The Journal of Scottish Philosophy, 4 (2) 2006, ISSN

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1 BOOKNOTES Larry Witham, The Measure of God: our century-long struggle to reconcile science and religion, HarperSanFrancisco, ix+358 pp. ISBN David Edmonds and John Eidinow, Rousseau s Dog: Two Great Thinkers at War in the Age of Enlightenment London, Faber and Faber pp ISBN In the last twenty years or so, cultural history has had an increasing presence in the world of the book buying public, and considerable success. For the most part, it is the cultural histories of science, medicine and technology that have been prominent, though some episodes in the life of letters, such as the creation of the Oxford English Dictionary, have also attracted widespread interest. By contrast, though philosophy and its history form a venerable part of our intellectual heritage, they have not figured much in this new phenomenon to date. These two books are notable, therefore, in being works concerned with the cultural history of philosophy, whose authors are writing, not for philosophers, but for a general market. What makes them even more remarkable, from this journal s point of view, is that the stories they narrate are closely associated with Scottish philosophy. Witham s second sub-title is The Story of the Gifford Lectures. This is more informative than the first, because while the lectures whose story he recounts involve the relation of science and religion on several occasions, what we now understand as the science-religion debate figures relatively little within them. This is hardly surprising. The lectures began in Glasgow in 1888, and arose from endowments given by a wealthy Scottish lawyer Lord Adam Gifford to the four ancient universities of Scotland. The endowments were enormous by the standards of the day, and have been able to sustain lectures on a regular basis in all four places since (though the dust jacket overstates their frequency when it describes them as annual ). The result is a huge number of lectures to date, some The Journal of Scottish Philosophy, 4 (2) 2006, ISSN

2 of them of lasting importance, some of little value at all. So, though Lord Gifford s aim was to promote natural as opposed to revealed theology with as much rein given to free thinkers as to theologians, and while this inevitably brought into view from time to time the challenge natural science presented to traditional religious belief, it would be surprising if the lectures as a whole reflected this or any other single issue, and still less any debate that could meaningfully be characterised as ours. However, even if the first subtitle is a little misleading, what is remarkable, and commendable, is Witham s ability to forge a single and informative narrative out of the vast mass of material that almost 200 Gifford Lecturers have produced. Witham is not a philosopher. This shows a little painfully from time to time, in for instance his giving William as Bishop Berkeley s first name (in confusion perhaps with the popular Biblical commentator William Barclay), in his assertion that A. N. Whitehead coined the term panentheism, and in his summary that Thomas Reid boiled all other knowledge [other than the knowledge of God] down to an innate common sense shared by all normal people. It is on the strength of this that he attributes to Reid a Plantinga-type view: People know God exists in the same way they know other people have minds (p. 283). Still, Witham does not write as a philosopher or intellectual historian. He writes as a journalist with an interesting story to tell, and this may be the key to the book s having the impressive coherence it does. Out of all the lectures, published and unpublished, Witham successfully identifies a number of important phases that certainly reflect a journey Western intellectuals have made in the aftermath of Darwin. The first is Absolute Idealism, a philosophy briefly dominant at the turn of the 20th century, and now almost everywhere identified as defunct (though if it is indeed in some sense non-viable, this is more loss than gain in my view). The demise of Absolute Idealism was widely perceived as the end of a distinctively philosophical attempt to understand reality, and for a time replaced, in the Gifford Lectures and more widely, by anthropology, on which considerable intellectual hopes were pinned. Psychology, physics, sociology, history, the rejection of Enlightenment rationalism, and the embrace of pluralism followed in fairly rapid succession. It is really only towards the end of this sequence that we find Gifford Lecturers addressing the science/religion question as we currently think of it, though the book s earlier chapters set out the wide background against which this debate is best appreciated very well. It is to be emphasized then, that this is the story of the Gifford Lectures and not an academic assessment of what their changing content has shown. But it is story worth telling, because the Giffords are a remarkable phenomenon. No other lecture series can claim the enduring and distinguished character that this series has had. There have been some very minor contributors, and some disasters, but it remains true that the lecturers have included some of the most outstanding figures of their time William James, Albert Einstein, Karl Barth and Hannah Arendt, for 182

3 instance and no fewer than eight Nobel Prize winners. It is precisely because the story to date is worth telling, that speculation about the future seems irresistible. The endowments, though worth much less than they were before the devastating effects of World War I, still exist and the Lectures can be expected to continue. What shape might they take and what role might they have? Witham concludes his book with a chapter subtitled Scotland, America and the Giffords. In it he draws attention to the incontestable fact that the intellectual background of the Scottish Enlightenment out of which Lord Gifford s project grew was the same background that so powerfully influenced the academic and intellectual formation of the independent United States of America. From the start, Gifford Lecturers have included major figures from the academies of the US, and it is arguable that their standing is now rather higher in the US than in Scotland or the UK more widely. He finds, plausibly (and despite his imperfect account of Scottish Common Sense ) a connection with American pragmatism, and notes correctly the revival in the US of serious natural theology of the sort Gifford aimed to promote. It is true that there is a somewhat romantic ring about this final chapter, which perhaps good journalism requires. But however that may be, it raises an interesting question, and one of special significance for this journal: Does the Scottish philosophical tradition, which was so influential in theological, philosophical, social and educational thought in America, have any resources to help resolve, or even illuminate, the contemporary debates in these same areas in which, it seems, current opinion in the United States is so very deeply divided? Even if we were to answer this question in the affirmative, a further question arises: Does the story of the Gifford Lectures as recounted by Witham provide us with a route back into that shared tradition? This seems to me more doubtful. Coherent though he makes his story, there is no disguising the extraordinary variation that the Lectures have contained. Their continuation, therefore, is more likely to reflect difference and division than to resolve it. Deep difference of opinion provided the context in which David Hume and Jean-Jacques Rousseau published their works, resulting, curiously, in their both becoming denigrated and fashionable. Though their lives were almost co- extensive (Hume was born a year before Rousseau and died three years earlier), their paths only crossed for a few months in Rousseau s Dog recounts the events of those months. David Edmonds and John Eidinow scored a modest first in publishing history when they produced the immensely and surprisingly successful book Wittgenstein s Poker. This told the story of the extraordinary episode in which, it is alleged, the philosopher Wittgenstein, incensed by the error of his views, threatened the philosopher Karl Popper with a poker. Rousseau s Dog is another volume of a similar sort. Their publisher s attempt to repeat that earlier success is slightly barefaced, but this would be a ground for criticism only to the extent that it was carelessly done, or sought to manufacture a significant episode out of historical thin air. Any 183

