Notes

948 • Notes to Pages 29–37

4.The term is Pierre Bourdieu’s ([1979] 1984; Bourdieu and Passeron, [1970] 1977). There are some similarities between my approach and Bourdieu’s. Both of our works derive from empirical studies of education’s effects on stratification and of the inflationary market for educational credentials. In early work (Collins, 1971) I used the term status group culture for what I now call cultural capital. I disagree with Bourdieu’s principle that the intellectual field is homologous to the social space of non-intellectuals, however; the dynamics of struggle over the intellectual space is shaped in a distinctive way by the law of small numbers; and the cultural capital specific to the forefront of intellectual competition is not the cultural capital of educated persons generally, and it is not directly transposable with economic capital, in either direction.

5.The short-term, disruptive emotions are best explained as departures from a baseline of emotional energy, and thus are affected by the EE trajectory at any particular time. A full theory of emotions must include both levels. See Collins (1990); and on the sociology of emotions more generally, Kemper (1990); Scheff (1990).

6.A writing style is the precipitate of a particular kind of emotional energy flow. A crabbed and involuted style, full of false starts and shaky transitions, comes from a weak and hesitant EE flow. The writer who hides the speaker’s voice behind an unbroken wall of abstractions and technicalities is clinging to his or her identity inside the community of intellectual specialists, not at its creative core but near enough the outer boundary to be concerned mainly with marking oneself off from the lay world of non-specialists outside. The distinctive styles of successful intellectuals, too, are tracks of their dominant EE flows. The sonorous periods of Gibbon bespeak his membership in a world where leading writers could be parliamentary orators, and belonged to an aristocracy of pomp and circumstance. The social sources of Russell’s and Wittgenstein’s ultra-confident styles are analyzed in Chapter 13.

7.In Sung China, there are the Ch’eng brothers, studying and discussing together from an early age, then spearheading the Neo-Confucian movement. In France of the late 1920s, there was the student circle of future literary and philosophical eminences Jean-Paul Sartre, Paul Nizan, Raymond Aron, Simone de Beauvoir, and Maurice Merleau-Ponty (Cohen-Solal, 1987: 74–75). In London of the early 1850s, a youthful group of friends comprised Herbert Spencer, T. H. Huxley, Mary Ann Evans (George Eliot), John Tyndall, and G. H. Lewes, their important creativity still in the future. There was the youthful friendship of Marx and Heine, or for that matter Marx and Engels. Centuries earlier we find the schoolmates Descartes and Mersenne. This structure seems to burst forth across various fields of creativity, again suggesting that what is being circulated is not so much cultural capital as emotional energy. We could add the friendship of future novelist F. Scott Fitzgerald, critic Edmund Wilson, and poet John Peale Bishop during their student days at Princeton University (Mizener, 1959: 36–55); or the youthful Bloomsbury circle which nurtured the incipient creativity across a range of literary, artistic, and scholarly fields that became famed as the work of Virginia Woolf, Lytton Strachey, John Maynard Keynes, and others (Bell, 1972).

Notes to Pages 39–50 • 949

8.The issue is not one of motivation. When an individual enters the intellectual field, the structural problem is where one will fit into the apportionment of attention. This cannot be evaded, whatever one’s values of modesty, self-effacement, or commitment to intellectual virtues.

9.Strictly speaking, for a successful IR, participants should match similar CCs, so that they have something to talk about. For creative intellectuals, CCs cannot be completely similar, but should overlap enough so that one or another participant can contribute new CC to the others, and CCs can be recombined to produce new ideas. Participants do not match EE levels the same way. What is necessary for a successful IR is that at least one person have relatively high EE, to take the initiative in getting the interaction flowing and bring the available CC into the conversation. The law of small numbers suggests that one person tends to get the most attention in each intellectual group; two persons with very high EEs would tend to negate each other by competing over attention. The formula for a successful IR is: matching CCs, complimentary EEs.

10.We can be even more definitive. Being calculating is a particular kind of conscious thinking. Insofar as thought is itself determined by CC, EE, and surrounding network opportunities, there are structural conditions under which individuals will have sentences going through their minds such as “What will happen if I do this? Wouldn’t it be better if I . . .” We could also specify the conditions under which individuals think nothing of the sort but merely go with the flow. In circumstances of steady energy flow, whether high or low, persons tend to follow their path without reflecting about it. It is when energy flows are sharply contradictory, owing to network locations which pull one way and another, that conscious calculation is more likely. At the extreme, low success in IRs leading to low EE, combined with a multiplicity of unattractive interactional opportunities, can lead to paralyzing self-reflectiveness. The IR chain model expanded in this direction would constitute a sociological psychiatry.

11.In the United States, the number of published writers of commercial (trade) books is estimated at 45,000 (Kingston and Cole, 1986: 36).

12.Kuhn’s theory asserts that there are fundamental differences between those fields (sciences) which possess paradigms and those which do not (humanities and social “science”). But stratification of creativity and recognition appears to be rather similar in all fields. Analysis pointing to similar structures underlying artistic careers is given in White (1993); see also Kaufer and Carley (1993); for mathematicians and sociologists, see Crane (1972).

13.Chambliss (1989) gives a compelling image of the differences among ranks of achievement in any competitive field, intellectual, athletic, or professional. The reality for those in the successful inner circle is simply “the mundanity of excellence”: a smoothly applied routine of using finely tuned resources with the confidence that one knows how to make them pay off. To those in the outer tiers, even those in the second competitive rank, there seems to be some mysterious quality that the successful possess, and this sense of difference generates a barrier of anxiety which makes it all the more impassable.

14.This sketch of a conversational artificial intelligence is amplified in Collins (1992).

950 • Notes to Pages 52–58

On the levels of rhythmic coordination in conversation, see Sacks, Schegloff, and Jefferson (1974); Gregory (1994).

15.This should not be taken too literally. Thinking is carried out with ideas deriving from past conversations, which come into consciousness to the extent that they are carried on the emotional loadings deriving from the social solidarity they have been associated with in past conversations. Verbal thinking does not depend on visualizing oneself talking to an audience. One should not suppose that some people (i.e., “intellectuals”) have vivid imaginations, whereas most of the rest of us prosaically go about our business of thinking without imagining audiences. The social sense of ideas constitutes the very possibility of human thought.

2.Networks across the Generations

1.Sources for Chinese rankings (Fung, 1952–53; Needham, 1956; Chan, 1963; Ch’en, 1964; Schwartz, 1985; Kuo, 1986; CHC, 1979, 1986; Dumoulin, 1988; Graham, 1989). Sources for Greek rankings (DL, 1925 [orig. ca. 200 c.e.]; Sextus Empiricus, 1949 [orig. ca. 200 c.e.]; Suidae Lexicon, 1937 [orig. ca. 950 c.e.]; Zeller, 1919; Guthrie, 1961–1982; EP, 1967; CHLG, 1967; Rist, 1969; Dillon, 1977; Kirk and Raven, 1983; Long, 1986; Reale, 1985, 1987, 1990). Additional information on network connections among Chinese philosophers (Ariel, 1989; Chang, 1957–1962; Cleary, 1983; Gernet, 1982; Graham, 1958, 1978; Knoblock, 1988; Kodera, 1980; Liu, 1967; McMullen, 1988; McRae, 1986; Odin, 1982; Pulleybank, 1960; Smith et al., 1990; Takakusu, [1956] 1973; Welch, 1965; Welch and Seidel, 1979). Additional network connections among Greek philosophers (CHLG; DSB; OCCL; Frede, 1987; Hadas, 1950, 1952, 1954; Jonas, 1963; Tarrant, 1985; Rawson, 1985).

2.I assume three active generations per century, corresponding to the typical period of creative maturity within an individual lifetime. Hence each individual typically overlaps the lifetimes of the creative generations immediately before and after: until age 33 or thereabouts, as pupil or protégé of the elder; thereafter as mentor or obstacle to the younger. Corroborating my use of 33 years as a generation, succession charts of Buddhist lineages show an almost exact correspondence to the figure of three generations per century. See Kodera (1980: 98), which gives a succession of 39 generations in 1,300 years; and the Ch’an lineages in Dumoulin (1988: 328–335).

3.The Chinese average is affected by some long empty spells: 21 generations out of 63 in which there are neither major nor secondary figures, although there are minor figures scattered throughout. Leaving aside these empty generations, as well as the 6 empty generations in the Greek networks, gives us averages which are almost identical: 0.6 major philosophers and 1.5 secondary ones per generation for China,

0.6major and 1.6 secondary for Greece.

4.One might suppose that creativity is based on a randomly distributed trait, a rare trace element of human physiology or psychology; hence it should occur more frequently when populations are larger. But neither in China nor in Greece is creativity regularly related to population size. We might restrict this finding by

Notes to Pages 58–63 • 951

assuming that creativity can come out only in the literate population; but wide historical variations in the literacy rate do not correlate with creativity (estimates from McEvedy and Jones, 1978; CHC, 1986, 1979; Rawson, 1985; Havelock, 1982; Jones, [1964] 1986: 874–879, 910–912, 930–934, 992; Mann, 1986: 206– 207, 253–256, 269, 313–316, 336). And we shall see that the concentration of creativity continues even within the massive highly educated populations of modern times.

5.These initial ratings are relative to any given history: comprehensive volumes treat more individual figures; specialized histories of particular eras or schools of thought offer comparisons only within their scope; longer books allow lengthier treatments of particular philosophers. Sources include both ancient and modern ones. There are, of course, differences: Sextus Empiricus, Diogenes Laertius (both ca. 200 c.e.), and the Suidas (ca. 950 c.e.) have somewhat different priorities than we do. Diogenes Laertius gives 75 pages to Epicurus and 71 to Zeno of Citium but only 49 to Plato. Aristotle is treated as a distinctly secondary figure, receiving 19 pages—the same as Aristippus and less than Pyrrho’s 22 pages (Greek text, 1925 Loeb edition). Diogenes’ relatively modest assessment of Plato was a minority position in his day, and Diogenes’ preference for Epicureanism was something of a last gasp for that philosophy. The Suidas (Byzantium) shows virtually no interest in Latin authors, and does not even mention Lucretius, Seneca, or Augustine. It also shows little interest in Christian or heretic philosophers, ignores most of the Middle Platonists, and is very spotty on the Presocratics, giving Heraclitus only 1 reference, compared to 32 for Aristotle and 75 for Plato. Among the Neoplatonists, Plotinus gets a surprisingly low 3 references, Porphyry 13, Proclus 26. Diogenes Laertius, writing some 15 generations after the classic age of Greek philosophers, was of course no more of a contemporary than we are, and the Suidas is 20 generations later than that. My method averages together reputations from different periods, using generous cutting points so that persons who had major reputations for any extended period of time are listed as at least secondary in the overall scheme.

6.Not to be confused with Euclid the Alexandrian geometer, 100 years later.

7.In the Confucian school, the canon had an especially privileged position; from the Han dynasty onwards, it comprised the books which were officially recognized by the state, and which in later dynasties were used as texts for civil service examinations.

8.Compare the figures to whom Sorokin gives most attention in his Contemporary Sociological Theories of 1928 (in rank order from the top): LePlay, Huntington, Pareto, Marx, Durkheim, Coste, Engels, De Roberty, and LaPouge. Weber ranks in the next group of secondary figures along with Winiarsky, Hobhouse, Gumplowicz, Ammon, and Gobineau. Our current pantheon members Simmel, Toennies, Comte, Cooley, and Thomas are treated as minor figures; George Herbert Mead is not mentioned at all.

9.In the Greek networks, a couple of important incidental figures connect the great Roman Stoics Seneca and Epictetus: the emperor Nero and Epaphroditus (187 in Figure 3.6), Nero’s secretary and owner of the slave Epictetus. Incidental persons

952 • Notes to Pages 64–67

also figure in our representation of formally organized schools; because of the care with which lineage transmission records were treated by the Buddhist sects, we usually know the names of sect leaders for generations, even if there is nothing significant to be said about their own doctrines.

10.The periphery is the world of the autodidact, and home of the myth of posthumous glory. Though one might hope to find “closet creativity” here, untrammeled by conformity to the fashions of the center, the reality is almost the reverse. Peripheral intellectuals may combine ideas in different ways from what the intellectuals of the current core are doing, yet they depend on cultural capital transmitted from the past, only with a greater lag. I recall an undergraduate student—older than the others, someone who had come back to school on his own—coming up to me excitedly after a sociology class, proclaiming his discovery: social change is neither a straight-line evolution nor a cycle but their combination in a spiral. I hadn’t the heart to tell him that he was working on the ideas of Vico and Condorcet, more than half a dozen generations behind his time.

11.Where formal schools constitute probable connections among known individuals via unknown intermediaries (marked “x”), they are indicated as dotted lines. This dotted-line symbolism is also used for connections which are likely but not certain. In some cases, these formal school connections run through persons labeled “i”: those whose names are known incidentally because of their connection to a more eminent philosopher rather than mentioned because of notable accomplishments in their own right (for example, see the Ch’an lineages in Figures 6.3 and 6.4). The problem of incomplete information, especially as it affects our view of ancient networks, is considered in Appendix 2.

12.To avoid misunderstanding, it is worth underlining what the network chart is about. Everyone has a social milieu that is much larger than the ties shown on the chart, including many persons who are not intellectuals as well as some who are. What this network displays are ties among philosophers who have achieved at least some minimal degree of eminence in intergenerational memory.

13.Incidental figures are excluded from these calculations of immediate connections, since they are listed only because they are known from their connection to a more famous figure rather than in their own right. They are however, included in subsequent calculations where they mediate links to more distant philosophers of higher rank.

14.Once again let us understand the substantive significance of my methodology. If we could add links to a chain indefinitely, and we included any persons in these chains whatsoever as long as they eventually link up to someone of eminence, we could undoubtedly connect anyone to anyone else in the history of the world. The “small world” studies on social networks in the 1960s (Travers and Milgram, 1969) show that many Americans can communicate with a high-status person unknown to them within about six links or so. To guard against this possibility, I allow “incidental” figures (those marked “i”) into the networks only as one-link connections between members of the well-known intellectual community. Moreover, experimental studies of message transmission show that communications tend to become garbled after a few links. What this implies for our intellectual networks

Notes to Pages 69–72 • 953

is that two-link connections may be providing cultural capital as well as emotional energy, and four-link connections are important mainly because of the structural effects of belonging to a dense creative chain or community; they may shape creative energy but do not significantly transmit cultural capital.

15.The chart might scatter major and minor figures about with no ties among them; this, of course, would mean not that they had no social contacts at all, but that their immediate circles, teachers, and pupils are too unimportant to appear on the chart. The isolates actually appearing in the network charts are given in Appendix 1.

16.On various lists, down through late antiquity, the number of sages varies, sometimes to 10, and the membership fluctuates. Thales, along with Solon, is the most constant across all lists.

17.Confucius (fl. 480 b.c.e.) was deified in the mid-Han dynasty, and his cult received official recognition from around 60 c.e. until the end of the dynasty (200 c.e.), and again from the mid-Tang (ca. 700) onwards. Mencius (fl. 320 b.c.e.) was worshipped in Confucian temples after about 1100 c.e., Chu Hsi after 1241 and again following political interruptions from 1313 onwards (Fung, 1952–53: 2:534; Needham, 1956: 31).

18.Undoubtedly later figures also have had their reputations swollen by the success of their long-term followers. Socrates is so celebrated because many schools branched off from him, and his fame was highest during the time when those schools flourished. Plato’s dominant standing, above other major philosophers, is partly due to the Neoplatonic school, which used him as a legitimating figure for doctrines that diverged fairly substantially from his own emphases. But here we are just adding glory to glory. Socrates, Plato, and other cases of this sort that one could mention—for instance Mencius, Chu Hsi, and the Tao Te Ching author—are unquestionably major creators of new ideas; they mark turning points in the networks of their own day, and are not merely emblems for turning points which happen later, although this is also true.

19.See the cases cited in Chapter 1, note 7; or the section “A Cascade of Creative Circles” in Chapter 10. In European philosophy, where biographical data are most abundant, there are relatively few connections which consist only in a “clubbing together” of the famous. For instance, Hume brought Rousseau to England in 1766, at the end of both their creative lives. But both Hume and Rousseau had other important network connections earlier, noted in Figure 11.1. Where contacts consist only of this “club of the famous,” I have not included such ties in the network charts.

20.Chinese books at this time were written on pieces of bamboo tied together with cords, and hence were rather bulky.

21.Guthrie (1961–1982: 2:388); Hadas (1954: 64–67). Anaxagoras’ book was on sale in Athens for a drachma, relatively cheap at about a day’s wage for a skilled worker. There were professional copyists at Athens, and by 50 b.c.e. at Rome; in Cicero’s day one way to acquire a book was to borrow it from someone else and set one’s slaves to copying it (Rawson, 1985: 42–45). Libraries began to be collected, at first within the philosophical schools themselves, at the time of Aristotle. The Hellenistic

954 • Notes to Pages 73–81

kings competed over possession of great libraries, first at Alexandria (soon after 300 b.c.e.), at Pergamum (190 b.c.e.) and Rhodes (100 b.c.e.), and thereafter in the houses of wealthy Romans (OCCL, 1937: 64; Rawson, 1985: 39–42). In China there is mention of bookshops in the Han capital Loyang ca. 50 c.e., which provided the impoverished young Wang Ch’ung his learning (CHC, 1986: 1:633– 64). Imperial libraries existed from the first unified dynasty, the Ch’in, onwards.

22.The prevalence of personal ties among creative intellectuals is documented in many other modern fields besides philosophy (Griffith and Mullins, 1972; Crane, 1972). Zuckerman (1967) shows that Nobel Prize–winning scientists are most likely to have been trained in the laboratories of previous Nobel Prize winners.

23.Later in the book I will occasionally zoom in on individuals whom we know a great deal about, attempting to show how their trajectory through micro-socio- logical networks shaped their personality, (e.g., Peirce, in Chapter 12; Wittgenstein in Chapter 13; Sartre in Chapter 14). At least two of the three, I dare say, might well have admitted the validity of this kind of analysis.

24.Detailed analysis, including the pattern of apparent exceptions to this general rule, is given in Appendix 1.

25.These figures can hardly be taken as exact. For reasons discussed in Chapter 12, our ability to judge the long-term reputations of intellectuals becomes less reliable as we near our own generation; totals after 1835 are probably inflated, and after 1900 are surely unrealistic. On the one hand, the Japanese network may overstate the number of secondary figures by including some who are publicized only in histories of Zen Buddhism; on the other hand, the total of minor figures could be expanded by including more from Buddhist sources. For India, the number of important thinkers is no doubt understated owing to the large amount of creativity before 400 c.e. which took the form of anonymous or pseudonymous religious texts. In general, information on which the Indian network was based is sparser, and dating more conjectural, than for the other world networks. The world total is also incomplete insofar as several of the networks are truncated, justified by the lesser influence of philosophers of recent centuries; for example, I have traced the Chinese network only through 1565 c.e. In my view the most important omissions are the networks of Buddhist philosophers in Tibet and Korea (although some of the founders of the Tibetan lineages are found in the Indian network in the key to Figures 5.4 and 5.5).

3.Ancient Greece

1.We thus see why, as Holton ([1973] 1988) documents, the themata of intellectual discourse usually come in opposing pairs or trios. Holton lists a large number of opposing themata from the history of scientific theories. The fact that Holton’s list of oppositions is much larger than the three to six positions specified in the law of small numbers implies that what is constant is not a set of deep-rooted cognitive schemata repeating throughout history but rather the structural condition of splitting.

Notes to Pages 82–94 • 955

2.These external conditions are prominent in historical and sociological accounts of the emergence of Greek philosophy (Lloyd, 1987, 1990; Bryant, 1996).

3.From Latin calculus, Greek chalix: pebble.

4.The family migrated to Boeotia, a rather backwoods region of mainland Greece. Hesiod is known to have read a poem at a festival at Chalcis, on the island of Euboea. But he wrote in the cosmopolitan language Ionian, not Boeotian (OCCL, 1937: 207–208).

5.For this reason I have included probable connections in Figure 3.1 for several persons: Pythagoras’ youth coincided with Anaximander’s maturity and fame at nearby Miletus; given Pythagoras’ reputation for wide travels, it seems likely that he would have heard the latter personally, although the sources do not mention it. Hecataeus of Miletus, an exact contemporary of Heraclitus, played a major role in organizing the Ionian revolt of 499–494 b.c.e. and traveled widely. He must have been at the neighboring city of Ephesus, and in his public capacity could hardly have been unacquainted with Heraclitus, an official of the local temple. Hecataeus was known as a geographer; given the connection of cosmology with geography at this time, Hecataeus likely connects with the chain of cosmological philosophers at Miletus (Guthrie, 1961–1982: 1:74, 173; DSB, 1981: 6:212).

6.Similarly, ancient sources attributed the origins of the atomist Leucippus to both Miletus and Elea (Guthrie, 1961–1982: 2:384). Elea was an Ionian colony, and Miletus was the most actively colonizing city of Ionia (Barraclough, 1979: 75).

7.Plato is reputed to have paid the princely sum of 40 minas (about 4,000 drachmas) for this book (Kirk, Raven, and Schofield, 1983: 324).

8.There was a chain of teachers at Cos down through 280 b.c.e.; after that point its leaders, such as Herophilus (107 in the key to Figure 3.5) and Erasistratus (108), migrated to Alexandria (DSB, 1981: 4:104, 382; 6:316). This was reorganization rather than intellectual death; medical doctrines were simultaneously appearing at Athens, branching off from Aristotle’s school, especially that of Diocles (76), who formalized Hippocratic materials using the categories of philosophy. Within a generation medicine, as well as natural science, was firmly institutionalized at Alexandria in the Museum (von Staden, 1989).

9.The Library was begun under Ptolemy (r. 323–283) and greatly expanded under his son Ptolemy II (r. 285–246), who is said to have purchased Aristotle’s collection of books (OCCL, 1937: 22, 138, 241, 281; Hadas, 1954: 21–24). The Museum, founded under Ptolemy II, supported literary scholars and also scientists. It is likely that both Ptolemy patronized individual scholars even before this formal institution was created; Strato was the tutor of Ptolemy II before returning to Athens as head of the Lyceum.

10.Epicurus had taught earlier at Lampsacus (on the Hellespont) and Mytilene (in the northeastern Aegean), where he formed his first community of followers. Other early branches were established at Antioch and Alexandria (Long, 1986: 17). The Epicurean community was organized into ranks, with the wise man at the top (Epicurus himself and his successors), followed by associate leaders, assistants, and pupils (Rist, 1972: 9–12). Probably the subordinate communities and lower ranks

956 • Notes to Pages 94–106

of membership included persons in lay life who provided material support for the intellectual elite.

11.The master-pupil chains, which we can trace down to 50 b.c.e. in the case of the Academics, Stoics, and Epicureans, break up after 200 b.c.e. in the case of the Aristoteleans, although there are scattered names of notable members of the school through the next three generations, and the scholarch of the Peripatos was part of the delegation of Athenian ambassadors to Rome in 156–55 b.c.e., along with the heads of the Academy and the Stoa.

12.The old Academy was physically deserted; Antiochus of Ascalon (d. 68 b.c.e.) lectured at a gymnasium near the Agora, the original property having apparently lapsed (Dillon, 1977: 60, 232). After 50 b.c.e. the Epicurean Garden was sold and the school became defunct at Athens (Reale, 1985: 183–184, 413).

13.The higher numbers apply if we count the medical schools and the Alexandria Museum.

14.Zeno of Elea, for example, was famous for taking part in democratic political movements; he was allegedly killed by a tyrant of Elea or Syracuse (DSB, 1981: 14:607–608). Empedocles was active both in politics and in practicing medicine (Guthrie, 1961–1982: 2:131).

15.But Gorgias, Prodicus, Hippias, and others also served as ambassadors of their native cities, and Protagoras was entrusted by Pericles with drafting legal codes (Guthrie, 1961–1982: 3:264, 270, 274, 281).

16.There were many scandalous stories, such as of Crates and his wife, Hipparchia, who mated under their cloaks in public, gave away their daughter for a 30-day trial marriage, and—a violation of sexist convention—attended (all-male) dinner parties together (DL, 1925: 6:97; Reale, 1985: 381–382, 30–34).

17.There is no indication that the Pythagoreans themselves had connected their mathematics with their transmigration doctrine. It was left for Plato to do this, because he was using their cultural capital in a different context: the competition against an active intellectual field of relativists armed with self-conscious logical standards of argument. The classical Pythagoreans, by contrast, apparently did not confront epistemological issues (cf. Morgan, 1990; Burkert, 1972).

18.Aristotle was not consistently hostile to mathematics, since he contributed to the formalization of proofs by pointing out the role of definitions, hypotheses, and axioms (in Posterior Analytics). The trajectory of his split probably developed as the religious cult of mathematics grew up around his rival for the succession as scholarch, Speusippus. Conversely, the Aristotelean school later returned to mathematics, after the Academy repudiated its number religion and turned to skepticism.

19.Three if we count the Alexandrian Library and Museum; this, however, was connected at first with the Aristotelean school and provided an alternate base which kept the school alive during the political upheavals after Alexander’s death.

20.As we see in Figure 3.4, Zeno emerged from extremely wide connections, as pupil of Academics, Megarians, Cynics, Eretrians, and even studying medicine in Alexandria (Frede, 1987: 230). His syncretism comes from this confluence of diverse cultural capitals.

Notes to Pages 107–122 • 957

21.Archimedes studied at Alexandria; though he resided in Syracuse, he “published” his results in letters to his Alexandrian mathematical friends ca. 240 b.c.e.

22.Eudoxus had moved at least part of his mathematical school from Cyzicus to Cnidus a generation or two previously (DSB, 1981: 4:465–467); it is possible that the mathematics at Alexandria was fostered by a further migration of the remnants of that school, at the same time as the medical scholars.

23.“The logic of propositions, which [the Stoics] studied, is more fundamental than the logic of general terms, which Aristotle studied . . . Aristotle’s syllogistic takes its place as a fragment of general logic in which theorems of primary logic are assumed without explicit formulation, while the dialectic of Chrysippus appears as the first version of primary logic” (Kneale and Kneale, 1984: 175–176). “When Clement of Alexandria [late 100s c.e.] wishes to mention one who is master among logicians, as Homer is master among poets, it is Chrysippus, not Aristotle, whom he names” (ibid., 116).

24.The Epicurean Philodemus had a school at Naples around 50 b.c.e., but the enterprise lapsed with his death (Rawson, 1985). Epictetus taught Stoicism in exile at Epirus (the backwoods of northwestern Greece) after 100 c.e., but his successful school was not perpetuated.

25.Later, the most famous developers of Empiricist medical doctrine, Menedotus and Theodas (100s c.e.), were also the main representatives of skepticism, leading up to Sextus Empiricus. The connection is further supported by the fact that medical Empiricism and philosophical skepticism both disappear together after 200 c.e.

26.This was not strictly accurate. There were a few Epicurean renegades, such as Timocrates in the founding generation (who wrote a scathing exposé of the community’s practices), and Metrodorus of Stratonicea, who joined the Academy in Carneades’ generation (Frischer, 1982: 50–51; Tarrant, 1985: 94). But this is nothing like the shifting of personnel among the other schools: Zeno himself, Arcesilaus, and Chrysippus all built up their cultural capital through such moves.

27.Both circles were concerned with poetry, a high-prestige art in Rome at this time. Epicurean doctrine survived mainly because it was embodied in Lucretius’ Latin masterpiece. In the other school, as Figure 3.5 indicates, one of Philodemus’ pupils was Virgil.

