was astonishingly successful—truly amazing, in light of what the author promised but never delivered.

Despite its shortcomings, the Ramist method became immensely popular and challenged other teachers to invent ‘systems’ of their own. One such professor was Franco Burgersdijck, who was rector at Leiden when Descartes studied there. Traces of Ramist thinking in early writings by Descartes—echoed by his Discourse on the Method—testified to the huge success of Ramism. Another success that Descartes emulated was less spectacular, not at all systematic and yet more durable: Montaigne’s Essays reconstructed ancient scepticism, popularized renaissance classicism and secularized religious disciplines of self-examination.

Chapter 3 examines picturing in printed books as a way of writing—in particular, picture books published by Descartes to announce his daring theories of matter in motion and of mind’s relation to matter and the body. My chapter starts with ways of writing—not imposed on Descartes and other philosophers but chosen by them—before moving on to ways of picturing that evolved in their post-medieval environment of print publication. Technologies of printing put new pressures on old boundaries between words customarily made public in speech or writing and images newly pictured for public display to many viewers.

In these changing circumstances, Descartes published pictures of a strange game of tennis in order to explain optical phenomena and human vision while also solving puzzles of sensation and perception. By putting such pictures (several dozen shown in Chapter 3) into his books, he built on earlier progress in explanatory picturing—achievements of medieval artists and artisans whose techniques became world-changing once books could be printed by machine in many identical copies. Mechanical reproduction of explanatory pictures in printed books was an explosive cultural force—both disruptive and productive—which energized the ‘scientific philosophy’ (a modern term) promoted by Descartes in order to replace the ‘natural philosophy’ (a medieval term) of retrograde Aristotelians. His picture books were nodes of aggregation for ‘epoptic’ communities, as I’ll call them, whose experiences of a new pictorial technology were both shared and remote, both stabilizing and destabilizing.

Chapter 4 shows that because philosophy has sometimes changed for non-philosophical reasons, historians of philosophy ought to take such reasons into account. Change in the human past, studied by historians, includes events in philosophy—events explained by causes, motives and reasons. When philosophy’s history comes up for discussion, must these explanatory antecedents of change always be philosophical? My three previous chapters assumed that ‘no’ is the answer. Was I wrong? Maybe historians of philosophy should never rely on non-philosophical evidence. But this absolutely internalist stance—saying ‘never’—is incompatible with stories told in my first three chapters. To show that ‘sometimes’ is a better answer, my fourth chapter locates case histories about Descartes, Spinoza and earlier disrupters of philosophy in a new taxonomy of narrative that excludes absolute internalism.

Chapter 5 notices that philosophy, compared to other disciplines in the contemporary university, has been unusually attentive to its distal past. Not all philosophers have supported so much attention, however, which in any event has been selective and defectively so. Voices heard as authoritative about philosophy’s history have sometimes been silent—culpably silent—about valuable philosophical messages from deep time. The silences have been failures of memory, signs of an oblivion that forgets stories about the past even when their philosophical interest is well established, their moral importance is great and their cultural currency is all too evident.

This fifth chapter calls on philosophers to end the oblivion and resurrect their dishonored dead. My contribution is a typology of oblivion that might help organize, motivate and communicate a commitment to revival—a pledge to ‘bring out our dead.’ Taking this pledge would support two sides of the same effort, one focused on the past and mainly academic, the other with moral and political force in the present. The first would make more room for work on lesser-known philosophers like Agricola, Burgersdijck and Ramus alongside accounts of better-known philosophers like Descartes. The second—more ambitious than the first—would take inspiration from studies like those by Dwight Lewis, Stephen Menn and Justin Smith about Anton Amo, a philosopher from the past whose story (see the end of Chapter 5) should now be a chapter in every philosopher’s bible.

Conclusion: History and philology show how practices of writing and picturing from a post-medieval past led Descartes to modern insights about philosophy. Nonetheless, he turned his back on this past as not just unhelpful to philosophy but as harmful—a clutter of distractions and obstructions. Before establishing himself as modern in the Meditations, he had already declared independence from his past. In his autobiography of cultural emancipation in the Discourse, he presented himself as liberated from history and philology. This tale of deliverance in the philosopher’s account of his early life has given later philosophers a model and a license—a license to ignore valuable information. And no modern philosopher’s life-story has had more attention from non-philosophers. My new assessment of old philological evidence, displayed in pictures by my Conclusion, tracks this young soldier of innovation as he found a strange path—strange for us, not for him—to philosophy through poetry and pictures.

My book proceeds in unconventional ways—indeed, counter-conventional ways—while promoting fresh perspectives, adjusted attitudes and revised intentions.⁴ My approach is emphatically offbeat throughout Chapter 3, which analyzes ways of writing seen in the books that Descartes started to publish in 1637. The word ‘seen’ may look misplaced in this use, but it’s crucial: the philosopher wrote most of his revolutionary books as picture books. Today this phrase indicates “a book format most often aimed at young children.”⁵ These were not the readers that Descartes wanted, and yet he kept making picture books throughout his career while also writing without pictures—the Meditations in particular. Like the Meditations, part of his intellectual inheritance was textual, including pictureless writing by Ramus and Montaigne. Another part of his heritage was pictorial, however, including renowned picture books by Vesalius and Galileo.

Descartes wrote books about philosophy and put pictures in them. In the long run, à la longue durée, his pictorial innovations were no stranger than writing philosophy in verse or as myth or in epigrams—practices validated by Parmenides, Plato and other honored ancients. Philosophers today still accept departures from the prosaic norm in dialogues (Berkeley and Hume) and aphorisms (Nietzsche and Wittgenstein), not to speak of technical notations that mystify many readers—a practice that worried Descartes.⁶ To discuss novel ways of writing in pre-Cartesian and Cartesian picture books—which for philosophers of the era were novelties—I’ve used unaccustomed forms of prose, aphoristic and dialogic, along with fictions, a parable and fragments of literary criticism. I’ve tried to confine referring, name-checking and informational pedantry to footnotes, which has made some notes longer than I would have liked, especially in Chapter 3. These counter-conventional means and messages are considered, deliberate, adopted for my own purposes but also—I hope—in line with philosophy’s ancient purpose of making progress by questioning itself.

An acute reader of this book, when it was complete in draft, asked me this question: how might the writing of philosophy’s history change if the case that I’ve stated, especially the theory in Chapters 4 and 5, were to be accepted by experts on the subject. This is my answer: accounts of philosophy’s past would be made richer and more informative for philosophers and their students if both spent more of their working hours on philosophy’s cultural, psychological and socio-economic settings and, reciprocally, less time on the philosophies that they study.

If the exchange were zero-sum, adjustments would be needed. If specialists on Descartes spent time getting to know the epoptic Cartesian communities introduced in Chapter 3, for example, they’d have less time for everything else. However, even if a change of procedure—deemed to be enriching only by me—required such trade-offs and was nonetheless desirable, the change couldn’t be obligatory: there’s no chance of that, nor should there be.

This is what I’ve said in Chapter 4 about writing histories of philosophy in the way that I recommend: “internal evidence suffices for many histories . . . even though a normative historiography of philosophy can’t be absolutely and completely internalist.” Explaining what I mean by ‘histories,’ ‘historiography’ and ‘internalist’ is part of my project, whose aim I’ve stated in Chapter 5: that historians of philosophy “might be persuaded, now and then, to make a little more room for less conventional material and unfamiliar procedures, alongside their usual work and as deliberate departures from standard practices.”⁷

The contemporary literature of philosophical biography already provides concrete examples of practices that suggest the possibility of a temperate anti-internalism: authoritative books with plenty of germane material have been written about Descartes by Gaukroger, Rodis-Lewis and others; about Hobbes by Martinich; about Locke by Woolhouse; about Leibniz by Antognazza; about Hume by Harris; about Kant by Kuehn; about Hegel by Pinkard; about Nietzsche by Hollingdale, Köhler and Safranski; about Russell and Wittgenstein by Monk . . . it’s a long list.⁸ These exemplary biographies aren’t histories, to be sure: the genres are different with distinctive aims and constraints. Both deal with philosophy’s past, however. Philosophical biographers often travel from philosophy itself, stricto sensu, to the larger world of one philosopher or another and then back to that thinker’s philosophical island—both newly reconnoitered on the voyage.

For example: Hobbes’s world, explored in detail by Martinich, was large and busy. His philosophy, now canonical in Anglophonia, makes no sense apart from its setting in the British church and state of his time. Everything he wrote, from De corpore to Leviathan, from squabbles with Descartes to debates with Thomas White, responded to his chaotic human environment. It could be, however, that biography—even where evidence is plentiful—isn’t a good path to every thinker’s thinking. Gödel, the subject of several biographies, might be a test case. But I don’t know a better route to Hobbes’s philosophy than Martinich’s account of his life. Even micro-stories (see my Chapter 4) about Hobbes’s thoughts are hard to imagine without benefit of externalities like those examined in Martinich’s fourth chapter. He did all this for Hobbes in less than 400 pages. Can’t authors of journal articles on smaller topics do some of what Martinich has done, though in fewer pages, for other dead philosophers? Recent experience has led me to hope that they can.

One such experience, still underway, is my ‘active participant observation’ of UCLA’s Philosophy Department.⁹ Students and colleagues at UCLA have broadened my notions of history and philosophy—constricted as they were when I joined my colleagues full-time twenty years ago. I had no degree in philosophy and no formal higher education in the subject: after leaving my Jesuit college, where everybody philosophized, all my studies of the usual academic kind were about history. And UCLA’s philosophers welcomed me warmly—without reservation.

They had already been observing each other for many years. For the last twenty years, I’ve been observing them. I saw that the distancing effect of participant observation on an observer (myself) wouldn’t guarantee objective observations: on the contrary, because the observer’s self-awareness (my own) was heightened, observations were distorted by personal dispositions—at least a little. Nonetheless, my current notions of philosophy, those that shaped this book, are UCLA’s gift to me—long after my Jesuit teachers had given me their very different ideas.

Another heartening experience—in partnership with Milo Crimi, a brilliant UCLA student who became a skilled editor—began when the late Nick Rescher asked me to take charge of the History of Philosophy Quarterly for a few years. It was forty years ago, counting from 2024, when Nick founded HPQ. Milo and I made Nick’s historic achievement our polestar as we found our own way on editorial policy and practice. There was no interference when we implemented directions in publishing advocated by Chapters 4 and 5. (Nick saw an early draft of Chapter 4.)

We didn’t want to make a revolution at HPQ, just progress, and maybe we did. I had found reasons to try in my talks about philosophy with Nicolas Berggruen. He and I met weekly, for months at a time, during several years when we both lived in Los Angeles. We talked—patiently, sentence by sentence—about three books: Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics, Nietzsche’s Genealogy of Morals and Sartre’s Existentialism is a Humanism. Nicolas assures me that he learned a great deal from those sages. Two of his lessons for me stood out: first, that conversations about philosophy and philosophy’s past might improve if they became international and multilinguistic; second, that philosophers might benefit their own theorizing as well as civil society by attending more often to practical problems of current concern. Editing HPQ gave me a chance to act on the first lesson. My gratitude for both lessons stands behind the book’s dedication to Nicolas.

My very warmest thanks go to Joseph Almog, Brian Baigrie, Stephen Bann, Michael Beaney, Deborah Brown, Shane Butler, John Carriero, Sophia Catalano, Becko Copenhaver, Greg Copenhaver, Kathleen Copenhaver, Milo Crimi, Martin Davies, Dan Garber, David Glidden, Gabe Greenberg, Paul Grendler, John Kardosh, Henrik Lagerlund, Keith McPartland, Gideon Manning, Peter Momtchiloff, John Monfasani, Francesco Nappo, Alan Nelson, Calvin Normore, John O’Malley, Nick Rescher, Andrea Robiglio, Ingrid Rowland, Erika Rummel, Jerry Stannard, Lindsay Waters and participants in Philosophy 206 at UCLA; thanks also for help with finding and acquiring digital images and other resources to people at Alamy, ArtStor, the Bayerische Staatsbibliothek in Munich, the Biblioteca Ambrosiana in Munich, the Biblioteca Medicea Laurenziana and the Biblioteca Nazionale in Florence, the Bibliothèque Nationale de France, the British Museum, the British Library, Carcanet Press, Curtis Brown Ltd, Dreamstime, the Herzog August Bibliothek in Wolfenbüttel, the Österreichische Nationalbibliothek, the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam, the Scottish Beekeepers Association, Vectorstock and the Wellcome Trust.

¹ Berthold Brecht, “Denn wovon lebt der Mensch,” Dreigroschenoper; the new method that Descartes promoted in 1637 “consiste plus en pratique qu’en theorie” according to the inventor: AT, 1.349; CSM, 1.53.

² https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Renaissance; cf. Copenhaver (1992).

³ Kraye (1988); Gracia and Noone (2006), pp. v–xi. Recent books in English about Renaissance philosophy are Schmitt et al. (1988), Copenhaver and Schmitt (1992), Hankins (2007a) and Adamson (2022).

⁴ Although my project has moved far from the recent literature on Descartes, I’m greatly indebted to this growing body of work by Almog (2002), (2008); Ariew (1999), (2011); Ariew, Cottingham and Sorell (1998); Brown and Normore (2019); Carriero (2009); Des Chene (1996), (2001); Garber (1992), (2001); Gaukroger (1995); Menn (1998); and Rodis-Lewis (1998), among others.

⁵ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Picture_book.

⁶ Descartes (1637), p. 296, on new symbols in his algebraic geometry: “I fear this will be readable only by those who are already acquainted with what’s in geometry books.”

⁷ Chapters 4.9 and 5.6 of this book.

⁸ Antognazza (2011); Gaukroger (1995); Harris (2015); Hollingdale (2002); Köhler (2002); Kuehn (2002); Martinich (1999); Monk (1990), (1996), (2000); Pinkard (2001); Rodis-Lewis (1998); Safranski (2003); Woolhouse (2007).

⁹ Lindeman (1924), pp. 191–200.

Part 1 Mostly Practice

The history of philosophy is the subject of this book, and its center is the Descartes of philosophical historiography: he has been studied in this way for nearly four centuries. Descartes knew—either personally or through their books—many people named in Chapters 1, 2 and 3, which present the practice defended theoretically by Chapters 4 and 5. One feature of this practice, however, is to discuss persons and events that Descartes possibly or certainly knew nothing about. Chronology guarantees his ignorance of everything after he died. Otherwise, until after February of 1650, neither chronology nor circumstances will have constrained him in this way.

Many names that matter for my story never came up in the twelve volumes of the Adam/Tannery edition of the philosopher’s works and letters: for two important examples of persons missing from these documents, see Chapter 3 on Jacques Besson and Andreas Vesalius. Anatomy was important to Descartes, and Vesalius was a hero of the new science that the philosopher advocated. Descartes almost certainly knew the anatomist’s name and what he achieved. Bodies not just dissected but also mechanized—automata like those depicted by Jacques Besson—also fascinated Descartes. But Besson was no celebrity, and Descartes could have seen automata in books by other authors.

For my purposes it’s of secondary interest whether Descartes ever heard of Vesalius (I assume so) or Besson (maybe not). What’s primary is that Vesalius (d. 1564) and Besson (d. 1572), who did not share a Lebenswelt with Descartes (born 1596), nonetheless and proleptically shared a durable and transpersonal Denkwelt with him.¹ Chapter 3 introduces such a thought-world and its post-medieval ‘epoptic’ communities, groups that still form today around picture books. One such community had gathered around the Fabrica after Vesalius published it in 1543; the group changed but persisted and aggregated again around Cartesian pictures published in 1637 and afterward.

Just as Adam and Tannery reported no trace of Vesalius in their monumental edition, they and their documents also never mentioned Montaigne—until Charles Adam added a twelfth volume of Vie & Oeuvres. There Adam used Montaigne’s comments about himself—about attitudes, habits and experiences—to answer questions left hanging by the correspondence and the Discourse, thus filling gaps in the life story revealed by the reticent Descartes. Adam mentioned, for example, that the philosopher’s pious schoolmate, Father Marin Mersenne, chided Pierre Charron, who outlived Montaigne and revived his revival of scepticism in time to tempt Descartes. Montaigne’s very words—so Adam suggested but did not say—may also have interested Descartes in hydraulic machinery like Besson’s. Montaigne, a tutelary spirit of autobiography, brought a treasury of information to Adam’s project. The fame of the essayist’s reflections on himself had already certified the guarded confessions in the Discourse, where Étienne Gilson later established Montaigne’s continuous presence.² That Descartes never acknowledged this presence took little away from it. What mattered more than one person’s awareness of another was the cultural Denkwelt—not specifically epoptic like the communities described in my third chapter—that Descartes and Montaigne (d. 1592) both inhabited. Regardless of person-to-person connections, the same goes for Franco Burgersdijck (d. 1635), Peter Ramus (d. 1572), Ignatius of Loyola (d. 1556), Erasmus (d. 1536), Rudolf Agricola (d. 1485) and others back to Petrarch (d. 1374). Some were too celebrated for Descartes to miss. But for my purposes his knowing or not knowing each person matters less than the evolving world of thought that they all lived in.

¹ Makreel (1982).

² Adam (1910), pp. 19–20, 57, 63–4, 131, 163, 199, 226; for Gilson see notes 65, 66 and 68 in Chapter 2 of this book.

1 Meditations

Philosophers have scarcely plucked this string, I think.

Montaigne¹

1 Logic and the Classics

Philosophy as Descartes left it was taking shape by the new year of 1641, when he sent his Meditations out for criticism. But philosophy as Descartes found it had been in place well before 1637, when he released his manifesto on method anonymously in Leiden. Descartes wrote his little book in French, not Latin, titled it a ‘discourse,’ not a ‘treatise,’ but called the texts introduced by it both ‘treatises’ and ‘essays.’ He spoke less formally in the Discourse to a larger audience than he would soon address more rigorously in the Latin Meditations for experts.²

Franco Burgersdijck, an eminent professor of philosophy, had recently died in Leiden. He was still the more celebrated philosopher—by far—in 1637. In 1630 he became rector at Leiden, and Descartes went there to study. Burgersdijck died in 1635, and he too had addressed his books to a wide readership—though for different purposes: he wrote textbooks for students in the best Dutch schools. The publication of his Elements of Logic, commissioned by the government, had been a state occasion in 1626: three of Leiden’s stellar classicists, Cunaeus, Heinsius and Vossius, contributed poems to commend the Elements.

Burgersdijck’s writings, especially his logic, are a window into what Descartes repudiated after the senior professor had tried to reform it: philosophy as it emerged from the post-medieval centuries. What Cartesian philosophy emerged from is my topic. A common way of representing this piece of the past has treated it as warfare between ‘humanists’ and ‘scholastics.’ As far as I can see, no such combat about philosophy was widespread in Europe.³

2 From Petrarch to Descartes

In 1911, Joseph Vrin founded the publishing house which is still the most important in France for philosophy: the Librairie Philosophique J. Vrin. This distinguished firm, after producing the standard edition of the works of Descartes and a number of classic studies by Étienne Gilson, began to advertise a series called “From Petrarch to Descartes.” Starting in 1971, the new collection focused on “Renaissance authors—both philosophers and scholars—and debates about ideas, literature and the history of the transmission of knowledge characteristic of the humanism reborn at the dawn of modernity.”⁴

Judah Abravanel, Leon Battista Alberti, Dante Alighieri, Jean Bodin, Giordano Bruno, Tommaso Campanella, Girolamo Cardano, René Descartes, Marsilio Ficino, Francesco Guicciardini, Niccolò Machiavelli, Michel de Montaigne, Thomas More, Francesco Petrarca, Francesco Patrizi, Guilliaume Postel and Bernardino Telesio: these are seventeen “philosophers and scholars” studied by the Vrin series since the turn of the millennium. Seven were philosophers by anyone’s reckoning. Only one of the seventeen was English, however, and twelve were Italian by birth or residence. All seventeen are of philosophical interest, and eleven lived and worked in the century before Descartes was born.

But only one of the seventeen—Descartes—is a fixture in philosophy’s Anglophone canon. What canon? Officially there is no such thing. For recent and common practice, however, see Philosophy 101: From Plato and Socrates to Ethics and Metaphysics, published just ten years ago by Paul Kleinman. The book’s modest aims make it a least common denominator for an Anglophone canon. Of the twenty-three philosophers selected by Kleinman, starting with Socrates and ending with Wittgenstein, none worked in the three centuries between the death of Thomas Aquinas and the birth of Francis Bacon.⁵

The thin canon in Kleinman’s book broadened and deepened in a New History of Western Philosophy in four volumes by Anthony Kenny, a distinguished philosopher and an authority on its history. Kenny described the period between 1100 and 1800 in two of his volumes. Part of this period matched the Vrin series and covered about three centuries: Petrarch triumphed as poet laureate in 1341; Descartes died in 1650. Kenny gave less than a tenth of the space in his two volumes to this whole era—which included the Renaissance and the sixteenth century and took up nearly half the time between 1100 and 1800.⁶

The sixteenth century gets little attention from an Anglophone canon, whether in a bare-bones manual like Kleinman’s or in a full-bodied history like Kenny’s. Why should this be? The Vrin series has studied this century for more than fifty years: it’s not lack of opportunity that has made this period a desert in Anglophone philosophy. The very same terrain has invited inquiry when viewed from outside Anglophonia, where neglect has been the problem. But what motivated the neglect and what sustains it? Answering these questions requires a look at patterns of periodization as frameworks for philosophy’s past.⁷

One such pattern was settling out by 1716, when Leibniz denounced Newton’s concept of force as “inexplicable, unintelligible, precarious, groundless and unexampled, . . . a chimerical thing, a scholastic occult quality.” Speaking for progressives of his time and the previous century, Leibniz accused Newton of betraying philosophy and science by reverting to an unenlightened past—to scholasticism, the philosophical correlate of medieval decadence in culture and politics. A barbaric ‘middle age’ (media aetas) had come after the loss of Greek glory and Roman grandeur and before their recovery; the word ‘scholastic’ identified bad habits of a degenerate era. And in the history of philosophy where Leibniz was a hero, ‘scholasticism’ was also becoming a partition of chronology—a slice of previous time.⁸

Later on, in the nineteenth century, anachronism blurred the timekeeping when a new ideology also called ‘scholasticism’ agitated Europe’s cultural politics. Catholic intellectuals of this period revived medieval systems in order to promote their own views, thereby contaminating what they studied—a theology from the past—with current affairs. Their neo-scholastic propaganda was aggressively polemical: they constantly attacked humanism, materialism, modernism and secularism as threats to Christian faith. In England of the same era, Protestants also deployed the word ‘humanism’ to warn of such dangers. For Coleridge in 1812, humanism was the view that Christ was merely human. Targets expanded by 1853, when a British critic of Feuerbach called humanism “a system which finds everything in man, . . . intolerant of the existence of religion.” When papalist Catholics managed the debate, loathing humanism and lauding scholasticism went hand in hand.⁹

No such alliance between enemies of humanism and friends of scholasticism was possible in 1600: at that time, near the end of the passage from Petrarch to Descartes, no one talked about ‘humanism’ or ‘scholasticism.’ Experts on the period are now alert for anachronisms—but as heirs of a tradition which has treated humanism like a ray of light breaking through medieval gloom. An “enlightened spirit of humanism,” in the words of a nineteenth-century observer, began with schooling about “Greek and Roman antiquity”—Matthew Arnold’s explication of ‘humanism.’ This vague thought, or something like it, has shaped the periodization of European culture, including philosophy. But the thought had to be invented and propagated—most famously by Petrarch, though not in the context now identified as a “humanist-scholastic debate.”¹⁰

Erasmus provoked the sixteenth-century round of this old quarrel. Descartes ended it for philosophy after the Society of Jesus, Peter Ramus and Michel de Montaigne had spoken up—to mention only the most resonant voices in the long controversy that Petrarch instigated before he died in 1374. Petrarch’s fame in later centuries is well known. But he never called anyone a ‘humanist’ in the polemics summarized here, nor did he label any movement a ‘humanism.’

3 His Own Ignorance

Petrarch’s main contribution to the ‘humanist/scholastic controversy,’ written toward the end of his life, was an invective—a form that he mastered. On His Own Ignorance and That of Others was anti-French, anti-urban and anti-modern by his lights, though from our point of view his hostility seems anti-medieval. His targets were naturalist Aristotelians in Padua, Paris and elsewhere, and he distinguished their views from Aristotle’s original teachings.¹¹

Petrarch doubted that reason had much to say about “nature’s secrets and God’s deeper mysteries,” and he assailed his rationalist opponents for arrogance, dogmatism and obscurity. He called them an “insane and raucous mob of scholastics.” But this was the only instance of scholasticus in Petrarch’s harangue, where a frequent term of abuse was aristotelicus, repeated more than twenty times. Aristotelians were “noisy” and “contentious,” but it was not their logic or dialectic that exercised Petrarch. What enraged him was their dogmatic behavior in support of a naturalist doctrine—not a method, though such a thing might (or might not) have been indicated by scholasticus in its solitary appearance. The later fortunes of the term make Petrarch’s skimpy use of it noteworthy: his solitary use of scholasticus was not enough to give the word a stable sense.¹²

And while he attacked deranged Aristotelians this once as a “mob of scholastics,” Petrarch tallied Aristotle’s errors without savaging him—“this great man who knew much, though he was human and capable of ignorance.” The old pagan sage could not really have known God. His theology was on the right path but sidetracked by polytheism and the pernicious claim that the world was eternal: Petrarch’s hatred of this doctrine was fierce, though poorly argued. His critique of Aristotle’s ethics had more weight: the Philosopher went wrong by valuing virtue theory more than the practice. Plato also fell short of the true Good but came closer than his student.¹³

As for authentic philosophy, according to Petrarch, its goal was Christ’s truth—not Plato’s or Aristotle’s. As stewards of truth, philosophers needed high standards of clarity, coherence and consistency, but they were bad judges of their own abilities. Boasting about the little they knew, they forgot scripture’s contempt for philosophy as “vain deceit.” Naturalism and materialism were their most corrosive errors. Their worst vices were impiety and arrogance. Windiness and obscurity disqualified them as teachers. Talking mainly to competitors, Aristotelian philosophers “have told many lies—the ones called ‘philosophers,’ I mean, since truth-telling is always the way of real philosophers.”¹⁴

Some philosophers did better than others. Both Aristotle and Plato were experts on nature, for example, though Plato surpassed his student in theology. As an authoritative voice on moral philosophy, Cicero had the advantage of Latin, the language of Western Christendom, and the eloquent Latin of Augustine’s teaching was also powerful. But Petrarch could study Aristotle’s pagan ethics only in a crude Latin that he despised. He owned copies of Plato’s dialogues in Greek but couldn’t read them—decades before Leonardo Bruni and others began to translate Plato. Yet by measuring Aristotle against Augustine, Cicero and rumors of Plato, Petrarch anticipated the turn that philosophy would take in the next century, when classicists like Bruni challenged Aristotle’s authority by putting Platonic, Epicurean and Stoic texts into circulation.¹⁵

Petrarch granted little authority to any philosophy: it was all “vanity in disputing,” as Solomon had warned. Sages knew less than they claimed, and their ignorance was no great loss—least of all the wise of Petrarch’s own century. In the age of Ockham and Buridan, the poet had little use for innovators or technicians. God had revealed what sinners needed for salvation, and ordinary people could do the rest “without much learning—or any, in fact.” Later, when Erasmus dug deeper in soil that Petrarch had cultivated, he found a more robust fideism in Paul’s letters, where the wise “have become fools.” The spiritual program of the Praise of Folly—based on a subtle moral psychology—was a more thoughtful response by Erasmus to problems handled crudely by Petrarch in the invective On His Own Ignorance.¹⁶

The ethical and epistemic basis of Petrarch’s manifesto was thin and shaky: near the end of his tirade, he conflated Socratic ignorance with Academic scepticism. Borrowing from Cicero, he attributed a statement to Socrates that rebuked the absurd vanity, arrogant sophistry and sectarian confusion of philosophizing that he had observed—personally though superficially—at Bologna and Padua. But the Academic sceptics went too far, he added, trapping themselves in a circle: “look at this vaunted philosophy that either claims to be ignorant or forbids even ignorance to be known.” Petrarch was on to a real problem: claiming to know nothing, not even to know that nothing was known, eliminated the minimal knowledge required for salvation. And what about the admired Socratic ignorance? If “I know only this, that I know nothing,” then how can I know what God has revealed? Satisfactory answers blending a critique of profane knowledge with a theology of grace were beyond Petrarch’s reach.¹⁷

When the poet wrote his polemic, he was more concerned with fame and reputation than with knowledge and grace. He attacked Aristotelians to defend his own good name as a promoter of “liberal studies,” “respectable skills” and “human knowledge,” never exactly reproducing phrases that he saw in Cicero’s writings: studia humanitatis and studium litterarum. In order to seem modest and pious, he posed as ignorant while associating himself with “educated people” (homines literati)—though not with ‘humanists.’ That word in Italian (umanista) or Latin (humanista) was unknown to him and everyone else at the time. Whatever Petrarch might have said about a humanist/scholastic controversy, he had to say it in languages that lacked the core terminology for such a dispute.¹⁸

4 Scholastics without Humanists

Attitudes and words evolved, however, taking a long time. Even when Jacob Brucker wrote his monumental history of philosophy in the eighteenth century, neither the language of the controversy nor what it signified had yet reached the state now taken for granted. ‘Scholastic’ was a key term for Brucker, however; only ‘eclectic’ was more important to him. And no one was more convinced that the dismal medieval story, rightly told and understood, would show that philosophy was resilient and progressive. He praised philosophers in a righteous eclectic present—his own—for overcoming a depraved scholastic past. But he had no conception of ‘humanism’ nor of ‘humanists’ as its practitioners: he was aware of no such ideology nor any such role. Hence, without the makings of a contest, he could not reconstruct a humanist/scholastic quarrel, despite his savage and incessant attacks on medieval philosophy.¹⁹

The long rhythms of Brucker’s story—a tale of enlightenment—are still audible in the grand narrative of European philosophy: ancient foundations, a medieval collapse and a post-medieval recovery stymied but finally achieved. Europe entered a long night of barbarism and ignorance in the seventh century. Once the darkness lifted, the outlook for philosophy was still bleak. What emerged after the eleventh century was madness: “a new kind of philosophy—usually called ‘scholastic’—that swore by Aristotle’s words, destroyed anything sound and rational in philosophy and theology, and . . . gripped people’s minds with its insanity.” Confusion reigned until the Turks took Constantinople in 1453 and drove Greeks to Italy with seeds of ancient wisdom in their baggage.²⁰

Brucker’s assault on “the sectarian pseudo-philosophy of the Middle Ages” was harsh and relentless—but more than a rant. He gave reasons for despising scholastics: they were abstracted, dogmatic, incoherent and quarrelsome—logic-choppers whose finicky rules were useless at best, at worst destructive. By mixing reason with revelation, they confused theology with philosophy, while poisoning metaphysics with their toxic dialectic and reducing physics to a hollow ontology. Once philosophy had fallen from its ancient heights, scholasticism was its besetting sin and unredeemable: once Brucker made this charge and defended it—to be propagated by the Encyclopédie—the scholastic way of philosophizing never recovered.²¹

What saved the day, Brucker claimed, was philosophy’s heritage from antiquity, whose recovery was Petrarch’s project. Brucker praised the poet not only for his learning and literary art but also for service to philosophy—as an expert on its history and a compelling moral critic: “countless others followed his example and worked for the restoration of letters.” In the fifteenth century, promoters of this cause were Barbaro, Bruni, Landino, Poggio, Poliziano, Valla and others. Their ideal, as Brucker wrote, was humanitatis litterae or humanitatis studia or litterae humaniores, terms that needed no explaining in his day. By the time the Critical History was complete in 1744, readers of its overwrought Latin recognized these Ciceronian phrases as labels for classical philology—the result of what Petrarch, Bruni and Poliziano had started. Brucker noted that their project of cultural renewal was not the same as philosophy, but he also credited their classicism for rescuing philosophy from scholasticism.²²

At one point, after a few sentences about Donato Acciaiuoli and the recovery of Aristotle in Greek, Brucker realized that too many names (mainly Italian) had piled up, slowing his story down. So he simply listed three dozen “rising stars who scattered the shadows brought in by so many centuries of barbarism.” Nine of these Quattrocento luminaries—Matteo Palmieri, Niccolò Perotti, Giovanni Tortelli and others—had appeared in a similar grouping by the Book of Chronicles published in Nuremberg by Hartman Schedel and his collaborators in 1493. Today, everyone on both lists would be called a ‘humanist.’ Brucker gave them no collective name when he described what they all tried to do—“bring the light of learning back to its happy beginnings, which also made them anxious to find better tools for laboring at philosophy, . . . since none of them worked on teaching the classics in a way that would completely neglect philosophy.”²³

Brucker’s Latin for “teaching the classics” was humanior disciplina—teaching that was ‘more civilized’ or ‘cultured.’ Any translation into contemporary English is an anachronism, but none more than ‘teaching the humanities’ or ‘humanist teaching.’ Compare Brucker’s list with the names in the Chronicles. There Tortelli was a “theologian.” Perotti was a “theologian” and “rhetorician.” Palmieri had three titles: “historian,” “orator” and “philosopher.” But none was a ‘humanist.’ The other designations were for roles—job titles, we might say—and the Chronicles used more than a dozen. Roles or jobs were the categories that Schedel relied on to sort intellectuals now called ‘humanists’—a word that never appeared in the Chronicles or in Brucker’s History. Schedel, unlike Brucker, focused on roles, and ‘humanist’ wasn’t one of them.²⁴

Italians first used the word umanista—as far as we know—around the time when the Book of Chronicles was published. Umanista remained rare in Italian through the sixteenth century—even rarer in Latin. As a role-word, naming a serious student of the classics, ‘humanist’ entered the English language only in 1589, shortly before Bacon used it this way. But ‘humanist’ was not yet indexed historically: its first explicit link with the period of the Chronicles came around 1800. Our usual name for this era, ‘renaissance,’ came four decades later. Only afterward were ‘humanists’ or ‘humanism’ attached to a ‘renaissance,’ where J. A. Symonds put them in 1881. Brucker distinguished philosophy’s story in that still nameless period from a different story that was simultaneous, related but larger in scope—a “general history of learning in rebirth (renascens).” But he could not yet talk, as Symonds did and we still do, about ‘Renaissance humanism’ or ‘Renaissance humanists.’²⁵

What Brucker could not yet say in the eighteenth century could not have been said in the sixteenth century before Descartes was born. ‘Humanism’—no matter what kind—was unknown to people of that time, who rarely called anyone a ‘humanist.’ Some of them knew ‘scholastic’ philosophy by that name, but they did not oppose it to a different undertaking called ‘humanism.’ On the few occasions when they identified someone as a humanist, the person was usually a teacher or sometimes a student of grammar, rhetoric or classical literature. Comparing grammar teachers or students of the classics to scholastic philosophers or theologians might be something to talk about. But it wouldn’t be a humanist/scholastic controversy about philosophy.

Had there been such a quarrel in the sixteenth century, it would have started—by Brucker’s reckoning—because “scholastic theology and philosophy were sources of so much evil that people put their energy into shouting them down and getting rid of them, thereby doing great service to advancing an improved philosophy.” The first to enlist in this fight, according to Brucker, were Erasmus, Juan Luis Vives, Lefèvre d’Étaples, Mario Nizolio and Beatus Rhenanus. Brucker named Erasmus before the others but had more to say about Vives, Lefèvre and Nizolio. They had spoken ex professo on distinctly philosophical topics, whereas Erasmus “did not play a role on the stage of philosophy, . . . though everywhere in his writings he tried to provide his readers with the idea that philosophy must be done better.” His brave defense of authorial freedom and his searing jokes about “scholastic idiocy”—especially in the Praise of Folly—were “enormously helpful to the restoration of philosophy.”²⁶

5 Barbarians and Fools

Brucker praised Erasmus as a philologist and gave him a pivotal role in the history of philosophy. By the start of the sixteenth century—as Brucker saw it—enough ancient wisdom had been recovered to sustain philosophy’s rescue from its medieval collapse, and Erasmus led the revival. He published his Antibarbarians in 1520, more than thirty years after writing it, but just four years after his New Testament appeared in Greek and Latin. His life’s work was a triumph for some, a scandal for others. Softer and subtler with invective than Petrarch, he confronted professional theologians who attacked his scriptural scholarship and its educational imperatives—that schools and universities should teach more biblical and classical languages, which would crowd out fixtures of the traditional curriculum. His elegant dialogue defended the whole apparatus of ‘classical education,’ as it came to be called. Erasmus described it as “writing, languages, philosophy, history, antiquity, Latin, Greek and the authors”—meaning the ancient authors and including philosophers.²⁷

When Erasmus needed to name what he defended, this master of eloquence found dozens of labels: his favorite phrase was ‘good letters’ (bonae litterae), which he had not found in Cicero’s writings or in Petrarch’s invective on ignorance. Cicero had used ‘good skills’ (bonae artes) in much the same way, however, and for Erasmus the “letters that they have reason to call ‘good’” could also be ‘skills,’ ‘disciplines,’ ‘learning,’ ‘literature’ or ‘sciences.’ He preferred ‘skills’ or ‘letters’ or one of these other terms to the noun humanitas, the adjective humanus and their relatives: humanitas appeared only once in the dialogue, and humanus only in four passages—in the relevant sense.²⁸

In different senses, however, Erasmus described many things as humanus. There was a human “race,” a human “society,” human “affairs,” “mind,” “reason” and most of all “effort,” to stress capabilities (more than animal) of human striving as apart from limitations (less than divine). Disciplines, letters, sciences and studies that were human were not divine: their powers were not supernatural, their content was not theological, and yet they could be instruments of Christian religion. Their roots were in ancient pagan wisdom, however, which was ‘secular’—a term that Erasmus took from his opponents. Early Christians had used the Latin word to classify their persecutors as ‘worldly’ heathens.²⁹

A secular wisdom redeemed by good letters instructed the faithful in good morals, teaching them to be good people and better Christians: this was the aim of classical education as Erasmus saw it. As often, however, what he said on this point was more clever than clear. At one moment, after denying that good letters sufficed to make a good conscience or attitude (bona mens), he still insisted that the classics could help a little: otherwise, if his educational projects lacked moral consequences, they would have been pointless.³⁰

Erasmus defended good letters against the “barbarism” of “barbarians.” These “Goths” were inarticulate, sub-literate savages: they were hostile to learning and letters, and their ignorance corrupted the ancient wisdom that he wanted to preserve. Some were fake philosophers, but it was not philosophers who provoked Erasmus to write the Antibarbarians. Theologians were his targets, and he accused them of “barbarism in speech, confusion about facts.” Once he also singled dialecticians out as barbarians, but for moral failings, not bad logic: self-assured in their incompetence, they were hypocrites for criticizing others as arrogant.

Erasmus worried less about what his philosophical opponents taught than about how they behaved and what they called themselves and their books: medieval summas misused a fine Latin word, he complained, and neologisms like Thomista and Scotista annoyed him. Perhaps humanista would have bothered him in the same way: we can’t know.³¹

The barbarians were theologians who were enemies of Erasmus at a moment when he was vulnerable. They were not all the theologians, however, nor were they philosophers or ‘scholastics,’ a word used only a few times in the dialogue and then (except once) positively or neutrally. Long ago, in the days of Christian martyrs, learned people—the Fathers—strengthened the faith by “learning human disciplines.” At the same time, Origen, Lactantius and others who excelled as readers and writers were “well versed in scholastic disciplines.” Speaking of Christian intellectuals whom he revered, Erasmus praised them for learning that was ‘human’ but also ‘scholastic.’ Later Christian thinkers emulated these sages. Bede was a venerable master of “scholastic disciplines.” John Duns Scotus was also a scholastic—a real achievement, according to Erasmus—because Scotus also respected ancient philosophy.³²

What we now call ‘scholasticism’ never came up in the Antibarbarians. In the few places where Erasmus used the word scholasticus, he usually praised what it labeled. In the story told by the dialogue, scholastic disciplines were as old as the Fathers, and Erasmus credited them with a good run—better than anything accomplished by the “scholastics or theologians of our own time.” These were the modern barbarians who disputed about “trivial little objections in the scholastic manner” and gave dialectic a bad name. The resulting barbarism—a tasteless mistake but not a scholastic method—was what Erasmus wanted to eliminate. What he promoted was good letters and good conduct, not humanism or the humanities. Part of good letters was philosophy, especially ancient philosophy, and part of the philosophy was Aristotelian.³³

Erasmus mentioned philosophy in his dialogue as often as theology, but no polemic about recent philosophy backed up his attack on recent theology. He pointed out that the Fathers had honored philosophy: Jerome praised it, and even Augustine found it useful. In fact, philosophical conversations around the time of Jesus were lively and providential. In those blessed days, pagan sages prepared the way for the Gospel and armed the first Christians with arguments against heretics: had those philosophical defenses never been erected, martyrdoms would have been wasted.³⁴

So there were good philosophers and bad, according to Erasmus: some eloquent, some not; some modest, some arrogant—though no more or less prideful than poets. Some taught good methods: Pythagoreans, Socratics, Platonists and especially Academics. Theophrastus, Aristotle’s student, was “easily the best of philosophers”—a quick phrase to drop, hyperbolic, empty though perhaps sincere. This disciple of Aristotle, like Erasmus, was a student of human types. Although his teacher had tangled himself in syllogisms, the Antibarbarians made no sustained assault (like Petrarch’s) against the school that the Stagirite founded. On the contrary: Erasmus praised this “Prince of Peripatetics” as a champion of knowledge against ignorance, a stalwart in the cause that his dialogue promoted.³⁵

The battle-cry was to “struggle, prevail, triumph. . . . By struggling with the studious in learning, with everyone in modesty, courtesy and tact, I shall conduct myself so that the more I know, the better I am seen to be.” Good letters would lead, after all, to good behavior and a good reputation. Like ancient sages whose philosophy made straight the way of the Lord, pious Christians could still reach “what stands closest to the highest Good, which is the summit of learning. For what could a person get, along the path of excellence, that is more exalted than knowledge?”³⁶

Erasmus considered this exaltation compatible with Paul’s warning that “knowledge puffs up, but love builds”; also with the Apostle’s advice that “if any man seems to be wise, let him become a fool”; and with God’s promise through Isaiah to “destroy the wisdom of the wise.” Barbarians who “toss their little sayings at us” missed Paul’s point: although learning without love was empty and inflated, love without learning was blind. What puffed up the barbarians was not knowledge but their own ignorance, as Paul himself understood: he was a scholar among saints who “brought liberal learning into his apostolic work”—“the only one of the apostles who was fully informed about everything.”³⁷

Love that keeps righteous knowledge from puffing up—“charity” in the King James Bible—was grounded in humility and modesty: restrain the self and make room for kindness to others. A moral habit—forbearance—was what Erasmus admired in Socrates and the Academics: questioning rather than instructing, debating instead of asserting. The delusion of self-assurance was the worst incompetence. “In the end,” he admitted, “after doing my best to learn everything, it will be as if I can’t know that I know.” The issue might seem to be epistemic. Yet what was at stake wasn’t truth or certainty but how people should treat one another. And the remedies that Erasmus proposed in his dialogue went not much deeper than Petrarch’s proposals in his invective on ignorance.³⁸

6 Theologians v. Humanists

The Antibarbarians defended wisdom—including philosophy—on moral and cultural rather than epistemic grounds: barbarians were know-nothings whose ignorance left them tone-deaf to the learned muses. Educational antibarbarism was enough for Erasmus in a work drafted when he was young. The mature message of his Praise of Folly was quite different, more religious than moral or pedagogic. He started the Folly nine years before the Antibarbarians was actually published, and he revised this masterpiece repeatedly while producing another—his New Testament. This epochal triumph of philology spotlighted its author as a critic of Catholic tradition just before the Reformation erupted. In this climate, Erasmus hoped to persuade all Christians that folly and madness—not wisdom—would save them. He realized that his project seemed crazy, and he said so, repeating his claim to a critic: “the happiness that Christians seek by so much labor is nothing but a kind of madness and folly.”³⁹

Whose madness? The craziness in this intricate comedy was hard to pin down. Foolish praises of folly came from Folly personified, whose voice masked her performance with irony: most of her speech was a cascade of jokes about her retinue of fools—nothing too weighty, just virtuoso wit in sublime Latin prose. Then the last part, a bit more than a tenth of the whole, turned serious to make this case: Platonic dualism was the metaphysical basis of an intricate moral psychology that justified a practice—meditation—sacralized in the eucharist, whose visible signs (bread, wine and the ritual that transformed them) enacted and signified the death of Christ.⁴⁰

To prepare for death, true philosophers imitated Christ by renouncing the flesh. Real philosophy was training for death (mortis meditatio), a wise folly that sought ecstasy through the death of the body. Erasmus wrote that Plato defined philosophy

as practicing (meditatio) death because it leads the mind (mens) away from visible and bodily things—doing just as death does. . . . When the chains have been broken, the mind (animus) struggles to declare itself free, as if planning (meditari) an escape from prison, and then they call it madness. . . . Yet we see such people—in an absolutely godlike display—predicting the future while understanding tongues and scripts never before learned by them. This happens, no doubt, because the mind starts to apply its native strength as it gains a bit more freedom from the body’s contagion.⁴¹

Up to a point, Socrates had made the same case in the Phaedo: philosophy was “the practice (meletê) of death” that taught the soul to rescue its invisible nature, which was good and godlike, by detaching from the body, whose visible nature was foul and corrupt, like a corpse. But when the soul ascended to the “invisible, divine, deathless and wise,” it left behind not only error, fear and animal passion—according to Socrates—but also anoia or “folly.” According to Erasmus, however, rapturous mania with its gifts of tongues and prophecy was a blessed state and an aim of the authentic philosophy that practiced death.⁴²

Manic ecstasy as a gift from the gods was another Platonic theme—not absent from the Phaedo but dominant in the Phaedrus. Knowing these texts, Erasmus ignored the Phaedo’s negative remark about folly and focused on philosophy as an ascetic meletê or meditatio—based also on scriptural and patristic writings that used the Latin word to render the Greek. Both words signified not just thinking but constant, careful, purposeful thinking of the kind needed to plan, prepare, rehearse, exercise and practice. Such thinking, as Plato and Erasmus saw it, was blocked by the body; real thought occurred only after a meditator discarded the body. Meanwhile, “as the mind plans (meditari) to depart from the body, . . . the life of the pious is nothing more than practicing (meditatio) for that life to come,” the life whose “great prize is nothing but a kind of madness.”⁴³

Winning this “great prize” settled a contest of faculties: flesh v. spirit with soul in between. Erasmus found these three elements of the Folly’s moral psychology in Paul’s Epistles. Flesh, the lowest level of human nature, was consigned to Satan for destruction in order to save spirit at the highest level. But soul was intermediate and indeterminate: it might be damned by passions that served the flesh or might be saved if passions could be spiritualized by ascent. Lust, for example, was a bodily passion and always depraved. But love, a related habit of soul, could be redeemed, as when family and friends—in themselves snares of the flesh—loved one another spiritually ‘in Christ.’ The rite called ‘communion’ channeled this collective grace: the sacrament, by separating Christ’s blood from his body, symbolized the madness of God’s death and exhorted the faithful to do the same by mortifying their own flesh in order to be “raptured away to the eternal, invisible and spiritual.”⁴⁴

The Folly’s asceticism was worse than harsh—hard-hearted. Loving a child or a parent was a perverse passion that had to be redeemed by (somehow) sublimating it in love for Christ. Embodied love, always flawed, had to be disembodied and spiritualized. Forsaking the flesh made the saints seem insane, however: they appeared to be “outside themselves”—ecstatic, as they truly were. Heaven was the ultimate ecstasy, where “the spirit will be absorbed by the Supreme Mind, and the person will be totally outside himself.” Drowning the self in the bottomless sea of the Godhead was a commonplace of Christian mysticism, and yet the notion was jarring, like a related claim: that madness and self-extinction were good in God’s eyes. Wisdom that people sometimes boasted about was folly to God. At other times, after learning that God emptied out his own divinity to save mankind, people realized that the incarnation and cross made foolishness redemptive.⁴⁵

This mystical spirituality and radical asceticism took Erasmus a long way from the Antibarbarians, where good letters had made the good life self-aware, responsible and respectable. Folly described good people, good deeds and good laws in her speech, but she mentioned good letters only once—in a joke about Italian braggadocio. She had nothing to say about learning as human, humane or secular. She gave philosophy plenty of attention, however. Before Folly closed her speech with the authentic philosophy of Christ as practice for death, ordinary counterfeit philosophy got its share of abuse: philosophers were sour old dogmatizers, wordy, evasive and obscure, trying to hide their incompetence but always failing. Not even the ancients (except Plato on practicing death) had anything useful to say: they taught their followers nothing but how to waste time. Socrates and Aristotle were like the rest—nothing special in Folly’s estimation. She found the Academics less arrogant than others, however, because they admitted that human nature was incomprehensible to them.⁴⁶

Folly’s indictment of philosophy, past and present, was just another lampoon. In the same jokey, shallow way, she also attacked poets, lawyers, rhetoricians and other learned professionals before savaging the powers-that-be, clerical and civil. Some wayward intellectuals provoked her more than philosophers: grammarians (grammatici) and writers (scriptores) especially. These haughty schoolmasters tormented their students but flattered their peers: they expected toadying to be repaid by fatuous praise for their own trivial findings, sometimes stolen from rivals.

Those who chase undying fame by publishing books . . . in order to have them judged by a few intellectuals . . . seem quite pitifully and perpetually tormented. They add, change, delete, replace, restore, rephrase and show their work around, then put it away for nine years and can get no satisfaction: their worthless prize is commendation by very few people.

Philosophers got less grief from Folly than these scribblers. We call them humanists. But as she ran through her list of job-titles—poet, lawyer and so on—she never mentioned a ‘humanist.’⁴⁷

Folly aimed her longest and strongest blast at theologians, whom she distinguished from dialecticians (quarrelsome like lawyers) and philosophers. The latter were specialists in natural philosophy—ignorant, contentious, pretentious and addicted to guesswork. Folly’s complaints about philosophy were about nothing in particular, however. Her strongest objection was a string of technical abstractions made to look silly by leaving them out of context: “ideas, universals, separated forms, first matters, quiddities and haecceities.” Flaws of character and habit, not doctrine, also made dialecticians handy targets for Folly: ignoring common sense, they talked too much, fought about nothing and never bothered to search for truth.⁴⁸

Theologians copied the bad behavior of logicians but had special vices of their own: they were snooty, touchy, self-regarding bullies. Folly complained about their teachings as well, giving theology more attention than any other department of learning. Bad preaching propagated bad theology and spread doctrinal errors about grace, the sacraments, law and the reading of scripture. To show how theologians distorted the Bible, Folly contrasted Paul’s exegesis of the Savior’s teachings with readings by obtuse medieval interpreters. Nicholas of Lyra, despite his fame, had failed to notice that:

all mortals are foolish, even the pious. Did not Christ himself, even though he was the Wisdom of the Father, become foolish in some sense by taking on human nature in order to relieve the folly of mortals? . . . And he wanted them to be healed by nothing else except the folly of the cross—through unschooled and thick-headed apostles to whom he ceaselessly preached folly in order to make them shun wisdom.

Christ’s words and deeds, explicated by Paul, made it “absolutely obvious that the Christian religion has some kinship with folly but none at all with wisdom.”⁴⁹

Erasmus used the word ‘scholastic’ only four times in the Folly, ‘theologian’ or ‘theology’ ten times as often. He accused scholastics of failing both as theologians and as preachers because they ignored the Bible’s message—so loud and so clear. Subtleties of dialectic tied them in knots, dazzling and diverting them with “majors, minors, conclusions, corollaries, suppositions that are utterly trivial and yet more scholastic babbling.” When Folly belittled her retinue for misreading the Bible in this inept way, the errors that she rebuked were religious—not philosophical, even though philosophy came up often in her speech. The Aristotelian philosophy taught by scholastics was no big problem for Folly—as it had been for Petrarch. She didn’t call philosophers ‘scholastics,’ any more than she identified overbearing schoolmasters and obsequious authors as ‘humanists.’⁵⁰

These scribblers kept hunting for fame, but their paper chase was foolish, and Folly warned that it would end badly. Then everything changed for Folly’s creator after 1517 when Martin Luther changed everything for Europe. A genteel reform of Christian faith was no longer possible. Rage overtook reason: Catholics denounced Erasmus as a renegade, and Protestants despised him as a weakling. His jokes in the Colloquies, first published in 1518, angered people who might have laughed a few years earlier. Now they worried that his corrosive wit might infect their children in school as they parroted his elegant Latin.⁵¹

To make fun of abstinence from meat, Erasmus added The Eating of Fish to the Colloquies in 1526. This dialogue between a butcher and a fishmonger immortalized the atrocious food and appalling sanitation that he hated in Paris as a young man, while studying at the Collège de Montaigu. In that grim place “the walls understand theology,” he recalled. But the theology, viewed in hindsight, was just “scholastic fluff.” When he enrolled at Montaigu in 1495, Jan Standonck was leading the College through a program of material and spiritual renewal. Theology was Standonck’s academic discipline, but his passion was ascetic rigor. His approach to sacred doctrine was practical and lacked the depth reached by John Mair, his student, who succeeded him in 1499. Noel Béda, also Standonck’s student, took over from Mair in 1504.⁵²

This dynasty of Paris theologians presided at the Sorbonne, where Béda was elected Syndic in 1520. In 1526, when Erasmus released The Eating of Fish, Béda published lengthy Notes Against Jacques Lefèvre d’Etaples and Desiderius Erasmus, blasting Erasmus as the greater threat to orthodoxy. “It certainly has pained me,” he thundered:

to watch their pestilent teaching plant its roots deeper every day through the incessant publishing of new books, and to see division brought to the Church by these people—who are schooled only in remedies of letters (humanitas) and languages—and then continued with ever greater violence and no small loss of souls. The plague has been all the more incurable because these theologizing littérateurs (humanistae theologizantes) have scorned the physicians—professors of sacred scripture—who could cure such diseases. They behave as if teachers knew nothing about their own subjects. And they claim that professors are out of date and deal only with philosophical problems or tricks of argument and sophisms, charging that they give scarcely a nod to divine speech and detest the study of ‘ancient theologians’—meaning sainted doctors of the Church—with equal horror. Finally, even though people keep calling the professors ‘scholastic theologians,’ they by no means deserve to be named theologians without qualification, the reason being that these Hellenizers, in order to be rated the real and true theologians, persist in appropriating that title for themselves.

Béda scorned Erasmus and Lefèvre as shills for Luther, charging that ignorance of theology and reckless meddling with scripture had lured them into heresy. Trusting only the Fathers as their guides, they rejected:

the scholastics, like Peter Lombard, William of Auxerre, Alexander of Hales, Albert, Thomas, Bonaventura, Richard of Middleton, Ockham, Paludanus and other writers of this type. In this way, the wordsmiths (humanistae) use words of their own to make a show of themselves, while also trumpeting their claims to the world, all the while using various names—‘rabbinical,’ ‘crude,’ ‘barbaric’—to disparage scholastic experts (doctores) as ignorant of good literature (literatura), which is why they keep calling scholastics their enemies.

Béda’s use of humanista was unusual—and pejorative by contrast with scholasticus, which he understood as the theology taught (across party lines like realist v. nominalist, Thomist v. Scotist or Franciscan v. Dominican) at Paris and other universities from Peter Lombard’s time through Ockham’s and still ruling those institutions in his own day. A scholastic professor, like Béda and his predecessors at Montaigu, would respect this tradition, while a humanista, without academic standing, would ignore or vilify it—according to Béda.⁵³

In his lexicon, ‘scholastic’ was a term of praise, and he couldn’t complain that Erasmus used it pejoratively. The enemy’s weapons of abuse—in Béda’s view—were slanders of a different kind about culture (barbarism), education (crudeness) and conduct (rabbinical legalism). These were not the errors of doctrine or method that would be prominent if scholasticism, under some such rubric, had been a target for Erasmus. In the book that Béda introduced by berating incompetent humanistae, he charged every imaginable error against them. But when he assailed their defamation of his colleagues, the defamed parties were theologians who—so Erasmus and Lefèvre alleged—perverted the language of scripture when logic and philosophy misled them. But Béda’s erudite opponents had not made scholastic philosophy their main culprit, which was theology corrupted (allegedly) by misuse of philosophy.

The Antibarbarians and the Praise of Folly, where humanus and its cognates never stood for our ‘humanities’ or ‘humanism,’ would not have prepared Béda’s readers for his tendentious handling of humanista. Nor would these books have led anyone to expect that ‘scholastics’ were targets of the belletristic amateurs that Béda loathed. Moreover, Béda couldn’t claim that his adversaries had billed their fight with his allies as a battle between humanistae and scholastici: to that extent, his polemic was continuous with the Antibarbarians, the Folly and their descent from Petrarch’s invectives. The novelty was that Béda himself depicted his own combat with Erasmus and Lefèvre in just that way. Why he did so is plainer to us than it was to Béda’s contemporaries. As far as philosophy was concerned, this skirmish between humanistae and an irate scholasticus never escalated to warfare.

7 Rules for Directing the Soul

In the wake of Béda’s accusations, university officials condemned Erasmus three times. Within a few years, however, the accuser landed in jail. Béda chose victims with connections at court and made other political mistakes; public disgrace and exile followed, and then he died. He blundered by attacking lecturers on Greek and Hebrew whose official title was ‘royal’: he feared that promoting the Bible’s original languages would diminish the standing of the Latin Vulgate. When Béda got into trouble, Ignatius of Loyola had been at the University for several years, learning the ways of the Paris clerisy and attracting followers of his own. Later, when Ignatius advised a companion, Jerónimo Nadal, to avoid the royal lectures, Nadal prudently complied.⁵⁴

Nadal was still in Spain when Ignatius came to Paris in 1528 and spent his first year at Montaigu, where Erasmus had studied. Although Nadal’s work for the Society of Jesus would be momentous, he did not enter the Order until 1545. He knew Ignatius in Paris, but he was not one of the first to be led through the Spiritual Exercises, with Ignatius himself directing. By the time Ignatius left the University in 1535, the core of the Exercises had been in place for more than a decade.

Loyola’s formative insights came after he turned to religion in 1521 but before he left Spain, where at least one person who befriended him was an Erasmian. The Handbook of a Christian Soldier that Erasmus wrote in Latin also circulated in Spanish—like The Imitation of Christ. Ignatius and many others treasured this book, whose spirituality had been formative for Erasmus as well, despite its anti-intellectual character: as a boy, Erasmus had been in the care of the Brethren of the Common Life, who spelled out their devotional practices in the Imitation.⁵⁵

Like Erasmus, Ignatius saw meditation as a path to mystical union. But the high-toned cheekiness of the Folly, although it promoted meditation and ecstasy, was not congenial to this unpretentious Christian warrior, whose Latin was still slight when he studied at Montaigu. The simple piety of the Imitation and similar handbooks was more to his taste. Inspired by these devotional writings and encouraged by his own experience, Ignatius planned his Exercises in four parts or weeks. The last three weeks highlighted Gospel stories—Christ’s incarnation, birth, baptism and so on—filled out by “reading from the Imitation of Christ.” The same three weeks required meditation, the discipline that dominated the start of the Exercises.⁵⁶

The Exercises began with a call to order: “the first exercise is a meditation, applying three powers of the soul to the first, second and third sins. After a prayer for preparation and two preludes, the exercise includes three main points and a colloquy.” One prayer, two preludes, three points and a colloquy constituted the meditation that was the very first exercise and that addressed three faculties of the soul explicitly: memory, intellect and will. Though only these three faculties were singled out, a fourth was involved:

The first prelude is a composition made by seeing a place, where we note that in a contemplation or meditation about something visible—as in a contemplation of Christ, our Lord, who is visible—the composition will use the eye of imagination to see a physical place, like the temple or the mountain where Jesus Christ was.⁵⁷

Even when the object of meditation was abstract and “invisible,” like a state of sin, imagining made it concrete, a painful disease “of the soul imprisoned in this corruptible body.” The first week’s fifth exercise followed a psychological protocol and prescribed a harrowing “meditation on Hell” in order to make the pains of the damned felt by “inward cognition.” Torments imagined within flowed out to the five external senses: see the fire, hear the shrieks, smell the rot, taste the bitter tears and feel the frying heat.⁵⁸

Pains that threatened from hell had to be suffered now in order to cleanse the soul of the body’s corruption: purging the senses was meditation’s first task and a basic technique in the regimen of the Exercises—like examination of conscience. A scrutiny of sins to feed “the worm of conscience” addressed the sinner’s past and was recollective. But meditation was to be transformative and relied on other persons—the Trinity and the Blessed Virgin—who became present through prayer for spiritual conversation. One type of prayer was meditation, well known to Ignatius from the Christian devotional tradition.⁵⁹

For centuries pious Christians had prayed in three ways: purgative for beginners in the spiritual life; illuminative for those making progress; and unitive for the highest stage. At the summit came mystical union with God, leaving the native self depleted or eliminated: disembodiment of the self was an aim of ascetic spirituality, a punishing routine of progress toward piety. For the shriven and sanctified, the bliss of unitive prayer transcended emotions of affective, illuminating prayer, which had already supplanted the mental prayer of purgation. The Exercises gave instructions mainly about the beginner’s mental prayer, treating it in two ways: as contemplation, where imagination was in charge and cognition was simple and direct; and as meditation, where cognition was manifold and discursive, with will, intellect and memory prevailing over imagination.⁶⁰

The day-to-day regimen of the Exercises was severely ascetic, and its deeper requirements were harsher. To discipline the mind, interior penance cultivated grief. Exterior penance made the body feel pain, deprived it of light, altered its postures to cause discomfort and punished the flesh with whips and chains—though “not to penetrate the bone and go underneath.” A deeper wound was “to love no created thing whatsoever in itself, but only in God, who created them all.” Even before the self faded away in the beatific vision, purely human love had been canceled by instructions to be “indifferent to all created things.” Total conformity to the divine will replaced any lesser affection, submitting to a mystical love detached from everything but God.⁶¹

Traces of mystical experience—seeing visions of divine persons, hearing them speak, feeling their warmth—were evident in the Spiritual Diary that Ignatius started in 1544, though not so much in the Exercises, already in final form by then. The climax of the Exercises was the “contemplation to attain love” in the fourth week. The love to be attained (or joyously accepted) was mystical, unitive and all-consuming, kindled by a prayer “to offer and give to his Divine Majesty all that is mine and myself. . . . Take and receive, Lord, all my liberty, my memory, my understanding, and all my will. . . . Pour your love and grace into me because that is enough for me.”⁶²

Enough for what? For salvation, according to the Exercises. But salvation of what? The meditative faculties that started the Exercises had been surrendered, displaced by God’s love and grace. Any self that remained, lacking memory, intellect and will, would be a shallow vessel for divine gifts that were received passively when God ‘poured’ them in.⁶³

After the fourth week’s procedures, the Exercises added a section of “mysteries” and “apparitions” of Christ—brief selections from the New Testament to provide additional material for meditating and contemplating. Next, to manage situations that might otherwise perplex the penitent, came five sections of rules. The first two were for the “discerning of spirits.” They described how bad angels (demons) affected the soul differently than good angels. The last set of rules armed Christian soldiers against Europe’s religious turmoil by regulating “true and sure thinking in the Church militant.” The appalling thirteenth rule declared that “what I see (video) as white, I shall believe (credo) to be black if the hierarchical Church defines it to be so.”⁶⁴

The point of the thirteenth rule wasn’t physical, psychological or epistemic—that the senses were unreliable—but moral: the senses belonged to an agent whose autonomy impeded salvation and had to be surrendered. Absolute conformity to God’s will—also submission to authorities divinely appointed—liquidated autonomous agency. Even the senses had to submit in their most basic deliverances, and compliance was also the rule for reasoning, deliberating, choosing and other meditative acts of higher faculties, as in the unitive contemplation of the fourth week.⁶⁵

This thirteenth abnegating rule was one Jesuit response—severe and characteristic—to what the Society faced as an arm of “the Church militant.” A very different response, expressed by the eleventh rule, was to “define matters necessary for eternal salvation and also refute and expose every falsehood and erroneous teaching.” Since defining, exposing and refuting needed reason and other higher faculties, it was not enough for these purposes to mortify the body, obliterate the self and subsume all agency in the Godhead—the path to salvation mapped by the Exercises. On the contrary: if mental faculties were to do their godly work, they had to be strengthened by education, for which the eleventh rule endorsed a theology that was both “scholastic and established.”⁶⁶

Listing Augustine, Gregory and Jerome as “established experts (doctores positivi),” the eleventh rule described these ancient Fathers as masters of emotions that excited total love of God. The rule-makers partnered these holy sages with “scholastic experts (doctores scholastici)”—Aquinas, Bonaventura and Peter Lombard—whose updated lessons came later. These “more recent” teachers defined orthodox dogma in order to crush heretics. This was how the word ‘scholastic’ entered the lexicon of the Exercises—not a memorable beginning. Ignatius used it only in this single passage and more or less as Béda had, to describe university instruction in theology based on Peter Lombard’s Sentences and developed by Thomas, Bonaventura and their followers.⁶⁷

Scholasticus was more visible in the Society’s other charter documents. In the Constitutions of 1559, a manual of organization, the word described Thomas’s doctrine as distinct from patristic theology—echoing in this one place the usage of the Exercises. In other passages, however, a scholasticus was a person, not a doctrine. Scholastics were students who sought:

nothing except the glory of God and the good of souls. . . . While they are in the colleges, . . . their very labor in studying . . . is itself highly meritorious. . . . An order should be observed in pursuing the branches of knowledge. Scholastics should acquire a good foundation in Latin before attending lectures on the arts and . . . passing on to scholastic theology and then to established theology.⁶⁸

This barebones curriculum that shaped a scholastic’s career was still a novelty in the Jesuit experience—only about ten years deep. The Order’s original mission had not been educational, though it was plain from the start that recruits to the Society needed schooling. All the first companions who joined Ignatius at the University of Paris studied philosophy. New members there and at other universities needed places to live where veterans could guide them: this was the role of the first Jesuit colleges, of which three dozen had been founded by the time Ignatius died in 1556. By then, however, the colleges were offering free education not just to recruits but to any qualified male. The curriculum sketched by the Constitutions was growing into the most ambitious educational project of pre-modern times—announced definitively in the 1599 Plan of Studies (Ratio studiorum).⁶⁹

The Plan explained that a ‘school’ (schola) or ‘class’ (classis) was one of five ‘grades’ (gradus) of ‘lower studies’ (studia inferiora), where each level had its own distinct aims and student body. Sorting students implicitly by age (admitting 10-year olds, roughly, for a 6-year program, approximately) and by social class (starting with students who already knew a little Latin) as well as by subject made Jesuit teaching more orderly and effective than the competition, especially in Italy, where most of the early colleges were located. “Schools of lower studies,” said the Plan, “should be no more than five: one in rhetoric, another in classics (humanitas) and three in grammar.” Every student in such a school was a scholastic in the broadest sense—simply ‘a student at school.’⁷⁰

But a scholastic in the Plan was sometimes a Jesuit—not fully ‘professed’ and bound by four final vows, yet already one of ‘our own’ (nostri) as distinct from the ‘outsiders’ (externi) who quickly became a majority. After undergoing a spiritual initiation (novitiate) and taking three preliminary vows (poverty, chastity and general obedience, but not special obedience to the Pope), Jesuit scholastics were expected to teach. They often taught at colleges of lower studies open to the public, sometimes as they themselves progressed through the first level of higher studies—“the arts or natural sciences that prepare their minds for theology,” which was the second and final level of higher studies.⁷¹

As a student of theology and the Bible, a scholastic commented on the sacred text and defended “scholastic conclusions” about it. He also drafted answers responding “in the scholastic manner (more scholastico) to assigned questions, giving grounds for answers and conclusions and for solutions to objections.” Scholasticus in these cases designated a method and a style, modeled on the pattern (ratio) used by Thomas Aquinas to organize his Summa of Theology. The same word also described the content of Thomist theology as taught by Jesuit professors—an academic rank sought by some scholastics. Hence, people who were Jesuit scholastics and taught the laity in Jesuit colleges—students who were also scholastics in those schools—applied a scholastic method while learning scholastic doctrine that they might eventually go on to teach.⁷²

All students schooled by Jesuits were scholastics in the broadest sense. Likewise, just as a scholasticus was anyone in a schola, a humanista was anyone in a schola of humanitas. The Plan used the word humanista for a pre- or post-pubescent student at the mid-level of lower studies who had already passed through three schools (scholae or classes) of grammar and was on the way to a school of rhetoric.

After students have left the schools of grammar, the level of this school is to prepare the ground, as it were, for public communication (eloquentia) by understanding the Latin language (lingua), a certain amount of scholarship (eruditio) and a little material about rules bearing on rhetoric.⁷³

Grammar—taught from an Introduction by Manoel Alvares still used in the nineteenth century—was drill in Latin word-classes, word-forms, syntax, prosody and composition; these intermediate and advanced lessons followed abcs of reading and writing that Jesuits didn’t teach. Grammar lessons helped students internalize the classics by reading, hearing, memorizing and repeating examples of correct and refined speech and by imitating them in oral and written exercises.

After several years of such instruction, students of humanitas were ready for Cicero’s moral philosophy, Vergil’s epic poetry, Caesar’s history and lyric poetry by Horace, always “purged of any obscenity” and directed toward pietas—a Roman ideal sacralized for Christian use. The waking life of a humanista in a classics school (schola humanitatis) aimed at understanding Latin (cognitio linguae) by reading, copying, memorizing, analyzing, imitating and declaiming texts by these Roman authors and a few others. Two stylistic norms were primary for the reading, writing and speaking of Latin, along with some Greek and maybe Hebrew: correct usage (proprietas) and variety of expression (copia), goals promoted by Erasmus and endorsed by Jesuit textbooks.⁷⁴

Unlike Noel Béda, who had accused Erasmus of betraying the faith, the Jesuit authors of the Plan did not treat humanista as a pejorative. On the contrary, the Plan linked this uncommon word with the more usual humanitas or ‘classical literature’ that was fundamental in the Jesuit curriculum. A large part of the Society’s plan for education—a journey in five stages from grammar through rhetoric by way of humanitas—aimed to teach the Greco-Roman classics with an overlay of Christian devotion.⁷⁵

Another part, culminating in theologia scholastica, started with other remnants of antiquity—“the arts or natural sciences,” meaning logic and natural philosophy with some metaphysics and moral philosophy, all of it Aristotelian. The scholastic theology of Aquinas, as Jesuits presented it, was based on elements of Aristotelian philosophy, which in turn assumed basic instruction in grammar, rhetoric and the classics.⁷⁶

In the Plan’s instructional economy, all humanistae were scholastici just because they studied in a schola where their Jesuit teachers were also scholastici. Some humanistae, who might be recruits for the Society, emulated scholastici who taught them: they dreamed of following these teachers in a schola like their own. The Plan envisioned no conflict between humanistae and scholastici, treating them as partners or as identical. Juan Alfonso de Polanco, who helped Ignatius write the Constitutions, stressed the practicalities to another Jesuit who worried about the cosas de humanidad. These lessons were indispensable, Polanco argued, because they instructed students in languages, taught them to communicate, prepared them for philosophy and showed them how to read the Bible.⁷⁷

Ideology was also at stake in the Society’s formative years, and yet the Constitutions conceded that scholastic procedure was not the best for preaching or public speaking. Although the Plan obliged Jesuits to be educated in just this scholastic way, the spirituality of the Exercises was experiential, favoring a theology that was more mystical than theoretical or ‘speculative.’ In fact, pure theory was insufficient for basic Jesuit commitments which—in Jerónimo Nadal’s phrase—pledged the Society to “the spirit, the heart and practice.” Abstract theorizing could never reach deep into feelings and lead souls to God.⁷⁸

Figure 1.1 La Flèche, Étienne Martellange SJ, 1612 Gallica, Bibliothèque Nationale de France https://gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/btv1b69374326.item

For similar reasons, Erasmus had campaigned against speculative theology as useless or pernicious. But Jesuits could hardly denounce Aquinas’s metaphysics while exalting it. Instead, they classicized their Thomist theology and philosophy while also sanctifying Roman pietas—the martial, familial and civic virtue of the Aeneid—as saintly Christian piety. Starting in the 1590s, Jesuit philosophy (not theology) was being expertly classicized in commentaries on Aristotle published from the University of Coimbra. Meanwhile, civic virtue was being Christianized with extraordinary effect by Jesuit teachers in a few universities and many, many colleges—enacting the Erasmian maxim that good letters made good morals. “By joining learning with piety,” in the words of the Plan, “young people sent to the Society for education should—along with their letters—drink in morals worthy of Christians.”⁷⁹

Shortly after publishing their Plan, Jesuits welcomed a student—René Descartes—to their new college at La Flèche in the Loire Valley. When the child arrived, the school’s imposing design by Étienne Martellange, a Jesuit architect, was not yet fully executed. The new boy was on site to see old structures being torn down and new buildings erected—sights for the author of an autobiography to remember (Fig. 1.1). The philosopher’s thoroughly scholastic education at La Flèche was also a new construction, and it was thoroughly humanist as well—though not as those words have come to be used in modern times.⁸⁰

¹ Montaigne (1978), p. 551.

² On ‘discourse,’ ‘essay’ and ‘treatise,’ see the first part of Chapter 3 of this book; Copenhaver (2017) was an early sketch of this chapter and the next.

³ Bos and Krop (1993); Ruestow (1973), pp. 14–18; Van Rijen (1993); Gaukroger (1995), p. 210; Van Bunge (2001), pp. 27–37; Somos (2011), pp. 10–12, 93–6, 202–4, studies Burgersdijck’s three colleagues (Daniel Heins, Pieter van der Cun, Gerrit Vos) from the ‘Leiden Circle’ whose scholarship promoted secularization. On humanism v. scholasticism, see Nauert (1998) commenting on Rummel (1995); also Perreiah (2014).

⁴ The description came from the Vrin website: http://www.vrin.fr/collection; see also Zarka (2012).

⁵ Kleinman (2013).

⁶ Kenny (2004–7).

⁷ Garber (2001), pp. 13–30, explained why neglect of this kind was unwise. And once Charles Schmitt challenged the neglect with his Cambridge History of Renaissance Philosophy in 1988, progress began and continued: for works of reference, see Schmitt et al. (1988); Copenhaver and Schmitt (1992); Parkinson (1993), pp. 16–139; Kraye (1996a); Popkin (1999), pp. 279–328; Hankins (2007a); and Adamson (2022); for monographs and collections, French, Wettstein and Silver (2002), pp. 1–139; Hankins and Palmer (2008); Blum (2004), (2010a), (2010b); Pasnau (2011); Martin (2014); Palmer (2014); Lagerlund and Hill (2017).

⁸ Leibniz in Alexander (1956), p. 94.

⁹ OED s.v. ‘humanism,’ 2, 5b; De Lubac (1963), pp. 42–7; Turner (2000), pp. 234–5, 299–300, 383–6; De Wulf (2003), pp. 146–7; Hankins (2006), pp. 151–3; Bod (2013), pp. 1–12, 346–63; and https://filosofianeoscolastica.vitaepensiero.it for the Rivista di Filosofia Neoscolastica, founded in 1909 and still publishing “in costante confronto col dibattito filosofico e scientifico del Novecento.”

¹⁰ OED s.v. ‘humanism,’ 3a, 4; Ferguson (1948), pp. 153–9, 202–3, 260–6, 279–81, 333–57; Rummel (1995), The Humanist-Scholastic Debate, is an excellent study. My different views about the ‘debate’ focus on a narrower area—philosophy—and I use different terminology, ‘humanist/scholastic controversy’ or ‘quarrel,’ to distinguish my usage from Rummel’s in a neutral way because her valuable book has been a model, not a target.

¹¹ Petrarca (2003a) by David Marsh presented all four of Petrarch’s invectives, identifying their topics as ecclesiastical hierarchy, French and Italian society, medicine and scholastic philosophy, the last being the essay On His Own Ignorance examined here and cited as Petrarca (2003b); see also Bausi (2008), pp. 193–5, 201, 204, 215. Besides Bausi’s thoughtful study, see Wilkins (1963); Mann (1984); Witt (2000), pp. 230–91; Hankins (2007b); and Kirkham and Maggi (2012) for introductions.

¹² Petrarca (2003b), ¶17, 27, 30, 48–9, 53, 89, 97, 102–6, 113–14, 129, 132, 147, 153, 156.

¹³ Petrarca (2003b), ¶26, 49, 55, 87, 95, 97, 100–2, 107–10, 113–14, 119; Bausi (2008), pp. 109–21, 218–19.

¹⁴ Coloss. 2:8; Petrarca (2003b), ¶17, 48, 74, 91–4, 97, 103, 108, 110.

¹⁵ Petrarca (2003b), ¶87, 95, 105, 108–10, 113–14, 119; Kennedy (2012), p. 270.

¹⁶ Eccles. 6:11; Rom. 1:21–2; Petrarca (2003b), ¶93, 144–5, 150; Bausi (2008), pp. 201–2.

¹⁷ Petrarca (2003b), ¶148, relying on Cic. Acad. 1.16, 2.74.

¹⁸ Petrarca (2003b), ¶12–14, 28, 31–2, 35, 38–9, 102, 145; Rummel (1995), pp. 50–1; Kennedy (2012), p. 263. Since Campana (1946) and Kristeller (1961c), the literature in English—not to speak of other languages—on the terminology and ideologies of ‘humanism’ and ‘humanists’ has kept growing; commenting on Kristeller’s discovery of humanista in an Italian letter of 1490, Grendler (2006) noted that “no earlier use of humanista has come to light, but . . . many additional references . . . in Italian and Spanish and a handful in Latin have appeared in the sixteenth century, especially in the last third.” See also Black (2001); Copenhaver and Schmitt (1992), pp. 24–37; Ferguson (1948); Fubini (2006); Grafton and Jardine (1986); Grendler (1989), (2002); Hankins (2006), (2007b); Kessler (2006); Kraye (1996b); Kristeller (1961b), (1988); Mann (1996); Mazzocco (2006a), (2006b); Monfasani (2021); Nauert (1999); Rabil (1999); Turner (2000); Witt (1999), (2000), (2012). Lorenzo Valla, who raged at Aristotelians as “perverters of natural meanings,” did not call them scholastici in his Dialectical Disputations: Copenhaver and Nauta (2012); Copenhaver (2011); also Copenhaver (2018); and (2019b), pp. 154–8, on ‘humanism’ in stories about Pico della Mirandola.

¹⁹ Longo (2011), pp. 477–9, 492–4, 515–19, 528–33; Copenhaver (2002a), pp. 296–300.

²⁰ Brucker (1742–4), 1.42–3, 3.709–11; Longo (2011), pp. 516–18, 529–32.

²¹ Brucker (1742–4), 3.720–1, 872–4; Longo (2011), pp. 529–31, 557–9.

²² Brucker (1742–4), 4.1.7, 21–35.

²³ Brucker (1742–4), 4.1.30–2; Schedel et al. (1493), fols ccxxxvir–cclviv.

²⁴ Brucker (1742–4), 4.1.31; Schedel et al. (1493), fols ccxlvv–ccxlvir, ccliiv.

²⁵ Brucker (1742–4), 4.1.32; Campana (1946); Kristeller (1961c); OED s.v. ‘humanist,’ A.1.a, b; s.v. ‘renaissance,’ 1.a, C2; n. 18 of this chapter.

²⁶ Brucker (1742–4), 4.1.83–6.

²⁷ Erasmus (1978a), p. 108; Rummel (1995), pp. 46–7: for the Latin Antibarbari, see Erasmus (1703–6), 10.1691–1744, translated and introduced by Margaret Mann Phillips in Erasmus (1978a), pp. xix–122, cited here as an accessible version, but with my translations; see also Bainton (1969); Rummel (1990), (2008); McConica (1991); Halkin (1993); Jardine (1993).

²⁸ Erasmus (1978a), pp. 16, 18, 20, 25, 28, 31, 35, 80–1, 83, 85, 97, for bonae litterae; for bonae artes, scientiae and so on, pp. 29–30, 47, 50, 62–3, 80, 84; humanitatis litterae, 43; humanae disciplinae, 26, 73, 108, 120–1; Cic. De or. 2.10, 3.136; Senec. 65; Off. 3.6.

²⁹ Erasmus (1978a), pp. 22, 24, 53, 61–2, 64, 85–6, 98–9, 113–18 for humanus with artificium, cavillatio, conatus, genus, ingenium, industria, labor, munus, opera, ratio, res, societas, studium, usus and vita; 46, 61–3, 72, 75, 88–9, 91–2, 94, 99–100, 107–8, 112–13, 120 for disciplina, doctrina, eruditio, litterae, litteratura, libri, sapientia and scientia as saecularis; also Hier. Ep. 60.11 for saecularis in early Christian usage.

³⁰ Erasmus (1978a), pp. 62–3, 73, 76, 78–81, 96, 99, 120.

³¹ Erasmus (1978a), pp. 18, 27, 35, 45, 48, 58, 63, 65, 67–8, 71, 73–4, 98, 114.

³² Erasmus (1978a), pp. 89, 108, 111–12, 115: the prince of humanists never used humanista where it would have counted most, in the Antibarbarians or the Praise of Folly, but he saw it used against him by his enemy, Noël Béda, discussed later in this chapter.

³³ Erasmus (1978a), pp. 55–6, 60, 108, 115.

³⁴ Erasmus (1978a), pp. 59–60, 82–3, 93, 95, 97, 107–8.

³⁵ Erasmus (1978a), pp. 46–7, 64, 68–9, 77.

³⁶ Erasmus (1978a), pp. 54, 61.

³⁷ 1Cor. 1:19, 3:18, 8:1; Isa. 29:14; Erasmus (1978a), pp. 65, 71–3, 85, 103.

³⁸ 1Cor. 8:1 KJV; Erasmus (1978a), pp. 54, 65–8, 85.

³⁹ Erasmus (1898) is the Latin text of the Folly, translated by Betty Radice in Erasmus (1993), which also included the letter that Erasmus wrote to Maarten van Dorp in 1514; see http://pot-pourri.fltr.ucl.ac.be/ for a Latin text of the letter, and for the passage cited see Erasmus (1898), p. 182, repeated in ¶23 of the letter to Van Dorp; also Screech (1988), pp. 67, 75. My reading of the Folly follows Screech, though I don’t agree that the Antibarbari is consistent with the Folly on the value of learning, as Screech suggested on p. 41. See also Asso (2008).

⁴⁰ Screech (1988), pp. 7–13, 75, 97–107, 117–27.

⁴¹ Erasmus (1898), p. 182; Screech (1988), pp. 75–7.

⁴² Pl. Phaedo 80D–81A; Screech (1988), pp. 77–83.

⁴³ Pl. Phaedo 67C; Phaedr. 244A–45C; 1Tim. 4:15, where ταῦτα μελέτα is haec meditare in the Vulgate; cf. Ignat. Ad Ephes. 19.3; 2Cor. 4:18; Erasmus (1898), pp. 182, 187–9; Screech (1988), pp. 75–8, 83–6, 135–6, 140–1.

⁴⁴ 1Thess. 5:19–23; Erasmus (1898), pp. 183–6; Screech (1988), pp. 91–2, 97–105.

⁴⁵ 1Cor. 1:25; Erasmus (1898), pp. 180–1, 186–9; Screech (1988), pp. 8–9, 22–4, 52–67, 104–5.

