I remember years ago reading a book about cave paintings. It was an unusual book. I can't remember the title and am not going to work too hard on recovering information about it, but I'll just write down here what I can remember, for fun. The writer seemed to be a Marxist, though of a specifically unorthodox kind. He disbelieved in the traditional Marxist notion of "primitive communism," that is, the quasi-Rousseauist idea that there was a time in human history before private property, surplus value, or class conflict. The rise of the ancient slave societies (on this trad-Marxist view) was over the dead body of those more primitive communities. But the book I was reading said that Marx was wrong in this, that there was a class conflict underway even among the cave dwellers, and that the famous admired cave paintings are evidence of it. I don't remember the particulars of the argument, but IIRC at all, the author was telling us we shouldn...
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Jean-Jacques Rousseau's role in the creation of romanticism has been exaggerated in some circles, says Isaiah Berlin. In making this case, he says that there isn't as sharp a break between the canonical Enlightenment figures on the one hand and Rousseau on the other as is sometimes thought, at least if we look to actual content. "If we consider what it is that Rousseau actually said, as opposed to the manner in which he said it -- and the manner and the life are what are important -- we find that it is the purest milk of the rationalist world....Rousseau's actual doctrine is not all that different from that of the Encyclopaedists. He disliked them personally, because temperamentally he was a kind of dervish from the desert. He was paranoiac, savage, and gloomy in some respects ... he did not have much in common with the people at Holbach's rather irreverent table or at the elegant receptions with Voltaire held at Ferney. But this was to a certain degree a per...
I mentioned Pufendorf here recently, very much in passing. But hey, why not devote a brief post to him? He does tend to get lost in quickie surveys of the Enlightenment figures, although he usually does show up in those lists. Here is a link to a discussion of some of his key views in Stanford's invaluable encyclopedia of philosophy: https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/pufendorf-moral/ Pufendorf's overriding project was to set natural law theory on a firm foundation. His presumption was that theology and exegesis was NOT a firm foundation, but a slippery sand of contending sects and state-sponsored devils quoting scripture for their own purposes. He wanted to start again with moral and political philosophy in much the way that Descartes recently had with metaphysics and epistemology. The equivalent of "I think," then ... in this writing? Consideration of what life would be like in a state of nature. Yes, Pufendorf -- a contemporary of John Locke -- had obvio...
I'll treat you today, dear reader, to another blog post inspired by shenanigans over at Yahoo!Answers. Someone asked, "Can anyone philosophically justify the existence of private property?" Some further explanation indicated that he had titles to land especially in mind. For the record, my answer was what regular readers of this blog would likely expect. The pragmatic answer is surely best: those social institutions are right which work, over time and on the whole. Private title to land is justified, if at all, only on that basis. Whether it IS justified by practical consequences is a fascinating empirical question. Consider Richard Pipes' book on this question, for example. That is much more interesting than trying to parse the differences between Locke and Rousseau on some primordial appropriation. But I'm bring this into Jamesian Philosophy Refreshed today because of another commenter. He ignored the specific matter of land and gave us a little lect...
Just thinking aloud here.... Jean Jacques Rousseau became famous as an advocate of a philosophy that sounded to his contemporaries like a primitivism. (There is a good deal of dispute among scholars as to whether primitivism in the usual sense is what Rousseau actually meant, but rightly or wrongly, it is the appearance of primitivism that made him an Enlightenment star.) His first successful philosophical work was his "Discourse on the Arts and Sciences." He wrote it in response to an essay contest inspired by the Academy of Dijon, which had asked the contestants, "Has the restoration of the sciences and arts contributed to the purification of morals?" The wording of the question indicated that the Academy thought there were two possible answers -- (1), no, human moral character st...