28.When Platonists reappeared at Athens from 50 c.e. onwards, they were not described as scholarch or diadochos (successor), although some of them (such as Calvenus Taurus, ca. 100–165 c.e.) had their own private schools (Dillon, 1977: 232–233, 237–239).

29.A handsome sum, since a day’s wage for a skilled workman was about one drachma, and a year’s salary for a Roman legionary about 1,000 sesterces, roughly equivalent to 250 drachmas (OCCL, 1937: 277–278; Finley, 1973: 79–80, 104).

30.On the social role of the rhetorician (who often doubled as legal advocate) and of the grammarians who prepared students for the rhetoric schools, see Kaster (1988).

31.The organizational weakness of pagan cults was that they had few if any full-time priests (Jones, [1964] 1986: 933). Their upkeep was usually tied to the local gentry; for instance, Plutarch of Chaeronea was among other things a priest of nearby

958 • Notes to Pages 125–138

Delphi. The Gnostics, although nontraditional in doctrine and elitist in membership, shared this traditional organization style of part-time leaders with merely local roots. The traditional Egyptian temples with their extensive property were an exception to this amateur pattern, but their circles were very parochial.

32.Another pro-Christian emperor, Gallienus, who called off the Decian persecutions, vetoed Plotinus’ project for the religious community “Platonopolis” (CHLG, 1967: 202).

33.This is not to deny that there were external organizational and political factors involved in the heresy disputes, but rather to stress that there were internal intellectual issues involved as well, which had their own sociological impetus inside the intellectual community. The heresies emerged when there was a coordination of the two levels of struggle.

34.The tendency of Middle Platonism to become relatively more associated with Christianity may well be another reason why Plotinus formulated a rival Neoplatonist doctrine for the anti-Christian coalition.

35.Of the eight great Latin and Greek doctors recognized by the church, seven worked in the generation of the 360s to the 390s: Ambrose, Augustine, Jerome, Basil of Cappadocia, Gregory of Nazianzus, Gregory of Nyssa, and John Chrysostom (Attwater and John, 1983: 41, 107, 194). This is the period immediately after the failure of Julian’s restoration of the pagan cults in 362–363. The only major church father not in this generation is Pope Gregory the Great, active 575–604.

36.Once inside the church, it was not difficult to choose a winning faction. In 386 the Manichees were purged at Carthage; in 388 a Donatist bishop was executed; in 391 the emperor issued a general edict against paganism; in 399 imperial agents closed pagan shrines in Africa (Brown, 1967: 74, 184, 187). Carthage, a land of organizational struggle among Catholics, Donatists, and Manichees, was just the place to produce a thinker like Augustine. An ingredient of his greatness was the opportunity to define the doctrinal content of orthodoxy for the victorious organizational faction.

37.It was about this time that Neoplatonism had its last upsurge, with the formal reestablishment of the Academy at Athens and Alexandria. Neoplatonism made a useful religion for educated pagans under Christian power, since it favored inner worship approached via philosophy rather than exterior cult practices at just the time when the latter were being abolished.

4.Ancient China

1.Historical sources are often vague regarding the lives of intellectuals of early China, as they are for Greece and India. What follows here is an attempt at coherent reconstruction of how the oppositions of the intellectual community unfolded. It should be understood throughout, without repeated caveats in the text, that an interpretation is being offered. Occasional footnotes cite evidence in regard to controversial points about the dating. Network sources for Chapters 4 and 6 are those given in Chapter 2. On Chinese social history, see Eberhard (1977); Gernet (1982); CHC (1986).

Notes to Pages 140–149 • 959

2.Han Fei Tzu mentions eight schools (Han Fei Tzu, [sect. 50], 1964: 118), Hsün Tzu mentions 5 major schools of Confucian ju (scholars), although perhaps only a smaller number survived down into contemporary times (250 b.c.e.) (Knoblock, 1988: 214–220, 224–229).

3.Mo Ti himself led 180 soldiers. All the Mohists in the state of Ch’u—a total of 83—were wiped out in a siege in 381 b.c.e. (Fung, 1952–53: 1:82). By 280 the major armies were perhaps on the order of 100,000 men (Knoblock, 1988: 8); Eberhard (1977: 49), however, suggests only around 10,000.

4.A parallel development occurred in Europe during the 1600s: the international network of diplomats, religious emissaries, and soldiers of fortune became for several generations the base of the new intellectual community which formed outside traditional positions in the church (see Chapter 10).

5.This collection of intellectuals also produced what was becoming the prestige intellectual product: an encyclopedia of knowledge under the standard title, Spring and Autumn Annals (in this case) of Master Lü (the prime minister). Spring and Autumn Annals was the title of a Confucian text, attributed to Confucius himself.

6.There remained for a while groups such as the augurs in Rome, but even in this religiously conservative city-state the college of pontifices was monopolized by politicians (OCCL, 1937: 65, 342; Rawson, 1985). There were some hereditary priests in Greece as late as 500 b.c.e. who played an occasional role in philosophy; Heraclitus came from such a priestly family in the cult center of Ephesus, and his imprecations upon the new secular philosophers were probably related to their professional challenge. There are also shamanistic aspects to figures such as Empedocles and Heraclides Ponticus and in the medical cult of the Asclepiades. But even they were not especially concerned to restore the ancient rites, which would have seemed outside the realm of political possibility.

7.Plato is the principal exception here. Of all the Greek philosophers, he is closest to the Chinese pattern of centering his analysis on political projects, and in the Laws he proposes an ideal state centered on a compulsory but non-traditional cult. But this political interest was confined to Plato’s own lifetime; the Academy, in both its phases of astral religion and skepticism, quickly fell back into the mainstream pattern of Greek intellectuals in focusing on the inner lives of individuals. If there is a tradition of “Western individualism,” it originated in the autonomy of political struggle from religious legitimation.

8.In the absence of Hui Shih’s own texts and with minimal survivals of Kung-sun Lung’s, there have been widely divergent interpretations of their positions. Fung Yu-lan (1952–53: 192–220) regards Hui Shih’s as a metaphysics of particulars in ceaseless change, Kung-sun Lung’s as a realism of universals. Graham (1989: 82–83) argues that all philosophers of this period took nominalism for granted, and interprets the paradoxes as explorations of part-whole relations. Farther afield, Reding (1985) suggests that Hui Shih’s statements derive from political arguments. The most extreme position is that of Hansen (1983), that classical Chinese language lacks abstractions and thus constrains thought into channels totally different from those of the West. This linguistic determinism is rejected by Schwartz (1985: 12, 165, 168) and moderated by Graham (1989: 389–428).

960 • Notes to Pages 151–167

9.The Canons refute positions of all the rival schools, including the Five Agents of Tsou Yen, but do not mention doctrines of the Tao Te Ching or the Legalists (Graham, 1978: 61). This implies a date before Han Fei Tzu popularized legalism, but at least contemporary with Tsou Yen.

10.Empedocles had four elements (fire, water, earth, air) ordered by opposing principles of strife and love. It is generally agreed that wu hsing should be rendered not as “five elements” but as “five processes” or “five agents”; hsing is “walk” or “move” with the connotation “put into effect” (Knoblock, 1988: 216–217). Major (1976) proposes “five phases.” But three of the five (wood, metal, earth) are concrete substances, conceivable as processes only under interpretations imposed later.

11.These comprised the Odes, Documents, Rites, Changes (Yi Ching), and Spring and Autumn Annals. This culminated a struggle over precedence among a wide range of earlier texts, each supported by their own specialists.

12.During the T’ang, relatives of the imperial house were executed or impeached for consulting diviners (CHC, 1979: 334, 379–381; Fung, 1952–53: 16; Woo, 1932).

13.It is notable that the word yi (change), and the cosmological opposites yin and yang appear for the first time in this Appendix rather than in the original divination texts or the earlier Appendices commenting on the interpretation of particular hexagrams (Legge, [1899] 1963: 38, 43). The argument is not very abstract; overall the tone is more one of worldly advice than of cosmological system. The text of the third Appendix “makes plain the nature of anxieties and calamities, and the causes of them” (Legge, [1899] 1963: 399), extols the superior man, and sprinkles references to ancient sage-kings who were allegedly inspired in their technological inventions by the hexagrams. This is another indication that this Appendix dates from the time of the burning of the books, when works on technology and other practical lore remained in favor.

14.The Han dynasty produced considerable work in science and mathematics, although generally in other branches of the official bureaucracy than the Confucians (Needham, 1959: 19–30, 199–200, 216–219; Mikami, 1913; Sivin, 1969).

15.In 37 c.e. the descendants of Confucius were ennobled, and in 59 annual sacrifices to Confucius were instituted at all schools. Wang Ch’ung wrote soon after.

16.Recall that in the comparative analysis of networks in Chapter 2, Wang Ch’ung is one of the most unusual figures in all of the world history of philosophy: an individual of at least secondary importance in the long-term attention space who has no contemporary rivals of equal eminence, and who is not only a horizontal but also a vertical isolate from chains of historically significant intellectuals.

17.We find a similar situation in Japan during the Sengoku period, the “country at war” (1470–1580). Vociferous public debates took place among the rival branches of Pure Land Buddhism, but these generations are devoid of intellectual innovation. At this time the monasteries were major political powers, and their debates were an immediate part of the struggle for public prestige and military alliance.

18.The Chuang Tzu (chap. 6) speaks rhapsodically about death as a natural and even desirable process.

19.Members of the “Five Pecks of Grain” movement, a health cult for the peasantry,

Notes to Pages 173–190 • 961

for example, memorized the Tao Te Ching but gave it a vulgar interpretation. “‘The Tao that can be Tao’d,’ this is to eat good things in the morning: ‘the Tao that is not eternal,’ this is to have a bowel movement in the evening” (Welch, 1965: 119).

20.Kuo Hsiang’s major work is his commentary on the Chuang Tzu, which was in part a continuation—and perhaps a plagiarism—of the unfinished commentary by Hsiang Hsu in the previous generation. As Figure 4.4 indicates, Hsiang Hsu probably took part in the discussions of the Seven Sages of the Bamboo Grove, and is indirectly linked to Wang Pi and the rationalistic interpreters of Taoism. Kuo Hsiang probably had some contact with Hsiang Hsu’s son, reportedly careless in scattering his father’s treatise about (Fung, 1952–53: 206). Whatever the individual contributions, the “philosophy of Kuo Hsiang” is very much a product of the core intellectual factions around Loyang in the late 200s.

5.India

1.There were eight such swings: (1) Consolidation of the numerous small kingdoms in the middle Ganges into 16 major states around 600 b.c.e., then down to 4 contenders 100 years later, culminating in the Maurya Empire over almost all of India ca. 300–185 b.c.e., and disintegrating thereafter. The two leading states around 500, Magadha and Kosala, were the first patrons of Buddhism and Jainism.

(2)A three-way split among leading states, peaking around 150 c.e., including the south-central Andhra kingdom, another Buddhist patron. (3) The Gupta Empire in the north, from 335 c.e. to the late 400s. (4) Harsha’s reconquest of Gupta territory around 600–650. (5) In the late 800s another three-way struggle in the north, including the last great patron of Buddhism, the Pala kingdom in Bengal, expanding westward into the ancient Magadha heartland. The last three cycles prior to the British Empire involve Muslim invaders from the northwest; in counterpoint, Hindu kingdoms in the far south attain their maximal size. (6) Around 1000, the Ghaznavid Muslim empire centered in Iran and central Asia conquered the northwest; meanwhile the Chola Empire expanded in the south. (7) Another Muslim conquest in the late 1100s, expanding by 1335 to almost all of India except the far south, then disintegrating rapidly after 1340. In the south the kingdom of Vijayanagar attains its greatest size in the 1500s. (8) The Mogul conquest from Afghanistan in the 1560s, spreading south in the 1600s; its disintegration after 1770 leaves the power vacuum filled by European overseas empires (Davies, 1949; OHI, 1981; Dutt, 1962; Thapar, 1966; Craven, 1975; Zürcher, 1962; Gombrich, 1988; Chandler and Fox, 1974).

2.The centralizing Maurya dynasty arose on the basis of a succession of parricide kings. The Arthashastra, or classic of statecraft, composed at this time, advocated the most blatant tactics of treachery and espionage as the path to artha, worldly success.

3.Hence the lower Ganges province takes its name, Bihar, from vihara, monastery. On Buddhist support, see OHI, (1981: 169–173); Dutt (1962: 331; 225–230).

4.Sharma (1965); Mann (1986: 356–357); OHI, (1981: 112–113, 178–179, 206– 208). An exception to this pattern apparently occurred in coastal states of the south

962 • Notes to Pages 193–195

and west, where overseas trade gave an alternative basis for state revenues. The importance of this pattern for state-building in the European context is shown by Tilly (1990). This may be a reason why the Jainas, associated with merchants, were major contenders for state alliance in these regions. Conversely the Buddhists, with their agrarian monastic base, fit Tilly’s alternative pattern of state formation: landed revenues. Hence Buddhism declined in the south as the trade-based states rose.

5.It is worth underlining that the so-called “six darshanas” or “orthodox philosophies” (Nyaya, Vaisheshika, Yoga, Samkhya, Mimamsa, Vedanta), which are the standard rubrics in virtually all general histories of Indian philosophy, were by no means static or primordial positions. The notion of “six darshanas” was not created until fairly late in the medieval period, and they developed, much as philosophical schools did elsewhere, out of debates both among their own ranks and across the attention space with non-Hindu rivals. The ideology of the darshanas is part of the static bias which it is necessary to break through in order to reconstruct the actual history of Indian intellectual life.

6.Sources for the networks which follow (EIP, 1977, 1981, 1987, 1990; Halbfass, 1991, 1992; Isayeva, 1993; Potter, 1976; Dasgupta, 1922–1955; Chattopadhyaya, 1972, 1979; Basham, 1989; Raju, 1985; Pandey, 1986; Nakamura, 1980; Dutt, 1962; Hirakawa, 1990; Conze, 1962; Kalupahana, 1992; Lamotte, 1958; Stcherbatsky, 1962; Phillips, 1995).

7.Nakamura (1973: 33–35); Chattopadhyaya (1972: 32–40); Gonda (1975); Stutley (1980). For a position stressing the long-term unity of orthodox Hinduism since the early Vedas, see Smith (1994). On the other side, see Krishna (1991).

8.These separate groups of teachers were recognized outside the Vedic texts as well. The Buddha himself refers to followers of the Samaveda, Rigveda, and the two Yagurvedas (Barua, 1974: 284). Krishna (1991: 83–84) argues for even more sub-splits within the schools of the Vedas.

9.It is not clear when the Upanishads actually became standard parts of the Vedic transmission schools; as we shall see, the early and middle Upanishads depict freelance sages who are quite critical of Vedic priestcraft. The reorganization of Upanishadic lore into a broad pan-Vedic coalition may have occurred in the early centuries of the Common Era.

10.E.g., Chand. Up. 7.1.2; Brihad. Up. 1.5.5 and 4.1.2 (700–500 b.c.e.). Somewhat later the Aitareya (1.3.9), about 500 b.c.e., mentions only the three Vedas. The Buddhist Jataka tales, ca. 300 b.c.e., similarly refer to the three Vedas; so does Kautilya’s Arthashastra, which itself draws on spells from the Atharva, as from a separate tradition, as “secret means” for spying and destroying enemies (bk. 14). The earliest to list all four as Vedas is the Mundaka Upanishad (1.5), ca. 350–300 b.c.e. But the late Maitriyana (6.32) still lists only three Vedas and calls the Atharva “hymns,” indicating that the canon was not settled as late as 200 c.e. Dates from Nakamura (1973: 77–78); see also OHI, (1981: 86–87, 107).

11.Krishna (1991: 95–109) points out that the “Upanishads” are an inchoate category of texts, selected under that label from a wide variety of sources and time periods. Far from constituting “the end of the Vedas,” they were often selected from

Notes to Pages 195–199 • 963

chapters in the midst of Brahmanas and Aranyakas, or expanded from such texts, while others were added later. Most of them originally did not use the term “Upanishad,” which in the Arthashastra (300 b.c.e.) still meant “secret weapon” rather than a religious doctrine.

12.Chakravarti (1987); Mizuno (1980); Hirakawa (1990); Jacobi (1884); Dutt (1962: 46–51). The Videha land, whose king sponsors debates involving such sages as Yajñavalkya, is a scene of the Buddha’s life too. Both kinds of sources show kings striving to attract famous sages to their courts by material patronage (e.g., Brihadaranyaka Upanishad 2.1.1).

13.Cf. Chandogya Upanishad 5.11 and 17; 6.1; Brihad. Up. 3.7; 6.2; Kaushitaki Upanishad 1.1. This probably indicates the rivalry of the Samavedists to which Uddalaka’s Upanishad was attached, against the White Yagur, allied to Yajñavalkya’s lore, as well as against the Rigvedists of the Kaushitaki.

14.Brihad. Up. 3.6.1; 3.9.27; cf. Chand. Up. 1.8; 10.10–11, where the threat that “your head will fall off” invokes a magical punishment for singing a hymn without knowing its meaning. The implication is that winning a debate sequence was regarded as a demonstration of superior magic.

15.Akin to this may be the famous lesson of Uddalaka Aruni about breaking a seed into infinitesimal pieces to find the invisible essence (Chand. Up. 6.12). Ruben (in Chattopadhyaya, 1979: 141–156) points out that Uddalaka’s sequence of arguments (Chand. Up. 6.1–16) indicates a kind of hylozoist materialism of living matter; for instance, he instructs his son to abstain from eating for fifteen days in order to show that this impairs one’s memory, concluding that “mind comes from food” (6.7.6). The ultimate lesson, that one’s self is part of the invisible essence of the universe, does not so much imply that the universe is spiritual, as that the human self, too, is produced from the hylozoic essence. Given the lack of distinction between levels of abstraction, what later philosophers interpreted as a transcendental monism may just as well have been a claim for one physical element underlying the others, in much the same sense that Thales posited water as the primal element. Similarly, Uddalaka’s experiment with salt invisibly pervading water (Chand. Up. 6.13) is primitive physics as much as it is transcendental philosophy.

16.Brihad. Up. 6.3; this magic is attributed to Uddalaka Aruni, who gives it to his “pupil” Yajñavalkya. Similar worldly magical claims are made in some of the most “philosophical” Upanishads, e.g., Chand. Up. 2.1–29; Kaush. Up. 2.6.4–10.

17.Only one of the classic Upanishads, the Maitrayani (1.3–4), equates life with suffering, and it uses words identical with classic Buddhist phrases; this is a late Upanishad from around 200 c.e.. (Nakamura, 1973: 77–78). Its contemporary, the Mandukya Upanishad includes phrases found in the Prajñaparamitasutras of Mahayana Buddhism.

18.O’Flaherty (1980: xi–xxiv, 3–13). The clearest formulation of the karma doctrine appears again in the late Maitrayani Upanishad (3–4), in virtually Buddhist language; this is also the only Upanishad which links karma and rebirth to the performance of caste duties (4.4.3). In the pre-Buddhist Brihad. Up. (3.2.13), a debate is described in which one question has to be discussed privately. The

964 • Notes to Pages 200–206

narrator then tells us at the end of the chapter that the interlocutors talked of karma. This may be a late interpolation, since the lines appear at the end of a chapter. If not, it implies that karma—in whatever version at that time—was a secret doctrine, not a view that would be accepted as religiously binding by most hearers. As late as the Bhagavad Gita, a series of interpolations in the Mahabharata influenced by the new Hindu philosophical schools ca. 100–500 c.e., there is a mixture of conflicting doctrines about reincarnation and other forms of life after death (e.g., 1.42.44; 8.6.23–25; 9.25). The thread which is retrospectively emphasized, that favorable reincarnation depends on performance of one’s duties under caste law, becomes the dominant religious interpretation still later, in the final onslaught against Buddhism around 700 c.e..

19.For debates on these dates, see Hirakawa (1990: 22–23).

20.The futile questions which the Buddha tells his followers to avoid are similar to Kant’s antinomies: the beginning and end of the universe, the difference between body and soul, life after death. These are favorite debating topics among the Upanishadic sages; by denying their solubility, the Buddha claims a superior level of reflexive sophistication.

21.For various translations and sources, see Nakamura (1980: 66–69; Kalupahana (1986: 10–16).

22.The Ajivikas too received royal patronage, for instance, under the Maurya dynasty. Mahavira and Makkhali Gosala were close associates until their debates led to a sharp break between their respective sects. Mahavira and Shakyamuni competitively proselytized some of the same lay patrons. But Shakyamuni’s strongest enemy, in tactical struggles in the lay community as well as in debate, was Makkhali Gosala (Mizuno, 1980: 120–141; Basham, 1951; OHI, 1981: 77, 130). This rivalry probably resulted from the fact that Shakyamuni was both appropriating and negating Makkhali’s key doctrine in proposing a method to overcome karmic fate.

23.Mizuno (1980: 99, 104). The Jainas also preached, although not as aggressively as the Buddhists.

24.Chakravarti (1987: 122–149). This recruitment base continued throughout the lifetime of Indian Buddhism.

25.The range of meditation techniques includes one-pointed concentration, observing one’s breath, stilling the inner dialogue, focusing on consciousness itself apart from its objects (Buddhist and Yoga techniques); visualizing energies or lights within one’s own body, especially in the genitals; raising inner heat and moving it about one’s body (tantric techniques); inwardly visualizing symbols, gods, the experience of one’s own death, the letters in the name of God, and so on (Tibetan Buddhist, Sufi, Taoist, Kabbalist techniques); outwardly focusing on visual symbols (mandalas, crucifixes, etc.); chanting mantras (pure sounds) or sutras (holy texts), singing verbal hymns; rhythmic dancing (Sufi darvish sects, medieval Japanese Amidaists); physical activities to the point of exhaustion, or self-torture (Sufis, shramanas, Christian ascetics, shamans, tribal vision-seekers); verbal prayer or communication with a personified deity (Christianity); counting, slowing, or holding breaths (Buddhists, Taoists); blowing and spitting (Chinese Huai-nan Tzu);

Notes to Pages 206–209 • 965

intellectual “investigation of things” (Neo-Confucians), or analysis of concepts into emptiness (Buddhists); koan paradoxes, sometimes together with receiving shouts and blows from one’s teacher (Ch’an); enlightenment during preaching (T’ien-t’ai and Amida Buddhism, Sufism, enthusiastic sectarian Christianity). The resulting experiences range from tranquillity to weeping and emotional enthusiasm, from “bright light” to “divine dark” to “clear glass consciousness,” from floating detachment (zazen) to deep trance (samadhi) to sudden enlightenment (satori).

26.Results of meditation have been conceived to involve both detachment from the world and action in it. Detachment may be interpreted as an end in itself, or an end to individual suffering (Buddhism); as contact with God or salvation from sins (Sufism, Christianity, Mahayana); as individual psychotherapy (post-1950 Western secularism). Worldly results aimed at include health and longevity (Taoism); magical powers such as clairvoyance, levitation, and spells over other living beings (shamanistic and folk beliefs, incorporated in most mystical traditions as lesser side effects); political power to regulate the state (Taoism); shelter from political persecution (medieval Jewish Kabbalism); motivation of millennial political movements, ranging from nationalist particularism (Sufism, Imamism, Kabbalism) to universalistic trans-sectarianism (Rosicrucianism, Masonism).

27.In later historical cases, monasteries become organizational vehicles for settling frontier areas or introducing capitalist accumulation, especially in a rural economy. This is most notable in China ca. 400–800 c.e., and again in Christian Europe 1050–1300 and in Japan 1200–1600. The key advantage of the monastic mode of organization is its ability to free up and reinvest resources in a society otherwise dominated by kinship organization of production.

28.Nakamura (1973: 77–79). The Mandukya Upanishad, which Gaudapada (ca. 500–600) used as a basis for developing Advaita, is not attached to a Vedic school and does not exist independently of Gaudapada’s commentary (Isayeva, 1993: 50). A good many Upanishads may have originated in this independent fashion before acquiring a connection with a Brahmanical lineage and canonical status from later scholars. Some Upanishads became attached to more than one Veda (e.g., the Katha, attached to Black Yajur, Sama, and Atharva; the Kena, attached to both Sama and Atharva; Muller, [1879–1884] 1962: 1:xci; 2:xxi). This implies that at some period the schools competed over possession of this new high-prestige intellectual property.

29.The Manu Smriti collected earlier ritual duties and prohibitions, beginning after 200 b.c.e., reaching its final form about 100 c.e. The Yajñavalkya Smriti shows a more systematic treatment of law, ca. 100–200 c.e. Its attribution to the sage implies that the Upanishads were being taken into Brahmanical orthodoxy at this time. Still other rival law books were created around this time by the Vishnu sect and others. There was an outpouring of law texts in the medieval period, 700– 1200, when Hinduism definitively triumphed over Buddhism (Basham, 1989: 101–103). Manu became regarded as the definitive book of Hindu caste law only during the British Empire in the 1800s; before that time other works were more widely used in Hindu legal circles (Doniger, 1991: lx–lxi).

966 • Notes to Pages 211–228

30.Manu Smriti 2:3. In contrast, ca. 150 b.c.e. Panini’s grammar (4:6) had merely defined nastika as a non-believer in the other world, excluding only the materialist element philosophers.

31.The Ramayana depicts the Buddhists in the guise of demons inhabiting Sri Lanka, who are defeated by an expedition to the island, headed by a warrior-hero who is identified with one of the gods of the Hindu pantheon.

32.See the accounts of Lamotte (1958: 571–606); Conze (1962: 119, 123, 195); Hirakawa (1990: 110–118); Raju (1985: 147, 154–156); Nakamura (1980); Dutt (1962).

33.Theological issues are those of concern only to believers in particular religious tenets; these may be highly particularistic, such as the name and distinctive identity of God, or local traditions of stories, rituals, and memberships; for instance, the Christian dispute over the immaculate conception of the Virgin Mary, or Hindu arguments over the relative standing of Shiva or Vishnu. Theological issues may also develop more abstract questions, such as the relations among the Trinity, or the existence of cosmic bodies of the Buddha. Philosophical issues are those which, although they may arise in a theological context, are potentially detachable from it and of interest to a wider range of argument. Many issues entwine between theology and philosophy; this is one reason why theological controversies give rise to philosophy, even if the theologians are opposed to it, as was the case in early Buddhism, Christianity, and Islam alike.

34.Hirakawa (1990: 302–303). Mahayana emerged at the same time (100 b.c.e.–100 c.e.) that scribes were taking the place of the oral reciters who specialized in memorizing particular classes of texts (Dutt, 1962: 30, 149).

35.Willis (1979: 52–53). There seem to have been two Vasubandhus, the Yogacara in the mid-300s (designated Vasubandhu I), and the Sarvastivadin a century later (Vasubandhu II). This interpretation is supported by Frauwallner (1953–56), Dutt (1962: 270, 281–282), Potter (1976), and Nakamura (1980: 109), although the traditional identification of the two is maintained by some scholars.

36.Conze (1962: 166–171); Nakamura (1980: 129); Guenther (1972: 59, 132). A thousand years later, a similar inflation of enlightenment took place in the Zen school in its late scholasticizing phase in Japan.

37.Cut off from these developments in the north was a flurry of Buddhist philosophy in Sri Lanka in the mid-400s, where Buddhaghosa combined all the schools into a Theravada master text (Conze, 1962: 203; Kalupahana, 1992: 206–216). It was a syncretism characteristic of defensive periods, at a time when Buddhism was closing down in south India. Its survivors migrated to Sri Lanka, where the king fought off a Tamil invasion from the mainland.