⁴⁶ Erasmus (1898), p. 86; on bonae litterae, cf. 59, 121, 154, 185; humanus, pp. 15, 46–7; philosophy as arrogant and dogmatic, pp. 21, 24, 70–1; wordy, evasive and obscure, pp. 48, 57, 105, 109; useless, pp. 38, 40, 44–5, 61; Socrates, pp. 38–9, 41, 70, 163; Aristotle, pp. 41, 91, 94, 118, 126; Academics, p. 89; nn. 40–1 of this chapter.

⁴⁷ Erasmus (1898), pp. 101–10.

⁴⁸ Erasmus (1898), pp. 111–13.

⁴⁹ 1Cor. 1: 18–25; 2Cor. 5:21; Philipp. 2:7–8; 1Tim. 1:13; Erasmus (1898), pp. 114–27, 159–81.

⁵⁰ Erasmus (1898), pp. 117, 124, 137–8, 150; nn. 46 and 47 of this chapter.

⁵¹ Erasmus (1898), pp. 45, 106; Rummel (1990), pp. 8–13, 239.

⁵² Erasmus (1536), pp. 308, 321: the standard English version of the Colloquies is cited in Erasmus (1997); see also Renaudet (1953), pp. 172–83, 267–76, 315–16, 337–47, 356–9; Farge (2008), pp. 143–50; Sartori (2008).

⁵³ Béda (1526), sigs aa1v–2r; Rummel (1995), pp. 6, 83–4, 89–91; Farge (2008), pp. 156–9; n. 18 of this chapter; also Gielis (2008).

⁵⁴ Farge (2008), pp. 158–64; my main guide to Ignatius and the early Jesuits was O’Malley (1993), pp. 7–8, 11–14, 23–32; Father O’Malley’s wiser views sometimes differed from mine.

⁵⁵ O’Malley (1993), pp. 25–9, 264–6; McConica (1991), pp. 4–9.

⁵⁶ Ignatius of Loyola (1903), pp. 322–3, 328, 348–9, 356–7, 398–9, 448–63, 518–19; O’Malley (1993), pp. 27–9, 261–3.

⁵⁷ Ignatius of Loyola (1903), pp. 274–5 (versio prima).

⁵⁸ Ignatius of Loyola (1903), pp. 294–7 (versio prima).

⁵⁹ Ignatius of Loyola (1903), pp. 222–5, 260–1, 270–1, 296–7, 282–3, 290–3 (versio prima); Ganss (1991a), pp. 62–3.

⁶⁰ 2Pet. 1:4; 1Cor. 15:28; Dion. Areop. MT 997B–1001A; Ignatius of Loyola (1903), pp. 222–5, 334–7, 434–47; Russell (2004), pp. 248–95; Ganss (1991a), pp. 60–3, 229, 396, 402; McGinn (1991), pp. 157–82; Louth (1981), pp. 46–9, 159–78. The key text is the opening of the Mystical Theology attributed to Dionysius the Areopagite and absorbed into Christian tradition long before Ignatius. Dionysius advised initiates to imitate Moses on Sinai: “Be exalted in ignorance toward union, joining what lies beyond all being and knowing, moved toward . . . divine darkness by an ungovernable and unconditional abandonment of yourself and of everything. . . . After all is purified, Moses hears the many-voiced trumpets, sees the many lights, . . . separates from the many and reaches the peak of divine ascent . . . ; released from the seen and from seers, he enters the dark of unknowing, the true mystery, with his eyes closed to everything attained by knowing, since now he is in the absolutely unfelt and unseen, . . . being neither himself nor any other, unaffected by any knowing and, at his best, unified with the absolute Unknown.”

⁶¹ Ignatius of Loyola (1903), pp. 250–3, 274–5, 298–309, 372–5, 514–15 (versio prima); Ganss (1991a), pp. 229; Ganss (1991c), pp. 251–4.

⁶² Ignatius of Loyola (1903), pp. 426–31 (versio prima); Ganss (1991a), pp. 229–32, 447–8; Ganss (1991c), p. 251–4, 266–7.

⁶³ Ignatius of Loyola (1903), pp. 250–53, 430–1; Ganss (1991a), p. 229: the technical phrase ‘infused contemplation’ weakens the image—pouring into an empty vessel; the first Latin version (versio prima) of the Exercises, complete by 1541, has infunde where the Spanish autograph has dadme, the ‘vulgate’ version of 1548 has dones, and the modern version of 1835 has da; see the introduction to Ignatius of Loyola (1903), pp. 148–9, 160–2, 172–3.

⁶⁴ Ignatius of Loyola (1903), pp. 448–9, 496–7, 510–11, 528–9, 548–9, 556–7 (versio prima).

⁶⁵ See n. 62 of this chapter.

⁶⁶ Ignatius of Loyola (1903), pp. 554–7 (versio prima).

⁶⁷ Ignatius of Loyola (1903), pp. 554–7 (versio prima). The expertise in question wasn’t ‘positive’ in the sense of the current English word. Classical Latin positivus was ‘conventional’ or ‘arbitrary’ as distinct from ‘natural’; on positivus in Parisian theology just before Ignatius, see Grendler (2017), p. 322, with Congar (1946), coll. 462–72; also n. 52 of this chapter.

⁶⁸ Ganns (1991b), pp. 294–5, 300, 460–1.

⁶⁹ O’Malley (1993), pp. 200–8, 215, 225; Grendler (1989), pp. 363–8.

⁷⁰ Anon. (2002), pp. 98–100, 114, 132, 144, 210, 246, 264, 326; O’Malley (1993), pp. 211, 215–17, 226; Grendler (1989), pp. 377–81.

⁷¹ Ganss (1991a), p. 454; (1991b), p. 285, 294–5, 299; O’Malley (1993), pp. 206–8.

⁷² Anon. (2002), pp. 88, 114, 132, 144, 148, 152, 156–8, 190, 314–16.

⁷³ Anon. (2002), pp. 224–6, 268, 276–80, 338.

⁷⁴ Anon. (2002), pp. 92, 98–104, 116, 134–6, 152–4, 210–22, 226, 236, 242, 246–8, 254–6, 278–80, 286–8, 312; Soarez (1576); Alvarez (1581); Erasmus (1978b); O’Malley (1993), pp. 215–16; Grendler (1989), pp. 189–91, 373–4, 378–80.

⁷⁵ Anon. (2002), pp. 92, 98–100, 104, 116, 134, 210, 214, 218, 226, 236, 246, 256, 312; n. 52 in this chapter.

⁷⁶ Anon. (2002), pp. 194–204; O’Malley (1993), pp. 247–50.

⁷⁷ Anon. (2002), pp. 519–26; O’Malley (1993), pp. 210–11, 256.

⁷⁸ Ganss (1991b), pp. 296–7; cf. Anon. (2002), pp. 148, 158; O’Malley (1993), pp. 243–4, 251–2.

⁷⁹ Anon. (2002), pp. 112, 120, 134–6, 152–4, 242–4; O’Malley (1993), pp. 209–12, 221, 253–6, 260–3; Schmitt (1983), pp. 39–46; Schmitt et al. (1988), p. 814.

⁸⁰ Descartes (1637), pp. 9–10, 13–16, 23–4, 30; AT, 6.7–9, 11–14, 22–4, 29; (1985), 1.114–17, 122–3, 125; Whitely (1995). Demolition and rebuilding were thematic in the Discourse. Martellange’s drawing should be compared with an engraving by Louis Boudan that shows the school as it had grown by the time Descartes died: Boudan, Veüe du Collège des Iesuites de La Flèche, at gallica.bnf.fr. See also Chapter 3.2 of this book.

2 Methods

The one and only way to proceed.

Ramus¹

1 Clermont, La Flèche and Harvard

By 1563, well before the Jesuits finished their Plan but after they had issued the Constitutions, members of the Society were teaching at the Collège de Clermont (now the Lycée Louis-le-Grand) in Paris. Henri III, who supported the new college, was assassinated in 1589 by a Dominican friar, and the throne passed to a Protestant, Henri IV. To gain full control, the new king switched religions—for the second time—in 1593. Serial conversions seemed insincere to many, including the angry adolescent who stabbed him a year later. This time the assailant was a student of Jesuits—at Clermont. The government banned the Society and shut the College down until after 1603, when the versatile king welcomed the Order back.²

The violence at Clermont showed what Jesuits faced while soldiering for the Church in an age of religious war. The scandal not only exposed the Order’s political peril but also underlined its resilience and success. Reinstatement came on a royal scale with Henri’s gift of land, buildings and income for a new Jesuit foundation at La Flèche, a royal property near Tours (Fig. 1.1). The college was one of the first to teach the curriculum described by the Plan of 1599. Born in 1596, Descartes went to La Flèche at the usual age, studying until 1614 or so as a humanista and scholasticus, just as the Plan directed.³

This pupil of Jesuits changed the course of European philosophy while his teachers reshaped Europe’s institutions of secondary and higher education. By the time a pope suppressed the Society in 1773, Jesuits had founded more than eight hundred schools of various kinds: most were colleges like La Flèche (though not so magnificent), guided by the same Plan and using the same methods of instruction for the same purposes. Nothing like this had ever happened before in Europe. This immense triumph of Catholic education eventually helped persuade the Church that a force as strong as the Society had to be eliminated.⁴

Far away across the Atlantic, in New England south of Maine, there was no need to suppress the Society. Until the nineteenth century, no Jesuits went there to implement the Plan. Meanwhile at Harvard College, founded by the Massachusetts Bay Colony in 1636, hunger for pedagogical order had taken different nourishment from the dialectic of Peter Ramus (Pierre de la Ramée). In 1661, a future head of the College advised his nephew to “refer all things” in his studies to Ramus since “there is not one axiom of truth ever uttered that doth not fall under some speciall rule of art”—‘axiom’ and ‘art’ being Ramist code-words. Until 1689, theses defended at Harvard commencements often came from the huge Ramist literature.⁵

2 Ramus

The mature Ramist system of 1572 was still evolving as the Jesuit Constitutions were being drafted, and the novel pedagogy spread as fast as the Society’s curriculum—not because new schools were founded, however, but because many, many new books were printed, read and taught. By 1650, 250 editions of the Dialectic had appeared; the total triples by counting other works by Ramus or in the orbit of his Dialectic. Demand for Ramist manuals was international. Customers were eager everywhere in Europe except Italy, though most buyers were Protestants in northern countries. The famous author became even more famous as a Protestant martyr in 1572, stabbed in the Massacre of St. Bartholemew’s Day. Except for readers in German-speaking regions, the British wanted his writings more than anyone else. They could read the Dialectic in English by 1574.⁶

Within a few years the hubbub was loud at Cambridge. Christopher Marlowe, who earned a degree there in 1584, opened his best play by having Faustus quote Ramus on the purpose of logic: bene disserere est finis logices. When Ramus was about to be murdered in a lesser drama, Marlowe’s Massacre at Paris, the dialectician defended himself by running down an Aristotelian opponent, Jacob Shegk. “Scheckius takes it ill,” he insisted,

because my places, being but three, contains all his.

I know the Organon to be confused,

and I reduced it into better form.

Perhaps “logic’s chiefest end,” as Faustus claimed, was indeed “to dispute well.” But was the day of an insurrection the right moment for Ramus to dispute about logic? “Poor Ramus sitting at his book” seemed oblivious, detached from imminent doom. Marlowe’s telegraphic allusions hit the right notes, however; brevity, simplicity and the plainest possible form were selling points for Ramism.⁷

Ramus—a charismatic teacher—had fashion on his side in two other ways: as an enemy of Aristotle and as a champion of classicism. Although the nature, depth and duration of his opposition to Aristotle have all been contested, the lines from Marlowe’s Massacre confirmed this attitude. His classicism was undeniable—fervent and ingenious. He loaded almost every page of the Dialectic with quotations from Cicero, Vergil and other ancients. But what was all this erudition doing in a logic book? Logike was the title of the first English version of the Dialectic, where Ramus claimed logic as his subject right away: Dialectica est ars bene disserendi, eodemque sensu logica dicta est.⁸

Logic—pure form—has no content. How could logical form be classical or not classical? Ramus classicized logic by displaying its form in literary examples—paragraphs from Cicero’s speeches, verses from Ovid’s poems and so on, like this line where Vergil had put the notion of cause into hexameter verse:

Happy the one who could recognize causes of things.

Before ever laying eyes on a logic book, students of Ramist teachers knew lines like this by heart, memorized as badges of cultural attainment and social status. Scarcer in their copybooks were different sentences like this:

Whatever of whatever kind, concerning such a one of whatever kind, knows it to be such a one of a kind as it is.

This sentence, a sophism, came from Peter of Spain’s Summaries of Logic, a medieval textbook that was still the standard when Ramus was born in 1515. Sophisms of this type showed how certain words—‘every,’ ‘whole,’ ‘both,’ ‘whatever’ and others—were used or misused to quantify terms in contrived propositions. Unlike excerpts from Cicero or Vergil, example sentences like this were unique to instruction in logic and otherwise useless—or worse.⁹

For aspiring writers and speakers of Latin, no models were better than Cicero’s oratory, Vergil’s poetry and their stirring moral lessons. No one, least of all the logician himself, would have made such claims for the examples in Peter’s Summaries. Take this one, called a paralogism, used to illustrate the fallacy of equivocation:

Every healthy thing is an animal;

urine is healthy;

therefore, urine is an animal.

Another paralogism had the same purpose:

Everything useful is good;

an evil is useful;

therefore, an evil is good.

In both cases, the conclusion was false—which was not the worry. The issue was the syllogism’s form, not its content. As part of a teacher’s lesson, a perverse paralogism might be fun for teenage boys and easy to memorize. But messages that were just silly in some cases (urine is an animal) were unedifying in others (evil is good). Since the purpose of paralogisms was to exemplify fallacies, something had to go wrong. But the Summaries also gave examples of good arguments, like

No animal is a stone;

every human is an animal;

therefore, no human is a stone.

Did anyone need a syllogism to explain that no human is a stone? Of course not: the Summaries made no such claim, as its critics understood. Nonetheless, by the time Ramus was born, enemies of the odious old logic could make the following case: what was right in it (the syllogistic) was trivial and vacuous; what wasn’t trivial and vacuous (fallacies, sophisms, paralogisms) was wrong, either in fact (‘an evil is good’) or by moral or aesthetic standards. And all logical prose failed by norms of the prevailing classicism. These criticisms applied mainly to the first part of the Summaries—the six chapters on Aristotle’s logic as transmitted by Porphyry and Boethius. Nearly two-thirds of this part was a long chapter on fallacies, loaded with paralogisms.¹⁰

And yet it was the other six chapters that went beyond Aristotle to a new semantics, called supposition or properties of terms, which provoked a harsher response from Thomas More—the Moria flattered by Erasmus with the title of his Mωρίας ἐγκώμιον or Praise of Folly. In 1515, More wrote a long protest to Maarten van Dorp, a Louvain theologian who had attacked his friend. The letter harangued Van Dorp about logic and complained that dialectical quibbles had misled professors of theology. Dialectic had to confine itself to teaching, More insisted, “to the nature of words, the meaning of statements and forms of inference based on them.” This was actually Aristotle’s conception of logic, and More had no quarrel with a logic of words, sentences and arguments. This was the content of the first part of Peter’s Summaries on terms (words) used in propositions (statements or sentences) and then combined in syllogisms (arguments or forms of inference).¹¹

More protested instead about the “little logicals, so called (I think) because there is little logic in it, . . . so-called suppositions, ampliations, restrictions, appellations and what not.” More’s target was the second part of the Summaries, whose examples he ridiculed: sentences about the Antichrist, for instance, that were meant to show how future- or past-tense propositions extended (ampliated) what their terms stood (supposited) for. The Summaries had described ampliation as “produced by the verb ‘can’ in ‘a man can be the Antichrist,’ . . . where ‘man’ is ampliated not only for present time but for future time.” More replied with angry sarcasm: “had theologians expert in dialectical cunning not surveyed this exposition (ever so subtle) of that proposition, surely the Antichrist would have invaded the Christian commonwealth long ago.”¹²

3 Agricola

Despite More’s taunts, the Summaries lived on—though not to prosper. Peter’s text had been copied constantly since the thirteenth century, leaving hundreds of manuscripts that still survive, and before the Reformation it was printed many times, though seldom afterward. The book’s high standing in Catholic schools made it obnoxious to Protestants: what could a godly preacher possibly do with its twisted sentences? But much of Europe stayed Catholic—like More, who hated the Summaries.

When he wrote to Van Dorp and attacked Peter’s suppositions, he may have helped sell the theologian on an alternative: On Dialectical Invention by Rudolf Agricola (Huusman), a Dutch scholar who died in 1485, seven years after finishing his own innovative book. Van Dorp joined the team that Erasmus organized in Louvain to get Agricola into print. His encouraging words in the first edition of 1515 paled beside the florid praise from Erasmus, who called his countryman “truly godlike.”¹³

With publicity like this, the Dialectical Invention sold fast: dozens of editions in various formats appeared by the end of the century. Readers gave it high marks for originality, utility, sensitivity to natural language and engagement with the classics. They were often thinking of classroom use—not an obvious selling point for a book so large and demanding. Adding detailed commentary only made the load heavier. As for originality, one commentator complained that Agricola had no more to say than the fifth book of Peter’s Summaries—and said it not as well.¹⁴

Book 5 of the Summaries was on ‘places’ (loci, topoi). Agricola’s strategy was to borrow the logical machinery of this book, attach it to a rhetorical framework and fuel it with erudition. The fulcrum of the Summaries was book 4 on syllogisms, which developed material from books 1–3. These three books introduced terms as elements of predication in propositions, which obeyed rules governing the placement of both in syllogisms. Agricola’s innovation was to move away from terms, propositions and syllogisms as tools of predication and inference, toward places as tools for finding arguments: furthermore, the arguments (argumenta) to be found were not sequences of propositions leading to conclusions—like the syllogisms in book 4 of the Summaries.¹⁵

Agricola’s subject was dialectic, the art of talking acceptably (probabiliter) about anything: the art covered all speech about any subject—sermons included. The main purpose of speech was teaching, according to Agricola; its other two functions, to move and to please, were secondary. In one way, then, he moved his huge linguistic project away from rhetoric as an art that dealt with style—with elegance and beauty—but did little or nothing to make messages delivered by speech acceptable (probabalis).

Yet in another way, by absorbing tasks into dialectic that had belonged to rhetoric—invention, most notably—Agricola assimilated dialectic to rhetoric. He also eliminated the usual distinction between dialectic, whose arguments started with merely acceptable (endoxic) premisses at any level, and demonstration, whose apodictic arguments had to begin with premisses that were better than acceptable—true and primary. Even for Aristotle, however, speech that achieved demonstration had to be acceptable as well, and acceptability was the domain of the dialectic.¹⁶

Dialectical Invention had three parts: book 1 explained what places were; book 2 described the dialectical use of places in speech; book 3 showed how dialectic could bring an audience along by arranging items of language to optimize brevity, order, variety and other attractions. The places (loci) of book 1 were Aristotle’s topoi as interpreted by Cicero, Themistius, Boethius and others, culminating in book 5 of Peter’s Summaries. Transformed and aggrandized by Agricola, places were the core of his dialectic, displacing the predicaments—terms for predicating that Aristotle called ‘categories.’ When Agricola shifted his focus from categories to places, he also transferred his attention from predication to “tracing something through the places” or topical description, and from syllogistic to “putting argumentations from the authors into their places” or topical reading.¹⁷

Finding (inventio) was discovering (finding gold under the ground), locating (finding where the gold was) and/or devising (finding a better way to find gold). Every speaker had to find something to speak about, and the Dialectical Invention—with locating in the foreground—was a handbook for finding material and then arranging it effectively for use in speech. After finding came judging, which arranged findings in statements correctly and effectively by sorting matches and mismatches. Finding and judging were instruments of dialectic: book 2 gave instructions for judging after book 1 had presented places whose contents had to be found and then arranged for judgment.¹⁸

Agricola said that the aim of dialectic was to teach by finding what was acceptable and by arranging findings in an orderly way. His places were locations and containers—like drawers in a file cabinet—where speakers and writers could go to get what they needed. What they needed were ‘arguments’ in one sense of the word: argumentsc. An argumentc was a word or term or something picked out by a word or term. This argumentum was different from an argumenta, an inferential sequence of propositions. Agricola assumed this distinction early in book 1:

In all of nature, any two things that match a third also match each other. I say that items are ‘matching’ (consentaneus) when one can be said of the other. For human and substance there is agreement (convenire) in animal, for example, because every animal is a substance and every human is an animal: it follows, then, that in those very items they agree with one another, so that every human is a substance. . . . Thus, if you want to see whether two items agree or not . . . but they cannot be compared in order to tell whether they are matching or non-matching, you need to find (invenire) some third item such that you can be quite sure that it matches one of them. Then, once this third item has been paired with the other, so that it matches or does not match, we will know whether both items in question match one another. This third item is sometimes called a ‘middle’ of an argumentation (medium argumentationis) because it joins two items placed as extremes. But sometimes it is called an ‘argument’ (argumentum) because it is joined acceptably (probabiliter) to the items placed and is an instrument for producing belief in them. This is the part—the thinking out of a middle or an argument—that dialecticians call ‘invention.’ The other part is called ‘judgment.’¹⁹

That was the gist of it. To learn whether N matched H, the dialectician had to search in places to find an A that matched N or H, then check whether A also matched whichever of N and H still needed testing. If A matched both N and H, it could serve as a middle for them—an argumentc. Statements that said or predicated N of H, or the reverse, including statements in an argumentation or argumenta, could be made acceptably (probabiliter) only if N and H had been shown to match by finding an A as a unifying argumentc for them. Unless A “unifies in reality, and not just as a matter of opinion or appearance, we will go wrong in argumentation,” as in:

some A is N

every H is A

some H is N,

where A was animal, N was non-reasoning and H was human: “non-reasoning and human seem to be joined in animal,” Agricola explained, “but clearly the animal of which non-reasoning is said is not the same one said about human.” Peter of Spain would have ruled this argument out as invalid because its form was bad. But the problem as Agricola saw it was faulty invention or finding—the A found to match H was the wrong A because it failed to match N. A remedy for bad finding was better judging, the part of dialectic that tested argumentsc by putting them to use in argumentsa, either syllogisms or enthymemes or other forms of inference.²⁰

Although distinguishing argumentsc from argumentsa was crucial, Agricola took the distinction for granted: his Latin masked the difference less than our English. According to Cicero’s cursory definition, an argumentum was “something acceptable found (probabile inventum) for the producing of belief.” The right tools for this job were argumentsc “fetched from places (loci),” those being where “arguments are kept.” Finally, “bringing an argumentation (argumentatio) to a conclusion” relied on “recognizing places of arguments (argumenta).”

Plainly, argumentsc first found in places and only then assembled into argumentsa were not themselves argumentsa. In the Latin of Cicero’s day, in fact, an argumentatio was always an argumenta or its presentation. But an argumentum was often an argumentc—anything supporting a belief or a claim, including concepts, facts and states of affairs with standing as evidence but with no propositional, inferential or narrative character. Cicero’s argumentum could also be an argumenta, however—an ‘argument’ as we commonly use this word. This was the labile terminology that Agricola inherited and used without concern.²¹

Places—“containing whatever can be thought or said about anything”—were scanned for argumentsc in order to locate the topical descriptions that topical reading relied on: these were the main mechanisms of Agricola’s machine, cleverly re-engineered from Peter of Spain’s Summaries.²²

The Summaries had sorted places into two kinds: maxim places and difference of a maxim places. Maxims were ‘maximal propositions’ (propositiones maximae) of great generality, like ‘what is true of the defined is true of the definition.’ Species were distinguished in a genus of such maxims by applying differences (definition differs from the defined, which differs from cause, which differs from the caused, and so on) to the genus. The result was a genus/species taxonomy of places and a set of rules—the maxims. Agricola found maxims impractical and superfluous, however. Instead of rules (maxims) in an orderly framework (a taxonomy), he provided rich accounts of each and every place and illustrated them extensively with authoritative and familiar examples from classical literature.²³

Topical reading was a way to find argumentsa in such examples, perhaps stated as enthymemes like this one (e):

p1 [C is P]

p2 P is W

c C is W,

where P, the crucial argumentc, was (or was like) an enthymeme’s middle (medium). This middle had been elusive in the Summaries, not quite coinciding with the middle term of a syllogism. But Agricola’s topical reader relied on a firm rule of syllogistic—clearly stated by the Summaries—that excluded the middle term, P, from e’s conclusion (c). Given this restriction, from c and p2 together the reader could reconstruct e’s suppressed premiss (p1) in order to assemble a complete argumenta. For c, the writer could use a ‘question’ or disputable claim like ‘Cato was wrong to divorce his wife.’ The same writer might already be sure about p2: that ‘a philosopher is wrong to divorce his wife.’ Together, c and p2 supplied the enthymeme whose suppressed p1 had to be ‘Cato was a philosopher.’²⁴

To “put argumentations from authors into their places,” topical readings depended on topical descriptions to classify and clarify argumentsa like the one about Cato. Correct description identified P as “something that is in Cato” but was not his substance; this P could be found in a number of metaphysical places—subjects, acts and ‘adjacents’ or modes. By fitting a P into some such set of places, topical description enabled the reader to isolate the topical identity of an e and thereby understand just how—because of P—W could be said conclusively of C in the conclusion of e, an argumenta.

This account—condensed and more abstract than Agricola’s—exposes the vagueness of places as capacious as what he called ‘adjacents.’ Agricola’s reconnaissance of a related statement, ‘a philosopher needs a wife,’ stayed closer to the ground by tracking the philosopher through his species (Stoic), cause (teacher), effects (books), aim (tranquility), place (native land) and so on.²⁵

4 Dialectic and Dichotomies

As compared to Agricola’s Dialectical Invention or Peter of Spain’s Summaries, the Dialectic by Peter Ramus was exceptional in its brevity. The Latin text of the Summaries was about 50,000 words; the Dialectical Invention was twice that size. But Ramus used only about 14,000 words for the last Latin edition of the Dialectic published before his murder, and most of the words were Cicero’s, Vergil’s or another Roman author’s. The first three chapters of the first book, on finding (inventio), needed only 269 Latin words, 382 in this English version:

Chapter 1: What Is Dialectic?

Dialectic is the art of speaking well and in the same sense is called logic.

Chapter 2: On Parts of Dialectic and on Kinds of Argument.

The parts of dialectic are two, finding and judging. Finding is the part of dialectic about finding arguments. An argument is what is related to something that is to be argued, such as is each reason by itself and taken on its own. An argument is artificial or non-artificial. The artificial is what argues from itself, but it is primary or else descendent from a primary.

A primary is what is of its own origin, and it is simple or paired. The simple is what is taken without qualification and absolutely, and it is either matching or non-matching. The matching is what agrees with the thing that it argues for, and it matches either absolutely or in some way—absolutely like cause and effect.

Chapter 3: On the Efficient, Productive and Sustaining.

A cause is that by whose power a thing is. This first place of finding, then, is the source of all knowledge, and only that is believed to be known whose cause may be grasped, as the poet correctly says:

happy the one who could recognize causes of things.

Cause is efficient and matter or form and end. The efficient is the cause by which a thing is: even if this has no real kinds apparent to us, the immense richness is still divided in certain ways. First, it either produces or supports. Ovid On Cures for Love 1:

When it seems this art of mine can heal you,

Don’t be sluggish: that’s my first prescription.

The laziness that makes you love supports your loving:

this pleasure’s cause that evil feeds on.

Take idleness away, and Cupid drops his bow,

his flames are snuffed and all his arrows blunt.

In this way, a father and mother produce, and a nurse supports, as in Aeneid 4:

You had no goddess for a mother, traitor,

nor any Dardan father: awful Caucasus

begat you on its craggy hardness

to suck the breasts of savage tigers.

So it was that Romulus, who founded the City of Rome, then the rest of the kings, consuls and emperors, were keepers and supporters.²⁶

In these three chapters Ramus defined and then divided ‘dialectic’ into finding and judging, before he defined, divided and subdivided ‘argument.’ Everything else in the first book of the Dialectic was a catalog of places that contained arguments: causes, effects, subjects, adjuncts, the diverse, disparate, related, opposed, deprived, equal and so on, through 23 very short chapters. By quoting classical texts at every turn, Ramus made otherwise abstract notions concrete and planted them in a familiar landscape of classroom experience.

Seeing the last verses of Chapter 3, every schoolboy knew—despite Dido’s curses—that Aeneas was indeed the effect of human causes, his divine mother and “Dardan father.” Ramus glossed the poet’s verses with an epistemic remark: “only that is believed to be known whose cause may be grasped.” A few words from Vergil’s epic brought glimpses of epistemology and metaphysics within range of adolescent yearnings.²⁷

Causes—efficient, material, final and formal—were places where students went to find arguments, tagged by the “mother” and “father” in Vergil’s well-known lines or by the “makes,” “supports” and “cause” in Ovid’s verses. What was such an argument? Ramus gave his readers almost nothing to go on. An argument was “related to something that is to be argued, such as is each reason by itself and taken on its own.” Part of this was circular, and the rest was baffling. What was “each reason,” how was it “by itself” and why should it be “taken on its own”? A reader of Peter of Spain’s Summaries would have been told, at least, that “a reason is the same as the middle that brings in a conclusion”—something like (if not exactly like) the middle term of a syllogism. The Dialectic offered no such help, neither for causes and effects nor for other elements of reasoning.²⁸

Maybe teachers of a Ramist syllabus had more to say in their classrooms. Maybe they consulted one of the many commentaries on the Dialectic or works subsidiary to it. Possibly so. But the weight and complexity of commentary would have crushed the charms of this best-seller: brevity, simplicity and a low price. By contrast, nothing was brief or simple in the literature published during the author’s own lifetime to explicate and defend the Dialectic, a tangle of polemics where Ramus constantly changed his mind and adjusted his project to fend off attacks. Maybe he thought of the evolving Dialectic as an outline to be filled in by live instruction and constantly modified. This is a charitable reading of a textbook that attracted countless readers but gave them little to read.²⁹

Book 1 of the Dialectic showed (not at all plainly) where to find arguments. Book 2 showed how to judge and arrange them. Tools for judging were axioms, syllogisms and a method. The process of judging was either axiomatic or dianoetic: the latter derived one judgment from another, as in a syllogism; the former operated on single judgments, as when one of them was affirmed or denied, and then it was called an ‘axiom,’ which had to be either true or false—hence propositional. Four brief chapters classified axioms as also contingent or necessary, simple or composite, generic or specific, united or divided and so on, stuffing distinctions into five pages that took up three books of the Summaries.³⁰

Ramus gave readers an obtrusive shortcut. He supplied “three laws of evidence belonging to the art: the first, κατὰ παντός, may be called the law of truth; the second, καθ᾿ αὑτό, the law of justice; the third, καθόλου πρῶτον, the law of wisdom.” The terminology was Aristotle’s, describing how predicates belonged to subjects in premisses of demonstrative syllogisms. Ramus, before introducing the syllogism, used his own new laws on governing arguments in axioms that were not yet syllogistic premisses. How the laws worked was a mystery in the Latin Dialectica, unsolved by the Greek decoration. Only ancillary polemical works revealed that the law of truth was about universality, the law of justice about coherence and the law of wisdom about reciprocal, recursive or reflexive statements.³¹

After more chapters about axioms came several ways to divide syllogisms: they could be proper or specific or generic, for instance, with two sub-types each for the specific and generic. While Ramus was still alive, an authoritative edition simply numbered the abbreviated subtypes: gen. i, gen. ii, spe. i and spe. ii. Stymied by this brevity, a later editor added labels—cesare, camestres, festino and baroco—from Peter of Spain’s elaborate cipher in the Summaries. This was the famous barbara celarent code, whose labels designated forms (moods) of the syllogism. Deriving the moods, showing how they differed and introducing the cipher took a whole book of the Summaries. Ramus’s editor, stumped by Ramist reticence yet stuck with it, extracted four pieces of Peter’s code and used them without comment: having to translate this brave new dialectic into the old logic would have mortified Ramus.³²

His next five chapters on the syllogism were just as perplexing. Then came the second kind of dianoia, which was method. There, with just nine pages to go in his book, Ramus became truly original. Agricola had never mentioned methodus nor its Greek ancestor, μέθοδος, though the word was attested in classical Latin. Aristotle (not to mention Plato and Galen) often applied μέθοδος to inquiry or its results or procedures. Echoing the Topics, the first sentence of Peter’s Summaries declared that dialectic “has a path to the principles of all methods”—never to use the word again. Once was enough for Ramus, who made method into something grander.³³

“As we observe truth and falsity in an axiom,” he explained, “as we observe following (consequentia) and not-following in a syllogism, so in method the issue is that coming before is clearer, of itself, and coming after more obscure, and judgment is all about order and confusion.” In judgment, after invention had found arguments in their places, the arguments were put into axioms that were true or false; the axioms went into syllogisms that followed (consequens) or not; and then method showed what came before (praecedere) and what came after (sequi).³⁴

Judgment was the subject of book 2—mostly about axioms and syllogisms. Then, almost at the end, Ramus announced that clarity and obscurity—the “order and confusion” that judgment was all about—had to be settled by method, not by axioms or syllogisms. Items were to be sorted as either coming before more clearly or else coming after more obscurely, such that the coming before was clearer “of itself” (per se). “Method puts the first in first place by a distinct conception, the second in second place, the third in third place, and so on in succession, always advancing in this way from universals to singulars.” What came before was more universal, antecedent and better known; what came after was more particular, consequent and less well known. Items were more known or less known by nature and absolutely, and the method that displayed this natural order was “the one and only way to proceed.”³⁵

Ramus used an analogy—not a passage from the classics—to show how method worked. He compared it to a game played with tokens or counters. Items to be ordered were like slips of paper with writing on them, mixed in a jar: method was like a way to find slips with winning words on them. What words in particular or of what type were written on the slips? Ramus was silent. But when he developed the analogy by making grammar the subject of a search, the first item selected from the jar was the “definition of grammar,” which might be propositional and hence an axiom—not an argumentc.

If so, method was a way to sort and display axioms by using ‘partitions’ to divide them and ‘transitions’ to keep the results unified. Otherwise, if the writing on the slips was sub-propositional, the game would sort argumentsc. In any case, even before the game was on, before slips were tumbling in the jar and the methodical machinery was up and running, there was

no need for finding places since they have all been discovered, nor for a first judgment by axiom since each one, no matter which, has been appraised and approved, nor for a second judgment by syllogism, since all disputes about each subject have been decided and conclusions reached about them. All that remains is method.

In this Platonic order, everything was always already arranged: method, the third level of judgment, was instantaneous and omnicompetent, showing where everything went, making patterns clear, keeping parts distinct and—above all—finding everything in its proper place.

Ramus didn’t illustrate method in the Dialectic with a bifurcating chart or ‘dichotomy’ like those that were ubiquitous elsewhere in the Ramist literature. He made it easy to dichotomize, however, by organizing his book relentlessly by division into twos—or ‘partition,’ as he called it. The desired effect was direct and synoptic. The structure as a whole, with all its partitions, came under the eye all at once. When Ramus designed his Dialectic, pictures and charts had been disseminated widely by printed books for only a century or so. Novelty and technology help explain the book’s stunning success.³⁶

Imagine yourself in a Ramist classroom. Your teacher has arranged a debate and picked you to lead the discussion. You open with an assertion about Socrates and convert it to a question. Pieces of an answer are already in their places for you to find: these pieces include argumentsc that can match Socrates and each other, like substance, animal, mortal and rational. Arranged by judgment, the arguments go into axioms and syllogisms, certified and illustrated by classical examples. With this procedure in mind, you’ve asked whether the son of Sophroniscus (an individual) was wise (a simple mode).

To confirm your answer, ‘Socrates was wise,’ you locate this statement among particulars and singulars at the rightmost ב/א partition, where the claim that ‘adjunct ב (wisdom) belongs to individual substance β (Socrates)’ is a ב axiom partitioned from an א axiom: ‘adjunct א (folly) belongs to individual substance β.’ At the far left, X, the trunk of the tree, is the definition of universal substance, partitioned into axioms about the animate (II), rational (B), mortal (ii) and so on, moving right and finally reaching the wise Socrates—a β individual whose correct adjunct is ב rather than א.

Figure 2.1 Alexander Reid, A Ramist Table of Tumors, 1635 Chirurgicall Lectures, p. 14

Ramists claimed that this method worked for every subject matter. In 1635 Alexander Reid, an eminent surgeon and anatomist, used it to organize lectures about tumors and ulcers (Fig. 2.1). Master the method, and you too could have a career in medicine because—as the Harvard professor told his nephew—you had been clever enough to “refer all things” to Ramus. Reid, lecturing in London, referred everything in the Ramist way just before Descartes recommended a different method in Leiden.³⁷

Ramist charts like Reid’s—displayed on a single page of a printed book—turned Porphyry’s Tree on its side to show how “the method always advances from universals to singulars.” Although Ramus mentioned induction briefly in book 1 as “gathering parts together to constitute a whole,” his account of method at the end of book 2 authorized no movement back (or up) from singulars to universals, warning that when poets or orators “put some antecedents after their consequents, . . . the order has been distorted.” The way forward (or down) from universals, Ramus insisted, was “the only method that Aristotle taught.”

This appeal to Aristotle was sincere, but as usual the Dialectica gave no reasons: only the author’s polemical treatises revealed his shifting motives. The preface to his textbook pledged to look beyond Aristotle to Cicero and Quintilian, though without attacking the Philosopher. Ramus’s own enemies—rather than friends of Aristotle—were the mob that he blamed for “insane sophistry in many of Europe’s universities.”³⁸

Experts on Ramus have disagreed about his attitude to Aristotle. My related question asks whether he was a paragon of humanism—often understood as anti-scholastic and therefore anti-Aristotelian. As far as the Dialectic was concerned, evidence of classicism was abundant in its use of ancient texts to illustrate philosophical statements. But Ramus himself in his most famous book didn’t write like a skilled classicist—like Erasmus, for example. A Jesuit scholasticus, drilled in Erasmian Latin, would have given the Dialectic low marks for variety and correctness, for copia and proprietas. Once Ramus invented his own terms of art—methodus as a kind of dianoia, for example—propriety was a lost cause. The only copia in the Dialectic came from Cicero, Vergil and other authors of examples in Latin prose and poetry.³⁹

The prose of the Dialectic was terse and elliptical to the point of mystification, far from Agricola’s luxurious Latin or—if clarity was the aim—far from the Summaries by Peter of Spain. In style, however, the Dialectic’s hurried sentences resembled formulaic statements in the Summaries more than Agricola’s flowing periods. As polished prose, the Dialectic by Ramus was no match for the Dialectical Invention by that revered master of classics. In its teachings, the Ramist Dialectic was a mangled misappropriation (via Agricola) of the logic of the Summaries. And the text that Ramus backed up with classical examples read more like a medieval logic manual than anything that Erasmus wrote—more scholastic than humanist, to put it that way.

But Ramus taught lessons that prepared students for the imminent revolution in philosophy. The syllogisms of the medieval schools were useless, he complained, while requiring every thought to be clear (clarus) and plain (evidens). The best explanations were the simplest; the light of reason, native in all humans, guided nature’s own dialectic; and this natural light was a capacity for ideas—logical items like genera and species—as innate mental contents. No inquiry could proceed without a rigorous and robust method. Descartes said the same in the fourth rule of his Regulae, “to investigate the truth of things, a method (methodus) is necessary.” And the key to this procedure was “universal knowing (mathesis universalis)”—just as Ramus had maintained. A dozen uses of mathesis in the Rules and two dozen of methodus identified the project as Ramist. But Descartes lost interest in it. He seldom mentioned Ramus and never connected him again with an important point of philosophy.⁴⁰

Two years before starting the Rules in 1620, Descartes had found a new friend and advisor in Isaac Beeckman. Like Ramus, Beeckman was a mathematician. He had learned mathematics at Leiden from Rudolph Snell, a Ramist who published commentaries on the Dialectic and related texts. Teaching school in Utrecht, Rotterdam and Dordrecht, Beeckman stayed with the method of the Dialectic and acquired the eleven Ramist titles on the auction list when his books were sold in 1637.⁴¹

5 Burgersdijck’s Logic

Before Descartes went to study at Leiden in 1630, the schools had worried the government in that part of the United Provinces, where many people prized conformity and public order. Not long before, in 1619, the States General of Holland had executed a founding father, the aged Johan van Oldenbarneveldt, in the wake of religious commotion.

In this tense climate, Holland and West Friesland decided to reform their schools: in 1625 they chose Franco Burgersdijck—a professor recently returned to Leiden from the Hugeunot Academy in Saumur—to examine the teaching of logic. The result was Burgersdijck’s Elements of Logic, his third book, which followed introductions to natural philosophy (1622) and moral philosophy (1623). After he died in 1635, more textbooks on economics, politics, physics and metaphysics appeared posthumously. The Latin Elements of Metaphysics (1640) was popular in England, like the logic manual, which came out in English in 1697: Anglophone students were still told to read it after Hume’s Treatise had fallen lifeless from the press.⁴²

The main competition in Protestant Europe for Burgersdijck’s Logic was Bartholemew Keckermann’s System of Logic. Keckermann also produced school texts on many subjects, including philosophy and logic. After moving from Heidelberg to Gdansk in 1602, he died in 1609, nine years after publishing his first System of Logic—an early effort to present philosophy as a ‘system.’ This ambitious goal excited many commentators, including Rudolph Goclenius. In Ramist style he distilled Keckermann’s logic into 84 charts—A Breaking-Down of Keckermann’s Larger Logic Into Fuller Tables Than Those Yet Published.⁴³

Burgersdijck was even more ambitious: instead of condensing Keckermann’s System he wanted to replace it with his own, while praising his rival as the best of those who had “mixed Aristotle’s doctrine with the doctrine of Ramus and pieced a logic together out of both positions, supplying the content from Aristotle, the method from Ramus.” What Keckermann took from Ramus was productive, according to Burgersdijck: he had outdone Aristotle and his recent followers—Augustin Huens, Fortunat Krell, Pieter De Bert and Pierre Du Moulin—who also wrote textbooks. But Aristotle had produced no “general logic” or “complete system,” and these logicians did no better merely by paraphrasing the Organon. Burgersdijck’s bolder project was “a system of logic according to the nature of the art,” emulating Keckermann’s System only to surpass it.⁴⁴

“Logic is an art that makes instruments,” said Burgersdijck, “and with them regulates the intellect in thinking about things.” These instruments were four: definition, division, syllogism and method. Burgersdijck’s notion of ‘instruments’ was like Agricola’s, whose main dialectical tools were finding and judging. But Burgersdijck took his four instruments from Ramus, for whom defining and dividing preceded the syllogism as steps toward method at the apex of understanding.

According to Burgersdijck, however, “definition and division direct the mind by themselves, just like the syllogism and precepts about method.” His conception of logic was psychological and epistemic—no longer the linguistic model of Ramus, Agricola or Peter of Spain. This was also Keckermann’s model, according to his competitor. They agreed that logic “regulates the intellect in thinking,” but Burgersdijck complained that Keckermann devalued the cognitive work done in logic by defining and dividing, which “direct the mind’s first operation” and do so “by themselves.”⁴⁵

Knowing how definition and division work in partnership with syllogisms and method was “of supreme importance for understanding how to use logical precepts and form a system of logic.” Lacking this knowledge, Keckermann really had no system—according to Burgersdijck—though what he had was at least more complete than traditional Latin Aristotelianism or Aristotle’s original logic in Greek. Completeness was not coherence, however. In this regard, Burgersdijck aimed higher, not just to fill gaps in logic that Aristotle had left (method, hypotheticals, a full treatment of division) but also to assemble new material effectively under his four instruments, thereby grounding his “system of logic” in the “nature of the art” and succeeding where Keckermann had failed.⁴⁶

Burgersdijck recognized that Ramus had the same goal: for “all his precepts to cohere with one another and each to be put in its own place.” Seeing method as expressing this zeal for coherence, Burgersdijck identified “method and use as the two things taught by Ramus of which he is especially proud.” Since Burgersdijck’s own logic incorporated a less grandiose method, he himself—like Keckermann—was a semi-Ramist. But he didn’t endorse Ramus. Far from it. He charged that “Ramus confined the philosophical disciplines, and logic especially, too much within limits and nearly destroyed it. In fact, when he labors to be brief, not only is he obscure but even worse than obscure—maimed.”⁴⁷

Burgersdijck’s protests about Ramus made a long list, including outrageous unfairness to Aristotle, whose logic needed improving, not vilifying. “I have derived my precepts mainly from Aristotle,” Burgersdijck countered, “taking them from his exact words as much as I could.” Ramus, by contrast, was not just surly about the first great logician. He was irresponsible about logic itself. He omitted even more than Aristotle left out, especially the inferential structure of syllogistic reasoning with its “canons of judgment”—rules and proofs like those that filled Peter of Spain’s fourth book. Skipping much of what logic needed to be complete, Ramus made his dialectic out of “bare definitions and divisions, about which he is quite abundantly wrong.”⁴⁸

These egregious blunders were the price of a presentation so concise that it became unintelligible, as if writing could be made coherent just by speeding it up. Muddled by brevity, Ramus failed by one of his two main norms: coherence. The other norm was “for nothing to be lodged in his precepts whose use he had not found in the sages,” meaning that every precept in his logic had to be certified by quoting a classical Latin author. Burgersdijck’s verdict was that Ramus, once again, had taken a good thing too far.⁴⁹

Burgersdijck laid out the chapters of his own Elements as sequences of numbered theorems, which by themselves were like the “bare definitions and divisions” proposed by Ramus. These were the theorems in Burgersdijck’s first five chapters:

1.1 Logic is an art that makes instruments and with them regulates the intellect in thinking about things.

2.1 A posit (thema) is what can be presented (proponere, from ponere, ‘to put’) to the intellect for thinking about.

3.1 Of simple posits, we must first consider categories and features that arise from the manifold disposition of things arranged in categories with regard to one another and from the mind’s way of forming concepts of them; and next the interpretation and features that the mind attaches to terms from the way it interprets its concepts.

4.1 A substance is a being that self-stands on its own and sub-stands accidents.

5.1 An accident is a being inhering in a substance.

At this point, readers who remembered Aristotle’s logic or Peter of Spain’s Summaries would have realized that Burgersdijck had started with the first part of the Organon—the Categories—and had preserved the traditional division of categories into classes of substance and accident.⁵⁰

But what was a thema, unknown in traditional logic? The verb proponere in theorem 2.1 only implied what Burgersdijck knew, that a θέμα—a noun related to τίθημι, the verb ‘to put’—could be a premiss or proposition or simply an item ‘put up’ for consideration. The Latin term of art had entered textbooks by the middle of the sixteenth century, and thema, which stayed clear of subject/object problems, may have been Burgersdijck’s safer choice over ‘object’ in a psychological logic meant to “regulate the intellect.” Since a thema could be sub-propositional, ‘posit’ works better than ‘theme’ in English.⁵¹

Students might have been lost if there were nothing to go on but Burgersdijck’s curt theorems. So he filled in with long, learned comments about some of them. Most of this material was strictly philosophical—his exposition of thema or ‘posit,’ for example, in connection with cognizing by forming concepts:

To think is to form a concept or conception about a thing presented. A conception is a representation of a thing in the intellect. . . . A first conception is what represents a thing directly as it is in itself. . . . Second-level conceptions are formed from primary conceptions arranged with one another. . . . Posits are simple or combined. Simple posits, like ‘human’ and ‘runs,’ are grasped without any combining of conceptions. Combined posits are grasped with two or more conceptions linked by affirming or negating, like ‘human runs.’ . . . Combining conceptions is nothing other than affirming or negating when understanding or speaking. Combined posits are divided from the simple by this distinction—not because words are many or compounded. In fact a simple posit is often expressed by a composite word like ‘republic’ or ‘goatstag.’⁵²

Burgersdijck’s approach to these basics of logic was psychological and, in that regard, not traditional. Like Peter of Spain, however, he kept his exposition at a level and pace that beginners could manage. His account of the novel term thema was also like Peter’s introductions to technical terminology in that its content was all and only philosophical.

But elsewhere Burgersdijck’s aims were philological as well. After the eleven Latin words of theorem 1.1, for example, came several pages of dense commentary, citing not just Aristotle but also Plutarch and John of Damascus. Then the commentary on theorem 2.1 rose to an erudite finale by putting Aristides, Bucephalus and Cyllarus alongside Plato and Socrates. These expositions by Burgersdijck included “definitions and other necessary material in Greek.”⁵³

Hoping that “boys would get used to the Greek language and ready to read Aristotle,” he made a show of his classicism even though he was uncertain about it:

Doing my best to say everything clearly, I’ve used easy examples, either constructing them or searching in the best authors for a pattern of logical precepts that was plain to see in them. For although one could illustrate the use of all logical precepts from the best authors, it would still suit the comprehension of boys to explain my precepts with bare examples rather than hiding technique under quotations from those authors who are most praised. However, in order to help more advanced students, I will sometimes provide commentary—God willing—to demonstrate both the nature of logic and the truth of its precepts by adding uses of them by some eminent authors.⁵⁴

Ramus, by accepting no rules or principles of logic “whose use he had not found in the sages,” claimed to put the ancient texts in charge. Burgersdijck turned this around, promising to check for “a pattern of logical precepts that was plain to see” before choosing examples. Hoping to adapt classicism to logic more effectively than Ramus, he still admired his predecessor’s philological aims—which he shared. As a skilled Hellenist, he assumed that logic and philosophy required Greek, a language to be learned not just from philosophers like Aristotle but also from literary artists like Plutarch. He also showed off his mastery of classical Latin to an admiring public. The orotund sentence that opened his preface had 39 words, the second sentence had 58, and so on through arpeggios of syntax in the high style that Erasmus had encouraged—without always using it.⁵⁵

But Burgersdijck, a teacher of schoolboys, put the theorems of his Elements into simpler Latin, like the plain style of Ramus. A direct voice suited the body of his textbook, while elsewhere, addressing peers in his preface, his Latin was elaborate and self-aware. As a way to write logic, the simple prose that Ramus too could turn on and off was less like Agricola’s Latin than Peter of Spain’s. To write in such different ways, Burgersdijck needed the stylistic self-awareness that came from Petrarch through Valla, Agricola and Erasmus to the schools of Holland. The persona we now call ‘humanist’ was one that Burgersdijck—without calling it that—could take off and put on, as when he summed up what Ramus had achieved as “a person of learning and refinement.”⁵⁶

But Burgersdijck also called Ramus “rash and quite unjust to ancient tradition”—especially Aristotle. In a long, involved period (89 words), Burgersdijck explained what Ramus got right while defaming the Philosopher—before he made an even worse mistake:

Although this man was correct to reject a philosophical procedure accepted for so many centuries—whereby everyone who professed philosophy did not just swear by Aristotle’s words and judge people guilty of error (and yes, the crime of heresy!) if they departed by a hair’s breadth from his rulings; no, the same professors also transmuted philosophy into a profusion of sharp and thorny questions in order to dispute in the universities as barbarously and contentiously as possible, no differently than they would debate some great matter of religion, while meanwhile abandoning the manifold benefits that ought to come into human life from philosophy—then, after all this, in order to mend this perverse behavior, and wanting to avoid Scylla, so to speak, Ramus fell into Charybdis: for while he was capable of restraining that wanton itch to dispute and, with truly laudable effort and enterprise, eliminating barbarism from schools and universities, he confined the philosophical disciplines, and logic especially, too much within tight limits and nearly destroyed it.⁵⁷

The writer of this ornate prose (could he possibly have been a scholastic?) inherited his stylish Latin and tired hyperbole through the classical lineage of Erasmus, Valla and Petrarch. The same author (could he have been a humanist?) mounted a robust defense of the Aristotelian hegemony that Descartes and Galileo were subverting.

Clearly, this Burgersdijck was a temperate reformer who never saw combat in a war of humanists against scholastics. While winning fame in the Netherlands where Descartes also lived, he never fought such a battle. Then in 1637, two years after the Dutch professor died, Descartes put his own project before the public in this admired philosopher’s city. Descartes called it his Method, wrote a Discourse about it in the vernacular and addressed a larger readership than the experts who debated his Meditations a few years later.

Ramus had also published his Dialectique of 1555 in French because he wanted readers outside the universities to see it. It was not the first book about philosophy in the French language, but it was the first in that tongue to change so many minds about philosophy. The Dialectique was a manifesto, and so was the Discourse by Descartes. A reader in 1637 who wanted to know what this Method aimed to overthrow—to see what philosophy was as Descartes found it—could find no better guides than books by Franco Burgersdijck, and not just his logic. His natural philosophy, metaphysics and moral philosophy also aimed to reform what Descartes rejected.⁵⁸

In these enormously popular textbooks, Burgersdijck summed up philosophy as it was at the turn of the sixteenth century: he was born in 1590, a few years before Descartes, and the two shared a heritage from the first post-medieval centuries. Presenting Ramus as the bane of Aristotelians, Burgersdijck located him on

a trail broken by Lorenzo Valla, Rudolf Agricola, Luis Vives and others who had long since shown their contempt for Peripatetic teaching and had formed logic in a different way by another method. Ramus did this with more spirit and audacity, in fact, though the risks did not pay off.

This flood of Latinate “contempt” ran from Petrarch through Erasmus to every classroom in Europe. Teachers of Latin and Greek indoctrinated privileged boys with linguistic snobbery and had them memorize jokes by Erasmus about barbarians. By propagating this polemic in his own temperate way, Burgersdijck distanced himself from the medieval way of doing philosophy. He wanted to “eliminate barbarism from schools and universities,” but there was no ‘humanism’ for him to use as a weapon against ‘scholasticism.’⁵⁹

The word scholasticus appeared only once in the preface to the Elements, to describe the government’s charge to Burgersdijck and his colleagues in Leiden: “deliberate on the order of teaching in schools (scholis).” The ensuing “scholastic business (negotium scholasticum)” produced the classicized Elements—Burgersdijck’s response to the Ramist craze that gripped Protestant Europe for a century. Since he republished the preface a year before he died in 1635, he must have been happy with his “scholastic” project—a project about schools, under that ambiguous rubric. The preface did not present logic itself as scholastic in content, method or style. Quite the contrary: the preface followed introductory lyrics by Cunaeus, Heinsius and Vossius that adorned logic with philology; “he holds heaven cheap and reason vile,” the learned Vossius chanted, “who does not love your book on reasoning.”⁶⁰

6 As Descartes Found It

Burgersdijck’s narrow use of ‘scholastic’ was just one sense of the word in the Jesuit Plan of Studies, which regulated the pedagogical environment where Descartes, himself a scholasticus, first heard it—so we may assume. Nothing could be more methodical than the Plan. But no ‘method’ was explicit in it, despite the word’s prominence by 1599: the year when the Plan was announced was also the year when Keckermann published his first System. Because Jesuits—Francisco de Toledo and Pedro de Fonseca—wrote the only logics that the Plan authorized, Ramist systems by Keckermann and his followers were out of bounds for the young Descartes. By 1606, Sebastian Couto was ready in Coimbra with a new Jesuit logic. His detailed commentary (766 pages of fine print) was not for beginners, however: a simpler Jesuit manual, something at the level of Burgersdijck’s Elements or Peter of Spain’s Summaries, introduced logic to Descartes.⁶¹

Plainly, this remarkable student’s experience of Jesuit education and its ratio—roughly a synonym for methodus—was formative: how could it not have been? Part of this formation was the rich inheritance of classical languages and literature that he shared with Burgersdijck: both were taught by teachers who learned, at one remove or another, from Erasmus—though Philip Melanchthon, a Lutheran, stood in Burgersdijck’s genealogy where Ignatius of Loyola stood for Descartes.⁶²

The methodical Spiritual Exercises that Ignatius himself drafted had gone deeper than the Plan into the Society’s soul. But the Plan didn’t compete with the Exercises: their harmonizing aim was “to join learning with piety.” To that end, a short version (days, not weeks) of the Exercises was an annual event at La Flèche. This religious regimen gave students like Descartes their first methodical experience of meditation. The very first meditation in the Exercises addressed “the soul imprisoned in this corruptible body.” Thinking like this about his body might have unsettled a growing boy’s mind. Or maybe he confided in God, encouraged by the Exercises.⁶³

We’ll probably never know what the author of the Meditations made of such advice. We have some of Montaigne’s thoughts about meditation, however, which he seldom brought up explicitly. He called it “a rich and powerful study for anyone who knows how to sound himself out and use it vigorously.” But how many were up to the task of meditating? “Tending to one’s own thoughts” could be easy or hard, “depending on whose mind it is”—though everyone’s mind had plenty in it to work with. Revealing his own thoughts, introspecting about introspecting, Montaigne wrote that “nature has given to me, as she has given to everyone, enough material for my own use, and enough subjects (sujets) of my own to find and judge (inventer et juger).” Speaking Ramist language, he proceeded more cautiously than Ramus along paths that Descartes would also walk.⁶⁴

After opening his Discourse with a theme from Montaigne’s Essays, Descartes never lost sight of their vernacular advice: “good sense (bon sens) is the thing best shared in the world.” Those words, published anonymously, opened the philosopher’s first proclamation to Europe’s Republic of Letters. Then, still talking about good sense, he added that “everyone thinks himself so well supplied with it that even those hardest to please about everything else scarcely ever want more of it than they have.” No great philosopher since Plato had put wit like this on paper.

Only Montaigne could have taught Descartes to write philosophical French with such grace and power, and scarcely a page of the Discourse lacked a trace of the Essays. As for good sense, common sense (sens commun) and the settled (rassis) attitude sustained by both, these were habits that supported Montaigne’s studied sense of himself. Descartes read the Essays closely and never forgot them—remembering this remark, for example: “sense (sens) gets quite a fair share of the graces that nature has provided for us, since no one is displeased with his supply of it.”⁶⁵

Not no one, maybe. Philosophers came up short, if we take the first sentence of the Discourse at face value and set it beside a later one: “no one can imagine anything so strange and hard to believe that some philosopher has not said it.” Descartes wrote those words in French and without attribution. The Latin originals came from Cicero On the Nature of the Gods, a work that Montaigne used for the essay that most affected Descartes. The sceptical Apology for Raymond Sebond repeated that very sentence in Latin to back up yet another complaint about philosophy: “it has so many faces and such variety and has said so much that we find all our dreams or reveries there.”⁶⁶

Montaigne named Cicero often in the Essays, exalting this hero of antiquity and glorifying the classics as the sixteenth century neared its end. Descartes snuffed out a spark of this glory when, wearing his mask of silence, he went to Montaigne’s Apology and copied Cicero’s slur on philosophy without citing it. Was the mannerly sceptic who wrote the Apology a Ciceronian or a humanist? He mentioned humanists only once, to turn an epigram about ways of writing: “in theologians we see the fault of writing in too cultured a way (humainement) more commonly than we see in humanists (humanistes) not enough writing in the theological way.”⁶⁷

Humanity (humanité) was a trait that Montaigne admired, though not especially in learned people. And it didn’t take a scholar or theologian to annoy him as scolastique. Anyone could be a cramped formalist: a “slave to precepts” might be a sectarian philosopher, a garrulous historian or a noisy neighbor down the road. Any of them could be addicted to “schoolboy chatter.” Montaigne disliked pettifoggery. But he never contrasted it with a humanism whose name he couldn’t speak, nor did his great essay on scepticism take aim at ‘scholasticism’ avant la lettre. Predictably, then, we find nothing scolastique at all in the Discourse on the Method, nor anything humaniste there when Descartes remembered being “nourished on letters (lettres) as a child” at La Flèche.⁶⁸

To return to an earlier question: since Montaigne and his age have been studied so much by so many others, why is it that Anglophone philosophers have given so little attention to the era that formed the schooling that formed Descartes?

Impediments have been many: habitual, ideological, institutional, intellectual, linguistic, methodological, political, sociological and so on. Here I’ve discussed one obstacle: the confusion that comes from framing the era as a war between humanists and scholastics. Many celebrated works of the time—books that could not have ignored such a conflict—recorded no such encounter. The humanist/scholastic antithesis can’t work because it can’t do justice to texts like those studied here—timeless monuments by Petrarch, Agricola, Erasmus, More, the early Jesuits, Ramus, Montaigne, Burgersdijck and Descartes that had nothing to say about ‘humanists’ fighting ‘scholastics.’ My evidence is partial, to be sure, but sufficient for present purposes.

Where the humanist/scholastic antithesis prevails, no plausible story can be told about post-medieval philosophy. For philosophers, the humanist side of the polarity is especially confusing. Is this a humanism obligated to modern ideology—to secularism—hence not to be found in pre-modern culture? Are the few people actually called ‘humanists’ by post-medieval people—by Noël Béda, for example—better seen as philologists or classicists who carried no such ‘humanist’ baggage? The pioneering philology that Béda resisted, as Brucker wrote long ago, sought “to find better tools for laboring at philosophy.” Philosophers rely on these tools today, and the products are informative, but the ‘humanist’ label distorts the philological enterprise. The term ‘scholastic’ also misleads: post-medieval users applied it inconsistently; their usage was variable and nuanced. As a student of philosophy as Descartes found it, I’m wary of ‘scholasticism.’ And I’m against ‘humanism.’⁶⁹

¹ Ramus (1572a), p. 87.

² Dupont-Ferrier (1921–5), I, 1–27; some of Copenhaver (2017) was an early sketch of this chapter.

³ Baillet (1691), pp. 8, 16–35, said that Descartes went to La Flèche after Easter of 1604; that “in the whole of his classics course (tout le cours de ses humanitez), which was five years and a half, no one noticed any particular excitement in him,” though “he made great progress in knowledge of the two languages”—meaning Latin and Greek—adding that “he was in the first year of his philosophy course” in 1610; that logic, “of all the parts of philosophy, was the one to which he later testified that he had most applied himself at the College”; that “the ethics he studied . . . was not completely useless to him”; that “he was even less satisfied with the physics and metaphysics that they taught him in the following year”; that “his love for philosophy was even more passionate than for classics (humanitez)”; and that “he left the College of La Flèche after eight years and a half.” For the chronology, where the modern experts have disagreed with Baillet and among themselves, see Gaukroger (1995), pp. 20–1, 38–41, 48–53; Rodis-Lewis (1998), pp. xi–xvii, 1–2, 8–23; also Sasaki (2003), pp. 13–44; Ariew (1999), pp. 7–55.

⁴ O’Malley (1993), pp. 16, 202–5; Grendler (1989), pp. 370–6.

⁵ Miller (1954), pp. 115–23; Ong (1983), pp. 4, 72, 121, 165, 175, 195, 199, 214: in English, this is the classic study of Ramus, on whom see also Sellberg (2014); Copenhaver and Schmitt (1992), pp. 230–9; Jardine (1988), pp. 184–6; Meerhoff (1986); Bruyère-Robinet (1984); and Gilbert (1960), pp. 142–4, examining an earlier work of 1547 which Ong called the Training in Dialectic (Dialecticae institutiones in its first edition of 1543).

⁶ Ong (1983), pp. 4–5, 17–29, 301–5; Sgarbi (2013), pp. 23–46, 79–97.

⁷ Marlowe, Faustus, 1.7, where Faustus repeats Ramus but converts his Latin statement into a question, “is to dispute well logic’s chiefest end?”; Massacre, 9.1–3, 40–52; Gilbert (1960), pp. 197–209; Ong (1983), pp. 199, 258–60, 302–4; Riggs (2004), pp. 58–97, 309–15.

⁸ The words quoted in Latin by Faustus, “speaking well is the aim of logic,” reflect the opening of the Dialectica, “dialectic is the art of speaking well, and in the same sense was called logic”: Ramus (1572a), p. 6. The text cited here is the last Latin Dialectica prepared by Ramus before his murder; Ramus (1572b) gave the text prior to this last revision: neither of these editions contained any commentary, for which see Ramus (1560), with praelectiones by Omar Talon. Ramus (1574) was the first of two translations into English; Ramus (1636) was the second: see Ong (1958); (1983), pp. 18–35, 172–6, 189–90; cf. the avant-propos by Bruyère-Robinet in Ramus (1996), p. 8.

⁹ Ramus (1572a), pp. 6–9; Cic. Marcell. 1.6; Verg. G 2.490; A 365–7; Ov. Rem. am. 135–40; Copenhaver, Normore and Parsons (2014), pp. 73, 78; Peter of Spain (2014), p. 499.

¹⁰ Copenhaver, Normore and Parsons (2014), pp. 17–22, 46–62; Peter of Spain (2014), pp. 179–81, 256–425.

¹¹ Copenhaver, Normore and Parsons (2014), pp. 13–14, 17, 42–6, 62–78; More (1986), pp. 24–6.

¹² More (1986), pp. 30–2; Copenhaver, Normore and Parsons (2014), pp. 67–70, 84; Peter of Spain (2014), pp. 224, 440–2, 446.

¹³ Mack (1993), pp. 257–60, 303–5; Copenhaver, Normore and Parsons (2014), pp. 16, 86–7.

¹⁴ Mack (1993), pp. 257–83, 301–2.

¹⁵ Copenhaver, Normore and Parsons (2014), pp. 17, 25, 38–41.

¹⁶ Agricola (1539), pp. 1, 178, 191–3; for a critical text with a German translation, see Agricola (1992), pp. 8, 196, 208–12; McNally (1967) translates a few chapters into English; Mack (1993), pp. 120, 125, 169–70, uses ‘agree’ for consentaneus where I have ‘match.’ See also Akkerman and Vanderjagt (1988).

¹⁷ Agricola (1539), pp. 27, 171–2, 175, 182, 354, 362–3, 375; (1992), pp. 40, 184, 188, 204–6, 386, 404, 426; Mack (1993), pp. 121–2, 130, 138, 203, 207, 227–9, 233–5, from whom I have taken the terminology of ‘topical description’ and ‘topical reading.’

¹⁸ Agricola (1539), p. 8; (1992), p. 16; Copenhaver (2002b), pp. xi–xvii.

¹⁹ Agricola (1539), pp. 1–9, 178–9, 196–7; (1992), pp. 8–20, 196–8, 214–16; Mack (1993), pp. 139–40, 174.

²⁰ Agricola (1539), pp. 8–9, 178–9; (1992), pp. 16–18, 196–8: as Agricola stated the conclusion, it might have been either particular or universal, and in both cases the argument was invalid.

²¹ Cic. Part. or. 5, 139; Agricola (1539), pp. 1–2, 258–60, 360; (1992), pp. 8–10, 302–6, 398, where argumentatio, whose role is doxastic, is also distinguished from expositio, which aims to explain but not convince; see also OLD, s.vv. argumentatio, argumentum; Mack (1993), pp. 177–8, 190–1, 199.

²² Agricola (1539), p. 175; (1992), p. 186; Gilbert (1960), pp. 76–7; n. 17 of this chapter.

²³ Mack (1993), pp. 142; Copenhaver, Normore and Parsons (2014), pp. 39–41; Peter of Spain (2014), p. 202.

²⁴ Agricola (1539), pp. 355–6; (1992), p. 390; Mack (1993), pp. 200, 227–9; Copenhaver, Normore and Parsons (2014), pp. 33, 38–41, 48; Peter of Spain (2014), pp. 174, 196–8.

²⁵ Agricola (1539), pp. 62, 75, 368; (1992), p. 68, 82, 414; Mack (1993), pp. 166, 233–4, 245–6.

²⁶ Ramus (1572a), pp. 5–7.

²⁷ Ramus (1572a), pp. 7–43; Verg. A 4.365–8; Gilbert (1960), pp. 141–2.

²⁸ Ramus (1572a), p. 5; Nuchelmans (1980), pp. 173–5; Copenhaver, Normore and Parsons (2014), p. 38; Peter of Spain (2014), p. 196; n. 26 of this chapter.

²⁹ Bruyère-Robinet (1984), in a tour de force of exposition and analysis, traced these changes over three decades through twenty-one different editions, in fifty-three redactions, of works by Ramus and other Ramist texts, while strenuously and convincingly disagreeing with the standard work in English on Ramus, which is Ong (1983).

³⁰ Ramus (1572a), pp. 61–5; Ong (1983), pp. 242–3, 251–2; Nuchelmans (1980), pp. 171–8.

³¹ Ramus (1572a), pp. 63–4, drawing on Arist. Post. an. 73a26: “First let us define what we mean by ‘of every case’ (κατὰ παντός), by ‘in itself’ (καθ᾿ αὑτό) and by ‘universally’ (καθόλου)”; see Ong (1983), pp. 258–63; Bruyère-Robinet (1984), pp. 267–75; Barnes (1993), pp. 6, 110–11; Mack (1993), pp. 338–9.

³² Ramus (1572a), pp. 72–7.

³³ Ramus (1572a), pp. 77–87; Peter of Spain (2014), pp. 101–2; Ong (1983), pp. 224–40; Gilbert (1960), pp. 39–57, 122. Galen’s several methods, as counterpoints to the unitary method on which Ramus insists, were especially important to Ramus, whose system was essentially Platonic, inspired mainly by the Philebus. Ramus acknowledged his debt to Agricola, though not in the Dialectica, especially for his extensive discussion of ordo: see Agricola (1992), pp. 472–526; Bruyère-Robinet (1984), pp. 112–13, 234, 304–6,

³⁴ Ramus (1572a), p. 87.

³⁵ Ramus (1572a), p. 87; for the earliest presentation of method by Ramus, see Ong (1983), pp. 245–6.

³⁶ Ramus (1572a), pp. 88–9; Mack (1993), pp. 351–3; Ong (1983), p. 181, fig. xii, showed the earliest Ramist chart in a book from 1543; see also Bruyère-Robinet (1984), p. 67; with Oosterhoff (2021), pp. 13–19, figs 2.2–3, and Ariew (2021), pp. 42–5, on “philosophical tables.” Berger (2017), p. 17, discussing “diagrams that . . . use pictorial space to exhibit relationships” of philosophical interest, described “stemmata” as depicting “the mind in breaking down a question or problem” and connected “stemmata summarizing logic, moral philosophy and rhetoric” with Ramist charts. Swan (2005), pp. 108–14, discussed “the grid and . . . the tabular diagram” as forms of “visual representation . . . common to natural history.” The array shown just after Fig. 3.6 of this book is synoptic, like a Ramist chart.

³⁷ Reid (1635), p. 14; Vance (2004); Tebeaux (2011), pp. 225–8; also n. 5 of this chapter.

³⁸ Ramus (1572a), pp. 2–3, 45, 87, 94–5, where the distorted order is ‘cryptic,’ demoted from earlier versions where it is the ‘method of prudence’: Ong (1983), pp. 245–9.

³⁹ N. 74 of the first chapter of this book; n. 8 of this chapter.

⁴⁰ Descartes (1996), 10.371–9; (1985), 1.15–20; Bruyère-Robinet (1984), pp. 96–7, 120–2, 210, 219–20, 236–8, 247–61, 309–10, 327–30, 385–94.

⁴¹ Bruyère-Robinet (1984), pp. 385–94; Van Berkel (2013), pp. 153–9.

⁴² Alexander Pope, Dunciad, 4.295–8; Burke (1963), p. 3.

⁴³ Freedman (1997), pp. 305–13, 340, 348; Catana (2008), pp. 18–21.

⁴⁴ Burgersdijck (1660), sigs A8, B3–4.

⁴⁵ Burgersdijck (1660), sigs A8v, B4; p. 1; Ramus (1672a), pp. 88–9; Mack (1993), pp. 351–3; nn. 16–18 of this chapter.

⁴⁶ Burgersdijck (1660), sig. B4.

⁴⁷ Burgersdijck (1660), sig. B2, pp. 75–7.

⁴⁸ Burgersdijck (1660), sigs B2v–3r, 5r.

⁴⁹ Burgersdijck (1660), sig. B2v.

⁵⁰ Burgersdijck (1660), pp. 1–23.

⁵¹ Burgersdijck (1660), pp. 1, 6; Nuchelmans (1980), pp. 160–1, 196, 200; for relevant uses of θέμα and thema after Aristotle, see Quint. Inst. 4.2.28; Diog. L. 7.78; Longin. 32.8.

⁵² Burgersdijck (1660), pp. 6–8.

⁵³ Burgersdijck (1660), sig. B5r, pp. 1–7.

⁵⁴ Burgersdijck (1660), sig. B5r.

⁵⁵ Burgersdijck (1660), sigs A7, B2v, B5r; n. 49 of this chapter.

⁵⁶ Burgersdijck (1660), sig. B2r.

⁵⁷ Burgersdijck (1660), sig. B2r.

⁵⁸ Ramus (1996); nn. 2–3 of the first chapter of this book.

⁵⁹ Burgersdijck (1660), sig. B2.

⁶⁰ Burgersdijck (1660), sigs B4v–5r, 8v.

⁶¹ Anon. (1630); Anon. (2002), p. 196; Dial. conimb.; Ashworth (1988), pp. 145–6: the single use of ‘method’ in the modern text of the Plan (Anon. [1850], p. 82) occurs in a clause—about teaching vernacular languages—not found in the 1599 text: cf. Anon. (2002), p. 246.

⁶² Gilbert (1960), pp. 125–7; Nuchelmans (1980), pp. 159–67; Ong (1983), pp. 236–40; Mack (1993), pp. 356–60.

⁶³ Rodis-Lewis (1998), pp. 8–18; on the Exercises as a model for the Meditations, see also Rorty (1983), pp. 548–52; Hatfield (1985); Vendler (1989); Mercer (2017), pp. 2542, 2545.

⁶⁴ Montaigne (1978), p. 819.

⁶⁵ Montaigne (1978), p. 657; Gilson (1947), pp. 1–2, 83, tracking the many echoes of the Essays in the Discourse.

⁶⁶ Montaigne (1978), p. 546; Gilson (1947), pp. 16, 178; Cic. Div. 2.119.

⁶⁷ Montaigne (1978), p. 323.

⁶⁸ Montaigne (1978), pp. 393, 419, 435, 539, 647, 754, 757, 781, 801, 926, 991, 1059; Gilson (1947), pp. 4, 100–1.

⁶⁹ N. 23 of the first chapter of this book.

3 Cartesian Tennis in Thirteen Sets

Those who play tennis have proof enough of this.

Descartes¹

1 Questions about Technology

Questions about method and meditation have had more answers from philosophers than questions about technology. Martin Heidegger asked such a question in the middle of the last century and ended his reply with a cheap applause line: “questioning is thought’s piety.” So may we hope. My aims are less reverential, but I’ll also suggest questions about technology: in particular, about printing with movable type as a way to make picture books about philosophy.

Descartes promoted this pictorial art “in the age of its mechanized reproduction”: Walter Benjamin’s indelible words. Benjamin maintained that the mechanisms were both constructive and destructive. With that thought in mind, I’ll start with the Optics published by Descartes in 1637—a technical treatise introduced by a personal, autobiographical essay, a Discourse on the Method. Three questions will ask (a) why Descartes picked the game of tennis to explain light and vision in the Optics; (b) how readers might have responded to this sporting imagery; and (c) what prepared him to use such pictures. Another question: (d) what was it to explain in the way that Descartes explained light and vision?²

To explain phenomena of refraction—expliquer was his word—Descartes described a ray of light as action or motion and pictured it as the path of a tennis ball. He used versions of a tennis picture (Fig. 3.1) several times in his Optics, along with many other images.³

Figure 3.1 A Tennis Ball, Descartes, 1637 Dioptrique, p. 11

The essay that preceded the Optics had no pictures at all. But both the essay and the treatise addressed basic problems of philosophy. How did this treatise differ from an essay as a form of writing? Should philosophers have preferred one form or the other or something entirely different? Whatever form they chose, why use pictures to write about philosophy? Writing essays is now an established practice of philosophers. What about picture writing, and what might such a form of writing be?

Descartes wrote both essays and treatises and put hundreds of pictures in his books, though not in all of them: not in the Meditations—most conspicuously—which was a sequence of essays. As he philosophized with and without pictures, he also promoted an aniconic ideology. In his theorizing, though not in his practice, he embedded an iconoclastic reflex—a Platonic distrust of images—emulated by others and hardened by time.⁴

The Latin Principia of 1644, the first full statement of his philosophical system, used about 90 pictures in just over 300 pages of text. Three years later, after Abbé Claude Picot had overseen the printing of a French translation, he said he noticed during production that “the same figure is used in several places.” Actually, he must already have realized that any translation, if it were complete and otherwise unchanged, would repeat these images as originally printed: someone—presumably Descartes—thought that readers needed plenty of pictorial help where words in the 1644 text couldn’t stand on their own. But Picot decided that so much duplication would make the translation “too big and hard to bind.” So he cut the pictures by half and moved them all to the end.⁵ Modern editors have done the same for the French Principes and Traité de l’Homme. Pictures placed by Descartes for readers to see next to his words were demoted to appendages or excised from these foundational texts of modern philosophy. With the pictorial evidence degraded in this way, oblivion about philosophizing with pictures became a habit.⁶

The culpable oblivion was about writing philosophy with pictures—not about picturing as such, which has had plenty of philosophical attention. Nor has the oblivion been a catastrophic defect—just a failure of philosophers to remember what their own writing practices used to be, a lapse of memory that may have left them less mindful about how best to communicate now. Franco Burgersdijck, who ruled philosophy in Leiden when Descartes lived there, had to decide which kind of writing—less Greek or more Greek—would be better for his students. Descartes had to decide about writing with pictures: no pictures, some pictures, more pictures, fewer pictures, what kind and where to put them?⁷

2 Talking, Writing and Picturing

My inquiry examines how and why thinkers like Descartes made their books. But language written in books was only one kind. Language was also spoken out loud and in silence. Which worked best for philosophy: visible writing, audible speech, silent speech or no speech at all? Philosophers could express their thoughts by speaking and writing, and both kinds of language accommodated pictures. But the mind, which kept quiet about its thinking, let nothing be heard outside, while the mind’s eye saw pictures inside. Outside the mind, facial expressions and bodily gestures that went along with speaking could be seen and pictured. And pictures went with many kinds of writing.

Writing could be poetry or prose, fiction or non-fiction, and philosophers had written in all these ways. A poem by Parmenides was a charter document of Western metaphysics. Another cherished text of philosophy, Plato’s myth of the cave, was a fiction. These dichotomies—prose/poetry, fiction/non-fiction—are Eurocentric. In the even smaller Anglophone domain, both poetry and prose could be long-form or short-form. Both forms fit the usually pictureless prose now written by English-speaking philosophers, who assert focus by producing long-form writing in books called ‘monographs.’ ‘Essay’ and ‘article’ are labels for short-form philosophy. But most articles published in philosophy journals are mini-treatises, not essays in the strong sense: impersonal voices anonymize the speakers in them.⁸

Montaigne, who wrote philosophy and established the essay in modern prose, died just before Descartes was born. His Essais went through four editions in the author’s lifetime. The essays kept changing because they were personal and the person kept changing: “I myself am the content of my book,” he declared. Descartes knew Montaigne’s book well; its high standing with French intellectuals licensed his own self-scrutiny in the vernacular Discourse. He wrote this suite of introspections in French—not Latin, philosophy’s official language at the time. But his French essay immortalized an argument, the cogito, that still goes by a Latin name.⁹

Stated in Latin, the cogito mimicked an older form of language, the enthymeme or truncated syllogism taught by medieval logicians whose teachings Descartes abandoned. Written out as an argument:

I think:

therefore, I am

mirrors

I reason:

therefore, I’m human,

which is a shorter version of a complete syllogism,

I reason;

every reasoner is human:

therefore, I’m human.

Enthymemes, shortcuts of rhetoric, displaced longer syllogisms and punched up their messages by moving fast: if everybody accepted a quick statement, why beat around the bush? But rules of logic required tests of validity that enthymemes failed. And yet the invalidity left no one less certain about being human or just being. The author of the Discourse, taking a shortcut while making new rules for certainty, evaluated his rhetorical situation and argued briefly in French in order to make his point quickly to as many readers as possible. He wrote in French when more people could read the vernacular with speed and understanding than the fancy academic Latin of his day.

Montaigne had put an epistemic slogan of his own in the vernacular—que sais-je? He appealed to readers by doubting what he knew rather than asserting it, and spaces between his essays were cues for reflection. Some essays were larger than others: the longest was a symphony about scepticism; the shortest was a minuet in three paragraphs about parsimony. Montaigne published more than a hundred essays, and many ended after a few pages in breaks useful to readers—pauses for contemplation built into the structure of his prose. Gaps between essays gave relief and invited meditation. These breaches were strengths of the essay as a form of writing in printed books—a temperate genre that left room for thoughtfulness and imposed few rules.¹⁰

Montaigne’s presence in the Discourse linked classical philology, a monumental Renaissance achievement, with the Cartesian revolution in philosophy that wrecked the monument. The demolition is a fact of history, and the Discourse was a snapshot of the ruins: Descartes tore an old house down, replaced it with a new one and left renaissance culture in the rubble—though not all of it.¹¹

Francis Bacon, an older contemporary, also examined the customs of his age. When he surveyed the recent past in 1620, he proclaimed that “printing, gunpowder, and the nautical compass . . . changed the . . . world: first, in literature; second, in warfare; third, in navigation.” Descartes was a traveler but not a navigator. War was one of his professions, however, and when he moved on to victories in “literature,” the printing press was an engine of triumph for him. A renaissance technology equipped this scourge of renaissance philology not only to promote his philosophical innovations but also to display his mastery of the essay, a genre that had prospered in renaissance philosophy: Montaigne was Bruno’s contemporary.¹²

The medieval philosophy discarded by them and by Descartes had favored just a few forms of writing. Commentaries, manuals, sermons, syllogisms, textbooks and treatises were ancient. The quaestio, quodlibet and summa were novelties devised later for Christian schools, where many older types of prose were little known or less useful to philosophers: acronyms, adages, anecdotes, aphorisms, apologues, apothegms, deliberations, dialogues, digressions, doxographies, eclogues, ekphrases, encomia, epigrams, epithets, essays, eulogies, fables, invectives, letters, maxims, mottos, orations, panegyrics, parables, slogans and others. The post-medieval revival of this exuberant Greco-Roman literature left Descartes unmoved but excited others to find new uses for ancient forms and their classical nomenclature.

The words essai and essayer were thoroughly vernacular, however; they had drifted from their late Latin moorings by the time Montaigne set a new course for them. After 1595, anyone who published ‘attempts’ or ‘essays’ or ‘trials’ in French wrote in Montaigne’s wake. Descartes, born a year later, settled on ‘discourse’ and ‘meditations’ when his own collections of essays were printed.

Writing in French to proclaim his originality, he avoided Bacon’s use of ‘essay’ forty years earlier to title a work of philosophy in English. Bacon’s pamphlet—just ten aphorisms in the original version—eventually inspired Locke, Hume, Mill, Russell and many others to make ‘essay’ a canonical choice for Anglophone philosophers. Adaptable, useful and endorsed by celebrities, this genre attracted distinguished writers of English: their prose with the ‘essay’ label could be long or short, formal or informal, academic or demotic, specialized or generic, personal or impersonal—so impersonal, in fact, that most philosophical essays in English eventually lost touch with the genre’s roots in personal experience and reflection.

This depersonalized philosophy abandoned an interpersonal form—the dialogue—which had flourished in Bacon’s era and survived for Berkeley and Hume to use: Berkeley’s Hylas and Philonous still speak to undergraduates today. The Irish Bishop and his British contemporaries learned to write in the dialogic way from Jonson, Marlowe and Shakespeare—from Twelfth Night, for example, where Olivia tried to silence Viola’s covert flattery:

Olivia Come to what is important in’t; I forgive you the praise.

Viola Alas, I took great pains to study it. . . .

Olivia It is the more like to be feigned. I pray you keep it in. . . .

If you be not mad, be gone; if you have reason, be brief.

’Tis not that time . . . [for] so skipping a dialogue.

