Hutchins, Barnaby

Isis

English

Ghent University Academic Bibliography

1Eric  Watkins  (Editor).  The  Divine  Order,  the  Human  Order,  and  the  Order  of  Nature: Historical  Perspectives.  xxviii  + 240 pp.,  index. New York, NY: Oxford University Press, 2013. $74 (cloth).The philosophical and natural-philosophical developments of the early modern period have long been subject to an especially pervasive grand narrative,  that of the conflict between empiricism and rationalism and its eventual synthesis in Kant. For quite some time now, that narrative has been routinely rejected. And yet there remains something attractive about such an all-encompassing approach, and the historiography of the early modern period has a tendency to seek out a replacement for the empiricism–rationalism opposition.  Eric  Watkins’  collection  aims  to  provide  that  replacement.  In  his introduction to the volume, Watkins notes the value of the alternative narratives that have appeared in the scholarship over the last twenty years or so (grounding of sciences, scepticism, evil, freedom, etc.) but criticises them for being too piecemeal. ‘What is thus needed’, he writes, ‘is a broader perspective that could unite these partial narratives into a single account’ (p. xvii). The goal of this collection is to show how the notion of order (whether natural, divine, human or moral) provides that unifying account.The individual essays are all of high quality, as is to be expected, given the impressive roster. The first section of the book provides some context from medieval Aristotelian and  Jewish  thought.  Marilyn  McCord  Adams’  piece  is  a  thorough  overview  of  the relationship between the divine and natural orders in the work of Thomas Aquinas, Duns Scotus, and William of Ockham, while Steven Nadler’s succinct chapter argues that, for Maimonides, the intellectually virtuous can avoid the misfortunes of the natural order via knowledge gained from the overflow of God’s intellect.2Daniel Garber opens the book’s second section (on the pre-Kantian early modern period) with a comparison of Descartes, Leibniz, Hobbes, and Spinoza on God’s involvement in laws of nature. Garber concludes with the apposite (although underdeveloped) suggestion that modern science has maintained an early modern conception of natural laws while ignoring  their  metaphysical  baggage  –  similar  points  are  later  raised,  but  again  not developed, by both Peter Harrison and Eric Watkins. Robert Adams then presents an extensive account of Malebranche’s occasionalism. Malebranche recurs in Tad Schmaltz’s chapter, which argues that he is the originator of a particular tradition of addressing the natural and moral orders through universal laws that extends through Berkeley and (more surprisingly) Hume. Peter Harrison analyses the relations between Descartes, Cambridge Platonism,  and  Newtonianism  through  the  lens  of  laws  of  nature.  Both  Donald Rutherford and Martha Bolton then turn that lens on Leibniz. Rutherford argues for a reconciliation of laws with powers,  where each is  as explanatorily fundamental  as the other,  while  Bolton  argues  in  favour  of  an  interpretation  of  monadic  appetites  as exclusively desire-like.That Kant gets the final section to himself appears to be a nod towards the traditional narrative.  Andrew Chignell  gives  a  detailed  analysis  of  the  notion  of  hope  in  Kant’s philosophy  of  religion,  showing  how its  role  in  the  moral  order  rests  on  a  minimal conception of the possibility of God. The volume concludes with Watkins’ argument that certain features of the natural and moral orders are only possible on the basis of the divine  order.  The  claim is  revisionary  in  redirecting  Kantian  anthropocentrism back towards the divine order, which, given Watkins’ aims for the volume, makes perfect sense.3The  advantage  of  the  volume’s  approach  is  that  it  is  wonderfully  ambitious.  If  early modern philosophy really does turn out to have order as its overarching theme, it will provide us with rich, more historically adequate insight into the period. However, the volume does not quite reach its goal. Firstly, more needs to have been done to justify the assumed need for a unifying narrative. It may well be that the period involved various philosophies  that  overlapped  piecemeal  in  various  ways  without  any  single  unifying thread. Secondly, even if we accept the need for a unifying narrative, the volume would have benefitted from an extended, programmatic attempt to argue that it is order that plays that role. The introduction includes a few general remarks about how order was at issue (p. xviii), but the justification is missing. Presumably, the evidence in favour of order is intended to come out of the individual essays that make up the collection. What they show, however, is that order is an issue for certain early modern philosophers, but not that it is the issue that provides a united, single account. The picture that comes out of these essays is ultimately not that of order as a new grand narrative, but of order as a partial  narrative  that  usefully  highlights  various  features  of  various  philosophies  and various connections between them. Which is no bad thing.

The Divine Order, the Human Order, and the Order of Nature: Historical Perspectives

Barnaby R. Hutchins

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Eric Watkins (Editor). <i>The Divine Order, the Human Order, and the Order of Nature: Historical Perspectives</i>. xxviii + 240 pp., index. New York: Oxford University Press, 2013. $74 (cloth).

https://biblio.ugent.be/publication/8547651/file/8547652.pdf

The Divine Order, the Human Order, and the Order of Nature: Historical Perspectives

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