38.Old geopolitical bases reappeared in the newer religious-intellectual rivalries. Mithila was apparently in old Videha, the rival of the Magadha capital in the time of the Buddha and Mahavira (OHI, 1981:77).

39.The Samkhya-sutras, however, were not manufactured until around 1400, during the period when the “six darshanas” rubric was adopted among orthodox Hindus (EIP, 1987: 327).

40.A brief guide to this entire period appears in Chapter 15 under the heading “The

Notes to Pages 229–234 • 967

Indian Sequence” (pages 818–826). There is no overall narrative history of Indian philosophy as a sequence of ongoing arguments; most histories segregate Buddhist and Hindu developments from each other, and within each camp divide the exposition among separate schools as isolated rubrics. The volumes of the Encyclopedia of Indian Philosophy (EIP) provide corrective material at a high level of detail; and partial sketches of overall dynamics and interactions among the schools exist in Stcherbatsky’s (1962) and Frauwallner’s (1953–1956) classic works; see also Rubin (1954). A recent exception is Phillips (1995), which concentrates primarily on the interaction between Nyaya and Advaita.

41.These included lengthy classifications of fallacies, which the Greeks tended to ignore; that is to say, the Indians treated logic as the science of argument rather than the study of valid inference. See Potter, (1976: 56–92); Stcherbatsky (1962); EIP (1977); on the development of Indian logic and its conflictual interaction with Buddhist logicians, see Shastri (1976); and generally Matilal (1986, 1990).

42.In this ecumenical mood Bhartrihari interpreted the Vedic aum as identical to the Madhyamika shunyata; in the succeeding generations, Bhavaviveka (500s) and Chandrakirti (600s) accepted Hinduism as propaedeutic to Buddhism (Halbfass, 1991: 66). Grammar became among the most intersectarian of disciplines. Bhartrihari’s grammar was commented upon by the Yogacarin Dharmapala, the head monk of Nalanda, in the 500s.

43.The details of Bhartrihari’s argument are connected with discussions by his grandteacher Vasubandhu about the nature of time in the Buddhist Abhidharma (EIP, 1990: 41–44, and Potter, 1976: 130–134) as well as with issues then debated between the rival Hindu substance philosophies Samkhya and Vaisheshika.

44.Dignaga’s doctrine is something like Saussure’s structuralist theory of language, in which words take their meaning not by indicating instances but by marking differences from one another. As the later commentator Dharmottara (700s) puts it: pure sensation is all that exists; thought makes it definite by negation; negation is the essence of thought, not of reality (Stcherbatsky, 1962: 1:536).

45.Dignaga here expresses the equivalent of the position of Duns Scotus and William of Ockham that God—the ideal condition of knowledge—perceives everything in its radical particularity, its haecceitas, without the distorting lens of universals.

46.EIP (1987: 4); an early version was known simply as the “sixty topics.” A rather similar activity is implied in the name of the Vaisheshika, which originally seems to have meant “those who make distinctions” (Halbfass, 1992: 272–273). Samkhya lists paralleled in many details the Buddhist Abhidharma. Samkhya as the philosophy of “enumeration” seems to have made its turf the coordination of various lists of this sort, setting up parallels, and deriving further categories from more basic generative ones. Later lists were created by cross-classifying, resulting in mega-systems of 28 or 50 items or more.

47.Purusha is the older concept. In the Rigveda it is the primal Man from whose body the universe was divided; in the Brihadaranyaka Upanishad, it is identified with atman, which divides itself into man and woman, from whose copulation were created the living species. Prakriti, material nature, is eventually identified with the female side, while Purusha becomes a plurality of individual soul substances. In

968 • Notes to Pages 237–246

the tantric Yoga cult that became popular after 800 c.e., the naked woman who copulates with the yogi (in inner visualization or in the flesh) is regarded as an incarnation of Prakriti (Eliade, 1969: 259).

48.The Yoga-sutras, compiled around 500 c.e., differed from previous sutra collections on meditative practice by incorporating an explicit metaphysics from Samkhya, and by adding Hindu theism. Classic Samkhya culminating in Ishvarakrishna was atheistic, following the tendency toward a naturalistic cosmology which comes from raising the level of abstraction on a mythological tradition of anthropomorphic world elements. The Yoga-Samkhya combination heightened the Hindu identity of both positions. Before this time, Yoga meditation was more typically identified with Buddhism; the Yogacara school simply meant “those who meditate.” Philosophical intellectuals looked down on this rather eclectic Hindu syncretism. Yoga is not counted as one of the “six darshanas” by Haribhadra in the 700s; by the time it gets standard mention (around 1400), it is usually lumped in a rubric of positions that are no longer intellectually alive. Shankara in the 700s considered Yoga meditation beneficial mainly for “persons of slower understanding,” and regarded its plurality of souls, and its progression through which the meditator rises from matter to atman, as obstacles to understanding the true non-dualist reality (Halbfass, 1991: 226).

49.It is worth stressing, insofar as the image of Indian philosophy is so heavily colored retrospectively by the later dominance of Advaita, that all five darshanas that existed before 700 c.e. were at least partially materialist, and included sense perception among the valid sources of knowledge.

50.EIP (1981: 15–16, 177, 346). As usual there is debate over the authenticity of these connections. I follow Potter (EIP, 1981) in dating Shankara in the early 700s rather than the traditional 788–820. See also Wood (1990: 38, 47); Isayeva (1993: 83–87).

51.Gaudapada’s famous commentary was on one of the most Buddhist-influenced Upanishads, the Mandukya (ca. 200 c.e.). This Upanishad was also devoted to the cult of the mantra aum, which we have seen Bhartrihari advocating across Buddhist-Hindu lines a few generations earlier. In his commentary on this text, Shankara blatantly inserted the terminology of Brahmanistic Vedanta (Isayeva, 1993: 61). On the composite nature of the Gaudapadiya-Karika and its relationship to Buddhism, see King (1995).

52.Halbfass (1991: 301–310). The complexities of how a sacrifice could bring about its consequences became a fertile ground for debate among the Naiyayikas, from Uddyotakara in the 500s to Jayanta in the 800s. They raised issues such as how a sacrifice gave merit to the sponsor who merely paid the Brahmans to carry it out, or how deficiencies in the karma of the sacrificer could offset the potency of the ritual.

53.After Prabhakara’s Mimamsa had disappeared as an active school, this structural conflict was repeated 400 years later: Prabhakara’s extreme epistemological realism was reappropriated by Ramanuja as part of the differentiation of Advaita intellectual space.

54.For Shankara, the self cannot observe itself, just as “even hot fire cannot burn

Notes to Pages 248–259 • 969

itself, and even the most able actor cannot climb on his own shoulder” (Brahma- sutra-bhasya 3.3.54). Shankara also takes over Prabhakara’s argument for the self-validity of knowledge, while transferring its conclusion from the empirical world to the self, which is in the nature of the case not delimited by any of the concepts which apply to objects. In addition, Shankara cuts short any infinite regress of consciousness observing consciousness, since its knowledge is immediately self-revealing (Isayeva, 1993: 126, 184–185).

55.For instance, in opposing the Mimamsa doctrine of karmic action through ritual, Shankara defends salvation by insight alone, which was the mark of the Madhyamika school. Shankara engages in his lengthiest polemics with the Yogacara school (Isayeva, 1993: 172). This is in keeping with the sociological principle that conflict is most intense when it occurs over close identities (Coser, 1956: 67–71).

56.Shankara’s disciple Sureshvara formulated the argument: “No doubts can arise in relation to the Self, since its nature is pure immediate consciousness” (Deutsch, 1969: 19).

57.Orthodox scholars count between 10 and 14 Upanishads as fundamental, out of the hundred created by this time. Shankara established 11 as classic by citing them in his commentary on the Brahma-sutras, and wrote commentaries on 10 of them (EIP, 1981; Nakamura, 1973: 77–79). Badarayana had referred to 6 of these; Gaudapada’s Advaita commentary had publicized yet another Upanishad, the Buddhist-influenced Mandukya, which Shankara (if his surviving commentary is authentic) added to the canon.

58.Shankara’s home math at Sringeri in south India was probably founded on the site of a Buddhist monastery (Eliot, 1988: 209–211).

59.Basham (1951: 284). Time is the only unextended substance the Jainas recognize, and that too is a substance. On Jaina philosophy generally, see Raju (1985: 106–123); Potter (1976: 115, 145–149).

60.Although Buddhist texts disappeared from India as Hindu triumphed, Sanskrit texts by Shantarakshita and Kamalashila were preserved in Jaina collections, further testifying to the cosmopolitanism and the marginality of Jaina observers in this period (Dutt, 1962: 239).

61.Nakamura (1980: 309–311, 332–341); Stein (1972: 72–74, 165, 224); Dutt (1962: 350–351). Prominent sexual-yogic tantrists in the 800s included the Bengal king Indrabuddhi and his sister.

62.The Shaiva movement became philosophically creative when it came into contact with a long-standing network of Nyaya logicians in the midst of declining Buddhism in Kashmir. The Shaivas’ mythology of their god of death and destruction was the ideological counterpart of their practices of overturning orthodox Hindu taboos through ritual orgiasticism and even violence. The Shaiva order branded their bodies with the mark of a phallus, inhabited charnel yards, carried skulls, and daubed their bodies with ashes. Theirs was the charisma of emotional shock; nevertheless it entered the field of intellectual argument when Shaivas began to convert the Nyaya and Buddhist logicians. The emotion-centered mythology was rationalized into a cosmology in which the universe is composed not of consciousness, substance, or even nothingness but of the energy of creation and destruction.

970 • Notes to Pages 261–269

Contacts and debates with Advaitins resulted in identifying the pan-energy cult with metaphysical monism. A variant on this position, Shaktism, identified this energy with metaphysical potentiality (Pandey, 1986; Eliot, 1988: 2:211–222; Muller-Ortega, 1989). The internal debates of this network cannot be followed here. Leading thinkers were in a network from about 900 to early 1000s c.e. passing from Utpala to Abhinavagupta and Shri Kantha, including the minor figures listed as 137–134, 161–165, and 185–189 in the key to Figures 5.4 and 5.5, but not depicted in these network diagrams.

63.The story goes that Udayana defeated Shri Harsha’s father in a public debate; the son exacted revenge (Phillips, 1995: 75).

64.Shri Harsha was in Bengal, and thus in the sphere of whatever Buddhist networks survived in India during these generations of Buddhism’s death.

65.Potter (1976: 181); Halbfass (1992: 235). A Buddhist philosopher ca. 1090, Ratnakirti, had also taken the step of refuting the existence of other minds. Culminating earlier debates of Advaitas and Buddhists, which seem to have treated any solipsistic conclusion as a reductio ad absurdum, Ratnakirti let the argument for solipsism stand on its own merits. The Buddhist criterion of being—Dignaga’s standard, that which is causally effective—underlies all other conceptions of being; the resulting primacy of momentariness further entails the non-existence of other minds and other experiences (Halbfass, 1992: 24; Nakamura, 1980: 310). Ratnakirti, coming as the very last gasp of Buddhist thought in India, was an isolate indeed; his boldness gained him no following among the unphilosophical tantrists of his own camp, and his reputation was swallowed up in the Hindu tide. The same matrix of argument, in the following generations would lead again to an extreme with Chitsukha.

66.The sect claimed a succession of at least three previous leaders, including the philosopher Yamunacharya, a relative of Ramanuja’s father. Ramanuja codified the rituals and hymns of prior south Indian poet-saints, while bringing the lineage onto philosophical turf by providing a comprehensive theology. Ramanuja was the great organizer, founding some 700 maths and establishing monastic rules. Unlike Buddhists and Shaivites, Ramanuja monks were allowed to marry, and abbotships were hereditary, a feature which was imitated by several other Vaishnava sects, and which no doubt added property interests to sectarian barriers and hostilities (Eliot, 1988: 2:231–237, 316; Dasgupta, 1922–1955: 3:63–165).

67.Phillips (1995: 145) regards Ragunatha’s Neo-Nyaya as similar to the ontology of David Armstrong. See also Potter (1976: 122); Phillips (1995: 142–144).

68.Gangesha, the creative founder of Neo-Nyaya, acquired a reputation as impenetrably scholastic; for example, in his major work he considers the merits and defects of 35 definitions of veridicality (Phillips, 1995: 130).

69.Phillips (1995: 145) argues that Neo-Nyaya is an unrecognized contribution that will eventually become part of the forefront of world philosophy: “It is inevitable that on-going work in [Western] ontology embrace eventually the Nyaya-Vaisesika tradition, i.e. when its most astute contributors, Raghunatha, Jagadisa, and Gadadhara, have been recognized by the broad philosophical community [of the future] as the great philosophers they are.”

Notes to Pages 269–288 • 971

70.See 251–253 in the key to Figure 5.5; and Raju (1985: 61).

71.Potter (1976: 252–254). This pattern is particularly prominent in modern thinkers such as Ramakrishna who represent India to the West.

6.Buddhist and Neo-Confucian China

1.At the end of the Northern Wei (about 534 c.e.) there were 2 million monks and nuns, and 30,000 temples. The size of the Buddhist church fluctuated widely during battles for political favor with Taoists and Confucians. In 574–577, the Northern Chou emperor, at the instigation of Taoist advisers, confiscated the property of the Buddhist temples and returned as many as 3 million monks to lay life. After reunification, the Sui emperor in 601 drastically curtailed the Confucian schools and promoted Buddhism; during his reign 230,000 monks and nuns were converted. In the mid-T’ang dynasty (713–741), a time of violent shifts in the political popularity of Buddhism, there were 125,000 monks and nuns; in 830 as many as 700,000 monks were officially registered. In the great persecution of 845 the census indicated 260,000 monks and nuns to be returned to secular life, 4,600 monasteries and 40,000 temples and shrines destroyed, and several million acres of fertile lands confiscated. Even these numbers do not indicate the full extent of Buddhism; they do not include novice monks, who may have been far more numerous than the fully ordained monks. In addition, the monasteries at this time possessed 150,000 slaves, who were turned into tax-paying peasants. Data from Ch’en (1964: 136, 155, 158, 190–191, 200–201, 204, 232, 242, 244, 250–251, 259, 401). On Chinese population growth, see McEvedy and Jones (1978). On Chinese social history in these periods, see Eberhard (1977); Gernet (1982, 1962); CHC (1986, 1979). On the development of Buddhism, see Ch’en (1964); Demiéville (1986); Zürcher (1959); Weinstein (1987). Network sources are cited in Chapter 2.

2.On economic growth in medieval China, see Elvin (1973); Jones (1988). On the role of Buddhist institutions in economic growth, see Gernet (1956); Ch’en (1964); and the theoretical model in Collins (1986: 19–76), and Collins (1997).

3.Loyang in the east and Ch’ang-an (Sian) in the west were the two great capital cities of northern China; the seat of government often changed between them, while the other remained the secondary capital.

4.In fact, the Yogacara doctrine of Consciousness-Only had already been in existence in China, previously imported from India by Paramartha around 550; Hsüan-tsang himself had studied with these masters before going to Nalanda. Chinese intellectuals did not fail to understand these doctrines; the school had survived already for three generations. And the Hua-yen philosophy that displaced ConsciousnessOnly was fully as abstract and technical.

5.Hsüan-tsang’s travels to India became the subject of the most popular novel of medieval China, Journey to the West (or Monkey). It is a comic fairy tale of supernatural demons and protectors, featuring the monkey with magic powers who accompanies Hsüan-tsang. The basket of scriptures which is the object of the trip is a kind of magical precious object; there is no sense that it has intellectual contents. This reflects the way Hsüan-tsang was received by the emperor and the

972 • Notes to Pages 290–296

populace when he returned to Ch’ang-an. Earlier, the translator Kumarajiva was reputed to be a great magician, and was even forced to mate with court concubines to propagate his magic powers.

6.Gregory (1991); Weinstein (1987: 63, 149); Dumoulin (1988: 45–49, 225–235, 284–285). The influence of Hua-yen within the Ch’an lineages is noted in Figures 6.3 and 6.4 from the time of the great innovators Shih-t’ou and Ma-tzu, ca. 750, down to Ta-hui, ca. 1150.

7.In Figure 6.3 we see the Ch’an lineages already starting to split at the time of Hung-jen’s contemporary Fa-jung (238), the alleged founder of the Oxhead school, who syncretized Ch’an meditation with the old Three Treatise school. Obviously there was no strong anti-intellectualism here, but the splitting was a structural harbinger of things to come. The most prominent Oxhead master was Hung-jen’s pupil Fa-chih (240), who combined meditation with the Amidaist practice of invoking the name of the Buddha. The Oxhead school lasted through seven generations of masters, although it never had any of the famous “Zen”-style paradoxers (McRae, 1985; 1986: 241–242). Hung-jen’s pupils included three more who originated their own lineages: the “Northern school” patriarch Shen-hsiu; his rival Hui-Neng; and Hsuan-Chih (240a), who founded a Szechuan school which practiced meditation on the Buddha’s name, another syncretism of Ch’an with the Pure Land school. Hui-Neng in turn was not only master of the contentious Shen-Hui but propagator of several other lineages as well, including those of the “Zen” radicals Ma-tzu and Shih-t’ou. It is apparent that Hui-Neng did not make an isolated doctrinal breakthrough, but was in the midst of an organizational transformation as Ch’an lineages split off all around him.

8.Consciousness-Only, with its great intellectual difficulty, was highly elitist; the route to enlightenment culminated in mastery of the philosophy, with the highest religious status reserved for advanced scholars. T’ien-t’ai had already made a similar claim, with its hierarchy of doctrines to be mastered before enlightenment. At the opposite end of the field, the Pure Land sects made salvation as easy as possible, with the Amidaists taking it to the extreme of demanding only chanting a holy name. In the midand late 700s this conflict became explicit, as T’ien-t’ai and Pure Land monks polemicized between intellectual and anti-intellectual, hard and easy routes to peak religious status. Hui-neng himself was subject of polemical attack by Tzu-min (268 in Figure 6.3) of the Pure Land school; and Tzu-min is a lineage predecessor of Fa-chao (271), who preached the prospect of damnation in hell and condemned the easy paths to enlightenment, including universal salvation. The Ch’an route, however, was at neither of the two Pure Land poles, which applied essentially to laypeople, and differed over the rigorousness of faith required. The Ch’an innovation concerned the restrictedness or availability of high religious status among the elite of meditation specialists.

9.We see this clearly by comparing Figures 6.3 and 6.4: in the former the Ch’an lineages fan out across the page, taking the place of all other Buddhist factions; in the latter, from 900 through 1200, we see the Ch’an lineages winnowing down, the surviving branches amalgamating with one another and finally disappearing, while the neo-Confucians fan out across their side of intellectual space.

Notes to Pages 310–324 • 973

10.This effort to rewrite the Confucian lineage is reminiscent of Shen-hui’s claims for an esoteric lineage which were announced at the time of the Zen revolution 60 years earlier, and might have been inspired by it. Hartman (1986) points out parallels between Ch’an and the philosophy of Han Yü’s ku wen movement; both movements were challenges to the state-supported popular Buddhism of the capital. Late in life Han Yü was friendly with a monk from Shih-tou’s Ch’an lineage (275a in Figure 6.3). On Li Ao, see Barrett (1992).

11.“Han Yü’s bold equation of wen and tao, which is perhaps related to his philosophical equation of thought and action, constituted a dramatic lift for the status and role of literature in a Confucian society. It demanded for the writer a position on par with the administrator. Artistically valid literary expression was no longer a polite accoutrement of the civil servant but rather became a basic requisite for great political success” (Hartman, 1986: 14). Han Yü himself had repeatedly failed the examinations under the older system.

12.It is only at this point that Chou Tun-I was retrospectively made a founder of Neo-Confucianism, although his ideas had been seeping among the Ch’eng disciples after the Shao lineage disappeared around 1130 (Graham, 1958: xix, 168). At the same time, Chang Tsai’s system, based on the Supreme Void, lost influence to the Ch’eng focus on principle. Chu Hsi rewrote the earlier history of these movements, obscuring the central formative influence of the Ch’engs by ascribing the origins to Chou Tun-I; whereas Chou was not a militant Neo-Confucian but a Confucian-Taoist syncretist who added only the Supreme Ultimate to his system.

13.Plato’s idealism, centered on mathematics, emerged within the first seven generations of the Greek intellectual community, and his immediate successors took it in the direction of a rather particularized religion of star worship. But Plato himself explored a variety of positions, and what became known as “Platonism” did not settle into a pervasively religious idealism until the Roman period; in the interim, the Academy was predominantly in the skeptical camp. For India, it is conventional to interpret the philosophy of the Upanishads as idealist; in Chapter 5 I argued that this tendency has been exaggerated.

14.In fact, Ch’an paralleled Hua-Yen as a highly reflexive philosophical consciousness, but the Neo-Confucians were building from too concrete a level to see this. What Ch’an cultural capital could produce in abstract philosophy was demonstrated in virtually the same generation (the early 1200s) in Japanese Zen with Dogen’s system. Figure 7.2 in Chapter 7 shows that Dogen was both a direct and indirect pupil of Chinese Ch’an networks, and also a great-grandpupil of Chu Hsi.

7.Japan

1.As before, philosophers are divided into major (listed in all capitals), secondary (listed by name), and minor (listed by number in the key to Figures 7.1 through 7.5). Criterion for ranking is the relative amount of space devoted to them in a combination of sources (EP, 1967; Piovesana, 1963; Kitagawa, 1987, 1990; Dumoulin, 1990; Dilworth, 1989; Maruyama, 1974; Najita and Scheiner, 1978; Tsunoda, de Bary, and Keene, 1958; Totman, 1993; Akamatsu and Yampolsky,

974 • Notes to Pages 326–333

1977; Harootunian, 1989; CHJ, 1988: chap. 14). Not listed are persons who receive less than a minimal amount of citation in these sources, who fail to appear in more than one source, or who receive only minor mention in these texts. (Additional sources used for network information are Najita, 1987; Nosco, 1990; Ooms, 1985; Bellah, 1957; Weinstein, 1977). It should be stressed that the criterion for inclusion in this network is relative ranking in the attention space; the network does not simply reproduce the lineage charts which were used as a mode of organizational legitimation (and transfer of rights of office) in Chinese and Japanese Buddhism, and which were imitated by the Neo-Confucian, Ancient Learning, and National Learning schools. Similarly, my criterion for network contact is not simply listing in one of these official lineages as a pupil or successor; it is significant direct personal contact (including written correspondence) between individuals, whether they are listed as doctrinal followers or not. As we see repeatedly throughout the world, innovation typically breaks off from within an established school of thought. Thus, Ogyu Sorai was a student at the Hayashi school of official Neo-Confucianism, although he became its most vehement critic; Kamo Mabuchi, the promoter of National Learning, is linked by intermediaries of acquaintanceship as well as pupilship to Sorai’s lineage of Ancient Learning. It is the same in the Buddhist period: Honen the Pure Land founder and Eisai the patriarch of Japanese Zen were taught by the same Tendai masters.

2.Sources on Japanese institutional and historical development (Yamamura, 1990; McMullin, 1984; Anderson, 1974: 435–461; Kitagawa, 1990; Sansom, 1958, 1961; Morris, 1964; Frédéric, 1972; Ikegami, 1995).

3.Once again eminence arises from the center of the prior network. Saicho began by studying with all the main Nara orders; in China his ordination came from Tao-sui (269 in Figure 6.2), a grandpupil of Chan-jan (267), who had revived the T’ien-tai doctrine during the mid-700s. Saicho, a typical importer, eclectically collected other ordination certificates, from Zen as well as Vinaya and mantra (tantric) masters.

4.Kukai was ordained by a grandpupil of Amoghavajra (254 in Figure 6.2), a Ceylonese tantrist who had been tutor and rainmaker to emperors.

5.A popular saying of the Kamakura period went: “Tendai for the imperial court, Shingon for the nobility, Zen for the warriors, Pure Land for the common people” (Dumoulin, 1990: 31).

6.This syncretism had already set in by the mid-900s, when the Zen master T’ien-tai Te-shao revived the old center on Mount T’ien-t’ai; among his pupils were Tao Yüan, who edited the Zen chronicles, Record of the Transmission of the Lamp

(1004, formulating a Zen orthodoxy), and Yung-ming Yen-shou, who compiled a huge syncretist overview of all teachings, emphasizing compatibility between Zen and the sutras. In a parallel branch of the same lineage, Ch’i-sung (1007–1072) even incorporated Confucianism into Zen by composing a work on the classic

Doctrine of the Mean.

7.See Dumoulin (1990: 8–15, 54). Nonin’s pupils made contact with Te-kuang, a disciple of Ta-hui, of secondary stature in Figure 6.4, from the Lin-chi line. These pupils brought back a rich reliquary from China, including Ta-hui’s dharma robe, implying that the Chinese lineages encouraged the Japanese as continuers of a

Notes to Pages 333–342 • 975

visibly dying tradition. Genealogical documents of lines of succession were preserved in monasteries as precious treasures.

8.Eisai was already middle-aged. He had been to China 20 years earlier, at which time he had merely returned with Tendai texts; on his later trip he studied Zen and Vinaya as well. Upon his second return to Japan, Eisai founded the first Zen monasteries, but he continued to be very compromising toward the established schools. His monasteries at first remained a branch of the Enryaku-ji on Mount Hiei; they continued to practice ceremonial, sutra reading, and Shingon, even developing a version called tantric-magical Zen. Such eclecticism was nothing new. Eisai also brought back with him Neo-Confucianism from a very minor pupil of Chu Hsi. His visit coincided with a compromising mood in Chinese Zen, the height of its contact with the Neo-Confucian networks (as we see in Figure 6.4).

9.In all, 46 Rinzai lineages were founded in Japan, along with several other Zen sects; the official Zen history included the lives of 1,600 important monks (Dumoulin, 1990: 8, 36). These numbers far exceed the upper limits of the attention space; by the law of small numbers only a few lineages could become eminent. It was by building on a successful vector of attention that a small set of Rinzai and Soto lineages produced virtually all the famous masters, whose names appear as major and secondary figures in Figure 7.2 (as well as most of the names in the key to that figure which meet the criterion of sufficient historical attention to be listed as “minor”).

10.The tea master Murata Juko, in the late 1400s, created the famous Zen stone garden of the Daitokuji in Kyoto. This monastery became a center for the tea ceremony and for the most worldly aspect of Zen. Other outstanding Kyoto temple rock gardens were built around 1500 by Soami, a samurai and government official who simultaneously excelled as poet, tea master, and ink painter (Kidder, 1985: 222–236; Kitagawa, 1990: 126; Dumoulin, 1990: 20, 151–153, 248; Varley, 1977).

11.“This is the great watershed, a point of demarcation in Japanese cultural history remarkably similar to that in the West between the arts of the Renaissance and those of Medieval Christianity from which they emerged” (Rosenfield, 1977: 207).

12.The inflation of religious currency was also promoted in the interests of raising money from the laity. One of the targets of Ikkyu’s scorn was the Zen abbot Doso, who raised money among the wealthy merchants “by granting certificates of enlightenment to lay people who attended mass meditation sessions at which koan were ‘solved’ by esoteric transmission rather than through rigorous self-directed meditative enquiry” (Collcutt, 1990: 614).