Maybe the time has come, however, when philosophers—dutiful to reason and keen to be brief—simply assume that dialogues will be “skipping” or frivolous.¹³

☞ Notice to readers: many subsequent passages, indented and in single quotation marks, are dialogic responses from a second voice to questions from the narrator like this:

The dialogue and aphorism are forms of prose with some of the essay’s strengths and others as well. Dialogues are dramatic and conversational. They’re lively, familiar and comfortable because everybody gets to talk—isn’t that right?

‘Really? I’m not so sure. Some dialogues are debates—uncomfortable for some contestants. Socrates, a star in early philosophical dramas, was deadly discomforting.’

Indeed he was. But his dialectical exchanges with students kept conversations moving. Aphorisms lose the give and take, but they have the essay’s personal voice—explicitly or implicitly. They’re also quick and digestible, but anecdotes are quicker. Quicker still are emblems, epigrams, maxims, mottos and slogans—units of prose near the minimum. Philosophers who now call their writings ‘essays’ seldom lay claim to anecdotes or aphorisms. They’re too short to sustain philosophical argument: qed and too bad for too much brevity.

‘But sustained argument isn’t the only path to truth, is it? What about Nietzsche? He was an artist in aphoristic prose.’

What about Nietzsche? You’re right to ask. Again, qed. Look: aphorisms skip transitions, fail to keep thoughts on track and drop allusions that never get picked up. Aphorisms are self-indulgence congealed in lumps of prose.

‘So Nietzsche sinned against philosophy by aphorism? Then Teresa of Ávila—philosophical herself, a prolific writer and possibly an inspiration for Descartes—would have been just the right saint to save this sinner. Now let us pray for the mad Nietzsche’s soul to the learned, lascivious mystic while we meditate on Bernini’s statue of her in ecstatic marble: if that’s sainthood, please give me more. Wittgenstein also sinned by aphorism, didn’t he? Who should throw the first stone?’¹⁴

Good grief! What are you talking about? I can’t keep track. Stoning and marble saints? Statues and sinful philosophers? What’s going on? You’re jumping around too much. All this commotion derails what you have to say—diverging dialogue and fractured aphorisms. Philosophers need prose of a different kind—linear and converging—to sustain and contain their arguments. qed again.

‘Speaking personally, in the spirit of the essay: linear thinking is a treasure, but diverging is priceless—until the price gets too high. What about Mary Flaw, a character in Edmund Gosse’s memoir of childhood? She broke through a boundary of deviance that’s best crossed with a return ticket. The flawed Mary had

a good intelligence and an active mind, but her wits had left the rails and were careering about the country. . . . She always received us with effusion, tripping forward to meet us and leading us . . . with a dancing movement. . . . The conversation of Mary Flaw was a great treat to me. I enjoyed its irregularities, its waywardness.¹⁵

Mary’s affecting talk went in short unruly steps—flawed yet choreographed in Gosse’s telling. So stick with short forms even if they’re scrappy—aphorisms and anecdotes in essays as Montaigne designed them. Essays on his model are still read, and philosophers have written some of them. But now they mostly use ‘essay’ for writing of a different kind.’

Some essays are middle-size units of prose. Kant’s collected works will do as an example of a maximal unit. A famous case near the minimal end is a maxim—the ancient injunction to know thyself: gnothi seauton. The first line of modus ponens—‘if p, then q’—is a later candidate. If this hypothetical becomes ∀x(P(x) → Q(x)), the result won’t be gnomic like ‘know thyself’ and not poetic either.

‘But will it be prose? If ∀, P, Q, x and → are the only parts of a statement, can the statement be prose? What about ∀ at the beginning and → in the middle? How will readers say the sentence out loud? Looks like ∀ and → are signs, the same as P and Q, just less common.’

Good: but are they pictures too? Wasn’t ∀ once an ox with horns? Wasn’t → a feathered arrow?

If ∀ and → were pictures and also pieces of modus ponens, would the logic be prose? Can prose be made of pictures? Some pictorial forms look normal in print but carry little or no semantic load, like these three,

❧ ❧ ❧

They’re near the lower limit of prose. But on which side of the line between prose and non-prose would you put them? If you saw these dingbats between two stretches of prose, would you stop to read them? Probably not, though you might stop to think. You saw seven of them just a minute ago, and then you read the paragraphs that came next.¹⁶ Suppose the seven that you saw were like these three dingbats instead:

✆ ✆ ✆

‘They’re different from what I saw before—the ones you just showed me, like this: ❧’

That one was a ‘fleuron.’

‘Now that you’ve pointed it out, I see a flower that I didn’t see before.’¹⁷

But a telephone icon is plain to see inside the other dingbat:

✆

This simple form, at the margin of picturing, shows an old-fashioned tool for talking. It looks nothing like a cellphone. Points and lines printed in older geometry books were even simpler. Did they picture anything? What did a printed point stand for? Nothing that readers could have visualized. And yet a row of points,

• • •

like a string of fleurons or little telephones, sends a message: ‘pause here before continuing.’ A stretch of prose ahead of the points relies on them to signal an end before a new beginning.

The points also enrich the prose by decorating it in a way that isn’t quite pictorial—or minimally so. Like fleurons and telephone dingbats, points can make a page attractive without clarifying or enhancing the information printed on it. The prose relies on the points incidentally, not essentially: the information on the page would be the same without them or without dingbats.¹⁸

But writing sometimes depends more than incidentally on pictures that do more semantic work than dingbats. Some pictures light up a written message just by showing it again in a non-alphabetic way (Fig. 3.17): this was one type of picture writing—by illustrating. Another type was by explaining: Descartes explained light in this last way by picturing a tennis ball in his Optics (Fig. 3.1). When he put this image to work in prose, his picturing wasn’t the same as illustrating or decorating (Fig. 3.20).¹⁹

Epigrams—usually declarative sentences—went farther beyond dingbats and their micro-messages than quick imperatives like ‘know thyself,’ ‘no parking’ or ‘slab!’ “The oldest of beings is God,” said Thales sententiously, “for he is uncreated.” Aristippus replied in the same stately measure when asked how Socrates died: “as I myself would wish to die,” he intoned. The first extensive record of what these old philosophers declared and did, compiled by Diogenes Laertius in the third century ce, was packed with epigrams. The book was called Lives and Tenets (gnômai), not Lives and Arguments (logoi). Critics classified it as doxography to register disapproval because Diogenes collected opinions (doxai) rather than demonstrations (apodeixeis).²⁰

He attributed “very fine sayings” to Aristotle—like “the roots of education are bitter, but the fruit is sweet.” He recorded another epigram by the same sage about seeing and mathematics: “as seeing takes light in from what surrounds it, so does the soul from mathematicals.” Sharp epigrams like this are compact, sometimes elliptical. Without mentioning bodies or senses, this one implied that seeing needed bodies and the body’s sense of sight, whereas a soul enlightened by mathematics wasn’t a body—nor were numbers that belonged only in the soul.²¹

The clipped Aristotelian remark was vaguely Platonic, like comments by Descartes in his pictureless Meditations on the difference between visualizing a thousand-sided polygon in a bodily way and understanding it mentally. A few years earlier he had told a reader that his 1637 treatises—richly pictorial—were obscure because they hadn’t managed to “withdraw the mind from the senses.”²² He and other Platonists sometimes treated senses and bodies as if they were attacks on the mind by a foreign power. If pictures were sensory images of bodies or in bodies, they were not just alien-from but also threatening-to geometrical and arithmetic constructs that only minds could make and use. Should Platonists and other philosophers have banished all pictures from philosophical prose? Should they have locked the sensory contagion down?

Many kinds of writing restrict form and content. Prayers don’t sit well with curses. Jokes on tombstones are rare, like technical manuals in rhyme. A military acronym, smeac, directs soldiers to draft orders in exactly 5 paragraphs, not 4 or 6: just 1 paragraph each for Situation, Mission, Execution, Administration and Command. Prose so tightly prescribed forbids and forgets everything else in favor of clarity, familiarity and speed—purposes that physicians optimize when they write prescriptions. Near the extreme of rigid optimization are computer programs that can be wrecked by tiny mistakes in punctuation: a stray comma blows up reams of code.²³

Code it surely is. But is it prose? If prose is (mostly) non-poetic writing that can communicate interpersonally, the answer must be yes. By the same standard, printed telephone books used to be on the far side of a divide between prose and non-prose, whereas printouts of computer programs are now on the near side. Picture this: an expert goes on stage and reads 20 pages of a program in Python to other coders. The world’s worst poetry reading would be less awful. The audience would be bored and might lose track. But no one in the room would complain that the speaker’s performance was rote recitation or unmeaningful. A computer program is a limiting case of statements put together in short-, medium- or long-form prose—categories that also include the essay.

Schools and colleges used to teach prose to students by having them imitate models made by Abraham Lincoln, Mark Twain, John Kennedy’s speechwriter and other authoritative figures. Sometimes these exercises were ‘essays’—like the ‘5-paragraph essays’ now sent to college admissions offices. Not so long ago, however, ‘composition’ and ‘theme’ were sterner labels, suggesting not just order but also objectivity, pedagogy and propriety. One classroom rule enforced objectivity by banning first-person sentences as subjective—too personal to be sound. So teachers banished essays like Montaigne’s from much of the K–16 curriculum. But other essays, constructed like 5-paragraph battle orders, became passports to promised lands of higher education. Inflexible prescriptions for prose have had their uses. And yet rigidity has withered the essay—a form of writing with a distinguished philosophical pedigree that imposes few rules on writers.

Another kind of writing, pictorial prose about philosophy, makes more demands and has its own deep genealogy, starting with works by Descartes. Yet the first post-Cartesian additions to the Anglophone canon—Hobbes’s Leviathan, Spinoza’s Ethics and Locke’s Essay on Human Understanding—were pictureless, except for two diagrams in the Ethics and the politically charged frontispiece of Leviathan. The sovereign monster at the front of his book showed that Hobbes knew how to weaponize pictures, even though picturing vanished in the rest of his masterpiece and thinned out elsewhere in his publications. Had Descartes himself promoted the aniconic philosophies that followed later?²⁴

In days gone by, philosophers who wrote pictureless prose indulged in fine sayings and made grave pronouncements in epigrams. Kant summed up insights into cognition by declaring that “thoughts without content are empty, intuitions without concepts are blind.” He did the same for natural necessity and moral freedom with “the starry skies above me and the moral law within me”. He expressed “admiration and awe” for the law and the skies: like doxai collected by doxographers, Kant’s maxims aimed to edify, not just to clarify.²⁵

Quine compiled his own doxography, modestly titled Quiddities—in aphoristic form, however, not epigrammatic. The first aphorism, labeled “alphabet,” was mostly about “picture-writing,” a “crude technology . . . limited to the depiction of the visible”—though only “on the face of it” because Egyptian hieroglyphs “transcended” this limitation, as when a “hieroglyph for bringing depicted a bowl with legs and feet.”²⁶

The meaning of the hieroglyph wasn’t ‘bowl’ or ‘legs’ or ‘bipedal bowl.’ Quine compared this pictorial device to writing ‘melancholy’ with pictures of “a melon and a collie.”

But then he dismissed the procedure as “punning with familiar words.” He also added that this “rebus principle . . . gave way to an acrophonic one” with “a hieroglyph depicting something whose name merely began with that sound”—like a picture of a ‘bowl,’ pronounced nu, as the beginning of a different word starting with a nu-sound. This was “a notable step of abstraction,” he reckoned, while tracking progress from pictographs through syllabaries to alphabets. The apex of this evolution—not mentioned by Quine—would be a thoroughly abstract concept-writing: a Begriffschrift, as Frege called it, where might turn up in the first line of modus ponens.²⁷

Is the little bowl or cup that holds the first x in Frege’s a picture? If so, the evolution of language must have gone wrong—from a logical point of view—because Frege, if we follow Quine’s account, would have made his drawing (what else to call it?) in the recidivist spirit of “the early Roman poet Ennius.” Writing a script ancestral to Quine’s own alphabet, Ennius had “reverted imaginatively to picture-writing within the alphabetic medium” by using words made of letters to depict things in action. In the poet’s verse, someone armed with a rock has cracked (comminuit) someone else’s skull or head-case (cere-brum),

saxo cere- comminuit -brum

with a rock he the head- split -case.

The poet’s device was “tmesis, the sandwiching of one word in another,” in Quine’s words, like “‘a- whole -nother ballgame.’” Experts think that Ennius was also making a joke.²⁸

Quine had fun putting his autodoxography together, he said, while acknowledging that philosophy was “on the whole no laughing matter.” On the surviving evidence, many philosophers have indeed been humorless, with celebrated exceptions from Socrates to Sidney Morgenbesser. Their sporadic comedy, like Quine’s, has usually been on the witty side of funny. And wit, at its sharpest, needs a sense of irony and the moment as well as acuity in speech—Oscar Wilde’s gifts more than Quine’s or Wittgenstein’s. And so jokes, like pictures, have mostly broken out at the margins of philosophy, sometimes in epigrams.

Years before Quine started at Harvard, William James went there to teach psychology (philosophy came later) while Henry Adams was giving history lectures. Adams, whose education is the most thoroughly described in American experience, would have been helped by the word ‘synesthesia’ when he recalled his earliest years: “children knew the taste of everything they saw or touched, from penny-royal and flagroot to . . . the letters of a spelling book: the taste of a-b, ab, suddenly revived on [my] tongue sixty years afterward.” A current name for what Adams remembered is ‘grapheme-taste synesthesia.’ But when he wrote, this terminology was still new—devised by Mary Whiton Calkins, who studied with James.²⁹

Synesthesia melds two or more senses: the tasting and reading that came together for Adams normally arrived through separate channels. Seeing differed not only from tasting, however, but also from looking, though the look/see difference didn’t map on to different sensory organs. Eyes that didn’t taste not only saw but also looked, though not always simultaneously. We see letters and words while reading, but we don’t usually look at them, just as we often hear music without listening for notes. When letters or words are labels on pictures, however, we look in order to attend, ever so briefly, to graphemes that become ‘equipment’ in Heidegger’s sense. But Heidegger’s ‘ready-to-hand’ is the wrong description; ‘eye-ready,’ like ‘camera-ready,’ is a better fit.³⁰

On many pages of the Optics and other picture books by Descartes, letters labeled pictures, whereas other letters on other pages were just parts of words. His tennis pictures were on pages where some letters were labels (Fig. 3.1). He put the letters there to be looked at, if only for an instant, in order to be read along with pictures. But letters placed just to be seen—not read like words or looked at along with pictures—filled many other pages. On yet other pages he made systematic use of conventions for labeling that we now take for granted: the quickest, least thoughtful glance at eye-ready labels was enough. But no convention was natural, and these too—now often as inconspicuous as dingbats—had to be invented before Descartes could deploy letters as labels for explanatory picturing. An intermediate step—attaching short paragraphs of explanation, one by one, to a number of pictures, all on the same page—used too much space.³¹

Ennius, cited by Quine, was a poet and good at epigrams. Quine’s colleagues might not have liked what the poet wrote: “he whose wisdom cannot help gets no help from being wise”; even worse, “the idle mind knows not what it wants.” Wittgenstein also used epigrams in the intricately nested Tractatus for some of his seven headline (‘zero-level’) sentences. Not for the fifth, however: “propositions are truth-functions of elementary propositions.” Nor the sixth: “the general form of a truth-function is [p, ξ, N(ξ)].” But the seventh and last was an epigrammatic jewel: “whereof one cannot speak, thereof must one be silent.” The structure of the Tractatus required this coda to reprise everything that came before it back to the opening notes: “the world is everything that is the case.” Everything in between was terse, though not all of it was epigrammatic like the opener. Not every short sentence was clever, concise or commandingly abrupt, like Wittgenstein’s third headline: “The logical picture of the facts is the thought.”³²

Figure 3.2 Not a Field of Vision, Wittgenstein, 1922 Tractatus, 5.6631

Figure 3.3 A Field of Vision, Detail, Descartes, 1637 Dioptrique, p. 36

What’s a “logical picture”? As Russell parsed Wittgenstein’s book in 1922, the form of such a picture could only be logical—not physical or spatial. Such a picture had no structure, size, shape or location in physical as distinct from logical space: it was a picture without the usual pictorial features.

On the other hand, both logical and painted pictures had elements (EP) that went together, logically or physically, and both could match things elsewhere that also had elements (ET) that went together. A test for pictures of both types would be how well an EP structure could fit an ET structure. Wittgenstein said that a picture, in order to be a picture, needed “elements that have a certain relation to one another.” Things in the world, not just pictures, also had relatedness or fitness—like a hummingbird’s head, a tongue inside and a flower outside—and a picture had the special task of fitting itself reciprocally to the fitness of something else. A picture needed a coherence of its own to fit some other coherence outside the picture—which, prima facie, ruled out many paintings made while Wittgenstein lived.³³

Statements about pictures were everywhere in the Tractatus. There was also a picture (Fig. 3.2) meant to show what a “visual field” was “surely not like.” This image which, according to Wittgenstein, failed at resembling a visual field, shared a form with a more complex visual field shown in the Optics, where an eye dissected from a cadaver took in a “depiction” of objects within its field (Figs. 3.3, 3.9).³⁴

Different forms of writing, like different forms of picturing, had their strengths and weaknesses. Dialogues were quicker than textbooks. Aphorisms were faster than treatises. Poems were more memorable than prose. Pick up an Iliad in prose. Could you learn it all by heart—or even a few of its twenty-four books? Or just a few pages?

‘Yes, I could do that. A few pages, anyhow. I once played Funes in a dramatization of the unsettling story by Borges about unerasable memory. I spoke my lines, and other lines spoken by other characters reminded me of what to say to them. Character, dialogue and other dramatic devices were armatures of memory—like regular verse structure, repetitive meter and characteristic epithets in Homeric poetry.’

OK, I see. Poets and playwrights erect scaffolds of memory in words that gestures, movements, blocking and props make more concrete. Before Plato was born, after earlier Greeks had finally written the Iliad down, fleeting words were still seldom captured on pages of books. But Parmenides eventually had a poem fixed in writing so that other philosophers wouldn’t forget him.

‘Plato also wrote prose in order to remember Parmenides even though he claimed to distrust writing as a threat to memory—and he thought that pictures were even worse.’³⁵

You know Hume’s Treatise of Human Nature, right?

‘Sure: he finished it about a century after the Discourse.’

Do you know any of it by heart?

‘Just a few phrases. Like “reason is the slave of the passions.”’

Hume completed it just after Alexander Pope published his Essay on Man. The Treatise and Pope’s Essay both discussed human nature. Do you know Pope’s Essay?

‘I do. But I haven’t read it. Didactic poetry in rhymed couplets is a taste that I haven’t acquired.’

Try this: a game about couplets. What words fill out a rhyme after this line from Pope’s poem?

Know then thyself, presume not God to scan.

‘I don’t know. What comes next?’

How about this?

To do a better job, you’ll need a plan.

‘No! That’s awful—singsong bizspeak.’

What about this? Does this fit?

The proper study of mankind is man.³⁶

‘That fits—ok. Now I remember both lines.’

So can you give me a few sentences from Hume’s Treatise that fit word for word?

‘No, I can’t. There’s great writing in the Treatise. But the fitness isn’t poetic like Pope’s couplets.’

Memorability comes along with poetic fitness, which might be bad for philosophy. Pope decreed that a poem’s “sound must seem an echo to the sense” in his Essay on Criticism.

‘Who made him the pope?’

Just good taste, he said. Anyhow, other poets followed his rule about reinforcing sense with sound. But his procedure would cramp philosophy, right? Pope’s specialties—rhyme and predictable rhythm—would be inhibiting. The same was true for accent, line-length, meter and other regularities: poetic patterning would squeeze philosophical prose into forms that cut thinking short with prosody.³⁷

‘Prosody: what an odd word for something poetic! But philosophers needed more space than poems can give. So they preferred prose—short-form, long-form or in between.’

A treatise could be as roomy as it needed to be, but longer forms were riskier. Hume’s Treatise, having too much to say, “fell dead-born from the press”—a defunct volume that later philosophers had to exhume. Hume himself had better luck in 1741 with short essays on morals and politics that philosophers now rarely discuss.

‘But people used to love them. Before Hume died in 1776, new editions kept coming, followed by many more through the nineteenth century and afterward. These little essays, translated and in English, kept attracting buyers and motivating publishers.’³⁸

You’re right. What you say checked out when I looked at Amazon. Searching for ‘Hume’ pulled up more pages with ‘essay’ than with ‘treatise.’ But Pope the rhymester also did well with ‘essay’ as an internet commodity. The philosopher still outsold the poet, however. Hume’s essays were masterpieces of short-form prose, a discipline less rule-bound than poetry—especially poems at the far edge of regularity: sonnets in exactly fourteen lines; limericks contorted by rhyme; haikus compressed into seventeen syllables. This was bound to squeeze philosophical argument out, no?

‘Well, a syllogism only had three lines—or two if it was an enthymeme like the cogito.’

Heidegger’s Question About Technology showed poetic speech constricting thought and ignoring clarity. Rapping on Gebirg, Gemüt and Gestell, he made too much of too little resonance. The Ge- Ge- Ge- fitness of these words was more visible than meaningful—in plain sight with pleasing sound but weak in sense, as Pope might have complained. Ge- was a prefix for collective nouns that named either an agent, whose action could be continuous or discontinuous, or else what an agent acted on. So many options blurred the fitness that Heidegger wanted and exposed his choices as capricious. Why not Gewässer, Geheule and Gerippe instead? The question would be impertinent if Heidegger had taken his Ge- words from a poem by Hölderlin. But the philosopher asked tin-eared questions about technology in his own prose.³⁹

Dents in Heidegger’s diction show that philosophy was harder to manage in poetry than in the looser language of prose. Nevertheless, this morally troubled thinker was right to wonder about technology, though it’s odd that he showed so little curiosity about picturing when he asked his questions. When Heidegger first lectured on technology in 1949, Walter Benjamin had been dead for almost a decade and had published his landmark essay on disruptive technologies of art in 1936.⁴⁰

Heidegger’s reticence about picturing muted his tailor-made vocabulary of concealing, revealing and unconcealing, of clearing, lighting-up and shining-forth. He said that technê was a name for “bringing the true forth into the beautiful”; he described eidos in ordinary Greek as the “sight that a visible thing presents to the sensory eye”; but he insisted that Plato’s eidos or ‘form’ was “what is not and never will be perceptible by sensory eyes.” Since he found the “visual domain” of modern physics “unable to be looked at (unanschaulich),” maybe he would have excluded Descartes and his pictorial optics from a history of that science.⁴¹

3 Might Pictures Help?

Descartes also wrote a picture book about meteorology, his Météores, more or less as Aristotle had defined the subject: the study of phenomena on the earth’s surface but also inside it and up to the sphere of the moon—clouds, earthquakes, lightning, rainbows, shooting stars and so on. Aristotle treated them all as erratic and fundamentally organic. He identified their root cause as respiration, as if the planet itself were breathing in spasms. Descartes offered physical but not organic explanations for the same phenomena. He proposed causes that were too small to be seen, and yet he showed how they worked (Fig. 3.4) by picturing “small particles of various shapes and sizes.”⁴²

Figure 3.4 The Earth as a Lodestone, Descartes, 1644 Principia, p. 271

Aristotle’s meteorology included metals (metalla) and stones (lithoi). Descartes examined some of them in his Principia, another picture book, where “particles of matter” (particulae materiae) told the story again with “shape, size, position and motion” (figura, magnitudo, situs et motus).” Magnetic stones got special attention because of their power to attract and repel. And yet these lodestones were just stones, inanimate pieces of the planet like other rocks. Descartes claimed that a magnet’s remarkable properties came from the planet’s matter, not from a soul. William Gilbert had already described “that great magnet, the earth” in a book with images of a small “spherical magnet” called a terrella or ‘little earth.’ Descartes outdid Gilbert by picturing the whole planet as a lodestone energized by swarms of particles.⁴³

The large sphere in the center was the earth (call it S), whose south and north poles were A and B at its edges. Spheres I, K, L, M and N were smaller magnets (not in scale) oriented in different ways to A and B. Countless little screws circulating from the south (E) of the cosmos toward A were grooved to twist one way; others flowing from the north (F) toward B twisted the other way. Horizontal lines crossing S depicted channels or pores; these were also grooved to accept screws entering them from one direction but not the other. After traveling through channels that matched them, some screws exited the earth and moved toward G or H in the distant universe. As other screws slowed down, their grooves wore out. The quickest screws moved through matter whose pores eroded them less because they matched the screws better.⁴⁴

This account of two magnetic phenomena—attraction/repulsion and polarity—was ingenious but complicated and contrived. Working through the sentences that stated the theory is a chore; making sense of them without a picture would be worse. Descartes must have thought that readers needed more help than words alone could give. He used exactly the same strange image of the earth as a lodestone three times within these seven pages. A few years later, however, his supporters produced a French translation of the very same material that supplied no pictures at all where the text explained “how channeled (canelées) parts make their way through and around the earth.”⁴⁵

Did his pictorial ingenuity put them off? Maybe not. Makers of books had practical reasons to be stingy with pictures: they were hard to acquire and costly. They might also be risky: the second commandment forbade graven images. To enforce this rule in the Europe where Descartes was born—where pictures of magnets weren’t the problem—iconoclastic Christians slaughtered other Christians who venerated icons and knelt before statues to pray. Philosophers also had reasons—less destructive—not to trust images. In this climate of opinion, academic and religious, admirers of Descartes spoiled his Principia by hiding crucial pictorial material at the back of the book.⁴⁶

For reasons of their own, empiricists like Bacon might have objected to showing sights that no one had ever seen, and Descartes was aware of such concerns. At the very end of the Principia, he took the unusual (for him) step of appealing to Aristotle on a related question, the evidentiary standing of purely theoretical entities.

He cited the Meteorology, chapter and verse, for an assessment of findings “not manifest to sensation (sensui non manifesta).” He weighed Aristotle’s evaluation of such evidence and reached this conclusion: that the Philosopher “thinks he can offer sufficient reasons (sufficientes rationes) and demonstrations (demonstrationes) if he can just show (ostendat) that these things can happen (fieri posse) as he explains them (explicantur).” Descartes wanted to defend his own reliance on “particles that can’t be sensed (insensiles).” And Aristotle had confirmed that a good theory (logos) could appeal to the imperceptible (aphanôn tê aithêsei) in order to explain phenomena (phainomenôn hupolaboi) whose appearing (phainô) required them to be perceptible.⁴⁷

Yet it was one thing to demonstrate, explain or reason about imperceptibles, quite another to show pictures of them. Descartes crossed an epistemic line and found Aristotle with him on the other side. The ancient sage had seemed unconcerned about picturing in his own Meteorology. Since he described some “maps of the world (periodous tês gês)” as “absurd,” he must have seen them drawn, but he used no drawings of his own to correct them. He mentioned diagrams (hupographai) of stars and winds, however. Aristotelian meteorology wasn’t a rigidly aniconic science.⁴⁸

But Aristotle objected to poetry as a vehicle for meteorology. A predecessor in this science was Empedocles, who wrote poems about nature, and Aristotle preserved a fragment of his verse—“sea, sweat of earth”—by making fun of it. The poet’s words, up to a point, conformed to Aristotle’s organic theory of meteorological change as planetary respiration. But the Philosopher found it “ridiculous for someone who talks of ‘sea, sweat of earth’ to suppose that he has said anything clear.” By Aristotle’s prosaic standards, Empedocles failed a small test of clarity by letting a muse of poetry seduce him.⁴⁹

Plato had deeper concerns about the arts—moral as well as epistemic worries. He scorned poems and paintings as fakes, copies of copies and corrupters of reason.⁵⁰

His dislike of picturing may help explain why—if you check the Greek text of his Meno in John Burnet’s Oxford edition—you won’t find any pictures where you’ll see them in standard translations and commentaries. At Meno 82, Socrates exploited a slave boy with a test of recollection in order to show that the boy knew truths that he hadn’t learned. The truth in question was geometrical, and Socrates asked the boy if he understood what a square was and if it was ‘like this’ (toiouton). Unless Socrates had a square to point to, his deictic question, sharpened by a demonstrative, would have made no sense. This is why translations have printed a picture in the Meno where nothing was pictured in Burnet’s text or noted in his apparatus. Translations—but not Burnet’s Greek—have also provided stage directions for Socrates.⁵¹

Like Burnet, Richard Bluck allowed no pictures in his later Cambridge text. But his thorough commentary—ten times more pages of English than Greek—interpreted toiouton to mean that “we must imagine Socrates drawing a square in the sand.” He confirmed that “much use is made of sensible diagrams” in the Meno. He reported disagreement among the authorities, however, including one who used “evidence of . . . eyesight” to explain the boy’s recollection. And his commentary (but not his text) printed pictures to show which depictions of a square could have “helped the slave.”

Figure 3.5 Squares, Plato, before 1100, Österreichische Nationalbibliothek, Cod. suppl. gr. 7, fol. 416v

We learn, nonetheless, that Plato introduced the square not “to stress sense-experience” but as “simple and striking”—something that an “illiterate slave” could manage. In the end “no words of Socrates and no diagram (necessarily imperfect) could account for the slave’s understanding.” Written words would have been meaningless to a boy who couldn’t read—though maybe spoken words would work or a picture or a diagram. And yet Bluck assumed that a diagram visible to bodily eyes had to be imperfect—in the way of all flesh. If every such picture was too flawed to explain anything, why clutter up a page of printed Greek?⁵²

But what about manuscripts? The most important witnesses to the Meno, according to Bluck, were four documents including Bodleian Clarke 39, known as the ‘Clarke Plato’ or B. Written before the year 1000, B was the oldest Plato manuscript of its kind. The Meno, on twenty-eight pictureless leaves, came last in these old pages. And no one had put pictures in another manuscript now in Vienna: this document, designated suppl. gr. 39, was several centuries younger but had equivalent authority.

Suppl. gr. 7 was yet another Vienna manuscript, however, and considerably older than gr. 39. It had diagrams in a hand different than the primary scribe’s in its margin (Fig. 3.5), below a comment about Aristotle’s mention of the Meno in the Prior Analytics. Although a long tradition of aniconic criticism has left the Meno pictureless, this key document showed the tracks of a reader who thought that Plato’s words called for picturing. Someone other than the main scribe of suppl. gr. 7 drew the diagrams and may have invented them. Or maybe not. They could have been copied from a different manuscript that had better authority. In any case, nothing showed that Plato himself had insisted on recording the slave boy’s lesson without pictures.⁵³

Analysts of language have distinguished using words from mentioning them: in writing I use the word ‘frog’ to say that a frog has four legs, but I mention the word to say that ‘frog’ has four letters. A convention of punctuation has distinguished one use of language from the other by putting the merely mentioned word in single quotation marks. Suppose (counterintuitively if not impossibly) that pictures, just like words, could be both used and mentioned in some such way. Then, even if Plato only mentioned a square pictorially at Meno 82 without using it that way, Socrates could once have used a pictured square by pointing at his own sketch in the sand.

The item used or mentioned in the Meno wasn’t just a square, however; it was a geometrical construction based on a square. Some constructed squares are divided by diagonals into right triangles; others are divided by intersecting transversals into smaller squares; and so on. A simple undivided square couldn’t provide enough picturing for the demonstration in the Meno, and a complex construction would have been more trouble even to mention pictorially, not to speak of using it.

Figure 3.6 Infinite Baseball

And yet a simple square, effectively visualized, might have said a great deal. Think of a baseball diamond, at first by itself, its squareness completely isolated; then follow rules of the game to enrich the geometry mentally in familiar ways (Fig. 3.6). Two sides (a, b) of a right triangle go from home plate through first base and third base. Two sides (c, d) of a smaller acute triangle go from home plate through opposite points straddling second base. Triangular areas E and F, occupying all of left and right fields, are larger than G, another triangular area with sides c and d, which like a and b are inside the park. If a, b, c and d all kept going beyond the park—on and on without ever stopping—then area G′, like areas E′ and F′, would keep on expanding. But it seems that unending growth would never make G′ as big as E′ or F′.

A baseball diamond—by itself a simpler square than the Meno construction—becomes part of a mental map to spaces that are all limitless and yet look different from one another. Are these unbounded areas both different and infinite? In the nineteenth century, Georg Cantor proved that not all infinities are the same: some infinities (counting numbers, prime numbers, rational numbers) were countable; but the infinity of real numbers wasn’t countable. Cantor devised a proof—a ‘diagonal’ proof—to support the counterintuitive finding that not all infinities of numbers were alike numerically. Even though a key element of Cantor’s reasoning was ineliminably visual, his proof could be presented in completely abstract terms. It worked by examining numbers in an array that kept expanding down and to the right, like this:

9 3 9 0 2 . . .

7 3 0 0 9 . . .

4 3 5 7 7 . . .

1 6 2 0 6 . . .

5 2 9 6 8 . . .

. . .

In this example—which was not Cantor’s—the boldface numbers 9, 3, 5, 0 and 8 are the partly numerical, partly pictorial heart of the proof: the numbers go slantwise to infinity as the array grows in orthogonal directions by following a few rules. Mathematicians have expressed the proof rigorously with nothing but numbers like 9, 3 and 5; symbols like {}, R and P(S); and technical terms like ‘bijection,’ ‘cardinality’ and ‘power set.’ But rigor that delights mathematicians stymies other people. Anyone who can read ordinary numbers, however, can also look at the numbers in boldface and visualize their path toward infinity. The array is an expandable synoptic sight (like a Ramist chart) that shows where 9, 3, 5 and the rest are headed.⁵⁴

Visualizing numbers in this way was informative—also novel, for some viewers, or even arcane. Visualizing a baseball park with endless baselines may also be novel, but the underlying experience isn’t arcane. Millions of people see this sporting geometry every year. Widely shared experience makes baselines familiar and picture-ready—like the player, racket and ball in Cartesian tennis (Fig. 3.1).

A ball pictured in the Optics stood in for a particle of light, which was imperceptible in practice for Descartes and perhaps in principle. When he wrote his treatise, no one had seen or could possibly have seen particles of light, which we call photons, just because of their tiny size—leaving elasticity, rigidity, speed, wavelength, observer effects and other difficulties for physicists of a later day. By showing pictures of light particles (Fig. 3.11), Descartes made the unseen seen in order to explain how such bodies might behave. A tennis ball also made his physics of light familiar, just as a baseball diamond familiarizes the mathematics of infinity. In both cases, familiarizing the unfamiliar was part of the explaining, and so was picturing.⁵⁵

When Descartes chose pictures for his Optics, he picked familiar sights as bridges to unfamiliar treatments of everyday experience. Light was the topic of the treatise’s first chapter, which examined “how rays of light enter the eye, . . . not what the nature of light truly is.” To achieve this limited aim, Descartes made “two or three comparisons (comparaisons) that help to conceive of light in the way that seems to me most convenient (commode).” Explaining by accommodating—by considering the convenience of readers and the writer—was part of his project, and the pictures in his toolkit were useful in this way.⁵⁶

Some of these images were completely abstract and showed nothing seen in the world (Fig. 3.11); others represented ordinary visible things (Figs. 3.1, 3.7, 3.8). In 1622, Johann Kepler—praised by Descartes as his “first master” in optics—attacked Robert Fludd for using images of the wrong kind to explain physical phenomena. Fludd had recently published his profusely pictorial Story of Both Universes. Kepler denounced Fludd’s books for their “many pictures (picturae)” and preferred his own “mathematical diagrams (diagrammata) arrayed with letters.” This was the kind of explaining, with labeled diagrams, that Descartes chose in some cases—but not others. In other situations his explanations were concrete picturae of sights that readers had seen.⁵⁷

Figure 3.7 Sticks, Descartes, 1637 Dioptrique, p. 56

Descartes familiarized readers with his optics by reminding them of dark nights when a stick (baston) came in handy for feeling a way over rough ground. Then he asked them to reflect on people “born blind (nés aveugles)” who could do the same thing “so perfectly and exactly that one might almost say that they see through their hands (voyent des mains) or that the stick is an organ of some sixth sense” (Fig. 3.7). Eliding common with uncommon experience, Descartes accustomed readers to novel explanations: just as sightless people felt things through sticks with great sensitivity, so sighted people saw things with accuracy because air acted like a stick when light traveled through air to the eye. The air/stick analogy was ancient. But Descartes added a restriction: just as “no material thing”—only action or motion—came up from the ground through the stick to the walker’s hand, so nothing material came from seen objects through air to the eye. And in both cases the action was instantaneous.⁵⁸

At first Descartes described light as “a certain movement or a very quick and lively action.” But if light moves, ever so quickly, how can it act instantaneously? He soon gave a modified account: “it’s not so much movement as action of luminous bodies that must be taken for their light.” The revision came with a second comparison, which bypassed vexing differences between sticks and air. He showed the reader “a tub at harvest time completely full of grapes half-pressed,” and he compared the tub with the universe; the juice with “a very fine and fluid matter” that fills the universe; and the partly pressed fruit with air or other media (Fig. 3.8). The tub comparison was weaker than the stick comparison because Descartes could state it only by packing his whole plenist cosmology into a few lines. No one had seen the whole cosmos or a plenum, though everyone recognized both parts of his previous comparison—air and a stick.⁵⁹

Figure 3.8 The Tub, Descartes, 1637 Dioptrique, p. 6

The only pictureless chapter of the Optics—the fourth on “senses in general” and “vision in particular”—was nonetheless reflective about conventions and techniques of picturing. To begin his account of visual experience, Descartes insisted that “what senses is the soul, not the body.” But he located the soul in a part of the body, the brain, where “impressions that objects make on external organs” were transmitted through nerves by fluid action (“spirits flowing through”) and mechanical action (“like pulling one end of a taut string”). These physical impressions were enough to supply what was required

in order to sense (sentir). The soul has no need to observe (contempler) various images (images) sent by objects (objets) to the brain, as our philosophers commonly suppose, or at least we must conceive (conçevoir) the nature of these images in a totally different way. . . . Their only reason for proposing them was this: once they noticed that our thinking (pensée) can easily be aroused by a picture (tableau) to conceive the object depicted (peint), they assumed that thinking, because of little pictures that had formed (s’en former) in the head, should do the same in order to conceive objects that contact (toucher) our senses. We should note, nonetheless, that there are many things besides images that can arouse our thinking—signs (signes) and words (paroles), for example, that in no way resemble (resembler) the things that they signify (signifier).⁶⁰

While mollifying “our philosophers,” Descartes accepted that images of sensed objects ended up “in the head.” There was no need, however, for such images “to resemble (resembler) in every way the objects that they represent (representer).” Partial resemblance—even none at all—was enough for mental representation. Moreover, incomplete resemblance was actually a “perfection,” not a defect, in some representations. Their effectiveness came from

not resembling objects as much as they might. You’ve seen that prints (tailledouces), made from just a little ink put here and there on paper, represent to us forests, towns, people, even battles and storms, as well as an endless variety of qualities that they make us conceive in these objects, and yet there’s nothing that gets resembled, strictly speaking, except shape (figure) alone. And even this resemblance is quite incomplete (imparfait), seeing that prints represent to us bodies at different heights and depths on a totally flat surface. Moreover, by following rules of perspective, they often represent circles better with ovals than with other circles, squares better with diamonds than with other squares and likewise for other shapes. The frequent result is that in order to be more complete as images and to represent an object better, prints must not resemble it.

That images resembled or failed to resemble what they imaged—according to Descartes—had no invariable bearing on their mental work of representing. To explain how the work got done, he referred to his previous account of a sightless person’s stick (Fig. 3.7), described in his opening chapter but not pictured there. When the stick struck a hard rock, nothing resembling the rock or its hardness traveled through the stick to the person’s hand. Upon contact with the rock, however, the stick moved in a certain way and thus indicated—represented—a large or hard object rather than a small or soft one. Likewise, when nerves transmitted movement from a sense organ to the brain in order to represent a sensed object, what they delivered to the brain brought no resembling with it.⁶¹

Figure 3.9 An Ambiguous Head, Detail, Descartes, 1637 Dioptrique, p. 36

Yet when the sense of vision was active, “objects seen by us imprint rather complete images of themselves”—not in the brain, however, but “at the backs of our eyes.” Descartes described this retinal imaging in chapter 5 with four identical drawings of an eye removed for optical study and placed above a picture of a human head—nicely drawn but ambiguous (Figs. 3.3, 3.9). The dissected eye had been taken from “a man freshly dead.” Did the picture of a head show this cadaver with an empty eye socket? No: the drawing of a man and his eye stood in for (represented?) a reader squinting through an eye taken from a dead person. But readers learned this only by studying an intricately labeled image with the help of a densely detailed text.⁶²

After chapter 5 applied words to images in order to show that representing might owe nothing to resembling, chapter 6 continued the discussion. Even if a retinal image—“a depiction (peinture) that passes to the head and inside”—resembled a distal object of vision, nonetheless

it’s not by means of this resemblance that the depiction makes us sense the object, as if there were still other eyes in our brain to perceive it. Instead, in order to make the soul have such sensations (sentiments), nature has arranged for movements that make up the depiction to act directly on our soul insofar as it’s united with our body. . . . And there’s no need for any resemblance between ideas (idées) that the soul conceives (conçoit) and the movements that cause the ideas.

Both sensations and ideas were mental effects of a chain of material causes: matter in motion. The local cause/effect series started from an external physical object, proceeded through a physical medium and then passed from the front of the eye to the back, where the effect was a physical state of the retina and farther on a state of the soul—“united with our body.” All the antecedent causality was physical and none required resemblance—even though the retina happened to have a “depiction” on it.⁶³ After describing more details of visual anatomy and physics, Descartes showed a picture of the sightless man (Fig. 3.7) for the first time in the Optics: the man’s two sticks were like two eyes working together to register distance and position.⁶⁴

In these middle chapters of the Optics, Descartes made basic distinctions between resemblance and representation—findings of consequence for metaphysics, physics, psychology and the new Cartesian specialty of epistemology. Picturing was part and parcel of his philosophizing about the senses, where he reflected about a picture of his own—“the blind man of whom I have spoken before”—when he had not yet shown the picture to readers. Previously, in the pictureless Discourse, picturing had also been his point of view when he defended his prolonged reluctance to make his thoughts public. Just as painters “put some things in the light and keep others in the shade,” Descartes concealed some of his findings while revealing others. One partial revelation was what he “thought the nature of light to be.”⁶⁵

Descartes insisted that rays of light “must always be imagined (imaginés) as exactly straight” until they hit obstacles. But why should readers have accepted that the movement of grapes in juice (Fig. 3.8) was rectilinear by default?⁶⁶ Descartes saw the problem and addressed it with his third comparison after the tub and the stick: a line traced by a ray of light was now like the straight path of “a ball that passes through air.” Ordinary balls were deflected from their paths by “linen sheets, sand or mud” that didn’t stop them but changed their direction and speed.

“Those who play tennis,” Descartes explained, “have proof enough (esprouvent assé) when their ball strikes a rough patch or else when they hit it with a turning racket—which they call ‘cutting’ or ‘curving,’ I believe.” Up to a point, the tennis imagery was more persuasive than a vat of grapes: a ball struck by a racket was easier to visualize than fruit floating in juice. But the first tennis player pictured in the Optics (Fig. 3.1) aimed his ball at a pond or a puddle, not a lawn or pavement, and then the ball “strikes the surface of the liquid body obliquely, . . . changes course . . . and goes again in a straight line.” A real tennis ball, even a heavy one, would have bobbed up right way from water deep enough to slow but not stop it—a poor model for a refracted ray of light.⁶⁷

The model was creaky and yet the comparison worked. People who had never given a thought to the optics of refraction could understand the phenomena better by looking at the picture of a tennis player that Descartes showed. Stated formally, the principle explained by the picture was that the ratio of sines of angles of incidence and refraction equals the ratio of indices of refraction: in modern notation, sinθ2/sinθ1 = v2/v1 = n1/n2. Descartes could manipulate the algebra at a time when conventions of trigonometry like ‘sinθ’ were not yet settled, and very few could have handled the mathematics however it was symbolized. But many people had seen rackets batting tennis balls.

4 Players and Spectators

Who were these people? Who was Descartes (never a professor of philosophy) trying to teach with his tennis pictures? In the order of comparisons, tennis came last in the first chapter of the Optics after the stick and the tub. Many sighted people had seen sightless people walking with sticks. Such sights were common, without class distinctions, in cities, towns and villages. The countryside was where peasants crushed grapes, however: tubs and pruning knives were their basic equipment—but not tennis rackets. Handball, an older and simpler game, had needed no gear: only a ball, a flat place and a wall—behind a cloister or at the end of an alley.⁶⁸

Figure 3.10 Tennis in Leiden, Crispijn van de Passe, 1612 British Museum, 1972-0722-6-8

Descartes showed a racket in his picture (Fig. 3.1) but still called the game jeu de paume—literally, the ‘palm game.’ As a boy he may have played it at La Flèche (Fig. 1.1), where Jesuits taught him religion and the classics. At a different school in Fulda, where Athanasius Kircher learned the same lessons, the Society let its students play tennis. Leiden, where Descartes studied and then prepared the Discourse for publication, built a large court for members of its university: a print made in 1612 by Crispijn van de Passe showed an indoor space big enough for 7 people to watch 4 players (and a judge or substitute) from a gallery (Fig. 3.10). Verses at the bottom recommended a workout: “rackets (retia) make a little ball (pilula) fly back and forth to exercise a young man’s mind and body.” Mens sana in corpore sano, as the poet advised.⁶⁹

The players in the Leiden print were prosperous urbanites who could spare time for a game, while King Henri IV in neighboring France commanded all the time in the world. Henri had endowed La Flèche with a gift of land and buildings—plenty of real estate for a large installation like a tennis court, which in those days was a royal perquisite. In 1572, when Henri was still a duke and a target for assassination, he left his room at dawn one morning to play tennis during the urban riot that killed Peter Ramus. Years later, after he took the throne, court gossips reported how often and with whom the king “played la paume the whole of the afternoon.”⁷⁰

Shakespeare brought his Henry the Fifth to court a little later, in 1605, knowing that royals and nobles would get both ends of the joke when the Dauphin sent Henry a gift of ‘balls’ from French territory that England planned to invade: “tennis balls, my liege,” sniffed the Duke of Exeter. Henry’s retort played on the game’s tackle and terminology:

When we have matched our rackets to these balls,

we will in France, by God’s grace, play a set

shall strike his father’s crown into the hazard.

Shakespeare’s companies had already opened their play in London. Did tennis humor sail over the heads of rowdy audiences in town? Not all of them. Some people who could afford a play could also afford a game, and there were more than a dozen courts in London when James I ruled England and Descartes took classes at La Flèche.⁷¹

Some people knew about tennis but didn’t like it. Giving advice on rearing children, Montaigne despaired of a boy who would just as soon “win a prize for tennis” as bring a brave victory home from war: “his tutor should strangle him quickly when nobody’s around.” Montaigne’s family had bad luck on the courts, as he recalled while explaining that “to philosophize is to learn how to die.” His essay made death’s absurdity concrete by reciting a list of luminaries who died in ridiculous, trivial ways—including the essayist’s own brother, “hit in the ear by a tennis ball and killed.”⁷²

All things considered, tennis was a sport for the better-off when Descartes put pictures of the game in a book about optics. Such pictures assumed protocols for seeing formed by cultural as well as optical perspective. Suppose that pictorial conventions like perspective that Descartes took for granted had not been available to him—that the visible record of European picturing from Giotto through Caravaggio had somehow vanished. Could anyone in that visual desert have made the pictures that Descartes used in the Optics? Surely not some of them (Figs. 3.1, 3.7, 3.8). And more pervasive than norms or habits of art were educational, institutional, religious and other customs firmed up by everyday practice. If Europe’s socio-economic experience from Giotto through Caravaggio had also been erased, customary ways of living that sustained conventional ways of seeing would have been lost for readers of the Optics.⁷³

These readers may have been players of tennis or spectators or people who just knew the game’s name or others who had never heard of it. Take the last case. If someone knew what a stick was or a tub but not a tennis racket, tennis pictures wouldn’t help much with optics. The sporting images worked only for people who knew at least a little about tennis—though maybe not much. Even scanty knowledge of the game would help a picture seem real, more credible than a philosopher’s cartoon of a befuddled man tapping a ball into a puddle (Fig. 3.1). Spectators who had watched tennis balls whizzing by were better prepared by ordinary experience to read the Optics with understanding. Their familiarity with the game enabled Descartes to make abstractions concrete for them.

Figure 3.11 Reflections Abstracted, Descartes, 1637 Dioptrique, p. 10

A key point for Descartes was that rays of light were like paths of tiny balls in motion: he said this with words before showing it in austere images like the second picture in the Optics (Fig. 3.11). To extend his account from refraction to reflection, he described “balls ABC which, after striking surfaces of bodies DEF, are deflected (se reflechissent) toward GHI.” The construct was complex but two-dimensional, without perspective or shading; its images conveyed information but showed nothing seen in the world. However, once a spectator of tennis learned that circles ABC were “balls,” memories of the game could fill in abstract structures with concrete, visualizable experience. To capitalize on such recollections, Descartes put a third, more concrete picture (Fig. 3.1) on the next page after the abstractions. His pictures cemented and reinforced experiences of viewers whose lives had prepared them to look at these images—viewers like those who watched from the Leiden gallery around 1612 (Fig. 3.10). Years later some of them may have read the Optics.⁷⁴

The official designation for a current form of the game is ‘real tennis’—more a name than a description. If Henri IV or a player from Leiden could have looked at the tennis pictures in the Optics, neither would have identified the third sight shown there (Fig. 3.1) as real tennis: it was just a man tapping a ball into a wet place and playing under the two-person minimum. No monarch nor any athlete, seeing this image of someone amusing himself with a ball, would have recognized authentic tennis or a genuine jeu de paume. True: people now play solitary table tennis against a machine. But the setting for tennis in the Optics was Leiden society four centuries ago.⁷⁵

Suppose you walked into to an art gallery, skipped the dealer’s captions and strolled through different rooms. In one room you saw the Leiden tennis print (Fig. 3.10). Then in another room you looked at the second image from the Optics (Fig. 3.11). Would you have connected them?

‘No. But in the past, a place and a time—a context—would have tied them together. Now it would take stories to connect them for me. The better I know the stories, the better I understand the pictures—and what the pictures explain.’

Is explaining in that way narrative?

‘Sometimes. Yes. Of course. But I just read a book that says stories can’t really handle the past, that “narrative history gets almost everything wrong.”’⁷⁶

Did the book have pictures?

‘Yes. Here it is. Take a look. Some are like pictures that Descartes used—anatomical views of the brain, for example. There’s also an old photograph: “Kaiser Wilhelm as admiral in 1912.” Here, look at it.’

Thanks. I see. So that’s the Kaiser. If I had just beamed in from Mars and you showed me the picture and the caption, could you explain them to me—on my visit from another planet? Could you tell me what an admiral or a Kaiser was on Earth in 1912?

‘Sure. I’d use stories—narratives—to help me explain. But what about the book? It says that telling stories “gets almost everything wrong.”’

Maybe the author thinks he has better options.

‘Maybe so: he accepts “true chronologies and other facts about what happened in the past.”’⁷⁷

True chronologies? How about a chronology from last week: July 13, July 14, July 15 and so on? Is that a true chronology?

‘Yes, absolutely.’

Where were you on July 14?

‘I was in Paris—on Bastille Day!’

Was it fun?

‘Of course it was fun! Bright lights and booming explosions, just like July 4 here.’

What else made the two days alike for you? They both had 24 hours, right?

‘Ahh, come on now!’

But if I were from Mars, could you explain to me—without narrating anything—why Bastille Day was like July 4?

‘I doubt it. But that’s what the book told me: no narrating’.

I’ve been reading some books too—about mathematics. People find mathematical abstraction as strange as the philosophical kind. So I thought that learning about it might make me feel better. An eminent mathematician and an accomplished writer of fiction co-authored one of the books. After reviewing “the last few decades [of] intellectual activity . . . on the interplay of mathematics and narrative,” these experts reached a conclusion: “It might seem that narrative and mathematics have little use for each other, but this is not so. . . . As anyone who teaches the subject knows well, . . . mathematics has a great need for narrative.”

‘That’s nice if you think that mathematicians tell stories today. But no ice has been cut for Descartes four centuries ago, has it?’

I don’t know. Maybe it has. Aristotle was a big target for Descartes. And a distinguished historian of philosophy wrote this in the same book: Aristotle’s “mathematical reasoning shares the sequentiality, if not the temporality, of narrative.” Not only that, but “ancient Gree[k] and Chinese . . . mathematical reasoning . . . [had] just [what] . . . mathematics as a whole shares with narrative.”

‘So maybe this works for historians, mathematicians and novelists. But what about logicians and philosophers of mathematics?’

Gabriele Lolli taught logic at Torino and philosophy of mathematics at the Scuola Normale. Lolli thought it plausible that “proofs (dimostrazioni) have a narrative character.” He also suggested that narration might be a metalanguage for proof. btw: he also noted that G. H. Hardy and other mathematical superstars “talk about proof as ‘seeing (vedere).’” Like seeing the Kaiser, maybe?⁷⁸

‘I still keep worrying that narratives might come up short. What if it’s true that they get “almost everything wrong.” Then why rely on them to explain anything?’

I haven’t read the book. But if I’m hearing you, the author claimed that explaining without narrative is the only route to an accurate, coherent and credible account of the past. I don’t buy it. Good authority (Lolli’s, for example) and good sense (yours and mine) weigh against it. It’s pretty obvious that many accounts of the past, as distinct from the past itself, can be true only as stories because that’s exactly what they are: they’re not uninterpreted data or bare statistics or strings of free-floating propositions. They’re recovered narratives, which people find indispensable, of human experience. They’re historical and context-dependent, like explanations by picturing that refer to things outside the frame of a picture.

‘I’m still worried. But go on.’

OK. When the author of the Optics pictured balls bouncing in abstract space (Fig. 3.11), the story outside the frame was short or no story at all—just a locus of matter in motion. But people in Leiden lived most of their lives in stories that happened outside the frame of Van de Passe’s print (Fig. 3.10), and some characters in the stories were friends or enemies of the twelve people inside the picture. Descartes used pictures of this type and other types—concrete and abstract, narrative and analytic. Where he showed a light particle as a tennis ball, answers to implied questions made his epiphany concrete in stories that provided many responses. Here’s a question that was natural for readers of the Optics in 1637: what was the errand that brought a player with his racket to the edge of this pond (Fig. 3.1)? Elsewhere in the Optics (Fig. 3.7), at an “untidy spot,” a dog slept away its “doggy life” behind a sightless man. And when the dog woke, it barked or growled or whined or fertilized the grass.⁷⁹

Descartes probably knew some rules of tennis. If Plato had known rules of baseball (Fig. 3.6), could he have anticipated Cantor’s account of infinite sets? It’s a silly question—except that it bears on picturing in philosophical texts like the Optics. Burnet’s Greek text of the Meno is pictureless. Experts call such a text ‘critical’ because it has passed severe tests of textual criticism—after ancient scripts have been deciphered, old manuscripts have been collated and rules have been applied to produce texts that commentators and translators will accept within limits of reason. But when all the findings from all the manuscripts, duly scrutinized and collated, testify to gibberish somewhere, printing the gibberish may violate a principle of charity—especially for a work as much examined as the Meno by an author as revered as Plato.

Textual critics have delicate procedures for solving such problems. One of them identifies a ‘lacuna’ or gap in a text—typically not because an author has left something out but because surviving copies made by scribal readers (and writers) are flawed. Burnet’s text showed no lacuna where Socrates needed a picture. Another procedure is ‘conjectural emendation’—an expert guess made to fix a problem in manuscript evidence. Burnet made no guess about a geometrical figure even where Bluck said later that Socrates had needed such a picture. In Greek texts endorsed by Cambridge and Oxford, this diffidence was bound to confuse readers of the Meno. (I was confused, for example.) Why not help by conjecturing that the Meno’s archetype might have had a picture? Maybe the Meno’s author disliked pictures so much that he passed rigidly aniconic habits on to later Platonists, including the author of the Meditations.

5 Pictures Gone Missing

The passage about the square in the Meno is so important in its setting that the diagram’s absence is a textual crux. Elsewhere the dialogue’s need for pictorial help was less acute. Not so for a big book on architecture by another ancient sage, Vitruvius, who wrote in the time of Julius and Augustus Caesar. No Roman work about building and machines has had more readers than De architectura, whose author has done as much for modern architecture as Plato did for modern philosophy. Both made designs that experts still imitate. And yet no one made pictures to show the architect’s work in the 80 or so medieval manuscripts of his book, even though some of the author’s words (like toiouton in the Meno) referred to images.⁸⁰

When Poggio Bracciolini found a manuscript of De architectura in 1414, Leon Battista Alberti and other eminent Italians took notice. Giovanni Sulpizio da Veroli made a printed edition in 1486 to present the Latin text of this book when it was still a novelty. He printed only a single image, and he explained why: “as for drawings of figures, I couldn’t get copies of them; they’re difficult to describe and hard for craftsmen to make, so I’ve left spaces in margins. And when drawings get published by my effort or someone else’s, they can be attached in their proper places.” The only picture that made it into his book was a diagram of wind directions, but Sulpizio himself left spaces for 3 other images. Had they been printed, they would have shown abstract diagrams—not the physical machinery that Vitruvius described elsewhere. But Sulpizio realized that a picture book about architecture would be a hit. And after 2 more picture-poor editions, the first richly illustrated Vitruvius—by Giovanni Giocondo in 1511—finally delivered dozens of woodcuts.⁸¹

‘With due deference to facts of history before Giocondo, I find it hard to imagine a detailed introduction to architectural practice, not just theory, in a book with no pictures.’

Really? Your imagination can’t do better?

‘OK. I can visualize such a book: words on pages, with or without meaning, are easy for my mind’s eye to see. It’s simple for pictureless words, but not when the unpictured items are an acroterion, an aedicule, an annulet, antefix, architrave. . . .’

Pictures on the internet skim this architectural alphabet. But medieval readers had no such help. De architectura in its pictureless state remained all but useless—except to historians and connoisseurs of Latin. Before Giocondo, this remarkable old book was a paradigm of impracticality: a long piece of technical writing about man-made things that provided no illustrations or pictorial explanations.

‘You’re right: Vitruvius minus pictures didn’t add up to much. Then why all those pictureless manuscripts?’

I don’t have an answer. But after the Middle Ages, in the early days of print, the single image supplied by Sulpizio in 1486 required a technology that could have made many more pictures for his book. Experts say that Vitruvius himself used only 11 images: they infer this number from his words—some of them more explicit than toiouton in the Meno. Suppose 11 were the right count: then Vitruvius must have decided that he didn’t need more pictures or that making more wasn’t worth the trouble. The second reason is likelier, given conditions of book-making more than two millennia ago.⁸²

There was no printing in ancient Rome, but publishing thrived when Vitruvius was designing buildings and machinery. Roman scribes (often slaves) wrote fast to make books quickly and in quantity—fast enough, in big enough numbers, to amplify the buzz for an ambitious architect. One ancient author described a text duplicated in a thousand copies. Copyists needed persistence, practice and skill to make a living in this way by hand.

Some ancient books were illustrated. In the fifth century a painter made 42 pictures for the ‘Roman Vergil,’ a collection of poems on 410 large leaves of parchment. A scribe copied almost 800 pages of text with great care and left spaces for illustrations. The bar was higher for making pictures than for copying Vergil’s words: the painter’s colors were rich but the drawing was crude. Making any pictures at all for a manuscript was harder than putting letters on its pages. Making pictures accurate—not only pictorially but also textually—was even harder. And unless pictures were accurate in both ways, adding them to a text might make a book even more confusing than words on pictureless pages: hence the need to add labels to pictures and key them correctly to words. On the other hand, some pictures—according to their makers—stood on their own “without need of letters” and still explained how parts of things went together.⁸³

Conventions for matching pictures to words with alphabetical or numerical labels were not yet mature when Vitruvius was writing. This helps explain why he didn’t fill his book with pictures—unlike Giocondo, who could count on a flourishing new technology and knew conventions of reference that would make picturing effective.

One kind of effectiveness was efficiency. If Giocondo found mistakes in printed copy, they could be corrected, a sheet at a time, before finishing a whole book, and printed pictures could be checked in the same way—for looks as well as accuracy. These new capabilities enabled Giocondo to produce a “work of art in the age of its mechanized reproduction,” in Walter Benjamin’s famous phrase. Once a typesetter put a page together, no one had to set the whole page again. Once a woodcut was ready for the press, no one had to draw the whole picture again. In a printer’s shop, economy of effort, quantity of output and speed of production were fundamental improvements over the medieval routine in a scriptorium. These post-medieval innovations added up to a modern technology.⁸⁴

When Descartes used this technology to put pictures in his books, his practice overshot his aniconic theory.⁸⁵

Maybe some pictures would have satisfied him just by decorating a page or illustrating words printed on it, even if the effect was merely rhetorical or persuasive. Persuasion wasn’t enough for his Optics, however, where he used expliquer fourteen times and applied this word to images. At one point, while picturing tennis in order to introduce optical reflection, he undertook “a whole process of explaining (expliquer) . . . to make it as easy as possible to understand.” Elsewhere—eager to accommodate and familiarize yet shunning detailed images from “bloated” anatomy books—he wrote that “those I have put here will be enough to explain everything,” unlike others that would “serve only to divert your attention.” As with words, the philosopher was choosy about pictures, and he relied on both to explain his philosophy.⁸⁶

But not always. If pictures were sins against clarity, the Meditations printed in 1641 was a saintly book. Inside, after the title-page, it showed no images of any kind: even decorative scrollwork stopped right after the front matter. Later, at the start of the sixth meditation, Descartes described—without picturing—an unusual geometrical figure while discussing how an “object of pure mathematics” could be cognized.

Understanding (intellectio) was one way to cognize; imagining (imaginatio) was another. The meditator could understand that all triangles had exactly and only 3 sides while reporting a distinct experience: “I also gaze at (intueor) these 3 lines in my mind’s eye as if they were present, and this is what I call ‘imagining’ (imaginari).” A different figure with 1,000 sides, a chiliagon, was no harder to understand. But the meditator couldn’t “imagine (imaginor) its thousand sides” as he could visualize the 3 of a triangle. Imagining a figure that had hundreds of sides wouldn’t distinguish it from any other such imaginings—of 800 sides or 1,200 instead of 1,000. The mind’s eye couldn’t resolve the differences. Anything merely imagined—not just this outlier of geometry—might be obscure and indistinct in the same way, thus failing basic Cartesian tests for reliable cognizing.⁸⁷

Although Descartes had more to say about chiliagons, he couldn’t picture such a thing in print and didn’t try. Which were more familiar to his readers in 1641: chiliagons or tennis balls? Surely educated players and spectators of the game had seen and understood pentagons, hexagons, maybe even icosahedrons. But chiliagons? Descartes couldn’t show this overgrown polygon to his readers. He couldn’t picture it clearly and distinctly in his book, just as no one could imagine it: a chiliagon was both easy to understand and impossible for any mind’s eye to gaze on in an exact image (intueor, imaginor). This antithesis between possible understanding and impossible imagining was the point that Descartes made with pictureless words.

The meditator didn’t say that the omitted image was bound to fail pictorially. And yet it was bound to fail in just this way. No technology of printing, then or now, could resolve a 1,000-sided image in a book the size of the Meditations. Maybe a giant could print a chiliagon on a huge page where gargantuan readers would take it all in and mark its sides while numbering them up to 1,000. But this wouldn’t be an ordinary mind’s eye taking a look. And even the giants would fail at some point with a myriagon of 10,000 sides or a decakismyriagon of 100,000 and so on: no joy for even the roomiest imaginations.⁸⁸

In principle neither mental visualizing nor picturing on paper could produce reliable results—given the chiliagon exclusions. But the philosopher’s aniconic stance in the Meditations contradicted his explicit statements elsewhere as well as his own practice—not just in the Optics but also in the Principia and other writings. Like the Optics and the two treatises that followed, the Principia was image-rich, and Descartes published it three years after the Meditations. Whatever the chiliagon exclusions were meant to exclude, they didn’t stop Descartes from explaining with pictures.

In the Meditations Descartes implied, without saying so, that pictures always fail as explanations. A parallel error, which he didn’t call out, would be that narrative explanation “gets almost everything wrong.” Both objections sell explaining short and oversimplify its aims. These aims are many and overdetermined, as parents discover when yet another explanation fails after a child restates a why question yet again, over and over, registering unhappiness with every answer. Here’s a why question for adults: why have some of us needed a new word—‘mansplaining’—to restrain our explanatory impulses? It’s pretty obvious: crisp Cartesian standards like clarity and distinctness are sometimes out of place and not good enough.⁸⁹

Explaining differs from proving, however. Maybe it’s obvious why explaining the limit theorem to new learners goes faster than proving it to them. And maybe explaining is the most that publishers of calculus textbooks expect from pictures today. Not too long ago, students seldom saw such visualizations in print—more often on blackboards. But explanatory visualizing, as in infinite baseball (Fig. 3.6), helps non-pictorial proving communicate the pure mathematics of Cantor’s number theory: Cantor himself built elements of picturing—like words in a synoptic Ramist chart (Fig. 2.1)—into his celebrated proof.

The meditator worried more about imagining than picturing. But early in his reverie he described sights in dreams as “painted images (pictae imagines) that can’t have been fashioned (fingi) except in the likeness (similitudo) of real things (res verae).” Reality was a pricey neighborhood in metaphysical currency, and pictures were cheap imitations across the tracks. Maybe pictures weren’t always copies of copies, as Plato charged, but first-run reproductions, all by themselves, were also unreliable—bargain-basement goods not to be trusted. And yet Descartes trusted his readers with hundreds of pictures.⁹⁰

6 Benjamin’s Disruptions

Technologies that put his pictures into print were still growing stronger—nearly two centuries old—when Descartes finished his Optics. It took longer to label them ‘technologies,’ however, and then to question them under this rubric. Descartes, before he drafted Le Monde, already lived in a world shaped by industrial processes, but mining, minting and printing were not yet called ‘technologies.’ Until such enterprises acquired some such label, reflection about them was inarticulate: there could be no questions as ambitious as Heidegger’s about technology, no complaints as pointed as Benjamin’s about technologies of picturing. Centuries earlier, when Descartes was still working, people had lacked words to worry exactly and explicitly about the new technology that they relied on without yet giving it a name of its own.

When Isaac Casaubon, the philosopher’s learned contemporary, warned against converting “theologie into technology,” he wasn’t concerned about anything mechanical. Casaubon’s word ‘technology,’ like ‘doxology,’ designated a type of speaking or writing. What concerned him wasn’t machinery but language—an “artificiall discourse” that degraded sacred doctrine by treating it like “other arts and sciences.” In the first generations after Casaubon and Descartes, a ‘technology’ was still just a terminology—just talk about a field of profane learning or a secular technique.

Later—after an industrial revolution but before Napoleon—the scope of ‘technology’ narrowed to “mechanical arts and applied sciences.” But this technology was still all words and theory—not real things or physical practices. And then Jacob Bigelow, a medical botanist lecturing at Harvard on Elements of Technology, used the word in 1829 not just for talking about applied sciences but also for using physical devices and processes, including machinery. By the turn of the century, these ‘technologies’ included products of such tools. Their inventors filed for patents, and generals ‘mechanized’ their battles with newly invented implements of destruction.⁹¹

Before these modern times—‘modern’ as in Charlie Chaplin’s movie—no one called printing a ‘technology,’ even though presses had been running before Columbus sailed. When the Optics went to press, technological change without the label had been gaining speed for nearly 200 years. Vessels assembled in shipyards carried gold across the Atlantic. Miners designed equipment to dig precious metals. Mechanical presses struck coins in royal mints. Francis Bacon catalogued new gear for navigation, communication and warfare. Bacon and Descartes were both dead by the summer of 1650, but later historians postponed the ‘first industrial revolution’ for more than a century, waiting for power looms, the cotton gin and Adam Smith’s efficient pin factory.⁹²

Scientific theories sometimes preceded industrial practices, but Robert Boyle resisted theorizing—including the Cartesian kind—while recognizing his own need for explanatory pictures. Starting around 1650, Boyle and others published pictures of air pumps and put new designs on paper to test machinery that later entrepreneurs improved when they powered textile factories with steam. By 1780 people were sweating alongside boilers, and the experience of changing the world with machinery—for better or worse—was widespread. Reflecting on the experience was still uncommon, however, and no one yet thought of it as ‘technological.’⁹³

During the two centuries before 1650, nonetheless, a number of technologies produced picture books like the Optics. Printing words on paper with movable type was a relief technology—applying ink to raised surfaces made from pieces of metal locked in a frame. To add pictures, a different relief process carved pieces away from wooden blocks and applied ink to the raised surfaces that remained. Europeans had combined pictures with words in woodcut blockbooks decades before they printed books as pictureless as the Meditations. Although the first picture books printed with movable type may have been made with metalcuts in the late 1450s, woodcuts were easier to carve. Woodcuts also kept printing simple by keeping inked picture-surfaces in the same plane with type-surfaces. But even a soft metal like copper worked better than the finest-grained wood for making pictures in delicate detail. Intaglio techniques that ‘cut into’ (intagliare) metal removed it from places where some ink stayed after the rest was wiped off: aquatint, drypoint, engraving, etching and mezzotint were intaglio processes.⁹⁴

Lithography came later and brought new efficiencies to picture-making. Lithographers needed no skill at relief or intaglio, and artists could have their pictures put on the same flat surface with words. This was Walter Benjamin’s analysis of the consequences:

This much more direct process . . . enabled graphic art to market its products not only expansively, as it already had, but also in the form of creations that were always new. . . . Drawing could even accompany everyday life and keep pace with print. But lithography . . . soon saw itself outpaced . . . by photography. Processes for reproducing images freed the hand for the first time from artistic tasks of the greatest importance, which from then on involved only the eye. . . . Since the eye perceives faster than the hand can draw, the process . . . accelerated so much that it could keep pace with speech. . . . In practice, just as lithography implied illustrated newspapers, photography did the same for films with sound. . . . Mechanized reproduction had reached such a level by 1900 that it could not only operate on past objects of art, while also transforming their effects, but also attain autonomous standing among artistic activities. . . . Nothing is more revealing than . . . the repercussions on art in its traditional form of . . . reproducing works of art and of the art of cinema.

Descartes was no artist (except in prose), and lithography came too late to help him—not to speak of movies. But Benjamin’s assessment of post-Cartesian progress in pictorial technology illuminates how the Optics showed what it showed in its own time and place.⁹⁵

Benjamin noted that a photographer’s lens transmits sights that an eye can’t see by itself, which was also true of lenses in telescopes and microscopes described by the Optics. But technologies that changed values and prices for “artistic and scientific uses of photography”—in Benjamin’s words—were post-Cartesian. And yet viewers of scientific images in the Optics could already see that some of these pictures had more or less aesthetic value than others (Figs. 3.7, 3.9). Machines known to Descartes and his readers duplicated such pictures while Rembrandt’s prints were revaluing art reproduced by the same mechanical means—just as Margaret Bourke-White, Henri Cartier-Bresson, Dorothea Lange and other photographers gave new value to a different kind of reproducible art during Benjamin’s lifetime.⁹⁶

Benjamin treated photography and printmaking as alike in one crucial capability: their power to make an artist’s work ubiquitous by putting copies into “situations out of reach for the original.” With its unique, self-identical, physical presence—its hic et nunc, in Benjamin’s phrase—an original, preserved and sequestered by tradition, was authentic, authoritative and impossible to reproduce. For a copy, however, reproducing was a condition of possibility. Just as Ansel Adams made multiple prints from single negatives of Half Dome, artisans had applied Rembrandt’s techniques to make many impressions from just one etched plate or carved woodblock: their products moved immovable things—a large statue or a huge cathedral—to viewers in distant places. Pictorial technology used by Descartes also transported a tennis game through space and time: readers of the Optics after 1637, far from Leiden, could also look at Crispijn van de Passe’s print of a match played there around 1612 (Fig. 3.10), the date of this original work of art.⁹⁷

Benjamin observed that the camera “instructs us in unconscious optics as psychoanalysis does in unconscious drives.” Watching a movie, I usually don’t notice how a machine—a roving camera—shifts my point of view: hence Benjamin’s “unconscious optics.” Freudian analysts looked for hidden impulses that patients may not have wanted to notice. What if their unconscious urges visualized experiences of sights that should have been concealed? Benjamin worried not only about the aesthetics of optical technologies but also about their psychology, politics and morality.

A filmmaker moves in for a close-up, changes focus, points a camera at a hidden place—an “unimagined field of play” for an audience to see. Viewers that Benjamin described had been “locked up with no hope of escape” in apartments, factories and offices. Then suddenly a movie “blew up this prison-world with the dynamite of tenths of a second.” Optical liberation and pure joy? Maybe not.⁹⁸

The “destructive, cathartic capability” of mechanized picturing, as Benjamin saw it, threatened art—though not (he thought) a science like optics. When a machine makes many pictures of a work of art, he pointed out, “the technology of reproduction . . . detaches the reproduced item from the domain of tradition,” degrading authenticity and diminishing authority—the dreaded Mona Lisa effect. In Benjamin’s calculus, Leonardo’s overexposed painting had lost its ‘aura.’ Yet “no natural object is vulnerable in this way,” he maintained. In nature—hence in science—there were no auras to be lost when tradition failed.⁹⁹

But what do you think?

‘Maybe Benjamin was right if the pictured items were light particles: as long as they existed, their energy, momentum and spin couldn’t be lost. And since no one could see a photon to experience its aura, there was no photonic aura for viewers to miss. But by now, nearly a century after Benjamin’s essay, millions have seen a different tiny thing—a double helix—pictured on disposable cardboard. In 2007 marketers of video games displayed this icon on packaging, where it stayed until Amazon acquired Double Helix Games in 2014.’

Was the advertising a loss—a degradation? Did seven fat years of commerce cheapen this image? Monetary devaluing wouldn’t have worried Descartes because the Optics wasn’t a commercial project.

‘But maybe picturing light with tennis balls made his pages look frivolous. Picturing could cheapen science, not just his art—don’t you think?’

Depreciated knowledge was definitely a loss in 1637. But Descartes himself was a greater threat to traditional learning than picturing by machine. The technology was still too new to overwhelm tradition.

Yet pictures reproduced in copies of the Optics “replaced something unique”—to use Benjamin’s words—just by showing a tennis player’s ridiculous serve into a pond over and over. Readers of this book could look and laugh at Cartesian tennis in a library, in a tavern, at home or somewhere else where the game had never been played. According to Benjamin, such results of mechanical reproduction were shattering: technologies that enabled “reproductions to be present to viewers in any and all situations . . . made the reproduced items actual” and caused a “disruption (bouleversement, Erschütterung) of tradition.”¹⁰⁰

Undisrupted tradition had confined the display of paintings and drawings—though not statues or architecture—mainly to places where such things had been sequestered, inside walled properties and sacrosanct churches controlled by the great and good. Outside, visible to every sinner, church façades displayed saintly statues. But marquees ouside movie houses that fascinated Benjamin attracted profane crowds—not penitent congregations—to come inside and take a look. The throngs who paid for seats in dream palaces to watch movies populated “contemporary mass movements” whose “most powerful agent” was film. As changing times dissolved tradition, movies were catalysts of revolution and forces of modern turmoil—‘modern’ as in Chaplin’s movie. Moving pictures were more discomposing than the static pictures that Descartes used, but both were disruptive.¹⁰¹

The past is a foreign country, and where Descartes lived is now far away, hard to map or keep in focus. Can a modern meditation on technology like Benjamin’s give us a sharper look at the philosopher’s post-medieval picture books? Can this recent critic’s insights outweigh risks of anachronism?

‘Or what about insights from modern psychology? What about inattentional blindness—now overexposed on YouTube by the famous gorilla experiment—as a constraint on how viewers of pictures might have seen them long ago? What about cognitive penetration, gestalt closure and perceptual learning? Don’t these also have something to show about differences between seeing pages of print in old books and looking at pictures on those same pages?’

You’re right. Today’s science matters. But contemporary Anglophone philosophers—my main audience—can handle the latest psychology better than me. Maybe I can help with Benjamin, however.¹⁰²

Benjamin used pictures of one type—paintings that were art objects—to explain why people of his day no longer viewed art as they had before the nineteenth century. Until then, they had seen paintings mainly in churches, monasteries and palaces controlled by abbots, bishops and princes. Lay and clerical hierarchies decided whether and how grand pictorial art was seen, not only by limiting access to closed spaces but also by doling out occasions for looking at pictures—by presenting art bit by bit within confines of tradition. Time-bound control by tradition prevented quick “collective reception” of paintings until new technologies changed circumstances of reception and made “mechanized reproduction” a fact about art.¹⁰³

When Benjamin concluded that “the mechanized reproduction of works of art changes how the masses react to art,” his diagnosis was distinctly modern. Key examples were Picasso paintings and Chaplin movies—both instantly recognizable and both praised as art at different moments by different viewers of his day who didn’t like each other: the “backward attitude” to a painting by Picasso, he noticed, “became more progressive” for a Chaplin movie. Such responses to movies and to paintings pictured in magazines fused popular culture “with an expert’s outlook” and allowed “critical responses to coincide in the public with being entertained.”¹⁰⁴

In 1637 the Optics had readers but no ‘public’ in Benjamin’s sense; there were no ‘masses’ to hoot or applaud. But before Descartes published, changes in picturing had been as transformative as those that Benjamin traced to the “mechanized reproduction of art.” And these older transformations were in the same lineage with post-Cartesian innovations. Successful technologies of letter-press printing, woodcutting, engraving and etching that were still fresh when Descartes was born in 1596 encouraged the development of later technologies—offset printing, lithography, still photography and moving pictures—before Benjamin died in 1940.¹⁰⁵

7 Epoptic Coherence

In the Meditations Descartes described how to isolate thinking from sensory experience—at least in part. “Now I shall close my eyes,” he wrote, “and erase from my thinking all images (imagines) of bodily things, or actually, since this can’t be done, I shall disregard them as fake and worthless (inanes et falsae).” Procedures outlined by his book—exercises in metaphysics—ruled out pictures of tennis (Fig. 3.1) and other bodily things recently used by the author to promote a new method for philosophy. Meditating would now demote and displace his earlier pictorial approach.¹⁰⁶

Purging the senses to isolate the mind was familiar therapy for the spirit. Descartes learned this regimen from Jesuits at La Flèche, where spiritual exercises sanctified a curriculum for boys who would rather have played tennis. Students not only enjoyed games in his school and acted on stage, they also watched each other playing and performing. Tennis players watching one another attracted other watchers—to the court at Leiden’s university, for example (Fig. 3.10). Besides the 4 players and a judge in Van de Passe’s print, 7 other people were watchers or spectators: looking at the game connected them with the players and with each other at this site of a sporting community.¹⁰⁷

They all watched the game and shared it in different ways, 7 of them as spectators. Others who saw the printed picture of the game were spectators of these spectators: with viewers at other remote sites, they shared vicarious experiences mediated by mechanically duplicated images. Viewers in various locations saw the game at different times, and they outnumbered spectators pictured beside the court. How many remote spectators were there? A few were enough then and there to make Benjamin’s account of mechanized picturing relevant here and now.

There were no ‘masses’ in Leiden, and 7 spectators fell short of a crowd even in 1612. Crowds gathered, all the same, often as spectators. During the same years, London’s theaters admitted 2,000 or more playgoers for single performances. By today’s standards, a few thousand is no crowd at all for events that multitudes line up to see. In 1980 more than 100,000 fans jostled to watch a Super Bowl in a stadium. In 2015 the same spectacle attracted a TV audience of 114 million. Numbers this big were beyond Benjamin’s experience, but his thoughts applied to any mechanized picturing—not only the movies that dazzled him but eventually television and the internet, as well as older images printed in the Optics.¹⁰⁸

The crowds that filled movie palaces in Benjamin’s day were large by his standards. In the years before he died, over 18,000 theaters showed films in the United States, many offering 2,000 seats or more—as spacious as the old London playhouses. Weekly attendance peaked in 1937 at 88 million viewers, who had billions of experiences of film-watching over the course of a year. By size alone, the crowds that Benjamin saw at the movies during these years justified his assessment of their ‘disruptive’ cultural and political energy. Like watching a Super Bowl on TV, seeing a story through the machinery of a movie house was a shared visual experience that I’ll call epoptic from epoptês: a ‘watcher’ or ‘spectator.’¹⁰⁹

Three elements of an experience make it epoptic in this special sense: (1) watching something in this way is necessarily visual; (2) a number of watchers share the watching contingently and may be aware of the sharing.¹¹⁰ Even in the dark, Benjamin’s moviegoers—like tennis players squinting at sunset—watched one another watching. These 2 elements of synchronic visual sharing had exhausted the pre-epoptic experience of all such spectators in the distant past, whether the spectacle was chariots racing at Olympus or gladiators fighting in Rome or a bishop leading a procession through medieval Paris. A later element was post-medieval: (3) remote diachronic sharing of visual experience enhanced by mechanization. Post-medieval epoptic watchers, mostly literate, could be anywhere at any time. The technologies they used were artifacts of the Baconian modernity inaugurated by mechanisms of communication (printing), transportation (magnetic compasses) and long-range destruction (artillery). These modern technologies overcame physical distance in ways unknown to pre-modern people.¹¹¹

Although technology had enhanced nothing for earlier spectators, many of them illiterate, they nonetheless shared visual experiences of great power locally and synchronically—in churches and temples, for example. Worshippers crowded sacred sites not only to plead with divinity but also to see the divine in a temple or a Torah scroll or sacramental bread or the ‘things shown’ at ancient Eleusis. Experts on Greek religion know little about those rites. But they agree that hundreds of initiates passed together through stages of sacred things done (dromena), said (legomena) and shown (deiknumena). Passage from a lower to a higher grade bonded new initiates to veterans who had already reached the same level. After preliminaries, initiates attained the supreme rank of watchers (epoptai) who had gazed on the holiest sights and shared this sacred culmination with thousands of other fully inducted watchers.¹¹²

The Gospels of Matthew and Luke reported an unholy sight at the edge of epoptic experience. When Jesus taught in the Temple, some of his lessons were parabolic, like “render to Caesar’s what is Caesar’s.” But what was Caesar’s? The teacher familiarized his answer with a visual token, a coin stamped with a likeness of Emperor Tiberius, who was despised in Jerusalem. When the crowd saw Jesus displaying this particular coin—an artifact of industry that defiled the Temple with a graven image—the experience was shared and visual but also just local and momentary, hence not epoptic. The experience of other Jews elsewhere in the city was different: on the same day or the next, they handled coins of the same type from the same mint bearing different copies of the same imperial likeness. Hatred of Tiberius was everywhere, however, and when different people remote from one another and from the emperor used the coins, their shared antagonism was weakly epoptic. The experience was thin and transient. The coins were small and commonplace—usually uninspected like Heidegger’s ‘equipment’—and their tiny display of power explained nothing.¹¹³

Now, two millennia later, a contemporary ritual is profane and strongly epoptic: watching a football game on TV. Initiates at Eleusis watched the sacred rites only there and then, whereas television transports visual scenes to millions of watchers far apart in space and time. Smaller crowds in local movie palaces—when Benjamin noticed them—had experiences, both synchronic and diachronic, that were likewise epoptic. What these audiences shared was visual and mechanically duplicated for transportation through space and time. Vicarious viewers of a Leiden tennis match—by way of printed pictures—also had epoptic experiences, diachronically and on a smaller scale. Descartes had his tennis pictures printed for such viewers, who joined together in epoptic communities by looking at images in his Optics.