4 attempt to trade unduly on the reputation of the earlier book is reprehensible, no doubt, but so too is a failure to judge the new book on its own merits. I do not think it could not be faulted on the first ground. It is well researched and well written, and where it seems to require philosophical exposition this is competently done. In short, it is a good and easy read. There is, though, a question over the second. Since the book is not for philosophers or historians, to look for a significant contribution to academic research would be to apply the wrong standard. At the same time, the authors plainly aim at a story that amounts to something more than a whimsical if intriguing historical episode, and on this score, it seems to me, they fail. Hume and Rousseau are amongst the intellectual luminaries not just of their own remarkable century, but of the Western philosophical tradition. They came into personal contact when Hume was returning to Britain after his time as Secretary to the British Embassy in Paris, and Rousseau was seeking somewhere that he could live free from the hostility to his ideas that had led to enforced political exile. At first their relationship was marked by mutual admiration and profuse declarations of friendship. By the end it disintegrated in a welter of acrimonious recriminations. Such things are common, unfortunately. The fact that the people in question were famous philosophers gives added piquancy to this particular instance. But is there anything more to it than that? Rousseau had an exceptionally difficult personality. His desire for personal independence was such that he could regard innocent acts of friendship and generosity as insults and betrayals. Though born with a painful and progressively debilitating bladder problem, often short of money, and driven into flight by persecution for his ideas, he depicted his sufferings in a way that exaggerated the extent of all three. With respect to illness and poverty, this required him to deceive on occasion, and though there is no doubt that he was persecuted, he also sought persecution, and imagined it. Hume, famously, was quite different, a man of even temperament and natural kindness. If the authors of this book are to be believed,in his dealings with Rousseau, he was both somewhat naive and a little duplicitous. He ignored a serious warning that Rousseau was likely to prove poison, and while professing a deep admiration and friendship for him, was reluctant to distance himself entirely from the fashionable social circle of Horace Walpole and the Paris salons where Rousseau became increasingly the object of ridicule. The warning came true. Ensonced in the remote Derbyshire house that Hume had been instrumental in finding for him, Rousseau found evidence that his benefactor was someone who works in secret to dishonour me, and though Rousseau was indeed paranoid, there was just enough in Hume s behaviour to make this less than completely unfounded. Curiously enough, Hume s response to the letter in which Rousseau made his allegations attributed to him just the same intention; Rousseau was working to dishonour him in the eyes of his most valued acquaintances, and had made him the victim of a conspiracy. 184

5 There followed a great deal of writing, with accusation and counter-accusation, not just from the pens of the chief protagonists, but from their supporters in both France and Britain. While Rousseau s grievances seem firmly rooted in fantasy, he lost nothing of his literary skill and rhetorical power in airing them. The contrasting reasonableness of Hume s point by point refutation disguises an element of manipulating the truth. Rousseau s Dog conveys the flavour of both admirably. But in the end, and at this distance, it is difficult not to find all the exchanges tiresome and tedious. Why is this anything more than a storm in an historical teacup? Edmonds and Eidinow s answer is that before the final rupture, but as a crucial part of its cause, philosophy had crossed over into life. What is disclosed as the relationship between Hume and Rousseau develops, is the rational sceptic s inability to empathize with the man of sensibility. Presumably this is why a long central chapter is given over to an extended exposition of their respective philosophies. But in this regard, it seems to me, they fail. Rousseau was strange to the point of madness, and as a result made enemies among whom were several prominent Enlightment philosophes. This does not illuminate or validate the pre-romantic elements in his philosophical writings. Hume was reflective and sympathetic, but a little vain, and in this affair his vanity made him both naive and injudicious. Neither his strengths in the former nor failings in the latter have anything much to say about his moral philosophy, still less his empiricism. Certainly, Hume and Rousseau ended up worlds apart, but it is straining matters to contend, as the title of the central chapter does, that this was because their philosophies were those of different worlds. One final point. Rousseau did have a dog Sultan of which he was inordinately fond. The dog accompanied him on the journey from France to England with Hume, and thereafter to Derbyshire. But the title must have been chosen for its catchiness. Despite the authors occasional hints to the contrary, Sultan seems to have played no significant part in the affair. 185

The Age of Enlightenment

The Age of Enlightenment By History.com, adapted by Newsela staff on 10.13.17 Word Count 927 Level 1040L A public lecture about a model solar system, with a lamp in place of the sun illuminating the faces