13.Collcutt (1990: 604–609, 613). The situation was similar to that which arose in T’ang and Sung China, when certificates of monastic ordination (as ordinary monks, not as abbots) were sold in official revenue-raising campaigns; in the later period these certificates came to circulate for private resale. In the Chinese case, these certificates became used as a paper currency, and were items of investment on a speculative market (Ch’en, 1964: 241–244). The Sung dynasty economy was probably the world’s first breakthrough into full-scale market capitalism, outgrowing the sector of monastic entrepreneurship which had pioneered rationalized structures of market production and reinvestment. In subsequent dynasties the

976 • Notes to Pages 343–345

market was asphyxiated by governmental regulation, confined to local exchanges which never regained the dynamic of rationalized economic growth. When this structural complex was transferred to Japan through the Buddhist movements, market growth resumed. On the sociological model of the Chinese and Japanese Buddhist economies (Collins, 1986: 58–73; and Collins, 1997). On Japanese economic growth (Hanley and Yamamura, 1977; Nakane and Oishi, 1990; Totman, 1993; Nakai and McClain, 1991; Smith, 1959; Collcutt, 1981; McMullin, 1984; Yamamura, 1990.)

14.“There is no satori. Your mind is the original Buddha. Is there anything lacking in the Buddha mind? Can one attain enlightenment from outside oneself?” “Even when enlightenment is present, it is not good to simply stay with it, for the most important thing comes afterwards,” (quoted in Dumoulin, 1990: 323).

15.The full force of official establishment developed gradually. In 1640 an Office of Inquisition was established to check that families were registered with a temple; at first directed only against Christians, in 1661 its activities were extended to the entire population (McMullin, 1984: 243–245).

16.Hakuin described his experience as follows: “Night and day I did not sleep; I forgot both to eat and rest. Suddenly a great doubt manifested itself before me. It was as though I was frozen solid in the midst of an ice sheet extending tens of thousands of miles. A purity filled my breast and I could neither go forward nor retreat . . .

Although I sat in the lecture hall and listened to the master’s lecture, it was as though I were hearing a discussion from a distance outside the hall. At times it felt as though I were floating through the air . . . The state lasted for several days. Then I chanced to hear the sound of the temple bell and I was suddenly transformed. It was as if a sheet of ice had been smashed or a jade tower had fallen with a crash” (Dumoulin, 1990: 370). Hakuin remained egotistically proud of his experience and was not awarded the dharma seal. Months later, while he was begging in a village, his mind filled by working on a koan, a peasant woman knocked him down with a broom. When he regained consciousness, he suddenly found that the koan had been solved, sending him into dancing, clapping, and shouts of laughter. This time his master recognized the experience as valid (Dumoulin, 1990: 372).

17.Dumoulin (1990: 157 186, 194, 204, 331). Bankei Yotaku in 1647, after two years of extreme asceticism had left him close to death, experienced his own sickness as the shock of realization: “So I was ready to die, and at the time I felt no remorse. There was nothing special left for me. My only thought was that I was going to die without fulfilling my long-nourished desire. Then I felt a strange sensation in my throat. I spat against a wall. A mass of black phlegm, large as a soapberry, rolled down the side . . . Suddenly just at that instant . . . I realized what it was that had escaped me until now” (quoted in Dumoulin, 1990: 312).

18.“One night during zazen practice the boundary between before and after suddenly disappeared . . . It was as if I had arrived at the ground of the Great Death, with no memory of the existence of anything, not even of myself. All I remember is an energy in my body that spread out over ten times ten-thousand worlds and a light that radiated endlessly . . . I forgot that my hands were moving in the air and my

Notes to Pages 346–352 • 977

feet were dancing” (Dumoulin, 1990: 408). The account is from a Zen master of the mid-1800s.

19.Preston’s (1988) ethnography of a Zen meditation center concludes that the Zen experience is socially constructed by the focused setting and rituals of inward attention. What is constructed, however, is not a particular “culture” but an attitude set free from the contents of verbal cultures. The rituals of Zen practice are, so to speak, counter-rituals, which de-reify and disenchant the objects of ordinary social life. Buddhism recognizes a deep version of the social construction of reality; the institutions and paramount realities of the ordinary world (samsara) are mere “name and form.” The path pursued by Zen is not to escape into another realm but to transform into another key; instead of living focused on cognitive constructions, to live focused on the flow of wordless practices.

20.Kitagawa (1990: 143). Ooms (1985) points out that the shogun was more interested in promoting a cult, centered on the lavishly baroque Tokugawa mausoleum at Nikko, which elevated Ieyasu personally into a reincarnation of the national deity, the sun goddess Amaterasu. This cult, promoted vigorously in the 1640s, was no great success against the better-organized religious and educational institutions; indeed, Ieyasu had to rely on the Tendai abbott Tenkai to work out the theological justification of the reincarnation doctrine. Razan’s hostility to Buddhism was not a general propensity of the Tokugawas, but rather a stance in the struggle among intellectuals, which did not shift decisively in an anti-Buddhist direction until the opening of the successful proprietary schools in the 1660s.

21.Takuan was the teacher of Hoshina Masayuki, Lord of Aizu, who became central in the patronage network of the following generation (Ooms, 1985: 197). Takuan represents the height of fusion between samurai culture and Zen. Takuan was friendly with the shogun’s sword master, Yagyu Munenori, and was connected with a very famous swordsman, Miyamoto Musashi, author of A Book of Five Rings, on the spiritual dimension of combat. Takuan wrote for Munenori a text applying Buddhist doctrine of non-attachment to the technique of the sword fight. The connection is not merely to show fearlessness in the face of death; it is to avoid clinging to one’s opponent’s movements or to the sword itself, to flow through everything without distinction and without consciously directing one’s mind (Dumoulin, 1990: 285–287; Kammer, 1969).

22.Nakamura (1967); Dumoulin (1990: 341–344). It would be more accurate to say that Suzuki integrated Buddhist subduing of the body into the spirit of samurai military discipline, but universalistically, without caste distinctions among social ranks. Suzuki was close to official power and was given bakufu appointments, including restoration of provincial temple properties as a means of exerting control over local samurai. He was entrusted with a mission to pacify the peasants after a major provincial rebellion in 1637–1638 (Ooms, 1985: 123–139).

23.The network of tea masters in Figure 7.3 originated at the shogun’s court in the mid-1400s. The famous iconoclast Ikkyu Sojun, though not himself a tea master, connects this network with the religious elite, as teacher of Murata Shuko, a Zen monk who returned to the world as a tea master. The several branches of the lineage culminate in the most famous of all, Sen no Rikyu, in the late 1500s. Sen

978 • Notes to Pages 352–358

no Rikyu became tea master to Hideyoshi, and the social arbiter of good taste in the 1580s. The tea ceremony became a lavish display and a criterion of elite standing; in 1587 a huge gathering of 800 devotees was held at Kyoto, at which Hideyoshi was upstaged by his tea master. Sen no Rikyu’s claims to status precedence apparently provoked the dictator to demand in 1591 that he commit ritual suicide (Dumoulin, 1990: 239–241; Varley, 1977).

24.Sources on Tokugawa education (Rubinger, 1982; Dore, 1965; Totman, 1993: 161–168, 301–302, 349–354, 429–435, 469–471; Passin, 1965; Najita, 1987).

25.As Ikegami (1995) notes, Zen was not the source of the samurai ethos; samurai codes went back to a distinctive warrior culture of the medieval period, and these were transformed during the Tokugawa under conditions of pacification into the “tamed” and refined manners which became anachronistic emblems of samurai identity. The networks of leading Zen and samurai masters overlapped at just this time, because the underlying social bases of both career paths were crumbling simultaneously.

26.In 1682 came the first non-religious “best-seller,” Ihara Saikaku’s Life of an Amorous Man, a novel which was something of a cross between Defoe and the Memoirs of Casanova. This marks the point at which it became possible for a writer to support oneself purely off the market (Nosco, 1990: 27).

27.Sources on Tokugawa intellectuals (EP, 1967; Maruyama, 1974; Piovesana, 1963; Tsunoda, de Bary, and Keene, 1958; Totman, 1993; Sansom, 1963; Bellah, 1957, 1978; Harootunian, 1970, 1988; Matsumoto, 1970; Najita and Scheiner, 1978; Naita, 1987; Nosco, 1990; Ooms, 1985; Tucker, 1989; Wakabayashi, 1986; Koschmann, 1987; de Bary, 1979; Dilworth, 1979; CHJ, 1988: chap. 14).

28.In a passage which shows the rising tide of rejection of both Zen and Zen-like meditative practices prominent in religious Neo-Confucianism, Banzan declares: “My name is vacuity. How with this name can I make a pretense of learning and serve as a teacher of others?” (Maruyama, 1974: 42).

29.De Bary (1979). Ansai’s declaration of loyalty—"If a person errs by studying Chu Hsi, he errs with Chu Hsi. He has nothing to regret"—echoes the famous loyalty of Shinran to his master during the founding of the Pure Land movements: “Even though, having been persuaded by Honen Shonin, I should go to Hell through the Nembutsu, I should not regret it” (quoted in Maruyama, 1974: 37; Kitagawa, 1990: 115).

30.Shikoku is the large island south of the inland sea. The Neo-Confucian school there had an independent beginning already in the mid-1500s with Minamimura Baiken, supported by the local daimyo’s clan. Ansai went there to study following his Buddhist training at the old centers, at Mount Hiei and at a Rinzai temple in Kyoto (Ooms, 1985: 199).

31.Both were grandsons of Tokugawa Ieyasu, and held domains in the innermost circle of shogunal alliances.

32.In other words, the samurai becomes a policeman, although Soko formulates this as a more academic role: “The three classes of the common people make him their teacher and respect him” (quoted in Tsunoda, de Bary, and Keene, 1958: 399).

33.Soko’s pronouncements have an anti-Zen tone, which can be applied equally to

Notes to Pages 358–365 • 979

the puritanism of Ansai’s sage religion: “Those who eliminate all human desires are not human beings; they are no different from tiles and stones. Can we say that tiles and stones can comprehend the Principle of Heaven?” (quoted in Maruyama, 1974: 46). In contrast, Ansai’s chief disciple, Sato Naokata, explicitly extolled Zen as the basis for discipline within government bureaucracy. Here we have a rival legitimation for the same shift toward the peacetime samurai role which Soko was concerned with. Rival intellectual alliances approached the same issue with different resources.

34.Ito came from a branch of the lineage of Fujiwara Seika parallel and rival to Razan, via his teacher Matsunaga Sekigo. The Kogido initially took the form of a discussion group at Ito’s home, where his wealthy family entertained court nobles, doctors, Confucian scholars, poets, and painters. From this gathering developed regularly scheduled lectures with debates and grading (Rubinger, 1982: 50–51). By this route Ito became the first successful teacher from the merchant classes, breaking into the samurai educational monopoly.

35.Tetsugen was the most eminent member of the new Obaku Zen sect; he edited a comprehensive edition of the Buddhist scriptures of every sect, representing an equivalent on the Buddhist side of the tendency toward pure scholarship that was building up among the Confucians at this time, as well as the tendency to syncretism in a weakening movement.

36.In Sorai’s words, the samurai class “lived like guests at an inn,” where “even a single chopstick had to be paid for” (Maruyama, 1974: 132).

37.At Sorai’s school, pupils were required to sign an agreement which included this clause, in regard to studying the laws of the Ming dynasty: “These laws are the institutions of a different era and a different country. One must not simply employ them in the present era and destroy the existing laws” (quoted in Maruyama, 1974: 97).

38.Economics was emerging as a recognized discipline in the generation of the early 1800s, explicitly known as keizai (Najita, 1987: 8). In 1815, following the work of Kaiho, another Kaitokudo product, Kusama Naokata, produced a history of money, the central subject of economic controversy since the time of Arai Hakuseki and Sorai.

39.Here Sorai was directly challenging the Bushido school of Yamaga Soko, which defended the action of the ronin. Oishi Kuranosuke, the leader of 47 ronin, was a direct disciple of Yamaga Soko (Kitagawa, 1990: 159).

40.“Although li seems to be the Ultimate Principle, it is not so. Since it is an abstract principle, it can be used in any way whatsoever. It is like being able to call a white thing black or any other color” (quoted in Maruyama, 1974: 146).

41.During the crisis of the 1320s–1330s, when Go-Daigo tried to restore imperial rule, we find in Figure 7.2 the first significant Shinto branch of the intellectual network. The leaders of the Watarai family, priests at the national Ise shrine, excluded Buddhist emblems from its precincts while emulating Buddhism by stressing moral purity rather than merely ceremonial offerings for fertility and protection magic (Bellah, 1957: 65). The court intellectual Kitabatake Chikafusa now joined the Shinto cause, in part because of its usefulness in legitimating the Go-Daigo

980 • Notes to Pages 365–368

restoration; at the same time, Chikafusa relied on Buddhist metaphysics to give a larger significance to the conception of Japan as a divine nation under the kami. It should be noted that this took place two generations after the rise of Nichiren’s Hokke movement, which had made the same claim for Japan as the world’s Buddha-land. Again in the 1480s, when feudal combat in the aftermath of the Onin War destroyed any semblance of shogunal government, Kanetomo, a priest of the Yoshida shrine, promoted a syncretist Shinto which reversed previous rankings and made Buddhas and Boddhisatvas manifestations of the kami instead of the other way around (Kitagawa, 1990: 160).

42.Under Shingon auspices, the kami had been reduced to a dualism corresponding to Buddhist tantrism: matter and mind, male and female, dynamic and potential aspects of things (Maruyama, 1974: 155). We are reminded here that Keichu, the adumbrator of National Learning, was a Shingon monk in the camp of Shinto supporters.

43.The Shinto–National Learning movement was not the only religious reaction against (and split in the ranks of) the Sorai network. In 1729 (overlapping with the height of Kada no Azumamaro’s activity), the Kyoto teacher Ishida Baigan founded the Shingaku movement. It took an opposing position both to the Shinto fundamentalists and to Sorai’s naturalist utilitarianism. Shingaku preached that the spiritual reality behind Buddhism, Neo-Confucianism, and Shinto were the same; its main practice, however, was meditation, not ceremonialism, thus putting it closer to the Zen–sage religion tradition that was now disappearing from the upper-class intellectual space. Shingaku was preached successfully among the popular classes, but using the vehicle of the educational marketplace rather than the traditional evangelist. Baigan’s network connections shaped the direction of his innovation. He was the pupil of a lay teacher of the Obaku sect (i.e., the most syncretist of the Zen sects) as well as of a neo-Confucian; his early religious activity was in the Ise-pilgrimage movement; and he formulated his distinctive doctrine soon after engaging in argument with a disciple of Sorai. The term shingaku itself had been used by Sorai in his attack on Neo-Confucian philosophy (Bellah, 1978: 139; 1957: 134–138).

44.“What they call li is not something clearly fixed, it is not something readily comprehensible to the human intellect. Hence a Confucian should define li in terms of the theories of the ancient Sages, and a Buddhist should do so by using the theories of the Buddha . . . It is a Way based not on any objective criteria, but arbitrarily established by individuals” (quoted in Maruyama, 1974: 159).

45.The schools devoted exclusively to Japanese studies (kokugaku) never reached mass proportions. Only 9 such schools are known in the entire period before 1872, making up less than 1 percent of all proprietary schools. The vast majority (70 percent) remained those with curricula of Chinese studies or calligraphy (Rubinger, 1982: 13). The sheer number of schools, however, is not the source of intellectual movement on the creative edge. Under the law of small numbers, the 200 shijuku (proprietary schools) founded during 1789–1829, and the additional 800 founded during 1830–1867, were outside the center of intellectual attention; they propa-

Notes to Pages 369–376 • 981

gated older culture, and this period of mass expansion of schooling was not the time when the main intellectual innovations took place.

46.In France, the conservative monarchy following the 1815 restoration broke into factions because of divergence between ultramontane Catholics and the administrators of the state bureaucracy, especially over educational policy; the result was a series of liberalizing and conservatizing swings leading up to the Orleanist revolution of 1830. Again in 1860s, splits between Catholic traditionalists and statist officials undermined conservative control; in this case the dominance of the secularistic officials motivated the Catholics to join the anti-monarchist forces in pushing for liberalized rights (CMH, 1902–1911: 10:40–100; 11:295–297, 469– 474).

47.The first non-religious work was printed in Japan in 1591. Religious texts continued to be major items on the market until 1680–1700 (Nosco, 1990: 26). This was much the same time the transition occurred in European publishing.

48.Tokyo University was founded in 1877 with European teachers. In 1893 chairs were opened to Japanese professors and the Europeans were gradually replaced. The same model developed elsewhere: Waseda University originated in 1882; Kyoto University, the second imperial foundation, was established 1897 (EP, 1967: 252–253; Kitagawa, 1987: 305). Sources on post-Meiji intellectual life (EP, 1967; Kitagawa, 1987, 1990; Dilworth, 1989; Ketelaar, 1990; Najita and Scheiner, 1978; Tsunoda, de Bary, and Keene, 1958; Blacker, 1964; Gluck, 1985; Havens, 1970; Nishitani, 1982).

49.See Chapter 8, Coda: “Are Idea Imports a Substitute for Creativity?”

50.The attack on Christianity as an alien philosophy could be directed toward other contemporary aims as well. Inouye Enryo, a True Pure Land priest, in 1887–1890 attacked Christianity as irrational and irreconcilable with science; playing to the prestige of positivism, he argued that Buddhist religion is in greater harmony with rationality (Kitagawa, 1990: 230).

51.In other words, the network connection comes first. It was apparently via Suzuki that Zen’s appeal to the philosophical networks of the West came home to Nishida and stimulated his own creativity.

52.The central experience consists in “acts of consciousness,” which are also the “place of nothingness,” and the “historically formative act” (quoted in Dilworth, 1989: 149). Paralleling Buddhist dialectics is the puzzle in Aristotelean logic of how the individual can be reached by specification of the universal; a principium individuationis, Nishida suggests, points beyond itself to the ultimate emptiness of the things of conventional experience. A further resource is Kant’s unity of transcendental apperception, which Nishida takes as referring to a place where subject and object are united (Nishitani, 1982; xxxi). Nishida synthesizes a selection of Western concepts with a position rather like that of Nagarjuna and Dharmakirti: there is neither God/transcendence beyond phenomena nor substance to the phenomena themselves. Samsara is sunyata; the world is ultimate reality, as Emptiness.

53.In the 1890s Nakae Chomin attempted to revive Sorai’s naturalism as the explicit Japanese counterpart of Bentham’s Utilitarianism (Najita, 1987: 35). Thereafter

982 • Notes to Pages 389–398

the Kyoto school did not reign in Japanese philosophy without opposition. For a period in the 1920s there were some advocates of Marxism, but no indigenous creativity came from this.

8.Islam, Judaism, Christendom

1.The strong ÀAbbasid caliphate lasted long enough so that the period of redaction of hadith was closed before Islam began to fragment politically. Similarly, Catholic and Greek Christianity established its canon during the height of the Roman Empire, and its adoption as state religion allowed heterodox variants to be forcibly excluded.

2.The conflict between religious orthodoxy and independent intellectual concerns is one, but not the only, route to epistemology. Long-term processes in the development of epistemology and logic will be considered more fully in Chapter 15.

3.One point of substantive difference that was argued, however, was the unity of God, upheld by the Muslim theologians against Zoroastrian and Manichaean dualists. Even here Muslim theologians were more interested in turning the argument against anthropomorphists in their own ranks. A comparison with China and India implies that multi-religious competition in itself does not lead to proofs of the existence and nature of God. See Chapter 15.

4.It lacked only Muslim Spain, conquered between 711 and 759, which broke free in the name of the Umayyad caliphate, which had been overthrown by the ÀAbbasids in the civil war of 744–750. General sources for Islamic political, religious and social history (Hodgson, 1974; Lapidus, 1988; McEvedy, 1961; Humphreys 1991).

5.This account of philosophers and biographical data draws generally on numerous sources (Watt, 1973, 1985; Fakhry, 1983; Hodgson, 1974; Wolfson, 1976; Rescher, 1964; de Boer, 1903; individual essays in DSB, 1981, and EP, 1967). I have included scientists and mathematicians in the networks, since their pattern is intimately connected with that of the philosophers. The methodology of ranking philosophers into major, secondary, and minor figures is the same as that used in Chapter 2. Islamic philosophers are ranked according to the relative amount of reference to them in the cited sources. Jewish philosophers are ranked in relation to one another, based on Sirat (1985); Husik (1969); Guttman (1933); Pines (1967); EP (1967). These histories are all recent and largely European; earlier historical accounts on which they draw include Ibn al-Nadim (ca. 990), al-Baqillani (1000), al-Baghdadi (1030), al-Ghazali (1090), al-Sharastani (1130), Maimonides (1190), and Ibn Khaldun (1380).

6.Intellectual historians have tended to ascribe most kalamite positions to foreign influences (summarized in Wolfson, 1976: 58–79) and to downplay indigenous lines of development. The principal MuÀtazilite arguments, however, were formed before 830, and it was in the next two generations that most of the translation of Greek texts took place. The early MuÀtazilites knew something of the categories of Aristotelean logic, which seem to have come from secondhand accounts of

Notes to Pages 403–404 • 983

Greek philosophy then beginning to circulate (Fakhry, 1983: 8–9; Watt, 1973: 154–155, 205, 249); but they turned the concepts of substance and accident into a quite different direction through the dynamics of their own disputes. Democritus’ atomism is mentioned in Aristotle’s refutation of it in the Physics; but a translation was probably not available in the formative period of Arabic atomism. Most important, MuÀtazilite atomism is far from Democritean or Epicurean; the durable and spatial physical atoms of the Greeks are not the time-instants of the MuÀtazilites. When the genuinely Greek-oriented falasifa (philosophers) did appear, they polemicized against MuÀtazilite atomism (Peters, 1968: 144). Alternatively, Fakhry (1983: 33–34) suggests that this point-atomism came from Buddhist, Hindu, and Jaina schools in India existing by 500 c.e.; he mentions an anonymous treatise, “Religious Beliefs of India,” circulated in Arabic by the late 700s, contemporary with the MuÀtazilite founders. The Jainas, however, combined atomism with very un-MuÀtazilite doctrines in which everything is a substance, including motion, action, and time. The Nyaya-Vaisesika school of the Hindus combines atomism of material things with the reality of universals, plus the substances of infinite spirit (atman) and infinite mind (manas). The Buddhist Sarvastivadins had a timeatomism which was closest to the MuÀtazilites, but held very un-Muslim doctrines that the self is an unreal void, that God does not exist, that past and future as well as the cessation of existence all exist (Raju, 1985: 53, 121, 253–262). It is implausible that the Arabs would have extracted just the relevant aspects of atomism from these closely knit systems, even if they had access to these kinds of philosophical texts. Karl Potter (EIP, 1977: 17) concludes that there is little evidence of explicit East-West borrowing of doctrines in either direction.

7.In part MuÀtazilite political policy set in motion this course of events. Initially the MuÀtazilites were aggressive primarily toward the dualists rather than against the hadith faction; their alliance with the ÀAbbasids involved the suppression of the Zoroastrian religion of the old Persian regime and its Manichaean offshoot, which had flourished in Mesopotamia and the Christian Mediterranean since the 200s c.e. (Hodgson, 1974: 1:385). This aspect of kalamite religious policy continued, even with the reversal of caliphal favor toward hadith; it appears that Zoroastrians may have made up 20 percent of the population of Baghdad in al-MaÁmun’s time, but were down to perhaps 2 percent two generations later (Massignon, 1982: 241). The religious pluralism of the early Islamic Empire was closing down at the same time that a conservative orthodoxy was taking control.

8.MuÀtazilites still existed in the early 1100s (the last MuÀtazilite notable enough to appear in the Figure 8.3 key is 208), and their position was carried on by Jewish Karaites even longer.

9.From the late 700s there were already court astronomers and astrologers at Baghdad, including foreigners from India, Persia, and Central Asia (see 14 through 18 and 32 through 36 in Figure 8.1).

10.On the Nestorians and Jacobites, see Latourette (1975: 167–169, 282–283). The Nestorian headquarters was at Baghdad. Islam had acquired an empire not through a holy war to spread the faith, but because its effort to convert the Arabs had

984 • Notes to Pages 407–413

spilled over into border clashes with surrounding states; then it fell heir to a geopolitical vacuum owing to the mutually destructive wars of the Byzantine and Persian empires (Lapidus, 1988: 38–43). There was little effort initially to convert conquered peoples, and outside of Arabia, most Muslim cities had very large non-Muslim populations. The reversal of this religious policy began to pick up strength after 900.

11.Jewish philosophers are ranked relative to one another, separate from the ranking of Muslim philosophers. Hence it is not implied that Saadia ben Joseph is of the same order of importance in this intellectual field as his most dominant Muslim contemporaries.

12.I refer to him by his Latin name, Rhazes, to distinguish him from Fakhr al-Din al-Razi (Fakhruddin Razi), who lived eight generations later.

13.Rescher (1964). Aristotle’s had been a logic of classes, the Stoics’ a logic of propositions. The Baghdad school recovered these from Galen and from Aristotelean commentaries and extended their scope. The nature of possibility was debated. Matta and al-Farabi developed conditional syllogisms; al-Farabi dealt with general and particular predication and the quantification of predicates. He and Yahia ibn-ÀAdi took up from Alexandrian logic the question of universals, and attempted to reduce Aristotle’s 10 categories to substance and various species of accidents.

14.This was not necessarily due to al-AshÀari personally. There are indications that his position was already laid out in the previous generation by al-Qalanisi (74 in Figure 8.1), a moderate rational theologian among the hadith literalists; during his lifetime he was as famous as al-AshÀari. The latter’s fame resulted from a retrospective reinterpretation by his lineage two generations later of its own origins (Watt, 1973: 287–288, 311); by the time of al-Baqillani, there was a vehement polemic against MuÀtazilites as well as against Christians and Jews, and al-AshÀari’s public break with the MuÀtazilites made him an appropriate emblem of their distinctiveness. Once again we see that it is the lineage and its conflicts more than the individual which generates intellectual fame; and the structural crunch of intellectual attention deprives credit from someone like al-Qalanisi while giving it to another like al-AshÀari.

15.Wolfson (1976: 355–454; 1979). Davidson (1987) emphasizes that arguments for creation based on the impossibility of traversing an infinity go back to the Christian critic of Aristotle, John Philoponus, while arguments for God as the unmoved mover come from Aristotle. Philoponus was being cited by the Muslims by the time of al-Farabi in the early 900s; in the mid-800s al-Kindi was making arguments very similar to those of Philoponus (Davidson, 1987: 92–95, 106). Yet the early MuÀtazilites’ proofs emerged a generation before this, and some of them (such as Abu-l-Hudhayl’s) are not obviously dependent on Philoponus; even those which are similar may have come from the kalamites’ own discussions of divisibility and atomism. In any case, the issues did not become important for the Muslims out of passive imitation of the Greeks. Greek philosophy had been only marginally concerned with the existence of God in anything approaching a religious sense. Aristotle’s unmoved mover is unrelated to Providence, creation, or immortality.