While Descartes lived in the Netherlands, Father Pierre Bourdin, a Jesuit, was teaching mathematics at the Collège de Clermont in Paris. Bourdin had ‘thesis booklets’ printed to memorialize what his students learned. Other Jesuits at Clermont also produced them, but as of 1637 only Bourdin was putting pictures into his booklets, where he described their content as experimenta. Some of his pictures explained optical geometry and ocular anatomy, drawing on studies by Christoph Scheiner, a more eminent Jesuit, but also by Kepler and possibly Descartes. Bourdin had certainly seen the Optics by 1640, when he and one of his students rejected its account of refraction. Scheiner and Descartes kept working until both died in 1650, twenty years after Kepler. Then all three still spoke through pictures to durable epoptic communities, scattered through space and time, that shared the experience reflected in Bourdin’s optical images.¹¹⁴

Here’s an epoptic community in our time: you and your friends meet online to talk about pictures and words in a digital book. Your shared experience is ordinary, but technological conditions of its possibility are distinctive features of your modernity and mine. Epoptic experience itself, when it’s robust like ours, is distinctively modern (by Baconian standards) and—to some extent and together with other experience—it’s constitutive of our modern awareness of the world. When your cellphone rings and delivers yet another picture, the bell tolls for thee and me together: sensibilities, “all in pieces,” die choking on images, oblivious to everything else.¹¹⁵

John Donne—dead for six years when Descartes published his Optics—might have shunned the epoptic communities that the philosopher’s picture books eventually attracted: the poet complained in 1611 about “all coherence gone.” He mourned the old natural philosophy that Descartes, Galileo and other innovators attacked, abandoned and hoped to replace with a new movement—a scientific revolution in astronomy, biology, cosmology, mathematics, matter-theory, medicine, physics and psychology. These disrupters had new explanatory models based on machinery, and they made original observations with mechanical instruments.

The undisrupted coherence that Donne pined for—a homey anthropocentric cosmos of harmonic forms and sympathetic forces—was an intellectual construct but also a socio-political birthright. Coherence in the great cosmos, as Shakespeare had described it, demanded and sustained human order in smaller places, in

        communities,

degrees in schools and brotherhoods in cities,

peaceful commerce from dividable shores.

Concordant lessons were written in the stars, where

the heavens themselves, the planets and this centre

observe degree, priority and place.

But when human dissonance disrupted the harmonies,

take but degree way, untune that string,

and hark what discord follows.

In this hierarchy of lords and commoners where Shakespeare was self-made, Donne was his high-born contemporary. Things often went just right for John Donne because larks, snails and people in his world stayed where they belonged—on the wing, on the thorn and in subjugation—just where God in his heaven had put them and kept his eye on them.¹¹⁶

An intellectual framework for this providential and physical harmony was natural theology supported by natural philosophy: Newton still used this obsolete phrase in 1687 when he proclaimed a new science based on mathematical principles. The post-Cartesian scientific philosophy that replaced natural philosophy was still progressing in 1951, according to Hans Reichenbach, and its roots reached back past the Optics in 1637. This scientific successor to natural philosophy had both intellectual and socio-political dimensions. In books that Descartes published, images that explained the intellectual construct were visible to readers during the philosopher’s lifetime. By looking at these pictures and learning from them, watchers of Cartesian tennis formed epoptic groups that propagated scientific philosophy and outlived its founding communities.¹¹⁷

While the author of the Optics lived, how far did this book and its readers spread his new philosophy? The French original of 1637 prepared the way for a Latin translation in 1644 with woodcuts based on images in the earlier text. Assuming press runs at the high end for both versions, as many as 3,000 copies in total may have been printed. Since books once sold were resold, traded, borrowed, inherited, stolen, read in libraries and shared in other ways, each copy could have reached several readers—an average of three or four perhaps? If so, then 12,000 or so contemporaries of Descartes might have looked at pictures in his Optics—an epoptic community big enough to matter: 12,000 was about half the population of Leiden when Descartes was born.¹¹⁸

Before he went public with his pictures in 1637, Descartes was already a busy sender and an attentive receiver of scientific messages: the modern editors of his letters published 586 of them. One regular correspondent was his schoolmate from La Flèche, Father Marin Mersenne, whose output and input of letters was prodigious: items eventually published from Mersenne’s correspondence number 317 sent and 804 received. In these letters Descartes and Mersenne declared themselves as charter citizens of a new Republic of Letters—Pierre Bayle’s later name for an international collective of learned inquiry.¹¹⁹

Intellectual impresarios like Bayle, private academies like the Lincei in Italy and chartered organizations like the Royal Society of London institutionalized the ephemeral channels of epistolary communication that Descartes and Mersenne had relied on. Some of their pen-and-ink conversations were about books that had pictures in them. By propagating exchanges of pictorial information through transitory networks that later became durable, these early promoters of scientific philosophy created persistent epoptic communities—invisible colleges of visual learning in a coherent social order that sustained intellectual innovations.¹²⁰

But in the Christian story told by both of John Donne’s churches—essentially the same faith that Descartes professed—coherence of this kind was a temporal dispensation. In the linear course of sacred history, from creation through judgment to redemption or damnation, all such coherence would be gone for good at the end of days. If history was a secular story, however, paradigms gained might replace paradigms lost in progressive transitions, with a new coherence overriding an older one until an even newer one prevailed. And so it was that scientific philosophy, socialized and sustained by epoptic communities, overcame natural philosophy when Descartes, Galileo, Kepler, Kircher, Scheiner and others published their upsetting picture books.

Benjamin understood that technologies of picturing were disruptive both positively and negatively and that some new disruptions were also coherences. Had he lived to stare at a smartphone or be filmed by a cctv camera, he could have evaluated the mixed results of these later disorders. Contemporaries of Descartes had already seen unsettling sights in books about anatomy and astronomy. But Galileo’s telescope was also a positive disrupter: had he doubted its benefits, he might have picked a less confident title for his Messenger from the Stars in 1610. Very soon—by 1611—“all coherence gone” was Donne’s gloomy assessment of Galileo’s news from the skies. Poets were entitled to hyperbole, and pictorial technologies had indeed destabilized Donne’s world with optical disruptions.¹²¹

The slower-to-ripen book that Copernicus published in 1543 brought many images to few readers at first: the pictures were mostly abstract and made sense only to experts (Fig. 3.12). The Church finally banned this disturbing volume in 1616—after Galileo publicized it at a time when the clergy had learned to fear him: their panic had already sent Giordano Bruno to the stake in 1600. Bruno’s cosmology of infinite worlds was even more threatening than heliocentric astronomy, and his printed books showed many images—more cryptic than provocative, however (Fig. 3.13). But the censors put all his works on their Index of Banned Books in the year when the Church executed him.¹²²

Figures 3.12 and 3.13 Eccentrics and an Epicycle, Copernicus, 1543 Atoms, Bruno, 1591

“Mechanized reproduction . . . changes how the masses react,” Benjamin wrote: yes, and how their bosses react too. The Index was the Church’s self-defeating response to cultural and technological change, including new epoptic communities formed and sustained by pictures reproduced mechanically. Pictorial innovations stimulated by these technologies and shared in these communities operated at both ends of the gap in attitude between Donne and Galileo. For nearly two centuries before the astronomer brought the heavens down to earth by showing a rugged, imperfect moon (Fig. 3.14), people had been sharing productive disruptions of an older order of picturing: images were disquieting sights in books that carried a new pictorial science to readers all over Europe who shared these disturbing experiences.¹²³

With no trains, trucks, airplanes or internet to transport books and pictures, slower forces of industry and commerce were enough to support growth in the output of destabilizing images. But the very same processes of mechanical reproduction that produced these pictures also stabilized them by printing identical copies over and over—“exactly repeatable pictorial statements” that had never been possible for drawings and paintings done by hand. Images duplicated exactly made scientific findings more reliable, familiar and credible. Pictures also harnessed time by blending observations of distinct events: Galileo backed up his troubling claims by augmenting pictures of the moon in this way (Fig. 3.14).¹²⁴

Figure 3.14 An Imperfect Moon, Galileo, 1610 Sidereus nuncius, p. 9v

8 Feats of Picturing

The architecture of Vitruvius survived the Middle Ages without help from pictures. But many manuscripts of that era preserved diagrams, drawings, paintings and other pictorial forms in unique originals made by hand and never copied mechanically. Some pictures were only or mainly decorative, while others told a story or explained something in a visual way. ‘What did it look like?’ ‘What was it for?’ What was it made of?’ ‘How did it work?’ These were questions addressed by medieval picture-makers, who answered with images presented for pre-technological observation. When the same questions kept coming after printing was invented, mechanical reproduction confirmed and enhanced pictorial answers of the same kind and also added new kinds.

Benjamin’s term, “mechanized reproduction,” pinpointed the key difference between explanatory picturing during the medieval centuries and picturing of the same kind afterward. The distinction has a well-marked chronology: medieval artists and artisans made many pictures, but until printing was invented around 1450, the only widespread technology of picturing—as distinct from arts and crafts like architecture, sculpture, sign-painting and weaving—was the minting of coins, which were too small to do much explaining. Moreover, some remarkable achievements of explanatory picturing were post-print and yet pre-technological in the same way.¹²⁵

It’s hard to imagine how little picturing there was in the medieval world compared to ours and how hard it was for pictures to explain nature. Here’s how to get a feel for the difference. Can you make a sketch (pt) of a triangle with three sides meeting at three points in the usual way?

‘Sure thing.’

Now visualize pt as pv in your mind’s eye, not on paper. Both pt and pv are pictures, right?

‘Yes: but pv shows me the triangle in a different way—visualized but not ink on paper.’

Now make another drawing on the same piece of paper but show the three sides drifting away—left, right and down—from the center of pt.

‘I can do that faster in my head—for my mind’s eye to see.’

I hoped you might say that. Suppose you and I had never seen a pt on paper. Could you show me what a pv looked like to you by making a model with three sticks? Could you move the sticks away from the center of the model?

‘Yes I could. It’s easy to visualize a drifting pv. Then I could show you a replica of my mental picture by making a model with sticks and pushing them around. But other models and visualizations would be harder: cutaway views, for example, or exploded views. Leonardo showed an exploded view in a picture (Fig. 3.15) that he drew only for himself to explain how parts of a reciprocating machine could work together: he duplicated, extended and suspended the parts in explanatory space.’

Leonardo’s skill at explanatory picturing was beyond compare, though others—eventually including Descartes—could also visualize complex structures. No paper view ever exploded in daily life, however, when experiences more common than looking inside a disassembled machine were seeing into a building whose walls were unfinished or fallen or just looking through its windows from outside.¹²⁶

Figure 3.15 An Exploded View, Leonardo, 1478 Biblioteca Ambrosiana, Codex Atlanticus, fol. 30v

Figure 3.16 A Cutaway, Giocondo, 1511 Vitruvius, fol. 72r

Figure 3.17 Ruins in a Fantasy, Colonna, 1499 Hypnerotomachia, sig. piiiv

Giovanni Giocondo, Leonardo’s contemporary who edited Vitruvius, cut walls and a floor away from a building in order to look through barriers and explain how to install drainage below and behind them (Fig. 3.16). Seeing through solid walls and a floor was physically impossible in a finished building yet achievable by visualizing and also by picturing. Cutting away, a step toward transparency (Fig. 3.18), extended the ordinary experience of seeing a building with parts missing—either not yet in place or else fallen down. Hypnerotomachia (A Dream Battle) was a fantasy without technical content printed in 1499. This entrancing book showed hidden structures ruined and fallen (Fig. 3.17). Christians had come to find pagan antiquity glamorous, and its ruins were evocative.¹²⁷

They were also instructive. For purposes of explanation, leaving a wall on the ground in pieces or cutting it away in order to see past it had roughly the same effect as making it transparent: all these ways of picturing revealed parts ordinarily concealed and showed how they went together. Since a cutaway, unlike an exploded view, left parts assembled, cutaways—which were conventions of drawing but not of realism—preserved conventions of realism better than exploded pictures: a house was incomplete when a wall had been cut away, but if all remaining parts were left standing, they were pictured where they should have been in relation to one another (Fig. 3.16).¹²⁸

By this standard, a different way of seeing-through would improve on cutting-away because all parts remained and stayed put—each in its place. If a fully framed and nearly complete house has been pictured and most parts are transparent, if not all, I can see many parts and still look through them as transparent.¹²⁹ But even a transparent picture of a finished house can’t show the whole house (Fig. 3.18). Within conventions of realism,

no picture can show all of any ordinary thing that takes up space in three dimensions. I can’t see the back of a chair—even a transparent chair—from in front of it. (Looking at a chair was an exercise in phenomenology for Husserl.) No matter where I stand to look at a chair, I can never see the whole of it all at once. And yet, without seeing its back, I realize it must have a back, and I know, more or less, what I would see if I walked around it to take a look.¹³⁰

Figure 3.18 A Transparent House, 2021 Alamy.com ENA2GR

When Hume attacked intelligent design arguments in theology, he doubted that we could observe any truly universal design in order to admire the work of a cosmic designer. The universe, everything there is, isn’t something that we can observe—not because it’s too big but because we can look only from somewhere that must be inside it. Hume applied a different perspectival restriction to our little piece of the universe: planet Earth. He was right: the Starship Enterprise could never warp to a place where Spock could see all of Vulcan at once.¹³¹

Figure 3.19 A Transparent Engine, 2023 Vectorstock 19578239

Unlike illustrations or decorations, cutaway, disassembled, exploded, ghosted and transparent pictures explain what they show by eliminating or adjusting such obstacles to vision, often by leaving things out rather than putting them in. A map that pictured all its terrain—coinciding exactly, point by point and measure for measure—would be perfectly useless: this was what Borges said about a “Map of the Empire whose size was that of the Empire.” Even within my own mental empire, my mind’s eye can’t see a complete picture of anything in the material world—in the strict sense of ‘complete.’ Not impossible but still difficult are incomplete visualizations of ordinary natural or artificial things that people often see—things like houses that are more complex than a two-dimensional chiliagon. And yet, up to a point, people can visualize complex solid things like houses that have many parts. Some owners of cars powered by internal combustion engines can see mentally how the engines work. But how many can visualize a detailed transparent view of such a machine (Fig. 3.19) or of a human body?¹³²

The epochal book that Descartes released in 1641 advertised his meditations with “a little ink put here and there on paper,” like this:

l (left) and c (center) are my tags for these two ink marks. Neither the l mark nor the c, as shown here, could have communicated anything to readers of the Meditations. By themselves they were just ink on paper, not words or pictures. When readers saw the l and c marks in 1641, however, they were not isolated in white space. They were seen in the publisher’s logo on the title page of the Meditations (Fig. 3.20).¹³³ Figure 3.21 shows the l and c marks again, roughly as they were in the logo.

Figure 3.20 Publisher’s Logo, detail 1, 1641 Meditations, title page

Figure 3.21 Publisher’s Logo, detail 2, 1641 Meditations, title page

The marks shown in this Figure are fragments that deliver no meaning apart from their whole. There’s no way to tell that mark l on the left belonged to the second a in the word aeternitati, curled around a phoenix, or that mark c on the right belonged to the bird itself. By convention, a complete letter a—not a fragment like mark l—represented a sound, the first vowel in mater. The sound by itself—isolated like marks l and c—signified nothing. The visible letter a delivered meaning only by combining-with and differing-from other visible signs. Mark l, part of such a sign for the vowel a, had to be completed in order to contribute semiotically to a whole with semantic content—the word aeternitati. And the whole letter a had to be both next to and unlike the two whole ts that surrounded it.

For centuries philosophers had recognized that letters like a and words like aeternitati did their work by convention and situation.¹³⁴ By convention, the alphabetic sign for the first vowel in mater was made of three lines arranged in a certain way. Two longer, slanting verticals joined at the letter’s apex; then, about halfway down, a shorter horizontal, perpendicular to the altitude of the verticals, connected them. These three lines were figural elements of a sign that represented a certain sound, and mark l was a piece of this sign—one of its two longer lines.

Mark c was part of another conventional sign that also represented by unlikeness and juxtaposition, but c’s way of representing was pictorial, not just figural like l’s way. Moreover, c might have resembled what it represented: such claims were plausible, and Descartes took the trouble to contest them. A less credible notion would have been that mark l partly resembled the sound represented fully by a whole letter a. And yet students of the Hebrew alphabet claimed that the Bible’s sacred letters were meaningful even part by part.¹³⁵

Figure 3.22 Publisher’s Logo, detail 3, 1641 Meditations, title page

In one way, elements of mark c—half-a-dozen verticals, roughly parallel and slightly curved—were like mark l as part of the letter a: all these parts were darker ink on lighter paper. Moreover, just as the letter a needed its figural difference from the letter t in order to represent a different sound, so likewise—in order to represent a different bodily shape—the darker lines of mark c on the phoenix’s neck needed their pictorial difference from lighter space above them on the phoenix’s head (Fig. 3.22). The logo’s artist kept a space under the phoenix’s eye bright and flat by leaving it un-inked, in contrast to lines inked below the bird’s head to darken its neck as it curved backward into shade. By convention, the flat lines of mark c signified a shape that broke through the plane of the paper, just as the silent lines of letter a, also by convention, signified a sound that traveled through space.

No one ever saw such lines in nature—neither in a letter a nor on a bird’s neck. These were flat marks, artificial and conventional, on flat paper—conventions that readers of picture books had to learn. Explanatory images (Figs 3.1, 3.7, 3.8, 3.9, 3.41, 3.42, 3.54, 4.1) in picture books by Descartes relied on these conventions, which readers had learned from other picture books, just as they had learned to read words from books printed by machines. This learning enabled them to share what they had seen and had read with other members of epoptic communities.¹³⁶

9 An Old Order of Picturing

In one way, pictures that Leonardo drew on paper were just like every picture in every medieval manuscript: none was reproduced mechanically until much later. The technology was there, however. Leonardo could have had drawings reproduced in many copies soon after he made them—and the images might have been more than just presentable. Imagine them engraved by someone with Martin Schongauer’s skill! (See Fig. 3.25.) But few of Leonardo’s contemporaries saw the pictures in his notebooks: they went unpublished until the nineteenth century. Moreover, before the modern era, tradition kept even famous paintings like his Mona Lisa from public view. Before the nineteenth century it wasn’t possible—according to Benjamin—“to pry such an object from its shell, to destroy its aura.”¹³⁷

No medieval painter acquired a personal aura—nothing like the halo that Leonardo’s contemporaries bestowed on him—so there could have been no such prying into medieval artistry. But works of art have survived from that era and have kept the explanatory skills of artists visible—in exploded views like those that Leonardo drew (Fig. 3.15), for example. Inventories of technique grew as arists found more and better ways to look inside or underneath, to see big things from far away and small things up close.¹³⁸

In earlier times, medieval artists had learned to make pictures better by cutting away and by disassembling, by flaying and sectioning, by making obstacles transparent and scaling things to suggest size. Artists who never saw a printed book made pictures of three-dimensional constructions in progress, of machines in operation and bodies in motion: they used two-dimensional images that implied other dimensions of depth and time. They captured complexity by drawing in fine detail, and they emphasized clarity with simple schematics. Before anyone had microscopes, they pictured small things beyond the reach of ordinary vision. They used labels to name parts of pictures and to connect pictures with texts in orderly ways. They made pictures look friendly: they showed icons of happy suns beaming their rays, and they put human faces on kings and saints that familiarized viewers with heroes remote in time and exalted in status.

Once such a picture was finished, however, no one ever saw an exact copy of it—exact in the ordinary way that a page of a printed book, once printing was invented, could exactly duplicate a meaningful pattern of light and dark. Earlier drawings and paintings, which could be seen reliably only at their own wheres and whens, had no epoptic extensions.

Eventually, by the time Descartes finished his Optics, enough pictures had been extended in this way—reproduced mechanically in large enough numbers—to reach many observers, who applied new norms of credibility. “Words are but wind,” said an adage from this era, “but seeing is believing.” Careful thinkers like Descartes, wary of mere belief and hoping for counter-adages, would have been disappointed with “seeing’s believing, but feeling’s the truth” from the same anthology of proverbs. Feelings, whether haptic or emotional, registered even lower than believing on Plato’s epistometer. And later, in Benjamin’s day, pictures would be prized more for cash-value than truth-value: “a picture is worth a thousand words,” said merchants during World War I. Leonardo would have agreed but for reasons of his own.¹³⁹

Leonardo, Michelangelo, Raphael and their contemporaries were heroes in a renaissance fable—told by Giorgio Vasari a generation after Raphael—about liberating pictorial light from medieval dungeons. The fact is that all three continued a medieval practice that Leonardo perfected: putting pictures on paper by hand. The practice kept evolving in modern and post-modern times, but no one surpassed Leonardo, who shared a birthday with the printing press. He grew up when printed books were novelties but some materials for drawing on paper were as they had been for centuries. Leonardo was born in 1452, Michelangelo in 1475 and Raphael in 1483. Raphael has been credited with designs for Hypnerotomachia, a printed picture book like none other (Fig. 3.17): imagining pictures for this technologized fantasy would have made him—unlike Leonardo—complicit in the mechanical displacement of manuscript art.¹⁴⁰

Artists had excelled at drawing and painting long before Leonardo. Even those with little skill or opportunity helped develop techniques of picturing and applied them to many different subjects. Books that scribes copied over and over, like Bibles, were regular occasions for picturing, and choices had to be made about visual presentation. Would pictures be holy if they showed Adam and Eve naked (nudus) in the Garden? How big was the snake (serpens) that tempted them? What color was the fruit (fructus) that they ate? How to depict the tower (turris) of Babel under construction? Did giants (gigantes) see with two eyes or one (like a cyclops) when they roamed the earth? Which animals (animantia) did Noah rescue, and what did his ark (arca) look like? Did it have sails? And where to show the columns (columnae) breaking in Dagon’s temple when Samson pulled them down?¹⁴¹

The words of scripture were sacred and indisputably correct, but what things did the words name? This was a question that makers of pictures had to answer. Their drawings and paintings showed things in basic classes—natural/artificial, organic/inorganic, human/non-human—as they came on stage in opening scenes of the biblical drama. But the Bible said little to distinguish the mechanical from the non-mechanical: no machina entered the saga until halfway through the last book of the Torah.¹⁴²

Nonetheless, Christian readers of scripture had reasons—both scriptural and non-scriptural—to look at machinery. Among multitudinous pictures in medieval documents, depictions of mechanical equipment—especially gear to put buildings up, like the Tower of Babel—represented physical complexity and sometimes explained it. These images and others not only showed things of various kinds but also presented sights of various types along with various ways of seeing: above and below, abstract and concrete, hidden and revealed, impossible and possible, inside and outside, labeled and unlabeled, moving and static, overhead and underneath, permanent and temporary. Pictures of buildings and equipment for building—observed in cutaway, disassembled, exploded, ghosted, scaled, transparent and other carefully wrought views—were especially good for technical explaining. A few such likenesses have survived from very long ago—wall paintings from Egypt of the pharaohs and reliefs in stone from Rome of the Caesars.¹⁴³

Villard d’Honnecourt’s superb pictures of machinery are more recent. His album of architectural, engineering and other drawings, assembled by 1250, collected hundreds of images on 33 pieces of parchment. On one side of a leaf, Villard crowded a hydraulic saw, a jack hoist and a trip-wired crossbow alongside a platform for a rotating angel and an automated eagle designed to turn its head (Fig. 3.23, lower left). In a crude transparency, he made the automaton’s rods and gears visible behind its wings, and he added a caption to state the drawing’s purpose: “how to make an eagle’s head turn toward a deacon when he reads the Gospel.”¹⁴⁴

Figure 3.23 Medieval Machinery, Villard d’Honnecourt, before 1250 Alamy.com HTNMXW

Villard made his pictures on trips to a number of sites—Chartres, Laon, Reims, Soissons and other places in France and elsewhere—when architecture and other arts were in their Gothic glory. Most medieval artists had no such special occasions for doing their work. Readers who could pay wanted illustrations for yet another prayer book: this was reason enough to make pretty pictures. Tasks for drawing were sometimes technical, however, and they made different demands than Villard’s mechanical designs could handle. In Tuscany around 1400, Mariano di Iacopo (Taccola) and his followers made pictures for technical treatises good enough to bear comparison—distantly—with Leonardo’s machines.¹⁴⁵

Most medieval picturing was not at all technical, however, neither its motives nor its products. The Flower of Virtue explained nothing physical: it was an anthology of moral edification meant only to improve character and save souls. Shortly after 1300, a pious friar made the first of several dozen versions produced by later scribes and artists in nearly a hundred surviving manuscripts. These were ethical bestiaries, where animals were mascots of virtues. Courage was a roaring lion, temperance was a plodding camel, and busy little insects—bees and ants—stood for justice and prudence.¹⁴⁶

Figure 3.24 A Virtuous Medieval Ant, Fior di Virtù, after 1350 Biblioteca Nazionale Centrale, Firenze II.IV.125, 14v

An ant in a fourteenth-century manuscript had large wings, prominent eyes, wispy antennae and one too many segments: four instead of three (Fig. 3.24). The parts of some old-world ants, which grew to an inch or so, were easy to see, and wings sprouted at breeding time were hard to miss. Whoever drew this ant, with or without a lens to enlarge it, had taken a close look—despite the extra segment. Hand-drawn pictures of insects—diligently observed yet short on accuracy, clarity and completeness—marked boundaries of visibility that no one crossed with satisfactory results until artists made pictures with microscopes (Figs 3.47, 3.48, 3.50).¹⁴⁷

Meanwhile, no benefits of observation reached beyond direct observers except through verbal description or through carving, drawing, molding, painting, weaving and other handicrafts. Until artisans fashioned woodblocks to make woodcuts around 1400, there was no technology of picturing—except insofar as minting small coins and shaping pots were such technologies. This absence alone made the visual experience of medieval people unimaginably unlike our own. And even after printing was invented, the most convulsive influences of mechanical reproduction on picturing—as Benjamin envisaged them—were still far in the future.¹⁴⁸

Figure 3.25 Peonies, Martin Schongauer, c.1472 J. Paul Getty Museum, 92.GC.80, from artstor.org

Nonetheless, and lacking exact dates for pictorial causes and effects, it’s safe to say that techniques (not technologies) of drawing and painting by hand had progressed by the time pages fell from the first printing presses. A sublime example was a little watercolor, ten inches high, of three peonies that Martin Schongauer painted from life around 1472 (Fig. 3.25). Later images of flowers—innumerable images made with realist intent before and after photography arrived—have all been different from Schongauer’s peonies but, by norms of craft, none can have been better. At some time between 1400 and 1550, more or less, picturing by hand in European conventions of realism became unsurpassable by any test of craft, leaving fashion, style, taste, individual expression, special applications and so on as the main discriminators. Schongauer was a hero in this tale. Leonardo was a giant.¹⁴⁹

Figure 3.26 Ladders in a Triangle, Tractato d’Abacho, 1480–1 Biblioteca Medicea Laurenziana, Firenze, Acq. e Doni 154, 222r

The marvel of Leonardo’s achievement—by Europe’s aesthetic norms—makes it all the more notable that so much of his most admired work was practical and technical. Few viewers have yearned for a look at disassembled gears (Fig. 3.15). And yet Leonardo’s mechanical drawings now get the kind of attention paid to sumptuous paintings by Caravaggio or Giorgione or Titian. The practical pictures in Leonardo’s notebooks had medieval ancestors, and some of them, like drawings by Toccola’s school in Tuscany, were works of aesthetic as well as technical art.

Other hand-made pictures had no pretensions. The little manuals called ‘abacus books’ were rarely written in Latin: teachers of arithmetic used them with students from families who wanted careers in commercial trades for their children. A plain, crisp painting in a Tractato d’abbacho from 1480 showed a young man—a hero for such students—leaning a ladder against another ladder attached to the side of a wall (Fig. 3.26). Counting rungs on the ladders, which were two sides of a right triangle, was easy. To estimate the distance between the ladders at the bottom, it was also easy to plug numbers of rungs into familiar Pythagorean proportions. The image—simple and memorable—taught such calculations quickly and concretely.¹⁵⁰

Figure 3.27 Triangle, Oresme, De configurationibus, 1500 Florence, Biblioteca Nazionale Centrale, Conv. soppr. J.IX.26, fol. 32v

Not concrete at all—yet also quick and eventually more powerful—was a different triangle (Fig. 3.27) roughly drawn for a book On Configuring Qualities by Nicole Oresme, who died in 1382. Oresme wrote this about such pictures:

Except for numbers, everything that can be measured is imaged (imaginor) in the manner of continuous quantity. To measure it, then, one must image points, lines and surfaces or their properties in which, as Aristotle holds, measure or proportion is found primarily. In other things, however, this is recognized in a likeness. . . . Although indivisible points or lines are nothing, one must still depict (fingere) them mathematically in order to recognize measures of things and their proportions. Therefore every increase (intensio) that can be taken in sequence should be imaged by a straight line erected as perpendicular upon some point of an interval underlying (spacium subiectum), so to speak, the thing that can increase: a quality, for example.

Oresme’s triangle showed pictorially how “something that can be measured”—unless it was a number—could be “imaged in the manner of continuous quantity.” If the base (ab) of his triangle was continuous time, measured as a quantified quality from vertex a, another such quality, like constant motion, could be the altitude (ac), and a third side (cb) could be a different quality, like motion decreasing uniformly to zero at b. Then the area of rectangle abgf, defined by e as the midpoint or mean of cb and equal to the area of triangle acb, would measure distance traveled over time ab. More important for present purposes than Oresme’s reasoning was this drawing, which foreshadowed graphical representations of coordinate geometry used later by successors of Descartes (though not by Descartes himself) to revolutionize mathematical calculation.¹⁵¹

10 Disruptive Creations

In the destabilizing book that Copernicus published in 1543, front matter and prefaces advertised “very convenient tables (tabulae expeditissimae) from which you will be able to calculate”: these were lists of astronomical data, not pictures. Author, publisher and other parties named at the front of the book showed no excitement about pictorial evidence. Buyers who flipped through the book’s first pages would have spotted nothing about pictures until they came to the astronomer’s letter to a pope. Sniping at his critics, Copernicus alluded to Horace and mocked their reliance on planetary eccentrics (Fig. 3.12)—as if they had gone “to different places to get hands, feet, a head and other parts that might be quite well depicted (depicta) yet no match for a single body and also not matching one another in any way, making the assemblage monstrous rather than human.”¹⁵²

Elsewhere this big disruptive book was picture-poor but generous with abstract figures. Satisfactory images had to be both correct (parts put together properly) and accurate (parts matching parts of something else). A printed image of a triangle, all by itself, could be correctly triangular or not. But being accurate or not required something else to be seen and also possibly triangular. All this could happen without regard to conventions of realism. Moreover, in the human world of sights, no one could actually look at what eccentrics or epicycles might be accurate or inaccurate about. Maybe they were just visible analogs of astronomical calculations. Or maybe some were notional images of real paths of planets—purely notional because no one, watching from anywhere at any time, could ever have seen such a path, even if it was calculated correctly.

All Copernican (Fig. 3.12) and some Cartesian (Fig. 3.11) images were near the abstract end of a spectrum of explanatory picturing. Closer to the concrete end were “life-like images” of plants that Leonhart Fuchs described in his herbal of 1542. He had a sharp question for critics who resisted his innovations in botanical picturing:

Who in his right mind would devalue a picture (pictura) that everyone knows to express reality much more clearly than anything sketched (delineo) in words—even words from the most eloquent people? Nature has seen to it, in fact, that all things may be captured in a picture, and that those put before the eyes in paintings or on paper (in tabulis aut charta) go deeper into the mind than those described by words unadorned. Plainly, then, there are many plants which, in the absence of words to describe them in that way, may be recognized at a glance as soon as such pictures can be put before the eyes.

Fuchs wanted his botanical drawings to be so recognizable that “even uneducated people wouldn’t mistake them”: his images had to be instantly familiar to everyone, unlike epicycles or light particles pictured for expert eyes.

Figure 3.28 Wild Spikenard, Leonhart Fuchs, 1542 De historia stirpium, p. 10

His pictures showed plants as plants should have looked, with roots, stems, leaves and flowers in the right shapes, places and postures—all the more convincing if your copy of the book had been colored by hand. The drawings were schematic (Fig. 3.28), however, not really “life-like”: they pictured types rather than specimens. If a specimen of wild spikenard dug from the ground were shown accurately, leaves might be torn, flowers droopy or missing and roots tangled, just as in the wild. Some botanical and anatomical images, called ‘counterfeits,’ were made in just this way: they were replicas of real particulars, not duplicates of a schematic picture made to Fuchs’s standards.

Fuchs had no established taxonomy to rely on when he showed plants as types—not as tokens found in nature. His pictures of typical plants represented kinds, not individuals, by generalizing visually and adding some particulars (a flower that hadn’t yet blossomed) while subtracting others (a broken stem). Like maps that omitted most of their terrain, botanical images in Fuchs’s style were selective about what they showed.¹⁵³

Figure 3.29 Artists Picturing a Plant, Leonhart Fuchs, 1542 De historia stirpium, p. 897

A great artist had already pictured plants in a richer style: in 1503, well before Fuchs published his book, Dürer painted his Great Piece of Turf. Conveying more information than Schongauer’s peonies (Fig. 3.25), this magnificent watercolor showed nine different species as you might come across them next to a path—not lined up in a gardener’s pageant. Dürer aimed to please and impress more than to explicate and instruct. But his didactic books passed his skills on to German artists who helped Fuchs explain botany by picturing. For his part, Fuchs gave his team praise and publicity by closing his herbal with their names and with their likenesses at work (Fig. 3.29).¹⁵⁴

Philosophers now treat their own ancestors like secular saints. They canonize and picture them. For promotion to the Anglophone canon, what should a sage look like?

‘The pictores in Fuchs’s herbal looked careful and diligent. Maybe philosophers should look thoughtful and wise?’

That’s not what the facts show. Reliable depictions of philosophical faces were slim to none from before the fifteenth century.

‘I’ve seen lots of marble Aristotles in museums.’

Me too: museums everywhere show portrait busts of Aristotle, Epicurus, Plato and other ancients. But they’re almost all Roman copies of Greek public statuary that represented types of civic virtue. The heads were originally perched on top of elevated bodies that stood or sat on bases. Getting close enough for a good look was hard. And the purpose of these statues was memorial, not archival or psychological. Sculptors weren’t trying to record faces accurately or fix personalities in stone.

‘Next time I imagine an old Stoic in a cloak, I’ll supply a face of my own. What about medieval philosophers—friars like Thomas Aquinas under their cowls? I’ve seen Saint Thomas painted on a wall—bare-headed, tonsured, haloed and using a Muslim philosopher for a footstool.’

Don’t let the details distract you. Visual anonymity was also the medieval norm. Artists who painted pictures of Aquinas and Ibn Rushd had no way to know what their subjects looked like. Domenico Ghirlandaio made the first convincing picture of an important philosopher shortly before 1490 in Florence. It’s a credible portrait of Marsilio Ficino because Ghirlandaio knew how to capture the philosopher’s character. He painted him with great skill in a scene that tourists now pay to see every day. For the Anglophone canon, however, all this attention hasn’t saved Ficino from oblivion.¹⁵⁵

‘What about Descartes? I know what he looked like . . . don’t I? Have I been fooled?’

Five likenesses survive by people who saw or could have seen him alive. One that you may have seen is a Louvre portrait linked with Frans Hals but not painted by him. Frans van Schooten, who had helped Descartes illustrate the 1637 treatises, engraved the earliest likeness (Fig. 3.30) in 1644.¹⁵⁶ Printed and digital images of thinkers who rose to the canon after Descartes are now widely recognized. Pictures show them as European males, well-dressed, middle-aged or older and serious—but not especially wise or thoughtful.

Figure 3.30 Descartes, Frans Van Schooten, 1644 Descartes (1644), tp

‘What else do the portraits show? Suppose we had no idea what Descartes, Kant or Nietzsche looked like. Without the faces presiding over their arguments, would we respond in the same way?’

What if Kant looked like Nietzsche? Would the sage of Königsberg make the grade as an icon of Enlightenment? What if Nietzsche looked like a young G. E. Moore? Would he do for a believable Antichrist?

‘Imagine this: every website that shows a picture of Kant or Nietzsche reverses them. It’s tempting—though probably not true—to say that no one would notice. The history of philosophy might go viral for a few minutes.’

I bet it would. The visual evidence at stake would be evidence like any other. If Kant’s pigtail and Nietzsche’s moustache were fungible, what else might have been switched in the cloud? But once the epistemic basics were secure, would it matter that Descartes looked shifty in Van Schooten’s engraving (Fig. 3.30) yet clear-eyed and confident in the picture that Hals didn’t paint?

The earliest printed books, ‘incunables’ published by the end of 1500, did little to show what such philosophers looked like. The pictures of thinkers in the Nuremberg Chronicles of 1493 were exceptional in number but not otherwise. This very large book—336 sheets of paper, about 18 inches by 13 and over 3 inches thick—set the standard for picture books in the grand manner by illustrating all of human history since the creation with 1,809 woodcuts. The publishers could afford only 645 woodblocks, however, so they used them more than once. Two of the sages depicted were Socrates and Hermes Trismegistus: one historical by our standards, the other mythical. But readers of the Chronicles saw the same personage, respectably dressed in fifteenth-century style, under their different names (Figs 3.31 and 3.32).

Figures 3.31 and 3.32 Socrates and Hermes Trismegistus, Hartman Schedel, 1493, Nuremberg Chronicles, fols lxxiiir, lxxivv

Other images in the Chronicles depicted things that many Europeans had actually seen around 1493: cities, for example. Visitors to Florence or residents might have recognized its urban panorama spread across two folios of this big volume. But elsewhere in the book they would have found ‘Marseilles’ in one place and the same cityscape labeled ‘Padua’ in another—puzzling for people who knew what both cities looked like.¹⁵⁷

‘OK: some people who bought the Chronicles had gone to both cities or lived there. But none of them had met Trismegistus or Socrates, and nobody was fooled by the identical pictures. What was the point?’

The point was to pay for fewer woodblocks. As a matter of marketing, pictures in duplicate or triplicate were better than no pictures at all: all of them made books more attractive. Makers of books realized that people liked to look at pictures. Even though pictureless books were cheaper, publishers invested in picture books because they might bring in more buyers.¹⁵⁸

‘When customers actually looked through the Chronicles and noticed that Socrates and Trismegistus were identical, didn’t they want their money back?’

Probably not. Any human face on a dead philosopher was better than no face at all.

Picturing the ancient dead as recognizably human familiarized readers with deep history and set the stage for credible visualizing in the present about other past or distant things. Pictures of unfamiliar plants and animals, drawn for purposes of scientific explanation, were no more or less costly to print than imagined likenesses of old faces. Publishers who paid for these images economized by re-using woodblocks, and printers sometimes used old pictures for new books without asking authors whether to print them or where to put them. After the Chronicles appeared, Fuchs and other authors complained about these money-saving shortcuts, but publishers ignored them. Books by Descartes also used repurposed pictures.¹⁵⁹

Imagine that a woodcut Socrates in the Chronicles was not identical to Hermes Trismegistus (Figs. 3.31–32) but instead pictured Plato’s teacher as accurately as Van Schooten’s engraving showed Descartes (Fig. 3.30). The person in the engraving had a big nose. Socrates would need a snub nose, absent in Fig. 3.31.¹⁶⁰ But plastic surgery by woodcut, accurate or not, would have missed the point for Fuchs and others who gave new explanatory power to anatomical, botanical, mechanical, zoological and other technical images. They generalized visually from sights of individuals by ignoring details, like a snub nose, in favor of blended findings from multiple diachronic observations. Skeletons shown by Vesalius in his art of anatomy, as they haunted his pages in 1543, were the bones of no one in particular (Fig. 3.36). These stripped-down bodies were neither generic fabrications, like a woodcut Trismegistus, nor particularized likenesses, like a cagey Descartes.

Fuchs had his herbal printed in 1542. A year later, Copernicus published De revolutionibus and Vesalius went to press with his Structure of the Human Body. Another stunning picture book by Georg Bauer (Agricola) on mining and metallurgy followed (posthumously) in 1556. By this time, roughly a century after printing had started in Europe, the mechanical reproduction of scientific images had reached new levels of disruptive effectiveness.¹⁶¹

When Vesalius introduced his book, he anticipated Benjamin’s point about transporting experience by picturing—in particular, the sobering experience of seeing a body cut apart. He presented his Fabrica

to those prevented from seeing an anatomy at first hand, since it runs through . . . each part of the human body in ample detail, using descriptions made by dissecting bodies dead and alive along with images (imagines) of all the parts placed in the framework (contextus) of the text in order to present the dissected body to the eyes (oculi), as it were, of those who observe nature’s works.

Like Fuchs, Vesalius insisted that such images explained his findings better than any words. An ornate picture of a crowd watching an anatomical performance—starring Vesalius, a female cadaver and a bony grim reaper—framed the title of his Fabrica in its first edition. The page showed spectators packing a hall in Padua big enough to admit the public. Space was limited, however, and only a few could actually be admitted to the show: hence the anatomist’s project of putting his art “before the eyes” of “those who cannot view an anatomy.” His explicit purpose was to explain remotely by picturing, and printed books quickly carried his pictorial explanations across Europe.¹⁶²

Not many readers of anatomy books ever witnessed an anatomy, a sight that was academically, culturally and psychologically disruptive. Vesalius was not yet thirty years old in 1543—resented by older professors for his upstart performances. Just a few years earlier, dissecting a human body was still rare enough that the young anatomist had to collect a femur “in the middle of the night” from a corpse rotting on a gallows. Meanwhile his day job prospered.

Figure 3.33 Dissecting a Hand, Vesalius, 1543 Fabrica, sig.*6v

Nothing could be physically closer to anyone than what his knife uncovered—body parts always so completely concealed that seeing them exposed was irresistible. His huge volume of 700 pages with 200 revelatory woodcuts was expensive, yet worth the price for buyers who soon called for an update. His book revealed sights that few people had seen—pieces of human flesh cut out for study. Astonished viewers peered inside a cadaver’s vitals and saw blood vessels laid out for scrutiny.

One picture (Fig. 3.33), uncanny and enticing, showed the anatomist in his best suit at the age of twenty-eight, caught in the act of uncovering body parts recently hidden under the skin of a dead man’s hand. Viewers saw the anatomist holding a piece of the lifeless hand after his own living fingers had peeled the cadaver’s skin away with knives left lying on the table. A piece of paper said what the picture showed: “muscles to move fingers.” And a motto under the anatomist’s expert right hand advised surgeons to use their tools “pleasantly, swiftly, safely.” Every part of the picture sent a moral or explanatory message.¹⁶³

Pictures can be more than pleasant, swift and safe, can’t they? Maybe informative or even inspiring? But these pictures, which were productive scientifically, were also disruptive in other ways and not really so safe, right?

‘Not so safe. I guess that’s right. Galileo’s pictures of the heavens (Fig. 3.14) inspired some people, like Descartes. But they threatened others, like John Donne. Vesalius inspired later anatomists by picturing the human body in convincing, informative, disruptive detail.’

Figure 3.34 A Pregnant Sow Prepared for Vivisection, Vesalius, 1543 Fabrica, p. 661

What about everyone else—people with no experience of anatomy who looked at the Fabrica? What about you? Suppose you had opened the book up right after it was published? You’re a philosopher, not a physician. Imagine you were there in 1543 and knew nothing about anatomy. Then you paged through the book and saw flesh peeled back, exposing a brain. You turned another page and innards spilled out of a torso. Would sights like those have inspired you?

‘Hard to say. Too many ceteris paribus variables. Without much on those pages to help me in a philosophical way, I might have felt frightened or threatened. Maybe worse than threatened . . . disgusted and horrified.’

We’ve both looked through the Fabrica. It’s full of disruptions. Can you say what disturbs you most right now? Guts displayed? Brains uncovered?

‘What gets to me most is a picture that shows how to set up a vivisection’ (Fig. 3.34).

Vesalius wasn’t bothered. Like other anatomists of his day, he valued vivisection as a technique. He thought that some observations—physiological and neurological especially—could be made only by dissecting a living animal. His woodcut of a vivisection showed a pregnant sow on her back, fastened to a plank by ropes and a chain. A dog could be used instead, he said. But pigs were better than dogs, he noted, because a pig would keep squealing beyond the time when a dog would stop barking.¹⁶⁴

‘Screams for timing experiments? That’s awful!’

The instructions were callous, I agree. And the picture itself is repulsive. My first reaction to the “freshly dead” man in the Optics (Fig. 3.9) was the same—though not so strong. Until I checked the words that came after the picture—checked them two or three times—I thought I was looking at a dead man and an emptied eye-socket, not at a stand-in for myself.

Even at first sight, the small size of that ambiguous picture—less than a fifth of a page—diminished its disruptiveness, and Descartes quickly clarified what he meant. Then he showed the image six more times, after introducing it with instructions to “take the eye from a man freshly dead or, lacking this, from a cow or some other large animal.” He had been doing “anatomies on the heads of various animals” since the early 1630s, so he knew that a cow’s large eye was easier to handle than a human’s.¹⁶⁵ He also described non-human animals to Mersenne as unfeeling automata—even though “we’re so used to being convinced that they feel (sentir) as we do.” On the same day, writing again to the priest about fluids in arteries, veins and intestines, he reported experiments on “dogs opened up while alive.” Whether he observed someone else’s vivisections or did his own cutting is unknown.¹⁶⁶

Before Vesalius showed his picture of a vivisection, he had already taken human remains from the site of an execution. Descartes probably never ran such risks. In towns and cities where he lived, neighborhood butchers had scraps, like eyes from a cow, to sell or throw away. Traffic in cadavers passed through the university in Leiden, where a new anatomy theater opened just before he was born.¹⁶⁷

Was that where Descartes saw the “man freshly dead” that he described in his Optics? Did he dissect the man’s eye himself? Had the man been executed? What was his crime? Such questions are disruptive. The “freshly dead” person not shown in the Optics, mutilated for body parts, had recently looked back at other people in Leiden through living eyes. Jacob van Meurs, who made engravings around 1655 for Thomas Bartholin’s Anatomia, showed other dead eyes—no longer windows for a soul—in full frontal disfigurement. The left eye of Bartholin’s cadaver, dangling from an optic nerve, was mostly hidden, but the right eye stared back at the anatomist in dazed sadness (Fig. 3.35).

Figure 3.35 Disruptive Eyes, Jacob van Meurs after Karl van Mander III, 1655 Bartholin, Anatomia, (1655), p. 343

The last chapter of the first book of the Fabrica was an inventory of body parts—bones to be numbered and labeled. “I can tell all my bones,” the Psalmist wailed; “people look and stare upon me.” To guide such staring beneath the flesh and make it informative, Vesalius brought three complete skeletons on stage; the second was a Yorick resting its fingers on another Yorick’s skull (Fig. 3.36). The anatomist put three letters on top of the pensive skeleton’s cranium: a Roman a between a Greek α and β. A few pages later he keyed a list of descriptions to these letters: the a labeled a ‘suture’ to its left; α and β marked places on either side of the suture. The descriptions were technical but accommodating, and they matched pictures nearby: elsewhere in the Fabrica, Vesalius kept words closer to images by putting labeled lists of descriptions on pages facing his pictures.¹⁶⁸

Figures 3.36 and 3.37 A Yorick by Vesalius, 1543, a Skull by Casseri, 1645 Fabrica, p. 164; Tabulae, p. 15

To create his woodcuts, Vesalius worked with Jan Stephan van Calcar, perhaps a student of Titian, and with other artists. Because of what this team accomplished, anatomists could show surgeons where to cut closer and how to make their work less risky. Giulio Cesare Casseri and Adriaan van den Spiegel, both working before Descartes, made finer anatomical observations, took notes on them and published them in books. A skull (Fig. 3.37) made by Casseri’s engraver has had closer inspection than the gazing Yorick’s head (Fig. 3.36) in the Fabrica: more sites on the skull—two dozen, not counting teeth—have labels. As printed books proliferated after 1650, they acquainted readers with detailed systems of visual information. Labels drifted into data overload as avalanches of letters and numerals buried viewers under facts. But when Descartes used conventions of labeling in the Optics and elsewhere, his devices were still fresher and simpler.¹⁶⁹

Figure 3.38 Skeleton Woodcut, Richard Helain, 1493 Bayerische Staatsbibliothek BV036653449

In 1493 Richard Helain had published a woodcut sheet that tagged 52 bones in the human body with identifiers (Fig. 3.38). This eminent physician (mis)counted 248 bones in all, including 8 big enough to name in the skull. His woodcut was the first printed picture of a skeleton, and Hartman Schedel—also a physician and the impresario behind the Nuremberg Chronicles—owned several copies. Schedel could have used the image for medical consultations. Quite different pictures seen by him, Helain and many others had not been made for specialists—icons of Jesus, the Virgin and saints in hundreds of thousands of copies, maybe more: these images carried everyman’s prayers to heaven. Anyone could calculate pains of martyrdom by counting arrows on paper in a woodcut torso of St. Sebastian. But the suffering in the Savior’s crucifixion was beyond reckoning. Woodcuts of his infinite torment had a special name: ‘calvaries,’ from calvaria in the Latin Gospels.¹⁷⁰

Helain, Schedel and other learned people realized that calvaria translated a Syriac or Hebrew word for ‘skull,’ the name of the place near Jerusalem where Jesus suffered on the cross. But what place looked like a skull? Other body parts—an arm of a sea, a foothill, finger lakes, a mountain’s shoulder—were also places. People saw fingers, arms and shoulders—everyday sights—in the lay of the land, in each other and in themselves. Skulls were usually hidden from view, however, even though artists had drawn, painted, sculpted and assembled them in mosaics since ancient times. Nonetheless, after millennia of visualizing human bones, the state of the art in 1493 was Helain’s woodcut. Just 50 years later, in 1543, Vesalius produced his “bones of the human body” (Fig. 3.36). There’s no better way to gauge the astonishing speed and power of this transformation—this advance in scientific picturing by accumulated experience, technological progress and refinement of artistic skill—than to look at these different depictions of skeletons side by side.¹⁷¹

What Vesalius did for biology and the body, Agricola—who also studied medicine—did for geology and machinery. He divided his big book On Mining (De re metallica) into twelve parts on finding precious metals, digging them up and using machines and industrial processes to refine them by assaying, roasting, crushing, washing, smelting and separating. Georg Bauer called himself Agricola (both names mean ‘farmer’) to display his classical learning. But the ancients had disappointed him: they wrote about mining without “untangling” their words. To improve his new technology, Agricola decided not to dig deeper in dictionaries. Instead he not only wrote his own descriptions of machines and excavations, he also “hired illustrators (pictores) to print likenesses (effigies exprimere) of them so that things signified by words and yet unknown, whether now or in the future, would not encounter this same difficulty in being recognized.”¹⁷²

Mining was a hidden craft, mastered in legend by dwarves and dactyls who worked far from human eyes—high up on mountains and deep down in caverns. Agricola revealed mysteries of mining by cutting away hillsides that concealed this primordial labor, by making the earth transparent and by disassembling the machinery that replaced mythic toil with technology. A picture (Fig. 3.39) from Agricola’s book showed the ground—in a view from nowhere—sliced through to expose a tunnel where fire burned to break rocks. A miner below, blinded by smoke, hurried away while other workers above trimmed wood to feed the fire. A lip of ground covering the tunnel bisected the two-story image and defined a cutaway view. But Agricola’s visual intent was less clear in some of his geological pictures. Clumsy drawing made it hard to tell whether earth had been excavated from a hillside or whether the soil in front a vein of metal was shown as transparent.¹⁷³

Figure 3.39 Miners Above a Tunnel and Below, Agricola, 1556 De re metallica, p. 80

Figure 3.40 Mining Machinery Disassembled, Agricola, 1556 De re metallica, p. 234

Agricola’s pictures of machines were complicated but easier to read than his geology. Disassembled parts were on view in a large image of multi-purpose gear for crushing, grinding, cleaning and washing gold ore before mixing it with mercury (Fig. 3.40). Below and to the right of a large waterwheel (labeled A under the third paddle from the top), K was a smaller, circular, hollow millstone set in F, which was larger, square and looked solid. On the ground in front of K and F, both pieces were taken apart to show K’s bottom rounded to fit into G, a space scooped out in F, which turned out not to be solid. Disassembling the apparatus explained how it worked by separating its components and displaying them for study.¹⁷⁴

Descartes used cutaway and disassembled views like Agricola’s. He and his draftsmen also tried transparencies—including a variation now called ‘ghosting,’ used twice in the Optics for identical images of a sightless person walking with two sticks, one in each hand. To put the sticks in motion, an artist left their borders broken or ‘dotted’ beyond the point where they crossed (Fig. 3.7). Pictures in the Principia applied the same convention more effectively to explain centrifugal motion, less effectively to show the pineal gland mechanized in De homine (Fig. 4.1).¹⁷⁵

Figures 3.41 and 3.42 Simple and Complicated Lens Machinery, Descartes, 1637 Dioptrique, pp. 143, 147

The same pictorial devices explained lens-making in the Optics. Descartes started with the simpler of two machines (Fig. 3.41) for making models or dies out of metal, not lenses out of glass. KLM was a “ruler” (reigle) that passed at an angle through AB, a roller at the top of the picture. As the roller turned, the ruler’s hard tip scored a hyperbola in CG, the upper of two plates below the roller. The roller was solid, but a dotted line ghosted the ruler’s path through it. A few pages later, where the machinery was more complex, ghosting and transparency revealed mechanical workings between AB at the top and FE farther down (Fig. 3.42). In this same series of pictures and elsewhere, Descartes also used disassembled views to levitate parts of his apparatus in explanatory space.¹⁷⁶

Lens-grinding machinery advertised by the Optics stimulated efforts to make the gear work. But Descartes gave up after three years. Trials injured a craftsman who tried to improve the philosopher’s designs, and his response was haughty: “the hands of workers can’t go where my reasoning has gone.” He saw the machines being tested as flawed applications of a flawless geometry, not as implements with a practical purpose. No doubt he realized that novelties sometimes failed to catch on even if everyone had a use for them. John Harington, a poet at Queen Elizabeth’s court, had recently published two whimsical yet plausible sketches of a flush toilet: they showed one view “all in sunder,” the other “all put together,” of plumbing both disassembled and assembled (Fig. 3.43). Harington’s enterprise attracted no investors, however, and the universal needs that motivated him remained unmet for two more centuries.¹⁷⁷

Figure 3.43 A Flush Toilet, Harington, 1596 Anatomie, sigs Liiiir–Lvv

Before Vesalius dissected bodies to explain their biological machinery with pictures, Leonardo excelled at drawing the human body as if it were engineered. And Agricola’s pictures were anatomies of mechanisms and mines. Before Descartes came to Leiden—when students were already playing tennis on the University’s court—officials had funded another building for anatomists, a Theatrum Anatomicum like the new one built around the same time in Padua, where Vesalius had taught. The picture at the front of his Fabrica was splendidly theatrical, though he had also dissected in smaller, plainer spaces (Fig. 3.33). Experience confirmed that taking a human body apart was a crowd-drawing event like a play, a religious procession or an execution. A special ‘viewery’—a theatron from theaomai, ‘look at’—was the right place for this somber spectacle.¹⁷⁸

By the time Leiden opened its anatomical Theatrum in the 1590s, theaters of machinery were best-sellers in picture books that displayed civil and military engineering for non-engineers. The first such volume, published around 1571, was Jacques Besson’s Livre des instruments mathematiques et mechaniques, followed by two posthumous editions in 1578 from the same publisher: one with long, learned notes in Latin, the other briskly annotated in French, and both under the same title, Theatrum instrumentorum et machinarum. According to an editor of the 1578 revisions, Besson had more plans for this pioneering book: “he had hoped to add several pictures (tabulae) to his work and affix an explanation (explicatio), for the benefit of educated people, in order to instruct those with less experience in mathematics.” The book’s Latin title gave a stately name—‘theaters of machines’—to a new genre, which Salomon de Caus, Agostino Ramelli, Vittorio Zonca and others promoted with pictorial collections of their own.¹⁷⁹

Besson made elaborate, ingenious pictures mainly to entertain but also to show off his skill as a designer of useful devices, like machinery for raising water (Fig. 3.44). “By way of a lever and counterweight,” he explained, “one can, by pulling and pushing, raise water from a place as deep as human effort (main d’homme) can reach.” To make this mechanism more visible and plausible, he gave readers two views that no one could actually see: one by cutting away the well’s housing above ground, the other by exposing its shaft below.¹⁸⁰

Figure 3.44 Cutaways Through Artifice and Nature, Jacques Besson, 1578 Theatrum instrumentorum et machinarum, pl. 49

Heinrich Zeising from Leipzig imitated Besson’s pictures and turned his mechanical theater into vaudeville. Zeising died in 1607 soon after launching his project, but his partners kept going. For thirty more years—while Descartes lived in Germany and the Netherlands—these volumes in German kept finding buyers. To help readers see through walls and other obstacles, Zeising and his associates took what they learned from earlier theaters of machinery and produced extravaganzas to delight the eye.¹⁸¹

The Zeising project applied a number of different pictorial techniques to single explanatory images, where less familiar devices like ghosting and nesting enhanced ordinary perspective and shading. One image required a book to be thicker so that an enlarged picture could be folded in: the authors persuaded a publisher to print an outsized page that would show machinery rising through three floors of a building. An ingenious design elsewhere in the book for clockwork fruit would not have startled readers who had already seen mechanical shrubbery and statues moving in automated waterworks. A stylish Adam played a prank on a stylish Eve with hydraulic fruit: he handed her an apple that sprayed water (Fig. 3.45). The Zeising artisans took their toy seriously: they handled transparency, disassembly and a cutaway effectively (Fig. 3.46; cf. 16, 18–19, 39, 44, 56). The consequential side of this visual joke for Descartes would have been the hardware—hidden while being revealed—inside a mechanical simulacrum of an organic original.¹⁸² The butt of the humor couldn’t see inside the fruit’s copper shell—or through a real apple’s skin. But drawing this casing as transparent let readers see metal parts inside, yet not alive at the core like the apple that Eve gave to Adam in Eden.

Figures 3.45 and 3.46 A Joke with a Clockwork Apple, Heinrich Zeising and Others, 1614 Theatri machinarum funfter Theil, p. 102, pl. 23

11 Size, Scale and Magnification

The Zeising project that displayed technologies in order to entertain and explain also had aesthetic ambitions. Joris Hoefnagel shared them as a painter of beautiful pictures, and he achieved more. First a merchant, later an artist, he started with miniatures for the wealthy and went on to pictures of many kinds, from allegories, emblems and mythological scenes to plants, animals, landscapes, maps and other subjects from nature. His botanicals in color were extraordinary. Around 1596 he finished a minor masterpiece—mushrooms, plants, flowers, fruits, nuts, worms, insects, spiders, scorpions, shells, a frog, a mouse and a sloth, all made to adorn a small album of exquisite calligraphy by an earlier artist. Meanwhile, his son Jacob had taken his father’s techniques into the medium of print to make a masterpiece of his own for reproduction by mechanical means.¹⁸³

Jacob spotlighted a scary beetle, bigger than a pear, in the first picture of his Archetypa. You can count the joints on its thorny legs (Fig. 3.47). Just below, to the right of a spider, was a smaller insect—a bee or a fly (Fig. 3.48). Insect bodies have three parts: head, thorax and abdomen. But Jacob’s engraving of this small animal—maybe a third as long as the beetle’s middle leg—was anatomically fuzzy: no segment was sharply separated. Jacob, like his father and earlier observers of nature who worked without microscopes, could look closely at such things through hand lenses. Nonetheless, for these masters of minute detail, some sights were still out of range or not of interest.¹⁸⁴

Figures 3.47 and 3.48 Details 1 and 2 of Insects by Jacob Hoefnagel, 1592 Archetypa, pl. 1.

The visibility gap had been closing for more than forty years by the time Descartes published his Optics, where he wrote that “little flea glasses (lunetes a puce) made of a single crystal (verre) are used rather commonly everywhere.” Lenses for what we now call ‘reading glasses’ (Fig. 3.49) had been known since the thirteenth century. In the 1590s, Dutch artisans speeded up their development into scientific instruments. When news of optical progress reached the public in 1610, the excitement was about Galileo’s telescope, but the astronomer was also designing microscopes. Later he built the instrument used to make history’s most celebrated picture of bees (Fig. 3.50): others reproduced this image in 1625 to publicize a recently elevated pope, Urban VIII.¹⁸⁵

Figure 3.49 Eyeglasses, Pieter Brueghel the Elder, 1566 Albertina, from ARTstor

Making the bee picture—the first image ever made with a microscope for mechanical reproduction—was the task of Francesco Stelluti, a founder of the Lincei; he and his colleagues called themselves Lynxes because their Academy promoted sharp-eyed science and showed it in pictures. Stelluti partnered with Matthias Greuter, a German engraver working in Italy, to immortalize the Pope’s insects. A few words at the bottom of the print gave Stelluti credit for “making the observation with a microscope (microscopus).” A longer statement above flattered the pope and applauded the Lynxes for “exhibiting (exponere) and explaining (explicare) nature with these pictures (tabellae)”: they selected three bees for display because that was the number of insects that embellished Pope Urban’s heraldry.¹⁸⁶

Figure 3.50 Three Bees for a Pope, Francesco Stelluti, 1625 https://brunelleschi.imss.fi.it.apiarium, Scottish Beekeepers Association

The academicians published a single sheet, not a book, but in enough copies to please the pope and his retinue. The prints—only a few survive—were large, about 16 inches high. The bee in the center measured about 6 inches from stinger through antennae—10 times the size of real bees. This feat of explanatory picturing was astounding. People had never seen such magnification, and Descartes was enthusiastic about instruments that could do these amazing things.

He gave a full chapter of the Optics to lunetes—his word for microscopes as well as telescopes—along with detailed instructions for making these devices that could “see close and accessible (proches et accessibles) objects as distinctly (distinctement) as possible.” Distinctness was indeed an achievement of the new microscopy: notice the separate hairs between the eyes of Stelluti’s central bee. But the miracle for most viewers would have been magnification more than distinctness or clarity: we all look at bees; entomologists focus on parts of bees.¹⁸⁷

As a step toward explaining, close observation of parts came naturally to Descartes, whose matter-theory started with particles. He visualized, described and pictured tiny bits of matter (Figs 3.4, 3.11, 3.13) that he never saw. Stelluti’s bees invited viewers to look for such sights all the way down, beyond reach of normal vision. Magnification was an escalator that some people—with real or vicarious access to the right equipment—could ride below the reach of natural vision and examine micro-objects as if at human scale. Viewers who had no such instruments could see results of the new technology pictured and reproduced mechanically. Printing itself was a technology of magnification: artists assembled woodcuts by the dozen and pasted them together in collages 10 feet high. Anatomists drew bodies in life-size pictures and had them duplicated. And yet Descartes, fascinated by optical machinery, was taken less with magnification than with distinctness—an epistemic criterion announced in the Discourse and confirmed repeatedly in the Meditations.¹⁸⁸

Everyone knew how big bees were, more or less. Bees came in sizes to which believable pictures of bees had to answer in length, width and girth. Discrepancies of size between bees and other things in pictures of them would raise questions of scale and situation. But a bee on a broadsheet printed to glorify a pope couldn’t be small: only a big pontifical bee, whatever the surroundings, would suffice in 1625. Today, four centuries later, visual expectations are still forgiving: when people go shopping and see a double helix on a packaged video game, they take situational scaling for granted: no one objects to a molecular icon big enough to see on a store shelf.

Like everyone else around 1625, admirers of Stelluti’s bees and readers of Hoefnagel’s booklet had seen many insects, though few were as big as the huge beetles (Fig. 3.47) in the Archetypa. The artist familiarized these nightmares by showing them in benign company while also establishing a scale that helped readers reckon and adjust. Medieval artists knew this technique: where an elephant loomed over a human in a thirteenth century manuscript, “the dimensions of the animal represented may be imagined by the size of the person portrayed.”¹⁸⁹

The only animals in Stelluti’s print were bees garlanded by leafy, fruiting laurel branches (Fig. 3.50). The leaves, dwarfed by papal insects, were perfect for décor but not in their natural proportion: when nature’s smallest bay leaves matured, they were four times the length of the longest worker bees in Italy. A leaf of Laurus nobilis in scale with Urban’s Apis mellifera wouldn’t have fitted on a printed page with the rest of Greuter’s engraving. Printing had made such botanical and zoological images mechanically reproducible by 1450 or so. But conventions like the scaling used by Hoefnagel and then bypassed by Stelluti took time to develop and refine as new technologies of picturing matured. Years passed as makers of books improved their ways of picturing and readers digested the upgrades.

Wordy, picture-rich books produced by Conrad Gesner around 1550 showed such improvements. Gesner was a polymath when people could still fail by knowing too much: the title of one of his projects, A Universal Library or Catalogue Fully Complete for All Authors, declared how much information he wanted. His main achievement was a multivolume encyclopedia of zoology (Historiae animalium) not quite finished when he left it in 1558. Although he broke new ground in the life sciences, his outlook was fundamentally philological. After an early project, a Greek-Latin Lexicon, he never stopped rummaging through old volumes to find material for scientific research.¹⁹⁰

For example: 26 pages of dense prose, broken up by 3 pictures, opened the second part of his Historiae on egg-laying quadrupeds—an Aristotelian class that included reptiles and amphibians. Many, many words displayed the author’s learning: no scrap of animal lore was too trivial to fetch from a dusty corner of biblical, Greco-Roman, rabbinical or medieval erudition. Books like Gesner’s—high fashion around 1550—alienated Descartes from bookishness less than a century later.

Gesner’s pictures of animals usually reflected facts of nature. The first image presented by his volume on reptiles and amphibians was a chameleon—a familiar name, memorable behavior, hence a good opener. He wrapped this picture in Latin words—like laurel leaves encircling Stelluti’s bees—but the words were purely informative, not decorative. There were many species of chameleon: the one best known to Gesner’s readers grew to 16 inches. At 9 inches a smaller specimen would have been the size of his picture (Fig. 3.51). The reptile on the page clutched a branch (not a log) that suggested scale. Some readers will have seen chameleons in the wild, in a menagerie or dried in a collection.

Figure 3.51 Chameleon, Gesner, 1554 Historiae animalium, lib. 2, p. 3.

But few had seen a living crocodile—the reptile pictured by Gesner 5 pages after the chameleon. Greeks and Romans drunk on Egyptian exotica had collected archives of delirium about crocodiles, and Gesner needed 14 pages to digest their fantasies. He acknowledged that identification was elusive, and he realized that not every ‘crocodile’ was large. Its image on paper was a little shorter than his chameleon, but nothing was printed in the picture to locate its size in a setting. The skink pictured next in the book was even shorter—sideways on a page and with no visual cues to indicate scale. Of hundreds of skink species, the longest reached 14 inches, about half the size of the biggest chameleon. But the headline for Gesner’s skink chapter was “land crocodile,” suggesting an exotic animal that might be large and dangerous.¹⁹¹

Too much information; too little discrimination: Descartes had reason to discard the pictorialized classicism that students of Jesuits learned along with their prayers (Figs 6.2–6), even though experts on zoology and botany after Gesner had improved their scientific picturing. Ulisse Aldrovandi, a tireless producer of entomology, herpetology, ichthyology, mineralogy and ornithology, sharpened the visual standards of earlier observers and collectors. His study of aquatic invertebrates appeared just after he died in 1605, and his books kept selling through the end of the century.

Figure 3.52 Scraggy Horse Crab, Aldrovandi, 1605 De reliquis animalibus exanguinibus, p. 179

Aldrovandi’s volume on Other Bloodless Animals picked up where his observations of insects left off. A picture of a “scraggy horse crab” (Fig. 3.52) was striking—eye-catching like the book that presented it. Descriptions were less wordy than Gesner’s, though not by much, and the shaggy Mediterranean crab got a full-page spread—hard to miss: this image convinced by detail and took up 11 vertical inches of a 13-inch page.¹⁹²

Aldrovandi’s pictorially rich work was systematic before Keckermann and Burgersdijck promoted their novel philosophical ‘systems.’ He organized each part of his book in the same way, more or less. For large marine crabs, he proceeded through synonyms, genera, differences, descriptions, locations and uses for food. There were more topics for some animals, fewer for others. Some big crustaceans looked as real in Aldrovandi’s pictures as the horse crab, but other depictions were thin and schematic. The sketch of a “heart-shaped crab” that he borrowed from an earlier zoologist, Guillaume Rondelet, was just a shaded outline (Fig. 3.53; cf. Fig. 3.24). Aldrovandi used images of different types for different explanatory purposes, and his presentations were more effective than Gesner’s. Simplicity sometimes trumped accuracy—as Descartes understood when he made pictures of tennis balls and light particles (Figs 3.1, 3.11).¹⁹³

Figure 3.53 Heart-Shaped Crab, Aldrovandi after Rondelet, 1605 De reliquis animalibus exanguinibus, p. 206

12 Cartesian Statuary

Neither Descartes nor his followers published pictures of the mechanical statues described in his Treatise on Man, where the human body itself was “simply a statue or machine (statua duntaxat machina).” Having weighed these risky words and others, he had withheld his book in 1633 after the Church attacked Galileo: a Latin text finally appeared in 1662, a French translation two years later. Both versions, using different pictures, showed people coming too close to a fire: the image of a boy often seen today (Fig. 3.54; cf. Fig. 4.1) appeared in the French Traité.¹⁹⁴

Descartes wasn’t responsible for detailed drawings of cardio-pulmonary anatomy that asserted pictorial authority in these posthumous printings of his Treatise. He had written about such images, however, and then he introduced an elaborate analogy between human bodies and “fountains in the gardens of our kings.” After Descartes left La Flèche, around the age of 18, he may have lived near a royal showplace, Saint-Germain-en-Laye, a few miles from Paris. At the time, ornate fountains with moving statues (Fig. 3.56; cf. Fig. 3.23, lower left) delighted people who could afford to go and see them, and Descartes addressed readers who would have recognized what he described: “the nerves of the machine that I’ve undertaken to sketch out (delineare) can best be compared to pipes (tubuli) in these fountains.”¹⁹⁵

Figures 3.54 and 3.55 Mechanical and Alchemical Humans Descartes, 1664; Paracelsus, 1605 Traité de l‘homme, p. 27; Chirurgischer Bücher, p. 59

When Descartes wanted to explain how the body senses things outside it, he compared such things to people approaching a mechanized fountain and stepping on tiles that triggered movement in a statue of a pagan god or a sea-monster. He described statues spraying tourists with water (like Zeising’s apple, Fig. 3.45) that had flowed through pipes in an apparatus tended by a caretaker—like a soul in a body’s brain. The Treatise discussed these automated waterworks before showing a boy with his foot too close to a fire.¹⁹⁶

Figure 3.56 Automated Fountain, Jacques Besson, 1578 Theatrum instrumentorum et machinarum, p. 51

Readers—entertained by elaborate plumbing—eventually found a description of the boy backed up by a picture; the letters that labeled the image were hard to read as printed (Fig. 3.54):

If fire A comes too close to foot B, particles of this fire—moving very fast, as we know—have the force to take with them part of the skin on the foot that they touch, so much so that by pulling cord (funiculum) CC, which you see attached there, they open, with the same motion (momentum), a way to channel (meatum pori) DE where this cord ends—just as pulling the end of a rope (funis) produces, with the same motion, sound from a bell attached at the other end. Then, when the mouth of the channel or little conduit (ductus) D has been opened in this way, animal spirits from hollow F flow down into it and are carried through it into various muscles. . . . Notice that the number of very fine threads (filamenta) like CC is beyond numbering, . . . enclosed in pipes (tubuli) that carry animal spirits to muscles.¹⁹⁷

Many pages later, Descartes extended his hydraulic and mechanical analogies to pneumatics:

From all this we plainly see what may be found in this machine, . . . how animal spirits move in the brain’s pouches (ventriculi) and channels. . . . If you’re ever curious enough to take a closer look at the organs in our churches, you might notice the bellows (folles) that force air into certain receptacles. . . . And here please understand that the heart and arteries which force animal spirits into the hollows of our machine’s brain are like the bellows of an organ.¹⁹⁸

Descartes mentioned clocks and mills along with bellows in order to explain how “this machine” works. Channels, conduits, cords, pipes and ropes were the simpler gearless hardware that he emphasized in “artificial fountains (fontes arte facti).” The gods and the sea-monster, however, were automata that needed gears: these moving statues that decorated the moneyed estates of Europe were also exhibited in printed theaters of machines for the reading public. When Besson pictured a “perpetual fountain of winds with musical sound and heavens in motion,” he showed where plumbing was hidden under and around the machinery. Winds blew (and water gushed?) from mouths of sky gods at the top, while a regal figure enthroned below them turned and moved a scepter through a celestial circle (Fig. 3.56; cf. Fig. 3.23, lower left).¹⁹⁹

Besson imagined many such contrivances and showed how mechanical deities could move. The Treatise that Descartes chose not to publish in 1633 was more ambitious, however: he proposed not only a meso-mechanics of human anatomy analogized with public statuary—like Besson’s—but also a reductive model of physiology at the level of unseen micro-particles. Sensing and seeing were hard to engineer at both scales.

Problems of mind and psychology were secondary for another enterprising genius, Paracelsus (d. 1541), an alchemical physician whose influence was still strong when Descartes was writing: Franciscus de le Boë (Sylvius), who taught Paracelsian medicine in Leiden after 1639, turned Cartesian while devising chemical therapies. Paracelsus, the master iatrochemist, had been a clinician, pharmacologist and matter-theorist: for him the medical basics were more chemical and physiological than mechanical or psychological. A highlight of his instrumentation was a freakish alembic (Fig. 3.55). Fluid dripped from its spout, whose metal head also topped a human torso next to it. The pictorial analogy was coarse but unmistakable, summing up many runny noses in everyday experience. Paracelsus wrote a few sentences about his anthropoid still, but its power to explain needed little help from words. The picture was worth a thousand of them for readers—and there were many—who understood how distillation worked and saw how it might figure in chemical accounts of human illness.²⁰⁰

The picturing was fuzzier but still effective in the Treatise where followers of Descartes showed a boy with something (a tube? a cord? a cord in a tube?) running between his foot and his head (Fig. 3.54). The author had needed many, many sentences to situate this child in the prose landscape of his philosophy and to make the image explanatory, so that a picture could take readers farther along a path of understanding than words alone would carry them. Besson’s statues, Zeising’s apple and the human alembic imagined by Paracelsus were unforgettable sights from a genre, the printed picture book, that Descartes turned to philosophical purposes in the Treatise, the Optics and elsewhere. He may never have seen those other books. But his own writings addressed epoptic communities formed by pictures in them.²⁰¹

Besson’s book about machines put visions of stone and metal structures (Fig. 3.56) on paper. Had his dreams ever solidified in three dimensions, the results would have been big, heavy things with moving parts. Transporting them in pieces from where they were made and then putting the pieces together at distant sites would have been hard work. But the work could have been done: it was labor like this that produced trial models of machinery designed by Descartes for making lenses (Figs 3.41, 3.42). Metal fittings added weight to timbers heavy enough to support iron rods and rollers: the bulky apparatus, once assembled at a particular place, was there to stay. The mechanism could be inspected only where the philosopher’s helpers kept trying to make it work for an epoptic community formed by the Optics, where paper prototypes advertised the novel equipment.

Inventions shown in Besson’s Theatrum were less practical: metal greenery, moving statues and other fanciful surprises. He courted astonishment with likenesses of likenesses: he made graven images of automated gods for readers who never could have seen the plaster divinities in action. Even before Besson had published these designs, epoptic experiences of big objects—experiences delivered remotely from heavy originals but mediated by pictures on lightweight paper—were possible for his readers. As early as 1547, devotional prints of Michelangelo’s Vatican Pietà, to mention just one famous example, showed Mary and her crucified son to worshippers far from Rome. These were small, easily transported likenesses of a large sculpture, about 6 feet by 6 feet, that weighed more than 5,000 pounds.²⁰²

Figure 3.57 The Burning of William Gardiner, 1641 John Foxe, Actes and Monuments, p. 747

No religious images of this period—large or small, carved, painted or printed—touched more hearts than the horrifying pictures in the Actes and Monuments that John Foxe first published in 1563. This immortal picture book in the English vernacular—usually called the Book of Martyrs—was a long, dense narrative of Protestant suffering under Romish oppression: 57 images in the first of several editions intensified Foxe’s tales of piety made holier by torture. He was certain that brutalized saints had found joy in heaven—even farther beyond reach than a papist statue of Jesus in Rome.

Foxe’s torrent of words swamped the pictures in his Actes. But only one work, Holinshed’s Chronicles, was printed in England with more woodcuts while Foxe lived. There were 153 of them, nearly 3 times the original number, in the expanded Actes of 1570. In 1641 a publisher had new blocks cut for an eighth edition—so utterly unlike the pictureless Meditations of that year. A fresh woodcut in this printing of the Actes and Monuments showed William Gardiner, an English merchant, burned alive in Portugal in 1552 (Fig. 3.57). From a thousand miles and nearly a century away, this picture of Gardiner brought his pain home to co-religionists who were going to war in England.²⁰³

By 1641 Descartes was no longer soldiering in a war about religion. But across the Channel armed struggle about worship was imminent in the British Isles: violent conflict soon divided Protestants into armed factions like those that had already ravaged the continent. Religious gatherings that were godly for some believers were conventicles of Satan for others. The Bible was sacred for everyone, however. Some bibles were illustrated, and their epoptic bonding power was also divisive. Pictures in the Geneva Bible (1560) lit the Spirit’s flame in Puritans who attacked Anglican users of the pictorial Bishops’ Bible (1568). Bibles were the only works in print that fueled more sectarian and counter-sectarian hatred than Foxe’s Book of Martyrs.

Twenty years after Foxe first put his pious Actes on paper, Jean Cousin (père) finished an imposing marble monument for Admiral Phillipe Chabot de Brion. Cousin’s message was patriotic, however, not religious. His civic hero had died in 1543 before wars of religion broke out in France. The sculptor made the Admiral breathe again in alabaster. The stone’s transluscent warmth lightened the mass of the work’s heavy pieces. After another twenty years, André Thevet used an engraved portrait to introduce a short biography of Admiral Chabot: Thevet’s print pictured the Admiral himself, not his tomb. If the print had represented Cousin’s memorial, it would have shown a very large ensemble. In the next century an anonymous artist made just such an image—a paper likeness of Cousin’s marble likeness of Chabot (Fig. 3.58).²⁰⁴

When Cousin had completed the main recumbent figure, over 5 feet long and half as high, he left more than 900 pounds of stone intact. With all the decoration and secondary statues added—the Admiral’s attendants outside and inside a heavy double frame—the whole group weighed several tons. But much of the load vanished in the early 1790s when Jacobins destroyed the church that housed the tomb in Paris.²⁰⁵

Figure 3.58 The Tomb of Admiral Chabot Anonymous Ink and Wash Drawing, Seventeenth Century Bibliothèque Nationale de France, Gaignières 4427

By 1793, however, the Palais du Louvre was becoming the Musée du Louvre, a new home for revolutionary wreckage and later for spoils of empire. All the surviving Chabot marbles were safe in the Louvre’s collections by 1818. Count Frédéric de Clarac, an archaeologist, curated these and other sculptures during the Restoration while he compiled the museum’s first records in this field. In 1833 he contributed a notice on the Chabot marbles to the new Magasin Pittoresque, planned ambitiously as a weekly. A woodcut (probably) by Louis-Prosper Roux illustrated Clarac’s description. Roux showed only the memorial’s main figure, however, even though Georges-Louis Beausse had included all the original pieces in a 1792 engraving—roughly the same arrangement as the ink and wash drawing (Fig. 3.58) made in the previous century.²⁰⁶

For two hundred years or more, Roux, Beausse and this unknown draftsman met the weak demand for likenesses of Chabot’s likeness. Unlike the other two artists, Roux never saw the complete group, parts of which had been scattered or lost before he was born. A solitary Admiral was enough, however. Alone in knightly splendor—an aristocratic champion for France in a revolutionary age—Chabot without accessories appealed as much to the Magasin’s readers as Chabot wreathed in alabaster. Viewers of this sculpted hero’s printed likeness had formed a small epoptic community during the four decades since Beausse had published his engraving. Édouard Charton, who founded the Magasin, introduced his first issue with a pledge to such communities. He promised to give them:

something useful (utile) and helpful for private life (vie intérieure), for home and hearth, rich or poor, . . . delivered at the lowest price in separate issues with a variety of content (texte varié) accompanied by pictures (gravures), thus giving the draftsman’s (dessinateur) partnership with the writer (écrivain) a degree of usefulness (utilité) never known before.²⁰⁷

Every “home and hearth” was to be its own museum. Charton (anticipating Walter Benjamin) got his business plan right. Improved technologies of mass production kept illustrated magazines like Charton’s cheap and plentiful: they became vehicles of a mass visual culture that Chabot or Descartes could never have imagined. For a philosopher who had put his clear and distinct ideas into pictures, however, the lesser epoptic communities of those bygone days did their own remarkable work.

Today you can usually visit the alabaster Admiral’s memorial in the Louvre. In 2022, however, he and four of his hefty companions journeyed from Paris to Leuven for an exhibition. Even now, moving so much marble so far is costly and risky, much more so when Jean Cousin was making statues and Descartes was writing books about them. Putting likenesses of stationary stone likenesses on portable sheets of paper diminished impediments of bulk that confined originals to single places—too far away from almost everyone. The likeness of a likeness in Figure 3.58 had no such reach, however, because it was an original and was not printed. This hand-made picture, a unique rendering of Cousin’s sculpture, could never attract, address or sustain an epoptic community.

No such picture, without technological enhancement, could be shared by viewers in the epoptic way. After parts of Jean Cousin’s original were gone, nonetheless, people still wanted to see the Admiral’s funerary splendor. Their curiosity explains why mechanically reproduced likenesses of his memorial had a small circulation in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, occasionally eliciting epoptic responses like those evoked by very different images of cumbersome machinery in the Optics of 1637 (Figs 3.41 and 42).

13 “A Paper Kingdom”

When Descartes was putting his Optics together, the university in Leiden provided not only a spacious anatomical theater and a tennis court big enough for doubles (Fig. 3.10) but also a fencing school with room for a vaulting horse (Fig. 3.59). The philosopher’s military experience confirmed that fencing was a valuable skill. He could handle a sword and had soldiered for both sides—first Protestant, then Catholic—in the Thirty Years War. The top maître d’armes in Leiden was a fellow student of mathematics—Girard Thibault, a Belgian who published an elaborate fencing manual there in 1628. Thibault revealed “hitherto unknown secrets for using weapons . . . by mathematical rules based on a mysterious circle.”²⁰⁸

The circle—like the one inscribed on the floor of the Leiden school and pictured repeatedly in Thibault’s book—wasn’t much of a mystery: the tip of a sword, if the weapon was held correctly, described a circle as its bearer turned; if the sword’s length was also right, the circle’s martial magic was on the way. But Thibault embroidered his circles with geometrical constructions guaranteed to win the day for a swordsman who stepped to the right spots. Descartes also drafted a fencing manual but left it unpublished. Maybe Thibault’s success convinced him to shelve his project and forget it.