Notes to Pages 414–423 • 985

The Neoplatonists, who developed as a pagan rival to Christianity, eventually produced a full-fledged religious conception of God; but since their synthesis included Aristoteleanism, the One is very unlike a creator or Providence. Philosophical arguments over God finally became focused when the Neoplatonists had to make their peace with victorious Christianity. The Patristic writers were content with the argument from design—the order of the world implies a creator—but as Averroës later said, this is an argument for laypeople, not one argued at the level of formal philosophical consideration (Davidson, 1987: 219, 236). The more sophisticated level emerged with Proclus (mid-400s), the last gasp of the pagan Neoplatonist school at Athens. He was the first to recognize that Aristotle’s proof of an unmoved mover from the motion of the spheres is not a proof of a cause of the existence of the spheres; Proclus added an argument that the existence of the heavens requires an eternal being to sustain their existence, and compiled 18 proofs for the eternity of the world (Davidson, 1987: 51, 281–282). Proclus’ pupil was Ammonius (304 in Figure 3.8), who abandoned Neoplatonism for Christianity; he was the teacher of both Simplicius (306 in Figure 3.8) and John Philoponus. Simplicius was the first to take the impossibility of an infinite regress of causes as a proof of God (Davidson, 1987: 338). And Philoponus based his arguments explicitly on a refutation of Proclus (Contra Proclum); in converting to Christianity, he reconverted the cultural capital of his school into a reasoned philosophical theology which Christianity had previously lacked. With the ending of his lineage, however, Philoponus’ arguments were not taken up in Christian philosophy. They survived largely because similar lines of argument emerged among Muslim theologians. Less particularistically, the ancient struggle between an anthropomorphic monotheism and a defensive religion of philosophical syncretism (i.e., Christianity versus Neoplatonism) eventually brought about reasoned arguments over the fundamental items of the religious cosmology; and these arguments were picked up again when another monotheistic anthropomorphism (Islam) developed its own intellectual networks.

16.Davidson (1987: 214–215, 309–310), however points out that Ibn Sina did not produce a pure ontological proof, based on concepts alone, as Anselm did in Europe two generations later. Ibn Sina included reference to the fact that something exists. But he raised philosophical analysis toward the ontological level, although most of the further development was to take place after his texts were transmitted into Christian philosophy.

17.As compared to Descartes, Ibn Sina did not lay stress on the existence of self in the “cogito ergo sum,” but emphasized instead the modality of being which is thereby revealed.

18.Ibn Sina is the high point of Islamic logic; he contributes a theory of categorical propositions involving quantification of the predicate; of hypothetical and disjunctive propositions; of singular propositions; and a theory of definition and classification (Rescher, 1964: 154–155). A rather sterile debate between proponents of Ibn Sina’s “eastern” logic and the “western” logic of the Baghdad and Cairo schools supplied what focus of attention there was within intellectual life from the mid1100s down through the mid-1300s.

986 • Notes to Pages 425–439

19.In the key to Figures 8.2 and 8.3, 196 in Afghanistan, 207 in Transoxiana, 217 in Anatolia, 229 in Baghdad, 232 in North Africa, 235 in Khwarazm–Oxus River valley, 246 and 275 in India, Rumi’s order of darvish dancers in Anatolia, 255 in Egypt, 276 among the Anatolian lower classes, 277 in Persia, 294 in Iran and central Asia. Sources on these movements (Hodgson, 1974: 2:192–234; Corbin, 1969; Massignon, 1982: 36–51; Lapidus, 1988: 168–172).

20.After writing the Muqaddimah, Ibn Khaldun migrated to Egypt and finished life as a Malikite judge. Figure 8.3 shows that Egypt too had had no significant intellectual life at this point for several generations.

21.In fact, al-Kindi’s protégé Ibn HaÀimah (60 in Figure 8.1) translated Plotinus as “Theology of Aristotle.” Plotinus himself was not translated by name, and was very seldom mentioned (Fakhry, 1983: 20).

22.Similarly, in Christian Europe, the translations of Aristotle which were made directly from the Greek by James of Venice and others in the mid-1100s were interpreted within the Neoplatonic framework. Slightly later in the century, Gerard of Cremona, translating Arabic texts in Toledo, translated not only Aristotle but also Proclus’ Elements of Theology—the arch-Neoplatonic system—as the Liber de Causis, which also was attributed to Aristotle. The so-called “Theology of Aristotle” was also translated from the Arabic at this time. Europeans could see no difference between Aristotle and Plotinus, since they were apparently unaware of the latter until Ficino translated the Enneads in 1492 (DSB, 1981: 1:270–273; 11:42; Weinberg, 1964: 10–11, 95, 100).

23.Sources on Jewish philosophy generally (Sirat, 1985; Husik, 1969; Guttman, 1933; Wolfson, 1979; Pines, 1967, and individual articles in EP, 1967, and DSB, 1981).

24.Only rabbinical writings were in Hebrew. Thus Maimonides produced his rabbinical code in Hebrew, but his Guide for the Perplexed, a philosophical reconciliation with religion, was written in Arabic but using Hebrew characters, a kind of code for members combining the cosmopolitan and the ethnic religious communities. Bahya ibn Paquda, among others, also wrote in this way, in Arabic with Hebrew characters (Pelaez del Rosal, 1985: 106). Even the nationalist anti-cosmopolitans among the Jews, such as Judah Halevi, wrote in Arabic. Arabic was the language of the Jewish intellectual community, and even the critics of that community used it. The only philosophers who wrote in Hebrew before 1200 were Bar Hiyya and Abraham Ibn Ezra; both were in the Christian orbit, the former in Barcelona, while the latter traveled in Italy, France, and England (Sirat, 1985: ix; Hodgson, 1974: 1:357, 452, 468–469). Sources for this period generally (Husik, 1969; Sirat, 1985; Pelaez de Rosal, 1985; Cruz Hernandez, 1957).

25.This is the network of Jewish poets and grammarians (beginning with 2 and 3 in Figure 8.4) which was prominent at Córdoba down through 1100, and which branched off to form the great Jewish rabbinical academy at Lucena (30 miles from Córdoba), connecting to Ibn Zaddik, Judah Halevi, Abraham Ibn Ezra, and Maimonides. The early Spanish Muslim scientists were virtually all at Córdoba; we may note especially al-Majriti (9 in Figure 8.4), who apparently traveled in the east before 1000 and not only returned with astronomy and geometry, but also propagated magic and the numerology of the Pure Brethren texts, which

Notes to Pages 440–443 • 987

had been formulated in this generation at Basra. Al-Majriti’s pupils were astronomers and astrologers at Córdoba; one of them (22 in Figure 8.4) propagated the Pure Brethren system to Saragossa (one of the independent Muslim states of the north), where this astrological occultism was passed along to the first important Jewish philosopher in Spain, Ibn Gabirol (Sirat, 1985: 97). Ibn Gabirol is the creative individual at the intersection of the networks, connecting also to the Jewish network of poets and grammarians at Córdoba and Lucena; he became a famous religious poet in his own right. Another famous contemporary, perhaps also at this cultural center Saragossa, was the Jewish philosopher Bahya ibn Paquda. A second network worthy of note (10, 15, and 26 in Figure 8.4) begins with a follower of al-Sijistani in Baghdad, and continues the tradition of logic and mathematics first at Córdoba, then at Toledo (where also appear such scientists as 27 and 28; see key to Figures 8.4 and 8.5). The first scientific star is the mathematician-astronomer al-Jayyami (25 in Figure 8.4) at Córdoba in the mid-1000s.

26.Barcelona had been ruled by the Christians since the 800s; in the 1100s it became one of the first places for translation from Arabic into Latin. Bar Hiyya is notable for the first Hebrew exposition of the Ptolemaic astronomy and for the first complete solution in Europe of the quadratic equation (DSB, 1981: 1:23), while his philosophy is a mixed Neoplatonism reminiscent of the Pure Brethren influence propagated by Ibn Gabirol at Saragossa. The two cities are 150 miles apart, and for centuries were the major outposts between which influences flowed across the Muslim-Christian frontier.

27.Maimonides himself (1956: 164) reports that he was acquainted with Jabir’s son. The Guide for the Perplexed (pt. 2, chaps. 4–12) contains a section on astronomy.

28.See EP (1967: 4:267); DSB (1981: 5:591–592). Ibn Daud is sometimes identified with John of Seville; but John translated in Toledo about 1133–1143, whereas Ibn Daud and Gundissalinus came a generation later, in the 1160s (DSB, 1981: 15:174, 190).

29.Ibn Daud never mentions him, but it is unlikely that they did not know of each other, as they represented the opposing wings of the Jewish community on the reconciliation of philosophy and scripture.

30.At Saragossa, Muslim scientists and Jewish grammarians had had important networks in the previous century; here too was where Ibn Gabirol apparently brought Neoplatonism and astrological occultism from the Islamic network into Jewish philosophy, and where Bahya ibn Paquda probably flourished.

31.Meir ibn Megas (48 in the key to Figure 8.5), from the main Jewish academy of Lucena, was reputed to be Maimonides’s teacher (Pelaez de Rosal, 1985: 137); like Ibn Daud, Meir had migrated to Toledo as the academy broke up under the Almohad conquest in 1148. If the young Maimonides studied with Meir at Toledo, it is not unlikely that he would have known Ibn Daud as well.

32.Note that Ibn Zaddiq was an official in Córdoba during Ibn Rushd’s youth.

33.For instance, the existence of God; God’s unity, perfection, and justice; the creation of the world; validity of prophecy; and survival of the soul after death (Fakhry, 1983: 281–283). Ibn Rushd goes on to argue, for example, that the QurÁan

988 • Notes to Pages 444–455

nowhere says that creation did not take place from preexisting matter or in preexisting time; creation consisted only of giving form to the world.

34.Ibn Daud states that he wrote his Exalted Faith in order to defend free will; this would make a sharp opposition to Ibn Gabirol’s emanationism, in which everything is a manifestation or even an embodiment of the will of God. In countering this position, Ibn Daud produces a lengthy exposition of an Aristotelean universe (Sirat, 1985: 142–154).

35.Gilson (1944: 358); Fakhry (1983: 275, 292). Ibn Rushd’s Incoherence of the Incoherence, against al-Ghazali, was known in the east; his Aristotle commentaries were not (Watt, 1985: 119).

36.When he was sent into exile in 1195, it was to Lucena, the old Jewish intellectual center (Fakhry, 1983: 272). Was this a deliberate slap on the part of his fundamentalist Malikite enemies?

37.This connection to the Christian philosophers is even more direct in the case of Ibn Daud, who was the first to bring forth Aristoteleanism as an alternative to Neoplatonism. Ibn Daud apparently began his intellectual career by collaborating at Toledo with Gundissalinus on translating the Neoplatonists, Ibn Sina, and possibly Ibn Gabirol; this intimate familiarity with their texts, as well as with the Christian demand for idea imports, could then have motivated him to go on to criticize the Neoplatonist position and put forward Aristotle as an alternative.

38.One can see the change in the way linguistic lines shifted with the growing nationalism of the times. Virtually all of the Jewish philosophers wrote in Arabic up through Ibn Daud and Maimonides. The first step in nationalist reaction was to translate the Jewish philosophers into Hebrew: Judah ibn Tibbon (49 in Figure 8.5, father of Maimonides’s translator Samuel ibn Tibbon, 56), fled the Almohads to southern France, and translated Bahya ibn Paquda, Halevi, and Gabirol into Hebrew (Sirat, 1985: 213). After 1200 the Jews composed their original works in Hebrew, or occasionally in Latin or a secular European language.

39.Like most of the historians of world philosophy, I am guilty of slighting the Byzantine philosophers. The consensus is that they were “scholars and exegetes rather than creative thinkers” (EP, 1967: 1:436). Kazhdan and Epstein (1985) do little to upset this judgment.

40.It is dangerous to draw parallels to our own day, since we lack the perspective of future generations on what philosophical movements mark important turning points in the long-run attention space. Imports of French and German philosophies into the anglophone world have brought local reputations for their importers; the effects on indigenous creativity remain to be seen. On the side of the exporters, see Lamont (1987) for evidence that Derrida’s reputation was constructed more outside France than within its home network.

9.Medieval Christendom

1.On the organizational dynamics of the medieval church, see Southern (1970). For the papacy in the early period, see Morrison (1969: 205–360). On the monasteries, see Butler (1962); Knowles (1949).

Notes to Pages 458–475 • 989

2.Popes Innocent III (r. 1198–1216), Gregory IX (1227–1241), and Innocent IV (1243–1254) were especially powerful vis-à-vis secular rulers. Sources on papal organizational growth (Southern, 1970; Ullman, 1970; Kelley, 1986; Poole, 1915; Waley, 1961).

3.Ranking of philosophers into major, secondary, and minor is done according to their long-term influence, indexed by the amount of reference to them in numerous sources (Windelband, [1892] 1901; Geyer, 1928; Gilson, 1944; de Wulf, 1934–1947; Copleston, 1950–1977; Knowles, 1962; Weinberg, 1964; EP, 1967; CHLMP, 1982). The account of philosophical positions draws generally on these and other sources (Pieper, [1950], 1960; Evans, 1980; Paré, Brunet, and Tremblay, 1933; Southern, 1995; individual articles in EP, 1967, and DSB, 1981).

4.The debate over the Forms goes back to Plato’s Parmenides and Aristotle’s Metaphysics. Nominalism was upheld by Socrates’ contemporary and rival Antisthenes, and later by some of the Stoics, who incorporated materials from the Cynic position flowing from Antisthenes (Weinberg, 1964: 80). The early medievals picked up the most prominent puzzle in the literature available to them, the texts on ancient logic.

5.In Figure 9.4 and the key these are 66, the translator and astrologer Michael Scotus; as well as 78, 79, 94, 95, 96, 97, and Albert’s Dominican protégé, 92.

6.The number of Dominican houses by this time was equal to that of the Cistercians, while the Franciscan total was much greater (Southern, 1970: 285).

7.A few of the leading philosophers were Augustinian monks, such as Giles of Rome. The Cistercians reversed their anti-intellectual stance and established colleges at Paris and elsewhere from the 1240s, although they had no notable philosophers until the idiosyncratic Jean of Mirecourt a century later. There were also substantial numbers of Benedictines at the universities; to judge from the figures at Oxford (Cobban, 1988: 318–319), they were about two thirds of the friars’ total, but they played no part in intellectual leadership. It was the Franciscans and Dominicans specifically, not the monks in general, who provided the creativity of this period. And they were a minority of the university students; again judging from Oxford, the friars made up about 10 percent of the total. They are important in philosophy in part because they almost all concentrated in theology, whereas two thirds of the secular clergy were studying canon or civil law (Cobban, 1988: 214–215).

8.The curriculum within the arts faculty (later to become known as the philosophical faculty), consisted of the trivium (grammar, rhetoric, logic) and the quadrivium (arithmetic, geometry, music—i.e., arithmetical theory of tones—and astronomy). The Christian schools had begun by taking over the compendium of knowledge at the end of the Roman era, combining respectively the contents of the rhetoric schools with the scientific curriculum of the Neo-Pythagoreans. The higher faculties derived from the distinctive structures of licensed professions which emerged in medieval Europe. Within Christendom, the messy and conflictual overlap between church and state made for separate professions of lawyers and theologians not found in China or Islam, nor in the pagan Greek and Roman schools, where lawyer-rhetorician was the primary profession but theologians did not exist in the

990 • Notes to Pages 479–485

absence of a bureaucratic church. In Christendom medicine became a learned subject claiming the licensing privileges of the university corporation, again unlike in China and India, where it was a practice of private individuals or guilds of healers and magicians, and in Islam, where medicine was not admitted to the theological/legalist–dominated madrasas. As we shall see in Chapter 12, this differentiation of disciplines within the university was later to shape European intellectual life in a distinctive pathway, after the establishment of the research university in Germany around 1800.

9.The apex of papal power was during 1235–1248, when the German emperor was successfully excommunicated, defeated in war by papal allies, and deposed. The Germans were finally evicted from northern Italy in 1268 by a French army financed by the pope. In the 1270s the French king began to claim the right to tax the clergy for war expenses, which led to an open break in 1296–1303. This time the pope lost. In 1305 the new pope was a Frenchman, compliant with French policies, and in 1309 the Curia had moved to Avignon (Keen, 1968: 170–177, 207–221; Boase, 1933).

10.From here through the discussion of Ockham, we enter a progressively rarefying level of philosophical abstraction. The reader is invited to scan the section “Nominalism versus Realism of Universals” in Chapter 15 (pages 826–830) to keep tabs on the chess game of move and countermove in intellectual space.

11.Duns is a close parallel to Aquinas in this respect. Although there was opposition in the Dominican order, Aquinas was clearly the favorite of its dominant faction. As Albert’s star pupil, Thomas was named the Dominicans’ teacher at the papal Curia in Rome; the Minister General of the order personally directed him to write his great Summa contra Gentiles. When the Averroist controversy broke out in full force in the 1270s, Aquinas was sent back to Paris to combat it (Gilson, 1944: 526). Duns similarly came from the inner circles of his order. His family had been benefactors of the Franciscans for generations; his uncle was their Vicar General for Scotland, and young John Duns was taken into his uncle’s priory. Extensively educated at Oxford and Paris in the 1280s and 1290s, he was personally sponsored by Gonsalvus of Spain, the Minister General of the Franciscan order. During these years he must have been exposed to the teaching and debates of Giles of Rome, Godfrey of Fontaines, and Henry of Ghent, and would have personally known fellow Franciscans Richard of Middleton and Peter John Olivi (Bettoni, 1961: 2–6). Scotus was a strong supporter of the pope in his struggles against the kings; in the major theological movement of the time, Scotus helped the pope in establishing the dogma of the Immaculate Conception of the Virgin Mary.

12.Ockham was likely a pupil, or at least a hearer, of Henry of Harclay (141 in Figure 9.4) at Oxford, who in turn probably heard Scotus at Paris. Harclay criticized Duns from a nominalist direction that Ockham was to radicalize. At Avignon, Ockham apparently lived in the Franciscan house with another critical philosopher, Walter of Chatton (147), with whom he carried on a continuing controversy. He also would have encountered there Duns Scotus’s major disciple (143), Francis of Meyronnes (Gilson, 1944: 633–634; EP, 1967: 3:476–477; CHLMP, 1982: 863, 891).

Notes to Pages 488–518 • 991

13.Dante, from the anti-papal faction in Florence, was sympathetic to the Averroist worldview.

14.It contained stranger combinations yet, such as Fitz-Ralph (188 in Figure 9.6) of Balliol, who propounded a syncretism of Averroism and Augustinianism. Positions which had lost ground in the struggle for attention became a grab bag, alliances of the weak.

15.This network also ties to non-academic religious reformers such as Thomas More and Sebastian Franck. A generation back, the network was fed by Italian Humanist circles; Reuchlin derived his cultural capital from the Florence group, and the young Colet had corresponded with Ficino (EP, 1967: 2:138).

16.Popkin (1979: 37–43, 360–361); EP (1967: 5:366–368). Wuthnow (1989: 97–98) points out that the presence of a local parlement in Bordeaux kept the city orthodox, since the dominant nobility throughout Europe generally had an interest in maintaining the traditional status order of Catholicism. In Toulouse, where Montaigne probably had studied, an insurrection had been put down in 1562, and hundreds of Protestants were executed.

17.This is emphasized throughout CHLMP (1982). The creativity of the nominalists apparently lasted two generations, dissipating by the late 1300s. It is possible that later advances occurred but have been ignored by historians, since this period of late scholasticism has not been much studied. In any case, this obliviousness to nominalist innovation started very early, with its contemporaries.

18.The sheer complexity of argument tended to bury it. The works of Dullaert of Ghent (315 in the key to Figure 9.7), at Paris in the early 1500s, “summarize in great detail (and usually with hopelessly involved logical argument) the teachings of Oxford ‘calculatores’ such as Thomas Bradwardine, William Heytesbury, and Richard Swineshead; of Paris ‘terminists’ such as Jean Buridan, Albert of Saxony, and Nicole Oresme; and of Italian authors such as James of Forli, Simon of Lendenaria, and Peter of Mantua—while not neglecting the more realist positions of Walter Burley and Paul of Venice. The logical subtlety of Dullaert’s endless dialectics provoked considerable adverse criticism from Vives (Dullaert’s student) and other humanists” (DSB, 1981: 9:237). Two generations later, the leading Aristotelean in Italy, Zabarella (352), at the great University of Padua, discussed Aristotelean physics in complete ignorance of the work of the Merton College and Buridan groups (EP, 1967: 8:366).

19.The failure rate for the 1200s is skewed upward by several failures in the 1290s; prior to that point the success rate was quite high. Estimates of undercounting of “paper universities,” which received charters but failed to come into existence, probably make the failure rate for the 1400s 10 to 15 percent too low; see Rashdall (1936: 2:325–331). Enrollment data from Rashdall (1936: 2:149, 171, 178–191); Stone (1974b: 91); Simon (1966: 245).

20.The military and political struggle between pope and emperor during the 1200s probably explains why there were no universities chartered there during that period. The Italian ambitions of the emperor finally collapsed in the 1340s, as the papacy weakened as well. Soon thereafter Prague University was founded, with charters from both emperor and pope.

992 • Notes to Pages 528–533

10.Cross-Breeding Networks and Rapid-Discovery Science

1.When not otherwise cited, biographical and network information throughout Chapters 10–14 comes from the relevant articles in DSB and EP as well as other basic sources (Copleston, 1950–1977; Merz, [1904–1912] 1965; Heer, [1953] 1968; Chambers Biographical Dictionary; 1984; Popkin, 1979; Johnston, 1972; Schnädelbach, 1984; Toews, 1980, 1993; Köhnke, 1991; Willey, 1978; Lindenfeld, 1980; Ben-David and Collins, 1966; Dickey, 1993; Ayer, 1982; Coffa, 1991; Waismann, 1979; Dummett, 1981; Wang, 1987; Kline, 1972; Boyer, 1985; Levy, 1981; Spiegelberg, 1982; Gadamer, 1985; Fabiani, 1988; Cohen-Solal, 1987; Boschetti, 1985).

2.Michael Mahoney (private communication) points to a number of overlapping Parisian circles, in addition to the Mersenne-Montmor groups, around Le Pailleur, Thévenot, and Bourdelot, and materially sponsored by the royal minister Colbert; collectively these became in 1666 the basis of the Académie des Sciences. Figure

10.1omits most purely scientific academies and circles.

3.As in previous chapters, the ranking of philosophers as major, secondary, and minor is based on their long-term influence; this is estimated by the relative space which they receive in various histories (Hegel, [1820–1830] 1971; Windelband, [1892] 1901; Lévi-Bruhl, 1899; Bentley, 1939; Heer, [1953] 1968; Copleston, 1950–1977; Marias, [1941] 1966; EP, 1967; Passmore, 1968; Kneale and Kneale, 1984). On the growth of the European philosophical canon as viewed by anglophone scholarship, cf. Kuklick (1984).

4.Structurally this is the same condition I noted in Chapter 9 in comparing stagnant with creative periods: an intersection of overlapping and rival circles. The material improvement of transportation and communications in the 1600s broadened the geographical zone in which such an intersection of circles could take place.

5.It is impossible to avoid some anachronism in terminology. “Science” took on its restricted modern meaning in English after 1847. Latin scientia was equivalent to Greek episteme, knowledge in any realm. Some term is needed for making historical comparisons, precisely so that we can see what is distinctive about certain activities in various periods. “Science” enables us to focus jointly on the several activities of collecting information by observations of nature, especially in the well-defined occupations of astronomy and medicine, and the equally distinctive activity of mathematical calculation and measurement.

6.Price (1986). Sources for discussion of various methods by which speed of scientific discovery may be measured (Cole, 1983; Griffith, 1988; Cozzens, 1989; Leydesdorff and Amsterdamska, 1990; Collins, 1994). The rapid-discovery mode set in earlier in some scientific fields than others, and the rate appears to have accelerated several times, most recently since the 1920s. On differences in consensus, see Cole, Cole, and Dietrich (1978); Hargens and Hagstrom (1982).

7.Highly accurate calculations of pi made between 220 and 500 c.e. were variously and often inaccurately recorded in the standard textbooks of the T’ang and Sung, which sometimes gave the traditional value of pi as 3 (Institute, 1983: 86–87, 35,

Notes to Pages 534–538 • 993

38; Mikami, 1913: 45–58; Qian, 1985: 62–63; Ho, 1985: 125–127; Chen, 1987: 77–85; Li and Du, 1987). Algebra reached sophisticated methods in the solution of higher-order equations between 1200 and Chu Shih-chieh’s work in 1303; fifty years later textbooks had reverted to an elementary level of arithmetic (Ho, 1985: 106). In the 1500s those who still recorded the Sung “celestial element” algebra were no longer able to understand it (Mikami, 1913: 110). For other instances of loss of advanced work, see Ho (1985: 72, 77); Needham (1959: 31, 33); Mikami (1913: 37–39).

8.In India, Aryabhata I (late 400s c.e.) expounded two astronomical systems; shortly thereafter Varahamihira (ca. 500 c.e.) described five systems, one based on Vedic astrology and four on Greek models (DSB, 1981: 15:533–632). Chinese astronomy was always divided among competing models. In the Han dynasty there was a struggle between advocates of the kaitian (hemispherical dome) and huntian (celestial sphere) cosmologies; in addition, two other systems were known. The huntian model became dominant in the astronomical bureaus of dynasties after 550 c.e., but there continued to be advocates of a rival model as late as the Sung. During the T’ang dynasty, there were three different schools of Indian astronomers employed at the imperial observatory, but without influence on Chinese astronomers. In the Yuan and Ming dynasties, there were Arab astronomers in official service, but Chinese astronomers ignored the Arab-Ptolemaic epicyclic planetary theory (Needham, 1959: 171–436; Sivin, 1969; Ho, 1985: 82, 129, 161–168; Mikami, 1913: 101–106).

9.There is evidence of around five competing research groups in a scientific specialty (Price, [1963] 1986: 130–133).

10.Thus Boyle’s vacuum pump could not be successfully imitated by anyone who had not physically used an earlier exemplar (Shapin and Shaffer, 1985: 229–230, 281). Harry Collins (1974) emphasizes that tacit knowledge of how to do research must be transmitted by a personal network of craft-like apprenticeship, since it cannot be encoded in purely verbal instructions. Latour’s (1987) depiction of science as a network of human plus non-human actors may well anthropomorphize the natural world, but it has this much justification: research-front science includes an ongoing network of scientists together with the genealogy of machines on which they are parasites, and vice versa.

11.Many examples are given in Braudel ([1967] 1973: 244–324) in which technologies stagnated for hundreds of years, including during the European centuries of the scientific revolution. And even where there were periods of technological innovation, they did not spill over into lineages of scientific research technology unless they were carried by intellectual networks. Thus the periods of innovation in weaponry, shipping, and construction engineering at various times in the history of Hellenistic Greece, the Islamic world, and medieval Christendom did not connect to intellectuals or become rapid-discovery science. See references in Collins (1986: 77–116).

12.The number of mathematicians treated in DSB (1981) active in each third of a century is as follows:

994 • Notes to Pages 539–546

1200s: 3–4–7 1300s: 5–6–0 1400s: 2–3–10 1500s: 17–18–26 1600s: 37–44–23 1700s: 19–39–34

Moreover, before 1500, most of the names listed are persons who recorded any mathematics even without originality; the criterion for listing shifts over in the 1500s to original contributions.

13.The first use of the equal sign ( ) was in Recorde’s 1551 book on elementary commercial arithmetic; what would become the modern notation for operations was popularized in England by Harriot’s 1621 textbook. Neither book contained any original mathematics. On the history of notation generally, see Cajori (1928).

14.See Figure 10.1. The other major philosophers are Bacon, Hobbes, Spinoza, and Locke. If we look not at overlaps between the scientific and philosophical networks but at personal contacts among their members, we find that all of the major philosophers are within one link of a significantly creative scientist, and 12 of 14 secondary philosophers are within two links of a scientist. The only major philosopher who is not an active scientist, Locke, is a medical doctor, directly connected with 2 scientific stars and a host of other scientists. The fact of their working in science does not imply that the work of these philosophers is itself a significant contribution; Bacon’s experiments, for example, led to no important discoveries. Here I use the strong criterion, indicated in note 19, for identifying scientists. I will often use the term science to include both science and mathematics; it should be obvious from the context when I am using it in a more restricted sense, exclusive of the activities of mathematicians.