Friends and followers remembered his suppressed Treatise on Man, however, and they published it twice in the 1660s. One of these Cartesians was Father Adrien Baillet, who wrote an early biography of the philosopher. He found the fencing manual in draft with other unpublished documents, called it an “art of fencing” and concluded that Descartes “based the instruction on his own experience.” Baillet’s attentive description of the book’s title, its two parts, and its specialized terminology indicates that he had seen such a draft. No one knew more than this priest about the papers that he inspected. His judgment was good, though not infallible, and he was probably correct to identify Descartes as the author—a future soldier and later a philosopher who could appreciate what the new Leiden fencing school had to offer.²⁰⁹

The focus of Willem Swanenburgh’s engraving of the school was a circle like Thibault’s, and the whole floor was geometry in square tiles. Fencing manuals commonly used grids like this floor and tilted them to show perspective. The tiles were teaching aids for fencing masters: step from that square to this one, a teacher would shout, but don’t stop on the other one or your enemy will skewer you! A grid like the floor in Leiden, which could be drawn on a flat page without front-to-back narrowing, was coordinate geometry—‘Cartesian coordinates,’ as we now say.²¹⁰

Figure 3.59 Fencing in Leiden, around 1610 Willem Swanenburgh, Jan Woudanus and André Cloucqui Delineatio ludi publici gladiatorii, Rijksmuseum RP-P-1893-A-18091

Although Descartes established algebraic and geometric foundations for coordinate graphing in his Geometry, he showed no such designs in this visually forbidding book that experts have found daunting. Was the omission deliberate? Not long after their invention, printed books were duplicating Nicole Oresme’s hand-drawn graphs of distance, speed and time (Fig. 3.27)—pictorial innovations linked by researchers with Galileo’s kinematics. Was Descartes less well informed than Galileo? Probably not. Another possibility is that he knew pictures like Oresme’s but found them too pictorial: one later authority praised Oresme’s drawings for intuitive power; another called them “fictional” and “primitive.” In any case, Cartesian coordinates as we see them now were never Cartesian in the philosopher’s lifetime.²¹¹

Figure 3.60 Algebraic Geometry, Descartes, 1637 La Geometrie, p. 303

In 1637 the pictureless essay that Descartes called a discours or ‘discussion’ introduced three specialized studies derived from traités or ‘treatises’ that he had withheld in 1633. Soon after the Optics, Meteorology and Geometry were in print, he described the first two works.

It’s not always necessary to have reasons a priori in order to make a truth convincing (pour persuader). Thales, or whoever was the first to say that the moon gets light from the sun, surely gave no other proof except that on this assumption (en supposant) it’s easy to explain (expliquer) all the various phases of its light, and doing this was enough because, since that time, everyone has accepted this view without contradiction. My thoughts are so tied together that I dare to hope my principles will be found just as well proven (prouvés) by results (conséquences) that I draw from them—once people have taken enough notice to make themselves familiar (familières) with them and consider everything together—as the borrowing whereby the moon produces its light has been proved (prouvé) by its waxings and wanings.

The French texts of 1637 called his results experiences and suppositions, yet he gave them greater weight. He treated them not only as explanations but even as proofs, and then he followed them up with pictorial expositions of proof in the Geometry. The three treatises together filled 412 pages, numbered separately from the Discourse, and 160 pages showed pictures—sometimes 2 or more on a side. That this was a picture book is beyond question. Viewed as a group, however, the 45 pages with images in the Geometry looked different from the 75 pictorial pages in the Optics and the 40 in the Meteorology. Readers expected differences: they knew that geometrical constructions were abstract—different from other non-verbal sights that they had also seen in books.²¹²

“Euclid alone has looked on beauty bare,” the poet wrote, yet this Geometry would seduce only an algebraist. Before the first page, Descartes posted a “notice (advertissement)”: he warned that “up to this point I’ve tried to make myself intelligible (intelligible) to everyone, but for this treatise I fear it will be readable (pourra estre leu) only by those who are already acquainted with (sçavent) what’s in geometry books.” He had recommended nothing to read before his Optics and Meteorology. In fact, the Discourse had renounced book-learning. But geometry books were exceptions.²¹³

What made them special? The first printed textbook of geometry, published in 1482, used words, letters, numbers and drawings to prove its theorems. Mathematicians soon added special symbols, and Descartes adopted some of them while devising his own. His algebraic analysis of a routine statement in the Geometry, showing how to solve a quadratic, translates into modern notation as z² = az + b² and z² = az—b². But under “enfin si i’ay,” next to the relevant construction (Fig. 3.60), the line that would now be written z² = az—b² has bb instead of b². And instead of the = sign, now so familiar, he used this symbol:

perhaps by reversing a ligature, æ, from the beginning of æqualis, ‘equal’ in Latin. For some revisions of older notations, nothing but his own Geometry would help his readers. Moreover, even constructions familiar to him and other mathematicians—going back far beyond 1482 and the first printed Euclid—were still strange to many others. Descartes was right to warn that they might find his Geometry unreadable.²¹⁴

Before the first page of this treatise—the last of three presented in the first edition of 1637—his (usually) higher standard had been “to make myself intelligible to everyone.” And anyone, without reading a word, could see differences between the two previous treatises and the Geometry. One difference was the amount of mathematical exposition. Another was the type of picturing: only 5 of 45 pages with pictures in the Geometry showed anything but purely abstract constructions. An illustration taken from nature, a human hand, reached in only once. In the other two treatises, very different images—an odd tennis game, a sightless walker, a tub of grape juice, anatomical drawings, complicated machinery—were gateways to intelligibility and paths to explanatory success.²¹⁵

It would have been simpler—as a matter of logistics—for Descartes to present his three treatises aniconically: that’s how he wrote the Meditations a few years later, when he had already used a pictureless presentation for his introductory Discourse. The picturing in the appended treatises was a more demanding choice that required planning so that pictures could be prepared: the “notice” before the Geometry implied that the author had considered different ways of picturing. What’s more obvious to anyone who looks at his three treatises is that picturing was essential to his project, which was to explain the world in daringly new ways.

Why did Descartes, a soldier of innovation, deploy pictures at the vanguard of his revolution? In a later dialect of the algebra that he pioneered, one answer might be:

e=bpn

where e is disruptive energy, b is a count of book titles (as distinct from individual books bearing titles), p is a count of pictures printed under each title and n is an exponent to be determined. Variables b and p could be calculated only later: as a practical matter, the numbers were unknowable in 1637. They’re now framed by a notion—the incunable—invented before Descartes was born but not well developed until late in his life.²¹⁶

Incunabula (‘swaddling clothes’) is a word that experts on old books used for products of this industry from its first half-century—from its infancy, starting around 1450 and stopping at the end of 1500. The number of extant editions produced in Europe during this period, about fifty years, was 30,000 or so. In Britain, a small island, only 174 titles were published during the last five years before 1501, but almost 3,300 titles—19 times as many—made it to print there during the five years before Descartes finished the Meditations.

By 1650, during the half-century or so when he was alive and reading, the count of titles published in Europe had risen to many hundreds of thousands after a long period of growth. Since press runs for incunables already averaged as many as 600 copies, we can guess that tens of millions of books were made, sold, bought and sometimes read in Europe while Descartes was adding his to the pile. During the seventeenth century, Dutch publishers alone produced about 70,000 titles—not counting newspapers, posters and other throwaways.²¹⁷

In the merely metaphorical equation just introduced, e stands for energies that powered Europe’s culture of bookmaking, book-buying and book-reading when Descartes followed Agricola, Besson, Copernicus, Fuchs, Galileo, Vesalius and many others in their picturing practices. The quantity of printed material that delighted and disrupted readers by 1637, which had been zero around 1450, added up to an explosive force—millions of small detonations of information, intensified by pictures and witnessed by epoptic communities.

Many-fold growth in numbers of books brought an immense increase in pictures seen by these communities: many books presented a few images and some displayed dozens or more. To locate these changes where Descartes lived and worked, compare Leiden around 1637—when bookmaking thrived there—with the world of Erasmus, also a hero of Dutch culture and an ardent maker of books. Printing started only a few years before he was born in 1466. He grew up with the new technology, and a printed book, his Adages, launched his career. Just before the Adages came out in Paris in 1500, the author had been staying in England, where only a few dozen titles went to press in any year. By 1637, the annual average in the same small place was several hundred at least.²¹⁸

The hinges of history keep creaking, and now, as we strain to hear them, choosing cardinal moments for a chronicle of bookmaking will be arbitrary. For present purposes, since Descartes was born in 1596, 1600 is a benchmark. The Bruno outrage of that year bred trouble for Galileo, who started making public trouble of his own in 1610. Two decades later, as the Church finally crushed the astronomer, Descartes decided to suppress his own pictorial explanations of matter in motion. He made this decision after the cultural energy propagated by picture books had been growing for two centuries. Having read such books, he was right to worry that pictures like those in his Traité de l’homme, drawn to answer questions about human nature, might be explosive—hotter for him than fire toasting the feet of a mechanized boy (Fig. 3.54).

Of all the books that prospered in the Cartesian era and won lasting fame, none was less Cartesian—and none more starved for pictures—than Robert Burton’s Anatomy of Melancholy, which had gone through 4 editions by the time Descartes had his Discourse printed in 1637. When he started at La Flèche, the Anatomy’s author was finishing his studies at Oxford. Burton was 20 years older than Descartes, and in 1621 his masterpiece was ready—written to cure his own sadness by advising others about theirs. Four centuries later, in our own unhappy time, the latest Anatomy fills 1081 pages. The second folio edition of 1624 was already a fifth longer than the first octavo; the sixth in 1651 was a folio two-thirds larger than the original but posthumous and hence the last to add words written by the author. His thousands of printed prescriptions were a reading cure: no edition was big enough to hold all his advice for very long.²¹⁹

Burton called his volume “a cento collected from others”—a book made of quotations from other books.²²⁰ Every page was a flood of information, a deluge of names for nature’s therapeutic parts: rosters of inventories, tallies of catalogues, detours from digressions mapped by quotations cited and annotated in sub-sections of sections within partitions. There was nothing quite like it at the time. To get the feel of the Anatomy, imagine thousands of passages like this one about medicinal plants that

have a peculiar virtue to such particular parts, as to the head aniseeds, foalfoot, betony, calamint, eyebright, lavender, bays, roses, rue, sage, marjoram, peony et cetera. For the lungs calamint, liquorice, enula campana, hyssop, horehound, water germander et cetera. For the heart borage, bugloss, saffron, balm, basil, rosemary, violet, roses et cetera.

Then came 6 more such lists for the stomach, liver, spleen, kidneys, uterus and joints, “and so to peculiar diseases: to this of melancholy you shall find a catalogue of herbs proper.”²²¹

The glut of names—incantatory healing in fugues of print—would have appalled Descartes if he had ever seen Burton’s book. The author himself had misgivings. Although Oxford had educated him for theology, “there be so many books in that kind,” he reckoned, “so many commentators, treatises, pamphlets, expositions, sermons, that whole teams of oxen cannot draw them.” The unmethodical excess disoriented him:

Like a ranging spaniel . . . I have followed all, saving that which I should, and may justly complain . . . that I have read many books but to little purpose. For want of good method, I have confusedly tumbled over diverse authors in our libraries . . . for want of art, order, memory, judgment.²²²

Burton griped like a refugee from Ramism, while his disorder festered and other bookish prodigals fed his fever:

In this scribbling age, . . . presses be oppressed, and out of an itching humour that every man hath to show himself, . . . he will write no matter what. . . . To be counted writers, . . . to get a paper kingdom, . . . they will rush into all learning, . . . rake over all indexes and pamphlets for notes, . . . write great tomes . . . when they are not thereby as better scholars but greater praters.²²³

Burton feared his “roving humour” but couldn’t tame it. Books—all of them—were his universe, books everywhere making him as happy as a melancholic could be, including studies of “optic” and “perspective”:

What a world of books offers itself in all subjects, arts and sciences, . . . in arithmetic, geometry, perspective, optic, astronomy, architecture, sculptura, pictura, . . . in mechanics and their mysteries . . . with exquisite pictures of all sports, games and what not, in music, metaphysics, natural and moral philosophy! . . . What vast tomes are extant in law, physic and divinity for profit, pleasure, practice, speculation in verse or prose. . . . We have thousands of authors of all sorts, many great libraries full well-furnished. . . . Methinks it would well please any man to look upon a geographical map, . . . chorographical, topographical delineations, . . . parts of America set out and curiously cut in pictures, . . . to see a well-cut herbal, herbs, trees, flowers, plants, all vegetals expressed in their proper colours to the life. . . . To see birds, beasts, and fishes of the sea, spiders, gnats, serpents, flies et cetera, all creatures set out by the same art and truly expressed in lively colours with an exact description. . . . Heinsius, the keeper of the Library at Leiden in Holland, was mewed up in it all the year long. . . . I no longer (saith he) come into the Library but I bolt the door to me, . . . excluding lust, ambition, avarice . . . and melancholy itself, and . . . I take my seat with so lofty a spirit and sweet content that I pity all our great ones and rich men that know not this happiness.²²⁴

Daniel Heinsius, the librarian who brightened his day by shutting himself in with books, taught classics and politics at Leiden. Descartes was there while Heinsius helped the Elseviers correct the Greek text of the New Testament. Heinsius had a skill, classical philology, that bored Descartes and usually did without pictures. So too the iconophobic Burton—a theologian who relied on scholars like Heinsius to print God’s words correctly in their Bibles. He allowed no pictures in his Anatomy until 1628, when his publisher in Oxford wanted to market a third edition by showing what the author looked like (Fig. 3.61). In one of eight panels on the title-page, Christian le Blon depicted Burton as a “younger Democritus” holding a book, an ancient philosopher revived to smile ever so faintly at everything human—even human melancholy. Was it the Anatomy in Burton’s hands or a Bible? He told readers that they saw him in this pose only because “the printer would needs have it so.”²²⁵

Figure 3.61 The Bookish Robert Burton, 1632 Anatomy of Melancholy, tp

But Burton let readers know with other words that his immense “world of books” was also pictorial—plenty of room for “perspective, optic, . . . sculptura, pictura,” for “exact” images “well cut” and “truly expressed,” sometimes even in their “proper” and “lively” colors. He had even seen books with “exquisite pictures of all sports”: speaking of tennis, he claimed that Galen recommended it because playing “exerciseth each part of the body.”²²⁶ Like remarks by Descartes about this game, Burton’s advice addressed readers who shared visual experiences remotely—experiences brought to them by books and prints. But unlike Burton, Descartes had explanatory pictures printed in 1637 and 1644 for these epoptic communities: they included people far from Leiden who could have looked at Van de Passe’s print (Fig. 3.10) to see a match played there many years before.

Readers of books by Descartes saw pictures reproduced mechanically in order to explain things. Some explanations were analytic: they showed things taken apart to reveal components that had been hidden—small parts enlarged by magnifying, parts pictured with other parts to locate linkages and track collisions. Other pictorial explanations were psychological and rhetorical—unseen sights placed in familiar situations to make them less strange to see and more persuasive. Pictures of tennis balls and light particles worked both ways in the Optics. Some pictures were more analytic than psychological (Fig. 3.11); others reversed the balance (Fig. 3.1).

In both ways Descartes intended to explain his theories with pictures—despite the aniconic ideology promoted in the Meditations and elsewhere. It’s no surprise to find Plato’s ancient distrust of picturing in a semi-Platonic metaphysics. But Descartes was a maker and reader of printed books, not just an impresario of ideas, and such books in his day were full of pictures.

Let me ask you: when Descartes was working in Leiden, where could he have seen more pictures than in books? No movies, no television, no internet—no illustrated newspapers—and not a single public museum. The Age of Benjamin dawned later.

‘Shops and taverns advertised on the streets with painted signs.’

That’s right. Leiden’s population—eventually approaching 60,000—grew while Descartes lived there. The city was big enough for lots of trade, and signs for bakers or shoemakers may have been colorful. But would people who passed them every day keep noticing?

‘People saw signs on their way to church, didn’t they?’

They surely did. But Descartes was a Catholic on Calvinist soil, where many Protestant Churches had bare walls. The Pieterskerk in Leiden had been stripped of images since 1566; Hendrick van Vliet painted it that way nearly a century later, which was long after the ‘image frenzy’ (Beeldenstorm) of Dutch Protestant iconoclasm. But books were still better than many churches in Leiden for seeing pictures—also elsewhere in Northern Europe.²²⁷

Printed pictures enabled people to see things that had been out of sight or kept from sight. Some had been inaccessible because of what size they were (too small, too big, too heavy), where they were (far away or covered up) or when they were (in the past or future). Whose they were was another obstacle, cemented by education, gender, status and wealth—hence less physical than cultural. Would a prince invite a pauper’s daughter to visit his gardens and admire mechanized statues? Not likely. If she was luckier than most, however, she might have seen automata in a printed theater of machines (Fig. 3.56). Even so, other barriers were hard to break through: palisades of learned Latin and ramparts of abstruse geometry stood between her and the human machinery that Descartes explained in his picture books (Fig. 3.54).

Readers of these books in 1637 drew on two centuries of vicarious experience. As soon as printing was invented, authors and publishers of books—clever, diligent, energetic, enterprising, productive—began collaborating with artists and artisans to make picturing a better way of explaining than it had been in medieval manuscripts. Entrepreneurs of bookmaking inherited explanatory ways of showing from their medieval predecessors and capitalized on them—cutaways, disassemblies, ghostings, scalings, transparencies and visual explosions. Some memorable results (Figs 3.15, 3.17, 3.28, 3.35, 3.36, 3.47, 3.50) were pictorial wonders in themselves, apart from explanatory effect or monetary value.²²⁸

Improved ways of picturing enriched conventions of realism and made new techniques familiar to viewers in epoptic communities, who learned to take them for granted. Bones uncovered by Vesalius, machinery disassembled by Agricola, even transparent mechanical fruit in a Zeising entertainment: these were sublime, absurd and ever more accessible monuments of post-medieval picturing. Contemporary readers and viewers encountered these powerful images mainly as direct users, however, not reflectively as critics. Printed pictures were valuable to them and to Descartes for their own present purposes, rarely as milestones of progress. He and they had little reason to treat transformative but transient experiences of picturing as evidence of anything but the images themselves and even less reason to meditate critically on less conspicuous innovations—like improved conventions of labeling.

‘So what might have convinced Descartes to make picture books?’

Maybe he needed no convincing. Maybe he just acted, without much thought, on inherited, acquired and accumulated experience. Maybe he just assumed, as a reader habituated by picture books, that explaining would work better in his Optics if the book had pictures as well as words—without ever thinking deeply about the apparatus of picturing or thinking at all about its past or how picture books had become so effective.

As an avid reader, Descartes had seen many such books. Pictures were ubiquitous in fields of great interest to him: anatomy, astronomy, engineering, mechanics and optics. Breakthroughs in picturing had been spectacular: Galileo’s Messenger was a stunning example. Moreover, some innovators—unlike Descartes—had written self-consciously about their own explanatory picturing: Agricola, Besson, Fuchs, Stelluti, Vesalius and others. Fuchs realized that all his statements about plants would have been muted without pictures, so in gratitude he published likenesses of the picture-makers who drew the plants for him and engraved them (Fig. 3.29).

Descartes was less thoughtful than Fuchs about his pictorial resources—or maybe less inclined to go on record about them. Frans van Schooten, a mathematician, helped him with woodcuts for the Optics and other early works. The two were close enough to exchange letters, but the picture-rich treatises of 1637 had nothing to say about their collaboration. Since the author explored a larger domain than Fuchs investigated—everything physical in its metaphysical setting—his public reticence about picturing was all the more consequential. He wasn’t quiet about imagining, however, where the slope slipped quickly from an unruly faculty of mind (imagination or fantaisie) to its unreliable contents or products (images or fantasmes) and then to “fake and worthless” images of every kind.²²⁹

When Descartes took his life story public in the first two parts of his Discourse, he had used up 40 of the 54 years that a male of his means might expect. He had waited a long time before declaring himself: framing his treatises with autobiography was a way to compensate for delay. But the genre had little exposure in print at the time: The Book of Margery Kempe stayed in manuscript until 1940, Benvenuto Cellini’s Autobiography until 1728, Girolamo Cardano’s Vita until 1643. Descartes was a pioneer of self-narration in the printed book—after Montaigne had made self-scrutiny an art, after Jesuits turned it into a spiritual discipline and long after Augustine’s Confessions had given Christian autobiographers a sacred script. Had Augustine impressed Descartes more, he might have been less stingy with his early memories—recollections of parents, relatives, teachers and neighborhoods, squabbles with other children, sexual awakenings and struggles with sin as well as lessons learned from books.²³⁰

Augustine prized his books, to be sure, but for Descartes books and travels were the axis of his story: “I’ve been fed on letters (lettres) since my childhood,” he recalled. “I had an intense desire to learn from letters, . . . and I went to one of Europe’s most celebrated schools.” This summed up the philosopher’s life until, “as soon as age allowed me to escape control by my instructors, I gave up the study of letters entirely . . . for what might be found in myself or in the great book of the world (grand livre du monde).”²³¹

At this watershed moment in 1637, when readers first met Descartes in public as an author, books were something they all had in common—but so were births, families, homes, marriages, deaths and so on. The philosopher stayed silent about most of this, choosing not just to present himself as unusually bookish but also to make books and travel the only deep experiences revealed to his readers—except for distinctly philosophical experiences. Otherwise just a few skimpy disclosures introduced the author to his audience. And pictures printed in his books—images that also stayed silent about the person who chose them—were nodes of aggregation for epoptic communities whose characteristic mode of communication was technological, impersonal and remote.

When philosophers, heirs of Descartes, tell stories about philosophy, should they pay attention to the technology of picturing in print?

‘Why should they? Printing seems a long way from philosophy. On the other hand, everyone agrees that Descartes had books made with this young technology in 1637, 1641 and 1644, and that they became monuments of the history of philosophy. As for me—all things considered—I like what Susanna Berger says: that “the viewing and creation of imagery functioned as important instruments of philosophical thought and teaching.”’²³²

Many would also agree that Descartes triumphed by discarding a pre-technological achievement, natural philosophy, that had peaked around 1350. Three centuries later, another Cartesian victory was to modernize, not abandon, a different medieval practice, explanatory picturing, which is still improving in our own time.

And yet Walter Benjamin described post-Cartesian changes in technologies of picturing as disruptive. A description this temperate would have been irresponsible for technologies of destruction that wrecked the world after Benjamin died in 1940. After World War II, Heidegger hunted for the essence of modern technology. He called it not just disturbing but also monstrous and oppressive—a threat to humanity and “the supreme danger (höchste Gefahr).” Writing not long after Dachau, Hiroshima and battles fought with airplanes, flame-throwers, machine-guns, submarines and tanks, the professor pontificated about outrages that he had condoned from a chair of philosophy: “the menace to mankind does not come primarily from potentially deadly machines and the apparatus of technology.”²³³

He decreed that the graver threat was not technology in the usual sense but its transhistorical essence, and he gave it an idiosyncratic label—Gestell or ‘frame.’ His quirky term has forced interpreters to look outside the lexicons for ‘enframing,’ which would usually have been Einrahmung. But this ordinary word, unlike Gestell, wouldn’t have chimed with Gebirg and Gemüt in the poetaster’s prose: see the end of the second section of this chapter. Lines by Hölderlin persuaded Heidegger that so essential a danger as Gestell would inevitably bring on a “saving.” And then he concluded that redemptive answers to questions about technology could come only from art.²³⁴

But Benjamin maintained that technologies of art—pictorial art especially—were disruptive. He also appreciated their productive effects, however, and while he lived no one expected absolute disruption from anything, anywhere by anyone. Benjamin’s attitudes suited his moment. Fine-tuned questions about aesthetics were timely in the 1930s: Pound in poetry, Faulkner in prose, Dalí in painting, Cowell in music, even Marinetti in the art of cookery were making it not just new but strange. Ten years later, however, Europe was broken and starving—not a moment for peddling jokey recipes to an avant-garde of an elite.²³⁵

Even serious inquiry like Benjamin’s into aesthetic value was out of place by then—not because aesthetic questions had vanished, however, or because they had been answered to everyone’s satisfaction. But questions of moral value overwhelmed them. And Heidegger’s choice of art as a final solution to problems about technology was shameful—as if Goethe might come back to reclaim heilige Kunst for a post-Fascist Eden.

As a matter of philosophical priority in our post-modern times, questions of value about technology—both moral and aesthetic value—have become urgent, as they were not in 1637. This difference between the Leiden of Descartes and the Paris where Benjamin sheltered from Nazis can help us frame a map of motives and directions for philosophical inquiry into technologies of picturing and their products. While Benjamin and Heidegger were alive and proposing answers, the most pressing questions were overwhelmingly about value. But theirs was not the world where Descartes published his Optics. His pictures of a sightless man, a mechanized boy, a hapless tennis player and other bookish inventions were naïve, both morally and aesthetically, yet unproblematically so. In other ways, however, as vehicles for physics, psychology and metaphysics, such pictures marked epochal moments in the history of philosophy. Take a look and see for yourself: open books by Descartes alongside other picture books that he and his readers looked at.

¹ Descartes (1637), p. 10; AT, 6.90–91; CSM, 1.156: I cite the Optics and other works by Descartes in their first editions, with references to Descartes (1985), abbreviated as CSM, and to Descartes (1996), abbreviated as AT, for the reader’s convenience. The Optics, Meteorology and Geometry were paginated separately from the Discourse in the 1637 edition.

² Descartes (1637), tp; pp. 42, 55, 65, 74, 83, 153, 248; AT, 1.349, 562–5; 6.41, 55, 65, 74, 159, 227, 323; CSM, 1.53, 132, 139, 144, 149; 3.53, 87–8; Benjamin (1936); Heidegger (1962b), p. 34; In the body of his 1637 publications, Descartes never used essai for the Discourse, and he usually called the three works introduced by it traités, the same word that he used for the project that he had withheld in 1633. The title page advertised the 1637 treatises as “trials (essais) of this method”—the same sense of essai as in “some particular trials” on p. 74. See Gilson (1947), pp. 79–80, on a letter to Mersenne that used essais in the title of the Discourse as evidence that “their contents cannot be found without” the method, which “consists more of practice than theory.” Gilson explained that essai “at first has a positive sense . . . but also means that [the three treatises] do not aim, any more than the Discourse, to teach (enseigner) the method”—only to discuss it (parler). The titles and running heads of the Optics and Meteorology used discours or ‘discussions,’ but the Geometry’s three parts were livres: cf. Zittel (2009), pp. 129–32, 184–9; also Gilson (1947), pp. 74, 468–9, 474; and the beginning of section 13 of this chapter.

³ Descartes (1637), pp. 3, 11, 13, 15, 17–19; AT, 6.91, 93, 95, 97–9; CSM, pp. 1.157–60. Lüthy (2006), pp. 120, 132–3, uses “visual persuasion” and “graphic expression . . . of visual intuition” to describe pictures of the kind that I call ‘explanatory’; cf. Lüthy (2018), pp. 227–9, preferring “epistemic image” to “scientific image” and citing Daston (2015). According to Daston, an epistemic image has “the intent not only of depicting the object of scientific inquiry but also of replacing it . . . [as] a stand-in . . . for objects of nature.” But an image of a moving ball—a picture on a page—couldn’t roll down Galileo’s inclined plane: in fundamental ways, images couldn’t ‘stand-in’ for what they represented. And not all images made good models: the Mona Lisa didn’t model anything else. But physical models could be images. Elkins (1999), pp. 3–10, 52–4, 81, 253–61, made a good case for “informational images” while discussing seven other possibilities and providing a glossary of elusive terms like ‘image’ and ‘picture.’ He used ‘image’ as a “general nondescriptive term for patterns on surfaces,” so that a picture was “any image understood to be at least partly extra- or nonlinguistic, nonpropositional, unsystematic, nonsemiotic, or hypographemic,” in which case moonlight on water—strictly speaking—would be both an image and a picture. The “visual commentaries” and “plural images” in Berger (2017), pp. 3–4, 15, 18, 32, were explanatory, like pictures that I discuss, but with quite different ways and purposes of explaining, as shown by the stunning reproductions in Berger’s book. Here I use ‘image’ and ‘picture’ as near synonyms and only for man-made items like drawings and paintings. Inductive description is enough for my purposes: pictures for me are drawings, engravings, etchings, mosaics, paintings, prints, tapestries, woodcuts and so on—also high- and low-relief sculpture, including coins, but not sculpture in the round, which is usually (cf. Fig. 3.58) framed only by the space around it, whereas pictures are often framed by something other than ambient space. For related theoretical issues, see section 2 of this chapter; also Ivins (1969), p. 39; Edgerton (1991), p. 126; Topper (1996), pp. 246–7; Dackerman (2011b), p. 20; Daston (2011), pp. 127–9.

⁴ By the late nineteenth century, David Hilbert and other mathematicians had focused on justification or proof as apart from cognition or discovery. They insisted that proof could not rely on anything visual, whose presence in a proof would infect it with error. For statements of this regimen and later departures from it, see Barwise and Etchemendy (1996) and Mancuso (2005): their critics found dalliance with “visual sirens” not just wrong but “heretical” and “treacherous.”

⁵ Descartes (1644b); (1647), sig. i3v: an exact count of images in the original texts is difficult because distinctions among some images are unclear; cf. AT, 9.iii–362, pl. i–xx, also 8.xv–353, where the text of the Latin Principia had pictures, while CSM, 1.235–8, 259, has only five images in a partial translation; the images in the Traité de l’homme were moved to the back of the book in AT, 11.119–215. Tufte (1990), p. 116, noted purposeful repetitions in the Principia and discussed them again in Tufte (1997), pp. 82–3, 105–19. Baigrie (1996b), pp. 86–7, asked what “to make of the many illustrations incorporated by Descartes into his scientific treatises; . . . [they] have been treated as . . . ornaments, . . . [and] virtually no one has studied the pictures.” Lüthy (2006), p. 98, described the philosopher’s “densely illustrated” works as “a visual surprise” while noting that Descartes “introduces himself visually” to readers. For theory v. practice, see also Lüthy (2018), pp. 227–9, citing Elkins (1999), Zittel (2009), Daston (2015) and other recent work that has paid more attention to picturing; also Topper (1996), pp. 215–21. Eisenstein (1979), pp. 66–70, remarked that religious iconoclasm failed to eliminate “graven images” in the Reformation. But see section 13 of this chapter on the Beeldenstorm in Leiden, where Descartes lived; also the text at n. 46 on the 1647 French edition of the Principes.

⁶ Des Chene (2001), p. 74, n. 5, on advice to Descartes from Huygens against detaching pictures in the Optics from the text.

⁷ Alpers (1983), pp. 26–33, using ‘picturing’ roughly as I use it here, explained that “I employ the word ‘picturing’ instead of the usual ‘picture’ . . . [because] it calls attention to the making of images rather than to the finished product; it emphasizes the inseparability of maker, picture and what is pictured; and it allows us to broaden the scope of what we study . . . alongside of art as forms of picturing. . . . In defining the human eye itself as a mechanical maker of pictures and in defining ‘to see’ as ‘to picture,’ [Kepler] provides the model.” For picturing as seen by philosophers now, Kulvicki (2014) is brief, clear and attentive to the Anglophone literature since the middle of the last century. See also Baigrie (1996b), pp. 113–14, 119–22; Chapter 2.5 of this book on Burgersdijck; and Chapter 5 on culpable oblivion.

⁸ Parm. frg. 1 in Sext. Adv. math. 7.3 (DK, 1.148–51); Pl. Rep. 514A–520D. My remarks about picturing have Eurocentric limitations because I haven’t studied picturing elsewhere; for more inclusive views, see Rendgen and Wiedemann (2012); Christianson (2014); Doyle, Grove and Sherman (2019). Tufte (1983), p. 10, traced the development of “statistical graphics”—a post-Cartesian innovation—to William Playfair in the later eighteenth century, while commenting on Hobbes, Huygens, Galileo and other pioneers in “information design,” described as “the proper arrangement in space and time of images, words and numbers”; see also Tufte (1990), pp. 9–10, 18–20, 96–101; (1997), pp. 9–10. Most of Tufte’s examples were later than Descartes, and abstract diagrams are the rule in Spiegelhalter (2019), appropriately so for an introduction to statistics in present-day graphical representations. Friendly (2008), pp. 2, 9, dates the “first visual representation of statistical data” to 1644 in an extensive timeline of “data visualization” as distinct from “information visualization” and “scientific visualization”; see also Friendly (2010).

⁹ Descartes (1637), p. 33: je pense, donc je suis; (1644b), p. 2: ego cogito, ergo sum; AT, 6.32, 8.7; CSM, 1.127, 194–5; Gilson (1947), pp. 98, 292–4; Montaigne (1967), p. 20.

¹⁰ Montaigne (1595); (1967), pp. 135, 182–251, esp. 219; Desan (2017), pp. 248, 589–91. There was no paragraphing in the Paris (1595) edition of the Essais. Except for divisions between books and chapters, the only breaks in the text were for quotations.

¹¹ Descartes (1637), pp. 9–10, 13–16, 23–4, 30; AT, 6.7–9, 11–14, 22–4, 29; CSM, 1.114–17, 122–3, 125; Gilson (1947) tracked Montaigne’s presence throughout the Discourse.

¹² Bacon (1620), pp. 147–8.

¹³ Bacon (1597); (1996), pp. 81–9, 543–6; Shakespeare, TN 1.5.190–9.

¹⁴ John 8:7; https://www.alamy.com/stock-photo-the-ecstasy-of-st-teresa-by-gian-lorenzo-bernini-in-cornaro-chapel–147952948.html. See Mercer (2017) on Descartes and Saint Teresa, also the end of Chapter 5 of this book.

¹⁵ Gosse (2004), pp. 84–5.

¹⁶ Goodman (1968), p. 14, then Kulvicki (2014), pp. 91–99, treated pictures, whose representational conventions could be read, as having both syntactic and semantic features, like items of non-pictorial language.

¹⁷ Oxford English Dictionary, s.v. ‘fleuron,’ at oed.com, abbreviated here as OED. Marks like ❧ and ☞, giving instructions like ‘pause here’ and ‘read this,’ have the syntax of imperatives in pages of prose. This feature of some pictorial marks challenges views of compositionality like the “absence of grammar” account in Schier (1986), pp. 65–7: “If natural generativity is the hallmark of iconicity, there is no place for a grammar or syntax of pictures. . . . Pictures have no grammatical rules. . . . Pictures are weakly compositional; sentences are strongly so”; also Kulvicki (2020), p. 132, on “no interesting grammatical relations in pictures”; cf. Stern (2022), pp. 5–12. Stock images purchased through Dreamstime.

¹⁸ The first attested use of ‘dingbat’ for “a typographical device other than a letter or numeral . . . used to signal divisions in text” was in 1897: OED, s.v. ‘dingbat’; on points see Fehrenbach (2015). For different borderline cases—at the limit of picturing rather than prose—see Berger (2017), pp. 174–83; cf. Goodman (1968), pp. 30, 226–31; (1978), pp. 102, 131; Kulvicki (2014), pp. 99, 116; also relevant are calligraphy (spelling a picture) and ekphrasis (making poetry out of a picture).

¹⁹ Edgerton (1991), pp. 148–9; Hall (1996).

²⁰ Diog. L. 1.35, 2.76; Wittgenstein (1968), pp. 3e–4e, 8e–10e (2, 6, 19–21); Mansfeld (2020).

²¹ Diog. L. 5.17–18.

²² Descartes (1641), pp. 87–91; AT, 1.560–1; CSM, 3.86. Not all ancient distrust of picturing was Platonic; see Galen, De simpl. med. fac. 6.1 (Kühn 11.796–8); Plin. NH 25.8; Swan (2006), p. 248; Kusukawa (2012), pp. 20–1; nn. 35 and 50 of this chapter.

²³ Anon. (2021a).

²⁴ Hobbes (1651); Spinoza (1677), pp. 47, 55; Locke (1690); Bredekamp (2020), pp. 41–4; Tufte (1997), pp. 134–6; Berger (2017), pp. 187–96. Shapin and Shaffer (2011), p. 146, pointed out that images in original editions of Hobbes’s scientific writings were “almost entirely geometrical” and were banished by later editors to appendices; for example, Hobbes (1655), pp. 86–7, 96, 102–4, 107–8, 126, 144, 147, 150–1, 156, 162, 170, 182, 190–1, 200, 214, 236–7, 257, 268–9, 287. Lüthy (2003), p. 122, citing Gassendi’s collected works of 1658, observed that these pages “remained pictureless despite the many attempts of this author to describe atomic shapes verbally.” See also Collacciani and Roux (2021), pp. 90–1, and Raphael (2021), pp. 246–7, on pictures missing from textbooks where they might have been instructive.

²⁵ Kant, KpV, 5.161 (Gregor, 269); KrV, B75, A51 (Guyer and Wood, 193–4).

²⁶ Quine (1987), pp. 2–3, is the source of all quotations from this author in the next several paragraphs.

²⁷ Frege (1879), p. 19; Zalta (2019): for different perspectives on the evolution of writing as a “logocentric sequence,” see Elkins (1999), pp. 120–37. Stock images purchased through Dreamstime.

²⁸ Enn. Ann. 609 (Vahlen); Bishop (1957); Burton (2021), p. 114, where his simpler rendering was “cracked their sconce”: without tmesis, the phrase might have been saxo cerebrum comminuit.

²⁹ Adams (1983), pp. 727–8: ab seems to have been Adams’s name for the combined taste of letters a and b; the word ‘synesthesia,’ as now used, was attested for 1895: OED, s.v., 1.c; Ipser, Ward and Simner (2020); Jewanski et al. (2020).

³⁰ Heidegger (2001), p. 67; also Gombrich (1969), pp. 4–6, where a difference between seeing and looking emerged from the duck/rabbit illusion: “we can see the picture as either a rabbit or a duck, . . . [and then] we are compelled to look for what is ‘really there’”; cf. Kulvicki (2014), p. 81. Besides look/see and hear/listen, another distinction—between music heard, played or recorded (MH) and music notated by a score (MN)—is relevant and like the difference between a sentence spoken or written in a natural language (SN) and the same sentence formalized by logical notation (SL). It isn’t plausible that auditory experience of MH could somehow harm a corresponding MN. Yet people have claimed that visual experience in mathematics degrades mathematical SL statements: see Mancuso (2005), pp. 20–1, citing Needham (1997), p. vii.

³¹ Descartes (1637), pp. 6, 10–13, 15, 17–23, 25, where all fourteen pictures in the first two chapters were labeled—a pattern that continued afterward; AT, 6.86, 90–3, 95, 97, 99–105; CSM, 1.157, 159–64; Edgerton (1991), p. 187; Galluzzi (2020), pp. 92–100, figs 58, 78, 122–4. Des Chene (2001), p. 75, discussed captions and titles in books about machines accessible to Descartes. See Gombrich (1969), as in n. 128 of this chapter, for words close to ‘convention,’ including ‘agreement,’ ‘custom,’ ‘habit,’ ‘rule,’ ‘stereotype’ and ‘stipulation’ in frameworks of ‘practice’ that required ‘abilities’ or ‘capacities’; conventions ‘inculcated’ by groups to be ‘internalized’ by individuals could nonetheless be chosen. See also Goodman (1968), pp. 7–8, 34–40; Kulvicki (2014), pp. 34, 36, 56, 66, 85, 87, 100, 125–6.

³² Enn. Trag. 40.220–2; Gell. 19.10.12; Wittgenstein (1922), pp. 25, 30, 55, 75, 90.

³³ Wittgenstein (1922), pp. 9–10, with comments by Russell on 2.161, 2.17, 4.014, 4.111, 4.112; see also 2.13, 2.14, 2.15; and Goodman (1978), pp. 132–8, where a similar notion, “rightness of fit,” was the capstone of his theory.

³⁴ The discussion of Wittgenstein’s picture theory in Elkins (1999), pp. 56–81, was enriched by the author’s experience of teaching at a distinguished art school; he also evaluated Wittgenstein’s views in light of Black (1964) and Goodman (1968); see also Edgerton (1991), pp. 96, fig. 3.4, 153–4, fig. 5.2; Stafford and Terpak (2001), pp. 143–7.

³⁵ Pl. Phdr. 274D–275E; Borges (1998), with n. 7 in Chapter 5 of this book; https://www.google.com.books/

³⁶ Hume (1739–40), 2.3.3.415; Pope (1733), pp. 23–4.

³⁷ Pope (1711), p. 22.

³⁸ Hume (1741), (1777), (1987), p. xxxiv; Harris (2015), pp. 116–21, 139–45, 195–7, 245–7, 462–5.

³⁹ Heidegger (1962b), pp. 19–21, 28, 35; (1993), pp. 324–6, 333, 340. Gebirg, Gemüt and Gestell—‘mountain,’ ‘feeling’ and ‘frame’—were words that paid off poetically for Heidegger, though not well enough. He treated Gestell or ‘frame’ as also ‘skeleton,’ for example, while arguing that ‘enframing’ was the essence (bones?) of technology. Gewässer, Geheule and Gerippe—my words, not Heidegger’s—are ‘waters,’ ‘howling’ and ‘skeleton.’ He quoted Hölderlin twice in his Question. See the final aphorism of this chapter.

⁴⁰ Heidegger (1962b), p. 3, gave his first talks about technology in Bremen in 1949. Benjamin (1936) was the original version in French; (2019) is a partial English translation of the French with additions from the German revisions of 1938; (2015) includes three German versions; here I cite the French original, where possible, otherwise the 1938 German. Some differences among the versions are substantial. See also Ferris (2008), pp. 19–21, 104–5; Osborne and Charles (2020).

⁴¹ Heidegger (1962b), pp. 19, 22, 34; (1993), pp. 325, 327, 339.

⁴² Descartes (1637), p. 159; AT, 6.233; Martin (2011), pp. 1–11, 125–47; Wilson (2013).

⁴³ Descartes (1644b), pp. 271–4, 281, 283, 296; AT, 8.288–90, 296–7, 300, 314–15; CSM, p. 279; Arist. Mete. 378a17–78b6; cf. De an. 405a19, reporting a claim by Thales that “a stone has a soul because it moves iron”; Gilbert (1600), sig. *iiiir, pp. 184–91, 211–20.

⁴⁴ Descartes (1644b), pp. 270–5; AT, 8.287–92.

⁴⁵ Descartes (1647), pp. 416–22; Des Chene (2001), p. 74, described statements by Descartes that were “almost unintelligible” without the pictures that explained them.

⁴⁶ N. 5 of this chapter on the 1647 French edition; n. 227 on iconoclasm.

⁴⁷ Descartes (1644b), pp. 307–8; AT, 8.325–7; CSM, 1.288–9; Arist. Mete. 344a5–9.

⁴⁸ Arist. Mete. 346a32–3, 362a32–62b30, 363a26–64a14; Wilson (2013), pp. 166, 211, 258–60.

⁴⁹ Arist. Mete. 357a25–9.

⁵⁰ Pl. Rep. 595A–608B; Soph. 233D–36D; Ivins (1969), pp. 14–16; Eisenstein (1979), pp. 485–6; Hyman (1989), pp. 84–7; Bostock (2009), pp. 2–15; Pappas (2020); and n. 22 of this chapter for ancient but non-Platonic criticism of pictures as “very apt to mislead.”

⁵¹ Burnet (1903), at Pl. Meno 82B10; Guthrie (1961), pp. 364–9; Grube (1997), p. 881; Klein (1989), pp. 97–107; Lolli (2018), pp. 82–4; Lolli (2022) is the English version.

⁵² Bluck (1961), p. 169 at Meno 82B10, with pp. 8–17, 292–5, 299, 308, 441–58; cf. Lolli (2018), pp. 82–4: “Socrates does not confine himself to asking questions; he gets back to the shape (riprende la figura) . . . and draws (disegna) diagonals, . . . confirming the dialogical nature of the proof (la natura dialogica della dimostrazione) . . . based on careful attention to shapes (attenta ispezione di figure).”

⁵³ Bodleian, Clarke 39, fols 405r–418v, esp. 410v, at https://digital.bodleian.ox.ac.uk; cf. Österreichische Nationalbibliothek, Cod. suppl. gr. 7, fols 416v–418r; also Cod. suppl. gr. 39, fols 34r–47v, at https://digital.onb.ac.; Bostock (2009), pp. 3–5. The comment above the diagrams in Fig. 3.5 refers to Aristotle’s citation of this part of the Meno at APr. 67a8–b11; see also APost. 71a29 and Hoerber (1960), p. 78.

⁵⁴ For various presentations of Cantor’s diagonal proof and debates about visualizing in mathematics, see Barwise and Etchemendy (1996); Giaquinto (2002), pp. 24–41; (2007), pp. 50–87, 163–90, 264–5; Mancuso (2005); Friend (2007), pp. 19–22; Brown (2008), pp. 26–30, 46–7, 178–96, 217–19; Bostock (2009), pp. 103–12; also Lolli (2018), p. 59, on a different proof where Cantor used “shape, eloquent on its own (figura, di per sé eloquente).” The array shown here and a Ramist chart have different uses, but both are synoptic; see Fig. 2.1 in this book.

⁵⁵ See Ogilvie (2003), p. 156, on Gesner’s views about familiarizing with pictures. Lüthy (2006), pp. 99–101, described objections to models of light used by Descartes. Elkins (1999), pp. 40–4, called some items “unrepresentable” because they were “mathematical and not pictorial,” others because “they have never had conventional visual equivalents” and were “beyond full visualization.” But ‘unrepresentable’ in the second sense would cover light particles shown—hence represented—in the Optics.

⁵⁶ Descartes (1637), p. 3; AT, 6.83; CSM, 1.152; Zittel (2009), pp. 280–8; Lüthy (2006), pp. 99–101; cf. n. 65 of this chapter on “the nature of light.”

⁵⁷ Descartes to Mersenne, March 31, 1638, AT, 2.86; Kepler (1940), pp. 373–7; Ivins (1969), pp. 59–60; Des Chene (2001), p. 99; Lüthy (2018), pp. 256–60; and Eagleton (2006), pp. 48–52, for a different contrast between figurae as illustrations and diagrams as instrumenta or tools used to put other instruments together; also Kulvicki (2014), pp. 143–8, on pictorial abstraction in scientific explanation.

⁵⁸ Descartes (1637), pp. 3–6, 56–8; AT, 6.83–6, 134–7; CSM, 1.152–4, 168–70: Descartes provided no picture where he introduced the stick analogy in the first chapter of the Optics; two sticks in two pictures had a different purpose in the sixth chapter. See Suthor (2015), pp. 182–3; Lo (2017), pp. 384–5 and Diog. L. 7.157, for an ancient use of the analogy: “the thing seen is delivered, as if through a cane (baktêria), by the stretched air”; also Hyman (1989), pp. 4–15; (2006), pp. 115–17; Ierodiakonou (2014), pp. 238–9, 243–4, 247.

⁵⁹ Descartes (1637), pp. 4–8; AT, 6.84–8; CSM, 1.153–5, omitting the picture of the tub; Baigrie (1996b), p. 118.

⁶⁰ Descartes (1637), pp. 29–33; AT, 6.109–12; CSM, 1.164–5; Berger (2017), p. 184.

⁶¹ Descartes (1637), pp. 33–4; AT, 6.112–13; CSM, 1.165–6; Hyman (1989), pp. 10–11; (2006), pp. 73–4, 257; Swan (2005), pp. 196–8; Clark (2007), pp. 87, 337–43; Berger (2017), pp. 185–6.

⁶² Descartes (1637), pp. 35–45; AT, 6.114–25; CSM, 1.166–7, excerpted and without pictures: also Hyman (1989), pp. 16–17; my Fig. 3.3 shows the optical diagram without the human head below it.

⁶³ Descartes (1637), pp. 51–2; AT, 6.130–1; CSM, 1.167; Hyman (2006), pp. 121, 225.

⁶⁴ Descartes (1637), pp. 55–8; AT, 6.134–7; CSM, 1.169–70; Hyman (1989), p. 11; (2006), pp. 2, 60, 117–20, 125–6. Retinal images in the Optics were physical causes of brain states, not resemblances of anything, according to Hyman: “images produced by visible objects in our eyes cause our perceptions, . . . [and] are simply complex mechanical stimuli . . . [that] cause sensory perceptions.”

⁶⁵ Descartes (1637), p. 34; AT, 6.113–14; CSM, 1.166; also (1637), p. 42; AT, 6.41–2; CSM, 1.130; Braider (1993), pp. 186–7. For modern Anglophone debates about representation and resemblance, see Goodman (1968), pp. 34–40; Kulvicki (2014), pp. 39–45, 52–6, 66, 146–7; and n. 56 of this chapter on not declaring “what the nature of light truly is.”

⁶⁶ Cf. Des Chene (2001), p. 128, questioning other cases (not the grape juice) where Descartes “tends to think of unidirectional flows as if . . . [they were like] rigid rods”—hence straight.

⁶⁷ Descartes (1637), pp. 8–11; AT, 6.88–91; CSM, 1.155–6: Baigrie (1996b), pp. 115–16, observing that models used by Descartes “sometimes border on the extreme,” pointed out that a tennis ball’s finite speed was incompatible with the theory of light in the Optics. Tennis balls at the time of the Optics were covered with leather and stuffed with animal hair, not hollow: Gillmeister (2017), pp. 76–7, fig. 4.1–2.

⁶⁸ Descartes (1637), pp. 56–8; AT, 6.134–7; CSM, 1.168–70: he described the stick in the first chapter of the Optics but didn’t picture it until the sixth. Maybe the sight was so familiar and easy to visualize that a picture wasn’t needed; see n. 51 in this chapter.

⁶⁹ Descartes (1637), p. 10: ceux qui iouent la paume; AT, 6.90–1; omitted by CSM, 1.156; Juv. 10.356; Baillet (1691), pp. 8, 16–35; Gaukroger (1995), pp. 20–1, 38–41, 48–53; Rodis-Lewis (1998), pp. xi–xvii, 1–2, 8–23; Gillmeister (2017), pp. 176–81; also Dijksterhuis (2013), a thorough study of tennis in the Optics and Meteorology; for details on Van de Passe’s print, see also https://www.britishmuseum.org/collection/object/

⁷⁰ Marshall (1878), p. 19; Gaukroger (1995), pp. 40–3.

⁷¹ Shakespeare, H5 1.2.286–9; Robertson (1974), p. 18.

⁷² Montaigne (1967), pp. 49, 79.

⁷³ Dijksterhuis (2013), pp. 131–41, located the tennis images of the Optics in an “urban, patrician culture” while also concluding that Descartes designed them for “craftsmen.” In his study of prints, Ivins (1969), pp. 22–4, saw perspective as the basis of a “logical grammar for representation of space relationships in pictorial statements”; also Crosby (1997), pp. 182–90, 234–8.

⁷⁴ Descartes (1637), pp. 9–11; AT, 6.89–91; CSM, 1.155–7.

⁷⁵ Gillmeister (2017), pp. 26, 378, n. 90; Anon. (2023).

⁷⁶ Rosenberg (2018), pp. 1–5, reviewed by Satne (2019).

⁷⁷ Rosenberg (2018), pp. 2, 96, 123–4, 132, 142, figs 6.1, 7.4–5, 7.8, 8.1.

⁷⁸ Doxiadis and Mazur (2012), pp. vii–viii; Lloyd (2012), p. 403; Lolli (2018), pp. 68–9, 86–7, 117; Fahnestock (2021).

⁷⁹ Topper (1996), pp. 221–2; W. H. Auden (2022), “Musée des Beaux Arts”: “The Old Masters, how well they understood / . . . They never forgot / . . . a corner, some untidy spot / where the dogs go on with their doggy life and the torturer’s horse / scratches its innocent behind on a tree.”

⁸⁰ Rowland (2011); Vitruvius (1998; 1st ed., 1931), 1.xxvii–xxviii, 2.382–4, pll. A–T: recognizing that “the text . . . would admit of very many illustrations,” the editor of this widely read Loeb version supplied nine drawings and one photograph at the end of his first volume, then fourteen more drawings at the end of his second volume; he noted that “illustrations are intended, in the spirit of Vitruvius himself (10.8.6), rather to indicate . . . principles . . . than to exhibit details”; cf. Vitruvius (1999), illustrated in great detail.

⁸¹ Vitruvius (c.1486), unpaginated, at 1.6.11–12; 9.pr.5, 8; 9.7.7; Vitruvius (1999), pp. xiii–xiv; Rowland (2011); Galluzzi (2020), pp. 167–75, figs 92–5.

⁸² Vitr. Arch. 1.3–4, 13, 16; 2.2; 4.8.4; 5.7.1; 7.pr. 11, 5.7; 9.pr. 8, 4.6, 5.4, 7.7, for comments on drawing and painting in architecture; also 5 pr.5; 10.8.6, 11.8 on the difficulty of explaining with words; 6.2.2 on deceptive visualizing; 4.4.4 on visual pleasure; and 10.1.6 on familiarizing; Vitruvius (c.1486), at 9 pr.5 (schema subscriptum est, explicata est in ima pagina) and pr.8 (eius rei erit subscripta forma) for references to images made by Vitruvius and noticed by Sulpizio; also Vitruvius (1999), pp. 193, 245, 281.

⁸³ Plin. Ep. 4.7.2; Strada (1618), vol. 2, p. 18, with pl. 100; Reichman (1938); Keller (1964), p. 15; Ivins (1969), pp. 11, 163–4; Eisenstein (1979), pp. 258–61; Starr (1987); Vitruvius (1999) pp. 1–2; Wright (2001), pp. 7, 22–3, 27–9, 37, 45–7, 55; Kusukawa and Maclean (2006), pp. 91–2; Winsbury (2009), pp. 4–11.

⁸⁴ Benjamin (1936), p. 40.

⁸⁵ Freedberg (1989), p. 55, discussing the “myth of aniconism” in religion, observed that “theologians and lawyers may rail against figurative imagery, but in practice the strictures fail.”

⁸⁶ Descartes (1637), pp. 3, 8, 13, 24, 29, 35, 37, 43, 49, 51, 54, 63, 92, 100, 110–11, 140, 150; AT, 6.83, 89, 93, 104, 108–9, 114, 117, 122–3, 128, 130, 133, 141, 168, 176, 185–6, 214, 224; CSM, 1.152, 155, 163, 166–7, 172. See the text at n. 19 of this chapter on decorating, illustrating and explaining.

⁸⁷ Descartes (1641), pp. 88–9; AT, 7.72; CSM, 2.50; Baigrie (1996b), pp. 119–23; Swan (2015), pp. 226–9; also Galison (1984) on the cognitive role of imagination in works earlier than the Meditations.

⁸⁸ Silver and Wyckhoff (2008), pp. 128–9, cat. 20, with the text at n. 169 of this chapter.

⁸⁹ Rosenberg (2018), pp. 1–5, reviewed by Satne (2019); on the larger issue, see Fricker (2007).

⁹⁰ Descartes (1641), pp. 10–11; AT, 7.19–20; CSM, 2.13–14. During the last hundred years or so, as more and more students studied calculus, publishers have adapted textbooks to a changing readership. In 2009, nonetheless, on the website of the Mathematical Association of America, an enthusiast for an English version (still in print) of Landau (1934) rejoiced that there were “not even any drawings” in “this completely rigorous treatment”: https://www.maa.org/press/maa-reviews. But Courant and Fitzjohn (1965)—in 649 rigorous pages—had already used drawings to explore “the roots of calculus in intuitive reality.” And just a few years ago, Neill (2018) urged students to make drawings of their own “on a graphics calculator and zoo[m] in . . . [so] you can see that [a] curve now looks like a straight line”—my italics.

⁹¹ Casaubon (1612), sig. A3v; Bigelow (1829), pp. 4–5; OED, s.vv. ‘mechanized’ and ‘technology.’

⁹² Bacon (1620), pp. 147–8; Smith (1991), pp. 4–5; Deane (2000).

⁹³ Shapin and Schaffer (2011), pp. 60–2, 68–9, 83, 146–7, 261–3, 266–71, figs 1, 9, 11–15, 16b, 17–22: the authors included picturing under “virtual witnessing” as a means of verifying experimental results; also Christianson (2014), pp. 110–11.

⁹⁴ Febvre et Martin (1958), pp. 144–8; Ivins (1969), pp. 27–9; Landau and Parshall (1994), pp. 1–6, 21–8; Parshall, Schoch et al. (2005), pp. 1–7, 20–6, 95–6; Needham (2009), pp. 41, 55–65, fig. 6; Parshall (2009b), p. 10.

⁹⁵ Benjamin (1936), pp. 40–2; cf. Ivins (1969), pp. 15–16, on ancient Greek botany and “a complete breakdown of scientific description and analysis,” complaining that “all kinds of reasons have been alleged in explanation of the slow progress of science and technology in ancient times, but no reference is ever made to . . . the lack of any way of precisely and accurately repeating pictorial statements . . . [until] the fifteenth century . . . [and] the making of printed pictures”; also Lefèvre (2003), p. 70.

⁹⁶ Benjamin (1936), pp. 41–2; (2015), p. 80; Zittel (2009), pp. 206–8.

⁹⁷ Benjamin (1936), pp. 41–2; (2015), p. 65; Parshall, Schoch et al. (2005), pp. 47–51; Dackerman (2011b), p. 20; cf. Kemp (1990), pp. 129–31, 211, 221, fig. 250, on differences between Cartesian optics and artistic uses of optical theory; also Goodman (1968), pp. 112–15; (1978), p. 48, for a different approach to the notion of ‘copy.’ The face of Half Dome is about 5,000 feet, ten times the height of the very large Ulm Minster.

⁹⁸ Benjamin (1936), p. 59; (2015), pp. 80–1.

⁹⁹ Benjamin (1936), p. 42: en cela bien plus vulnerable que l’objet d’art; cf. (2015), p. 66: den so verletzbar kein natürlicher hat; cf. Ivins (1969), pp. 1–2: “The various ways of making prints (including photography) are the only methods by which exactly repeatable pictorial statements can be made about anything. The importance of being able exactly to repeat pictorial statements is undoubtedly greater for science, technology and general information than it is for art.”

¹⁰⁰ Benjamin (1936), p. 42; (2015), p. 66.

¹⁰¹ Benjamin (1936), pp. 42, 58–9; Lowenthal (2015).

¹⁰² Chabris and Simons (2009): Neither Benjamin nor Wittgenstein came up in Kulvicki (2014), where their contemporaries—Gombrich, Goodman and Wollheim—were prominent; but to be fair, Descartes was missing from Gombrich (1969); see also Wollheim (1980).

¹⁰³ Benjamin (1936), pp. 58–9.

¹⁰⁴ Benjamin (1936), pp. 58–9; (2015), pp. 78–9.

¹⁰⁵ Benjamin (1936), pp. 40, 45, 49, 58; Keller (1964), p. 49.

¹⁰⁶ Descartes (1641), p. 32; AT, 7.34–5; CSM, 2.24; Galison (1984); Daston and Galiston (2010), pp. 372–5.

¹⁰⁷ On boys acting in plays at La Flèche, see the Conclusion of this book.

¹⁰⁸ Whitney (2019), p. 40; for Super Bowl statistics, go to https://www.statista.com/; and https://franchisesports.co.uk/.

¹⁰⁹ OED, s.v. ‘epopt’; Dowden (1980); Herzog (1981), pp. 15–16; Butsch (2001), p. 108; also Makreel (1982) and my introduction to Part 1 of this book on Lebenswelt and Denkwelt.

¹¹⁰ For modern research on ‘joint attention,’ see Scaife and Bruner (1975); Seeman (2011); Mertcalfe and Terrace (2013).

¹¹¹ Bacon (1620), pp. 147–8.

¹¹² Dowden (1980); Cosmopoulos (2015), pp. 12–26, figs 5.8–13.

¹¹³ Matt. 22:15–22; Luke 20:20–6; also the text at n. 30 of this chapter on equipment. People in Jerusalem could see large likenesses of Tiberius only as stationary objects (see the last part of section 12 of this chapter) that could not be seen simultaneously by viewers who were not near one another.

¹¹⁴ Collacciani and Roux (2021), pp. 99–109.

¹¹⁵ John Donne, Meditation 17: “No man is an island entire of itself. . . . Any man’s death diminishes me because I am involved in mankind. And therefore never send to know for whom the bell tolls; it tolls for thee.”

¹¹⁶ Donne (1611), sig. A6v; Shakespeare, Troi. 1.3.78–137; Robert Browning, from Pippa Passes: “The lark’s on the wing; / The snail’s on the thorn; / God’s in His heaven— / All’s right with the world!”; Harris (1949), pp. 9–46, 123–9; Spencer (1949), pp. 21–32; Tillyard (1962), pp. 11–25.

¹¹⁷ Newton (1687); Reichenbach (1951); Gylmour and Eberhardt (2021).

¹¹⁸ Descartes (1637), pp. 1–294, translated in (1644c).

¹¹⁹ AT, 5.679–711; 208 letters are listed as translated in CSM, 3.vii–xviii; see Hotson and Lewis (2021) for Mersenne.

¹²⁰ For ‘invisible college’ in original and later uses, see Syfret (1948); Crane (1972); Wagner (2008); also Haas (1992) on “epistemic communities.”

¹²¹ Benjamin (1936), pp. 42–3; Galileo (1610); Donne (1611), sig. A6v.

¹²² Copernicus (1543), 3.86; Bruno (1591), p. 50; Eisenstein (1979), pp. 577–9; Lüthy (2003), pp. 123–8, figs 7–8, 12, 14.

¹²³ Galileo (1610), p. 9v; Donne (1611), sig. Aviv; Benjamin (1936), pp. 58–9; (2015), pp. 78–9; Kemp (1996), pp. 80–1; Dackerman (2011b), pp. 28–9, fig. 4; Christianson (2014), pp. 98–9. For drawings of the moon that Thomas Hariot made with a telescope starting in 1609, go to https://brunelleschi.imss.fi.it/galileopalazzostrozzi/object/ThomasHarriotThreeDrawingsOfTheMoon.html; William Gilbert, who died in 1603, had made cruder images without a telescope: https://bibnum.obspm.fr/exhibits/show/cartography/cartography_conquest/cartography_race/cartography_gilbert.

¹²⁴ Ivins (1969), pp. 1–2, as in n. 99 of this chapter; also Eisenstein (1979), pp. 80–8; Edgerton (1991), pp. 239–53, figs 7.12–118; Winkler and Van Helden (1992), pp. 208–9, n. 40; Biagioli (2000), pp. 548, n. 2, 565–9; Nonnoi (2003), pp. 227–30, fig. 1; Daston (2011), p. 127; (2015), pp. 19–20.

¹²⁵ Benjamin (1936), pp. 58–9; (2015), pp. 78–9; also on coins, see the text at n. 113 of this chapter. In Rome and other large cities of the late Republic and Empire, demand for bread, bricks, oil, water, weapons, wine and other commodities had to be met on an industrial scale; related forces drove industrial production of arts and crafts in bronze, ceramic, glass, terracotta and other media. Demand eventually declined, but people in medieval towns still needed shoes, for example, and they relied on shoemakers equipped with awls and lasts. Medieval people also needed bakers, blacksmiths, brewers, carpenters, cooks, millers, masons, scribes, thatchers, weavers, wheelwrights and other artisans whose tools were artificial but were not technologies or, in the relevant sense, technological: their tools were made by hand one at a time, not in large numbers by machines. The same was true of brushes, chisels, pens and other tools for drawing, painting, sculpting and writing manuscript books.

¹²⁶ Popham (1945), pll. 217–20, 227; Kemp (1981), pp. 113, pl. 37; Schultz (1985), pp. 72–3, figs 53–7; Anon. (1989), pp. 59, 170, pll. 9, 93; Lefèvre (2003), pp. 83–4, fig. 18; Botana (2020), p. 9, fig. 1.4; p. 34, fig. 2.11; p. 62, fig. 4.2; Galluzzi (2020), pp. 3–5, fig. 1; pp. 92–6, fig. 59; fig. 76. Fig. 59, by Francesco di Giorgio, was a hybrid of cutaway, disassembly and transparency; see also Anon. (1989), p. 112, pl. 50, where Leonardo’s anatomical figure was a kind of transparency. Des Chene (2001), p. 24, commenting on Leonardo’s skill with machines, regretted a “lack of mechanical as opposed to geometric intuition” in Descartes. Tufte (1990), p. 54, showed how to make a complicated disassembly easier to read.

¹²⁷ Vitr. Arch. 7.4; Colonna (1499), sig. piiiv; Vitruvius (1511), fol. 72r; Payne (2015b), pp. 115–18, fig. 5.12; cf. Husband (2008), pp. 36, 158, 220, 222, 292, 318, 321, figs 35, 126, 127, 176, 181, pll. 96, 184, 185, for manuscript illuminations where barriers to seeing into buildings were imagined away rather than cut away; also Holcomb (2009), pp. 17, 64–5, 84, 158–62, fig. 13, pll. 12, 20, 48, 49, where elements of buildings were sometimes just frames for other images; Rothbart (2007), pp. 42–7, fig. 6, discusses “occluding edges” in a drawing of a house; “occlusion shape” and “occlusion size” are key concepts in Hyman (2006), pp. 75–81, 98–9.

¹²⁸ By ‘conventions’ I understand what Elkins (1999), pp. 13–14, 35–6, called “interpretive protocols developed within art practice and art theory”—but also within the viewing of art, taking ‘art’ to include the ‘nonart’ of explanatory picturing. For my purposes, ‘conventions of realism’ are so close to ‘conventions of naturalism’—though not of expressionism, hyperrealism or surrealism—that no distinctions are crucial. I use neither ‘naturalism’ nor ‘realism’ in a metaphysical way, thinking instead of the psychology of aesthetics summarized by Gombrich (1969), pp. 86–7 (my italics): “Is not all naturalism in the art of the past selective? . . . Even Dutch genre paintings that appear to mirror life in all its bustle and variety will turn out to be created from a limited number of types and gestures, much as the apparent realism of the picaresque novel or of Restoration comedy still applies and modifies stock figures. . . . There is no neutral naturalism. The artist, no less than the writer, needs a vocabulary before he can embark on a ‘copy’ of reality.” For my purposes, illusionism and trompe l’oeil can be techniques of naturalism or realism. See also Goodman (1968), pp. 34–41; Ivins (1969), pp. 60–1 on “syntaxes”; Braider (1993), pp. 3–19, on ‘naturalism’; Crosby (1997), pp. 190–2; and Kulvicki (2014), pp. 112–26.

¹²⁹ https://www.alamy.com, ENA2GR, OY59492259.

¹³⁰ Ratcliffe (2013); Mion (2018).

¹³¹ Hume (1998), pp. 49–53, 68–71, 78–9.

¹³² Edgerton (1991), pp. 126–31, 140–1, 148, 154–9, 164–6, 170, 180–3, 187, 289. My Figs 3.18 and 3.19 are perspectival images, but Edgerton’s account of linear perspective—as conforming “to the actual optical and physiological process of human vision”—doesn’t apply. No such sights are accessible to ‘actual’ human seeing, in contrast to the tennis court in Fig. 3.10, for example, likewise shown in perspective but also preserving a convention of realism, the opaqueness of solid objects, violated by Figs. 3.18 and 19. Making a different distinction between actuality and appearance, Lefèvre (2003) distinguished ‘plans’ (as in architecture and engineering) from ‘pictures,’ which “endeavor to represent objects as they appear to the eye, whereas ‘plans’ try to represent objects as they are.” Some of Edgerton’s “drawing” or “drafting conventions”—abstracted, cutaway, disassembled, exploded, framed, ghosted, gridded, keyed, labeled, perspective, scaled, shaded and transparent views—could sustain conventions of ‘realism’ or ‘naturalism,’ as in note 128 of this chapter. This was so for perspective and shading but not for cutaway, exploded, transparent and other views. All these conventions, however, gave pictures the explanatory power of images studied by Edgerton, who traced them to “quattrocento artisan-engineers . . . [and] anonymous illustrators who stylishly plagiarized them in sixteenth-century books.” For anatomical transparencies and pictures with movable flaps, see Kornell (2022), pp. 4, 91–2, 136–7, 196–7, figs 1.3, 8.8, cat. 21, 51; also Des Chene (2001), pp. 72–4, on the importance of drawing conventions for Descartes.

¹³³ Descartes (1641), tp; also (1637), pp. 33–4; AT, 6.112–13; CSM, 1.165–6, as in n. 52 of this chapter.

¹³⁴ Arist. Interp. 16a19–21, 27–33, b1–5; Peter of Spain (2014), p. 102 (1.3–4).

¹³⁵ Van Helmont (1667); Copenhaver and Kokin (2014); nn. 60–5 of this chapter.

¹³⁶ For an influential account of picturing, see Gombrich (1969), pp. 24, 39–41, 71, 73, 79, 85–7, 116, 147, 173, 181–2 and elsewhere, where “schema” was his usual term for a sign like mark c; Gombrich (correctly) treated pictorial signs, like alphabetic signs, as both ‘seen’ and ‘read’: some of his terms for them were “convention,” “cryptogram,” “formula,” “gestures,” “motif,” “stereotype,” “stock figure,” “type” and “vocabulary.”

¹³⁷ Benjamin (1936), p. 44; (1995), p. 68; Edgerton (1991), pp. 167–9; Reeds (2006).

¹³⁸ Vasari (1991), p. 545; Christianson (2014), pp. 70–1, where the drawing by Taccola was a disassembled view, not actually exploded.

¹³⁹ Benjamin (1936), pp. 61–2; (1995), pp. 81–3; Fuller (1732), pp. 174, 256 (4087, 5813); Evening Star, Washington, DC, April 12, 1918, p. 17. The exactness ruled out here for ancient and medieval images was not the metaphysical kinship between two items that differ only numerically, so that otherwise each item is indiscernible from the other. Any pre-modern image that copied another image was inexact by a lower standard—like the one that we now apply to a photocopy or a selfie.

¹⁴⁰ Vasari (1991), 1.99–102, 2.539–44; Rowland and Charney (2017), pp. 188–206; Anon. (2021b).

¹⁴¹ Gen. 1–11; Judg. 16:23–30 (Vulgate).

¹⁴² Deut. 20:20, but see 1Kings 7:32, 8:13; Ps 89:15; also 2Chron. 26:15 for מְכוֹנָה and other relevant words in the Hebrew text.

¹⁴³ Galluzzi (2003), p. 47, fig. 1; Tutton (2021), pp. 80, 85, 120–1, 179, 208, 212–13, 218, 223, 232–3, figs 37, 41a, 75, 76, 128, 153, 157–8, 163, 166, 174, 175.

¹⁴⁴ Barnes (2009), pp.156–9, pl. 47.

¹⁴⁵ Edgerton (1991), pp. 112–14; Barnes (2009), pp. 23–6, 220–7; Galluzzi (2020), pp. 1–5.

¹⁴⁶ Botana (2020), pp. 5–7, 55, 87–8, 94–5, 174.

¹⁴⁷ Fior di virtù, Biblioteca Nazionale Centrale, Firenze II.IV.125, fol. 14v.

¹⁴⁸ Needham (2009), p. 48; Parshall (2009a), p. 10.

¹⁴⁹ Smith (2004), pp. 60–1, pl. 11; on achievements of craft, see the olympian remark by Lévi-Straus (1962), p. 55: “La peinture dite savant . . . atteste, dans ses meilleurs exemples, une complète maîtrise des difficultés techniques (dont on peut considerer, d’ailleurs, qu’elles sont définitivement surmontées depuis Van der Weyden, après qui les problèmes qui se sont posées les peintres ne relèvent pas guère que de la physique amusante); cf. Gombrich (1969), pp. 8, 34, on the same issue.

¹⁵⁰ Botana (2020), p. 165, fig. 8.5.

¹⁵¹ Clagett (1968), pp. 14–15, 34–5, 55–6, 164–7, 408–11, 516; Boyer (1968), pp. 290–3, 379–80; Kline (1972), 1.209–11, 308–18; Friendly (2010), p. 2.

¹⁵² Copernicus (1543), sig. iiiv, online at (http://ads.harvard.edu/books/1543droc.book/1543droc_front.pdf); on monsters assembled by artists, see Hor. AP 1–10.

¹⁵³ Fuchs (1542), pp. 10–11, online at https://www.biodiversitylibrary.org/item/129744#page/43/mode/1up; Fuchs’s typical plants were diachronic; not all the flowers, fruit and other parts shown were on the plant at the same time. See Arber (1986), pp. 212–21, 271–85, figs 101–4, cf. 99, listing 56 herbals printed in 112 editions between 1472 and 1597; also Landau and Parshall (1994), pp. 237–40, 258–9; Kusukawa (1997), p. 411; (2012), pp. 8–19, fig. 0.8; Ogilvie (2003), pp. 142–4; (2006), pp. 194–9, 206–8; Hoeniger (2006); Daston (2011), p. 128; Swan (2005), pp. 46–8; (2006), pp. 241–3; and Lefèvre (2003), pp. 78–82, on different ways of picturing for experts and non-experts; also Vesalius on pictures at n. 162 of this chapter.

¹⁵⁴ Fuchs (1542), p. 897: their names were Heinrich Füllmaurer, Albert Meyer and Veit Speckle; Dürer, Great Piece of Turf: https://artsandculture.google.com/asset/NgELdACk3I8Jkg; also Landau and Parshall (1994), pp. 245–55; Swan (2006), pp. 240–3, fig. 9.1; Dackerman (2011a), pp. 142–3, pl. 27; Kusukawa (2012), pp. 5–8, 45–7, 109–10, fig. 0.2.

¹⁵⁵ Zanker (2022), pp. 9–16, 32–43, 57–62, 74–5, concluded that statues of Greek philosophers stayed close to a “standard typology,” even though sculpture might “occasionally reproduce actual features of . . . physiognomy.” Carved and painted images confirmed statements—by Aristophanes, Plato, Xenophon and others—that Socrates fell short of the Hellenic ideal type of a fine mind in a fair body (kalokagathia). But the evidence of sculptures and pictures varied on how far he missed the mark and in what way. In Roman portrait busts of philosophers, which abbreviated full-length Greek statues, facial accuracy might have been irrelevant: a customer who bought a marble Socrates may have been more interested in communing with him than in the shape of his nose. For Aquinas and Ibn Rushd in the Spanish Chapel in Florence, go to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Triumph_of_Saint_Thomas_Aquinas; and for Ghirlandaio’s portrait of Ficino, go to https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Annuncio_dell%27angelo_a_Zaccaria_-_Marsilio_Ficino_-_Cristoforo_Landino_-_Angolo_Poliziano.jpg.

¹⁵⁶ Descartes (1644a), tp; compare the Wikimedia picture at https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Frans_

¹⁵⁷ Schedel (1493), fols xxxiiir, xlivv, lxir, lxxiiir, lxxivv, lxxxviv–viir; Gombrich (1969), pp. 68–9; Wilson and Wilson (1976), 20–9, 43–9, 181–91, 195–205.

¹⁵⁸ Kusukawa (2012), pp. 49–54.

¹⁵⁹ Landau and Parshall (1994), pp. 30–2, 36; Parshall, Schoch et al. (2005), pp. 73–5; Dackerman (2011b), p. 22; Kusukawa (2012), pp. 113–19: Dürer produced about 100 engravings in 30 years. But a single engraved plate, needing days or weeks of careful labor, could be re-used (with diminishing results) several thousand times: cost/benefit considerations favored as many uses as possible; see Anon. (2003), pp. 54–90, pll. 24–42.

¹⁶⁰ Pl. Theaet. 143E, 209A; Zanker (2022), pp. 34–8; Daston (2011), p. 127.

¹⁶¹ Crosby (1997), pp. 230–4; Ogilvie (2003), pp. 141–2.

¹⁶² Vesalius (1543), sig. *3v; Dackerman (2011a), pp. 124, 150–1, pl. 30; Kusukawa (2012), pp. 196, 200–1, 213, fig. 10.1. For an online translation of part of the Fabrica, go to https://wayback.archive-it.org/6321/20160901184031/http://vesalius.northwestern.edu/; also Vesalius (2014) for a blended edition and translation; and n. 153 in this chapter for Fuchs on pictures.

¹⁶³ Vesalius (1543), sig. *6r, pp. 161–2; Sawday (1995), pp. 195–7; Zittel (2009), pp. 253–5; Dackerman (2011b), pp. 32–3, fig. 6; Kusukawa (2012), pp. 50–61, 203–4, fig. 10.3; cf. Galluzzi (2020), pp. 121–3, fig. 77; also Kusukawa at https://exhibitions.lib.cam.ac.uk/linesofthought/artifacts/vesalius-portrait/.

¹⁶⁴ Vesalius (1543), p. 661; Shotwell (2013); Kornell (2022), p. 155, cat. 30—also pp. 74–5, 80–1, 106–7, figs 7.3–4, 8, cat. 6, for other pictures that may be hard to look at.

¹⁶⁵ Descartes (1637), pp. 36, 39, 42, 45, 61, 76, 116; AT, 6.114–17, 119, 122, 125, 139, 191; CSM, 1.166–7, 171; Descartes to Mersenne, late 1632, AT, 1.263; CSM, 3.40; Gaukroger (1995), pp. 222, 227–8, 270–1, 274–5, 294, 334, 405; Manning (2019), pp. 158–9, 162–4.

¹⁶⁶ Descartes to Mersenne, July 30, 1640, AT, 3.121, 141; CSM, 3.149; Gaukroger (1995), p. 334.

¹⁶⁷ Bartholin (1655), p. 343; Kornell (2022), pp. 116–17, cat. 11; also n. 178 of this chapter for contemporary pictures of the anatomy theater in Leiden.

¹⁶⁸ Ps. 22:17; Vesalius (1543), p. 164; Kemp (1996), pp. 53–7; Kusukawa (2012), pp. 229–31; cf. Botana (2020), p. 55, fig. 3.4; also Kornell (2022), pp. 20–1, fig. 2.8.

¹⁶⁹ Casseri (1645), p. 15; Van den Spiegel (1645); Kusukawa (2012), pp. 185–8; Kornell (2022), pp. 96–7, 120–1, cat. 1, 13; see Blair (2010), pp. 132–60 on diagrams, indexes and lists as “finding devices” in early printed books; also the Conclusion of this book for labeling in a Jesuit picture book designed for students like those at La Flèche.

¹⁷⁰ Helain (1493); Febvre and Martin (1958), pp. 129–44, 381–3; Parshall, Schoch et al. (2005), pp. 157–8, fig. 36; 177–80, fig. 1, pll. 45–6; pp. 216–18, pl. 61; Hamburger (2009), p. 155, fig. 20; Dackerman (2011a), pp. 34–5, pl. 6; cf. 60, pl. 9. The number of bones is 206 according to https://www.hopkinsmedicine.org.

¹⁷¹ Matt. 27:33; Mark 15:22; Luke 23:33; John 19:17; Schultz (1985), pp. 17–18, 24–5, 32–3, figs 7, 23, 28; Edgerton (1991), pp. 136–8, 148.

¹⁷² Agricola (1556), sig. α3v; Agricola (2010) is an English translation; Sawday (2007), pp. 86–96.

¹⁷³ Agricola (1556), p. 80, cf. pp. 30–6, 40–9.

¹⁷⁴ Agricola (1556), p. 234; Lefèvre (2003), pp. 81–2, figs 13–16.

¹⁷⁵ Descartes (1637), pp. 56–8; (1644b), pp. 56, 98–100; AT, 6.134–7, 8.64, 109–10; CSM, 1.168–70, 259; Edgerton (1991), pp. 141–3, fig. 4.20; Des Chene (2001), p. 84; Tufte (1997), pp. 60–1; Rothbart (2007), pp. 47–52; Sawday (2007), pp. 93–5, fig. 3.3; Sepper (2018); n. 64 in this chapter.

¹⁷⁶ Descartes (1637), pp. 126–7, 132, 137, 143–145, 147; AT, 6.200, 202, 207, 212, 217–19, 221; Zittel (2009), pp. 336–40.

¹⁷⁷ Descartes to Huygens, March 12, 1640, AT, 3.747; Harington (1596), sigs Liiiir–Lvv; Burnett (2005), pp. 1–70, figs 2, 14, esp. p. 70.

¹⁷⁸ Vesalius (1543), tp; Anon. (1989), pp. 173, 192–6, pl. 96, 108, 110, 111; Kemp (1981), pp. 135–7, fig. 24; Edgerton (1991), pp. 173, 178–9, figs 5.18–20; Sawday (1995), pp. 41–3, 72–6; Galluzzi (2003), pp. 58–60, fig. 23; Boer, Boek, Van Dam and Oostra (2018), pp. 618–20. See the print of the Theatrum made in 1612 by Crispijn van de Passe, after a drawing by Willem van Swanenburg: British Museum, 1972, 0722.6.10, at britishmuseum.org. For a 1615 engraving by Andries Stock after Jacques de Gheyn, see Swan (2005), pp. 54–6, fig. 24; and Kornell (2022), pp. 108–9, cat. 7, for an etching by Pieter van der Aa. Leiden opened a botanical garden around the same time.

¹⁷⁹ Besson (1578b), sig. A2r; cf. (1578a), unpaginated, for the same ad lectorem in French; (1572) was the first edition. Besson’s pictures in the 1578 editions were engraved by René Boyvin and etched by Jacques Androuet du Cerceau; the editor was probably François Béroalde de Verville: see https://metmuseum.org/art/collection/search/345981; also Keller (1964), pp. 4–8; Eisenstein (1979), pp. 261–2, pp. 555–6; Kemp (1981), pp. 136–7, fig. 24; Dolza (2003), p. 90, fig. 1; Sawday (2007), pp. 96–102; Dackerman (2011a), pp. 222–3, pl. 48; cf. 224–5, pl. 49. A manuscript ancestor of Besson’s project was the Bellicorum instrumentorum liber by Giovanni Fontana, who died in 1454. Roberto Valturio’s De re militari was printed in 1472 with bizarre woodcuts that were impressed by hand, not by a machine. A Roman work by Vegetius, also on military affairs, had no pictures in an early Latin edition (c.1475a), but a German version (c.1475b) put woodcuts at the back. See also Edgerton (1991), pp. 145–7; Galluzzi (2020), pp. 3–5, 93, 167, 183–9, 226, 257; and especially Des Chene (2001), p. 66 with fig. 6, and 72–4, 82–4, on the importance for Descartes of Caus (1615), Valturio (1472), Zonca (1607) and other authors of picture books about machines.

¹⁸⁰ Besson (1578b), pl. 49, with (1578a), unpaginated, for the description in French; Keller (1964), p. 2.

¹⁸¹ Keller (1964), pp. 9–10, 51, 67, 79, 105, did not discuss Zeising.

¹⁸² Zeising (1610), p. 38, pl. 11; (1614), pp. 86–102, pll. 1–2, 5–10, 12, 18, 20, 22–4. For various editions of the Zeising Theatrum, go to the website provided by the Wolfenbütteler Digitalen Bibliothek at digilab.hab.de.

¹⁸³ Kaufmann (1993), pp. 11–19; Ruestow (1996), pp. 50–2; Swan (2005), pp. 88–94; Bass (2019), pp. 10–55; Vignau-Wilberg (2017), pp. 20–44, 85–91, figs 2–9.

¹⁸⁴ Hoefnagel (1592), pl. 1; Ruestow (1996), pp. 52–3, 68; Stafford and Terpak (2001), pp. 180–4; Swan (2005), p. 80, fig. 33; Vignau-Wilberg (2017), pp. 110–11, figs 13–14; 155, fig. 1; 181, fig. 2; 447–55, figs 2, 4; 461–70; Bass (2019), pp. 105, 228–36, 241–5, figs 84, 108, 109, 110, pll. 26, 39.

¹⁸⁵ Descartes (1637), p. 78; AT, 6.152–5; Bradbury (1967), pp. 1–25; Wilson (1995), pp. 70–86; Ruestow (1996), pp. 8–12, 69; Stafford and Terpak (2001), pp. 184–6, 205–14; Swan (2005), pp. 5–7; Ilardi (2007), pp. 3–9; Rothbart (2007), pp. 58–61; Kren (2010), pp. 112–13; Peterson (2011), pp. 280–3; Vignau-Wilberg (2017), pp. 501–2, figs 1–2.

¹⁸⁶ Freedberg (2002), pp. 151–63, fig. 6.7; copies of Stelluti’s print held by seven libraries are online at https://brunelleschi.imss.fi.it. See Edgerton (1991), p. 2, fig. 1.1, for a flea shown in even more detail by Hooke (1665).

¹⁸⁷ Descartes (1637), p. 131; AT, 6.206; Freedberg (2002), pp. 160–2; Lüthy (2006), pp. 104–8 Zittel (2009), pp. 361–4.

¹⁸⁸ Descartes (1641), pp. 3, 5, 33, 45–6, 49, 60 and throughout; AT, 7. 13, 15, 35, 43–4, 46, 53; CSM, 2.9, 11, 24, 30–1, 37; Silver and Wyckhoff (2008), pp. 128–9, cat. 20; Wilson (2015), p. 57, fig. 3.2; Kornell (2022), pp. 47–9; also Lüthy (2006), pp. 102–3, 123, 131–3, addressing denials of atomism by Descartes and interpreting his use of images as “visual reductionism.” According to Des Chene (2001), p. 99, a picture can “insinuate that what it shows is all there is to show. . . . [Its] primary means . . . are detail, . . . clarity and distinctness.” But it was enlarging that made distinctness possible in Stelluti’s bee picture.

¹⁸⁹ Holcomb (2009), pp. 28–31, figs 24 and 25; also the text before n. 100 of this chapter for the double helix; and Peterson (2011), pp. 216–33, for Galileo on physical as distinct from pictorial scaling.

¹⁹⁰ Gesner (1537), (1545); Fischer (1966), pp. 36–49; Ogilvie (2006), pp. 236–40; Blair (2010), pp. 162–4.

¹⁹¹ Gesner (1554), pp. 2–21; cf. Holcomb (2009).

¹⁹² Aldrovandi (1605), p. 179; Castellani (2008); Aldrovandi’s books are online at https://www.biodiversitylibrary.org.

¹⁹³ Aldrovandi (1605), p. 206.

¹⁹⁴ Descartes (1662), pp. 1, 33, 56, 107–8, figs 12, 47; (1664), pp. 1, 27; AT, 11.141–65; CSM, 1.99–104: the familiar picture of a boy with his foot near a fire, published in 1664, blended two quite different images (one repeated) from the 1662 text; see also Zittel (2009), pp. 308–11, 321–6, 348–52. Des Chene (2001), pp. 4–7, 54, 68, 111, 156, emphasized that in L’Homme Descartes presented moving statues as indiscernible from human bodies.

¹⁹⁵ Descartes (1662), pp. 5–18; cf. the French version in AT, 11.119–202, partly translated in CSM, 1.99–108; Keller (1964), pp. 4, 57, fig. 23; Jaynes (1970), pp. 223–4; Gaukroger (1995), pp. 62–4; Stafford and Terpak (2001), pp. 42–7, 266–74; Sawday (2007), pp. 187–91; Zittel (2009), pp. 96–101, 150–5, 178–9; Galluzzi (2020), pp. 183–9, fig. 102.

¹⁹⁶ Descartes (1662), pp. 17–19.

¹⁹⁷ Descartes (1662), pp. 33–4.

¹⁹⁸ Descartes (1662), pp. 67–8.

¹⁹⁹ Descartes (1662), pp. 1–3; Besson (1578a), p. 51; see also Caus (1615) for automata that Descartes might have seen at Saint-Germain-en-Laye; Gaukroger (1995), pp. 62–4; Des Chene (2001), pp. 39–40, 128; Galluzzi (2020), pp. 188–9, fig. 102.

²⁰⁰ Paracelsus (1605), p. 59; Knoeff (2012); Kordera (2012).

²⁰¹ Descartes (1664), p. 27, in the French version; AT, 11.141–2, where the illustration is fig. 7 in the appendix at the end of the book; CSM, 1.102; also Galluzzi (2020), pp. 101–3, fig. 64, where a human was part of the apparatus in Leonardo’s design for a flying machine. The frontispiece in Rendgen and Wiedemann (2012) is a striking mechanization of the human body by Fritz Kahn: for an animation, go to https://archive.org/details/dermenschalsindustriepalastfullhdgerman.

²⁰² Jurkowlaniec (2019).

²⁰³ Foxe (1641), p. 747; King (2006); Aston (2011).

²⁰⁴ Thevet (1584), fols 382r–384v; (2010), pp. 70–7; Maréchalle (2009); Anon. (2013); (2020f).

²⁰⁵ Maréchalle (2009).

²⁰⁶ Clarac (1833), (1841–7); Maréchalle (2009); Bann (2015); Anon. (2022).

²⁰⁷ Charton (1833); Gilks (2017) tells a parallel story.

²⁰⁸ Thibault d’Anvers (1628); Brioist, Drevillon and Serna (2002), pp. 149–70, 218; Rijksmuseum RP-P-1893-A-18091 is an engraving by Willem Swanenburgh, after a drawing by Johannes Woudanus, of a fencing school at Leiden University in 1610.

²⁰⁹ Baillet (1691), 2.407; Wang (1963); Brioist, Drevillon and Serna (2002), pp. 168–70; Rodis-Lewis (1998), pp. xi–xiv.

²¹⁰ Meyer (1570), fol. iiir; Saviolo (1595), fol. 8r. Edgerton (1991), pp. 149–63, 177, figs 5.1, 5.3–4, 5.18–19.

²¹¹ Oresme (1505); Clagett (1964), pp. 305–9; Boyer (1968), pp. 379–80; Kline (1972), 1.308–17; Cajori (1993), 2.323.

²¹² Descartes (1637), pp. 41–2, 55, 64–5, 74–5, 83, 153, 248; AT, 1.562–4, 6.40–1, 55, 64–5, 74–5; CSM, 1.131, 139, 144, 149, 3.87–8, with n. 1 of the first section of this chapter; cf. Zittel (2009), pp. 129–32, 184–9, with Gilson (1947), pp. 470–4, commenting on AT 1.562–4, CSM, 3.87–8.

²¹³ Descartes (1637), pp. 8, 11–12, 14, 296; AT, 6.6–7, 9–13, 368; CSM, 1.113–17. Previously in the Optics, when the geometry became technical, Descartes had warned that he “could not make myself clear and intelligible enough to everyone”: (1637), p. 89; AT 6.165–6; see also Field (1997), pp. 224–6, for advice from Descartes to Girard Desargues about whether to address his work on conics to expert or non-expert readers; also Millay (2021), p. 37. In a different situation, while defending what he said in the Discourse about God’s existence, Descartes told a reader (AT, 1.560; CSM, 3.86) that he had avoided a full account of scepticism about physical things so that “even women (les femmes mesmes) could understand something while the more refined (subtils) might also find enough material to hold their attention.”

²¹⁴ Descartes (1637), p. 303; (1954), pp. 12–15; AT, 6.374–6; Euclid (1482), the first such geometry book to be printed, is described in detail at https://exhibits.stanford.edu/leonardo/catalog/jz56fj539; the Pythagorean theorem is on sig. a10v. Christianson (2014), pp. 36–7, reproduced a geometrical papyrus from around 100 ce; see also Scott (1952), pp. 93–4; Simpkins (1966); Kline (1972), 1.259–63; Edgerton (1991), pp. 163–6; Cajori (1993), 1.207–8, 245, 288, 301–5, 346–7, 349, 360, 375, 381–2, 2.180; Dupré (2006).

²¹⁵ Descartes (1637), pp. 296, 318, 320, 321, 356, 370; AT, 6.368, 391, 393, 395, 428, 443.

²¹⁶ De Jonghe (1588), pp. 255–6; cf. Glomski (2001), p. 344.

²¹⁷ Barnard and Mackenzie (2014), pp. 779–85, analyzed data (gathered since 1926) on publishing in England from its beginning until the end of the seventeenth century. For Europe as a whole, see Buringh and Van Zanden (2009); also White (2012); Pettegree and Der Weduwen (2018).

²¹⁸ McConica (2007); Hoftijzer (2015) described publishing in Leiden.

²¹⁹ Gowland (2021), pp. xi–xviii.

²²⁰ Burton (2021), p. 124.

²²¹ Burton (2021), p. 625.

²²² Burton (2021), pp. 20, 36.

²²³ Burton (2021), p. 24.

²²⁴ Burton (2021), pp. 20, 506–9: underlining mine, italics original; see the list of seventeenth-century titles on “optics and vision” in Clark (2007), pp. 332–3.

²²⁵ Burton (2021), pp. 2–3, with Gowland (2021), p. xvii; Mueller (1949), pp. 1074–6, 1086–7; De Jonge (1971); also Somos (2011).

²²⁶ Burton (2021), p. 491.

²²⁷ For Van Vliet’s Pieterskerk, go to https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Hendrick_Cornelisz._van_Vliet_-_The_Pieterskerk_in_Leiden_-_WGA25266.jpg; cf. Liedtke (2009), p. 35, fig. 11; also Kooi (2000); Vanhaelen (2012).

²²⁸ Landau and Parshall (1994), pp. 39–43; Kusukawa (2012), pp. 45–7.

²²⁹ AT, 1.325–34, 338–40, 7.34–5; CSM, 2.24, 3.50–1, for discussions just before 1637 with Huygens and Mersenne about figures; also Baigrie (1996b), pp. 87–8; Nadler (2013), pp. 178–80; Lo (2017), p. 375; n. 106 of this chapter.

²³⁰ Descartes (1637), pp. 3–23; AT, 6.1–22; CSM, 1.111–22; Cardano (1643); Cellini (1728); Kempe (1940); Menn (1998); Cummins (2017). The chronology of autobiography in Dibattista and Wittman (2014) listed only eleven authors before Pepys and named Descartes only in a section on Augustine; Gouhier (1958), p. 43, described the Discourse as “a story without stories, . . . going straight to ideas.”

²³¹ Descartes (1637), pp. 6–12; AT, 6.4–111; CSM, 1.112–16; Gilson (1947), p. 101.

²³² Berger (2017), p. 2.

²³³ Benjamin (1936), p. 42; (2015), p. 66; Heidegger (1962b), pp. 26, 28; (1993), pp. 332–3.

²³⁴ Heidegger (1962b), pp. 28, 35; (1993), pp. 333–4, 339–40.

²³⁵ Marinetti and Fillìa (1932), also (2014), an English version, with recipes and detailed instructions, like this definition of conrumore, ‘co-noise,’ which mimes menu phrases like con asparagi or con spinaci: “a term that designates the noise-affinity of a particular noise with the flavor of a particular food—example: the co-noise of rice in orange sauce and of a motorbike engine or the ‘Awakening of the City’ by Futurist noise-maker Luigi Russolo.” Only in Italy might a restaurant follow such recipes into culinary ruin, the verdict of two stories in the New York Times, of which the second appeared late in 2021: “Of Mouth Molds and Michelin Stars: Chef Finds Fame After Epic Takedown,” https://www.nytimes.com.

Part 2 Mostly Theory

“Let us now praise famous men. . . .” The praise, whatever its intent, excluded half the human race. The rest of the bible verse made this even clearer: “. . . and our fathers that begat us.”¹ The sentence introduced a book of wise sayings, a compilation of advice like the Book of Proverbs. But the praise enjoined was disastrously incomplete, and Ecclesiasticus 1:1 is now a cautionary text, not a commandment, for sexism blessed by scripture.

Completeness in accounts of the past has always been difficult, all the more now when norms of completeness, inclusion and exclusion have been changing fast. No one—certainly not Descartes himself—has ever had or can ever have a complete understanding of Descartes. Completeness, as a standard of scholarship, can be only an ideal and necessarily a collective ideal. Under these terms of completeness, such an understanding of Descartes must also be collective in its object. The understanding must take cognizance of a Denkwelt whose inhabitants Descartes might or might not have been able to name or recognize—like some people in Part 1 of this book, the practical part.

The theory in Part 2 maintains that completeness, aspirational for Part 1, should be a regulative ideal, though not necessarily a practice, for all histories of philosophy, not (obviously) just for studies of Descartes.

¹ Ecclus. 1:1, from a book classified as canonical scripture by Catholics but not by Jews or Protestants.

4 How Philosophy Changes

The word ‘philosophy’ is still an honorific.

Rorty¹

1 Philosophy in Bondage to History

Long ago in a galaxy far away, the host introduced each episode of a popular TV show with the same tag line: “What sort of day was it? A day like all days, filled with those events that alter and illuminate our times. . . . All things are as they were then, except you were there.” You Are There was the name of the show, and I was there—loyally, week after week for years—never doubting that I Was There, a witness to history as it actually happened. The host, Walter Cronkite, who also presided over the evening news 5 days out of 7, was the indelible, unalterable, unphotoshopped icon (in fuzzy black and white) of trust and truth. Walter’s version of history became mine: his “events that alter” were real moments of my world’s past, and his stories of bygone times were about real change in that world.²

The discipline of history studies change experienced by many humans in a distal past and recorded by a few. Philosophy has a history, which is different from a sociology of a proximal past or an inquiry about the psychology of individuals. Questions about philosophy’s history ask how philosophy has changed: the ‘how’ inquires about causes of change. These causes and their effects were, in one sense, and are now, in another sense, historical. Here I use history for past events and for what caused them then. I reserve ‘history’ for such events and their causes as described later in the present time of a retrospecting observer. Philosophy has a history and many, many histories.

In the past, causes described later by histories were events or states of affairs or states of mind and so on: these causes and their effects, which happened in history, were (and still are) historical later. Past thoughts and events produced history in the past, and later histories gave accounts of the history. Were such events or thoughts—setting aside their later presence in historical accounts—ever purely philosophical in history? If so, purely philosophical histories of some of this history might still be possible now—or even obligatory.

It’s hard to imagine a better example of pure philosophy than book 1 of Spinoza’s Ethics. It’s also hard to imagine even that tour de force of abstraction as free from human bondage, the subject of Spinoza’s fourth book. The ban that expelled him from his community at the age of 23 shaped not only what he wrote but also how it was published and how other people have read it. The excommunication and its sequel weren’t purely or even primarily philosophical for anyone involved, least of all Spinoza. Can there be an account, a history of such events, that’s both purely philosophical and complete enough to tell the story fairly?³

2 A Normative Historiography for Philosophy

Philosophy has a past now just as the Roman Empire used to have a past. Part of the Empire’s past, from the second through the fifteenth century ce, was a set of events—a piece of history, ‘distinct from histories that have given accounts of parts or all of this history: Gibbon’s Decline and Fall, completed in 1789, was a history that gave an account of the Empire’s history. A ‘philosophy of history’—not my topic here—has usually been a theory of history, not of history.

Any account of philosophy’s past, as an instance of history, will be historical. Must it also be a philosophical account? Likewise, must a history of architecture be an architectural account, a history of seismology a seismological account and so on? Different audiences may want different answers. Some histories of architecture have told their stories more effectively to some audiences by not always taking an architect’s perspective: too much expertise would lose too much of a lay or mixed audience.

Philosophy’s past has had a lay audience for some time: the same Enlightenment that created demand for Jacob Brucker’s Critical History of Philosophy in learned Latin also produced a market for Voltaire’s Philosophical Dictionary in a breezy vernacular. Today a lay audience for philosophy is indispensable if non-philosophical institutions like universities—supported by non-experts—are to remain safe harbors for philosophical expertise. Nonetheless, experts on philosophy certainly have a stake in the past of their own expertise.⁴

In this respect, philosophers have been more like architects, less like seismologists. A thorough history of seismology will include figures like Athanasius Kircher, a Jesuit contemporary of Descartes who had ingenious ideas about almost everything—including earthquakes. But few seismologists now bother with Kircher, even when examining seismology’s past, because that past, for all practical purposes, hasn’t been very deep: seismology’s living history has tracked the trajectory of its name, coined in the nineteenth century. By contrast, no general history of architecture will be thought competent by any audience, lay or expert, if it omits Bernini or Borromini, who were Kircher’s contemporaries, just as no general history of philosophy that omits Descartes or Spinoza, also the priest’s contemporaries, will be thought competent.

Philosophy, like architecture, has had a deep history and also has many deep histories to record and explain it. Architects have the Parthenon, the Pantheon, Notre Dame de Paris and many conflicting accounts of them. Philosophers have Plato, Cicero, Aquinas and their own conflicting accounts. These accounts of the deep past still resonate in the work of contemporary Anglophone philosophers: many teach about the past and investigate it. What they say in their classrooms and publish in their articles is unusually attentive to history and to histories, and this distinguishes philosophy from many other types of expertise.⁵

Why has Anglophone philosophy, in particular, been concerned with its deep past at all? The reasons are unclear to me, but the concern is manifest. Some English-speaking philosophers—by no means all—not only look for principled reasons behind the concern but also want to find better ways of addressing it. These are jobs for a historiography of philosophy that respects both lay and expert inquiry. The term ‘historiography’ in this use doesn’t mean ‘writing history’ as apart from ‘writing literature,’ ‘writing science’ and so on. If histories are accounts of history, the relevant historiographies give accounts not of history but of one or more histories or types of history: historiographies in this sense are accounts of accounts.

Historiographies can be descriptive, methodological and/or normative. Descriptive historiography gives expositions, sometimes comparative and critical, of one or more instances or types of history, answering what-is-it questions. Methodological historiography recommends procedures for producing histories, answering how-to-do-it questions. Normative historiography, sometimes descriptively informed and also selective about methods, says what type or types of history are to be preferred and why, answering what’s-to-be-done questions.

My topic here is a normative historiography of philosophy that emphasizes a rule of methodological historiography: that the historian’s research—within constraints of time, space and reason—should exhaust the relevant and available evidence.⁶ Since experts on philosophy have an interest in the results, historiographical reflection on philosophy’s past should look for norms that respect canons of philosophy while also respecting rules of wider application (applying not just to philosophy) that regulate all histories.

Understanding past causes of change in philosophy may illuminate the discipline’s present course and affect its future: current or future causes might be like past causes. Philosophy has changed and still changes, for example, as stronger arguments have displaced weaker arguments (or the reverse), just as politics changes and has changed when larger armies have defeated smaller armies (or not). Suppose change in philosophy involved not just arguments but also attitudes, beliefs, feelings, ideas, information, methods and so on. This broader scope of change might still restrict inquiry to philosophical attitudes, beliefs and so on that were internal to the discipline. But if such items were social, religious, psychological, political or cultural, they would be external—hence not distinctly and only philosophical.

However, an external history of philosophy would need to say something about issues internal to the discipline—necessarily so if the aim was a history of philosophy and not just a history of philosophy. By some standards, however, the resulting history would be at least partly external if it made substantial, not merely incidental, use of evidence from culture, politics, psychology, religion, society and so on.

In summary, histories of philosophy may be either internal or external, and some accounts of these histories—some normative historiographies of philosophy—may be either internalist or externalist and may be so either completely and absolutely or partially and relatively. I propose a normative historiography of philosophy that isn’t completely and absolutely internalist or completely and absolutely externalist.

Because philosophers, including historians of philosophy, are my main audience, I won’t have much to say about a completely externalist historiography since I assume that few philosophers would find such a thing plausible. As for complete internalism in philosophical historiography, this will be eliminated by cases—even just one case, in principle—of histories of philosophy that can’t do without non-trivial external material. If I’m right, the space for debate about a normative historiography of philosophy will have been narrowed—in a helpful way—by removing extremes. Maximalist positions will be eliminated—eliminated for externalism by practicalities and for internalism by argument.

3 Insides and Outsides

What’s inside, what’s outside, and why does it matter? Thoughtful people have been asking such questions about the history of philosophy since it first emerged as a field of learning in post-Cartesian Europe. After Descartes ejected history from philosophy, some of his admirers kept studying its past—pioneers like Georg Horn, Thomas Stanley and Jacob Brucker in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.

Brucker’s multi-volume Critical History—the first published attempt to tell European philosophy’s whole story in detail from start to finish—canonized the notion of a philosophical ‘system,’ a set of theoretical (generally metaphysical) principles related to one another, as apart from anything else, in such a way that internal coherence pushed everything else outside them. One of Brucker’s followers, Christian Brandis, expressed this distinction between the ‘system’ inside a philosophy and ‘circumstances’ outside with a different antithesis—a central history of philosophy’s past that subordinated or excluded marginal material about culture, politics, psychology, religion and socio-economic events.⁷

Leo Catana, taking a long view of the legacy of Brucker and Brandis, produced a history of histories of philosophy since the Enlightenment, while Michael Beaney focused on developments since 1945. Both discussed the inside/outside opposition while also tracking discussions of conceptualism, contextualism, genealogical, genetic and narrative explanations, hermeneutic analysis, rational reconstruction and other approaches.

Debates about these topics have sometimes been polarized by invoking an inside/outside or center/margin antithesis and advocating one location over the other, sometimes invidiously. When Imre Lakotos identified “actual great science” as what ought to be reconstructed rationally by historians of science (and philosophy, implicitly), he called the intended product “primary, internal history”—purified of “external” and “residual non-rational factors.” Later, in the wake of this polemic, Richard Rorty gave historians of philosophy reason to be cautious about “‘philosophy’ in the honorific—hence exclusionary—sense.”⁸

Both internal and external histories have presented accounts of philosophy’s past that experts have endorsed. In Anglophonia leading journals of the history of philosophy commonly publish articles that go light on context. But in the same domain, major university presses produce context-rich books about dead philosophers and their living ideas. Different sizes (see section 4 of this chapter) have suited different contents. Many philosophical biographies have been written, often by members of distinguished philosophy departments. But biography is seldom seen in journals whose limited space excludes long life-stories, whereas analyzing an argument or sequence of arguments fits inside 10,000 words or so. Supply has satisfied demand, more or less, for both parties—internalist and externalist.

In my view, this situation is normal, healthy and untouched by my contention about what a normative historiography of philosophy can and can’t be. My view also doesn’t require, in the past or present literature of the field, any concrete case of a completely externalist or completely internalist historiography. My claim is purely theoretical. I aim to exclude the latter historiography only in principle, not factually, while leaving the former to languish with attitudes as they stand.

However, I know an account of philosophy’s past—its whole worldwide past, in fact—at one of these extremes. This instance of an absolutely externalist history might have inspired a normative historiography of the same kind. It hasn’t done so, however, as far as I know. As for an absolutely internalist history on this grand scale, I know of none. Strict enforcement of a rigidly internalist historiography would exclude all non-philosophical information. Policing of internalist norms has had to be less thorough. Otherwise, a philosopher’s dates of birth and death, places of residence, native language, religion, university and other institutional affiliations would go unmentioned. I’ll discuss one internalist historiography of a less rigid kind: Michael Frede was its author. A stunning book by Randall Collins represents externalism at the other extreme.

The Sociology of Philosophies: A Global Theory of Intellectual Change is, despite its title, a history of philosophy, where Collins took on all philosophy across the globe for the past two and a half millennia. Instead of evaluating arguments, he studied philosophers as competitors in a market. The real locus of philosophical activity, he claimed, was and is a chain of social interactions among students and teachers, authors and critics, colleagues and rivals: this ritualized competition, not argument, is philosophy’s dynamo. Individuals make, state, accept, repeat or deny arguments because they are driven, whether they realize it or not, by competition for attention in a ritually structured marketplace.⁹

Philosophizing for Collins was an artifact of socio-economic interaction, and some philosophical worthies came down a peg or two: Socrates and Plotinus, Kant and Hegel, Moore and Wittgenstein suffered breathtaking re-evaluations when Collins distilled all philosophical activity into a residue of social juices flowing deep and unobserved by the actors. “Each utterance is a ploy.” Argument itself faded away—representing nothing more than “the most emotionally energizing membership coalition available in one’s network.” Rigor in argument was a charade—a masked ball where philosophers danced without knowing the address of the party.¹⁰

Seeing ourselves as others see us is therapeutic, and philosophers might be healthier after reading Collins’s book: they won’t believe it, however, nor should they. And yet his Global Theory is articulate, monumental, well informed and exhaustive. I can’t imagine a stronger statement of complete and absolute externalism: Collins found no explanatory value at all in the philosophizing that past philosophers have taken to be their main business. Hence, thinking of an audience of professional philosophers, my guess is that just summarizing the elements of his Global Theory should be enough—for practical purposes—to eliminate complete externalism from contention.

As far as I know, no published work on the scale or with the depth of Collins’s book has advocated complete internalism in the strictest sense. But Frede made a thoughtful and well-informed effort in lectures that he gave in 1986 and left unpublished. Frede began with various senses that ‘history’ might have in phrases like ‘history of philosophy’; then he concluded that the preferred type of history was “internal.” The “philosophical history of philosophy” that he recommended as an “internal history” was to be based on “philosophical considerations which led philosophers to abandon one view and adopt another, drop one line of reasoning and replace it by another” and so on. Internal history of this kind, according to Frede, had “priority over the other kinds of history, however legitimate and important they may be.”¹¹

While cautiously acknowledging “enormous and important deviations” from internal history in its ideal state, Frede promoted the ideal and asked what happened when “philosophical considerations” themselves went wrong. He imagined a past philosopher giving philosophical reasons and yet making a mistake for which the

reasons offered would not even then have been regarded as adequate. . . . Something about the person or . . . the social situation makes it difficult . . . for the person to recognize that his reasons are inadequate. . . . Only at this point, . . . [may] a philosophical history of philosophy . . . resort to psychological or social explanations. . . . Only if the evidence forces us to assume that the views were not really held on the basis of . . . [philosophical] considerations . . . can the philosophical historian turn to . . . other reasons.

A philosophical history of philosophy “resorts” or “has recourse” to non-philosophical reasons only in terminal situations. A properly philosophical history admits evidence external to philosophy only in extremis when internal evidence has brought inquiry to an impasse that won’t yield. Only a fatal flaw in internal evidence can force the philosophical historian to look elsewhere.¹²

Does internal evidence alone, without reference to other information, constitute the impasse? This seems to have been Frede’s position, which he didn’t press. If this was what he had in mind, then, since nothing but a failure of internal evidence would oblige historians of philosophy to look elsewhere, the soundest procedures—those that didn’t fail—would never call their attention to philosophy’s surroundings: cultural, political, psychological, religious, socio-economic and so on. Questions—philosophically productive questions, perhaps—would go unasked because inquiry at its best would never elicit them. A parable illuminates the ensuing culpable ignorance—culpable because it would not be invincible.

4 A Parable for Casuists: The Rope

Penitent (very tense) Bless me, Father, for I have sinned.

Confessor You seem worried, my daughter.

Penitent Yes, I’m worried! You’re right: my sin was awful!

Confessor What did you do?

Penitent I took a rope, and it wasn’t mine.

Confessor A rope?

Penitent (agitated) Yes, a dirty old . . . rope.

Confessor Taking what wasn’t yours was wrong: I understand. But maybe something else has you worried?

Penitent I don’t know. . . .

Confessor Your sin was a small one, wasn’t it?

Penitent (voice wavering) I don’t know, . . . I just don’t know.

Confessor I’m not sure I understand either.

Penitent I needed a rope to pull up the bucket in my well. So I just took it . . . took the rope.

Confessor Why does taking a rope bother you so much? Anything special about this particular rope? Was it expensive? Was someone hanged with it?

Penitent Just a dirty old rope, Father, in a corner of Squire John’s barn.

Confessor That’s hard to figure. Anything else to tell me?

Penitent Well, I didn’t untie the end of the rope that was tied to the Squire’s black mare.

Now leave the confessional to stand before a tribunal where you—a philosopher—have been charged with backing false philosophical views. I’m your lawyer, ready to tell your story and plead your case. By my own internalist standards, I can defend you only with your arguments, with other arguments that grounded your arguments, with the implications of those arguments and so on. But evidence has gone missing, the external kind, that would certainly prove your innocence—evidence not from arguments or what fell out of them.

Before the case went to the jury, my staff discovered the missing evidence and convinced me to disclose it to the court. Will a reasonable judge insist on introducing it? I believe so. But if Frede was right, this evidence should stay out of court because nothing philosophical would have forced its introduction.

A fair judge ought to rule that the evidence originally presented was incomplete and harmfully so. It may not have been faulty otherwise: the account of the arguments may have been accurate; arguments and chains of argument may have been in order. Still, because the totality of evidence omitted crucial facts, no verdict—analogous to the findings of a history—could be acceptable if it relied on that evidence alone.

5 Stories: Macro-, Meso- and Micro-

Size also matters. The parable of the rope is a micro-story, shorter than meso- and macro-stories. These labels cover all narrative—short, long and in between—including historical narrative and narratives about philosophy. A comprehensive taxonomy that includes all these distinctions supports an argument by cases. If even one credible history at the macro-scale needs external evidence, and if the same is true at meso- and micro-scales, the argument eliminates an absolutely internalist historiography by showing, at every level of inquiry, that competent historians of philosophy have used or ought to use external evidence.

Philosophers have told many stories at the micro-scale about their discipline’s past, often to decide which arguments have or should have persuaded another philosopher, faced with a puzzle, to choose one solution over others. When students learn these micro-stories, however, they encounter them in frameworks of meso-stories embedded in a macro-story. These are some meso-stories:

Plato’s metaphysics in the Academy;

realism, nominalism and Porphyry’s questions;

atomism and contingency in Kalam theology;

Avicenna and Maimonides on knowledge of God;

logic and semantics after Ockham;

scepticism before Descartes;

empiricism and rationalism before Kant;

idealism after Hegel;

language and logic from Mill to Tarski;

the analytic/continental divide after 1929.

The sequence is chronological, and it comes with historical packaging when philosophers use it. Story a belongs to ‘antiquity,’ whereas story e is ‘medieval’ and story i is ‘modern’: the labels interpret the chronology with a hermeneutic that philosophers didn’t invent.

What about meso-story b? When did it happen? Today, many would agree that Porphyry asked his momentous questions about universals in ‘late antiquity.’ In the nineteenth century, art historians called this period Spätantike. Philosophers now use similar words to locate Porphyry along with his teacher, Plotinus, and their successor, Proclus, in a remote chronological and cultural space. Before Spätantike became philosophical, students of painting, sculpture and architecture had also discovered a gateway to the ‘modern’ world in a ‘renaissance’ at the end of the previous era, long since described as a media aetas—a ‘middle’ age.

Why ‘middle’? Between what and what else did a ‘middle’ age fit? The word ‘middle’ in this use has always been pejorative. Petrarch treated it that way in the fourteenth century, yearning to live more like an old Roman than a contemporary Parisian. Ancient ways were to be cultivated and recent habits suppressed. Petrarch’s career overlapped Ockham’s, and the poet’s discontent with his own medieval civilization went hard on philosophers. Ockham and his professorial colleagues became villains in Petrarch’s grand narrative. Such complaints about philosophy notwithstanding, the first moments of now—of modernity and its sequel—have stood opposed, ever since Petrarch, to a medieval then that philosophers have studied in detail.

When a sequence of meso-stories about philosophy, like a through j, has needed a macro-story to frame it, defaults in the European tradition have been narratives shaped not by philosophy but by religion—the Christian religion in particular. Even when Jews and Muslims are the protagonists, as in meso-story d, the macro-story told today by Anglophone philosophers is a variant of the ancient, medieval, modern (amm) sequence: the middle element of amm, for better or worse, was invented by Christians who wanted to distance themselves from a pagan past.

The whole amm macro-story was a post-medieval construct that has always been unstable. As the last m has kept expanding, the middle m has felt and will keep feeling the squeeze, as a young Vladimir Nabokov predicted almost a century ago:

The spirit of generality has christened a long series of perfectly blameless years the ‘Middle Ages.’ . . . No matter that in five hundred or so years the twentieth century, plus several other centuries, will in turn also fall into a folder with some imaginative little label or other—for example, the ‘Second Middle Ages.’

When Nabokov wrote “christened,” he got it right about the amm sequence—a religious notion that was bound to be provisional in the long haul.¹³

In Petrarch’s era, the prevailing macro-story in the Christian West was also religious but different, based on Augustine’s chronology in the City of God. Shaken by the fall of Rome and inspired by biblical prophecy, Augustine divided human history into 6 periods (millennia) of roughly 1000 years. In his telling, after God has redeemed some humans and damned others, history will eventually stop. Muslims, sharing this eschatology, also expected time to end. But the pattern adopted by Ibn Khaldun, the most celebrated Muslim historian, was not Augustine’s. More concerned with political economy than theology, Khaldun described communities in development, not the decaying city of man, and he divided human time into 4 ages, not 6.

Philosophers invented none of these macro-stories—Khaldun’s, Augustine’s or our own unstable amm. This is no surprise: everyone tells stories to put the past in order, but not many care about philosophy. And when philosophers need a macro-story—to put a curriculum in context, for example—they take it off the shelf ready-made, externally, not produced internally by other philosophers.

But philosophers who tell micro-stories find internalist accounts easier to stick with. When the narrators are Anglophone analytic philosophers, the spirit of the craft—careful, patient, wary of bigthink, eager to drill down—favors stories whose scale diminishes the risk that neglecting an externality might wreck a narrative. But the risk increases as stories grow longer.

6 Meso-Stories around 1525

Singularities in accounts of logic and metaphysics have left black holes in internalist stories about philosophy. Some episodes in the customary macro-story have been about logic: the Kneales told the whole tale in their authoritative Development of Logic. Starting before Aristotle and stopping after Frege, they gave most of their attention—about 80 percent—to the first and third parts of the amm sequence. They began the middle 20 percent with Alcuin and ended with Kant. But they crammed the meso-story from Ockham to Leibniz into a hasty intermezzo—28 pages out of 783: 4 percent of their whole book covered nearly 3 centuries at a gallop.¹⁴

Their haste might be explained by an alternative meso-story, starting with a sudden break in the study of logic after 1347, when Ockham died. What he died of is unknown: probably the plague that began to kill Europeans in vast numbers just a year earlier. Philosophers were so plentiful in Ockham’s day that some must have survived the Black Death. But what about logicians? Maybe they were so few that every logician in Europe was called to glory within a few years of Ockham’s passing.

That’s not what happened, of course. Buridan lived for 16 years after Ockham died. Albert of Saxony kept going until 1390, by which time Paul of Venice had left Italy for Oxford, taking his Little Logic with him. In fact, because logic was a gateway to the university curriculum, more students studied this part of philosophy than any other, and they needed many teachers, some of them specialists like Ockham.

Rushing through an age of great logicians, the Kneales paused to puzzle about the “almost complete disappearance of a study which once seemed important.” This vanishing subject was the semantics added to Aristotle’s syllogistic after the twelfth century, although—according to the Kneales—not much logic of any kind survived Ockham’s passing. Actually, logic thrived, though in a way that the Kneales found hard to connect with later developments. This difficulty helps explain why their story hurried through 3 centuries. The disruption that they noticed is worth a look.¹⁵

A relevant meso-story—not fictional, this time—starts with the Summaries of Logic written by Peter of Spain shortly before 1250. Peter’s logic can still be read in about 300 manuscripts and 170 early printed editions: very big numbers. To calibrate, compare two other medieval logics. William of Sherwood, Peter’s contemporary, wrote a logic which has survived in only 1 manuscript and no early printed edition. Paul of Venice’s Little Logic was more in demand: 28 printed editions and about 80 manuscripts. Manuscripts of Peter’s Summaries, however, are now 4 times as many as manuscripts of Paul’s book, and early printings were 6 times as many.¹⁶

When printing was invented around 1450, the audience for Peter’s Summaries was already large: no book about logic had ever reached more readers. Then, between 1473 and 1639, publishers invested in 118 printed editions of commentaries on the Summaries by 17 different commentators. A chart, counting both texts and commentaries on the y-axis and measuring time on the x-axis, displays statistics about printed editions of Peter’s logic.

Table 4.1 The Publishing History of Peter of Spain’s Logic

Before 1525, 160 editions of the Summaries appeared in print, after 1525 only 7 editions. Peter’s logic all but vanished. After nearly 3 centuries of glory, the book that had dominated logic—not just in classrooms but also for technical commentary—lost almost all its acclaim. Why the large and sudden change?

No one knows. One part of the failed book’s environment is hard to miss, however: the Reformation was world-changing. The Peasants’ War broke out in 1524. Imperial troops sacked Rome in 1527. In 1531 Catholics and Protestants massacred each other in Switzerland. The pious kept slaughtering the pious until 1648. Amidst the carnage, when preaching was political, Protestants and Catholics alike despised traditional logic for corrupting God’s message. Pastors complained that the old logic not only made sermons dull and difficult but also occasioned the very sins that had caused so much bloodshed. One critic was Abraham Fraunce, who introduced his Lawyer’s Logic in 1588 by denouncing “those miserable Sorbonists and Dunsicall Quidditaries” whose “outworn sophistry, . . . if it had any use at all, was to feed the vain humors of some curious heads in obscure schools.”¹⁷

The agitated lawyer was a champion of logic. Logic “has something to do in everything,” he insisted, “and nothing is anything without this one thing.” Hence, “when a preacher has by continual perusing of the sacred scriptures furnished himself with store of matter, then logic will teach him how to teach others,” provided it was not “invented in cloisters”—like Peter of Spain’s obsolete textbook. In 1620, Thomas Granger heeded Fraunce’s call and published a Divine Logic . . . for the Use of Divines in . . . Preaching.¹⁸

A series of similar publications followed the first English logic, printed in 1522: they included Granger’s and Fraunce’s, and two dozen had appeared by the time Descartes died. Most were aggressively Protestant and written by lawyers (like Fraunce) or clergy (like Granger) or schoolmasters or government officials—not university professors. The university clientele, also rejecting the traditional logic, turned instead to Latin works by Rudolf Agricola and Peter Ramus. Agricola’s Dialectical Invention went through 76 editions in the sixteenth century. By 1650, 250 editions of Ramus On Dialectic were published. Catholic reformers like Erasmus promoted Agricola; Ramus, a Protestant martyr, promoted himself.¹⁹

To summarize what was left of logic for readers of Latin by the end of the sixteenth century: Agricola and Ramus had taken Peter of Spain’s place after Peter’s readership was already in steep decline. Why had so many turned away so suddenly?

The books that eventually replaced Peter’s hadn’t already displaced it: chronology rules this out. Although Agricola finished his book in 1478 and died in 1485, few noticed what he had written until after 1515, when Erasmus arranged its first printing. Meanwhile, from that year back to 1478, Peter’s Summaries had been printed 143 times. Agricola’s book could challenge Peter’s effectively only after 1523, when it first appeared with a commentary. By that time, however, the bottom had already fallen out for the Summaries, which was seldom printed after 1520. Agricola didn’t dethrone Peter as king of logic in Europe—nor did Ramus. He published his Dialectica only in 1555.

Peter of Spain’s logic book, neglected in Europe after the Reformation, was simple, accessible and relatively short—half the size of Agricola’s. The Dialectic by Ramus was even shorter—14,000 words in its last Latin edition of 1572. In fact, its telegraphic prose was concise to the point of bafflement: “when he labors to be brief,” according to another logician, “not only is he obscure but even worse than obscure—maimed.” Agricola’s failings were just the reverse. His book was long and, even though the prose sometimes achieved elegance, it was also studied and intricate: no easy read like Peter’s logic.²⁰

If Agricola and Ramus had published soon enough to overtake Peter in his days of dominance, betting on them at that time would still have been unwise. No matter the packaging, logic scares many readers off—all the worse for logical innovations poorly presented. Yet readers came in throngs to Agricola and Ramus after 1525. Moreover, the market didn’t turn away from the Summaries so sharply just for an update of traditional logic. No: Agricola—with Ramus close behind—changed the whole structure of logic.²¹

Half of Peter’s Summaries presented Aristotle’s logic as digested by Porphyry and Boethius; the other half added a new semantics unknown to Aristotle. Agricola and Ramus altered only the Aristotelian part of Peter’s design and skipped the rest. Syllogistic, the content of Peter’s fourth chapter, was the crux of what they changed—syllogisms made of propositions made, in turn, of terms, copulas, quantifiers and connectives. A syllogistic proposition asserts a predicate term of a subject term, and the Summaries was very much about predication, predicaments and predicables, introduced in the first three chapters. Agrippa dropped predication for ‘finding’ and ‘judging,’ and so did Ramus.

Agricola aggrandized the logic of places or topics—the subject of Peter’s fifth chapter—while bypassing the parts of Aristotelian logic most studied during the three previous centuries. Places were the core of Agricola’s dialectic, which eliminated the predicaments—terms for predicating classified by Aristotle in ‘categories.’ When Agricola shifted from categories to places, he also re-engineered Peter’s system. What had been a logic in 6 parts (introductions, predicables, predicaments, syllogistic, places and fallacies) now had only 2: finding (or ‘invention’) and judging. The pattern that Ramus used was mostly the same, finding and judging, to which he added a brief but momentous statement on method.²²

This quick look at Peter’s logic alongside the logics that replaced it shows how radical the transformation was, which may be why it didn’t last. Long after Descartes died and Hume’s first efforts had failed, students still complained about the musty old logic forced on them at British universities. What annoyed them was still essentially Aristotelian—a revised but not deeply restructured version of what Peter had taught. The Ramist craze was long since over, and Agricola’s new logic had expired even sooner.²³

The demise of scholastic logic after 1525 isn’t just noteworthy: it was an exceptional extinction that resists explanation—at least the internalist kind. The Reformation is an obvious place to look for answers outside of philosophy, though religious causes of philosophical effects will never satisfy internalists of the strict dispensation. Even so, another puzzling change around 1525 confirms that these years, as religious strife grew widespread and bloodier, were an inflection point for philosophy: another big change still lacks a philosophical explanation. At that moment, just as demand for traditional logic books collapsed, philosophers also retreated from a struggle about language and metaphysics that had rallied them for centuries—the Wegestreit or metaphysical War of Ways between nominalists of the via moderna (modern way) and realist followers of the via antiqua (old way).²⁴

In the early 1470s, Louis the Prudent of France and his advisers feared William of Ockham’s nominalism so much that this Most Christian King issued a decree banning it at the University of Paris. The authorities who ordered faculty not to teach the proscribed doctrine also directed booksellers and librarians to keep books about it chained up, off the market and unread. The professors, afraid and angry, replied with a manifesto in order to show who the maligned nominales really were: first by describing what they taught, then by blaming their persecutors, finally by insisting that attacks on them were unjust.²⁵

Distinctly philosophical worries provoked some of this academic panic. The professors began by identifying a doctrine of metaphysical semantics—their opposition to “multiplying things as terms are multiplied”—as a defining position for nominales. Then they added a special approach to logic: “properties of terms,” known today as supposition theory. In closing their appeal to the king, they claimed to be right about the metaphysics and semantics—about “matters pertaining to naming and reality.” But most of their grievances were about politics and religion.²⁶

Ockham, the founding hero of nominalism according to the nominales, had defied Pope John XXII on various theological points, like the timing of rewards in heaven for blessed souls. But Ockham also sided with monarchs against popes in their quest for earthly power. These quarrels, starting in the early 1320s, led to the first of 4 “persecutions” alleged by the nominalist bill of grievances, which singled Ockham out as the original victim. The second persecution, beginning around 1409, was a turf fight at the University of Prague, where a realist faction forced local nominalists to flee to Leipzig. Philosophy was least involved in nominalist complaints about the third persecution—expulsions of faculty from the University of Paris in 1413 after the Duke of Orléans was assassinated. But a venerable philosophical issue—knowledge of future contingents—sparked the fourth and latest conflagration in the 1460s. This most recent blowup was also religious, however: nominales claimed to be “defenders of the faith” assaulted by the “anger and hatred” of realist heretics—Thomists especially.²⁷

Summing up their case, the distressed professors in Paris repeated that matters of “naming and reality” were the heart of their teaching. Then in the same breath—on this very point—they insisted that their side was “always more in agreement with the faith and has often been approved by the Church,” unlike reales whom “the Church has rebuked.” The philosophically self-aware nominales justified their philosophy by pledging allegiance to religious dogma and waving a banner of ecclesiastical approval.²⁸

Plainly, the Wegestreit was a tangle of philosophy, politics and religion. Right from the start of this long fight, Church politics had harmed some philosophers and helped others, so we shouldn’t be surprised if non-philosophical combat also changed philosophy when the Reformation replaced medieval commotion with even more turmoil. The aggrieved philosophers themselves, in their protest to King Louis, supplied dramatic evidence for such a finding. The political and religious strife is well known and plainly relevant: the documented place of these events in a meso-story about the Wegestreit, a key chapter in the history of philosophy, invites investigators to look outside of philosophy while also looking within documents written by philosophers about externalities.

Whatever researchers may find, the end of the Wegestreit and the simultaneous failure of traditional logic should keep historians asking what it was that ripped the fabric of their discipline around 1525. If the forces were the same that drove Europe into religious war, how could a rigidly internalist historiography find an answer?

Although some regimes of complete internalism (like Frede’s mitigated kind) permit ‘resorting’ to externalities once all internal evidence has failed, this partial indulgence won’t resolve the post-medieval catastrophes in logic and metaphysics. After the Reformation and through the next century, philosophers kept producing relevant internal evidence: a few more editions of Peter’s Summaries were enough for the handful of readers who still cared, while professors of metaphysics still debated names and things—though no longer as soldiers in a Wegestreit. Internal evidence of these continuing activities is of the same types, logical and metaphysical, produced before 1525: this internal evidence that still accumulated after 1525 has not explained what needs explaining. Tellers of meso-stories about logic and metaphysics who ignore externalities in this period will neglect valuable evidence.

7 A Micro-Story around 1675: The pga

Philosophy changed around 1525 in ways that strain internalist rules: there are no satisfactory internalist versions of at least two major meso-stories from this era. Complex and overdetermined events challenge internalism in other meso-stories as well. Many more could be named than the 10 (A–J) listed in section 5 of this chapter, and the result would be plain: to exclude absolute internalism at this narrative scale. It would be tedious to make a list of micro-stories that also exclude internalism: there are too many of them. But recall some familiar events that involved Descartes in a meso-story.

Writing to Hendrik de Roy (Regius) in 1642, Descartes hoped to expose flaws in the traditional metaphysics of substantial forms. He still professed, nonetheless, that “the soul is a human’s true substantial form.” Regius, a Calvinist physician, had been denounced by Gijsbert Voet (Voetius), a Calvinist theologian, for trying to discredit scholastic natural philosophy: this was the metaphysical matrix of religious dogmas that Descartes supported, most conspicuously the human soul’s immortality. Voet was right to fear novel Cartesian teachings as threats to religion. Descartes eventually broke with Regius, but the controversy festered. A full account of the battle would put the philosopher’s statement about substantial forms in context—especially the civic and ecclesiastical politics of the United Provinces. The Catholic Descartes, a philosophical refugee, took shelter there, always hoping that “my staying in this country, since it’s an asylum for Catholics, will give no one a bad impression about my religion.”²⁹

In January of 1642, when Descartes sent his letter to Regius, Galileo—also a Catholic—died in Italy under (nominal) house arrest. Two months later, Descartes probably knew that the scientist was dead. Worried about his own risky views on astronomy, he told a correspondent that he had a channel to “a member of the committee that condemned Galileo”—a Cardinal who could tell him “what might be allowed or not.” The Cardinal was Francesco Barberini: he was the Pope’s nephew and also the Grand Inquisitor, though he had voted for Galileo in the notorious trial. Worried about “controversies allowed into theology from false philosophy,” Descartes assured the same correspondent that he wanted to avoid such disputes. In the same month, he also reminded Father Marin Mersenne that he had given “testimony in public to my being Roman Catholic.” He cited the preface to the Meditations, which certified that “appearances (especes) remain in the eucharist without the substance of bread.” He hoped such gestures might appease the “gentlemen of the Sorbonne.”³⁰

The philosophical theology of transubstantiation, like the metaphysical psychology of human immortality, was an issue charged with the politics of belief when Descartes wrote to Regius and battled Voetius while religious warfare aggravated these intractable problems. A full story would explain why it was never in the cards to theorize about the eucharist and the soul with philosophical immunity from politics and religion. In lieu of a long tale about substantial forms—a meso-story—I’ll tell a shorter one, a micro-story in less than two thousand words about Descartes, substantial union, the pineal gland and Spinoza: briefly, the Pineal Gland Affair (pga). Evidence for this pga story, because it turns on just two words—‘laughter’ and ‘loathing’—approaches the limit of brevity.³¹

Figure 4.1 The Pineal Gland in Situ, Descartes, 1662 De homine, p. 91

The story is pictorial (Fig. 4.1) and sensitive: it calls into question the good judgement of one eminent philosopher (Spinoza) and/or the good faith of another (Descartes). Needless to say, a glance at the pga won’t reveal “the nature of the soul and its relationship with the body” or even introduce the topic. Using this phrase, a recent exposition of “Descartes and the Pineal Gland” listed a dozen reconstructions of the body/soul relation as what Descartes may have had in mind: besides the usual suspects, dualism and hylemorphism, others on the list were interactionism, occasionalism, supervenience and trialism, excluding only behaviorism, functionalism and panpsychism. What to make of so much unclarity in so notable a chapter from philosophy’s past? As the author wrote, “Descartes never proposed a final theory.” But he was certainly alert to constraints on such a theory.³²

Descartes made his concerns known to the Sorbonne’s theology faculty in 1641. While introducing the Meditations, he said that philosophy was better than their discipline at two tasks: proving that God exists and that “the human soul does not perish with the body. . . . As for the soul,” he continued, “even though many have judged that its nature cannot easily be found, . . . still, because the Lateran Council held under Leo X . . . expressly charges Christian philosophers to . . . establish the truth as much as they can, I have not hesitated to attempt this as well.” Denying that the soul dies with the body, Descartes aligned himself with “Christian philosophers,” pledged allegiance to his Church’s theology and promised to support it with philosophy.³³

Since the thirteenth century, theologians had tied the Catholic faith to hylemorphic metaphysics on key doctrines, including Christ’s real presence in the eucharist and the soul’s immortality. They applied the intricate machinery of hylemorphism while trying to make two miracles intelligible: God’s body and blood looking like bread and wine; and humans living forever after their bodies died.

Like Descartes, Marin Mersenne had been taught these dogmas by Jesuits at La Flèche, and by 1629 the priest was exchanging letters with his philosophical schoolmate. Although Mersenne was uneasy about the official metaphysics, he still insisted that “if there is neither form nor matter, then man has neither body nor soul, contrary to what our faith believes.” Accordingly, if the position that Descartes took on the body/soul relation was a kind of hylemorphism—as later experts have said—perhaps its motivation, like Mersenne’s, was sincerely religious. Or was it prudential? Or philosophical? Or all three?³⁴

In 1600, 4 years after Descartes was born, Giordano Bruno was burned in Rome, and in 1619 another philosopher, Giulio Cesare Vanini, suffered the same fate in Toulouse, closer to home for Descartes. Vanini had revived the naturalist psychology of Pietro Pomponazzi, the most notorious victim of the Church’s demand that philosophers had to teach human immortality as philosophers. Descartes was smart to be cautious so soon after these agitators were executed. He had lots to say that might be incriminating, but he kept it out of print for the first 40 years of his life. Meanwhile, before the Discourse appeared in 1637, he had written more than enough to fill several books. But when the Church shamed Galileo in 1633, Descartes told Mersenne that he might burn all his papers.³⁵

Hobbes, an objector to the Meditations who corresponded with the author and with Mersenne, found a sure way to provoke the Christian clerisy. Everything—human persons included, maybe even God—was all and only body, so he claimed. Spinoza even dared to say that God and nature were one. Such views have been labeled “materialist monism” and “monist materialism.” And one of the dozen responses previously mentioned to the mind/body problem called Descartes a “covert materialist,” citing La Mettrie’s Man-Machine:

Descartes would have been a reputable person in every way—though he was born in a century that he was not destined to enlighten—had he known the value of experience and observation as well as the danger of deviating from them. . . . Without him the fields of philosophy . . . would still lie fallow. True, this famous philosopher was often wrong, as no one disagrees. But in the end . . . he was the first to give a complete proof that animals are just machines. . . . This magnificent confession absolves all his sins. After all, whatever tune he may play about two distinct substances, it’s obviously just a bit of cleverness, sly talk to make theologians swallow poison disguised by an analogy that everyone but them sees through.

Cynical and superficial? Of course. In the age of Voltaire and La Mettrie, settling a dispute with bons mots was stylish. But Spinoza was no cynic, and who would call his Ethics superficial? As a critic of Cartesian psychology, however, he used language harsher than La Mettrie’s.³⁶

Spinoza named Descartes only in the prefaces to books 3 and 5 of the Ethics, outside the main structure of his arguments. In book 3 he denied that the mind had complete control of the body’s actions and passions, and he dismissed what Descartes had claimed—just as La Mettrie would write—as a display of “talent and cunning.” In book 5 Spinoza asked again whether the mind controlled the affects and denied once more that control was complete. He also recorded his intervention in the pga:

We shall gain absolute command of our passions: this is the position of that most eminent man (surmising as much from his words). Had this claim been made less acutely, I would scarcely have believed it could come from someone so great. Certainly I could not be more astonished that a person who is a philosopher—someone who had firmly resolved to conclude nothing except from self-evident principles and to affirm nothing without grasping it clearly and distinctly, someone who rebuked the scholastics so often for wanting to explain things that are obscure by occult qualities—that such a person would take up a hypothesis more occult than any occult quality.

The offending hypothesis, as Spinoza stated it, maintained that the pineal gland enabled “the mind to sense external objects and all the motions stirred up in the body that the mind can move in various ways just by what it wills.”³⁷ He had already complained in book 2 about those who “say that human actions depend on the will” without knowing “what the will is and how it moves the body. Those who make another pronouncement, devising sites (sedes) for the soul and little dwellings (habiticula), generally provoke either laughter (risus) or loathing (nausea).” Spinoza was talking about Descartes again but without naming him in this passage—a scholium, not a preface—whose language could hardly be more vicious: risus is ‘laughter’ but also ‘mockery,’ and nausea is ‘loathing’ but also ‘being sick’ or ‘throwing up.’³⁸

What pushed Spinoza to express disgust with Descartes where belittling him would satisfy La Mettrie later? This is my question, a micro-question, about the pga.

Spinoza’s venom in book 5 derided the pineal gland hypothesis as ‘occult’—another nasty slur. By the time he used the word, occultus no longer meant just ‘covered up’ or ‘hidden’ but also ‘mysterious’ or ‘inexplicable’ in a magical or supernatural way. Later, when Leibniz denounced Newton’s notion of force as “a chimerical thing, a scholastic occult quality,” he used this language while charging his rival with treason against the new science. By berating Descartes with the same word, Spinoza drummed him out of the regiment of reform.³⁹

However Spinoza might have expressed this dismissal, its effect would have been harsh, but he could have kept talking like a philosopher. Without the gross insults, he could have called the pga hypothesis ‘occult’ because it concealed what philosophy should reveal and failed to demystify a mystery. Nicolaus Steno had shown that the gland couldn’t operate as Descartes had described it, and Spinoza could just have rejected the theory as bad science. But what scientific or philosophical grounds could Spinoza have had for risus and nausea? What blunder, what outrage made Descartes so ridiculous, so repulsive? Whatever it was that pushed Spinoza so far, he found the pga hypothesis so despicable that no “person who is a philosopher” could countenance it. Descartes was unredeemable. His license to philosophize was cancelled.⁴⁰

But Spinoza, while waving the repellent Descartes off as merely clever and without adequate ideas, did not—like La Mettrie—interpret the theory of “two distinct substances” as just “sly talk” meant to appease theologians. Spinoza’s formative religious experience in Amsterdam’s Talmud Torah congregation, unlike La Mettrie’s Jansenist schooling, wasn’t Christian. Nonetheless, he certainly appreciated the risks that Descartes would have run by not distancing soul from body, and he was also alert to his own vulnerability. He withheld the Ethics because he feared people might read it as “striving to show that there is no God”—just as many did read it.⁴¹

What else could he have done to make the Ethics even more despised than it came to be? One guess is this: Spinoza, reviled as a renegade Jew while living, could have attacked Descartes, a deceased Christian celebrity, not just for professing dualism but also for doing so only to placate his ecclesiastical masters.

My unconventional approach to the pga is not unexampled—given La Mettrie’s response to a related problem about Descartes and his “two distinct substances.” But what’s the evidence for my account? Must we turn to religion and psychology to explain why Spinoza called Descartes not just mistaken but nauseating? So it seems. Will using such evidence violate rules of internalism? Yes, on several counts. But Spinoza himself left this non-philosophical impasse among philosophical propositions and scholia. This blockage inside the Ethics forces us to look there again but also elsewhere, outside philosophy, in order to find evidence for a micro-story about philosophical stars of the first magnitude—a story that can’t be purely internalist.⁴²

That said, an objector might still bar my account of the pga from a proper history of philosophy just because I’ve turned to religion and psychology to explain how eminent philosophers handled a famous problem. The objector—no less dependent on the amm sequence than any of her colleagues—might not want to quarrel about this macro-story and might even permit externalist meso-stories. It’s hard to deny, after all, that non-philosophical events like the fall of Rome, the Reformation and World War II changed things utterly inside philosophy. But this temperate objector—who might also be wary of ‘philosophy’ as honorific while conceding macro-stories and meso-stories as well—will still be a die-hard internalist about at least one micro-story if she insists that a “philosophical history of philosophy” must exclude the foregoing account of the pga because it relies on evidence that all parties classify as external.⁴³

In order to repeal this prohibition, what remains is to make the case for an externalist micro-story more explicit by describing non-philosophical circumstances inside philosophy that require their inclusion in a story about philosophy—circumstances like those that troops fighting in the Wegestreit included in their meso-story. One last semi-fiction presents such circumstances at the micro-level.

8 Cartesiana

Once upon a time, La Mettrie collected Cartesiana. He owned a draft of the (now lost) fencing manual by the young Descartes that Baillet dated around 1613. La Mettrie also had a (now unknown) letter that Descartes sent to Mersenne just before his friend died in 1648. The fencing manual is still lost—hence unread like the letter to Mersenne—but a philosopher will soon find both.

What will she say? Considerations of fame and fortune, also ethics, make silence unlikely. Besides, the rule about exhausting evidence forbids ignoring documented information. The rule speaks to relevant information, however. Does an adolescent’s draft of a fencing book pass this test? Surely it does: by filling out an early episode in a famous philosopher’s biography. But will a micro-story about swordplay contribute anything to a history of philosophy? This remains to be seen.⁴⁴

The other notional discovery, the letter, records a confession that Descartes asked Mersenne never to reveal. The letter from Descartes called the pga the worst embarrassment of his life and admitted that the conarium made no physical or philosophical sense. “Please forgive my sin against philosophy,” he begged the priest, “in light of my duties to religion and your own. As you once wrote, it would have been ‘contrary to what our faith believes’ for me to reject the metaphysics propped up by my nonsense about the pineal gland.”⁴⁵

Many people would want to see the fencing manual. More would want to read the letter. Since the letter deals with a topic central to the Meditations, some of them would be philosophers anxious to know what the finder of the letter reported to her peers. The letter will have persuaded her that religion and psychology explain—by a philosopher’s own account of his philosophy—why Descartes disgraced himself with the pineal gland, thus making sense of his remorse, his castigation by Spinoza and La Mettrie’s sarcasm. Should her conclusion become part of the history of philosophy? Hard to see why it shouldn’t.

But fictional events, like Descartes sending a penitent letter to Mersenne, lie outside of history. Moreover, if a philosopher someday discovers a real letter saying the same thing, the authentic document would contribute nothing to an absolutely internalist history of philosophy. However, like the forgotten horse in the parable of the rope, this document, if it were discovered yet not introduced in evidence, would leave a fatal and blameworthy hole. Refusal to condone such fatalities eliminates absolute internalism from micro-stories about philosophy’s past.

9 Dying Like a Mathematician

Accounts of philosophy’s past are long, short or somewhere between. Since some accounts at all three levels need external evidence, an absolutely internalist normative historiography of philosophy is not an option anywhere: this has been demonstrated by an argument from cases about macro-, meso- and micro-stories.

When philosophers attend to history and make histories, they should be guided by ethics, rules of method and common sense not to exclude politics, religion, psychology and other externalities from what they examine—though they may decide against using this material in their stories. No matter: many others can write philosophical histories of philosophy (as Frede and others have used this phrase) with evidence made complete by including externalities. When these authors ask ‘how has philosophy changed’ or ‘how does philosophy change,’ sometimes they’ll find correct and credible answers outside philosophy. Since philosophers are human beings, not just philosophers, finding otherwise would be strange.

Consider a story about mathematics—a discipline even more remote from most human experience than philosophy. Évariste Galois, acclaimed as a pioneer of group theory in algebra, stopped doing mathematics at the age of 20: given the power of his discoveries, his untimely exit from the mathematical scene may have changed the whole course of the field—for worse or for better. Why did Galois stop? Suppose he was blocked but not technically. Would inquiring about such an inhibition (psychological, no doubt, but also mathematical) make the grade for an internalist history of mathematics. Again: hard to see why not. Mathematicians, not just philosophers, dread being blocked, and they share this occupational hazard with playwrights and poets.

Galois died in a duel, however, and fights with pistols had been on no one’s mathematical syllabus. If this terminal and non-mathematical fact about the end of a mathematical genius belongs to his story—and how could it not?—how to treat related information about the institutional side of his career? He was a progressive activist in reactionary times. Just before he was shot, he had been thrown out of the École Normale, founded during the French Revolution to promote secular learning. If you were a mathematician and curious about Galois, would you feel poorly served by a story that ignored how he died and said nothing about the motives of the society that disgraced him? What about the hemlock and the Athenian executioner at the end of the Phaedo? Suppose these non-philosophical facts about Socrates had never been disclosed. I’d be let down by stories so depleted. As a philosopher, I’d want to know such things, if they were true, about my philosophical ancestors. And I’d let the external evidence decide whether conclusions supported by it ought to interest me as a student of philosophy’s internal past.⁴⁶

For many, many stories, having such information isn’t necessary, though at one level of inquiry—the macro-story—it’s inevitable. Macro-stories aren’t made or managed by philosophers, who use them nonetheless to frame other stories—the manifold micro-stories and many meso-stories that sometimes turn on evidence external to philosophy. Nonetheless, internal evidence suffices for many histories—almost all micro-stories, perhaps, and many meso-stories too—even though a normative historiography of philosophy can’t be absolutely and completely internalist.

Suppose a story about philosophy looked good purely on internal evidence: what value might external evidence add? Suppose the additional evidence confirmed the story: that’s a gain. External evidence might also enrich a story, with or without confirming it. Or maybe the story could be disproved or corrected or adjusted by non-philosophical evidence. The parable of the rope shows that ignoring such evidence is blameworthy unless the ignorance is invincible. And in many ways, keeping external evidence in view can be a plus—not just a necessity—for histories of philosophy.

¹ Rorty (2010), p. 224, n. 36.

² Anon. (2021c); Copenhaver (2019a) was an early sketch of parts of this chapter.

³ Nadler (2001).

⁴ Brucker (1742–4); Voltaire (2012).

⁵ Sauer (2022), pp. 1, 4, proclaimed that “studying the history of philosophy is philosophically unhelpful” before deploring philosophy’s “strong historical focus”—his own observation.

⁶ The word ‘evidence’ here is ordinary English, not an epistemic or legal term of art; see Schauer (2022) for a recent discussion.

⁷ Another way to marginalize an inquiry pre-emptively is to deem its problems not “substantive,” as in Sauer (2022), p. 5.

⁸ Lakatos (1978), pp. 118–21, 132; Rorty (1984), pp. 58–61, 73; (2010), p. 224, n. 36; Catana (2008), (2013); Beaney (2019).

⁹ Collins (1998), pp. 19–53.

¹⁰ Collins (1998), pp. 48–53, 87, 126, 650, 660, 733, 736.

¹¹ Frede (1986), pp. 2–5, 25, 29, 37–8, 42–4, 48–50: this was an earlier version of lectures given in Oxford in 1989 but published posthumously in Frede (2022).

¹² Frede (1986), pp. 34–8, 43–4.

¹³ Nabokov (2016).

¹⁴ Kneale and Kneale (1962).

¹⁵ Kneale and Kneale (1962), p. 273.

¹⁶ Mullally (1945); Kretzmann (1966), p. 13; De Rijk (1972), pp. c–ci; Perreiah (2002), pp. xii–xxviii.

¹⁷ Fraunce (1588), sig. Biiiv.

¹⁸ Fraunce (1588), sig. Biiiv; Granger (1620).

¹⁹ Howell (1956); Ong (1958); Mack (1993), pp. 257–302; Sgarbi (2013).

²⁰ Agricola (1539), (1992); Ramus (1572a), (1996); Burgersdijck (1660), sig. B2; Peter of Spain (2014).

²¹ See the second chapter of this book.

²² Mack (1993), pp. 117–202; Copenhaver, Normore and Parsons (2014), pp. 19–41.

²³ Copenhaver, Normore and Parsons (2014), pp. 15–16.

²⁴ Normore (2017), pp. 130–1.

²⁵ Ehrle (1925), pp. 305–22, edited the royal decree, followed by the manifesto on pp. 322–6; see Baudry (1989) for translations of related documents by Rita Guerlac; also Schabel (1994).

²⁶ Ehrle (1925), pp. 322, 326.

²⁷ Ehrle (1925), pp. 323–5.

²⁸ Ehrle (1925), p. 326.

²⁹ AT, 3.501–6, 542–3; CSM, 3.205–9.

³⁰ AT, 3.542–3; 5.544–5; CSM, 3.210.

³¹ Armogathe (1977); Adams (2012).

³² Lokhorst (2015), pp. 17–19.

³³ AT, 7.1–3; CSM, 2.3–4.

³⁴ Mersenne (1625), p. 81; Hoffman (1986).

³⁵ AT, 1.270–1; CSM, 3.40–1.

³⁶ La Mettrie (1748), pp. 95–6; Ward (2000), p. 127; Ellenzweig (2016), p. 264.

³⁷ Spinoza, Ethics, 3 pr., 5 pr.

³⁸ Spinoza, Ethics, 2 P35 S.

³⁹ Leibniz and Clarke (1956), p. 94; section 2 of the first chapter of this book.

⁴⁰ Spinoza, Ethics, 5 pr.; Andraut (2018), pp. 90–1.

⁴¹ Spinoza, Letter 68; La Mettrie (1748), pp. 95–6.

⁴² La Mettrie (1748), pp. 95–6.

⁴³ Rorty (1984), pp. 58–61, 73; Frede (1986), p. 37.

⁴⁴ Baillet (1691), 2.407; section 12 of Chapter 3 of this book.

⁴⁵ Cf. Mersenne (1625), p. 81, as at n. 34 of this chapter.

⁴⁶ Lolli (2018), pp. 7, 66, 85: Lolli, a philosopher of mathematics who saw the tale of Galois as a “romantic model,” also wrote that “mathematicians ‘don’t know the history of yesterday (storia di ieri),’ . . . not even the lives (la vita) of those whose theorems they cite.” Lolli regretted the oblivion because he thought that “social circumstances or character” bear on stories told about people like Galois—both as humans and as mathematicians. Fortunately, there are biographies of mathematicians as well as histories of mathematics whose plusses and minuses are like the defects and virtues of histories of philosophy. Dupuy (1896), still a useful life of Galois, was written by a prominent defender of Alfred Dreyfus; Astruc (1994) was the work of a famous film critic almost a century later; meanwhile, Smith (1973) investigated the ENS during the period when Galois was ejected. Thyssen and Ceulemans (2016), authors of a recent “textbook” on group theory, introduced their topic by summarizing “the tragic life of Évariste Galois,” whose story remains irresistible to algebraists. Maybe Astruc was planning a movie—probably not about Paolo Ruffini, however, a less celebrated Italian who got there first on basics of the theory in question: see O’Connor and Robertson (1998).

5 Bring Out Your Dead!

And who’s to watch those watchers?

Juvenal¹

1 Data for a Typology

Historians of philosophy are custodians of philosophy’s memory: their task is to recover, record and explain the philosophical past. As long as parts of this past remain forgotten, the task is incomplete. Some forgetting—maybe most of it—is inevitable and blameless: some evidence stays lost despite all efforts to find it. Absent such efforts, however, persistent forgetting is culpable. Oblivion is the harmful unawareness that results.

Oblivion has been a failure of the history of philosophy in the contemporary Anglophone world: this is my first point. Second, I’ve identified four types (there may be more) of this blameworthy oblivion. Third, other losses follow from the pernicious forgetting: I’ll describe some of them and propose reparations.

Many philosophers of the deep past have been well remembered later: other philosophers have discussed them for centuries, and non-philosophers recognize their names today. Since the eighteenth century, authoritative works of record have memorialized their philosophical achievements. Their books have long been read in English, and the authors are now familiar to speakers of English. Their names evoke not only their own ideas but also broader perspectives.²

Three such unforgotten philosophers are Aristotle, Descartes and Kant. Evidence that we remember them can be quantified by PI scores, which can be calculated from entries compiled since 1967 by the Philosopher’s Index: current PI data cover more than half-a-century. For this period, 370 entries about Kant refer to (a) articles in English, with (b) Kant’s name in the title, (c) published in journals that (d) specialize in the history of philosophy. On the same measures, Aristotle’s PI score is 252, and Descartes gets 187.³

But Proclus scores only 5.

Yet there are good reasons to remember Proclus better: persistent attention from philosophers regularly confirmed by reputable authorities; long-standing accessibility to readers of English; and extent of influence within philosophy and beyond. By these standards and given his stature, so low a score for Proclus is puzzling. Wikipedia, a handy index of common knowledge, tells us that Proclus was “one of the last major classical philosophers” and that many of his works survive. A link will take you to a long list of his writings, fully annotated, most with English versions. Moreover, a different query to the PI database—looking for books in English about Proclus rather than journal articles—turns up more entries: twenty-four of them.⁴

These statistical facts indicate failures of memory only in the restricted case of journals—not books, blogs, podcasts and other sites of academic conversation—and only journals that record the history of philosophy in English as tabulated by the Philosopher’s Index.

On this small stage, Proclus has had little applause despite the large scope and influence of his work on cosmology, ethics, language, logic, mathematics, metaphysics, physics, politics and theology. Under any of these headings, his PI score never rises above 5. Neither this number, nor much higher ratings for Aristotle, Descartes and Kant, is an exact measure for present purposes: a different rating of 300 or 400 rather than 370 for Kant would say nothing very different about philosophy’s memory of him. Even though 370, 252 and 187 are exactly calculated numbers, they support only rough distinctions, like ‘most,’ ‘less’ and ‘least.’ In this framework, a particular set of dated PI statistics says that the journals in question have cared most about Kant, less about Aristotle and least—within an eminent group—about Descartes. This fact isn’t quantified exactly by PI scores, only roughly. But it’s a fact.

Moreover, even broad, rough measures of fact may be useful—likewise the exact lower bound at zero that all such measures share. As a statistical matter, zero attention to one philosopher is precisely the same as zero attention to another: total oblivion. And the same goes for topics studied by past philosophers but now forgotten by journals. PI scores for Proclus on politics and theology are both zero, for example. Although this ancient thinker explored both subjects extensively, the journals examined here and rated by PI scores have shown absolutely no interest in him as an expert on these matters. Also entirely forgotten—to name just a few more names—are Iamblichus, Peter Lombard, Tommaso Campanella and Mary Wollstonecraft: in Anglophone journals these renowned sages have been dead even to memory, and many more are moribund (Table 5.2).⁵

Figure 5.1 Smoking While Loading the Dead on a Plague Cart Nathaniel Parr After Samuel Wale, 1747 Wellcome Collection 6926i

And yet flashes of life gleam in annals of mortality (Fig. 5.1). Since Aristotle, Descartes and Kant are common points of reference in inquiries where they aren’t central, journals discuss them in articles whose titles never mention their names. This is so both for high-scorers like Kant and for low-scorers like Proclus. The resulting imprecisions bottom out in the same way: no interest at all, as calculated here, is just exactly none at all. Interest quantified in this way can be zero, or nearly zero, either about a philosopher or about a philosopher as an investigator of one topic or another—like Proclus on politics or theology.

Although Descartes is a high-scorer, he and Proclus both get zero for politics, where both Aristotle and Kant score 11. As previously stated, Kant’s global score of 370 isn’t meaningfully different from a 300 or a 400—a spread of 100 points, nearly 10 times more than the 11 for Kant on politics. And a PI score for a named philosopher on a particular topic (Kant on politics) is sure to be lower than the philosopher’s global score (just Kant): this is because Kant on politics competes for attention with Kant on ethics, Kant on metaphysics and so on. Even so, modest scores of 11 still indicate that journals have treated Kant and Aristotle as authorities on politics, a topic on which the same journals have granted Descartes and Proclus no authority—a difference registered in the statistics. Another distinction, small but informative, is that the score of 5 earned by Proclus was global—not attached to any topic yet still remarkably low for a thinker so highly esteemed.

However, the same statistics show that contemporary Anglophone philosophers have indeed been writing about Proclus—though rarely in journals that record the history of their field. If not just history journals but all journals, books, chapters, dissertations and other media are counted, Proclus scores 115, yet only 5 for the Anglophone journals studied here.⁶ The difference is striking—indeed, counterintuitive. On one channel—journals of the history of philosophy—philosophers in the English-speaking world have seldom heard a voice from the past that speaks loud, clear and often on other channels.

Because these journals are indispensable for philosophical communication and inevitable as choke points for careers in the history of philosophy, this failure to communicate has consequences. If graduate students are curious about Kant or dazzled by Descartes, their excitement may yield professional rewards. But pursuing Proclus is less likely to lead to publication and a paying job—given how journals allot their pages. Proclus—an eminent Neoplatonist and Plato’s last Successor (his title) as head of the Academy—has sunk near the event horizon of oblivion, if we take our bearings from data about the journals discussed here.

2 Ambiguity, Incompleteness and Oblivion

Oblivion can be beneficial, however. Funes the Memorious, an unforgettable Borges character, “remembered not only every leaf of every tree in every patch of forest, but every time he had perceived or imagined that leaf. . . . My memory,” Funes told a friend, “is like a garbage heap.”⁷ No forgetting at all: heaven help us! Besides, not all forgetting is oblivious, and oblivion about something might not be total for that item. Likewise for ambiguity—one of many philosophical topics obscured by oblivion. Like oblivion, ambiguity is sometimes incomplete or partial: sometimes a statement is somewhat ambiguous rather than totally ambiguous.

Ambiguity, unlike Proclus, is a promising career choice for young philosophers in Anglophonia. The extensive entry on this topic in the online Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (SEP) would encourage the young to think so. Duly canonized by the SEP, ambiguity has been blessed by institutional authority as a problem worthy of philosophers. The SEP entry allows that “authors, poets, lyricists and the like” have also valued ambiguity as “an extremely powerful tool,” while philosophers have been motivated by different “concerns regarding the regimentation of natural language in formal logic.”⁸ Fair enough: there’s plenty of ambiguity to go around.

The SEP entry on ambiguity ends with a long bibliography—nearly seventy items, including listings for Shakespeare and Thomas Pynchon, whose writings attest that “ambiguity in art can . . . increase . . . interest . . . by refusing to allow easy categorization and interpretation.” Strangely, the bibliography for the ambiguity entry makes no mention of William Empson, whose PI score (in the history journals) is zero. Empson published his classic study, Seven Types of Ambiguity, in 1930. Extolling this book, Wikipedia ranked him among the “three greatest English literary critics” of the last three centuries. The British Society of Aesthetics, which advertises its mission as “philosophical,” has sponsored a lecture in Empson’s name.⁹

Since the SEP entry confirms that poetic ambiguity warrants philosophical attention, Empson’s absence from the history journals seems odd, given his celebrity. Total silence about him on ambiguity, in a different register, is like total silence about Gödel on incompleteness: the title of the SEP article on incompleteness, which includes Gödel’s name, would be incomplete without it.¹⁰ Empson published his famous book nearly a century ago. For literary critics, he’s no longer a hot property—no better for career prospects in English departments than Proclus in philosophy departments. Empson and Gödel were contemporaries: Gödel released his breakthrough articles in the early 1930s, just after Seven Types appeared, and his fame has never dimmed.¹¹

Not so for C. I. Lewis. The book that made Lewis famous, Mind and the World Order, came out around the same time, in 1929, but now it’s out of print, just like Seven Types. Forgetting is sometimes incomplete, however—not entirely oblivious. Like Empson in the English Department on one side of campus, Lewis—his contemporary just across the quad in the Philosophy Department—has lost the buzz, though not all of it. Lewis’s PI journal score of 9 beats Empson’s zero, and philosophers have also fended off oblivion for Lewis with an SEP article all his own.¹²

Empson’s main achievement was a typology of ambiguity. He might have rested his case on the simpler finding that ambiguity adds value to art, that metaphor and other devices of poetry get power from ambiguity. “Juliet is the sun,” Romeo declares. No: Juliet is the girl up there on the balcony, not a main-sequence, G-type star. And yet Romeo gets it right by having it both ways: Juliet is his human beloved, who shines in his eyes like a sun. The more we explain Shakespeare’s words, the dimmer the explaining. Empson’s gift was to say more and make it clearer.¹³

In Seven Types he classified ambiguity in distinct critical categories and applied them to poetry. His starting point was a word, ‘ambiguous,’ that no one likes to hear about her own words. But Empson made this pejorative term productive by distinguishing its types and finding them in poems, thus compiling concrete detail about art thriving on ambiguity. Just as forgetting was a tonic for the memorious Funes, so ambiguity was a feast for Empson’s poets. But what about oblivion, which comes from intemperate forgetting?

Can total oblivion be a desired human good? Should I ever want my memory fully and forever disabled, deliberately eliminating an ability that helps make me human? Surely not. But suppose my oblivion were unwilled, temporary, particular and selective—forgetful accidentally and momentarily about some things yet not unmindful of others. Maybe that’s not so bad, maybe even useful. In any case, these are concerns for individual persons, not for groups of people as agents of institutional oblivion—the forgetting that eliminates a Proclus or an Empson from a whole sector of academic memory. Oblivion of that kind can’t be good for the academy.

In journals that tend to the history of philosophy in English, oblivion with these institutional effects—harmful and culpable—has been total for Empson and nearly total for Proclus. Other cases of oblivion, damaging in different and deeper ways, are also institutional yet partial. I’ll now leave Empson and Proclus to classify such cases before examining two of them in detail.

3 Four Types of Oblivion

Go into a bookstore, if you can find one, and genuflect: bookstores are churches of memory. Nietzsche and Heidegger will be on display, in English, on the few philosophy shelves, and what you see will reflect their PI scores for journals: Nietzsche’s global score is 106, just behind Heidegger’s at 111. The data show that Anglophone philosophy remembers both German thinkers. A number of topics are widely recognized as their inventions or special interests: Heidegger gets credit for anxiety, being, death, existence and time; Nietzsche speaks authoritatively about power, the Superman, tragedy, values and will.

And yet philosophical Anglophonia—as maker and market for journals that record philosophy’s past—has forgotten valuable, perhaps invaluable things about them both. Although Heidegger on care (Sorge) scores 10 when all formats are counted, and Nietzsche in all formats gets 17 for ressentiment (resentment), his score for resentment in the history journals studied here is zero, and it’s better only by 1 for Heidegger on care. Again, the results are counterintuitive. Shouldn’t Nietzsche’s visibility in popular culture be reflected across the spectrum of academic media—including philosophy’s leading history journals in English? Asking about resentment sharpens the larger question because this favorite topic of Nietzsche’s has exploded in today’s politics. More later on the resentment bubble.

First the high scores again: 370 for Kant’s global PI, 252 for Aristotle’s and 187 for Descartes. Kant, the most recent of the three, died more than two centuries ago. And yet robust numbers for these dead philosophers reflect their living academic and cultural presence: they speak to philosophers and non-philosophers now. Moreover, people who have never heard of them have not been made oblivious about their teachings by not knowing their names. (Inquiries can be ‘critical’ without Kant’s seal of approval.) But philosophers often name, remember and write about them in journals: hence the high PI scores attached to their names.

Global scores for Nietzsche and Heidegger are lower than for Kant, yet high enough to confirm that Anglophone philosophers have taken the two later Germans seriously as agents of philosophy’s history. In this respect, is any unusual forgetting in evidence for them? Their scores—106 for Nietzsche, 111 for Heidegger—are nowhere near oblivion of any kind, whether total (zero for Empson) or partial (5 for Proclus). Partial forgetting about Nietzsche and Heidegger comes along with a good deal of remembering, and yet, in moral terms, partial forgetting about them may have done more harm than complete silence about Empson.

In memory of Empson’s Seven Types of Ambiguity, I offer four types of oblivion for your consideration. I don’t know any other classification of oblivion, but maybe mine will tempt others to do better. At one extreme of completeness, Burton’s Anatomy of Melancholy—a state of mind like forgetting—might be a model for an anatomy of oblivion.¹⁴ Meanwhile, my typology isn’t at all comprehensive.

Table 5.1 Types of Oblivion

Type

Topic

Scope of Damage

Kind of Damage

Empson

1

ambiguity

total

academic

Proclus

2

platonism

partial

academic

Nietzsche

3

resentment

partial

moral

Heidegger

4

care

partial

moral and non-moral

To repeat: oblivion is unawareness that results from persistent forgetting and whose consequences are damaging in some way, either partially or totally. Type 1 oblivion is total in column 4 of Table 5.1. But in column 5 the kind of damage done by total oblivion is only academic—like Empson’s absence from journals, which is a worry mainly for specialists. Also academic is the partial oblivion (col. 4) about Proclus, which is Type 2. The oblivion that results from persistent forgetting about Proclus is only partial: Anglophone journals studied here sometimes, though seldom, remember him.¹⁵ Although Type 3 and Type 4 are also only partial—my examples are Nietzsche on resentment and Heidegger on care—the damage done by them may be worse than academic harm. T3 forgets a philosopher’s moral claim (col. 5), which might be very important. T4 also forgets a moral claim along with and despite its grounding in non-moral considerations (col. 5): in metaphysics, for example.

In recent times Nietzsche’s passionate aphorisms have attracted more non-specialist attention to his thoughts about resentment than most people now pay to Aristotle on courage or Descartes on the self or Kant on moral obligation. Courage, the self and moral obligation are serious matters, and philosophers who write for history journals have helped secure them in Anglophone memory, while bypassing Nietzsche on resentment. Their lack of attention to Nietzsche’s resentment—though not to Nietzsche—is T3 oblivion, which is partial: it aids and abets the absence of only some of his ideas from current moral inquiry. But if historians of philosophy don’t make space in their trade publications for resentment, will anyone else care whether this despicable attitude has a philosophical pedigree that might help us understand it better?

T4 oblivion about Heidegger on care has also been partial in the journals, like T3 about Nietzsche on resentment, yet more complicated and, as a philosophical matter, more damaging. Care, like resentment, weighs heavily on people, and yet T4 forgetting about Heidegger on care has been oblivious not only about his moral teaching but also about its non-moral (ontological and phenomenological) grounding. Since many philosophers since Kant have looked for ways to ground moral convictions, T4 oblivion should be more worrisome for them than T3 because the damage done cuts deeper into their own turf.

Suppose—and this seems likely—that both T1 (total) and T2 (partial) forgetting have happened more often than T3 and T4 (both partial). Even so, the more frequent harm caused by T1 and/or T2 oblivion may have been only academic, and the forgotten philosophers will surely have been less remembered than Kant. Everyone, not just philosophers, loses from T3 and T4 oblivion when moral insights get lost, but philosophers should feel T4 losses more because only they care much about metaphysics, Kantian or not.

But Kant, also Aristotle and Descartes, Heidegger and Nietzsche, are—unlike Proclus or Empson—memorable now: these dead philosophers are still cultural celebrities in our time. Their fame might diminish, but it wouldn’t vanish, if some custodians of the philosophical past—all the writers and readers, evaluators and editors of journal articles—found other things to do. Philosophers and non-philosophers alike would still celebrate these celebrities. And yet their current fame—including their popular fame—has been authenticated and amplified by philosophical journals that forget not only non-celebrities but also otherwise celebrated philosophical problems. Such oblivion about metaphysics and morals in the journals may have grave and urgent consequences.