15.During 1700–1900, 5 of 13 major philosophers were active in science (Berkeley, Kant, Schelling, Peirce, James), and 10 of 13 are within one link of an important scientist. Of secondary philosophers, 14 of 46 are scientists, and 33 are within two links of one.

16.We see this by comparing Figure 10.2 (network of Greek mathematicians) with Figures 3.1 to 3.8 (network of Greek philosophers). Sources for Greek mathematicians (Heath, [1921] 1981; Smith, 1951; Ball, [1908] 1960; Cajori, 1928; Knorr, 1975; Neugebauer, 1957; Boyer, 1985; Kline, 1972; van der Waerden, 1975; DSB, 1981).

17.This may be traced in the key to Figure 3.4 by noting the figures marked “medicine,” beginning with the merging of the Hippocratic lineage with the network around Aristotle and the Alexandria schools (71, 75, 76, 108). These connections are not depicted in Figure 3.4 itself to avoid overcomplicating the diagram.

18.As we saw in Chapter 8, the creativity of this original Baghdad group derived not simply from Greek imports but from the cosmopolitan situation which combined these with materials from Babylonian sects and Indian astronomers, resulting in al-Khwarizmi’s encyclopedic synthesis in the early 800s. By the generations of

Notes to Pages 548–549 • 995

965–1035, this elementary algebra had been developed to the high points of world mathematics at the time, al-Buzjani’s Diophantine equations and al-Karaji’s theory of algebraic calculation and algebra of polynomials, breaking with geometrical representations into an arithmeticized algebra. The Spanish network began around 965 with migrants from the Pure Brethren, numerological cosmologists branching from the Baghdad scientific network. Within a few generations this spread to the Jews (initially via numerology); it blossomed simultaneously into creative astronomy (e.g., al-Bitruji’s revision of the Ptolemaic system in the late 1100s) and the work of the major Jewish and Muslim philosophers. The scientific-philosophical network was disrupted in the eastern region around 1100. It was reestablished by Jewish travelers back from Spain: Abraham Ibn Ezra and Maimonides, who linked to the network around the Jewish doctor and astronomer Abu-l-Barakat and onward to the major astronomer al-Tusi and his lineage. The Jews played the role of cosmopolitan transmitters twice, not only to Christian Europe but also to the high point of Iranian Muslim science.

19.If we use the loose criterion of writing on some aspect of natural science, we would have to include 8 of 11 major philosophers (72 percent) and 19 of 48 secondary (40 percent) in medieval Christendom. By a stricter criterion (formulating principles in astronomy or physics, collecting naturalistic observations, or making at least crude calculations), we still find 45 percent of major and 23 percent of secondary Christian philosophers active in science. For comparison let us use a strong criterion: contributing actively to astronomy, mathematics, medicine, or naturalist observation. In Greece, 14 of 28 major philosophers were themselves scientists; in medieval Islam (including Jews), 5 of 11; in Europe, 1600–1900, 10 of 19. The percentages are similar in all four places: Greece, 50 percent; Islam/Jews, 45 percent; Christendom, 45 percent; Europe, 53 percent. Throughout the West, the most influential philosophers tend to be more interested in science than less influential philosophers. Among secondary philosophers, the percentages of overlap are lower everywhere: Greece, 28 percent (19 of 68); Islam, 20 percent (8 of 41); Christendom, 23 percent (11 of 48); and Europe, 28 percent (17 of 60). If we extend the perimeter to two links from the scientific network, the pattern is similar everywhere: for major philosophers, Greece, 82 percent; Islam, 82 percent, Christendom, 73 percent, Europe, 89 percent; for secondaries, Greece, 50 percent, Christendom, 44 percent, and Islam, 44 percent though here Europe stands out with 76 percent within the periphery of scientists.

20.Eminence among scientists and mathematicians is measured in the same way as for philosophers: by the relative amount of space devoted to them in histories of those periods.

21.In China, of 25 major philosophers, 6 (24 percent) were involved in some way in mathematical science, for the most part very tangentially. Among secondary philosophers, 7 of 61 (11 percent) were involved in astronomy, and only one of them, Liu Hsin in the Han dynasty, was an important astronomer. An additional 6 names of astronomers overlap the list of minor philosophers, making up less than 2 percent of the total. Extending the network outward, we find a mathematical

996 • Notes to Pages 550–551

scientist within two links for 16 of 25 major philosophers (64 percent) and for 15 of 61 secondaries (25 percent). If we start from the side of the mathematicians and astronomers, of the 12 major figures, none has any direct contact with philosophers important enough to be listed even as minor figures, and only 1 (the state astronomer Shen Kua, during the Sung dynasty) is within two links of a known philosopher. Of 9 mathematical scientists of secondary importance, only 1 has any philosophical contacts. By comparison, 63 percent of major Islamic scientists (12 of 19) are within two links of a known philosopher. Sources on Chinese mathematicians (Mikami, 1913; Needham, 1959; Sivin, 1969; Libbrecht, 1973; Nakayama and Sivin, 1973; Swetz and Kao, 1977; Graham, 1978; CHC, 1979, 1986; DSB, 1981; Institute, 1983; Ho, 1985; Qian, 1985; Chen, 1987; Li and Du, 1987).

22.The exception which proves the rule is the Buddhist monk I-hsing, the only important Buddhist mathematician and astronomer. He worked for the emperor at the time of the abortive Buddhist near-theocracy in the early 700s, and in the same temple where the great Hua-yen philosophy was created in the previous generation.

23.The method was revived and extended in Tokugawa Japan, leading to indigenous development of the calculus (Smith and Mikami, 1914). Here again we see a brief confluence of networks. Mathematics was carried in a network of samurai, bureaucratic officials of the shogun, and other high-ranking lords in positions concerned with accounts, astronomy, and other practical administration. By itself this was not conducive to intellectualized mathematics; but by the 1670s, these mathe- matician-officials were also running private schools in Edo and Kyoto, similar to the competitive expansion of Confucian schools which underpinned the philosophical outburst of the same period. Merely practical considerations were transcended by social competition over prestige; much as in Italy during the time of Tartaglia and Cardano, leading mathematicians attracted pupils by publishing problems and challenging others to solve them. Topics went far beyond practical problems, beginning with magic squares and circles, escalating to solving equations of very high degree. The most important developments from circle measurement problems to an integral calculus were made in the school of Seki Kowa from the 1670s through the early 1700s. Methods were kept secret, although occasionally spilled out in publications during the late 1700s. In the key period of innovation, the mathematical networks connected with the philosophical centers. Seki worked for the same Edo lord who employed the somewhat younger Ogyu Sorai; a Seki grandpupil became head of the Mito school. The mathematical lineages continued down through the early 1800s, but the connection with philosophy was not taken further; mathematics did not become invoked as an epistemological ideal, and mathematical methods were not generalized as abstract principles. Mathematical innovation stagnated after the mid-1700s; most likely the increasing bureaucratization of education in the later Tokugawa had a restricting effect on mathematics just as it did on philosophy. The wide expansion of low-status practical training schools for commercial mathematics, stimulated by the growth of the commercial

Notes to Pages 553–563 • 997

economy, remained separate from the samurai schools, and had no effect on innovation in abstract mathematics (Dore, 1965).

24.We see this in the surrounding conditions of several episodes of takeoff in intellectual mathematics: Athens established a monetized retail market in the late 400s b.c.e., and from 330 to 100 b.c.e. the international grain trade, centered on Alexandria, broke out of the usual government-administered exchange into the only competitive price-setting markets in antiquity (Polanyi, 1977: 238–251; Finley, 1973). Tokugawa Japan was a period of commercial capitalist boom; Italian and German cities of the 1400s and 1500s were commercial and banking centers. In the latter two cases we know explicitly that numeracy spread widely in the urban population, and there were many commercial schools teaching practical mathematics. Swetz (1987) and, in a Marxian version, Sohn-Rethel (1978) argue on the basis of this correlation that capitalism produced the mathematical worldview.

25.In Tokugawa Japan a rapidly expanding capitalist market, based on Weberian structural conditions, had very little innovation in machinery but a great deal of innovation in refinements of production for specialized market niches (MorrisSuzuki, 1994).

26.Rheticus in turn visited Cardano in 1545, and Cardano dedicated his great mathematical work Ars Magna to Osiander. The work was published in Nuremberg by the printer of De Revolutionibus (Blumenberg, 1987: 340). Cardano, in contact with virtually every innovative network, was also a friend of Vesalius. Historical sources on mathematicians of this period (DSB, 1981; Kline, 1972; Boyer, 1985; Smith, 1951; Cardan, [1575] 1962).

27.Michael Mahoney (personal communication) suggests that Copernicus’s new model was worked out within the long-standing Ptolemaic tradition of astronomy, eliminating some spheres and thereby better preserving Aristotle’s cosmology; thus Copernicus belongs to a “reestablished classical tradition.” Copernicus differs from Oresme in that he actually worked out the mathematics in detail; along the way, as I noted earlier, he took part in developing new trigonometric tables to speed up calculations.

28.Brunelleschi and Alberti became concerned with the geometry of perspective in the early 1400s, and Piero della Francesca treated the subject in a mathematical treatise in 1478. The painters too were raising their status by connecting their manual craft to an academic field; the result was to widen audiences and increase the focus of attention all around.

29.Notice that Descartes met Beeckman in 1618, before either of them did the work that would make them famous: yet another case of a network forming a node which promotes the later success of its members.

30.The intention is plain despite continuities in terminology. The new science is variously referred to as “natural” or “mechanical philosophy,” or sometimes merely “philosophy” (e.g., Bacon De Dig. 1.3). As did others, Descartes (in Principles) distinguished his “Philosophy” from “that which is taught in the schools” (Descartes, [1644] 1983: xxvi).

31.Here we see one of the weaknesses of the Burtt-Koyré thesis that the scientific

998 • Notes to Pages 565–568

revolution derives from the metaphysical assumptions of a Neoplatonic cosmology. It is not only that many of the scientific innovators were not following this particular metaphysics, or were more concerned with the adequacy of technical matters (Hatfield, 1990). The numerous competing strands of late scholastic, Humanist, and occultist philosophies between 1400 and 1600 constituted an intellectual field without a focus of attention; these are structural conditions for stagnation rather than for the dynamism of discovery. The main effect of philosophy on the mathematical and scientific revolutions was on the level of social structures; math and science networks were stimulated to make their arguments on a higher level of generality when they intersected with the networks of theologians and philosophers. The importance of this contact is not primarily through the transmission of philosophical capital into math and science, but in transmission of the emotional energy of intellectual competition characteristic of the philosophical networks.

32.Kangro (1968). Like Harvey, Jungius was a medical doctor from the Padua network.

33.Upheaval in the material bases of intellectual life fosters creativity in several directions at once. The last glory of Latin stylistics sprang up in the generations just before Bacon and Descartes: the anti-Ciceronian and Attic prose movements, which encompassed Montaigne and his teachers and lasted until the time of Milton (Croll, 1966). Descartes and especially Bacon were noted Latin prose stylists, along with their other accomplishments. As we have seen in the case of Greek philosophy, there is creativity in the moment of closing down an intellectual structure as well of opening one up.

34.Viète and Descartes’s father were both members of the Parlement of Brittany, and Viète was counselor at Tours in the 1590s, near Descartes’s home (DSB, 1981: 4:51, 14:52). The fame of Viète’s mathematics may have made an impression on Descartes in this way. Notice the parallel instances showing the public prestige of mathematical puzzle-solving: in 1593 the Dutch ambassador put a mathematical challenge to the French court involving an equation of the forty-fifth degree, which Viète solved. Descartes first became interested in mathematics through a challenge to solve a geometrical problem announced on a public placard in Breda, Holland, in 1618. It was on this occasion that he met Beeckman (Gaukroger, 1995: 68).

35.As Michael Mahoney (personal communication) puts it, Descartes’s symbolism “was essentially different from earlier systems of notation. It was operational. That is, the symbols revealed through their structure the operations being carried on them, so that one did the mathematics by manipulating the symbols . . . Moreover, unlike cossist algebra, Viéte’s and Descartes’ systems symbolized both knowns and unknowns, making it possible then to unfold the structure of equations viewed as general relations.” Descartes had a “drive for generality.”

36.Hatfield (1990: 159). Descartes does have a place for empirical observation, in the sense that “the truths that can be deduced from . . . Principles” include many which will not be noticed until “certain specific observations” are made. For the advancement of science, experiments must be made by those who know how to unite their results with a deductive system (Descartes [1644] 1983: xxvii).

Notes to Pages 573–590 • 999

11.Secularization and Philosophical Meta-territoriality

1.Compare the general model of political revolutions in Skocpol (1979) and Goldstone (1991).

2.In Figure 9.7, this is the lineage of prominent Scotists and nominalists (see 295 and 299 in the key), of whom the most notable was John Mair (314), the teacher of the reformer John Knox; Mair’s successors include Dullaert of Ghent (315), Thomist natural philosopher and editor of Buridan; Vives; and the leading Thomists of the period—all of whom were now teaching in Spain—Crockoert, Vitoria, Cano, de Soto, and Medina (335, 337, 338, 340, 341).

3.Aquinas had held that only in God are existence and essence united. Suarez held that this is true of finite beings as well. This sharpens the problem of how to characterize contingency, which led Leibniz to his distinction among kinds of necessity, logical and physical (Funkenstein, 1986: 118–121, 198).

4.Kagan (1974); Collins (1979: 4, 92). By comparison to Spain, consider the fact that England also was in an educational boom period during 1580–1670, when university students were about 1 percent of the late teen population, according to Stone’s (1974a) calculations, a ratio which dropped back to one third this level in the 1700s. In both Spain and England, the educational boom went along with an outburst of intellectual activity.

5.Bérulle is one of the main connections to Spanish movements. He was ambassador to Spain, and introduced the Carmelites—Saint Teresa’s order—into France. The conflict of the Oratorians versus the Jesuits structurally continued earlier battles in Spain (EP, 1967: 2:345–355; Ariew, 1990). See 31, 88, and 134 in the key to Figure 10.1.

6.Truchet (1967). The contemporary Spanish Jesuit, Balthazar Gracian, whose Art of Prudence (1647) is a manual on how to survive in a treacherous world by using deceit, had provided a model admired by Mme. de Sablé. Here we see the inner affinity of Jansenists and Jesuits beneath their surface antagonism.

7.In the same way the Cambridge Platonists, who published most of their works during this time, were absorbed in the flux of attention by more striking formulations of spiritual primacy. Henry More’s tutee Lady Anne Conway formulated a monistic ontology of spirits emanating from God, with matter at the lowest level as congealed spirit (Audi, 1995: 162, 513). Conway made little impact on the attention space: in part from sexist disregard of women, in part from her conversion to Quakerism, and above all because this Neoplatonist-sounding position was upstaged. On the other side, Locke produced the most defensible version of the primacy of extended matter, which eclipsed the earlier efforts on this side of the turf: those of Gassendi, who was not wholeheartedly modernist or secularist, and Hobbes, whose reputation survives because of his political philosophy rather than his ontology.

8.In Figure 10.1, note in the network 19, 31, 43–45, 97–98 and their ties. On the episodes recounted in the text, see Popkin (1979) and the relevant articles in EP (1967). The first round of controversy began with the arrival of Uriel da Costa, a crypto-Jew (i.e., forced convert to Christianity) who had studied at Coimbra, which

1000 • Notes to Pages 590–599

had been the Portuguese base for the Jesuit philosophers Molina and Suarez. In 1624 da Costa interpreted religion as a human creation. For this he was excommunicated by the Jews and his books burned by the Dutch; he committed suicide in 1640.

9.On the gradual development of Spinoza’s monism; see Funkenstein (1986: 81–87).

10.Brown (1984: 15–31); Funkenstein (1986: 118–123). The intellectual energy generated by this Leipzig milieu is shown in Figure 10.1: Leibniz’s teacher Weigel had previously taught Pufendorf, who became a famous legal philosopher and, like Leibniz, proponent of universal law. Another of Leibniz’s teachers was the father of the other notable German philosopher of this generation; this was Thomasius, who began as a natural lawyer, converted to Pietism in 1694, and produced a philosophy of mystical vitalism. Again there was a structural rivalry; the Pietists, who were the equivalent of the Catholic fideists in the context of Protestant Germany, became the main opponents of Leibniz’s lineage, including Wolff and his followers.

11.Broad (1975: 43); Mahoney (1990). Leibniz was publishing his “calculus of transcendent qualities” and his new dynamics between 1684 and 1694, just the years in which he worked out his philosophical system: Discourse on Metaphysics (1684–85); correspondence with Arnauld (1686–1690); New System (1695).

12.“Space is nothing but the order of co-existing things and time the order of successive things” (quoted in Brown, 1984: 147; see also 115). In keeping with this point, Leibniz criticizes Newton’s physics for assuming a frame of empty space, just as he rejects his theory of gravity as action-at-a-distance, since a vacuum does not exist in Leibniz’s metaphysics.

13.Hobbes’s important works were all produced at a rather advanced age: his contribution to Descartes’s Meditations on the First Philosophy in 1641 (age 53); De Cive, his first published treatise on political power, 1642 (54); Leviathan 1651 (63); De Corpore, containing his most thorough scientific materialism, 1655 (67). As in other cases, creativity had nothing to do with age, but with the moment of contact with the central intellectual networks. On Hobbes’s career trajectory, see Macpherson (1968); Shapin and Schaffer (1985); Lynch (1991).

14.Locke took over some of Cudworth’s arguments straightforwardly. His argument in the Essay (4.10) for the existence of God is identical to Cudworth’s: that nothing can come from nothing, and the existence of something implies the existence of an eternal creator (Copleston, 1950–1977: 5:58; Locke, [1690] 1959: bk. 4.10). This is the only point, along with the self-evident existence of the self, on which Locke admits knowledge derived other than from the senses.

15.Juan de Prado, who had been excommunicated from the synagogue in 1656 along with Spinoza, supported natural religion and was attacked by Orobio de Castro, who defended Jewish orthodoxy with Cartesian and Spinozaist weapons, a geometric sequence of proofs. Orobio wielded the same weapons against Christianity, and Locke was present at a debate in Amsterdam in 1684 on this topic, which he reviewed in one of his earliest publications (EP, 1967: 5:552). Bayle, not yet famous at the time when Locke met him, was similarly stimulated by the milieu of Jewish controversies over natural religion.

Notes to Pages 600–606 • 1001

16.Leibniz stresses the argument for innate ideas in his Discourse, written in 1686 but left unpublished; Locke’s Essay was completed the following year.

17.Lord Herbert of Cherbury, who had been English ambassador to France during the religious maneuvers of the 1620s, had argued for a minimalist religion based on common notions and the common consent of mankind; this argument was put forward in 1645, amidst the fervors of the Civil War, as a critique of religious authoritarianism. Locke has a network contact here too; Locke’s friend at the time he wrote the first draft of his Essay (during his stay in France in the late 1670s) was Cherbury’s grandson Thomas Herbert, who as earl of Pembroke was to receive the dedication of the publication (Fraser, [1894] 1959: xxviii). Pembroke later received the dedication of Berkeley’s Principles of Human Knowledge in 1710—an indication of the emerging split within the network of Locke’s successors.

18.An exemplary figure is Dryden (110 in the key to Figure 10.1). A supporter of Cromwell in the 1650s, he shifted to the Royalist court thereafter and was made poet laureate and court historian. In the early 1680s he wrote poetic satires defending the king’s party against the Whigs; in 1685 he followed court fashion and converted to Catholicism. Even with the Glorious Revolution he landed on his feet; in the 1690s he launched the dramatic career of Congreve (later recipient of Whig sinecures), and protected the Deist Blount.

19.These writers not only gave prestige to their political patrons but propagandized on their behalf as well. Swift in London during 1710–1714 edited the Tory party magazine. In the opposing literary circle, Addison made his reputation for poems celebrating Whig military victory and wrote the Whig attack on the Treaty of Utrecht which brought down the Tory ministry in 1714. Steele started as a gazeteer for Lord Harley, and edited Whig periodicals including Tatler and Spectator. Addison was rewarded by becoming secretary of state; Steele received a parliamentary seat.

20.The lineage of Boulainvilliers’s teachers goes back to the controversies over natural religion at Amsterdam in the 1650s. After La Peyrère’s scandalous pre-Adamite thesis got him arrested, he recanted and took refuge in the Oratorian college at Juilly. There Richard Simon continued La Peyrère’s project, producing in 1678 a historical critique of the Old Testament, which was in turn banned by Bossuet. In the next generation Simon’s student was Boulainvilliers. In Boulainvilliers’s philosophy the cogito implies a universal Being wider than matter; on this Boulainvilliers erects a natural religion, in which the body after death returns to universal matter while the soul remains an idea in the infinite mind (EP, 1967: 1:354; Roger, 1964: 6–7; Heer, [1953] 1968: 188).

21.Burrage (1993); Ariès (1962: 195–237); Heilbron (1994). The same collapse of enrollments and loss of professional credentialing is characteristic of the universities in England after 1670. In both places intellectuals operated in secular life and scorned the formalities of university lectures and examinations as “silly and obsolete,” “childish and useless exercises” (Green, 1969: 50; Stone, 1974b).

22.Condillac, the one member of the circle of Encyclopedists who came from a university background in theology, was the one who took up a traditional philosophical topic, although he did it using the new anti-metaphysical capital imported

1002 • Notes to Pages 609–615

from Britain by his network fellows, building a theory of mind on Locke and Newton.

23.I place “modern” in quotes to indicate that this is a historically relative usage. The alliance among religious and political liberalism and science, and among their opposites on the conservative side, was at its height in the Enlightenment and in the 1800s. The alliance has been breaking down in our own times, beginning with the existentialists and continuing through the postmodernists.

24.DSB (1981: 10:42–102); Westfall [1981]. Newton had early contacts with the main mathematical network too. His teacher Barrow had been a Royalist, unlike the Oxford scientists; ousted from his Cambridge fellowship in 1655, he toured the Continent and met the leading mathematicians, likely including Fermat and Roberval. Although Barrow’s substantive influence may not have been great, Newton was thereby made aware of the forefront of mathematical problems, and it was upon this terrain that he made his youthful contributions in the mid-1660s to the calculus and infinite series. Barrow recommended Newton as his successor when he gave up the Lucasian professorship of mathematics in 1669 to take the professorship in divinity. This suggests the order of precedence at Cambridge at this time: theology was regarded as more significant than science, and Newton shows the same priorities in his own work before 1684.

25.Berkeley was very young compared to other philosophers at their height of creativity: 25 years old when he published his masterwork, Principles of Human Knowledge. A similar case is Schelling, who burst on the philosophical scene in Germany at the age of 20. In both cases there was early contact with a core network, at a time when the structural situation was rapidly changing. For contrast there are the aged Hobbes and Locke. Young or old, whoever gets onto the central turf at those moments reaps the fame.

26.See Hume’s Letters (Greig, 1932: 23). Hume presents himself in the Introduction of his Treatise as a follower of Locke, Shaftesbury, Butler, and the other Deists. In a private letter in 1737, however, he points to Descartes, Malebranche, Bayle, and Berkeley as keys to his Treatise, suggesting the wider intellectual sphere at which he was aiming. This was just the time when Newton’s calculus of fluxions was coming under attack for its glib assumptions about infinitesimals. In 1734 Berkeley joined the fray with an extended critique, following the points he had raised against mathematics in his New Theory of Vision. Hume studied at Edinburgh with Newtonian mathematicians, probably including Colin Maclauren (122 in the key to Figure 10.1), who had extended Newton’s geometrical proofs and gotten his chair at Newton’s recommendation, and who led the Newtonian response to Berkeley in 1742 (Kitcher, 1984: 232–240; Jesseph, 1993). Hume picked up the theme of Berkeley’s attack; in the beginning of his Treatise he devotes considerable attention to arguing against the infinite divisibility of time and space (i.e., against the Maclauren-Newton position) and in favor of indivisible points, which must be matters of experience if they are to exist at all. He criticizes geometry (Maclauren’s specialty) as a science of no great certainty, since it must proceed via induction from the senses, and concludes that all knowledge, including that of mathematics, is only probable (Hume, [1739–40] 1969: 74–75, 176).

Notes to Pages 615–621 • 1003

27.By the 1770s and 1780s, these included Hutton, whose geology overturned biblical chronology, and Lord Monboddo, who produced early speculations on the evolution of humans from the apes. Sources on the social history of Scotland (CMH, 1902–1911: 6:117; Daiches, Jones, and Jones, 1986; Sher, 1985; Camic, 1983).

28.Hume was only in his mid-twenties when he wrote his Treatise in the 1730s. Once again, age is important only as it coincides with structural opportunity.

12.The German University Revolution

1.These are Bergson, Dewey, Moore, Russell, Wittgenstein, Carnap, Husserl, and Heidegger; at least another 12 are in the running for secondary: Croce, Schlick, Meinong, Scheler, Cassirer, Rickert, McTaggart, Whitehead, Alexander, Santayana, G. H. Mead, and C. I. Lewis. For sources, see Chapter 10, notes 1 and 3. Comparing Figures 10.1 and 11.1, we see that the number of major philosophers in any one generation in Europe is never more than 3—a pattern in keeping with that for medieval Christendom, Islam, India, China, and Greece. By my standard method of ranking by amount of attention given in comprehensive histories, for 1865–1900 the number of major philosophers is 5 (Peirce, James, Frege, Bradley, and Nietzsche). For secondary philosophers, the number calculated rises for 1835– 1865 to 12, for 1865–1900 to 9, and 1900–1935 to 12. These numbers are as high as or higher than those for even the most active generations in all of past history—the generation of 335–300 b.c.e. in Greece, when there were 8 secondaries, and 1265–1300 in medieval Christendom, when there were 9. It appears that we are gradually losing perspective on the fifth generation back from our own, that of 1835–1865, and almost certainly on the 1865–1900 generation. Within the next few generations of our future, some of these major figures will fall to secondary historical influence, and some secondaries to minor.

Unlike earlier network figures in the book, those in Chapters 12–14 list everyone by name and thus do not distinguish rankings by capitalization and key numbers. For convenience, what follows is a list of European philosophers ranked major (all capitals) and secondary by generation: 1600: bacon, Suarez, Campanella, Herbert of Cherbury, Boehme, Grotius; 1635: descartes, hobbes, More, Cudworth, Arnauld, Mersenne, Gassendi, Pascal; 1665: spinoza, leibniz, locke, Malebranche, Bayle, Thomasius; 1700: berkeley, Shaftesbury, Hutcheson, Wolff, Vico; 1735: hume, rousseau, Voltaire, Montesquieu, d’Holbach, Diderot, d’Alembert, Condillac, Butler, Adam Smith, Reid; 1765: kant, fichte, Hamann, Lessing, Herder, Jacobi, Schiller, Paley, Bentham, Condorcet; 1800: schelling, hegel, schopenhauer, Schleiermacher, Herbart, Maine de Biran, Cousin, Saint-Simon; 1835: j. s. mill, Spencer, Huxley, Newman, Kierkegaard, Emerson, Comte, Renouvier, Marx, Engels, Lotze, Fechner, Boole; 1865: peirce, james, bradley, nietzsche, frege,

Green, Bosanquet, Royce, Wundt, Mach, Brentano, Dilthey, von Hartmann, Hermann Cohen.

2.In anglophone philosophy, the canonical reputations of Berkeley and Hume were not established until the 1870s; until then Reid and Dugald Stewart were better known (Kaufmann, 1966: 277–278; Kuklick, 1984).