In particular: T3 oblivion about Nietzsche’s resentment and T4 about Heidegger’s care—specialist failings of history journals regulated and read by philosophers—propagate amnesia in the mind of the body politic. The obliviating message from journals to the public is that philosophers don’t care about what they forget. Heidegger protested about forgetting (Vergessenheit) in his “Introduction” to Being and Time (BT). But in the Genealogy of Morals (GM) Nietzsche called not-forgetting (Nicht-Vergessen) a weakness—a deficit of power rather than the “surplus that enables one to forget.”¹⁶ I have no stake in Nietzsche’s endorsement of forgetting nor in Heidegger’s complaint. Their views about oblivion concern me here only because of oblivion in journals about them.

4 Forgetting Resentment

Amnesia is a disease of memory, and Nietzsche made metaphors of disease thematic in his Genealogy, subtitled A Polemic. Poetic prose inflamed by polemic has been rare in philosophical writing, where calm, clarity, disambiguation and objectivity are ideals and methods. But objectivity—“castrating the intellect” in Nietzsche’s phrase—was a target of the Genealogy, not a goal, and the genealogist’s message was strident, not vague.¹⁷ Moreover, the book’s aphorisms were abnormal for philosophy, which expects coherent sequences of argument in continuous prose.

Much worse: elitist, racist and sexist language poisoned (another favorite metaphor of Nietzsche’s) many sentences of GM. These statements were and are repulsive, even when sanitized by clarifications, distinctions and evasions. Jews were chosen as the “priestly people of ressentiment” in one sentence until the next sentence discovered “related gifts” in “the Chinese or the Germans.” In one paragraph Jews fomented a “slave revolt in morals” until the next declared Jesus a champion of “Jewish values” and of “Israel’s revenge.” Amidst the equivocating, Nietzsche denounced anti-Semitism and blamed vindictive resentment on “anarchists and anti-Semites.”¹⁸

Nietzsche’s skein of dialectic, despite GM’s excesses and idiosyncrasies, held his book together as a masterpiece of rhetoric—though not philosophy. Nothing that the mature Nietzsche wrote was more approachable or less bizarre. Nonetheless, as the sum of its parts, GM is no longer plausible, if it ever was, as moral philosophy. Too much was self-referential. Too much depended on a cultural moment. My interest now isn’t the whole, however, but one of the parts. I claim that oblivion in journals of one type about one leading theme of GM—resentment—is a loss for us at our cultural moment. Read from this point of view, aphorisms were a strength of Nietzsche’s book because they were as portable as maxims and proverbs—quickly deliverable here and now to us.

Nietzsche tried to mitigate his remarks about Jews, but his generalized misanthropy was aggressive and unrestrained. At its core was a “will to power,” an affirmation of life and a requirement for biological, psychological and moral health. “Everything . . . in the organic world is . . . overpowering, mastering,” he insisted, and “all aims, all uses are merely signs . . . that a will to power has mastered something.” But he complained that most people in modern times—“the common man of the lower people, . . . the failed, sickly, tired, worn-out people who are beginning to make Europe smell”—were contemptible deniers of life. He despised them as foul, sick weaklings who “squirm like worms before us.”¹⁹ The incessant vituperation had no place in civil discourse. But connected with it—and detachable from it—was the idea of resentment, which bears on a current political crisis: populism in world politics.

From the Gracchus clan in ancient Rome to Mussolini’s mobs in modern Rome, waves of populism and demagoguery have been rhythms in history, and in recent years storms of populist rage have swept the globe. How should politicians respond? Can philosophers advise politicians? Nietzsche’s remarks about ressentiment indicate that it won’t be easy for philosophers to help. When I looked online recently for ‘resentment’ linked with ‘populism,’ I found this headline from the Berkeley News, dated September 10, 2020:

Resentment: The Emotion That Has Set Fire to U.S. Democracy²⁰

The internet confirmed that our political culture linked populism with resentment, and yet the Berkeley News article forgot Nietzsche while remembering Stephen Colbert. We can do better, however, by reading the Genealogy, whose message, once received, is unforgettable.

Nietzsche concocted a loathsome fable about primordial castes of ‘nobles’ and ‘slaves.’ Driven by a will to power, barbarian nobles were ruthless predators, he imagined, and slaves were easy prey. Slaves were happiest when passive—unlike nobles, whose joyous acts in battle showed that they were ‘good’ and their adversaries ‘bad.’ Elation was instinctive when nobles slaughtered other nobles. One side soon forgot why the other side was bad and had to be killed. Slaves, who feared nobles by instinct, were too weak to act on their fear of overlords. Rather than act they evaluated noble strength as ‘evil,’ not ‘bad,’ and they sized up their own weakness as ‘good’ yet endangered by malevolent might. Clever slaves needed time to reason their way to this transvaluation of values. But strength was always just ‘good’ for impulsive nobles, and ‘evil’ wasn’t in their vocabulary. The recalibration of ‘good,’ ‘bad’ and ‘evil’ by slaves was calculated and not soon forgotten.²¹

Slaves were cunning about their masters, said Nietzsche, but they were mindless lambs when the nobles attacked like birds of prey. By instinct, prey animals sensed predators as dangers to their welfare and survival. But cursing nobles as ‘evil’ was not an automatic response by slaves to threats against them, in the reflexive way that nobles scorned their noble enemies as ‘bad.’ When slaves branded nobles as ‘evil,’ their protests were studied evaluations, supporting the interpretation that ultimately motivated servants to rebel against predatory masters. Interpreting nobility as evil expressed the resentment that incited a slave revolt.²²

According to Nietzsche, a transformative result of this rebellion was characteristic of Judeo-Christian religion and modern European culture—the ‘ascetic ideal,’ another product of calculation and interpretation. “We weak people are, after all, weak,” the slaves reasoned, “so it would be good if we refrained from doing anything for which we lack enough strength.” Nietzsche added that this “cleverness . . . which even insects have . . . is clothed in . . . calm and patient virtue, exactly as if the weakling’s weakness were . . . a meritorious deed.” Slaves reached this conclusion through reactive cultivation of their own passive resentment, which they exalted as virtue, an ideal that could tame wolfish nobles and domesticate them.²³

Resentment was—and always is by Nietzsche’s account—“an unsatisfied instinct and will to power that seeks to master . . . life itself, . . . using strength to dam up the very source of strength.” Resentment was conservative: it expressed “protective . . . instincts of a degenerating life that seeks to preserve itself.” Maintained by habit and elevated by success, slavish resentment of a lustful, profligate, ravening nobility called up a counter-ideal, whose voice and enforcer was an ascetic priest. This archpriest’s mission was to “sustain the whole herd of failures securely in life.” The priest himself had to be sick—this “shepherd and advocate of the sick,” this “despiser of . . . all predatory health and power”—yet strong enough to dominate a sickly congregation.²⁴

Nietzsche’s vile story, up to this point, suggested that resentment would ultimately redeem the weak and that the ascetic priest would bless their “horrific readiness and inventiveness in finding pretexts for painful feelings, their enjoyment of being suspicious, grumbling over misdeeds and apparent insults . . . in search of dark questionable stories.” But the priest decided to “change the direction of ressentiment.” While his flock grazed on secrets and conspiracies, the artful shepherd mounted his own “secret struggle against the anarchy of the herd . . . in which that most dangerous explosive substance, ressentiment, piles up ever higher. To discharge this explosive . . . to avoid a blow-up . . . is his greatest master-stroke.” The priest thought that

every suffering person instinctively seeks a cause for his suffering, . . . something capable of suffering . . . and alive on which he can . . . discharge his feelings . . . to find relief, an anesthetic. . . . A desire to anesthetize pain . . . is the real physiological cause of ressentiment. . . . ‘I’m suffering: someone must be to blame’—this is how all the sickly sheep think. But their shepherd . . . tells them: ‘Just so, my sheep! Someone must be to blame: but this someone is you yourself!’

And so the weak became targets of their own resentment, inflaming their inborn sickness with self-hatred and fear of the strong.²⁵

Nietzsche’s account of resentment as an “explosive substance” would have helped Joseph Conrad if he had read the Genealogy while he was writing The Secret Agent, published in 1907. The facts behind his fiction were then 13 years old. In 1894 a French anarchist had blown himself up in London. His target was probably the Greenwich Observatory, a monument to British empire. In Paris a few days earlier, another anarchist had thrown a bomb in a crowded café. London was terrorized. Conrad described the Greenwich detonation as “absurd,” “fatuous” and “half-crazy”—a “blood-stained inanity . . . impossible to fathom by any reasonable or even unreasonable process of thought.” But he also allowed that “perverse unreason has its own logical processes.”²⁶

These were Conrad’s later reflections on his story, which revealed “logical processes” while describing a do-nothing anarchist who never managed to throw a bomb. This feckless terrorist and parasite—Alexander Ossipon, aka Tom, whose surname was an anagram for ‘poison’ and poisson—was a dynamic character in the novel: “an insolent and venomous evoker of sinister impulses which lurk in the blind envy and exasperated vanity of ignorance, in the suffering and misery of poverty, in all the hopeful and noble illusions of righteous anger, pity and revolt.” The toxic Tom evaded action while conspiring with Adolf Verloc, the ‘agent’ of the book’s title who scraped by in life—never in ‘cloVer’ nor very ‘cleVer.’²⁷

Conrad could have given Ossipon a title—‘ascetic priest’—from Nietzsche’s dictionary of ressentiment. But the novelist paid little attention to ‘resentment’: in 7 uses out of 8 in his book, the word indicated ordinary interpersonal irritation. Characters more annoyed than embittered nursed grievances up and down the social scale: some had money and power; and none were the contemptible worms of Nietszche’s fable. Conrad stressed ‘resentment’ only in one passage where Winnie, the half-clever Verloc’s wife and his murderer, complained “in sinister resentment” that she had been “a respectable woman” until “he made me what I am.”²⁸

In our own day, Conrad’s fiction about terrorism speaks powerfully to such violence and amplifies Nietzsche’s philosophical tale about ascetic priests and their submissive congregations. In light of the Berkeley News headline about a firestorm of resentment, resonances with Nietzsche’s GM story and with Conrad’s novel are manifest in current events. Ruth Ben-Ghiat, writing for CNN on January 7, 2021, described the previous day’s terror—the attack on the US Capitol building—as the “politics of resentment” in action.²⁹

Reading the news of that day again, it’s hard to disagree—just on the face of events—with Professor Ben-Ghiat, who studies Fascism in Italy. But what did she mean, and what should we understand, by ‘resentment’? We might hope for guidance from moral psychology and from philosophers who study envy, forgiveness, gratitude, hatred, love and other emotions that run as deep as resentment. An SEP article on moral psychology that mentioned “resentment” also named Nietzsche—but without connecting them.³⁰

The ugly parables in the Genealogy were so tormented by the genealogist’s passions and so hateful that propagating them might be worse than forgetting. Resentment of nobles, a haughty elite, led to a populist uprising—the “slave revolt” of Nietzsche’s insidious phrase. The resentful cultivated their own resentment, feeding it with “dark questionable stories.” Instincts that fueled resentment were conservative: gnawing fears that things were changing unfairly and raging impulses to keep them as they had been—or as they were imagined to have been. A counter-elite, a priesthood, realized that the resentment was dynamite and hurled it back at the resentful by persuading those deplorables that they were indeed deplorable because of their own weakness.

Summaries oversimplify Nietzsche’s fable, Conrad’s tale and current politics, pushing my sketch toward the simple lines of a cartoon. Obviously, no analogy is possible or desirable between GM as a whole and contemporary politics: transporting Nietzsche’s story to our times would bring the poison with it. Although some parts of the GM polemic—resentment, perhaps—might be more adaptable than others, even Nietzsche’s least repellent findings resist restatement and need more scrutiny than I can manage here.

My superficial analysis asks questions but doesn’t give answers. Suppose that resentment in the headlines and resentment in GM were alike enough to make comparison productive. Then what about the ascetic priest and our own priesthood of the well-off, educated and articulate? Both are elites. The ascetic priest in GM served an elite by turning resentment back against the weak and resentful. If such manipulations were possible in our time, they would be as wrong as they were in Nietzsche’s day or Conrad’s. So what might our ascetic priests achieve in the way of moral and political reform? The Genealogy gives no answer.

Philosophers might want to base their own practice on deliberately recovered memory and prescribe medicine for society’s amnesia by responding to current events in a philosophical way. But why bother with the Genealogy of Morals? Perhaps this upsetting book showed how resentment could be thought about—in the author’s mad way—within at least one framework of thought, even if the framework itself was unredeemable. Nietzsche’s complex and nuanced ressentiment might yet be rescued from oblivion. After a rescue, whether and how to make use of the salvage would be up to the philosophers.

5 Forgetting Care

Ernst Cassirer was the first Jew named rector of a German University, at Hamburg in 1929, the year of his debate with Heidegger at Davos. Cassirer was 55 at the time. Heidegger, a Catholic, was 11 years younger when he became rector at Freiburg in 1933 and events drove Cassirer out of Germany. Heidegger’s inaugural speech defiled everything else that he had said or would say later. He presented himself as a professorial Führer while channeling Nietzsche and misappropriating the philosopher’s will to power (Wille zur Macht):

The German university’s self-assertion (Selbstbehauptung) is the original, communal will (Wille) to its essence, . . . bringing leaders (Führer) and guardians of the destiny of the German people (Volk) into education and discipline. . . . In this essential will, learning and German destiny must come to power (Macht) together. . . . This will is a true will, provided that German students submit themselves to the law of their essence. . . . To give oneself the law is the highest freedom. The much-vaunted ‘academic freedom’ will be expelled from the German university.³¹

In Being and Time (BT), by contrast, Professor Heidegger wrote more like Professor Kant: the unfinished BT was longer and harder to read than the Genealogy—hence easier to forget. One difficulty was Heidegger’s diction. He assigned new meanings to old words (Dasein, Seiende); he pasted words together (Nur-immer-schon-bei, Ohne-einandersein); he coined and he cobbled (Faktizität, existenziell).³² He knew that Aristotle and medieval Aristotelians had done the same: to ti ên einai, clumsy in Aristotle’s Greek, had become the ungainly quidditas of medieval Latin, a scholastic neologism for ‘essence,’ which in BT was a target.³³ Heidegger introduced his book with complaints about Aristotle and the “Thomist and Scotist schools” as complicit in the “ancient ontology” of essence and substance that he sought to replace.³⁴

Being and Time posed an ontological question in a scholastic way: what does ‘being’ mean when we talk about being as such, as apart from this item (a doorknob) or that item (a neighbor)? Heidegger’s approach was through the being indicated when someone says ‘I am’ or ‘I exist.’ He named this being Dasein, remodeling an ordinary German word, and he billed his thoughts about being as “fundamental ontology.” He took his method from the phenomenology of Husserl, his teacher: crudely described, this was less a theory or a doctrine than a procedure or experience. Husserl’s project was a phenomenology of consciousness; Heidegger’s was a phenomenology of being, starting with Dasein’s way of being, which he called ‘existence.’³⁵

Existence set Heidegger’s Dasein apart from other items: for Dasein, to exist was to understand being—the being of others as well as one’s own. Dasein’s being came in classes, called ‘existentials,’ which Heidegger distinguished from the categories that had classified everything in the traditional ontology. ‘Being-in-the-world’ grounded Dasein’s existentials, and a Dasein that existed was ‘always already there’ in the world. In one sense, Dasein was just ‘being-there,’ and its voice was clearest in the first person. I’m always already (immer noch) within a world that is not (ontologically) an object for me as a subject outside it. Instead, my Dasein is always ‘thrown’ into and ‘concerned’ with a world that it ‘shares,’ while also always ‘projecting’ or getting ahead of itself and on to its own possibilities.³⁶

As projecting, thrown and concerned, Dasein had the being of ‘care.’ Deep down, care was living in time with death as the timekeeper—the “Absolute Master” as Hegel said. Dasein could deal with death badly or well, and care could be ‘authentic’ or ‘inauthentic.’ Authentic care understood Dasein’s being as ‘toward’ death in ‘ecstatic temporality,’ whose three ‘ecstases’ corresponded to care’s three moments: Dasein as projecting, thrown or concerned was always already outside itself—hence ‘ec-static.’ The three ecstases of projection, thrownness and concern, taken together, constituted the ecstatic temporality that disclosed the meaning of Dasein’s being—the being of care, which was an onion for phenomenology to peel: care (Sorge) wrapped around other comportments (Verhältnissen) of concern (Besorgen) and caring-for (Fürsorge).³⁷

The world that Dasein encountered wasn’t an array of abstract forms, according to Heidegger. He saw it as a web of meaning in which Dasein comported itself (sich verhaltet) to others and to itself. Care, which was how Dasein comported itself to itself, also involved other ways of comporting. Until a Dasein died, it always projected its own being toward death, so that death always shadowed the Dasein’s distinctive comporting to itself: the authentic mood that resulted from this comporting was anxiety (Angst) rather than inauthentic fear. But Dasein lived in its world alongside other entities and comported itself to them differently.³⁸

Some entities were ‘equipment’ (Zeug) and ‘ready-to-hand’ (zuhanden), and some of these were inert artifacts, though others were natural and alive—including human beings. To show what he meant by ‘equipment,’ Heidegger discussed tools, like hammers and tongs made of wood and metal. But a doorknob was his best example of the ready-to-hand items through which we constantly experience the world. “The kind of dealing that is closest to us,” he explained:

is not bare perceptual cognizing but rather the kind of concern that . . . puts things to use. . . . Such entities are not thereby objects for knowing the world theoretically; they are simply what gets used. . . . The kind of Being that belongs to such concernful dealings is not one into which we first need to put ourselves. This is the way in which Dasein always is: when I open the door, for instance, I use the handle. . . . Our interpretative tendencies . . . conceal not only the phenomenon of such concern but even more those entities themselves . . . in our concern with them.

When I take hold of a doorknob and open a door, I rarely notice the doorknob or observe that I’m holding it: I’m usually busy, unaware, indifferent. This way of comporting myself to others—which Heidegger strangely called ‘concern,’ a type of care—was for him primary, basic and not a type of cognition.³⁹

Ordinarily a doorknob isn’t anything that I bother to notice: that or how I see it, if at all, isn’t normally an issue for me. But on a standard post-Cartesian model, embodied subjects see and cognize such objects as bodies outside themselves: cognizing such an object implies noticing it, though not concern, and subject/object apartness is built into in the cognizing: seen objects register as apart, though sometimes dimly. But Heidegger thought that doorknob-users were not meaningfully apart from their ready-to-hand equipment, just indifferently unaware. In his bespoke vocabulary, this unawareness was ‘concern,’ which wasn’t the only type of care: another type was ‘caring-for,’ which mitigated the indifference.⁴⁰

Care was Dasein’s being, and when Dasein’s comporting to others was concern or caring-for, then the others—those comported-to—were always already there in Dasein’s world. Markers of this always-alreadiness—a key to Heidegger’s phenomenology—were adverbs of time like immer noch, repeated time and again in Being and Time, as in these statements:

Dasein always already understands itself.

As a modification of Being-in-the-world as a whole, Dasein is always care already.

In anything ready-to-hand, the world is always already there.

In Dasein, as being towards its death, its own uttermost ‘not yet’ has always already been included, that ‘not yet’ which all others lie ahead of.⁴¹

In another passage, concern was a time-bound perspective on the world:

The concern of common sense that looks around is grounded in temporality—indeed, in the mode of a making-present. . . . Such concern, as concernfully reckoning up—planning, preventing or taking precautions—always already says that something is to happen ‘then’ . . . that we must ‘now’ catch up with.⁴²

If my catching up with death was in an authentic mood, I’d be anxious but not fearful while immer noch comporting kept me immersed in the world. Even if my concern for others was merely instrumental, indifferent and/or unaware, my comporting would still be inevitable and unceasing. Since I’ve always already and necessarily comported myself to others, I’ve been inevitably with them in a manifold, some of which was human. This was how Heidegger’s account of anxiety, being, care, death and time disclosed a ground of community—like a clearing spotted in a forest.⁴³

Not just disclosing but also trusting this community might wake us up from Nietzsche’s nightmare, where an elite duped a resentful underclass into self-hatred. Initially, the instinctive resentment of the resentful might have seemed fixed because it had always been there already. But if making resentful people worse by deceiving them was possible for the ascetic priest, maybe truthful disclosing could reveal possibilities of something better.

Heidegger’s theory of care, not at all familiar, skirted the margins of familiar human community, thereby achieving moral insights that did him little good personally. The insights might be timely for us, however, even momentous—again in light of the Berkeley News and CNN headlines. Care of this kind, despite Heidegger’s strange account of it, might quench flames of resentment and allow journals to be less oblivious about what Being and Time theorized: care, concern and the ready-to-hand. If Heidegger was on the right track, the always-alreadiness of doorknobs and neighbors would bypass the Erkenntnisproblem that had stymied philosophers for centuries—the epistemic problem that motivated post-Cartesian metaphysics. Unlike resentment as Nietzsche presented it, care in Heidegger’s telling had a metaphysical payoff in addition to its moral import.⁴⁴

To repeat: Type 4 forgetting about Heidegger on care is oblivious now not only about a moral teaching but also about the non-moral or pre-moral ontology on which Heidegger grounded his thoughts about care.

Maybe Heidegger was wrong about care and Nietzsche was wrong about resentment. Even so, we shouldn’t forget an ugly statement by Heidegger’s contemporary, Wolfgang Pauli, a physicist who won a Nobel Prize and made a hurtful remark to a colleague about the possibility of being wrong. The younger scientist, not sure of himself like Pauli, once asked if he, the lesser mortal, was right about a particular problem: “not even wrong” was Pauli’s peevish verdict.⁴⁵ Would anyone claim that Nietzsche (who went mad) and Heidegger (a Nazi) were not even wrong? Unlikely. Their findings, wrong or right, are both judicable and memorable: they’re widely accessible to judgment, in fact, because they’ve been remembered in immense literatures. I’m no expert on either philosopher. Any reader can find, understand, appreciate or abominate what I’ve read by and about them—mostly in English, much of it in secondary literature. What if I’m wrong? Maybe I’ve misunderstood. But I haven’t forgotten. And in cases like these, the worse mistake is oblivion.

6 Philosophy as a Mindful Way of Life

In some ways, this essay has followed conventions for articles in journals: I started with a summary, I described and divided my project, I introduced technical terms, and I’ll use about 11,000 words by the time I’ve finished.

But in other ways what I’ve written is unconventional. Unlike many excellent articles in philosophy journals, my essay aims to be an essay, not a mini-treatise. Francis Bacon, David Hume, John Stuart Mill, William James, Bertrand Russell, Bernard Williams and others have been masters of the essay in Anglophone philosophy. To emulate them, I’ve kept my voice informal. While discussing a dozen or so other philosophers, I haven’t drilled down. I’ve claimed no expertise, and I’ve said only enough to identify these thinkers for other non-experts. I’ve given just a few lines or paragraphs to questions unanswered by long shelves of books. I have no solutions to propose—only statistics, hesitations and suggestions—and I haven’t tried to be objective. Sometimes my remarks have been literary and philological, sometimes allusive and not explicit. I’ve used unvetted, non-academic websites to relay popular beliefs, common opinion and the daily news.

My manner will annoy some and bore others; my views may be controversial; and my aims are practical. My allies may include philosophers and others who think that academic philosophy should sometimes respond in practical ways to current events like the disaster of January 6, 2021. Or maybe I’m a latter-day Diogenes, the Cynic who wanted to “debase the coinage” in ancient Athens.⁴⁶

Currencies of philosophical conversation in learned journals have value because they’re not cheap—not counterfeit debased by passing it on the street. Conventions that keep articles in journals authentic have been evolving since just after Descartes died.⁴⁷ They’re hard won, not expendable, and I don’t want to discard them. Instead, I hope that a key audience—writers and readers, evaluators and editors who produce and support journals of the history of philosophy—might be persuaded, now and then, to make a little more room for less conventional material and unfamiliar procedures, alongside their usual work and as deliberate departures from standard practices.

In their conventional form and with customary content, articles published in journals serve laudable purposes of professional philosophers—mostly professors of philosophy, appointed or aspiring, in universities. Professional philosophy isn’t the only kind, however; another is philosophy as a way of life, movingly described by Pierre Hadot.⁴⁸

Hadot tracked philosophy’s evolution from ancient schools and sages to professors and universities in medieval and modern times. Greek and Roman teachers of philosophy held their students to academic rules, he explained, but their aims were practical: to show the young how to live well and die well. Teachers kept theory in the service of this practice. Epictetus warned his students “not to be too quick to give lectures (sophistein),” and he talked to them about carpentry:

A carpenter (tektôn) doesn’t come up to you and say ‘listen to me lecturing (dialegein) about the art of carpentry.’ Instead, he makes a contract for a house, builds it and shows that he has skill (technê). . . . Do the same for yourself. Eat like a human, drink like a human, . . . get married, have children, behave like a citizen, put up with insults and find others bearable.⁴⁹

Hadot concluded that this practical, personal craft of philosophy had all but expired by the eighteenth century. He saw philosophy in his own day as “plainly no longer a way of life, a type of life—unless it’s the type of life of a professor of philosophy. . . . Modern philosophy goes on above all . . . in courses, which then end up in books.”⁵⁰

In fact, the philosophical engagement in life that Hadot promoted 40 years ago had already shaped Anglophone philosophy at its creation. Hobbes and Locke were much engaged, as philosophers, in England’s Civil War, its antecedents and its aftermath.⁵¹ In modern times, however, the political careers of Dewey, Mill and Russell were outliers in Anglophone philosophy, where almost all the activity today is now professorial in Hadot’s sense. But times change—also topics of Presidential Addresses organized by the American Philosophical Association in recent years. In this public setting, prominent philosophers have been speaking ex officio to their peers about current and urgent problems of practice—capitalism, digital media, feminism, privacy, racism, social justice and others.⁵²

In his Address, Stephen Nadler asked a good question about the history of philosophy: “what is it good for?” Learning this history would be good for citizens, he answered. While summing up, he asked another question and called it “rhetorical”: whether philosophy and other fields of the humanities should turn their attention to “specific and concrete practical problems of today’s society.”⁵³ My answer—speaking only about Anglophone journals of the history of philosophy—is this: yes, some adjusting in that direction, maybe not a lot, might be wise. Like Nadler’s question, my answer is also rhetorical in that I want it to be persuasive, motivated as I am by Hadot’s wistful observation that citizens rarely encounter philosophy except in college courses and textbooks. Changing the journals may, in the long run, at least change the courses and the textbooks.

Hadot’s diagnosis of modern philosophy allowed for “a few rare exceptions”: one was Nietzsche because he proposed “a radical transformation of our way of life.” Although Heidegger worked for state universities and wrote books, Hadot thought that he too wanted “to engage human freedom and action in the philosophical process”—or maybe the reverse. But Hadot also repeated Schopenhauer’s sour words about “university philosophy as . . . fencing in front of a mirror (Spiegelfechterei),” and he paraphrased Marx’s warning about isolating theory from practice. Hadot died ten years ago, and his stirring voice will be missed. He spoke up for philosophy as a way of life distinct from the “scholastic” (his word) life of “professors educating professors, professionals educating professionals.”⁵⁴

Heidegger wasn’t prominent in Hadot’s story, nor was Nietzsche’s Genealogy. But Hadot thought that some of their views supported some of his views just because theirs were ‘unprofessional’ (my word).⁵⁵ And because their accounts of care and resentment haven’t attracted authors and editors of articles written in English about philosophy for history journals, the fate of some disconcerting ideas from Being and Time and the Genealogy has been oblivion in those conversations: the ideas have fallen off this path of professional preparation for Anglophone philosophers. The old books were and still are famous, but oblivion about them in Anglophone journals has let their lessons be forgotten just where and when remembering may be urgent.

Maybe the books had set boundaries for philosophy.⁵⁶ Could anything more deviant than Nietzsche’s transvalued values or Heidegger’s vertiginous phenomenology count as philosophy? Suppose this essay had started with a prayer where an abstract usually goes. Some readers would have stopped cold. Others, sensing a freak show, might have kept going. The prayer that failed to stop them could have imitated Proclus, a distinguished philosopher, who began his Commentary on Plato’s Parmenides with these reverent words:

I pray to all the gods and goddesses to guide my mind in this study, . . . to kindle in me a shining light of truth . . . and open my soul’s gates . . . to Plato’s inspired guidance. . . . I ask intelligible gods, . . . intellectual gods, . . . supercelestial gods, . . . gods of the cosmos, . . . angelic choruses, . . . good daemons and . . . heroes . . . to prepare me fully to share in this most illuminating and mystical vision that Plato reveals to us in the Parmenides.⁵⁷

Of all Plato’s dialogues, none is more amenable than the Parmenides to distinctive practices of Anglophone philosophy, to painstaking anatomies of names, words and other bones and nerves of speech. This is also true of the Commentary by Proclus on the Parmenides, which treated language as a gateway to philosophy.⁵⁸ For this reason, Oxford University Press, with better authority than Wikipedia, has posted an online digest of a chapter about “Proclus on Epistemology, Language and Logic”—a welcome mat inviting analytic philosophers to enter the Successor’s temple and learn from his unrelenting scrutiny of language.⁵⁹

If this were the whole story about Proclus, why should he get so low a PI score—an obliviated 5? There’s more to his story, of course, whose strangeness shows up in the prayer that opens the Commentary. His analysis of words and names in the Parmenides was just a step toward perfecting a prayerful practice, toward achieving a “mystical vision that Plato reveals to us.” Proclus revered Plato as a theologian who philosophized in the interest of salvation, the highest end of practice, and for Proclus this practice was the best reason to theorize.

In our secular society, where philosophy’s public motives can’t be devotional or religious, specialists on Proclus have looked past his religious commitments, perhaps embarrassed by them. By modern norms, the philosopher’s flamboyant polytheism is weirder than anything that Heidegger or Nietzsche envisioned. But there’s nothing strange, shameful or threatening about engagement and practice as duties of a philosophical vocation. On the contrary, philosophy would benefit from more attention to practice and less oblivion about philosophers of the past who pursued their calling as a way of life that was both practical and mindful.⁶⁰

7 Memory, History and Names

Table 5.2 Some of Our Dishonored Dead

Adelard of Bath†

Robert Holcot†

Alessandro Achillini†

Iamblichus†

Pierre d’Ailly†

John of Salisbury

Anton Amo†

Cristoforo Landino†

Mary Astell

Peter Lombard†

Peter Auriol†

Justus Lipsius

Roger Bacon

Giannozzo Manetti

Laura Bassi†

Damaris Masham

Bonaventura

Agostino Nifo

Leonardo Bruni†

Mario Nizolio†

Franco Burgersdijck†

Francesco Patrizi

Walter Burley

Paul of Venice

Tommaso Campanella†

John Pecham†

Emilie du Châtelet

Peter of Spain

Christine de Pizan†

Pico della Mirandola

Anne Conway

Pietro Pomponazzi

Marsilio Ficino

Marguerite Porete†

Marianna Florenzi Waddington†

Porphyry

Moderata Fonte†

Bernardino Telesio†

Jean Gerson†

Frans Titelmans†

Gilbert of Poitiers

Lorenzo Valla

Robert Grosseteste

Nicoletto Vernia†

Heloise d’Argenteuil

Mary Wollstonecraft

Henry of Ghent

Teresa of Ávila

Hildegard of Bingen†

Tullia d’Aragona

So let’s have hopes for memory. Memory of philosophy, however, may not be the history that journals record. Memory may be “unconscious of its successive deformations,” less conscious than self-aware history in the journals. History mindful in this academic way should avoid the distorting and preserve awareness that unaided memory might lose. Yet statistics presented in this chapter—about Proclus, for example—are evidence of deformative oblivion in journals responsible for remembering history. If a principle of charity applies, those responsible for the journals must have forgotten valuable evidence—and culpably so. Otherwise they’ve ignored it on purpose and suppressed it. Pursuing this evidence instead, calling deformations out and examining them, might lead to other forgotten evidence and to remembering it anew.⁶¹

The burden of deformation can be located and weighed. One place for Eurocentric eyes to look is the period between late antiquity and recent modernity, until a century or so after Jacob Brucker constructed an academic past for philosophy and populated its post-Cartesian canon: he finished his Critical History of Philosophy a millennium after Proclus and the other ancients had gone.

By 1639, a century before Brucker promulgated his canon, Descartes had published the Discourse but not the Meditations. In those years, the philosopher best known where the Meditator meditated was Franco Burgersdijck†, while back in Paris the philosophical toast of the town was Tommaso Campanella†—lionized not only as Galileo’s defender but also as a utopian revolutionary, a political theorist and the last great scholastic metaphysician. A century later, when Brucker compiled his History, Burgersdijck† still had readers as a textbook authority on logic. But the (†) symbol after his name in Table 5.2 indicates a PI score of zero in today’s history journals.

Zero was also the calculation for 23 others in the Table, where none scored higher than 5. If all 50 had done as well as Proclus and had earned meager 5s, their PI numbers would have totaled 250, but this score for the whole group would still have been short of the 252 tallied by a single philosopher, Aristotle, and farther yet from Kant’s 370. Such scanty traces in history journals of 50 memorable women and men are a testament of forgetting by philosophers about philosophers. Many of the forgotten were pre-modern, however, and oblivion about them might only be Type 1 or 2—maybe no threat today to morals and civil society. Or maybe not: some ideas, for better or worse, are very old. “Bring out your dead” is my plea to the journals, and let’s have a look.⁶²

Take a look at Anton Amo†, for example, who was born in Guinea (Ghana) around 1700. When he was 7 or so, the Duke of Braunschweig-Wolfenbüttel brought Amo† to Germany, where he stayed for about forty years. He studied philosophy at Halle, Jena and Wittenberg, survived the scrutiny, earned degrees and taught classes. Later, as Amo† headed back to Africa, Kant was almost ready with his first publication. Like Amo’s Wittenberg dissertation, the beginner’s essay examined the mind/body problem. Did the junior philosopher notice what the senior philosopher had already said about a topic that accelerated the junior philosopher’s career? If Kant had heard that a black African was writing about The Impassivity of the Human Mind, would he have ignored the dissertation because of its author? Later he declared that people who looked like Amo† had “by nature no feeling that rises above the ridiculous.” He wrote them off as “lazy, soft and trifling” and claimed to have identified a chemical that made “all negroes stink (alle Neger stinken).”⁶³

When I started to wonder whether the Kant who spoke so wisely about Enlightenment had ever come across Amo†, the brutality of his Different Races of Human Beings wasn’t on my radar. Eventually, after checking this daft seepage from the Age of Criticism, I concluded that a famous philosopher’s awareness or unawareness of a less famous philosopher was a secondary issue. The main things were Amo’s presence—as a philosopher—in Kant’s world and also Kant’s part in that world’s abuses.

Figure 5.2 The Phlegmatic Gin-Soaked Dutch John Trusler, The Barge, Detail 1791 The Habitable World Described, 11.75, British Library

Some other unenlightened blather by Kant that was far less vicious than his vilifying of Africans summed up the Dutch as gin-soaked louts (Fig. 5.2), “cold and phlegmatic to an amazing degree; . . . no passion seems to . . . ruffle them”. Would Descartes, a careful thinker about passions, have condoned this? After all, he dismissed humoral psychology—souls steeped in phlegm, black bile and so on—as nonsense: the Meditations mocked this obsolete theory.⁶⁴ Would it not be remarkable, even so, if this stranger in a strange land, this French Catholic expatriate in the Protestant Low Countries, had never let slip a hurtful word about his Dutch hosts or their Dutchness? What about Franco Burgersdijck†, philosophy’s brightest light in Leiden? He became famous for rescuing the old Aristotelian system that Descartes aimed to destroy.

Now—while asking about Burgersdijck† and Descartes as I asked before about Amo† and Kant—my aim has been less to connect dots between people, more to explore worlds that they lived in. Spinoza certainly used the logic textbook that made Burgersdijck† a celebrity in Leiden. So it seems unlikely that Descartes—Spinoza’s most conspicuous target and Burgersdijck’s on-the-spot contemporary—knew nothing about the celebrated Dutch logician. But maybe Descartes found his work dull—too phlegmatic, perhaps. And too Dutch? Who knows? It’s very, very unlikely, in any event, that Descartes never heard of him. But this doesn’t matter much for my purposes or for improving the history of philosophy: today’s experts on Descartes—along with editors of journals and other users, monitors and authors of their content—should pay attention to Burgersdijck† and others like him just because he was productive and prominent in a philosophical world where he and Descartes worked on the same problems.

The same goes for Tommaso Campanella,† Bernardino Telesio† and Teresa of Ávila, a woman ignored in a famous meso-story that men told and retold until Christia Mercer recently challenged their silence. The customary narrative claimed that after Descartes made rationalism a target for empiricists, the struggle stalemated until Kant and Hegel descended like “liberating angels. . . . Once the story took hold, . . . historians burrowed down into the great systems of the period’s great men.”⁶⁵ Digging down to join these quiet dead left a past buried and silenced when digging others up would have been more productive. Without knowing their names, however, exhuming dead philosophers in order to resurrect them would be uninformative at best. So let’s keep making lists of our dishonored dead, calling them from their graves and shouting their names!

¹ Juv. 6.347–8.

² Jacob Brucker finished the first comprehensive history of philosophy in the early 1740s; on Brucker and afterward, see Santinello (1979–2004) and Cesa (2009). William Molyneux had his English version of the Meditations by Descartes printed in 1680. In 1838 Francis Haywood published Kant’s first Critique in English. Thomas Taylor died in 1835; his many translations of Proclus are still useful: see also Louth (2004); Harris (2008); and O’Hara (2008).

³ Anon. (1967– ): I’ve constructed and tested these measures from searches of data collected by the Philosopher’s Index as of 2021. I’ve sorted the results by (A) type of publication (journal), (B) language of articles (English), (C) words in titles of articles (‘Kant,’ ‘politics’ etc.) and (D) words in titles of journals (‘history,’ ‘philosophy’). Filtering in this way selected journal articles (not counting book reviews) published in English in the British Journal of the History of Philosophy, the Journal of the History of Philosophy, the History of Philosophy Quarterly and other Anglophone outlets. I searched for articles about the history of philosophy only as presented by these Anglophone journals during the period covered by the Philosopher’s Index. Filter A excluded books and other types of publication that were not journals, just as filter D excluded journals whose focus was not the history of philosophy. For filter C, note that a name (like ‘Kant’) or a topic (like ‘politics’) would often be found in texts of articles whose titles did not mention it: I’ve assumed that a word’s presence in an article’s title indicated some considerable focus by the author. Using PI data to make rough—not fine—distinctions, I’ve also assumed that unavoided sorting errors won’t negate my general findings.

⁴ Anon. (2020b); Helmig (2020).

⁵ The list of 50 in Table 5.2 in the last section of this chapter is merely cautionary, not exhaustive.

⁶ Proclus (2019) is the sixth volume of a new English translation of his Commentary on Plato’s Timaeus.

⁷ Borges (1998), pp. 135–6.

⁸ Sennet (2016).

⁹ Empson (1930); Anon. (2020c), (2020e).

¹⁰ Sennet (2016); Raatikainen (2020).

¹¹ Raatikainen (2020).

¹² Hunter (2016).

¹³ Shakespeare, RJ, 2.2.3.

¹⁴ For Burton’s Anatomy see Chapter 3.13 of this book.

¹⁵ On partial oblivion see also the beginning of the Conclusion of this book.

¹⁶ Nietzsche, GM 1.10 (Smith, 24); Heidegger, BT 2/21. An improved text of the Colli-Montinari edition of GM can be read online in Nietzsche (1967– ); Nietzsche (1996) is an English translation by Douglas Smith, whose equally fine “Introduction” to GM is Smith (1996); see also Anderson (2017). I’ve cited GM by section from Nietzsche (1967– ), keyed to pages in Nietzsche (1996); I’ve checked Smith’s excellent translation against the German and have adapted some quotations. I’ve cited BT by page in Heidegger (2001), matched with pages in the translation—which I’ve also sometimes adapted—by Macquarrie and Robinson in Heidegger (1962a). Like Smith (1996) on GM, the introduction to BT in Gorner (2007) is superb and, for my purposes, sufficient; Elgat (2017) is a recent study of Nietzsche on resentment.

¹⁷ Nietzsche, GM 2.8, 11; 3.9, 12 (Smith, 99).

¹⁸ Nietzsche, GM 1.7–8, 16; 2.11; 3.14, 27 (Smith, 20–1, 35, 54): In relevant contexts, GM uses the Franco-German ressentiment often but not always: cf. Voreingenommenheit at GM 1.13, Feindseeligkeit 2.9, Mißgunst 2.11 and Abneigung 3.18; Duden (https://www.duden.de) lists all but Mißgunst as synonyms of ressentiment, which is common in German though recognizable as a French loan-word, like amateur. ‘Resentment’ is much older in English, where ‘amateur’ no longer reads as an obvious borrowing, detectable by the -eur ending instead of -er or -or. I sense no lexical difference between English ‘resentment’ and Nietzsche’s ressentiment, which seems mannered when repeated, however. But some Nietzsche experts—including native speakers of German, which I am not—detect a lexical distinction: see Bittner (1994) and Reginster (1997).

¹⁹ Nietzsche, GM 1.10–11; 2.12 (Smith, 23, 27–8, 57–8).

²⁰ Lempinen (2020).

²¹ Nietzsche, GM 1.7, 10–17.

²² Nietzsche, GM 1.11–13 (Smith, 25–30).

²³ Nietzsche, GM 1.13 (Smith, 30).

²⁴ Nietzsche, GM 3.11, 13, 15 (Smith, 97, 99–100, 104).

²⁵ Nietzsche, GM 1.15 (Smith, 105–6).

²⁶ Conrad (2007b), pp. 249–51; Newton (2007), pp. xiii–xv. Authorities on Conrad have speculated about his knowledge of Nietzsche: see Butte (1989); Di Santo (2010).

²⁷ Conrad (2007a), pp. 38–9: poisson as French slang would fit Ossipon; Verloc, disappointed by the world, was just clever enough to resent not being in clover.

²⁸ Conrad (2007a), pp. 16, 70, 109, 114–15, 119, 241, 278–9.

²⁹ Ben-Ghiat (2021) is the CNN posting; see also Ben-Ghiat (2001), (2020).

³⁰ Doris et al. (2020), citing Strawson (1962).

³¹ Heidegger (1933): for one assessment—by a ‘conservative’ publication—of the controversy about Heidegger’s philosophical responsibility for his politics, see Kimball (1985).

³² Heidegger, BT 6–7/26–7, 12/33, 56/82, 121/158, 195/240.

³³ Arist. APo.82b38; Top.101b39.

³⁴ Heidegger, BT 3/22, commenting on Arist. Meta. 998b22, 1001a21 and Aquinas, ST 2–1.94.2.

³⁵ Heidegger, BT 7/27, 117/153, 131/170, 212/255; my overview of BT follows Gorner (2007); for more recent work on related issues, see McDaniel (2019).

³⁶ Heidegger, BT 44/70, 57–60/83–7, 74/104, 86–8/118–21, 135/174, 145–6/185–7, 191–3/235–8, 236/279.

³⁷ Heidegger, BT 121–3/157–60, 364–9/415–21; Hegel (1970), p. 153.

³⁸ Heidegger, BT 4/23, 12/32–3, 41–2/67–8, 83/114, 87–8/120–2, 190–3/234–8, 250–2/293–6, 260–3/304–7, 329/378, 342–4/392–5, 366/417.

³⁹ Heidegger, BT 67/95–6.

⁴⁰ Heidegger, BT 56–7/83–4, 121–3/157–9.

⁴¹ Heidegger, BT 83/114, 196/240, 259/303, 272/317.

⁴² Heidegger, BT 406/458.

⁴³ Heidegger, BT 133/171, 170/214.

⁴⁴ Cassirer (1906–7).

⁴⁵ Peierls (1960), p. 186.

⁴⁶ Diog. L. 6.20.

⁴⁷ In 1655 the Royal Society of London brought out the first issue of Philosophical Transactions, the world’s oldest scientific journal: https://royalsocietypublishing.org/journal/rstl.

⁴⁸ Hadot (2002) is a new edition of the 1993 original, of which Hadot (1995) is an English translation.

⁴⁹ Arr. Epict. diss. 3.21.4–5; Hadot (2002), p. 293.

⁵⁰ Hadot (2002), pp. 298–9.

⁵¹ On Hobbes see the last part of the Introduction to this book.

⁵² Anon. (2020d); Shapiro and Lascano (2021) explores “new themes” by “less familiar writers,” including Margaret Cavendish, Anne Conway, Sor Juana Inéz de la Cruz, Emilie Du Châtelet, Gabrielle Suchon—also Anton Amo, Diderot, La Mettrie and Shaftesbury. See Table 5.2 in this chapter. Diderot and La Mettrie might also be “less familiar” to Anglophone readers.

⁵³ Nadler (2014), pp. 40, 47–8; Sauer (2022) maintained that the answer to a question like Nadler’s was ‘not much at all’ if the aim was better understanding of philosophical problems.

⁵⁴ Schopenhauer (1998), 2.1.17 (211); Hadot (2002), pp. 297–300. See also Midgley (1992), p. 141: “Where philosophy is salaried and professionalized, [its] lawyer-like skills . . . no longer . . . clarify any . . . new vision. Philosophy becomes scholastic. . . . This happened in the late Middle Ages; . . . and it has happened to Anglo-American philosophy”; and Korsgaard (2022), pp. 24–5: “It’s a notorious fact that a lot of philosophical writing is awful. . . . I think over-professionalization is making it worse. . . . Many philosophers try to write in what you might call perfectly true sentences. . . . Why would someone try to write in perfectly true sentences? It’s because he’s afraid of his reader.”

⁵⁵ Hadot (2002), pp. 395–6.

⁵⁶ On a related question, see Dotson (2012).

⁵⁷ Proc. In Parm. 617–18 (Morrow and Dillon, 19–20).

⁵⁸ Proc. In Parm. 837–53, 1097–1103 (Morrow and Dillon, 210–22, 444–9), with Pl. Parm. 130E, 137C.

⁵⁹ Helmig (2016).

⁶⁰ Chlup (2012), pp. 31, 38, described the Successor’s Platonic Theology as “fairly hard to digest for modern readers” and suggested that only those who are “not afraid of . . . intricate details” should try. And yet when Neoplatonists took the “debris of pagan religion under their wing,” this was “not just a mark of their diminished confidence in the intellectual powers of man.” For recent thinking about Proclus, see also D’Hoine and Martijn (2017).

⁶¹ See Nora (1989), discussed by Wertsch (2007), pp. 651–3.

⁶² Brucker (1742–4); thanks to Grafton (2002), with roots in Monty Python, for “bring out your dead” as a precept of historiography.

⁶³ Kant (2007a), pp. 59–60; (2007b), p. 93; (2012); Lewis (2019), pp. 12–15, 37; Menn and Smith (2020).

⁶⁴ Descartes (1641), p. 9; AT, 7.18–19; CSM, 2.13; Marshall (1772), 1.43–4; Sturkenboom (2014); also Burton’s Anatomy of Melancholy in Chapter 3.13.

⁶⁵ Mercer (2017), p. 2540; see Chapter 3.2 of this book on Teresa and Bernini’s statue of her.

6 Conclusion

Who Was That Masked Woman?

He had no use for a mask or stagey footwear.

Horace¹

Most forgetting is passive—without self-aware agency. Oblivion, a neglected child of this careless parent, is even less active and selfish as well. Even when oblivion is partial, its consequences are all-or-none. If something persistently forgotten is only part of something else that you haven’t totally forgotten (see Chapter 5.3), you couldn’t be just ‘a little oblivious’ about the forgotten part, could you? But you might forget part of a mathematical formula while still remembering other parts. Without ill intent, you might also forget an anniversary intermittently without losing track permanently. Even forgetful people remember to say ‘I keep forgetting. . . .’ But penalties for sustained forgetting, like not noticing several anniversaries, inhibit oblivion—today’s cluttered oubliette for traces of agitated minutes spent yesterday in road-raged traffic, for example.

Both forgetting and oblivion are usually unintended. Come to think of it: could oblivion ever be intended? Or even persistent forgetting? If ‘forgetting’ were a success verb, it ought to be intentional—sometimes at least: in New York City, fuhgeddaboudit is an imperative that needs heeding. But if you put something out of mind today or tomorrow, what keeps it away next week won’t be any conscious effort of yours. If you’re still trying to forget, you’ll end up remembering. Some things now forgotten weren’t forgotten a few weeks ago, however. Yet when they stay hidden, it’s not because anyone has concealed them from you. Many things, mental and extramental, stay hidden that haven’t been covered up deliberately: they haven’t been hidden on purpose, like a face concealed by a mask.

Figure 6.1 Comic Mask, Terracotta, c.100 bce British Museum, 1842,0728.750

A mask—a larva, also a persona—was the most eye-catching part of an actor’s costume in ancient Roman comedy. A character named Messius had no “stagey footware,” however, and yet the poet Horace remembered him: Romans found him funny without a costume and mask. Messius wasn’t an actor. But he was a comic type: a country bumpkin whose face was so disfigured that people stared at him and jeered—like the cruel laughter at Victor Hugo’s Quasimodo. If Messius had gone on stage, a different twisted sight—a mask (Fig. 6.1)—would have covered his ugliness. Wearing no mask, he still looked ghastly.

But a scary larva, as distinct from a persona, was a phantom, not just a disguise: it was also a ghost that frightened Roman children. Authorities who wrote about larvae in Latin—Horace and Plautus certainly—were on the syllabus for boys at La Flèche, including Descartes. Selections from Horace were edifying lessons, secular sermons for a young humanista under Jesuit tutelage. What Apuleius and Petronius had to say about larvae would have been too racy for a Catholic classroom.²

A few years after leaving La Flèche, a grown-up Descartes wrote some thoughts down and dated them. “I go on stage masked (larvatus) like comic actors who put on a mask (persona) because they’ve been warned not to look shamefaced: I’m about to ascend to this showplace (theatrum) of the world where up to now I’ve been a spectator (spectator).” When he made this New Year’s resolution on January 1, 1619, he was concerned with seeing and being seen, with what was hidden and how to uncover it, with the difference between costumed actors and spectators in street clothes. “There are sciences now masked (larvatae),” he wrote, “which, if the masks (larvae) were lifted up, would look quite lovely.” His education had taught him that unmasking could be quick: “a good many books become totally clear from reading a few lines and looking at (inspicio) drawings (figurae).”³

Descartes was ambitious—planning to make big plans but keep them mostly private. He shared his hopes with Isaac Beeckman, however, a new friend who had studied mathematics in Leiden before they met in 1618. Wishes were tinder for their dreams, some so vivid that Descartes remembered and recorded them. Dreams led him, he claimed, to “foundations of amazing knowledge (scientia).” There’s no reason to doubt that Descartes had such dreams, which entered his legend. Even if he had fabricated his notes about them, they’d still be worth a look. Information about his early years—evidence to check against the thin autobiography in the Discourse—is scarce.⁴

Unsure of his plans yet intent on planning, he punctuated records of his sleep with fragments of poetry. He noted his unease about taking “authoritative statements from writings by poets rather than philosophers.” And yet poets had “inspiration (enthusiasmus) and the power of imagination (imaginatio), which are bits of knowledge (scientia) in us, like sparks from flint.” A spark flew from an eclogue by Ausonius, who said “it is and it isn’t.” The poet’s indeterminate advice kept Descartes searching through the same verses. But all he found was a question: “what path in life shall I follow?”⁵

Ausonius was a capable poet who hadn’t reached the summit where Horace ruled the canon with Ovid and Vergil. If Descartes had contrived his dreams, citing a lesser talent like Ausonius would have presented his erudite visions as comprehensive: the philosopher’s flashy contemporary, Gabriel Naudé, one-upped his readers with just such learned snobbery. Ausonius was approachable, however, and versatile too. Besides eclogues he wrote epitaphs, an epithalamion and exhortations, memorial and occasional poems, prayers, poems of praise and thanks, as well as epigrams—enough to fill two volumes in the standard English version. One epigram had already boosted his fame before Descartes noticed him: it was a picture poem well suited to mechanical reproduction in print.⁶

Picture poetry or ekphrasis was a classical tradition that started in the Iliad, where the singer’s description of the shield of Achilles was rich in pictorial detail. Rhetoricians who emulated these virtuoso performances in Homeric poetry made ekphrasis a school exercise and a test of compositional skill. Ausonius, like other artists in Latin verse, learned from teachers of rhetoric, polished his assignments and turned them into poems of his own. One of his epigrams addressed a statue of a god—originally Kairos in Greek, a male divinity whose Latin avatar was Caerus. The Greek name could mean ‘measure’ or ‘fitness,’ but often it was ‘opportunity’—a momentary chance to do something before it was too late. Nouns with the same sense in Latin were feminine—occasio and opportunitas—and Roman poets had made a goddess out of this Opportunity before Ausonius remembered her.⁷

Although Ausonius wrote after the Empire had turned Christian, he wasn’t fully de-paganized. When he conversed with a statue of Opportunity, however, his words were an interrogation, not idolatry. He noted that Phidias, a renowned sculptor, had made the goddess’s likeness. She told him so in versified dialogue, his thirty-third epigram, In simulacrum Occasionis et Paenitentiae:

‘Who made you?’ ‘Phidias: the one that made

Minerva’s’ statue, also Jove’s.

I’m Opportunity, his masterpiece number three,

and a divinity known to very few.’

‘Why stand on a wheel?’ ‘Because I can’t stand still.’

‘Why winged anklets?’ ‘I fly away fast.’ . . .

‘Hair over your face?’ ‘I go unrecognized.’

‘Your head’s bald in back!’ ‘Nothing to grab

     as I rush away.’

Ausonius painted Opportunity’s picture with words: ut pictura poesis, as Horace recommended. She stood on a wheel with wings on her feet, and she had a strange haircut—masking her face in front while leaving her bald in the back. She never stood still, she went away fast, and she left nothing behind once she was gone.⁸

Word-pictures were everywhere in Greek and Latin classics. After printing was invented, makers and sellers of ancient texts saw that the moment was ripe for mechanizing, stabilizing and broadcasting these hybrid forms. A lawyer, Andrea Alciato, brought the first books of ‘emblems’ out in the 1530s, and the new genre made a big hit. Even before Agricola, Fuchs, Vesalius and other entrepreneurs of picturing in print, Alciato created an art form that attracted many imitators. The emblem that he called In Occasionem is Figure 6.2.

Figure 6.2 Opportunity, Alciato, 1531 Emblematum liber, sig. A8r

In the 1531 edition of Alciato’s Emblems, Opportunity stood on a ball, not a wheel, when she answered her interrogator’s questions. She had no wings on her feet, and pudic drapery fell around her. Opportunity’s hair didn’t cover her face, however; her baldness in back wasn’t obvious; and she carried a menacing blade or cleaver—like a machete. Details of iconography had drifted after philologists before Alciato surveyed many ancient authorities—not just Ausonius. Alciato named Lysippus as the sculptor, not Phidias, and he never mentioned Ausonius. But he imitated the poet’s thirty-third epigram, which also questioned a deity and began by naming a famous maker of statues. Alciato’s title, In Occasionem, reflected what Ausonius had written, implying that his interrogation of the goddess was edgy or even hostile.⁹

Emblem books proliferated as the Society of Jesus taught students to meditate by directing the mind’s eye away from phantasms of sin toward visions of salvation. Jesuits were industrious makers of emblems, and Father Jan David advanced his Order’s project of pictorializing moral lessons in this incisive way. His Opportunity Seized and Shirked (1605) was in the lineage of emblem books, which by David’s time was well established. Recognizing Ausonius as an authority on Occasio, this clever Jesuit quoted epigram 33 at length and alluded to its title, In simulacrum Occasionis et Paenitentiae, with his own: Occasio arrepta, neglecta implied that regret (paenitentia) always followed after sinners had passed up a saving opportunity.¹⁰

Opportunity Seized was a long, learned book: more than 300 pages that David wrote after testing his theme with a simpler presentation in 1603—his Image (Typus) of Opportunity, a pictorial pamphlet on the same material. The later and much larger volume, meant for adults, was David’s expansion of this Image, a short picture book for children. He had help with the earlier project from Theodoor Galle, an engraver who made pictures to go with David’s words. Galle’s engravings were crucial: without exciting pictures, the 1603 book would have been wasted on its intended users—pre-teen beginners (like Descartes) in Jesuit schools.¹¹

Why did David decide to present Occasio to children in this costly way? The moment must have been teachable—too good to pass up. His picture book was a script for a short play, 120 lines that students could manage despite the elongated title: The Image of Opportunity, Displaying in Costumed Scenes How Good Fortune Comes from Welcoming Her, Misfortune from Neglecting Her. David expected that boys would be eager to dress up and show off in front of their schoolmates. He packed pictures with action in order to make his drama’s moral lessons more memorable for his students than an ordinary schoolbook. David’s handsomely printed script showed students the parts that they would play: how cool was that?¹²

A later Jesuit tapped the moral power of picturing for a different purpose. Father Claude Menestrier’s psychology of emblem-making theorized what David had practiced:

Images (images) are actually the matter of emblems because emblems are instructions that must strike (frapper) the eyes to pass from there to the soul. These images come from everything that can be sensed (sensibles) and from spiritual beings that we can represent under human shapes (figures humaines). Hence nature, arts, fables, metamorphoses, proverbs, apologues, moral maxims, axioms of knowledge, examples from history and poetic fictions are matter for emblems . . . because they have images that can teach . . . about morals and conduct in life.¹³

Some of the “poetic fictions” in David’s little school play had come from Ausonius by way of Alciato, who made “images that can teach.” The personified Opportunity and Time who led the play’s action were allegories, “spiritual beings under human shapes.” Pictures of them struck “the eyes to pass from there to the soul” (cf. Fig. 4.1). Menestrier’s remarks were consonant with notes that Descartes had already made:

Just as imagining uses shapes (figurae) to take bodies in, so understanding uses various bodies that can be sensed (corpora sensibilia), like wind and light, to give shape (figurare) to spiritual things: by going deeper into philosophy, then, we can raise the mind to heights of thinking.

Understanding got access to bodiless things—like principles of metaphysics—through “bodies that can be sensed.” This happened, for example, when “wind signifies spirit, motion over time signifies life, light signifies recognition, warmth signifies love and action at an instant signifies creation.”¹⁴

Such sequences of signifying, listed by Descartes in 1619, had been taught to him at La Flèche. Yet it could be that David’s superiors never sent his Image there. Or maybe the pamphlet arrived and went unnoticed. Or Jesuits who taught Descartes staged the play but left him out of the fun. Who knows? Let’s imagine something different: that college authorities made David’s Image the occasion for a banner event—a school performance with students crowding a small stage. Descartes could have missed the event if he was sick or in trouble—a bad boy misbehaving. Or in that very role he could have played a part in the minatory drama scripted by David’s Image.

In the last of twelve scenes that Galle engraved (Fig. 6.3), goats were parted from sheep for all eternity. Aloft on backgrounded clouds, 5 good boys had gone to heaven. One of them looked down on 3 classmates roasting in the Maw of Hell—foregrounded to drive the moral home—while 2 demons and a dragon stoked the furnace. Everyone who saw David’s play or read it accepted that eternal rewards and punishments were at stake, not just applause from children.¹⁵

Figure 6.3 Three Bad Boys Sent to Hell, David and Galle, 1603 Typus, fig. 12

David’s Image was short—only 25 leaves with few words but large pictures, 12 to illustrate the play, then 12 more to score additional points while pubescent passions were still boiling. The final picture in the second series was horrifying: a crucified Jesus, stooped under crushing lumber, stood on (not in) a pool of blood that poured from his wounds as a jackscrew behind the cross ground a burden of torment down on him. Inscriptions reminded students that these “ills and pains” of the Savior were really their own and that Christ’s suffering was “our” fault (Fig. 6.4).¹⁶

This scene of sacred horror illustrated a playbill for a drama acted by children, a short performance produced and directed by Jesuits and starring their students in order to teach them faith and the classics. The children had memorized phrases from Plautus and Terence not just to acquire vocabulary and get control of grammar but also to practice spoken Latin. Characters in the ancient comedies talked to one another in quick bursts, easy to learn and show off in schoolyard banter. Putting on a play exercised these skills and tested them. And drama in a Jesuit college was a serious matter: hence the grisly catechizing.

Figure 6.4 Jesus Crushed by His Cross and Standing on His Blood, David and Galle, 1603 Typus, [p. 25]

The longer version of David’s play had 23 roles, about the same for the shorter script as well: Opportunity, Time, an angel, 5 wise boys (prudens, sage in French), 5 unwise, 3 damned souls, a big devil, a little devil, and a chorus in heaven. Opportunity and Time, with God and cherubs looking on, opened Scene 1 of the shorter play. The two allegories explained how they kept the cosmos going, and both—Opportunity especially—were loaded with equipment. Time, a male, carried a scythe and an hourglass and wore a bizarre hat, an armillary sphere that proclaimed his universal domain. Opportunity, a woman, stood decorously beside him—bald in back but veiled in front by her flowing hair. She held a sphere of her own, also a laurel for resurrection, a crucifix and a ciborium. Hanging from her body or tied to her costume were a book, a crown, a cornucopia, a rosary and a bag of money. With so much gear to show off, this allegorical eye-full stole the show.¹⁷

Figure 6.5 Bad Boys Mocking Time, David and Galle, 1603 Typus, fig. 3

All 10 boys came on stage for the tableau in Scene 2, speaking only a few words—not too many to memorize. Devils from stage left tried to net them and hook them with fishing lines, while to the right, guarding Opportunity and Time, an angel warned the children away from temptation. In Scene 3 devils have trapped five bad boys under an ominous caption: “fools urged on by Satan waste Time disgracefully.” This lesson was a comment on stage business—bad boys making fun of Time by messing with his headgear and other props (Fig. 6.5).¹⁸

Misbehaving boys went from bad to worse in Scene 4. They insulted the goddess and snatched her attributes: “at a demon’s urging, they make an awful joke out of Opportunity.” One boy reached up to cover the back of her head with a mask (larva) and hide the bald skull that shocked him and his classmates (Fig. 6.6). Following the demon’s instructions, they snickered about exploiting Opportunity for sinful purposes—debasing her as a bride (sponsa) in juvenile fantasies. Like all the other scenes, the fourth was labeled to show who spoke which lines:

Figure 6.6 Boys Mocking Opportunity, David and Galle, 1603 Typus, fig. 4

Devil A Now, my young ones, go ahead and rush this goblin (larva) too. There are times when Opportunity (Occasio) makes herself your bride of her own doing.

Boy B (holding Time’s scythe) Let’s go, boys! We’ve got a new opportunity (occasio) to have fun here!

Boy C (holding Time’s hourglass) Ugh! What a dreadful monster!

Boy D (raising a laurel branch over Opportunity’s head) What’s this, male or female?

Boy E (wearing Time’s headgear) It wears hair over its face, but the back of its head is bald!

Boy F (masking Opportunity’s baldness) On May Day it’s the custom for boys to dress a bride (sponsa) up and cover her head with boughs to lead a long procession, while they cheer the new mistress (nympha) for all the happy days she brings. Look: the season (tempus) is right, so why don’t we have the same fable staged for us—seeing how things are?

Satyr G (playing phallic bagpipes) Well done!

Bad boys cooked up a spectacle for their next minutes on stage: they parodied Opportunity by treating her like a heathen May Day idol (Fig. 6.6). Their foolishness perverted a festival that should have been sacred to Mary the Ever Virgin—a wife and mother who was never a bride. Then in Scene 5, as the angel pointed up at heaven, the best opportunity of all, good boys restored equipment that had been snatched from both allegories.¹⁹

Previously in Scene 3, props taken by bad boys had distracted them: they never actually looked at Time. But in Scene 5, good boys heeded the caption: “the wise observe Time and Opportunity carefully.” Attitudinal senses of observe—‘esteem’ and ‘respect’—reinforced its visual senses, ‘notice’ and ‘watch.’ “How happy we are to look into (aspicio) your gleaming eyes (lumina),” said one alert boy to Time. Then another spoke joyfully to Time’s veiled partner: “how our little eyes (ocelli) have yearned to see you arrive, Opportunity.”²⁰

In a later scene Opportunity distributed gifts to good boys—first giving them a cross to bear but also worldly wealth and plenty. Then, as Time slipped away, desperate bad boys tried to hold on to Opportunity by grabbing her long hair. Sensing their foolishness too late, they felt remorse for their stupidity. They chased Time and Opportunity but couldn’t catch them. “How dangerous and damning it was to have shirked Opportunity,” they groaned, as devils—shrieking while good boys and an angel prayed together—chained them up and dragged them down to hell, the setting of the twelfth and final scene (Fig. 6.3).²¹

Did Descartes—costumed as a good boy, a bad boy or a devil—go on stage masked (larvatus) in this play? Did he watch a performance of Father David’s script? Did he ever see David’s book? None of this is known. Almost certainly, however, his teachers—Jesuits like David—exploited the power of pictorial pedagogy, which, as in every Jesuit school, enlivened the curriculum at La Flèche, making classical prose and poetry fun to look at and worth dreaming about.

Later, after Descartes left the Jesuits, words from eclogues by Ausonius stuck in the young soldier’s memory. Earlier, while he studied at La Flèche, a Jesuit had written that poet’s description of Opportunity into a school drama. As of 1603, this unforgettable allegory was in costume and ready to go on stage—masked for a play printed in a picture book used by students like Descartes. In 1619, he declared his own intention to go masked on to the world’s stage. In 1637 he took his mask off and showed his thoughts to the world in picture books of his own, though without the drama.

My micro-story of the philosopher’s encounter with Ausonius and a masked Opportunity is conjectural, historical and philological. Philology usually keeps its distance from philosophy and vice-versa, which isn’t a bad thing. At certain times, however—as Jacob Brucker reminded his readers—philosophy has needed philology. One such time, a meso-moment now called a renaissance, arrived during the centuries before Descartes was born and transformed philosophy as he found it. If philosophers now are to understand what happened to philosophy next—how and why it became what it was as Descartes left it—the prior moment needs both philosophical and historical attention. Philosophers should attend to it like historians and welcome their dishonored dead back from oblivion.²²

¹ Hor. Sat. 1.5.64.

² Plaut. Aul. 4.4.15; Capt. 3.4.66; Cas. 3.4.2; Merc. 5.4.20; Plin. HN pr. 31; Petr. 34.8; Apul. Meta. 6.30.3, 9.29.9; Poppi (2007); Bradley (2008); for persona in the pre-Cartesian era, see Robichaud (2018).

³ AT, 10.213–15; CSM, 1.2–3; Gouhier (1958), pp. 1–18, 39–41, examined the provenance of the notebook and the chronology of its parts.

⁴ Gouhier (1958), pp. 25–41.

⁵ AT, 10.180–5, 217, citing Baillet (1691), pp. 50–1; CSM, 1.4; Auson. Ecl. 7.2.1, 4.1. See Copenhaver (2015), pp. 331–51, on Naudé, a debunker of the Rosicrucian hoax, which Descartes mentioned in his notes; Gouhier (1958), pp. 117–57, concluded that Descartes didn’t take the bait, consciously or unconsciously, and that the Rosicrucian material was “purely ornamental.”

⁶ Auson. Epig. 33; Copenhaver (2015), pp. 338–42.

⁷ Hom. Il. 18.478–609; Plaut. Ps. 2, 3, 3; Phaedr. 5.8; Webb (2016).

⁸ Auson. Epig. 33; Hor. AP 361; Lee (1967).

⁹ Alciato (1531), sig. A8r; other editions showed a wheel, but in Alciato’s text Occasio stood above pennae, usually ‘feathers’ or ‘wings,’ though ‘feathers’ seems wrong, and it was her sandals that had wings. To compare emblems from different editions, go to https://www.emblems.arts.gla.ac.uk/; see also Cohen (2014), pp. 202, 216, 222, 239; Melion and Ramakers (2016b). Like Ausonius, Alciato began his title with the preposition in before an accusative noun, where in or de with an ablative or ad with an accusative would also be correct.

¹⁰ David and Galle (1605), sig. ++2; Melion (2016), pp. 375–6, 385–6, in a thorough analysis of David’s books; on the Jesuits and meditation see Chapter 1 of this book; on David see also Lieb (1999); Waterschoot (1999); and Manning and Van Vaeck on Jesuits and emblems.

¹¹ David and Galle (1603); Melion (2016), pp. 380, 384, 388–9.

¹² David and Galle (1603), tp.

¹³ Menestrier (1684), pp. 19–20, which is missing from Menestrier (1662).

¹⁴ AT, 10.217; CSM, 1.4; Grove (1999), p. 86: this excellent account of other evidence about teaching with emblems at La Flèche doesn’t discuss Ausonius on Occasio.

¹⁵ David and Galle (1603), fig. 12; (1605), p. 273, where the preface to the longer version of the play suggests that it had already been performed.

¹⁶ David and Galle (1603), fig. on p. 25, unpaginated.

¹⁷ David and Galle (1603), fig. 1; (1605), tp, p. 276; Melion (2016), pp. 387, 391, 403–4. Occasio and Tempus are taller than the boys. The boy who reaches up to mask Occasio in Fig. 6.5 stands on tip-toe. Two students each, one perched on another’s shoulders, may have played the tall allegories; they would need to stay on stage without falling only for a few minutes. Occasio’s bare feet in Fig. 6.6 point backward, revealing the top-and-bottom arrangement and reinforcing the strange look of her head.

¹⁸ David and Galle (1603), figs 2–3; Melion (2016), pp. 405–7, 411.

¹⁹ David and Galle (1603), figs 4–5; on David’s clever use of labeling to identify his characters, see Waterschoot (1999), p. 357.

²⁰ David and Galle (1603), fig. 5; (1605), pp. 270, 280; Melion (2016), pp. 403, 405–7, 410–11; in the story told by David’s longer book, Occasio had been blinded and her eyes veiled to cover up the injury.

²¹ David and Galle (1603), figs 6–12.

²² Brucker (1742–4), 4.1.83–6, as in Chapter 1 of this book.

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Index

For the benefit of digital users, indexed terms that span two pages (e.g., 52–53) may, on occasion, appear on only one of those pages.

Abelard, Peter xvi

Abravanel, Judah 4

Academics 16, 17, 20

Academic scepticism 9

Acciaiuoli, Donato 11

accounting xiv

active participant observation xxiii

Adam, Charles 1, 2

Adam and Eve 177

Adams, Ansel 121

Adams, Henry 83

Adamson, Peter xviin.3

adjacent 45–46

Agricola, Rudolf xviii–xix, xx, 2, 40–46, 49–50, 56, 60, 62, 65–66, 162, 170, 203, 232–33

and Cicero 42, 44

compared with Descartes 171–72

On Dialectical Invention see Dialectical Invention (Agricola), 1479

getting into print 40–41

Latin of 44, 54, 60, 231–32

linguistic model 56

on mining 170, 171f

original, whether 41

pictures of machines 171, 172f

on speech 41

on teaching 41

Alberti, Leon Battista 4, 113

Albert of Saxony 229–30

alchemy 191

Alciato, Andrea 281, 282f, 283–84

Emblems 281

In Occasionem 281, see also Occasio (Alciato)

Aldrovandi, Ulisse 185–86, 187f

heart-shaped crab sketch 187f, 187

algebra/algebraic geometry xxin.6, 104, 199, 201, 202, 244–45

Alpers, Svetlana 70n.7

Alvares, Manoel 31

ambiguity 251

in art 252

classifying 253

and oblivion 251

SEP entry on 252

typology of 252–53

amm sequence see ancient, medieval and modern (amm) sequence

Amo, Anton xx

anachronism xvii–xviii, 6, 11–12, 123

anatomy xiv–xv, 162, 164, 210

art of 161

books 131–32, 162

“bloated” 115–16

cardio-pulmonary 188–89

importance to Descartes 1

meso-mechanics of 191

of oblivion 254–55

ocular 128

pictorial studies xv

Renaissance anatomists xv

theater, in Leiden 166

visual 102–3

ancient, medieval and modern (amm) sequence xv–xvi

macro-story 228, 229

Anglophone philosophers xiii, xvi–xvii, 65, 71, 74, 80–81, 247, 253–54

and Descartes 4–5

macro-stories told by 228

and “From Petrarch to Descartes” period 5

on Proclus 250–51, see also Anglophonia

Anglophonia xiii, xvi, xvii, xviii, xxiii, 5, 222, 251, 254, see also Anglophone philosophers

ant 149f, 149

antiquity xv, 11, 32, 65, 227

late 227, 274

pagan 136–37

Roman 6

Antognazza, Maria xxii–xxiii

aphorisms

and dialogue 75–76

and essays 75, 76

and Nietzsche xxi–xxii, 75, 255–56, 258

and treatises 85

and Wittgenstein xxi–xxii, 75

Apostles 16–17

apple 177, 190, 192

Apuleius 278–79

Aquinas, Thomas 4–5, 29, 48, 157, 219

death (1274) xvi, 4–5

metaphysics 33

pictures of 157–58

scholastic theology 32

Summa of Theology 31

architecture xiv

histories of 218

pictorial studies xv

Renaissance xv

arguments and dialectic 42

arguments versus argument (argumentum) 42–43, 44

artificial versus non-artificial arguments 46

concept of argument 44

finding 42, 45

intelligent design arguments in theology 138–39, see also dialectic; Dialectical Invention (Agricola), 1479; Dialectic (Ramus), 1555–1572

Aristides 59

Aristippus 78–79

Aristotle/Aristotelians xviii, xix, 7, 20, 49–50, 56, 60–61, 90, 157, 247–49, 256

Bruni’s challenge of authority 8

Burgersdijck on 57

on categories 42

Descartes on 79

in Greek, recovery of 11

on logic 7, 37, 39–40, 233

meteorology of 90, 92–93

on nature 8

Nicomachean Ethics xxiv

original teachings 7

Petrarch’s attack on 7–8, 9

and picturing 92

Ramus’s views on 37–38, 52–53, 54

rating of 248–50

and scholasticism 10

on speech 41–42

theology 7–8

topoi 42

Arnold, Matthew 6

art xiv, xvi

of acceptable speech 41, 46

adding value to 252–53

ambiguity in 252, 253

of anatomy 161

of carpentry 269

of cinema 120

of cookery 212–13

forms of 281

graphic 120

Heidegger on 213

historians of 227

ink and wash drawings 195, 196f

literary 11

logic as 56, 58

manuscript 146

mechanized printing threatening 122

mechanized reproduction of 124–25

of medicine xiv

medieval artists 145

norms or habits of 107

objects of 120, 124

pictorial 67, 124, 212–13

presentation of 124

reacting to 124

reproducible 121

revaluing 121

rhetoric 41

rules of 36

self-scrutiny of 210–11

technical 151

technologies of 89, 212–13

terms of 58, 220n.6

theory and practice 138n.128

works of 115, 120, 122, 124, 144–45, see also picture books; picturing

articles

about ancient, medieval and modern philosophy xv

by Anglophone philosophers 219

breakthrough 252

in English 247–48

in journals xxiii, 248, 249, 256, 268

history 271

keeping authentic 269

leading 222

philosophy 71, 268, 269

artists xv, 75, 120, 121, 143–44, 146, 148–49, 157–58, 168, 169–70, 171–72, 183, 194, 195, 209, 280

German 156

literary 60

medieval xix, 134, 144–45, 147, 183

astronomy xiv, 129, 131–32, 210, 236–37

heliocentric 132

Renaissance xv

atom 81

Augustine 8, 16, 29

City of God 228

Confessions 210–11

Descartes on 210–11

Petrarch on 8

Ausonius 279–80, 281, 290–91

autobiography xiv, 2, 33

chronology 211n.230

framing treatises with 210–11

Renaissance xv

thin, in the Discourse 279

autodoxography 82–83

automation 147, 177, 190, 192–93

axioms 36, 48–49, 52

dividing/partitioning 52

of knowledge 283

sorting and displaying 51

and syllogisms 50, 52

true or false 48–49, 50, see also syllogisms

Bacon, Francis xvii, 4–5, 12, 73, 74, 92, 119

Baigrie, Brian 70n.5

Baillet, Adrien 35–36n.3, 198–99, 243

baptism xiv

barbarism 10, 11, 14–15, 24

barbarians and fools 13–17

eliminating from schools and universities 61, 62

Barberini, Francesco 236–37

Bartholin, Thomas

Anatomia 166, 167f

Barwise, Jon 69n.4

baseball 95–96, 96f, 97

baseball diamond 95–96, 97

infinite 96f, 117

rules of 112

Bayle, Pierre 130–31

Beausse, Georges-Louis 195

Béda, Noël xviii, 15n.32, 22, 23–25, 29, 66

accusing Erasmus of betrayal 32

Notes Against Jacques Lefèvre d’Etaples and Desiderius Erasmus 22–23

Sydic of the Sorbonne (1520) 22–23, see also Erasmus, Desiderius

bee 179, 180–81, 182, 183

Beeckman, Isaac 55, 279

Ben-Ghiat, Ruth 261, 262

Benjamin, Walter 115, 126, 128, 131–32, 144, 196–97, 208, 213

on aesthetic value 213

death of (1940) 124–25

and films/theaters 126

on mechanized reproduction 132–33

on photography 121–22

on pictures reproduced in copies of the Optics 123

on technologies of pictorial art 67, 118, 120, 121–22, 123, 124, 149–50

disruptive xix, 89, 123, 126, 131–32, 154, 162, 164, 165–66, 212–13

post-Cartesian 212

“unconscious optics” 121–22

Berger, Susanna 211–12

Berggruen, Nicolas xxiv

Berkeley, George xxi–xxii

Hylas 74

Berkeley News 258–59, 261

Besson, Jacques xviii, 1, 175–77, 191, 192, 203

automated fountain sketch 188–89, 189f

and Descartes 1–2

Livre des instruments mathematiques et mechaniques 175

Theatrum instrumentorum et machinarum 175, 176f, 192–93

Bible 21, 31, 146, 206

Bishops’ Bible 193

Geneva Bible 193

King James Bible 17

misreading 21–22

reading 32

Bigelow, Jacob 118–19

biography, philosophical xxii–xxiii, 222, 243

biology xv, 129, 170

pictorial studies xiv, xv

Black Death xvi–xvii, 229

Bluck, Richard 93, 94

Bodin, Jean 4

Boethius 39

Bonaventura 23, 29

books

abacus 151

on anatomy 131–32, 162

“bloated” 115–16

on geometry xxin.6, 78, 201

on mathematics 110

open 213

textbooks 31–32, see also manuals; picture books

botany xiv, 185

explaining by picturing 156

Greek 120n.95, see also plants

Bourdin, Pierre 128

Bourke-White, Margaret 121

Boyle, Robert 119

Bracciolini, Poggio 113

Brandis, Christian 221–22

Brecht, Berthold xvii

Brethren of the Common Life 25

British Society of Aesthetics 252

Brucker, Jacob 221, 222, 291

assault on “the sectarian pseudo- philosophy of the Middle Ages” 10–11

on citing names 11

compared with Schedel 11–12

Critical History of Philosophy 10–12, 219, 221–22, 247n.2, 274

on cultural renewal 11

on Erasmus 12–13

history of philosophy 11, 247n.2

and humanism 12

on insides and outsides 221

legacy of 222

list 11–12, 57

on Petrarch 11

on philology 66, 291

on philosophy’s heritage from antiquity 11

on scholastic theology and philosophy 12–13

on teaching the classics 11–12

Brunelleschi, Filippo xiv

death of (1446) xv–xvi

Bruni, Leonardo 8, 11

Bruno, Giordano 239

execution (1600) xiv–xvi

studied by Vrin series 4

whether a great philosopher xvii

Bucephalus 59

Burckhardt, Jacob xvi

Burgersdijck, Franco xviii, xx, 2, 55–63, 65–66, 187

and Agricola 56

and Aristotle 57

genealogy 63

and Keckermann 55–57

logic of 3–4

Elements of Logic 3, 55–56, 60, 63

teaching 55

and Peter of Spain 56

on Ramus 55–56, 57, 60–61, 62–63

rector at Leiden xix, 3, 62–63

theorems of 59

use of ‘scholastic’ 63

on writing classical language 70

Buridan, Jean xvi, 8–9, 229–30

Burnet, John

Greek text of the Meno 93, 112

Burton, Robert 205–7, 207f

Anatomy of Melancholy 204, 206, 254–55

Caesar, Augustus 112–13

Caesar, Julius 31–32, 112–13, 127

Calkins, Mary Whiton 83

calvaria 168, 169–70

Calvinism xiv

Campanella, Tommaso xvi, 4, 249

Cantor, Georg 96, 117

Caravaggio, Michelangelo Merisi da 107, 151

Cardano, Girolamo 4

Vita 210–11

care 254, 255, 256, 264–65

authentic 264–65

concern 265–66

forgetting 263–64

Heidegger’s care 256–57, 267–68

and resentment 271

theory of 267

Cartesiana 243–44

Cartesian meditation xiii, xvii–xviii, see also meditation; Meditations on First Philosophy (Descartes, 1641)

Cartier-Bresson, Henri 121

Casaubon, Isaac 118

Casseri, Giulio Casseri 167f, 168

Cassirer, Ernst 263

casuistry xiv–xv

parable of rope 225–26, 246

Catana, Leo 222

Catholicism xiv, 6, 17, 36

Erasmus and Catholic Church 22

Peasants’ War (1558) 231

schools 40–41, see also Jesuit Order

Caus, Salamon de 175

Cellini, Benvenuto xiv, xv

Autobiography 210–11

center/margin antithesis 222

Chabot, Admiral 194, 195, 196–97

Chabot marbles 195

tomb of 195, 196f

chameleon 184

Chaplin, Charlie 119

charity 17, 112, 272–73

Charron, Pierre 2

charter citizens, Republic of Letters 130–31

Charton, Édouard 195–97

Christianity

and authentic philosophy 8

Catholicism see Catholicism

Christian soldiers 28

communion 19

devotional tradition 26, 32

eleventh rule 29

and folly 21

Gospels 16, 25, 127, 168

martyrs 15

and meso-stories about philosophy 228

mysticism 19–20

New Testament 13, 17, 28, 206

and paganism 14

perceived threats to 6

prayer, methods of 26–27

Protestantism xiv

Reformation 17, 40, 231, 232, 233–34, 235–36, 242

revelation 9, 10–11, 103

sacrament 19

salvation 8–9, 272

and autonomy 28

eternal 28–29

and Spiritual Exercises 28–29

visions of 282

slaughter of Christians 92

Society of Jesus see Society of Jesus

thirteenth rule 28, see also Bible; God; Jesuit Order; Jesus Christ; Paul; religion; theology

Christianson, Scott 71n.8

Cicero

and Agricola 42, 44

logic 37–38

moral philosophy 31–32

On the Nature of the Gods 64–65

oratory/speeches 38

Petrarch on 8, 9

phrases of 11

and Ramus 46, 53–54

writings 13–14

cinema 120

cipher 49

civic virtue 33

Clarac, Frédéric de 195

classics and classicism 4, 30, 31–32, 41, 50–51, 54, 60

classical education 13, 14

classical philosophy xviii

Erasmus on 14

Greek and Latin 281

internalizing 31

and logic 3–4

Montaigne on 65

Ramus on 37–38, 54

Renaissance xix

Roman 32

students of 12

teaching 11–12, 32, 105, 206, 285–86

Clermont, Collège of (Paris) 35

Cloucqui, André 198f

codes 49, 79–80

code-words, Ramist 36

coherence see epoptic coherence

Colbert, Stephen 258–59

Coleridge, Samuel Taylor 6

Collège de Clermont, Paris 128

Collins, Randall 223

The Sociology of Philosophies: A Global Theory of Intellectual Change 223–24

Colonna, Francesco

Hypnerotomachia (A Dream Battle) 136–37, 137f, 146

Columbus, Christopher xiv

death of (1506) xv–xvi

comedy 18, 82–83

Roman 278

communion 19

computer programs 80

concepts 59

and argument 44

categories 58

combining of conceptions 59

concept-writing 82

force 5–6

forming 59

interpreting 58

intuitions without 81

logic 39–40, 56

representation 59

second-level conceptions 59

conjectural emendation 112

Conrad, Joseph 261, 262

The Secret Agent 260–61

Constitutions of 1559 see Jesuit Order

Copenhaver, Brian xviin.3

Copernicus, Nicholas xiii, xiv, xv–xvi, 132f, 132, 154, 203

De revolutionibus coelestium orbium libri vi 153–54, 162

cosmology xv, 99–100, 129, 132, 248–49

Cousin, Jean (sculptor) 195, 197

marble likeness of Chabot 194, 197

Couto, Sebastian 63

crab 185–86, 187

cranium 166–68

Crimi, Milo xxiv

Cronkite, Walter 217

Cunaeus 3

Cyllarus 59

Dante Alighieri xv, 4

David, Father Jan 282, 283–84

emblem-making 283

Image (Typus) of Opportunity (pictorial pamphlet and play script) 283, 284–85

bad boys in heaven or hell engraving 284, 285f

bad boys mocking time engraving 287, 288f

boys mocking Opportunity engraving 287, 289f

Jesus crushed by his cross engraving 285–86, 286f

longer and shorter versions of play 286–87

misbehaving boys theme 287–90

roles in play 286–87

Occasio arrepta, neglecta 282, 283, 287n.17, 287–91

Opportunity Seized and Shirked 282, 283

In simulacrum Occasionis et Paenitentiae 282, see also Galle, Theodoor

De Bert, Pieter 56

de Brion, Admiral Phillipe Chabot 194

de Caus, Salomon 175

de Clarac, Count Frédéric 195

declarative sentences 78–79

decoration 49, 195

de Fonseca, Pedro 63

della Mirandola, Pico xvii

de Roy, Hendrik (Regius) 236–37

Descartes, René 249, 251, 256

ambition of 279

and Anglophone philosophy 4–5

aniconic ideology, promoting 68–69, 115–16

and Aristotle 79

Cartesiana 243–44

Cartesian revolution in philosophy 73

cogito 72

compared with Agricola 171–72

death of (1650) 5

essays and treatises written by 68–69

I think: therefore I am argument 72

at La Flèche college see La Flèche college, Loire Valley

learning philosophical French from Montaigne 64

mechanical and alchemical humans sketch 187–88, 188f, 190

open books by 213

picture books see picture books

rating of 248–49

studied by Vrin series 4

as unforgotten philosopher 247–48

writings see writings of Descartes

Des Chene, Dennis 70n.6

description 108

scientific 120n.95

topical 42, 45

verbal 149–50

wrong 83

d’Étaples, Lefevre 12–13, 24

de Toledo, Francisco 63

d’Honnecourt, Villard xviii, 147, 148f

dialectic

and acceptability 41–42

of Agricola 41–43

aim of 42

arguments see arguments and dialectic

and barbarians 15

defining 38n.8

and demonstration 41–42

of Erasmus 21–22

as logic 46

of Petrarch 7

places see Dialectical Invention (Agricola), 1479

of Ramus xviii–xix, 36

and rhetoric 41–42

toxic 10–11, see also Dialectical Invention (Agricola), 1479; Dialectic (Ramus), 1555–1572

Dialectical Invention (Agricola), 1479 40–41

on arguments versus argument (argumentum) 42–43, 44

finding arguments 42, 45

book 1 42–43

book 2 42

book 3 42

compared with Dialectic 46

compared with Summaries 41, 44–45, 46

completion of (1478) 232

on devising 42

editions 231–32

on judging 42

on locating 42, 45

on places 42–43, 44, 45–46

size of 46, see also Agricola, Rudolf; dialectic; Dialectic (Ramus), 1555–1572

Dialectic (Ramus), 1555–1572

on artificial versus non-artificial arguments 46

and Beeckman 55

book 1 47–49, 52–53

book 2 48–49, 50

brevity 46

on cause 47, 48

Chapter 1 (defining dialectic) 46, 47–48

Chapter 2 ( parts of dialectic and kinds of arguments) 46, 47–48

Chapter 3 (the efficient, productive and sustaining) 47–48

classic quotations in 37–38

commentaries on 48

compared with Dialectical Invention 46

compared with Summaries 46

designing 51–52

editions 36–37, 46, 232

on finding/discovering 46

French edition (1555) 61–62

on judging 46, 48–49, 50

last Latin edition of 46

Logike as title of first English version 37–38

misappropriation of logic of the Summaries 54

partitioning in 51–52

on primaries 46

matching or non-matching 46

simple or paired 46

prose of 54, 60

publication of (1555) 232, see also dialectic; Dialectical Invention (Agricola), 1479; Ramus, Petrus

dialogue xxi–xxii

and aphorisms 75–76

of Erasmus 13–14, 15–16

of Plato 8

Dijksterhuis, Fokko 107n.73

dingbats 77, 78

Diogenes Laertius 78–79

discourse 3, 74, 118

civil 258, see also Discourse on the Method (Descartes), 1637; speech/talking

Discourse on the Method (Descartes), 1637 65, 72, 87, 182, 201, 202

audiences 3

autobiography of cultural emancipation in xx–xxi

completion of xv–xvi

confessions in 2

epistemic criterion in 182

first sentence 64–65

introducing the Optics 67

lack of scholasticism or humanism in 65

as a manifesto 61–62

Montaigne’s presence in 64, 73

pictureless 103

publication of xiii, 105, 204

and Ramism xix

Rules for the Direction of the Mind (1620s) 54–55

vernacular 71–72, see also Descartes, René; Optics (technical treatise introduced by Descartes’ essay Discourse on the Method), 1637; writings of Descartes

dishonored dead

making lists of 276

resurrecting xviii, xx, 291, see also oblivion

disruption xix, 89, 123, 126, 131–32, 154, 162, 164, 165–66, 212–13, see also printing; technologies

dissection

of bodies 1, 162, 174–75

engraving of dissected hand 163f, 163–64

of eye from a cadaver 85, 101–2, 166

of living animal 165

of scepticism xvii

Donatello (Donato di Niccolò di Betto Bardi) xiv

Donne, John 129–30, 131–33, 164

doxography 78–79, 81

drama xiv, 37, 285–86, 290–91

biblical 146

minatory 284, see also plays, theatrical; theaters

drawing xv, 82, 93, 101–2, 114–15, 128, 135, 146

detailed 145

on paper 146

and realism 138

tasks for 147, see also art

dualism 237, 242

Platonic 18

Du Moulin, Pierre 56

Dürer, Albrecht

Great Piece of Turf 156

early modern philosophy xv

eccentrics 153–54

Edgerton, Samuel 140–41n.132

education xiv, 24, 28–29, 30, 32, 33, 79, 83, 107, 208–9, 263, 279

antibarbarism 17

Catholic 36

classical 13, 14

free 30

in Europe xviii–xix

higher xviii–xix, xxiii, 36, 80

Jesuit 63

scholastic 33

secondary 36, see also Jesuit Order

eidos 89–90

Eisenstein, Elizabeth 70n.5

ekphrasis (picture poetry) 280

Elizabeth I, Queen of England xiv

Elkins, James 85n.34

emblems 75, 177–78, 281

books 282

and images 283

psychology of emblem-making 283

Empedocles 92–93

Empson, William 252–53

Seven Types of Ambiguity 252, 253, 254–55

engineering xiv, xv, 140–41n.132, 147, 210

civil, for non-engineers 175

military, for non-engineers 175

pictorial studies xv

engravings 124–25

earth as a lodestone engraving 90, 91f, 91

of Galle 283

bad boys mocking Time 287, 288f

boys mocking Opportunity 287, 289f

Jesus crushed by his Cross and standing on his blood 286f

three bad boys sent to Hell 284, 285f

intaglio techniques 119–20

Ennius 84

enthymemes 45, 72

displacing syllogisms 72

Epicurean texts 8

Epicurus 157

epicycles 154

epigrams xxi–xxii, 65, 78–79

epoptic bonding power 193

epoptic coherence 125–33

epoptic communities xix, 126, 195, 196–97

Cartesian xxii

contemporary example 128–29

defining epoptic 126–27

Descartes addressing 192

durable 128

explanatory pictures printed for 206–7

formed by the Optics 192, 197

and Gospels 127

members of 144

new 132–33

nodes of aggregation for 211

persistent 131

post-medieval 1–2, 126–27

shared watching 126–27, 128, 197, 203, 209

watchers of Cartesian tennis 130

shunning of 129

size of 130, see also Optics (technical treatise introduced by Descartes’ essay Discourse on the Method)

epoptic experiences 192–93

Erasmus, Desiderius xiii, 2, 6–7, 12–14, 18–19, 24, 40–41, 60, 61, 62, 65–66, 232

accused by Béda of betrayal 31–32

Brucker on 12–13

Collège de Montaigu, studying at 22, 23–24, 25

dialogue of 13–14, 15–16

Latin language, use of 15, 17n.39, 22, 25, 54

on Petrarch 8–9

poetry and prose of 54

on theology 16, 22

writings of

Adages 203

Antibarbarians (Antibarbarorum liber, 1520) xviii, 13, 14–15, 16, 17, 20, 24

Colloquies (1518) 22–23

The Eating of Fish added to the Colloquies (1526) 22–23

Handbook of a Christian Soldier 25

Praise of Folly and Letter to Maarten van Dorp see Praise of Folly and Letter to Maarten van Dorp (Erasmus 1515)

essays 71–73, 74, 80

and anecdotes or aphorisms 75, 76

compared with mini-treatises 71

Descartes’ collections of 74

established practice of philosophers 68

five-paragraph 80

gaps between 72–73

of Hume 88–89

in the Meditations 3, 68–69

as middle-size units of prose 76

philosophical 74, 75

short 88

terms as vernacular 74, see also Montaigne, Michel de

Etchemendy, John 69n.4

etching 119–20, 124–25

Euclid 201

evidence xxiii, 246, 247, 254, 279

and argument 44

Aristotle’s evaluation of 92

of classicism 54

complete 244

of deformative oblivion in journals 272–73

exhaustion of 243

external 224–25, 226, 244, 245, 246

forgotten 272–73

of humor in philosophers 82–83

ignoring 246

incomplete 226

internal xxii, 224–25, 226, 235–36, 245, 246

laws of 49

manuscript 112

missing 226

neglecting 235–36

non-philosophical xx, 246

ordinary English 220n.6

partial 65–66

philological xx–xxi

pictorial 69–70, 153–54, 209

proving versus explanation 117

relevant and available 220

reliance on 242

and religion 235

totality of 226

use of 220–21

violating rules of internalism 242

visual 159

explanation 78, 83–84, 175

explanatory picturing see picturing

narrative 117

philosophical 233–34

versus proving 117

resisting 233–34

scientific 98n.57, 161

expressionism 138n.128

externalism 221, 222–23, 235–36

absolute 223–24

complete 223–24

evidence 224–25, 226, 244, 245, 246

historiography 221, 222–23

history 222, 223

of philosophy 220–21

meso-stories 242

micro-stories 243

neglecting 229

organs 100

senses 26, 240–41

eye 51–52, 102–3, 120, 121

allegorical 286–87

of cadaver 166

dissecting 85, 101–2, 166

empty socket 101–2, 165

of imagination 26

light entering 97–98

mind’s eye 113, 116–17, 134, 135, 139–40, 282

of phoenix 143–44

removal for optical study 101–2

seen objects 98

sensory 89–90

eyeglasses 179–80, 180f

fencing 197, 270–71

art of 198–99

in Leiden 197, 198f, 198–99

manual 197–99, 243–44

masters 199

Ficino, Marsilio xvii, 4, 157–58, 158f

fiction xxi–xxii, 71, 110, 244, 261

poetic 283–84

field of vision 85f, 85

Fillia, Luigi 213n.235

finding arguments and dialectic 42, 45, 46

flesh versus spirit 19

fleurons (little telephones) 77, 78

Fludd, Robert

Story of Both Universes 98

forbearance 17

force, concept of 5–6

forgetting 247, 251, 253, 254–55, 256–57, 262, 267, 274, 277

endorsement of 256–57

incomplete 252

intemperate 253

and oblivion 277

partial 254, 256

persistent 255

sustained 277

total 256

unusual 254

fountain 190, 191

Foxe, John 194f, 194

Actes and Monuments 160f, 193

Book of Martyrs 193

Fraunce, Abraham 231–32

Frede, Michael 223, 224, 226, 235–36, 244

Frege, Gottlob 82, 229

“From Petrarch to Descartes” period xvi, xviii, 6

Vrin series 4–7

Fuchs, Leonhart xiii, xiv, 154–56, 155f, 157f, 162, 203, 210, 281

Galen 49–50

Galilei, Galileo xiii, 71n.8, 129, 131, 132–33, 164, 179–80, 199, 236–37

Messenger from the Stars 131–32, 210

moon, pictures of 133f, 133

picture books by xxi

Galle, Theodoor 282n.10, 283

engravings of 283, see also David, Father Jan

bad boys mocking Time 287, 288f

boys mocking Opportunity 287, 289f

Jesus crushed by his Cross and standing on his blood 284–85, 286f

three bad boys sent to Hell 284, 285f, 290

Galois, Évariste 244–45

Gardiner, William 160f, 193

Gaukroger, Stephen xxii–xxiii

gender 208–9

geometry 116, 173–74

abstruse 208–9

algebraic xxi–xxii, 104, 200f

books xxin.6, 78, 201

coordinate 199

graphical representations 153

optical 128

sporting 97

squares

geometrical construction based on, in Meno 95

pictorial representation 95

in Plato’s Meno 93–94, 94f, 95–96, 112–13

simple 95–96

tiles 199

undivided 95

technical 201n.213

triangles 151, 152f, 152f, 153

trigonometry 104, see also writings of Descartes

Gesner, Conrad xiv, 184, 185f, 185

Greek-Latin Lexicon 183–84

A Universal Library or Catalogue Fully Complete for All Authors 183–84

Gestell (frame) 89, 212

Gilbert, William 90, 133n.123

Gilson, Étienne 2, 4

Giocondo, Giovanni xviii, 113, 115, 136f, 136–37

Giotto (Giotto di Bondone) xiv, 107

Goclenius, Rudolph

A Breaking-Down of Keckermann’s Larger Logic Into Fuller Tables Than Those Yet Published 55–56

God 7, 19–20, 27, 33, 63–64, 78–79, 87, 129–30, 286–87

blood of 239

body of 239

glory of 29

grace of 28, 106

knowing/knowledge of 7–8, 227

love of 28, 29

madness of death 19

message of 231

mystical union with 26–27

and nature 239

promise through Isaiah 16–17

proof of existence 238

will of 28

words of 206, see also Bible; Christianity; Gospels; Jesus Christ; religion; Trinity

Gödel, Kurt xxiii, 252

Goethe, Johann Wolfgang 213

Goodman, Nelson 77n.16

Gospels 16, 25, 127, 147, 168

Gosse, Edmund 76

grammar 12, 20, 30, 31, 32, 50–51

control of 285–86

schools of 31

subject of a search 50–51

teaching 31

Granger, Thomas 231–32

Gregory 29

Greuter, Matthias 180–81, 183

Guicciardini, Francesco 4

Gutenberg, Johannes Gensfleisch zur Laden zum xiv

Hankins, James xviin.3

Hardy, G. H. 111

Harington, John 173–75, 174f

Harris, James xxii–xxiii

Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich xxii–xxiii, 223

Heidegger, Martin 67, 83, 89–90, 118, 127, 212, 213, 253–54, 256, 267–68, 270–71, 272

on care 254, 255, 256–57

Catholicism of 263

compared with Kant 254, 263–64

complaint 256–57

debate with Cassirer 263

lectures on philosophy 89

and Nietzsche 253–54

phenomenology of 271

PI score 254

rector at Freiburg 263

on technology 118

writings of

Being and Time (BT) 256–57, 263–64, 266, 267, 271

Question About Technology 89, see also time

Heinsius, Daniel 3, 206

Helain, Richard xiii, 168, 169f, 169–70

Henry III, King of France 35

Henry IV, King of France 35, 106, 108

Henry of Ghent xvi

hieroglyphs, Egyptian 81, 82

Hilbert, David 69n.4

historiography 222–23

descriptive 220

externalist 221

internalist 222–23, 226, 235

methodological 220

normative xxii, 218–21, 222–23, 244, 245

philosophical 1, 221

term 219–20

history 73, 83, 203–4, 217

accounts of 217, 218, 219–20

of architecture 218, 219

Augustine on 228

of Caesar 31–32

credible, at macro-, meso- and micro-level 226

cultural xvi

deep 161

discipline of history studies 217

European xv, xvi

facts of xvii, 113

journals 252, 254, 255–57, 272–73, 274

Kenny on 5

of learning in rebirth 12

linear course of 131

living 219

of mathematics 244–45

narrative 109

normative historiography 218

Nuremberg Chronicles (1493) 159

partition of xvi

and philology xxi

of philosophy see history of philosophy

philosophy of 218

of physics 89–90

remembering 272–73

repudiating xvii–xviii

rhythms of 258

of Roman Empire 218

as a secular story 131

of seismology 218, 219

self-aware 272–73

submerging Descartes in xvii–xviii

theory of 218

of the transmission of knowledge 4

types of 219–20

writing 219–20

history of philosophy xx, xxii, xxiii, 1, 5–6, 11, 13, 159, 211–12, 213, 217, 218, 220–22, 223, 235, 243–44, 247n.2, 247–48, 251, 254, 275–76

Brucker on 10, 11–12, 221–22, 247n.2

contemporary Anglophone 247

deep 219

in English 248, 253

findings 226

general 219

and historians 226

historians of philosophy as custodians of philosophy’s memory 247

history of 222, 224

internalist and externalist xx, 220–25, 229, 244

journals 222, 250–51, 269, 270, 271

normative historiography xxii, 218–21, 222–23

philosophical 224–25, 242

questions about 217, 270

taking a long view 222, see also history

History of Philosophy Quarterly xxiv

Hobbes, Thomas xxii–xxiii, 71n.8

De corpore xxiii

Leviathan xxiii, 80–81

on Meditations 239

Hoefnagel, Jacob 177–78, 183

Archetypa 179f, 179, 183

Hoefnagel, Joris 177–78

Hölderlin, Johann Christian Friedrich 212

Hollingdale, Reginald xxii–xxiii

Homer 280

Hooke, Robert 181n.186

Horace (Quintus Horatius Flaccus), poet 31–32, 153–54, 278–79

Horn, Georg 221

house 73, 138, 139–40, 195

finished 138

incomplete 138

movie 123, 126

playhouses 126

whole 138

HPQ xxiv

Huens, Augustin 56

Hugo, Victor

Quasimodo 278

humanism xviii, 11

defining 6

“enlightened spirit of” 6

humanist/scholastic controversy 3–4, 6–7, 9, 23–24, 61, 65–66

Brucker on 10

Montaigne on 6–7

Petrarch on 6, 7, 9

Petrarch on 6–7, 9

and religion 6

and the Renaissance 12

scholastics without humanists 10–13

terminology 12

humanista/humanistae 9, 15, 15n.32, 23–24, 31–32, 278–79

and scholastici 24, 32, 35

Hume, David xxi–xxiii, 74, 88–89, 138–39, 233

A Treatise of Human Nature 55, 87, 88

Husserl, Edmund Gustav Albrecht 138

Huygens, Christiaan 71n.8

hylemorphism 239

hyperrealism 138n.128

Iamblichus 249

Ignatius of Loyola xiii, xviii, 2, 24–25, 30, 63

Constitutions of 1559 29, 30, 32, 33, 35, 36–37

on meditation 25

Spiritual Exercises 25, 26–29, 33, 63–64

turn to religion (1521) 25

illustrations 114–15, 139–40, 147, 201–2

images xix, 69–70, 81n.24, 90, 100

abstract 98

and emblems 283

explanatory 144

figurative 115n.85

graven 92

hand-drawn, of insects 149

informational 68n.3

as models 68n.3

optical 128

in the Optics 68, 125, 126

Platonic distrust of 68–69

plural 68n.3

representation of 52n.36, 101

resemblance 100–1, 103

retinal 101–3

of sensed objects 100–1

sensory 79

sporting imagery 67

tennis see tennis, Cartesian

viewing and creation of 211–12

and words xix

of the wrong kind 98, see also objects; Optics (technical treatise introduced by Descartes’ essay Discourse on the Method), 1637; picture books; picturing; printing; tennis, Cartesian; vision

imagining 284

Descartes on 210

in meditation 26

and pictureless words 116

and picturing 117–18, 146

and understanding 116

Imitation of Christ (Thomas à Kempis), c. 1418–1427 25

incompleteness 252

incunabula (swaddling clothes) 202–3

Index of Banned Books 132–33

industrial revolution 118

ink and wash drawings 195

insects 148–49, 177–78, 179, 180–81, 183, 185–86

papal 183

intaglio techniques 119–20

internalism

absolute xx, 236

argument, by 221

challenging 236

complete 221, 224, 235–36

excluding 236

rules of 242

temperate anti-internalism xxii–xxiii

invisibility 18, 19, 26, 131

I think: therefore I am argument 72

James I, King of England 106

James, William 83

Jerome 16, 29

Jesuit Order xxiv, 28–29, 32, 65–66

Constitutions of 1559 29, 30, 32, 33, 35, 36–37

education

Catholic 36

civic virtue 33

curriculum 30

first colleges 30

pictorial pedagogy, use of 290

Plan of Studies (Ratio studiorum), 1599 30, 32, 33, 35, 36, 63, 114

schools founded by 36, 283

teaching at La Flèche college 35, 36, 105, 125, 239, 290

textbooks 31–32

Thomist theology 31

founder of xviii–xix

and logic 63

philosophy 33

and scholasticism 31, see also Bible; Catholicism; Christianity; God; Jesus Christ; Society of Jesus; Trinity

Jesus Christ 19, 21, 127

contemplation of 26

death of 18

humanity of 6

imitating 18

love for 19–20

mysteries and apparitions of 28

philosophy of 20

statue of 193

words and deeds 21, see also Christianity; God; Gospels

John of Damascus 59

John of Salisbury xvi

John XXII, Pope 234–35

Jonson, Ben 74

journals

Anglophone 249

articles in xxiii, 248, 249, 256, 268

history 271

keeping authentic 269

leading 222

as mini-treatises 71

philosophy 71, 268, 269

biography seldom seen in 222

evidence of deformative oblivion in 272–73

history 252, 254, 255–57, 272–73, 274

of philosophy 222, 250–51, 269, 270, 271

leading, in Anglophonia 222

judging and dialectic 42, 46, 48–49, 50

justice, law of 49

Kant, Immanuel xxii–xxiii, 158–59, 223, 229, 247–49, 251, 254, 255–56, 263–64, 274–76

appearance 159

on cognition 81

collected works 76

on Enlightenment 275

maxims of 81

on moral obligation 255–56

PI score 249–50, 254, 274

rating of 248–50

Keckermann, Bartholemew 56–57, 187

System of Logic 55–56, 63

Kempe, Margery

The Book of Margery Kempe 210–11

Kennedy, John 80

Kenny, Anthony 5

Kepler, Johann 98, 128, 131

Ibn Khaldun 228, 229

King James Bible 17

Kleinman, Paul

Philosophy 101: From Plato and Socrates to Ethics and Metaphysics 4–5

Kneale, William and Martha 230

Development of Logic 229

Köhler, Joachim xxii–xxiii

Krell, Fortunat 56

Kuehn, Manfred xxii–xxiii

Kulvicki, John 77n.16

labels 13–14, 15, 49, 66, 80, 83, 146–47, 227, 228, 239

adding to pictures 114–15

in anatomy 166–68

of bones 166–68

classical philology 11

conventions of 209

data overload 168

diagrams 98

essay 74

explanatory picturing 83–84

eye-ready 83–84

idiosyncratic 212

intricately labeled image 101–2

lists of descriptions 166–68

matching pictures to words with 115, 145

in the Optics 168

short-form philosophy 71

stories 226

technologies 118, 119

La Flèche college, Loire Valley 36, 106, 125, 130–31, 278–79

Descartes’ study at xviii, 35, 65, 105, 106, 284, 290–91

Descartes leaving 188–89, 279

Descartes starting 33, 204

illustration 34f

Jesuit teachers 35, 36, 125, 239, 290

philosopher’s scholastic education at 33

signifying sequences taught at 284

Spiritual Exercises, annual exercise of 63–64, see also Spiritual Exercises (Ignatius of Loyola)

Lakotos, Imre 222

La Mettrie, Julien 239–40, 241, 242, 243–44

Cartesiana, collecting 243

Jansenist schooling 241–42

Man-Machine 239–40

Landau, Edmund 118n.90

Lange, Dorothea 121

language 42, 240–41

as “artificiall discourse” 118

in books 71

elitist, racist and sexist 257

English 12

evolution of 82

French 61–62

as a gateway to philosophy 271–72

Greek 59–60

harsh 240

Latin 31

as philosophy’s official language 71–72

and metaphysics 233–34

native 223

natural 41, 83n.30, 251

non-pictorial 77n.16

older forms of 72

and pictures 71

of prose 89

Ramist 64

of scripture 24

scrutiny of 271–72

spoken 71

using versus mentioning of words 95

vernacular 61, 63n.61, 64, 71–73, 74, 193, 219

of Western Christendom 8, see also speech/talking; writing

larva (mask) 278–79, 287, 290

Lateran Council 238

Latin 12, 31, 61, 74, 175, 184, 187–88, 201, 278–79

‘abacus books’ 151

academic 72

of Agricola 44, 54, 60, 231–32

Aristotelianism 56–57

of Augustine 8

of Brucker 11–12

of Burgersdijck 55, 58, 59

Christians’ use of 14

of Cicero’s day 8, 44, 64–65

classical 49–50, 57–58, 60, 281

the cogito 71–72

in Critical History 11

De architectura (1486), Latin text 113, 114

of Erasmus 15, 25, 54

of Faustus 38n.8

Gospels 168

of Ignatius 25

Latinate “contempt” 62

learning 31–32, 208–9, 219

medieval 263–64

Meditations 3

New Testament 13

nouns 280

as official language of philosophy 71–72

of Petrarch 9

poetry 54, 280

Principia 69–70

prose 18, 54

of Ramus 38n.8, 46, 49, 231–32

reading, writing and speaking 31–32, 38, 285–86

in Summaries (Peter of Spain) 46

teaching 62

text of the Folly 17

translation 130

Latin Vulgate 24–25

Le Blon, Christian 206

Lefevre d’Étaples 12–13, 24

Leibniz, Gottfried Wilhelm xxii–xxiii, 5–6, 241

Leiden, the Netherlands 55, 70

Burgersdijck as rector at xix, 3, 62–63

classicists 3

Descartes studying at (1630) 55

fencing in university 197, 198f, 198–99

Heinsius teaching at 206

Leiden Circle 4n.3

manifesto on method released in (1637) 3, 52

Pieterskerk in 208

publishing in 203n.218

tennis in 86f, 105, 106

Theatrum 175

Le Monde 118

lens 121, 149

hand 179

lens-making 173

making 192

Leonardo da Vinci xiv, xv, 122, 135f, 135, 136, 144–45, 146, 151

death of (1519) xv–xvi

as a great Renaissance painter xv

Les Essais de Michel seigneur de Montaigne

Oeuvres completes xx

letters 83, 95, 142, 143–44, 153–54, 166–68, 201, 211, 239

apex 142

biblical 143

exchanging 210

labels, as 83–84, 190

letter-press printing 124–25

on manuscripts 114–15

and mathematical diagrams 98

reading 83

visible 142

whole 142, 143

words made of 82

Lewis, C. I.

Mind and the World Order 252

Lewis, Dwight xx

Librairie Philosophique J. Vrin (publishing house)

“From Petrarch to Descartes” series 4–7

light 67

movement of 99–100

particles of 97, 111–12, 122, 154, 187, 207–8

physics of 97

rays of 97–98, 103, 107–8

using tennis to explain in the Optics see Optics (technical treatise introduced by Descartes’ essay Discourse on the Method), 1637see also vision

Lincoln, Abraham 80

lithography 120, 124–25

Lives and Tenets (gnômai) 78–79

Locke, John xxii–xxiii, 74

Essay on Human Understanding 80–81

lodestones 90, 91f, 91

logic 10–11, 14–15

Aristotelians on 7, 37, 39–40, 233

Burgersdijck on 3–4

Elements of Logic 3, 55

champions of 231

and the classics 3–4

concept of 39–40, 56

dialectic as 46

fallacy of equivocation 38

logicians 229

medieval system of xviii–xix

paralogisms 38–39

and philosophy 24, 32

pure form 38

Ramus on

literary examples 38

Marlowe’s plays depicting 37–38

opposition to Aristotle 37–38

rules of 72

scholastic 233–34, see also Summaries of Logic (Peter of Spain)

Lolli, Gabriele 111, 245n.46

Lombard, Peter 23–24, 249

Sentences 29

love 88, 262

attaining of 27–28

for Christ 19–20

embodied 19–20

of God 28, 29

and grace 27–28

human 27

learning without 16–17

mystical 27

redeeming of 19

lust 19

Luther, Martin 22, 23

Lüthy, Christoph 70n.5

Lycée Louis-le-Grand 35, see also Clermont, Collège of (Paris)

Lynxes 180–81

Lysippus 281

Machiavelli, Niccolò di Bernardo dei xiv, 4

The Prince xvii

machinery 108, 112–13, 118–19, 147, 177, 190

Agricola on 44, 170, 171

Besson on 192

biological 174–75

books printed by xix, 144

cameras 121–22

complex 201–2

disassembled 136, 170, 209

explanatory models based on 129

flying 192n.201

hydraulic 2

hylemorphism, of 239

and language 118

lens-making 173–74

logical 41

looking at 146–47

mechanism of action 191

methodical 51

optical 182

in the Optics 197

parts working together 135

physical 113

picturing by 123

potentially deadly 212

testing 119

theaters of 175, 176–77, 191, 208–9

transparent view of 139–40

trial models 192

Vitruvius designing 114

water, raising of 175–76

works of art, and 122, see also mechanical presses; mechanical reproduction; mechanization; picturing

macro-stories 226–29, 245

in Christian West 228

not invented by philosophers 229

madness 10, 17, 18–20

magnetism

attraction/repulsion 91

compasses 126–27

earth as a magnet 90–91

magnetic stones 90

pictures of magnets 92

polarity 91

properties of magnet 90

spherical 90

magnification 182

Mair, John 22

Mancuso, Paolo 69n.4

manuals 5

abacus books 151

fencing 197, 198–99, 243–44

Jesuit 63

medieval logic 54, 55

of organization 29

Ramist 36–37

technical 79–80

Marinetti, Filippo 212–13

Marlowe, Christopher xiv, 74

Doctor Faustus 37

Massacre at Paris 37–38

Martellange, Étienne 33

Martinich, Aloysius xxii–xxiii

masks 277, 281, 287n.17, 290–91

masked ball 223

of silence 65

stage masked (larvatus, persona) 278, 279, 287

Massachusetts Bay Colony

Harvard College founded by 36

materialism 6, 8

mathematics 55, 79, 104, 175, 197, 244–46, 279

books on 110

history of 244–45

of infinity 97

and narrative 110

philosophers of 110, 111

pure 116, 117

story about 244–45

teaching 128

matter in motion 90–91, 99–100, 102–3, 129, 203–4

particles of 90

theory xix, 102–3, 111–12, 182, 191, 203–4

maxims 44–45, 73, 75

and essays 76

of Kant 81

moral 283

and Nietzsche 258

mechanical presses 119

mechanical reproduction xix, 67, 115, 123, 133, 134

and art 124–25

influences of 149–50

level of 120

microscope, use of 180–81

in print 280

of scientific images 162

of works of art 124

mechanization 126–27

mechanized explanatory picturing see picturing

medieval period xv, 10, 115, 151, 212, 227–28

Aristotelians 263–64

artists and artisans xix, 134, 144–45, 147

civilization 227–28

collapse 10, 13

decadence 5–6

documents 146–47

dungeons 146

erudition 184

and humanism 6

interpreters 21

Latin 263–64

logicians/logic manuals 54, 72, 230

manuscripts 112–13, 144, 209

Paris 126–27

philosophy 10, 62, 73, 157, 269

picture-makers 134, 148–49

readers 114

revived systems 6

Romans xvii–xviii

schools 54–55

summas 15

system of logic xviii–xix

visual anonymity/experience 149–50, 157–58, see also ancient, medieval and modern philosophy (AMM)

meditation xiii, xviii, 72–73

Cartesian see Cartesian meditation

on Hell 26

Ignatius of Loyola on 25

imagining in 26

and method xiii, 67

modern 123

Montaigne on 64

object of 26

and philosophy xiii

Platonic xviii, 18

in Praise of Folly 25

sixth, in Meditations on First Philosophy 116

and Spiritual Exercises 25–27, 63–64, see also Meditations on First Philosophy (Descartes, 1641); Spiritual Exercises (Ignatius of Loyola)

Meditations on First Philosophy (Descartes, 1641) 61, 112, 117, 141, 182, 193, 239, 243–44

aniconical presentation 117, 202, 208

compared with the Discourse 274

completion of 202–3

debates on 61

and distinctness 182

English version 247n.2

on failure of pictures as explanations 117

Hobbes on 239

introducing by Descartes 238

isolating thinking from sensory experience 125

in Latin 3

and Montaigne 64

philosopher’s aniconic stance in 117

preface to 236–37

publication of xiii, 3

publisher’s logo 141f, 141, 142f, 143f, 143–44

readers 141

saintly book, seen as 116

as a sequence of essays 68–69

sixth meditation 116

size of 116–17

title page 141f, 141, 142f, 143f

writing without pictures xxi, 68–69, 79, 116–17, 119–20, 193, see also Descartes, René; meditation

Melanchthon, Philip 63

memory 26–27, 28, 253

academic 253

and amnesia 257

Anglophone 255–56

armatures of 86

bookstores as churches of 253–54

failures of xx, 70, 248

of philosophy 247, 248–49, 272–73

recovered 262–63

scaffolds of 86

unaided 272–73

unerasable 86

writing seen as threat to 86

Menestrier, Claude 283–84

psychology of emblem-making 283

Menn, Stephen xx

Meno (Plato) 93, 94, 95, 96, 112–13, 114

archetype 112

Aristotle’s mention of in Prior Analytics 95

baseball diamond 96

Greek text 93

Meno 82 93, 95

Socratic dialogue 93

squares in 93–94, 94f, 95–96, 112–13

toiouton (’like this’) 93, 114

Mersenne, Father Marin 2, 130–31, 165–66, 236–37, 239, 243, 244

meso-stories 226–29, 236, 245

around 1525 229–36

examples of 227

frameworks embedded in a macro-story 227

Porphyry’s questions 227

sequence of, about philosophy 228

metaphysics xiv, 10–11, 32, 48, 103, 125, 213, 256

accounts of 229

of Agricola 33

of Aquinas 33

hylemorphic 239

and language 233–34

and logic 234, 235–36

and morals 256

and physics 55

Platonic 227

post-Cartesian 267

principles of 284

rejection of 243

semantics 234

semi-Platonic 208

textbooks on 55

traditional 236

Western 71

meteorology

of Aristotle 90, 92–93

picture books on 90

method xiii, xvii–xviii, 35–66

and logic xviii–xix

manifesto on 3

and meditation xiii, 67

of Ramus xix

scholasticism 31

and syllogisms 50, 56–57, see also Agricola, Rudolf; Aristotle/Aristotelians; dialectic; Dialectical Invention (Agricola), 1479; Dialectic (Ramus), 1555–1572; logic; Ramus, Petrus; Summaries of Logic (Peter of Spain), c. 1230

Michelangelo (Michelangelo di Lodovico Buonarroti Simoni), Italian sculptor xv, 146

as a great Renaissance sculptor xv

Vatican Pietà 192–93

Michelet, Jules xvi

microscopes 121, 145, 149, 179–80, 182

micro-stories 226–29, 242, 243, 245, 291

around 1675 236–43

Hobbes’s thought xxiii

internalist accounts 229

told by philosophers 229

Mill, John Stuart 74

mind/body problem 239, 274–75

mindfulness 70, 253, 272

mining 170

modernism 6

modernity

Baconian 126–27

and humanism 4

NOW of 227–28

philosophers slow to achieve xiv

philosophical xv

recent 274

shared experience 128–29

transition to xv, xvi

modern philosophy xv, xx–xxi

in Europe xiii

Monk, Ray xxii–xxiii

monographs 71

Montaigne, Michel de xiii, xvii, 2, 6–7, 64, 65–66, 74, 210–11

Apology for Raymond Sebond 64–65

family of 106

on humanist/scholastic controversy 6–7

Les Essais de Michel seigneur de Montaigne (The Essays of Michel de Montaigne) xix, 64, 65, 71–72, 76

pictureless writing xxi

presence in the Discourse 73

studied by Vrin series 4

teaching philosophical French to Descartes 64, see also essays

moon 90, 199–200

imperfect 132–33, 133f

pictures of 133

Moore, G. E. 159, 223

moral theology xiv–xv

More, Thomas 4, 39–40, 65–66

Morgenbesser, Sidney 82–83

motion 90, 98, 171–72, 190, 191

balls in 107–8

bodies 145

centrifugal 171–72

constant 153

over time 284

ray of light as 68, see also matter in motion

movies 121–22, 123, 126, 128

Chaplin’s 119, 124, see also drama; plays, theatrical; theaters

Musée du Louvre 195

music 205–6, 212–13

hearing without listening for notes 83

Renaissance xv

Nabokov, Vladimir 228

Nadal, Jerónimo xviii, 24–25, 33

naming 13–14

bad names 15

of bones 168

checking xxi–xxii

collective 11

familiar 184

good names 9

Latin names 71–72

meaning 280

names versus descriptions 108

parts of pictures 145

philosophers, by 254

Renaissance 12

scholastic philosophy 12

in scripture 146

in titles 247–48

narratives see stories

naturalism 8, 139–40, 140–41n.132

conventions of 138n.128

natural philosophy 61–62, 212

introductions to 55

and logic 32

and natural philosophy 130

old 129

scholastic 236

scientific philosophy replacing xix, 130, 131

specialists 21

navigation xiv–xv, 73, 119

New History of Western Philosophy (Kenny) 5

New Testament 13, 17, 28

Greek text 206

Newton, Isaac

concept of force 5–6, 241

natural philosophy 130

Nicholas of Lyra 21

Nietzsche, Friedrich xxi–xxiii, 159, 253–54, 256, 263, 267, 270–71, 272

anti-Semitism, denouncing 257

aphorisms xxi–xxii, 75, 255–56, 258

appearance 159

fable about primordial castes 259, 262

forgetting, Nietzsche’s endorsement of 256–57

Genealogy of Morals (GM) xxiv, 256–59, 260–61, 262–63, 271

and Heidegger 253–54

philosophical tale about ascetic priests 261

PI score 253–54

on power 253–54

remarks about Jewish people 258

and resentment 254, 255–57, 257n.18, 258–59, 260–61, 262–63, 267–68

dictionary of 261

on slavery 259, 262

transvalued values 271

visibility in popular culture 254

Nizolio, Mario 12–13

nominalism 227, 234–35

non-conformists xiv

normative historiography of philosophy 218–21, 245

externalist 220–21

internalist 221, 226

Nuremberg Chronicles (1493) 159–60, 161, 168

objects

of art 120, 124

epoptic experiences 192–93

external, sensing of 240–41

impressions made on external organs 100

imprinting 101–2

micro-objects 182

in the Optics 182

partial resemblance 100–1

representation of 100–1

resemblance 100–1

seen through air to the eye 98

solid 140–41n.132

stationary 127n.113

and subjects 266

touching of senses 100–1, see also images; imagining; representation; resemblance; sight; vision

oblivion

benefits of 251

classification 254–55

failure of history of philosophy in contemporary world 247

and forgetting xx, 247, 277

institutional 253

resurrecting dishonored dead xviii, xx, 291

total 253

typology of xx, 253–57, 255t

Type 1 255, 256

Type 2 255, 256

Type 3 255, 256–57

Type 4 255, 256–57

observation 149–50, 182, 239–40, 270

microscope, using 180–81

participant observation xxiii, xxiv

pre-technological 134

Occasio (Alciato) 281–82n.9, 287, 290n.20

Ausonius as an authority on 282

David presenting to children 283, see also David, Father Jan

Ockham (William of Ockham) xv, xvi–xvii, 8–9, 23–24, 227–28, 229–30, 234

offset printing 124–25

Ong, Walter

Training in Dialectic 36n.5

opportunity 5, 146, 280, 282, 283, 286–87, 289–91

in Emblems (Alciato) 281

masked 291

picture poetry 280

saving 282

statue of Opportunity 280, see also David, Father Jan; Galle, Theodoor

Optics (technical treatise introduced by Descartes’ essay Discourse on the Method), 1637 68, 107, 112, 115–16, 117, 122, 129, 130, 165, 197, 199, 200, 201, 210

air/stick analogy 98

completion by Descartes 118, 145

distinctions between resemblance and representation 103

epoptic community formed by 192, 197

French original edition (1637) 130

‘ghosting’ in 171–72, 173

images in 128, 130

benefits of 209–10

choice of 97–98

of machinery 197

older imagery 126

pictures reproduced in copies 123

retinal 103n.64

scientific 121

second 107–10, 108f

labeling in 83–84, 168

lens-making, explaining 173f, 173–74

“man freshly dead,” Descartes’s description of 166

middle chapters 103

philosophical purposes 192

pictureless chapter 100

readers 107–8, 111–12, 121, 124–25

setting for tennis in 108

sightless man with a stick, picture of 101, 103, 111–12, 171–72, 213

stick image 98n.58, 99f, 102–3, 104

and technologies 118, 119–20

on telescopes and microscopes 121, 182

tennis, using to explain light and vision in xix, 67, 68, 78, 128

appearing after the stick 104

ball, appearance of 97, 103–4, 111–12, 209

choice of setting 108

enhancing of understanding 104, 107

imagery 103–4

physics of light 97

showing a light particle as a ball 111–12

and visibility gap 179–80

visual field showed in 85, see also Discourse on the Method (Descartes), 1637; epoptic communities; images; machinery; picture books; picturing; vision; visual field; writings of Descartes

Oresme, Nicole 151–53, 152f

drawings 199

graphs of distance, speed and time 199

triangle 152f, 153

Ossipon, Alexander 261

Ovid 280

On Cures for Love 47, 48

Pacioli, Luca xiv

paganism 7–8, 14, 280

ancient pagan wisdom 14

antiquity 136–37

Aristotle’s pagan ethics 8

and Christianity 228

gods 190

Plato’s pagan meditation program xviii

sages 16

Palmieri, Matteo 11–12

parable of the rope 225–26, 246

Paracelsus 188f, 191, 192

paralogisms 38–39

Parmenides xxi–xxii, 71, 86

participant observation xxiii, xxiv

particles 90, 92, 190

of light 97, 111–12, 122, 154, 187, 207–8

of matter 90

and matter-theory 182

micro-particles 191

passions 19

patristic theology 29

Patrizi, Francesco 4

Paul 16–17

Christ’s words and deeds explicated by 21

Epistles 19

exegesis of Savior’s teachings 21

letters 8–9

Paul of Venice

Little Logic 230

Peasants’ War (1558) 231

periodization 5, 6, 193, 202–3

Augustine dividing human history into six periods 228

of the Chronicles 12

externalities 235–36

flowing 54

great men 276

between late antiquity and recent modernity 274

nameless periods 12

Spätantike. 227, see also medieval period

Perotti, Niccolò 11–12

persona see masks

perspective xxi, 247

architect’s 218

lacking 107–8

linear 140–41n.132

optical 107, 205–7

ordinary 177

rules of 101

showing 199

time-bound 266, see also view

Peter of Spain 44, 57, 59

linguistic model 56

readership 232

Summaries of Logic see Summaries of Logic (Peter of Spain)

Petrarca, Francesco 4

Petrarch, Francis 2, 11, 13, 21–22, 61, 62, 65–66, 227–28

on Aristotle 7–8, 9

on Augustine 8

on authentic philosophy 8

Brucker on 11

career of 227–28

on Cicero 8

death of (1374) 6–7

as a great Renaissance poet xv

On His Own Ignorance xviii, 7–9, 13–14

on humanist/scholastic controversy 6, 7, 9

manifesto of 9

on philosophy 8–9

on Plato 8

as poet laureate xvii–xviii, 5

self-awareness 60

Petronius 278–79

phenomenology 138, 271

philology xiv, xx–xxi, 13, 17, 62–63, 66

Brucker on 66, 291

classical 11, 73, 206

Descartes liberated from xx–xxi

and philosophy 291

Renaissance 73

philosophers

Anglophone see Anglophone philosophers

aniconic stance of 117

dishonored dead, bringing out see oblivion

great xvii

picture books of 123, 129, 131

slow to achieve modernity xiv, see also Descartes, René; individual philosophers

Philosopher’s Index (PI) 247–49, 252, 253–54

philosophy

aniconic 80–81

Aristotelian 21–22

authentic 8

Cartesian revolution in 73

classical xviii

confusion with theology 10–11, 236–37

false 236–37

heritage from antiquity 11

history of xx, xxii, 1, 5–6

in bondage to history 217–18

central 221–22

early modern xv

internalist and externalist xx, 221–25, 229

normative historiography xxii, 218–21, 222–23

philosophical 224–25

taking a long view 222

Jesuit Order 33

journals, articles as mini-treatises 71

lack of pictorial progress xiv–xv

and logic 24, 32

long-form 71

modern xiii, xv, xx–xxi

moral, of Cicero 31–32

natural see natural philosophy

and philology 291

philosophical modernity xv–xvi

pictorial prose about 80–81

picture books about 67

in poetry or prose 89

postmodern xv

and printing 211

product of the Renaissance xvii

real 18

revolution in 54–55

and scholastic theology 12–13

scientific see scientific philosophy

short-form 71

writing in verse, as myth or in epigrams xxi–xxii

writing with pictures 70

Philosophy in the Middle Ages xvi–xvii

phlegmatic, being 275–76

photography 121, 150–51

old photographs 109

and printmaking 121

still 124–25

physics 10–11, 102–3, 248–49

of light 97

and metaphysics 55

modern, visual domain of 89–90

visual domain of 89–90

Picasso, Pablo Ruiz 124

Picot, Abbé Claude 69–70

picture books 131, 145, 175, 203–4

benefits for publishers 160–61

Cartesian xix, xxi–xxii, 83–84, 144, 208–10, 290–91

epoptic communities 1–2

letters labeling pictures 83–84

on meteorology 90

movable type, with 67, 119–20

Nuremberg Chronicles (1493) 159

of philosophers 67, 123, 129, 131

post-medieval 123

pre-Cartesian xxi–xxii

printed by machines 144

readers 144, 209–10, 213

technologies behind 119–20

by Vesalius xxi, see also art; images; Optics (technical treatise introduced by Desces’ essay Discourse on the Method), 1637; picture poetry; pictures; picturing/the pictorial; printing

picture poetry 280

pictures 173, 174–75, 180–81, 203

abstract 132

analytic 207–8

animals, of 184

beautiful 177–78

in booklets 128

choosing for the Optics 97–98

combining with words 119–20

decorative 134

detailed 119–20

discussing 128–29

educational power of xiv

epoptic communities formed and sustained by 132–33

evaluating benefits of 90–104

explanatory xix, 119, 206–7

exploded 138

extended 145

geological 170

holy 146

how-it-works xiv

imagining 146

improving 145

ingenious 175–76

labeled 83–84

large 284–85

Leonardo, by 144

logical and painted 85

looking at 123–24, 130

of machinery 147, 171

making accurate 114–15

matching 166–68

missing 112–18

moving 123

multitudinous 146–47

naming 145

on paper 146

in the Principia 171–72

printed 93, 115, 128, 202, 208–9, 211

publishing 119

of ships xiv–xv

speaking through 128

statements about 85

static 123

of statues 187–88

technical treatises, for 147

tennis 83–84, 107, 108, 128

of three-dimensional constructions in progress 145

and time 133

transparent 139–40

types 124

using to discuss philosophy 68

viewers of 123–24, see also art; images; picturing/the pictorial; printed books

picturing/the pictorial xv, xx–xxi, 70, 71n.8, 78

Cartesian statuary 187–97

conventions for matching to words 115

descriptive creations 153–77

explanatory xvii–xviii, xix, 206–8

letters as labels for 83–84

by mechanized means xiii, xviii, xix

feats of 134–44

of human head of “man freshly dead” 101–2, 102f, 165–66

and imagining 117–18, 146

mechanized 122, 125, 126

by medieval artists 145

moral power 283

old order of 144–53

of the otherwise invisible 208–9

pictorial biology xiv, xv

Plato on 93

in printed books, as a way of writing xix

size, scale and magnification 177–87

and talking 71–90

technologies of

Benjamin on 67, 118, 120, 121–22, 123, 124, 131–32, 149–50, 212–13

disruptive xix, 89, 123, 126, 131–32, 154, 162, 164, 165–66, 212–13

movable type, with 67, 119–20

not labelling as such 118, 119

of tennis ball in the Optics see Optics (technical treatise introduced by Descartes’ essay Discourse on the Method), 1637; tennis, Cartesian

ways of xix

and writing xix, xx–xxi, 70–90, see also art; images; pictures; picture books

pietas (Roman ideal) 31–32, 33

Pineal Gland Affair (pga) 237, 238f, 240, 241, 242

pineal gland hypothesis 171–72, 237, 240–41, 243–44

Pinkard, Terry xxii–xxiii

places and dialectic

in Dialectical Invention (Agricola) 42–43, 44, 45–46

in Summaries (Peter of Spain) 44–45

plague xvi–xvii, 23, 229, 249, 250f

planets 90, 109, 138–39

plants 154, 155–56, 177–78, 210

medicinal 204

unfamiliar 161, see also botany

Plato xxi–xxii, 18–19, 20, 49–50, 51, 59, 79, 86, 117–18, 145, 157, 161

defining philosophy 18

dialogues 8

manuscripts 94

Meno see Meno (Plato)

myth of the cave 71

on nature 8

pagan program of meditation xviii

picturing, dislike of 93

Platonists 16

texts 8

theology of 8

Plautus 278–79, 285–86

players, tennis 104–12

educated 116

epoptic coherence 125, see also spectators

Playfair, William 71n.8

plays, theatrical 283–87, 290–91, see also David, Father Jan; drama; theaters

Plotinus 223

plumbing 173–74, 190, 191

Plutarch 59, 60

poetry

epic 31–32

of Horace 31–32

Latin 54, 280

long- or short-form 71

lyric 31–32

picture poetry 280

Renaissance xv

and sound 88

as a vehicle for meteorology, Aristotle on 92–93

of Vergil 31–32

Polanco, Juan Alfonso de 32

political theory xiv

Poliziano, Angelo xiv, 11

polytheism 7–8

Pomponazzi, Pietro 239

Pope, Alexander 87, 89

couplets of 88

Dunciad 55n.42

Essay on Criticism 88

Essay on Man 87

on rhyme and rhythm 88–89

Porphyry 39

Postel, Guilliaume 4

postmodern philosophy xv, 146

practice xviii, xxi–xxii, 1–2

architectural 113

of death 18, 20

and engagement 272

established, of philosophers 68, 262–63

everyday 107

medieval 146, 212

and policy xxiv

and prayer 272

problems of 270

and theory xvii, 67–68n.2, 70n.5, 269, 270–71, see also theory

Praise of Folly and Letter to Maarten van Dorp (Erasmus, 1515) xviii, 12–13, 17, 18, 24, 39–40

and Aristotelian philosophy 21–22

asceticism 19–20

indictment of philosophy 20

Latin text 17n.39

and meditation 25, 26

moral psychology 19

spiritual program 8–9

theology in 21–22, see also Erasmus, Desiderius

predicaments 42

predicates 49

Principles of Philosophy (Principia philosophiae), 1644 117, 171–72

appealing to Aristotle 92

concealing of crucial pictorial material at the back of 92

earth as a lodestone engraving 90, 91f, 91

hiding of pictorial material at the back of the book 92

in Latin 69–70

meteorology 90

particles of matter 90, 92

pictures in 171–72

spoiling of 92, see also Descartes, René

printing 112, 126–27, 162, 232

aquatint technique 119–20

drypoint technique 119–20

educational power of xiv

engraving see engravings

of French translation 69–70

of identical copies 133

intaglio techniques 119–20

inventing (c. 1450) 134, 145, 149–50, 209, 231, 281

letter-press 124–25

mezzotint techniques 119–20

non-existent in ancient Rome 114

offset 124–25

and philosophy 211

self-narration in printed book 210–11

technologies of xix, 114, 116–17, 118, 134

Benjamin on 67, 118, 120, 121–22, 123, 124, 131–32, 149–50, 212–13

movable type, with 67, 119–20

not labelling as such 118, 119

type-surfaces 119–20

woodcuts, use of 115, 161, 165, 168, 169–70, 193, 195

words in woodcut block books 119–20

printing press xiv, 73, 146, 150–51

Proclus 248–51, 253

progress xiv, xv, xix, xxiv

making xxi–xxii, 26–27

milestones of 209

optical 179–80

pictorial xiv–xv

post-Cartesian 120

technological 169–70

tracking 82

properties of terms 39–40

propositions

contrived 38

elementary 84

free-floating 111

future- or past-tense 40

inferential sequence of 42–43

leading to conclusions 41

maximal 44–45

philosophical 242

predication in 41

in Summaries 39–40

and syllogisms 41, 233

truth-functions, as 84

prose 76, 77

of Erasmus 54

essays as middle-size units of 76

forms of xxi–xxii

language of 89

Latin, in 18, 54

long- or short-form 71

as non-poetic writing 80

pictorial 80–81

of Ramus 54, 60

writing as 71

prosody 88

Protestantism xiv, 6, 40

Peasants’ War (1558) 231

proving versus explanation 117

psychology 121–22, 123–24, 129, 217

of aesthetics 138n.128

Cartesian 240

of emblem-making 283

of human immortality 237

humoral 275

isolating thinking from sensory experience 125

modern 123–24

moral 8–9, 18, 19, 262

naturalistic 239

and Paracelsus 191

and religion 242, 243–44

teaching of 83

publishing xxiv, 20

in ancient Rome 114

in England 203n.217

of first System of Logic 55–56

of Jesuit Plan 33

in Leiden 203n.218

of new books 23

and Vitruvius 114

Pynchon, Thomas 252

Pythagoreans 16

Quine, Willard 81, 82–83, 84

Quiddities 81

Quintilian 53–54

Ramelli, Agostino 175

Ramus, Petrus xiii, xviii, xx, 2, 6–7, 36–40, 50–51, 65–66, 232–33

Aristotle, opposition to 37–38, 52–53, 54

Burgersdijck on 55–56, 57, 60–61, 62–63

on classicism 37–38

code-words 36

Dialectic see Dialectic (Ramus), 1555

and Keckermann 56

Latin, use of 38n.8, 46, 49, 231–32

linguistic model 56

on logic xviii–xix, 37–38

manuals, demand for 36–37

mature system of 1572 36–37

method of xix

norms of 57–58

pictureless writing xxi

prose of 54, 60

Ramism xix, 37, 54–55, 64, 205

Ramist charts 51–53, 117

stabbing of (1572) 36–37, 106

Raphael (Raffaello Sanzio da Urbino), Italian painter xv, 146

realism, conventions of 138, 140–41n.132, 150–51, 154, 209, 227

reason 14, 22, 28–29

mixing with revelation 10–11

Petrarch on 7

as “slave of the passions” 87

reflection 72–73, 74, 107–8, 118

historiographical 220

optical 115–16

Reformation 17, 40, 70n.5

and changes in philosophy 231, 232, 233–34, 235–36, 242

refraction 68, 104, 107–8, 128

Regius (Hendrik de Roy) 236–37

Reichenbach, Hans 130

Reid, Alexander 52–53

A Ramist Table of Tumors 52–53, 53f

religion xiv, xv, 17, 61, 236, 243

dogma 235, 236

Greek 127

and humanism 6

iconoclasm 70n.5

Ignatius of Loyola’s turn to (1521) 25

images 193

Judeo-Christian 259

macro-stories, in Christian West 228

myth of aniconism in 115n.85

pagan 272n.60

and philosophy 233–34

and politics 234, 237

and psychology 242, 243–44

religious errors 21–22

self-examination xix

teaching by Jesuits 105

threats to 236

turmoil/wars of xiv, 28, 35, 193, 194, 233–35, 237

Wegestreit 235, see also Bible; Catholicism; Christianity; God; Gospels; Jesuit Order; Jesus Christ; Society of Jesus; Spiritual Exercises (Ignatius of Loyola)

Rembrandt 121

Renaissance xiii, xvi

architecture xv

authors 4

classicism xix

great philosophers xvii

internet definition xvi

music xv

philosophy 73

poetry xv

textbook accounts of xviii

Renaissance Philosophy xvi–xvii

representation 101–2, 140–41n.132

animals 183

civic virtue 157

concepts 59

graphical 153

images 52n.36, 101

mental 100–1

ordinary visible objects 98, 100–1

of physical complexity 146–47

pictorial 143

plants 156

representer 100–1

and resemblance 102, 103, 143

of sound 142, 143–44

of the spiritual in human shapes 283

unrepresentable pictures 97n.55

visual, of statistical data 71n.8, see also concepts; images; resemblance

reproduction, mechanical see mechanical reproduction

reptiles 184

Republic of Letters 64

charter citizens 130–31

Rescher, Nick xxiv

resemblance 100–1

partial 100–1

and representation 102, 103, 143, see also images

resentment/ressentiment 255, 258

forgetting 257–58

and Nietzsche 254, 255–57, 257n.18, 258–59, 260–61, 262–63, 267–68

dictionary of resentment 261

politics of 261

and populism 258

and US democracy 258–63

vindictive 257

Restoration 195

retina/retinal images 101–3

revelation 9, 10–11, 103

Rhenanus, Beatus 12–13

rhetoric 12, 41, 72, 258

and dialectic 41–42

and spirituality 30, 31, 32

teachers of 280

Rodis-Lewis, Geneviève xxii–xxiii

‘Roman Vergil’ 114–15

Rondelet, Guillaume 187

rope, parable of 225–26, 246

Rorty, Richard 222

Roux, Louis-Prosper 195

Royal Society of London 131

Rummell, Erika

The Humanist-Scholastic Debate 6n.10

Russell, Bertrand 74, 84, 268, 270

Russell, Norman xxii–xxiii

sacrament 19

Safranski, Rüdiger xxii–xxiii

Saint Bartholomew’s Day Massacre (1572) 36–37

salvation 8–9, 272

and autonomy 28

eternal 28–29

and Spiritual Exercises 28–29

visions of 282

Sartre, Jean Paul

Existentialism is a Humanism xxiv

Satan 19

scale 90–91, 128, 183, 184, 191, 223, 224, 229

industrial 134n.125

macro-scale 226

meso-scale 226

micro-scale 226, 227

narrative 236

royal 35

and situation 183

social 261

scepticism xvii, xix, 2, 65, 72–73, 227

Academic 9

Schedel, Hartman xviii, 168, 169–70

Book of Chronicles published by, in Nuremberg 11–12, 159–60, 160f, 161

Scheiner, Christoph 128, 131

Schmitt Charles xviin.3

scholasticism xviii, 5–6

and barbarians 15

Burgersdijck’s narrow use of 63

doctrine 31

humanist/scholastic controversy 3–4, 6–7, 61, 65–66

Brucker on 10

Montaigne on 6–7

Petrarch on 6, 7, 9

as an ideology 6

and Jesuit Order 31

method 31

scholastics without humanists 10–13

as a term of praise 24

theology 12–13, 28–29, 32

Scholasticus 29, 31

Schongauer, Martin 144, 150–51, 156

science 118, 180–81, 222

applied 118–19

bad 241

contemporary 124

historians on 222

and nature 122

new 130, 241

optics 122

and picturing, effect of 122, 132–33

writing 219–20

scientific philosophy xix, 130, 131

post-Cartesian 130

propagating 130

promoters of 131

Scotus, John Duns xvi, 15

scripture 215

contempt for philosophy 8

language of 24

meddling with 23

reading of 21, 146–47

sacred 23, 146, 231

words of 146

sculpture xiv, xv, 134, 192–93, 197, 227

Restoration, during 195

secularism xix, 6, 14, 66, 156

history as a secular story, imagining 131

learning 20, 245

sermons 278–79

society 272

technology 118

seeing see sight

Servetus, Michael xiv–xv

Shakespeare, William xv–xvi, xvii, 252

Henry the Fifth 106

Twelfth Night 74

ships xiv–xv

sight

disruptive 162

Heidegger on 89–90

out of 208–9

in plain sight 89

sense of 79

sightless man with a stick, picture of see Optics (technical treatise introduced by Descartes’ essay Discourse on the Method), 1637

synoptic 96–97

third 108, see also vision

signs 142, 201

alphabetic 142

conventional 143, see also symbols

size

of crowds 126

of Empire 139–40

of the Meditations 116–17

occlusion 137n.127

and parable of the rope 226

small 165–66

suggesting 145

skeleton 89n.39, 168

skulls 168, 169–70

Smith, Adam 119

Smith, Justin xx

Snell, Rudolph 55

Society of Jesus 6–7, 25, 28–29, 30, 282

banning of 35

charter documents 29

curriculum 36–37

education 33

ideology 33

members of 35

recruits for 32

Scholasticus 29

suppression of (1773) 36

teaching at the Collège de Clermont 35, see also Bible; Catholicism; Christianity; God; Gospels; Jesuit Order; Jesus Christ; religion

Socrates 4–5, 17, 20, 59, 78–79, 82–83, 93, 112, 223

Phaedo 18–19

and Ramism 52

Socratic ignorance 9

Socratics 16

sophism 38

Sorbonne

Sydic of the Sorbonne (1520) 22–23

theology faculty 238

soul 18, 19, 23

and angels 28

faculties of (memory, intellect and will) 26

intermediate and indeterminate 19

isolating from the body xviii

rules for directing 24–33

sound 82, 190

films with 120

and letters 142

musical 191

and poetry 88

representation of 142, 143–44

words 89

space

abstract 111–12

ambient 68

cultural 227

debate, for 221

explanatory 135, 173

indoor 105

lighter 143–44

limited 162, 222

logical 84

philosophers, required by 88

pictorial 52n.36

three-dimensional 138

and time 121, 128

traveling through 143–44

white 141

spectators 116, 126, 162

crowds as 126

educated 116

and epoptic coherence 125

of films and plays 126

illiterate 127

pre-epoptic experience 126–27

in street clothes, versus costumed actors 279

of tennis 104–12, see also players, tennis; Optics (technical treatise introduced by Descartes’ essay Discourse on the Method), 1637; tennis, Cartesian

speech/talking xix

acceptable messages 41

Agricola 41

Aristotle 41–42

barbarism in 14–15

Cicero 38

correct and refined 31

demonstration, achieving 41–42

dialectical use of places on 42

divine 23

of Folly (in Erasmus’ Praise of Folly) 18, 20, 21–22

and picturing 71–90

and teaching 41

and writing 71–90, see also language

Spiegelhalter, David 71n.8

spikenard, wild 155f, 155–56

Spinoza, Baruch xx, 237, 240–41, 242, 243–44

Ethics 80–81

Spiritual Diary (Ganss) 27–28

Spiritual Exercises (Ignatius of Loyola) 25, 26, 29, 33, 63–64

ascetic 27

as contemplation 26–28

day-to-day regimen 26, 27

instructions 26–27

lexicon 29

and meditation 25–27, 63–64

“mysteries” and “apparitions” of Christ 28

planning of 25

preludes 26

and salvation 28–29

spirituality of 33, see also Ignatius of Loyola; meditation

squares

geometrical construction based on, in Meno 95

pictorial representation 95

in Plato’s Meno 93–94, 94f, 95–96, 112–13

simple 95–96

tiles 199

undivided 95

Standonck, Jan 22

Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (SEP) 251, 252, 262

Stanley, Thomas 221

statecraft xiv

statistical graphics 71n.8

statues 75, 121, 187–88

of pagan gods 190, 280

of Opportunity 280

papist, of Jesus Christ 193

of Teresa of Ávila (Bernini) 75

Stelluti, Francesco 180–81, 181f, 183, 184, 210

stick 99–100, 103, 107

air/stick analogy 98

sightless man with a stick, picture of 101, 103, 111–12, 171–72, 213

stick image 98n.58, 99f, 102–3, 104

Stoic texts 8

stories

about Descartes xvii–xviii

about philosophy 211

favoring whose scale diminishes risk 229

getting things wrong 109

Gospel 25

histories of architecture 218

internalist stance xx, 221–25

life-stories 222

living one’s life in 111–12

micro- , meso- and macro-stories 226–29

of the past 217

forgetting xx

and narrative history 109

remote past xvii–xviii, see also history of philosophy

and pictures 109

telling by mathematicians 110

Sulpizio da Veroli, Giovanni 113, 114

Summaries of Logic (Peter of Spain), c. 1230 48, 63, 230t, 231, 232–33, 235–36

audiences 231

and axioms 48–49

book 4 41

book 5 41, 42

commentaries on 231

compared with Dialectical Invention 41, 44–45

Dialectic seen as misappropriation of logic 54

editions 231, 232

enthymemes 45

examples in 38–39

labels 49

Latin text 46

length of 46, 232

logic of 54

longevity of 40

manuscripts 230

meso-story in 230

and places 44–45

printing of 232

on propositions 39–40

and sophism 38

sun, the 199–200, 252–53

supposition 39–40

surface

of earth 90

flat 101, 120

of liquid body 103–4

surrealism 138n.128

Swanenburgh, Willem 198f, 199

sword 197, 198

syllogisms 16, 44, 48–49

and axioms 50, 52

defining 39–40

demonstrative 49

dividing/partitioning 49

enthymemes displacing 72

lines 89

of medieval schools 54–55

and method 50, 56–57

middle terms 45

and propositions 41, 233

syllogistic reasoning 57

truncated 72

symbols 201, 274, see also signs

Symonds, J.A. 12

synesthesia 83

systems

Aristotelian 275

complete 56

of humanism 6

of logic xviii–xix, 56–57

philosophical 69–70, 221–22

Platonic 50n.33

of St Peter 233

Ramist 36–37, see also Keckermann, Bartholemew

talking see speech/talking

Tannery, P. 1, 2

taxonomy xx, 156, 226

genus/species 44–45

technê 89–90

technologies

applied sciences 118–19

of art 89

crude 81

and doxology 118

Europe, progress in xv

Heidegger on 89

lithography 120, 124–25

mechanical arts 118–19

modern 115

new xiv, xix, 51–52, 115, 118

and the Optics treatise 118, 119–20

pictorial/of printing xix, 114, 116–17, 118, 134

Benjamin on 67, 118, 120, 121–22, 123, 124, 131–32, 149–50, 212–13

disruptive technologies xix, 89, 123, 126, 131–32, 154, 162, 164, 165–66, 212–13

movable type, with 67, 119–20

not labelling as such 118, 119

picture books see picture books

post-Cartesian 212

questions about 67–70, 89

relief 119–20

renaissance 73

and theology 118

value, questions of 213, see also printing

telescopes 121, 182

of Galileo 131–32, 179–80

Telesio, Bernardino 4

tennis, Cartesian 67

ball 97, 104, 105

aiming into a pond/puddle 68, 69f, 103–4, 107, 108

appearance of in the Optics 68, 78, 97, 103–4, 111–12, 128

being hit by 106

‘cutting’ or ‘curving’ 103–4

deflection from path 103

passing through the air 103

pictures of 207–8

and rackets 97, 104, 105

real 103–4

showing a light particle as 111–12

Descartes using to explain light and vision in see Optics (technical treatise introduced by essay Discourse on the Method), 1637

first pictured in the Optics 103–4

in Leiden 86f, 105

pictures of 83–84

players and spectators 104–12

and rules of tennis 112

watchers of Cartesian tennis 130

Thales 78–79

theaters

anatomical 166, 197

London 126

of machinery 175, 176–77, 191, 208–9

mechanical 176–77

United States 126, see also drama; movies; plays, theatrical

theology xviii, 6, 10, 29n.67, 31, 205, 248–49

alleged corruption by misuse of philosophy 24

of Aristotle 7–8

bad preaching 21

confusion with philosophy 10–11, 236–37

Erasmus on 16, 22

in Praise of Folly 21–22

of grace 9

ignorance of 23

intelligent design arguments in, Hume attacking 138–39

versus Jesuit philosophy 33

moral xiv–xv

mystical 33

natural 130

Paris theologians, at the Sorbonne 22–23, 238

patristic 29

of Plato 8

and political economy 228

preparation of minds for 30

professors of 39–40

scholastic 12–13, 28–29, 32

speculative 33

teaching 23–24

Thomist 31, 33

of transubstantiation 237

university instruction in 29, see also Catholicism; Christianity; God; Gospels; Jesus Christ; religion; scripture

Theophrastus 16

theory xxii, 91, 118–19, 264

aniconic 115

of care 267

good quality 92

group 244–45

of history 218

of light 104n.67

matter 129, 182

number 117

obsolete 275

optical 121n.97

organic 92–93

picture 85n.34

political xiv

and practice xvii, 67–68n.2, 70n.5, 269, 270–71

pure 33

rejection of 241

supposition 234

of two distinct substances 241–42

virtue theory 7–8, see also matter in motion; practice

Thevet, André 194

Thibault d’Anvers, Girard 197, 198, 201n.213

Thirty Years War 197

Thomist theology 31, 33, 234–35

Tiberius, Emperor 127

time 264–65, 266, 267, 291

Opportunity and Time 283–84, 286–87, 290, see also periodization; Heidegger, Martin

toilet, flush 173–74, 174f

topical description 42

Tortelli, Giovanni 11–12

Tractato d’Abacho

ladders in a triangle 151, 152f

transubstantiation, theology of 237

treatises 3, 73, 117, 205

of 1637 158–59, 210

and aphorisms 85

appended 202

compared with essays 71

by Descartes 68–69

in Geometry 200, 201–2

mini-treatises 71

pictorial 79

and picturing 202

polemical 53–54

presentation of 202

technical 147

triangles 151, 152f, 152f, 153

Trinity xiv, 26

denying xiv

truth, law of 49

tub, Descartes on 103, 104, 107

picture of 99f, 99–100

Tufte, Edward 70n.5, 71n.8

Twain, Mark 80

typology xx, 158n.155

of ambiguity 252–53

data for 247–51

UCLA xxiv

umanista 12

universe 90–91, 99–100, 138–39

Urban VIII 179–80

Apis mellifera 183

Valla, Lorenzo xvii, 11, 60, 61, 62

Valturio, Roberto

De re militari 175n.179

Van Calcar, Jan Stephan 168

Van den Spiegel (Spigelius), Adrian 168

Van de Passe, Crispijn 105f, 111–12, 121, 125

Van Dorp, Maarten 39–41

Van Helmont, Francis Mercury 143n.135

Vanini, Giulio Cesare 239

Van Mander III, Karl 167f

Van Meurs, Jacob 166, 167f

Van Oldenbarneveldt, Johan 55

Van Schooten, Frans 158–59, 161

Van Vliet, Hendrick 208

Vasari, Giorgio 146

Vegetius 175n.179

Vergil (Publius Vergilius Maro), poet 31–32, 37–38, 54, 280

Aeneid 4 47, 48

Verloc, Adolf 261

vernacular language 61, 63n.61, 64, 72–73, 74, 219

in Discourse 71–72

English 193

Montaigne’s use of 72–73, see also language

Vesalius, Andreas xiii, xiv, 1, 2, 161, 162, 164, 168, 170, 203, 210

bones uncovered by 209

death of (1564) xv–xvi

and Descartes 1–2

dissection of bodies 174–75

and Fuchs 162

picture books by xxi

Renaissance anatomist xv

works of

dissecting a hand 163f, 163–64

Fabrica 1–2, 162, 164, 166–68, 174–75

pregnant sow prepared for vivisection 164, 165f

Structure of the Human Body 162

Yorick’s skull 166–68, 167f

view

cutaway 146–47, 170

disassembled 145n.138, 146–47

exploded 135f, 135, 138, 146–47

ghosted 139–40, 146–47, 173

scaled 140–41n.132, 145, 146–47

transparent 139–40, 145, 146–47, 177

Virgil (poet) see Vergil (Publius Vergilius Maro), poet

Virgin Mary 192–93

virtue theory 7–8

visibility 26, 29, 81, 89–90, 130, 147, 154, 175–76

artists, skills of 144–45

diagrams 93–94

letters 142

life sciences xiv

nature 18

ordinary things 98

signs 18

vision xix, 27, 145

active sense of 101–2

explaining in the Optics 67, 100

mystical 271, 272

natural 182

normal 182

objects of 102

obstacles of 139–40

sense of 101–2

visual field 85

visual sharing 126–27, see also sight

Vitruvius 112–13, 114, 115, 136f, 136–37

De architectura (1486) 112–13, 114

Vives, Juan Luis 12–13, 62

vivisection 164, 165f, 165, 166

Voetius (Gijsbert Voet) 236, 237

Voltaire, François-Marie Arouet 240

Vossius 3

Vrin, Joseph 4

War of Ways 233–34

watchers see spectators

Wegestreit (War of Ways) 233–34, 235–36, 243

White, Thomas xxiii

Wilde, Oscar 82–83

William of Ockham see Ockham (William of Ockham)

wisdom, law of 49

Wittgenstein, Ludwig xxi–xxiii, 4–5, 82–83, 84–85, 124n.102, 223

aphorisms xxi–xxii, 75

epigrams, use of 84

picture theory 85n.34

Tractatus 84, 85f, 85

Wollstonecraft, Mary 249

woodcuts, use of in printing 115, 161, 165, 168, 169–70, 193, 195

words in woodcut block books 119–20

Woolhouse, Roger xxii–xxiii

word-pictures 281

words 39–40

of Aristotle 10, 61

of Christ 21

evolution of 10

and images xix

of Jesuit Plan 33

in Latin 46, 59

logic of 39–40

nature of 39–40

of Ramus 50–51, 60–61

Ramist code-words 36

of scripture 146

total words in Summaries (Peter of Spain) 46

total words in the Dialectic (Ramus) 46

world 7–8, 23, 64, 73, 84, 85, 98, 106, 107–8, 119, 128–29

industrial 118

material 139–40

medieval 134

prison-world 122

Woudanus, Jan 198f

writing

of classical language 70

concept-writing 82

in English xvi

forms of 68

of Latin 31–32, 38, 285–86

long-form 71

making coherent 57–58

of philosophy xxii

history change xxii

with pictures 70

treatise versus essay 68

in verse, or as myth or in epigrams xxi–xxii

pictureless xxi, 68–69, 79, 116–17, 119–20, 193

and picturing xix, xx–xxi, 70–90

as a way of writing xix, 68

as poetry 71

practices 70

as prose 71

and speech 71–74

strengths of essays as form of 72–73

visible 71

ways of xxi, see also language; speech/talking

epigram about 65

novel, in pre-Cartesian and Cartesian picture books xxi–xxii

picturing xix, 68

writings of Descartes

Descartes establishing himself as modern in xiii

Discours de la méthode (Discourse on the Method), 1637 see Discourse on the Method (Descartes)

Geometry (1637) 199–202, 200f

Meditationes de prima philosophia in qua Dei existentia et animae immortalitas demonstratur (Meditations on First Philosophy), 1641 see Meditations on First Philosophy (Descartes, 1641)

Meteorology (1637) 92, 105n.69, 199–201

Principia philosophiae (Principles of Philosophy), 1644 see Principles of Philosophy (Principia philosophiae), 1644

Regulae 54–55

Traité de l’homme (Treatise of Man, published posthumously in 1662 and 1664) 69–70, 187–89, 188f, 188n.194, 190, 191, 192, 198–99, 203–4, see also Descartes, René

Zeising, Heinrich xiii, 176–78, 190, 192, 209

Zonca, Vittorio 175

zoology xiv

List of Illustrations

Part 1 Mostly Practice

1 Meditations

Figure 1.1 La Flèche, Étienne Martellange SJ, 1612Gallica, Bibliothèque Nationale de France

2 Methods

Figure 2.1 Alexander Reid, A Ramist Table of Tumors, 1635Chirurgicall Lectures…

3 Cartesian Tennis in Thirteen Sets

Figure 3.1 A Tennis Ball, Descartes, 1637Dioptrique, p. 11

Figure 3.2 Not a Field of Vision, Wittgenstein, 1922Tractatus, 5.6631

Figure 3.3 A Field of Vision, Detail, Descartes, 1637Dioptrique, p. 36

Figure 3.4 The Earth as a Lodestone, Descartes, 1644Principia, p. 271

Figure 3.5 Squares, Plato, before 1100,Österreichische Nationalbibliothek,Cod. suppl. gr. 7,…

Figure 3.6 Infinite Baseball

Figure 3.7 Sticks, Descartes, 1637Dioptrique, p. 56

Figure 3.8 The Tub, Descartes, 1637Dioptrique, p. 6

Figure 3.9 An Ambiguous Head, Detail, Descartes, 1637Dioptrique, p. 36

Figure 3.10 Tennis in Leiden, Crispijn van de Passe, 1612British Museum, 1972-0722-6-8

Figure 3.11 Reflections Abstracted, Descartes, 1637Dioptrique, p. 10

Figures 3.12 and 3.13 Eccentrics and an Epicycle, Copernicus, 1543Atoms, Bruno, 1591

Figure 3.14 An Imperfect Moon, Galileo, 1610Sidereus nuncius, p. 9v

Figure 3.15 An Exploded View, Leonardo, 1478Biblioteca Ambrosiana, Codex Atlanticus, fol. 30

Figure 3.16 A Cutaway, Giocondo, 1511Vitruvius, fol. 72r

Figure 3.17 Ruins in a Fantasy, Colonna, 1499Hypnerotomachia, sig. piiiv

Figure 3.18 A Transparent House, 2021Alamy.com ENA2GR

Figure 3.19 A Transparent Engine, 2023Vectorstock 19578239

Figure 3.20 Publisher’s Logo, detail 1, 1641Meditations, title page

Figure 3.21 Publisher’s Logo, detail 2, 1641Meditations, title page

Figure 3.22 Publisher’s Logo, detail 3, 1641Meditations, title page

Figure 3.23 Medieval Machinery, Villard d’Honnecourt, before 1250Alamy.com HTNMXW

Figure 3.24 A Virtuous Medieval Ant, Fior di Virtù, after 1350Biblioteca…

Figure 3.25 Peonies, Martin Schongauer, c.1472J. Paul Getty Museum, 92.GC.80,…

Figure 3.26 Ladders in a Triangle, Tractato d’Abacho, 1480–1Biblioteca Medicea Laurenziana,…

Figure 3.27 Triangle, Oresme, De configurationibus, 1500Florence, Biblioteca Nazionale Centrale, Conv.…

Figure 3.28 Wild Spikenard, Leonhart Fuchs, 1542De historia stirpium, p. 10

Figure 3.29 Artists Picturing a Plant, Leonhart Fuchs, 1542De historia stirpium…

Figure 3.30 Descartes, Frans Van Schooten, 1644Descartes (1644), tp

Figures 3.31 and 3.32 Socrates and Hermes Trismegistus,Hartman Schedel, 1493, Nuremberg Chronicles,…

Figure 3.33 Dissecting a Hand, Vesalius, 1543Fabrica, sig.*6v

Figure 3.34 A Pregnant Sow Prepared for Vivisection, Vesalius, 1543Fabrica,…

Figure 3.35 Disruptive Eyes, Jacob van Meurs after Karl van Mander III, 1655

Figures 3.36 and 3.37 A Yorick by Vesalius, 1543, a Skull by Casseri, 1645Fabrica

Figure 3.38 Skeleton Woodcut, Richard Helain, 1493Bayerische Staatsbibliothek BV036653449

Figure 3.39 Miners Above a Tunnel and Below, Agricola, 1556De re metallica

Figure 3.40 Mining Machinery Disassembled, Agricola, 1556De re metallica, p. 234

Figures 3.41 and 3.42 Simple and Complicated Lens Machinery, Descartes, 1637Dioptrique, pp.…

Figure 3.43 A Flush Toilet, Harington, 1596Anatomie, sigs Liiiir–Lvv

Figure 3.44 Cutaways Through Artifice and Nature, Jacques Besson, 1578Theatrum instrumentorum…

Figures 3.45 and 3.46 A Joke with a Clockwork Apple, Heinrich Zeising and Others, 1614

Figures 3.47 and 3.48 Details 1 and 2 of Insects by Jacob Hoefnagel, 1592Archetypa

Figure 3.49 Eyeglasses, Pieter Brueghel the Elder, 1566Albertina, from ARTstor

Figure 3.50 Three Bees for a Pope, Francesco Stelluti, 1625https://brunelleschi.imss.fi.it.apiarium,…

Figure 3.51 Chameleon, Gesner, 1554Historiae animalium, lib. 2, p. 3.

Figure 3.52 Scraggy Horse Crab, Aldrovandi, 1605De reliquis animalibus exanguinibus,…

Figure 3.53 Heart-Shaped Crab, Aldrovandi after Rondelet, 1605De reliquis animalibus exanguinibus

Figures 3.54 and 3.55 Mechanical and Alchemical HumansDescartes, 1664; Paracelsus, 1605Traité…

Figure 3.56 Automated Fountain, Jacques Besson, 1578Theatrum instrumentorum et machinarum,…

Figure 3.57 The Burning of William Gardiner, 1641John Foxe, Actes and Monuments

Figure 3.58 The Tomb of Admiral ChabotAnonymous Ink and Wash Drawing,…

Figure 3.59 Fencing in Leiden, around 1610Willem Swanenburgh, Jan Woudanus and…

Figure 3.60 Algebraic Geometry, Descartes, 1637La Geometrie, p. 303

Figure 3.61 The Bookish Robert Burton, 1632Anatomy of Melancholy, tp

Part 2 Mostly Theory

4 How Philosophy Changes

Figure 4.1 The Pineal Gland in Situ, Descartes, 1662De homine,…

5 Bring Out Your Dead!

Figure 5.1 Smoking While Loading the Dead on a Plague CartNathaniel…

Figure 5.2 The Phlegmatic Gin-Soaked DutchJohn Trusler, The Barge, Detail 1791

6 Conclusion: Who Was That Masked Woman?

Figure 6.1 Comic Mask, Terracotta, c.100 bceBritish Museum, 1842,0728.750

Figure 6.2 Opportunity, Alciato, 1531Emblematum liber, sig. A8r

Figure 6.3 Three Bad Boys Sent to Hell, David and Galle, 1603Typus

Figure 6.4 Jesus Crushed by His Cross and Standing on His…

Figure 6.5 Bad Boys Mocking Time, David and Galle, 1603Typus,…

Figure 6.6 Boys Mocking Opportunity, David and Galle, 1603Typus, fig. 4

List of Tables

Part 2 Mostly Theory

4 How Philosophy Changes

Table 4.1 The Publishing History of Peter of Spain’s Logic

5 Bring Out Your Dead!

Table 5.1 Types of Oblivion

Table 5.2 Some of Our Dishonored Dead