1004 • Notes to Pages 627–636

3.Intellectual movements in this respect resemble other social movements (Marwell and Oliver, 1993).

4.Goethe on his travels in 1774 sought out Lavater, and it was on their voyage together down the Rhine, when Goethe was flushed with new fame from publishing Werther, that both first met Jacobi. The custom of the day was for travelers to visit the famous, and conversely for famous travelers to be greeted by literary aspirants along the way. The pattern recurs throughout Goethe’s autobiography ([1811–32] 1974).

5.Herder, another friend of both sides of the network, took from Jacobi’s publicity the cue to become an ardent Spinozaist. His Gott: Einige Gespräche (1787) rejected Kant as dry scientific rationalism and extolled the flowing impulses of nature as Spinozaist penetration by the infinite attributes of the divine (Zammito, 1992: 243–245). Herder’s vitalist philosophy sounds superficially like Schelling’s Naturphilosophie of a decade later, except that the latter would perform the task with post-Kantian tools: the synthetic a priori, the categories of the understanding, and the dialectic of the transcendental self. Kant himself probably goaded his old pupil into this split by his own review in 1784 of Herder’s Philosophie der Geschichte der Menschheit, in which he rejected on critical grounds Herder’s particularistic philosophy of history.

6.By 1802, publications on Kant numbered 2,832 items (Guyer, 1992: 449; Beiser, 1987).

7.About the same time, Fichte fell in love with a relative of the famous poet Klopstock. He eventually married her after the success of his book in 1793 made it economically possible.

8.In 1790 the French clergy were turned into elected civic functionaries; in 1794 Christianity was replaced with an official Deist cult, complete with a new calendar beginning with the Year One. The civic church lasted until Napoleon’s 1801 Concordat with the pope restored Christianity as the state church.

9.The atmosphere of Idealism, electrical science, and sexual liberation that surrounded Schelling is expressed in Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley’s Frankenstein, written in 1816 in a Swiss castle to entertain her companions Byron and Shelley. Mineralogy, another new field of scientific discovery, was also the site of Romantic speculation; in the context of the time, it was not incongruous that the most extreme member of the Romantic circle, Novalis, was a mining engineer. Swedenborg held the same occupation in a previous generation.

10.Born in 1770, Hegel did not make his independent mark until he was 37, with his Phenomenology of Spirit. In contrast, Schelling (born in 1775) was precocious, a famous leader of Idealism by the age of 20, and progenitor of three different systems by age 28—a forcible illustration that what counts is not biological age but time of centrality within the active network. Kant was a prolific publisher from 1781 (age 57) through 1798 (age 74), the years when he was maximally energized by being the center of attention.

11.Hölderlin was finally recognized as one of the greatest German poets through the attention of Rilke and Stephan George after the complete edition of his works came out in 1913.

Notes to Pages 636–640 • 1005

12.The famous incident when Schopenhauer was sued for throwing a seamstress out of his anteroom occurred in Berlin in 1821, at just the time when it became apparent that he would have no success lecturing in competition with Hegel (Safranski, 1989: 271–273).

13.Arthur Schopenhauer is not the only one who was inducted into creativity by these contacts; his widowed mother, Johanna Schopenhauer, began to write essays and novels in 1813, virtually simultaneously with Arthur’s philosophy, and became by the 1820s the best-known woman writer in Germany. She had also hosted Mme. de Staël—the other famous woman writer of the day—when the latter was an émigrée from the French Revolution. The Schopenhauer family, heirs to a merchant fortune, nicely exemplify the investment of money in the single-minded pursuit of cultural eminence: not as consumers, but for social contacts as means of cultural production.

14.“If I am asked where the most intimate knowledge of that inner essence of the world, of that thing in itself which I called the will to live, is to be found . . . then I must point to the ecstasy in the act of copulation” (Schopenhauer’s journal, quoted in Safranski, 1989:269).

15.Another distinctive strand in Schopenhauer’s cultural capital, the knowledge of Upanishadic philosophy, which was just beginning to be translated in 1799–1802, was made available by his wide network contacts in the old Romanticist camp. In just these years Friedrich Schlegel began to promote Sanskrit philology (1808), and August Schlegel in 1818 at Bonn occupied the first German chair of Indology (Halbfass, 1988: 63–107).

16.Hegel’s immediate background was not particularly distinguished in comparison to Schopenhauer’s: after leaving Jena in 1806, he had been a newspaper editor in Bamberg for two years, headmaster of a Gymnasium at Nuremberg for eight years, finally becoming professor at Heidelberg in 1816 (succeeding Fries, who went to Jena) two years before his invitation to Berlin (Gregory, 1989: 32–33; Kaufmann, 1966: 227–230; Safranski, 1989: 252).

17.In France, a mixture of various non-academic bases existed throughout the century. Voltaire and Rousseau, although popularized and eventually enriched by the new publishing market, relied for material support during most of their lives on oldfashioned individual patronage. Voltaire at one point also received some collective patronage at Frederick the Great’s academy. Montesquieu, Helvetius, d’Holbach, and Turgot were self-supporting aristocrats, although their intellectual interests were shaped by contacts with the circles around the new publishing enterprises. On the publishing market in Germany and its associated careers, see Bruford (1965, 1962); Brunschwig (1947); Wuthnow (1989: 228–251).

18.Johan Heilbron (1994: 26–46) shows that in France, where aristocratic salons in the period from 1650 to 1790 brought together status-conscious courtiers with the most ambitious intellectuals, the hegemony of the literary style was taken to an extreme. The standards of polite and entertaining face-to-face conversation produced an emphasis on aphoristic wit and superficial cleverness of expression, and a denigration of sustained argument or erudition as pedantic. In this milieu, disdain for the traditional university subjects was especially strong.

1006 • Notes to Pages 640–646

19.Sources on the movement to abolish the university (Lilge, 1948: 2–3; Schnabel, 1959: 408–457; Weisz, 1983: 18). On German education and its reform (Paulsen, 1919; Bruford, 1965; Brunschwig, 1947; Ben-David and Zloczower, 1962; Hammerstein, 1970; Turner, 1974; McClelland, 1980; Mueller, 1987).

20.The first educational administration independent of the church was founded in Prussia in 1787, a council composed of legal administrators, university professors, and rectors of the chief Latin schools. In 1794 the Prussian legal code made all schools and universities state institutions. The reforms in place by 1820 gave the philosophical faculty a further career basis: teaching in a secondary school was professionalized under the requirement of three years of university study in the philosophical faculty. In the 1700s most secondary school teachers were theology students waiting for a pastorate to open up. Prussian reforms after 1787 simultaneously raised the pay of secondary teachers to the point where they could compete with pastorates (Mueller, 1987: 18–26).

21.For example, the University of Berlin expanded from 28 chairs for full professors in 1810–1819 to 115 chairs by 1909; total teaching staff expanded from 54 to 540. In German universities as a whole, total faculty (including the ranks of

Ordinarius, Extraordinarius, and Privatdozent) grew from 890 in 1796, to 1,200 in 1835, to 3,000 in 1905 (McClelland, 1980: 80, 258–259, 266).

22.I put aside some cases which further complicate the argument. A few non-academic individuals became famous in philosophy even after the academic revolution in their nation: Schopenhauer, Marx, Nietzsche, Sartre, Camus. But most of these were academic hybrids, dropouts from academic careers (Sartre teaching in a lycée was pursuing a typical French academic career, like that of Bergson). And we generally see in their work a shift back toward a literary mode, a de-differentiation of the intellectual role and a revolt against the technical level of philosophy along with this distancing from an academic base.

23.Emerson’s network ties, before his creative work began in 1836, were literary: Goethe, Coleridge, Wordsworth, Carlyle. The Transcendentalists purveyed a mélange of Goethesque pantheism, Plotinine emanationism, Platonic Ideas, and the adulation of geniuses such as Shakespeare. Kant was often invoked but his distinction of critical versus dogmatic philosophy ignored; epistemological issues were dismissed in favor of direct intuition of higher Truth. The St. Louis Hegelians were more rigorous but unoriginal in the fashion typical of idea importers. Their arena for innovation was to apply the dialectic to current events. For example, in the Civil War, the slave-owning states represented “abstract right,” the North “abstract morality,” and the victorious Union was Hegel’s ethical state (Pochmann, 1948: 32).

24.How then did earlier non-academic philosophers such as Descartes and Spinoza create metaphysical systems? Generally speaking, it was against their expressed intentions. They were part of the scientific revolution, that is to say, the movement of rapid-discovery scientists which their general arguments were intended to justify. These intellectuals were unable to replace philosophy with science, because the very act of arguing for the foundations of science, and any continuation of these arguments by their successors, re-creates the turf of philosophy. Why thinkers like

Notes to Pages 647–649 • 1007

Descartes stayed on the abstract level whereas the philosophes of the 1700s or the Utilitarians of the 1800s limited their issues to topical lay concerns, cannot be explained by this aspect of their material bases, since all of them were non-aca- demics. The thinkers of the 1600s were inwardly oriented toward their own network, especially the part of it which was carrying out the autonomous researches of physical and mathematical science, whereas later non-academic philosophers were much more lay-oriented because of their bases in popular literary media and political movements.

25.“Religion on the strength of its sanctity, and law, on the strength of its majesty, try to withdraw themselves from [criticism]; but by so doing they arouse just suspicions, and cannot claim that sincere respect which reason pays to those only who have been able to stand its free and open examination” (Kant, [1781] 1966: A.xi).

26.“For if God actually spoke to man, man could still never know that it was God speaking. It is quite impossible for a man to apprehend the infinite by his senses, distinguish it from sensible beings, and recognize it as such” (Kant, [1798] 1991: 115).

27.A quasi-experimental validation of this point is the fate of the Karlsschule, founded by the duke of Württemberg at Stuttgart in the early 1770s, and upgraded from a Gymnasium to a university in 1781 (DSB, 1981: 7:366–368; Schnabel, 1959: 424). Here the culture was heavily secular, focusing on the Enlightenment program of practical sciences (especially medicine and public administration) plus vernacular languages. Its notable early graduates (all with medical training) included Schiller (posted as an army surgeon) and the biological scientists Cuvier and Kielmeyer. The Karlsschule was suppressed in 1794, at the height of educational failures during the crisis of the revolutionary wars. The structural weakness which it illustrated was that reform in too secular a direction eliminated the main career attraction of the traditional university: its credentialing claim on careers in the church and in law, the two occupations on which the bureaucratizing state was building. The Enlightenment culture left education dangling too much on its popular appeal to withstand shocks in material support.

28.Kant was the son of a harness maker, who happened to grow up in a university town; Fichte, son of a poor ribbon peddler, was educated by the charity of a neighboring landowner; Herder, son of a schoolmaster, was so poor that Kant remitted his lecture fees; Schelling’s and Hölderlin’s fathers were pastors. Hegel’s father was in the upper civil service of one of the small states, but Hegel too had to find support as a tutor and secondary school teacher. The literary intellectuals, by contrast, were typically from wealthy families; they were much less dependent on low-paying academic or clerical careers, and had greater access to aristocratic connections for becoming higher officials. Goethe, Jacobi, and Friedrich Schlegel were university-educated in law, the faculty favored by aristocrats. Schopenhauer, the only one of the major Idealists who was independently wealthy, could afford to be a maverick; by the same token he was uninterested in educational or religious reform.

29.The very availability of tutoring jobs was due to the widespread unfashionableness

1008 • Notes to Pages 650–656

of formal education at this time. The leaders of educational reform all had personal experience of one of the main alternative systems, and were strongly motivated to escape this alternative as a degradation of the autonomy of the teacher. The only remaining career path would have been to become a schoolmaster while waiting for a pastorate to open up; such positions were extremely low paying and isolated from most intellectual networks, whereas tutoring at least held out the possibility of contact with cultivated circles of aristocratic or upper-bourgeois society.

30.Despite periods of stagnation in enrollments, notably 1830–1860, in general the German university system was on a solid footing after 1810, quite the opposite of its precarious position in the 1700s. Similarly, the criterion that professors’ career advancement depended on their research publications built up gradually, becoming dominant throughout Germany by around 1850 (Jarausch, 1982; McClelland, 1980: 148, 171–172, 242–247).

31.Success on Kant’s intellectual development (Beiser, 1992; Ameriks, 1992; Werkmeister, 1980; Guyer, 1987). For positions and network details of the Wolffians, Pietists, and Berlin Academicians, see DSB (1981) and EP (1967).

32.In his Metaphysical Foundations of Natural Science (1786). Kant continued this project to the end of his life, leaving work from the early 1800s to be published posthumously (Friedman, 1992: 185–191, 199; Werkmeister, 1980: 101–128). The maturity and validity of a science depended on how far it moved along this path. Kant held that chemistry, especially in the version of Stahl, presented only empirical principles, not yet necessary ones; with the development of quantitative chemistry in the 1790s, Kant gave his endorsement to Lavoisier’s system.

33.Fichte described the fundamental method of Idealism: “It shows that what is first set up as fundamental principle and directly demonstrated in consciousness, is impossible unless something else occurs along with it, and that this something else is impossible unless a third something also takes place, and so on until the conditions of what was first exhibited are completely exhausted, and this latter is, with respect to its possibility, fully intelligible” (Fichte, [1794–1797] 1982: 25).

34.“There is no need for premature alarm at the fact that this proposition expressly contradicts the first principle . . . It is sufficient that this conclusion follows by correct inferences from established premises, no less than that which it contradicts. The ground of their unity will emerge in due time” (Fichte, [1794–1797] 1982: 153; cf. pp. 98 and 226): “All contradictions are reconciled by more accurate determination of the propositions at variance; and so too here. The self must have been posited as infinite in one sense, and as finite in another.”

35.Fichte’s own summary of “the essence of transcendental idealism” states: “The concept of existence is by no means regarded as a primary and original concept, but is viewed merely as derivative, as a concept derived, at that, through opposition to activity, and hence is a merely negative concept. To the Idealist, the only positive thing is freedom; existence, for him, is a mere negation of the latter” (Fichte, [1794–1797] 1982: 69). The identification of one’s personal self with freedom and with the Eternal and Absolute is stressed particularly strongly in Fichte’s popular manifesto The Vocation of Man, written in 1800 at the height of his identification with the Romantic movement. The theme was carried on by the other Idealists at

Notes to Pages 657–662 • 1009

this time, such as in Schelling’s Philosophical Inquiries into the Nature of Human Freedom (1809).

36.The first history of philosophy to go beyond Greek models based on Diogenes Laertius and to give some attention to relatively recent philosophy was that of Brucker (5 vols., 1742–1767) at Leipzig (EP, 1969: 6:227; Santinello, 1981). Brucker remained traditional in form, listing in parallel the opinions of various schools rather than attempting to explain why philosophers had developed their arguments. The first efforts to develop the chronological history of philosophical ideas coincided with the German university revolution: Tiedemann (6 vols., 1791– 1797) at Marburg, and Tennemann (11 vols., 1789–1819) at Leipzig. Hegel drew on their pathbreaking work, while illustrating that one needs a philosophy of one’s own to write the history of philosophy in a philosophical manner. In Hegel, too, the emphasis shifts to a modern canonical sequence, rather than remaining preponderantly with the Greeks. Hence Hegel shares with Aristotle, who made a similar move in the historiography of ancient Greek philosophy, a focus on a synthesizing system mediating all the extremes, and on dynamic potential as the prime substance. On Hegel’s intellectual development, see Harris (1972, 1983, 1993). Marx, who parallels Hegel in many ways during the following generation, also began by specializing in ancient philosophy, writing his dissertation on the Epicurean materialists.

37.Hegel sets out the critique at the beginning of his system, in the Introduction to the Phenomenology ([1807] 1967: 100–107), and repeats it in his Logic ([1812– 1816] 1929: 2:251–252). Hegel is not unprecedented here; in the 1750s the Pietist Crusius in polemics against the Wolffians had also rejected mathematics. Hegel claims, more damningly as an academic modernist, that mathematical method in science “belongs to a stage of mental culture that has now passed away” (Hegel, [1807] 1967: 106).

38.Fries and Hegel had become Privatdozenten at Jena in 1801, leading to a publications race in which Fries pulled ahead early. Fries got a chair at Heidelberg in 1805; this was later to be Hegel’s first chair, when Fries vacated it in 1816 to take the professorship at the old Jena center. Both competed for the Berlin job after Fichte’s death in 1814; but now in the period of growing conservatism, Fries’s activities in the radical student movement got him into trouble with the authorities and made Hegel more acceptable.

39.Schelling too had the pragmatic sense to abandon Naturphilosophie before its first burst of enthusiasm in the early 1800s wore off, leaving the field for minor disciples to exploit, himself moving into the more congenial humanistic field of comparative mythology.

40.MacGregor (1992). Here again Hegel followed Fichte’s path, especially in the latter’s quasi-socialist blueprint, The Closed Industrial State (1804).

41.It is instructive to compare Spinoza, whose monist system bears some resemblance to Idealist metaphysics. But Spinoza denied freedom of the will, while the Idealists exalted it to a metaphysical extreme. It is not the surrounding political situation which makes the difference in these views. During Spinoza’s youth, the United Provinces had won final recognition of its revolutionary struggle for independence

1010 • Notes to Pages 664–671

from Spain (1648), and the Dutch Republic in the 1660s and 1670s was the freest state in the world. Spinoza’s own political activities were on behalf of freedom of private religious belief, whereas the German Idealists were wresting control of the educational system from the theologians and proselytizing the creative freedom of the philosophical faculty. The difference in the immediate organizational bases for intellectual life, rather than the political context as a whole, explains the divergent positions on freedom in these philosophical systems.

42.Sources on the history of English university reform (Rothblatt, 1981; Engel, 1982; Green, 1969; Richter, 1969); for international comparisons, see Rothblatt and Wittrock (1993).

43.Bradley sardonically expressed his attitude toward religious authority by parking his bicycle in the Merton College chapel; upon protest that it was desecrating the holy place, Bradley replied that he was willing to have it consecrated (Richter, 1969: 36–38).

44.To see bare particulars in the world is not primitive or simple, but an advanced accomplishment resting on many intellectual distinctions. We ourselves, as well as children and animals, Bradley declares, first perceive universals. Even indexicals (“this,” “here”) are in some respect universals, words invocable across situations. To be sure, there is an indexically inexpressible aspect of every experience, but it resides not in the particularity of that moment, but in the fact that every “this” has for its subject reality as a whole; it is the whole which is indexical and inexpressible. Bradley hints at metaphysical consequences by pointing out that “this,” unlike other ideas, can never be a symbol of something else. If we could find all ideas whose contents cannot be used as adjectives of something else, this would open the way to a new Anselmian ontological proof (Bradley, [1883] 1922: 27, 35, 69, 98).

45.A foreign member was William James, who founded the American Society for Psychical Research in 1884, during the time when he was working on his psychology. Peirce and Royce participated in the 1880s and 1890s in research on haunted houses and table turning (Myers, 1986: 11; Brent, 1993: 209, 215, 223).

46.Bradley’s Logic (1883: 53–55) had started a somewhat similar argument: the fiction of the atomic now is due to the combination of presence (two events marked as simultaneous) plus existence (a real appears in the time series, but is not in time). Bradley concluded that presence is the negation of time. For Bradley, time is mere appearance, and there may be any number of time-sequence equivalents in the Absolute.

47.It was formulated in the Gifford Lectures, 1916–1918, and published in 1920 as

Space, Time, and Deity. Whitehead’s Process and Reality (1929) was from the Gifford Lectures for 1926–1928. James’s Varieties of Religious Experience was from the lectures for 1902. The Gifford Lectures on Natural Religion, endowed at the Scottish theological strongholds of Edinburgh and Glasgow, were a principal promoter of Idealist philosophy.

48.Russell (1967). Perhaps because German Idealism was acquiring a bad name under the influence of Russell’s polemics, Whitehead pretended that his system was a development of themes in the classical tradition from Descartes to Locke and

Notes to Pages 672–678 • 1011

Hume; in fact Whitehead’s discussion of these thinkers largely focuses on the flaws of their sensationism and intellectualism. Leibniz, the thinker whom he most closely resembles, receives relatively few explicit references. Whitehead and Alexander in effect recapitulate the positions of Leibniz and Spinoza in terms of twentieth-cen- tury scientifically oriented Idealism.

49.A phenomenon noted for all historical periods by sociologists of religion (Stark and Bainbridge, 1985; Finke and Stark, 1992).

50.Kuklick (1977: 135–136; 234–235). Royce had come as a graduate student to Hopkins from Berkeley, where Gilman had been president before Hopkins; he was introduced to Idealism by Hopkins’s G. S. Morris, who also taught John Dewey. During the customary sojourn in Germany, Royce studied with Lotze, Wundt, and Windelband. Characteristically for the Americans of this period, his own philosophy was more Idealist than that of his German professors.

51.James’s changing disciplinary identification may be traced in his successive titles: assistant professor of physiology in 1876, assistant professor of philosophy in 1880, and professor in 1885; professor of psychology in 1889; back to professor of philosophy in 1897 (Boring, 1950: 510–511).

52.For this reason Peirce regarded mathematics as the investigation of the consequences of hypotheses; he himself innovated mathematical notation similar to the work of Dedekind and Cantor (DSB, 1981: 10:484).

53.Buchler (1955: 354, 356). Peirce pointed out that an infinite regress results when one attempts to analyze certain kinds of relations: a statement of relation must always characterize the relation of relations to their subjects, and so on. The argument parallels Bradley, except that from Peirce’s mathematical viewpoint, such nested series of relations fit the definition of the continuum “as that in which every part is of the same nature as the whole” (EP, 1967: 6:76).

54.Brent (1993: 311, 300, 209); Buchler (1955: 323). Eisele (DSB, 1981: 10:485) summarizes: “Nature syllogizes, making inductions and abductions.”

55.This is confirmed by the pattern of the various European analogues to pragmatism. In Germany, Mach interpreted scientific laws as practical fictions; and indeed James met and admired Mach during a visit to the Continent in 1882, long before formulating his own pragmatist doctrine (Johnston, 1972: 181). Vaihinger’s Philosophy of As-If (1911) similarly resonates with James. But the aims are quite different from James’s religious concerns. Mach’s positivism is purely scientific, and Vaihinger is a Neo-Kantian concerned with the validity of the forms of experience in the absence of a thing-in-itself. Pragmatism never became a self-conscious movement in Germany as it was in the United States. In the German university orbit the generations of Idealists had long since passed, and there was no demand for such a stepping-stone between religious Idealism and secularism. Where we do find the analogue to the United States is in Italy, where a pragmatist movement, led by Calderoni, arose soon after the zenith of Idealism. Here the timing was like that in America: the university system was under reform, as secularizers wrested it from the hands of the church and installed a German-style educational system. The Italian pragmatists were a halfway house between positivism and Idealism, criticizing both schools while borrowing elements from both.

1012 • Notes to Pages 679–699

56.Peirce’s 1868 argument resonates both with his semiotic chains and with the later maneuvers of Idealists such as Royce. Peirce holds that Cartesian doubt is an impossibility; whereas Royce concludes that a larger Self is behind the activity of doubting, Peirce specifies that the very thoughts in which the doubt is formulated are composed of signs, whose meaning is in the system of signs and in the social community which uses them.

57.Peirce’s life is often depicted as a melodrama illustrating the moralistic prejudices of his day and the failure of America to honor genius. Alternatively, Brent (1993) gives a reductionist explanation for Peirce’s career difficulties as the result of chronic neuralgia, which drove him to drugs, and in turn to episodes of financial and professional irresponsibility, outbursts of anger, and violence against his wives and servants. Yet it appears that Peirce’s episodic afflictions, like his propensity for personal conflicts, coincided with times of uncertainty and strain in his intellectual career; he himself finally recognized that his sicknesses were set off emotionally by adversity (Brent, 1993: 294). A more sociological interpretation is that Peirce’s network position gave him high ambitions and resources, but placed insuperable obstacles in the way of creating a clear-cut intellectual position.

58.Peirce was another of Dewey’s teachers, whose energy must have given some indication of what could be done at the interface of Idealism and science; but Peirce’s formal semiotic did not favorably impress the unmathematical Dewey at all.

59.Experimental psychology in its academic origins stressed the overlap of physiology and philosophy because the discipline was created by the migration of medical physiologists into philosophy chairs—James in the United States, Wundt in Ger- many—motivated by the shortage of positions in science faculties and the surplus of positions in philosophy (Ben-David and Collins, 1966). Most American psychologists of this generation had been sojourning pupils of Wundt.

60.Ruckmick (1912). The first independent psychology department in the world was founded by G. Stanley Hall, Dewey’s old mentor, at Clark University in 1889. In Germany experimental psychologists, ensconced in philosophy departments in a university system which was no longer differentiating new chairs, never developed behaviorism, but continued the philosophical focus on consciousness with introspectionist psychology (1870s–1910) and then Gestalt psychology (1910s). I examine the origins of experimental psychology within the German university system in Chapter 13.

13.The Post-revolutionary Condition

1.Kline (1972: 623). The point was repeated as late as 1810 by Delambre, secretary of the mathematics and physics section of the Institut de France.

2.Abel had five papers in the first issue of Crelle’s journal (including his resolution of the long-standing puzzle of the general solution of quintic equations), and Galois’s general theory of the solvability of algebraic equations by means of the theory of groups appeared in Liouville’s journal in 1846.

3.Practicing mathematicians, such as Euler, Lagrange, and Gauss, did occasionally

Notes to Pages 699–702 • 1013

attempt to clarify disreputable issues such as divergent series (Boyer, 1985: 562, 566), but as an exploration of particular issues rather than a general methodological concern.

4.This helps explain why innovations in basic axiomatic systems now came from schoolteachers on the periphery of the mathematical world, such as Lobachevsky in Russia, Bolyai in Hungary, and Grassmann while teaching at a German Gymnasium. I explore this further in the section on England, “The Advantages of Provinciality.”

5.This is not to say that physical interpretations of non-Euclidean geometry were not offered; for example, elliptic geometry can be considered the geometry of a surface of a sphere. Gauss around 1820 attempted to measure angles among mountain peaks in order to test which geometry fit (Kline, 1972: 867–880). Non-Euclidean geometry was more a flashpoint of public recognition than an underlying shift in the way mathematicians worked. N-dimensional geometries, which had been used occasionally in purely technical manipulations by d’Alembert and Lagrange, broke the connection with the physical world even more decisively by the 1840s. Older mathematicians such as Gauss had anticipated some of these conceptions by following out pathways available in existing mathematical practice; but they failed to see the potential significance because they were still operating in a frame of reference, grounded in the lack of differentiation between mathematics and scientific application, in which mathematical concepts must have intuitive meaning. Gauss’s unwillingness to publish many of his ideas, in contrast with Cauchy’s ambitious rush into print in the new attention space of pure math, shows the key part the social context plays in selecting ideas from an unfocused background and putting them into the center of attention.

6.All categorical propositions are to be analyzed into propositions asserting or denying existence; “all men are mortal” becomes “an immortal man does not exist,” and “all triangles have 180 degrees” becomes “there exists no triangle that does not have 180 degrees” (Johnston, 1972: 292–293; Lindenfeld, 1980: 48–53).

7.This parallels Brentano’s doctrine, developed around the same time, that the mind intends objects; the object in general is, so to speak, a slot to be filled with particular objects. In Brentano, the doctrine is mixed with empirical psychology; Husserl, a network offshoot of both Brentano and Frege, extracts from their concepts a general phenomenology.

8.To put it another way: an entire functional statement may be taken as content for a second-order statement; thus, existence may be treated as a second-order concept, but it is invalid to collapse the levels and treat them as an attribute of a first-order concept within the nested statements. This is the error Descartes made when he argued that divinity implies existence just as the concept of a triangle implies truths about its angles. In the same way, the universal quantifier (“all”) is a second-order concept whose complexities are hidden in ordinary language (Kneale and Kneale, 1984: 504; Coffa, 1991: 73).

9.This is the Leibnizian problem of identity of indiscernibles again. Frege points out that it cannot be solved by distinguishing different positions in space or time, since the issue arises once again in this context.

1014 • Notes to Pages 703–707

10.Cantor originated the method of one-to-one correspondence; Cantor’s concept of the power or cardinal number of a set is similar to Frege’s Platonic object-numbers.

11.Here Frege converges rather surprisingly with Bradley, who also held in his very different logic of 1883 that all true statements are about a single object, the universe. The British Idealist and the German logical formalist pursue a similar path insofar as they are rebounding off a common enemy, empiricist logic in the manner of J. S. Mill.

12.When the full-blown logicist movement widened the search for predecessors, Bolzano was also added retrospectively to the pantheon. Beginning in the 1810s as a mathematician-philosopher in the pre-disciplinary mode of an old-fashioned university (Prague) on the periphery of the German system, Bolzano set out to refute Kant with a combination of Leibnizian metaphysics and infinitesimal calculus (Coffa, 1991: 26–32; Boyer, 1985: 564–566). The result included various distinctions resembling those of Frege and his successors. Bolzano was ignored, owing in part to his isolation in the networks of the time; his work lacked the drive to omni-symbolism which became the mark of the later movement, and his innovations were buried in a metaphysical system of archaic cast. As in other cases where adumbrations were recognized only in retrospect, Bolzano points up the importance of a full-scale intellectual movement to raise details from their surroundings and focus attention on them as landmarks of a new worldview.

13.Almost simultaneously, in 1844 Grassmann produced an even wider generalization of complex numbers, connected to n-dimensional geometry, and dropping not only the commutative but also the associative law. Grassmann’s work was little recognized until the 1860s. The difference in fame was due to the fact that Hamilton’s work came as the climax of controversy around the fundamentals of British mathematics; whereas Grassmann was working in a side area far from the topics on which German and French mathematicians were focusing attention. Grassmann originated not in the network of leading German mathematicians, but as a theology pupil of Schleiermacher. Under prevailing conceptions of mathematics, such nonnaturalistic innovations were likely seen in a theological rather than a strictly mathematical context. Hamilton too had German Idealist connections as an intimate of Coleridge; he claimed quaternions had cosmic rather than merely mathematical significance (Hankins, 1980).

14.Sir William Hamilton and Bolzano (see note 12) are structural parallels: both were philosophical conservatives at provincial universities who found their stimulus in opposing the influx of fashionable Kantianism. In both cases fundamental innovations in logic were set in motion in the 1830s which were not recognized until later.

15.Again in 1863 Mill was to promote his systematic philosophy by using Sir William Hamilton as a foil. Hamilton was especially well known in America, where Scottish faculty psychology dominated the colleges; there he became the subject of discussions from which emerged yet another innovation in logic, that of Peirce in the 1870s. As we saw in Chapter 12, Peirce’s starting point in mathematics, via his father’s work, was an extension of Cayley and Sylvester’s method for inventing

Notes to Pages 709–717 • 1015

alternative algebras, which they had generalized from Hamilton’s quaternions. Peirce was an American import of British mathematical and philosophical networks, who brought together their controversies into a full-fledged system.

16.There is even a personal connection to the core of the Utilitarians: John Stuart Mill was Russell’s godfather. This could hardly have produced any direct intellectual or emotional influence, since Mill died when Russell was one year old. But it exemplifies how central Russell was in the late Victorian network structure, a fact which must have shaped his intellectual trajectory. He was raised by his grandparents, Lord Russell, the introducer of the Reform Bill in 1832 and subsequent prime minister, and Lady Russell, an outspoken political liberal and promoter of Utilitarian causes.

17.Kline (1972: 1031–33). At this time Whitehead was purely a mathematician; his shift into philosophy did not occur until the 1920s.

18.Kline (1972: 1197–1208; DSB, 1981: 14:613–616; Peckhaus, 1990). Zermelo’s basic idea, showing the existence of relations by which every set in an infinite system corresponds to one of its elements, was already formulated in 1900–1901 lectures. It burst into prominence in 1904 in the aftermath of Russell and in tandem with Hilbert’s announcement of his formalist program. This was the formalist network in action; Zermelo was a Dozent at Göttingen, a colleague of Hilbert and Husserl, and a former pupil at Halle of Cantor, whose set theory Zermelo defended. At the same moment, Hilbert proposed his drastic new program to cure mathematical paradoxes, including these newest ones, by treating mathematical symbols as nothing more than arbitrary but consistent sets of marks on paper. Dramatic developments of this kind are not mysterious and sudden insights. Typically they happen in the course of long and intense concentration on problems focused by network conflicts. In this case Russell found his paradox, and Zermelo his axiom of choice, by wrestling with dubious points in Cantor’s system. Russell describes how he tried out every conceivable approach to his problems, just as W. R. Hamilton discovered quaternions in a sudden insight after 15 years of working on the problem (Coffa, 1991: 103, 115; Kline, 1972: 779).

19.Wedberg (1984: 139–141). Because of his emphasis on the independence of logical elements, Russell for a while endorsed Meinong’s 1904 doctrine of the types of reality of all mental and extra-mental objects. Russell could vacillate among various forms of realism—Platonist, sensory, and others—because his principle of acquaintance covered very generally every kind of item that might be directly known.

20.Wittgenstein also rejects Neo-Kantianism, which he otherwise somewhat resembles. The space-form is not merely a kind of spectacles through which we see the world; it involves a “multiplicity of relations” which we have had to discover through exploration of uses of symbol systems (Tractatus 4.0412). Wittgenstein seems to have in mind that a fact such as space having three dimensions rather than something else is not explained by Neo-Kantian a priority; logic permeates the world, including its “empirical” aspects.

21.Russell himself, who declared that his brain had been burned out by the struggle

1016 • Notes to Pages 717–720

to break through old gestalts in the theory of types, had an inkling of the importance of symbolism in Wittgenstein’s breakthrough (Russell, 1967: 228–229, 247). Referring to Wittgenstein’s notion of unsayability, in the introduction to the Tractatus (Russell, 1922: xvii–xviii) Russell says: “This view may have been originally suggested by notation, and if so, that is much in its favor, for a good notation has a subtlety and suggestiveness which at times makes it seem almost like a live teacher. Notational irregularities are often the first sign of philosophical errors, and a perfect notation would be a substitute for thought.”

22.Frege had already shown the way in pointing out that his distinction between asserting a function and the content asserted—a predecessor of the hierarchic theory of types—reveals the error in Anselm’s ontological proof.

23.“Vienna Circle” is a loose term for an entire movement. In the narrower sense, the circle was the personal seminar conducted by Schlick from 1924 to 1936; as the movement grew, it became formalized through the leadership of Neurath with its manifesto in 1929 and its own journal, Erkenntnis, in 1930 (Ayer, 1982; Popper, 1976; Quine, 1985; Waismann, 1979; Johnston, 1972). Overlapping were other sub-factions and discussion groups, as well as a pared-down circle of those Wittgenstein allowed to meet with him during 1927–1932. These circles are interconnected by visitors with the Berlin circle of Reichenbach, and with the Warsaw school of logicians; another node at Prague via the physicist Philip Frank, becoming more central when Carnap gets a chair there in 1931; and in the 1930s a widening network of young philosophers who spread the message abroad: from Oxford, Ryle’s pupil Ayer; from Harvard, Whitehead’s and C. S. Lewis’s pupil (and thereby James’s grandpupil) Quine.

24.Schnädelbach (1984: 87); Willey (1978: 155, 173); Johnston (1972: 189). Vaihinger began to formulate his doctrine in the 1870s after studying with the militant Neo-Kantian Lange. Vaihinger was strongly identified with Kantian scholarship; he founded the journal Kant Studien in 1896 and the Kant Society in 1904, the major channels for the proliferation of Kantian publications at the turn of the century. It was in this journal that Schlick delivered his attack on Cassirer’s Neo-Kantian physics in 1921. The Vienna Circle journal Erkenntnis was a successor to another of Vaihinger’s journals, Annalen der Philosophie.

25.Coffa (1991: 189–201). Einstein overthrew Newtonian space as an absolute container of motion; as late as 1920, Reichenbach regarded Einstein’s argument as providing support for Neo-Kantianism. Einstein himself came to dislike the NeoKantian interpretation, holding instead that time-space has physically objective existence. In 1921 Einstein wrote to Schlick in support of the latter’s critique of Cassirer’s interpretation of relativity theory. But Einstein’s opinion was hardly decisive for the changing philosophical atmosphere. His own sympathies were mixed and highly variable (Holton, [1973] 1988: 237–278). Early (around 1905) Einstein regarded himself as sympathetic to Machian phenomenalism, though drawing crucial components from Planck’s opposing position; in the 1910s he shifted toward theory-accessible realism; by 1922—just after his contact with Schlick—he was publicly attacking the Machians as overly empiricist. When the

Notes to Pages 720–732 • 1017

Vienna Circle was developing in the 1920s, Einstein was going in the opposite direction. The fact is Einstein’s special relativity was taken as support by all the major philosophical positions alike: Neo-Kantian, positivist, realist, pragmatist, and even religious Idealist.

26.We have seen this in the endless critiques by ancient Greek Academics pointing out contradictions in the doctrines of Stoics, and in the imperviousness of Epicureans to attack. In ancient India the Ajivikas were ridiculed for their inconsistency between believing in all-encompassing Fate and their personal striving for liberation. In medieval India the Nyaya-Vaisheshika school responded to acute Buddhist and Advaita attacks on paradoxes in their position not by backing away from their realism but by extending it. These schools lasted many generations without changing their positions.

27.Popper states in his autobiography that he had had the basic idea already in 1919, as the result of disgust with Marxist politics and the enthusiastic claims of the Freudian and Adlerian psychoanalytic factions. This was at about the same time Schlick was invoking falsification against the Neo-Kantians; but neither Schlick nor Popper made much further use of the idea in these years. Popper’s family and personal connections brought him in contact with a wide range of the avant-garde political, musical, and social science movements in Vienna during the 1920s; these connections also kept his career interests scattered until 1930, when he began to focus on developing the philosophical implications of a falsification criterion in terms of the debates that were now splitting the Vienna Circle. Although he retrospectively portrays himself as the destroyer of logical positivism, Popper became famous through his connection with the Vienna Circle (Popper, 1976: 36–38, 78–90, 107).

28.Kuhn’s originating network overlaps with that of Quine: both were members of the Harvard Society of Junior Fellows, and early in their careers both were personally connected to Conant, who built up the program in history of science at Harvard. Kuhn’s work is the best-known result of the confluence of two major organizational developments: the differentiation of the academic discipline of history of science, together with the foundation-of-science issues generated by crossdisciplinary border flows of mathematics and physics into philosophy which constituted the Vienna Circle.

29.Moore however remained oblivious to the revolt against the subject-predicate form being carried out by Frege and Russell; small wonder Wittgenstein despised the book.

30.See the genealogical charts in Levy (1981: 22–25); Bell (1972: xviii–xix). There is nothing to match this elsewhere. In Germany, Brentano came from a family of famous writers, and Fichte’s son had some reputation among theological Idealists; but in general German linkages are purely academic ones. In America, James and Peirce were born into families of famous intellectuals, but overall the intellectual network has few kinship ties. Nor were British philosophers usually tied together by kinship, except in these few generations. Under previous conditions, most intellectuals were either celibate clerics or recipients of patronage in aristocratic

1018 • Notes to Pages 734–738

households who could not afford to marry; after the Humboldtian university revolution, professors were middle-class specialists segregated in alliance networks by their careers.

31.For instance, in his Introduction to Wittgenstein’s Tractatus, (1922: xxii) Russell comments: “As one with long experience of the difficulties of logic and of the deceptiveness of theories which seem irrefutable, I find myself unable to be sure of the rightness of a theory, merely on the ground that I cannot see any point on which it is wrong.”

32.The doctrine of Stevenson (Quine’s pupil) that ethical statements are emotional expressions (1944) had a similar effect in the United States.

33.Mauthner, who explored the philosophy of language during Wittgenstein’s youth in Vienna, is sometimes regarded as an early influence or predecessor. Nevertheless, Mauthner’s “critique of language” did not set the pathway Wittgenstein followed from mathematical logic into a theory of propositions. The case of Mauthner shows that the philosophical resonances of language were noticed from time to time—as is to be expected in the increasing consciousness of symbol systems in fields ranging from Neo-Kantianism to Freud. The movement to turn all of philosophy into the study of ordinary language was a more specific and militant move within the philosophical discipline, and that is where its structural causes are found.

34.Wittgenstein was merely an undergraduate at Cambridge during his period of discipleship with Russell, never took a formal degree, although he was given a Ph.D. pro forma upon returning in 1929. Russell and Moore also had enough independent wealth (and, especially in the case of Russell, social eminence) to dedicate themselves to their intellectual interests, even during periods without academic support. Wittgenstein made ostentatious gestures of despising material wealth, for instance, keeping no furniture in his college rooms during the 1930s, so that his pupils had to bring their own chairs. It was the kind of sacrifice of wealth for status of which the satiated rich are capable; in a more conventional version, Wittgenstein cultivated entrée with the artistic elite upon his return to Vienna in 1914 by donating a large amount of money to them (Monk, 1990: 109). Something of the same self-confident eliteness was expressed in Russell’s insouciant style. At the age of 27 he could treat the famous mathematician Poincaré in debate as follows: “M. Poincaré requests a definition . . . Perhaps he will be shocked if I tell him that one is not entitled to make such a request since everything that is fundamental is necessarily indefinable . . . Since mathematicians almost invariably ignore the role of definitions, and since M. Poincaré appears to share their disdain, I will allow myself a few remarks on this topic” (Coffa, 1991: 130). Russell’s polemical style was a form of mocking, often with an undertone of class consciousness, as when he derided the Idealist conception of sensory experience as parts of a whole by imagining the professor calling his college servant to testify what the “plain man” thinks: “Well, sir, greenness is to me the name of a complex fact, the factors of which essentially and reciprocally determine one another. And if you, sir, choose to select one factor out of the complex, and to call it greenness, I will not dispute about the term, for I know my place, sir” (Coffa, 1991: 96).

35.The organizational setting too played a role. Göttingen had been the main center

Notes to Pages 742–748 • 1019

for programs of unification in mathematics since Riemann’s generalization of non-Euclidean geometries in the 1850s; Klein’s unification of geometry around the theory of groups and their invariants beginning in the 1870s and developing into an encyclopedic movement at Göttingen from 1886 until 1913; and Hilbert’s efforts at formal unification of vast areas of mathematics at the turn of the century (DSB, 1981: 7:396–397; Paukert, 1990). Husserl created an even broader program to unify science on its most general basis.

36.Lipps was a former pupil of Stumpf, and thus another network grandpupil of Brentano, whose act-psychology Lipps’s position resembled. Lipps was known for his theory of empathy, as the active project of the self into external objects. His psychological version of phenomenology was upstaged by the more radical objectbracketing phenomenology of Husserl.

37.Though publicly supportive of Scheler, Husserl referred to his work privately as “fool’s gold”; later he would call Scheler and Heidegger his “antipodes” (Spiegelberg, 1982: 269).

38.Heidegger overdramatized the extent to which the question of being had been forgotten since the time of Duns Scotus. In fact, it had become a hot issue among his own immediate network predecessors. Husserl bracketed the question of being in order to study essences; Meinong multiplied the kinds of being. Heidegger took the opposite direction from his teacher’s rival, searching for the univocal meaning of being underlying all varieties.

39.From Husserl’s viewpoint this was a merely naturalistic use, which he nevertheless encouraged when meeting Jaspers in 1913. At this point Husserl was still looking for allies (Natanson, 1973: 160). A key network contact in Jaspers’s development was Erich Frank, a pupil of Rickert and Windelband, who in 1914 discovered the virtually unknown Kierkegaard and shared this enthusiasm with Jaspers. In 1919 Frank’s Wissen, Wollen, Glauben, along with Jaspers’s Psychologie der Weltanschauungen, launched German existentialism (EP, 1967: 3:218–219). By 1923, Heidegger was personally acquainted with Jaspers.

40.In the pattern typical of creative groups, the personal relationships had formed before either of them did the creative work which made them famous. Out of this same period came a generation of younger scholars later to be famous in German thought: Heidegger’s assistants Gadamer, Löwith, and Marcuse. Another of Husserl’s assistants, Oscar Becker, forms the intermediary link as teacher of Apel and Habermas (Gadamer, 1985: 141, 171).

41.In the 1960s and again in the 1980s, there were controversies over Heidegger’s involvement with Nazism in the early 1930s (Bourdieu, [1975] 1991; Farias, 1987). None of these makes a convincing case that Heidegger’s politics determined his philosophy. Bourdieu’s analysis, the most sociological, rests on the assertion that the intellectual field is homologous to the surrounding social and political field. Hence Heidegger did not need to be conscious that he was expressing in the concepts specific to the philosophical field the same stance of the resentful provincial middle class which gave rise to Nazism in the political field. But in fact the intellectual field is not homologous to the social and political world; the one is governed by the struggle for attention under the law of small numbers, with its

1020 • Notes to Page 749

limit of a half dozen effective factions and its structural pressures for oppositions and regroupings; whereas the social and political worlds do not operate by this kind of struggle over attention space, and do not have the same numbers of factions and oppositions. Bourdieu posits a further homology between the factions within philosophy and the structure of relations within the intermediate level constituting the academic field of the universities in general. Nevertheless, the overcrowding of candidates for faculty positions after 1900, and a huge influx of students in the 1920s (Bourdieu, [1975] 1991: 123, citing Ringer, 1969), are not phenomena unique in the history of modern education, and do not account for the range of opposing positions in philosophy of this time. Similar overcrowding occurred in the 1830s and 1840s, but the result was not anti-modernist conservatism but the radicalism of the Young Hegelians (Toews, 1980: 213–216, 1993: 389–392; McClelland, 1980). The external resonances of Heidegger’s philosophy were not specific to (or even primarily with) the Nazis; its greatest popularity was among Protestant and Catholic theologians, and among the French existentialists of the anti-Nazi underground, and it received its widest fame in France in the years immediately after the liberation. The attempts to discredit Heidegger by means of his Nazi phase are part of the intellectual maneuvers of a later period.

42.Husserl followed Kant in taking time as the basic form of experience, since all experience is temporal but not spatial. For Kant, all categories are configurations of time: substance is permanence through time; causality is lawful succession in time; and so on. But in this Kantian approach, being itself is not temporal. Husserl kept changing his mind as to whether time flows from the pre-temporal transcendental ego or vice versa, or indeed whether subjectivity and temporality are identical (Dostal, 1993: 147–149).

43.There is an additional reason why Heidegger reverses Husserl’s position. Husserl identified being with the naturalistic level, distinguishing being from the essences revealed by bracketing. Heidegger’s being is univocal across all levels; therefore he eliminates bracketing.

44.The intermediary between Schutz and Husserl was Felix Kaufmann, a Viennese whose interests in mathematics, physics, and economics were fostered in the periphery of the Vienna Circle. Kaufmann had visited Husserl from 1922 on, and introduced Schutz to him in 1932. Schutz, an economist, took up the phenomenological method in order to clarify debates over the foundations of social science, and especially Max Weber’s categories of verstehen and rational action. Schutz’s followers, like the later phenomenologists in general, became known as violent antagonists of the logical positivists. Not uncharacteristically in the growth of intellectual movements, opposing movements tend to split off from a common center: in the network, Schutz is only two links away from Schlick, Carnap, and von Mises. Harold Garfinkel, a pupil of Schutz at the New School for Social Research in New York during the early 1950s, went on to develop the sociological research program of ethnomethodology, inventing methods for breaching the taken-for-grantedness of everyday life which are something like experimental equivalents of the phenomenological epochê. Garfinkel’s movement in U.S. sociology during the 1960s and 1970s resurrected some qualities of Heidegger’s preach-

Notes to Pages 750–764 • 1021

ing, emphasizing the moral resonances of uncovering the merely constructed nature of the social world while pessimistically recognizing the inevitability of such constructions.

45.It was this phase of Heidegger that gave him a philosophical point of contact— apart from whatever temporizing and bandwagon jumping was involved—for greeting the Nazi rise to power in 1933.

46.Projecting this back into medieval Christendom, William of Ockham is supposed to be a typical Anglo philosopher, but Duns Scotus is not; in fact both of these Britons spent most of their careers in France and Germany. The archetypal metaphysician, Saint Anselm, was archbishop of Canterbury.

47.Hoch (1991) suggests that the Vienna Circle shifted from a militant program of replacing philosophy with unified science to a reforming movement within philosophy because of their migration to the United States. At this time their base shifted predominantly from physics chairs to philosophy departments. Carnap’s chair at Prague had been in philosophy, but it was housed, unusually, in the natural science faculty; as in Vienna, the philosophy chairs had been split into one for inductive science or natural philosophy, another for traditional humanistic philosophy. The organizational background of the Vienna Circle was a European movement to absorb philosophy academically into the natural sciences. Nothing like this existed in the United States or Britain. Hence when the Vienna Circle migrated, it had to accommodate, becoming a reform movement within academic philosophy and eventually a technical specialty among others.

48.This may be one reason why Wittgenstein—apart from his usual cantankerous- ness—refused to go along with the Vienna Circle’s condemnation of Heidegger (Janik and Toulmin, 1973: 288).

14.Writers’ Markets and Academic Networks

1.Sources on the institutional structure of French education (CMH, 1902–1911: 8:52, 752; 9:126–129; 10:73–93; 11:23–26, 297; 12:92–93, 114–118; Weisz, 1983; Fabiani, 1988; Burrage, 1993; Ringer, 1992).

2.Politician-philosophers included not only the Idéologues but also Royer-Collard, who led the “Doctrinaires” faction, deriving politics from immutable self-evident principles (in fact taken largely from the Scottish philosophy of Reid, who held against Hume that man has a faculty of common sense); on the conservative side, de Maistre and de Bonald with their self-conscious traditionalism; Mme. de Staël, the daughter of the pre-Revolutionary finance minister, and emblem of the vacillating loyalties of the Royalist exiles; and Chateaubriand, like Destutt and Maine de Biran a former army officer, prominent after 1800 in the politics of Royalist opposition to Napoleon. Chateaubriand made his reputation in 1802 with his Genius of Christianity, written in opposition to Cabanis. The emergence of the political assemblies as the focus of attention went along with an underlying shift in the bases of intellectual production in the Revolutionary/Napoleonic period.

3.For instance, he was pictured on the cover of Time magazine in 1946 while on a publicity tour of the United States (Cohen-Solal, 1987: 271). The nearest approach

1022 • Notes to Pages 768–772

to such publicity would have been Kant, who was widely discussed in German magazines of the late 1780s; but the large-scale mass media did not exist yet in the twentieth-century sense. Sartre was the equivalent in philosophy of the publicity which elevated into media figures, among scientists, Einstein in the 1920s, and among writers, Hemingway in the 1940s. Within France, André Malraux had achieved some of this standing of front-page publicity in the 1930s with his exotic adventure-cum-writing exploits (Lacouture, 1975).

4.We see the same thing again with Sartre, whose first major production, Nausea, takes its surface content from his own situation as a provincial lycée teacher in Le Havre.

5.Deussen became a pupil of Zeller, and thus connects Nietzsche indirectly to the main Hegel network (Figure 13.1). Pforta had been Fichte’s secondary school as well. A younger schoolmate of Nietzsche, Ulrich Wilamowitz-Moellendorf, who later became the preeminent classicist of his day (and grandteacher of the hermeneutic philosopher Gadamer), made his first statement by critiquing Nietzsche’s Birth of Tragedy of 1872. Pforta was in fact the only Gymnasium which offered a truly elite curriculum in the 1850s–1870s; it selected most of its students for scholarships, and more than 30 of its pupils went on to become full professors at German universities, including Liebmann (originator of Neo-Kantianism) and Paulsen (Mueller, 1987: 29). Nietzsche was a product of the cutting edge of education in the German school system.

6.Although Nietzsche hated the anti-Semitic movement, he is within two links of it through two different connections: via Wagner to the latter’s son-in-law Houston Stewart Chamberlain, and via his own sister to his brother-in-law Foerster, who was an anti-Semite politician. From a network point of view, it is no surprise that Nietzsche’s philosophy became associated with this movement.

7.Wagner was in the first wave of those who recognized Schopenhauer in the mid-1850s, sending him the Ring libretto, as yet musically unscored, with a dedication. Schopenhauer replied politely but preferred, as a musical traditionalist, Mozart and Rossini; he suggested that Wagner had more genius as a poet (Safranski, 1989: 347).

8.The king of Bavaria had inherited in 1864 a palpably weak state in the geopolitics of the day, soon to be swallowed up in the unified German Empire through the wars of 1866–1871. His status equalization with Wagner is a case of aristocracy on the downward track meeting the market star on the upward slope. Wagner on his side was vituperatively scornful of musicians who let the popular market dictate their musical style, singling out Meyerbeer for connivance with the cliques and even bribery associated with his success at the Paris Opéra. Wagner’s anti-Semitism originated in this rivalry with the commercially more successful Meyerbeer.

9.Lindenfeld (1980: 115–116). Ehrenfels also was an ardent Wagnerian and a member of the Wagner network (thereby linking Kafka indirectly to Nietzsche), and a friend of Wagner’s son-in-law, the social Darwinist–racist H. S. Chamberlain. Given the oppressiveness of anti-Semitism in Kafka’s milieu, Ehrenfels showed his idiosyncrasy by concluding that the solution to racial decadence was free-breeding sexuality by means of polygamy.

Notes to Pages 773–775 • 1023

10.Lacan, in the Sartre literary circle of the 1940s, went on to become a leading figure of the 1970s and 1980s with his further synthesis of psychoanalysis with literary theory.

11.Another literary niche, lowbrow entertainment for the working class, had always existed, but was never a prestige motivator for intellectuals. Under modern market conditions, aspirants for the highbrow market have lumped together everything beneath their own standards, denigrating middle-class audience-oriented writings as if they were indistinguishable from penny dreadfuls.

12.Contemporary evidence too shows that most professional writers make very little income, and support themselves from other jobs; only a small fraction make a decent living by writing (Kingston and Cole, 1986).

13.Once a critical mass is attained, the visible production of avant-garde works, together with the palpable social milieu where intellectual values are held in high esteem by concentrated groups, makes such a center a mecca for international migrants. Other cities which locally passed the critical mass and became intellectual centers within their own language zone—London, St. Petersburg, Vienna, New York City, San Francisco—generally have been attractors only from their national hinterlands. This operated for Paris too; aspirant Frenchmen such as Rimbaud made the trek from the provinces. Paris alone became an international attractor for literary intellectuals: Germans such as Heine and Marx in the 1830s and 1840s; Russians such as Turgenev and Herzen in the 1850s; the Uruguayan Isidore Ducasse, who published under the French pseudonym Lautréamont in the 1870s; and a veritable lemming movement of American and British writers in the 1920s, not to mention Spaniards (Unamuno, Picasso), Latin Americans, and Russian exiles. It is notable that Germany has had less literarygeographical concentration than other language zones. German intellectual production was dominated by universities since their reform, and these kept up a decentralized network of competition among some 20 centers. International sojourners in Germany had no very central target, but wandered throughout the system.

14.Cohen-Solal (1987: 52–75); Biemel (1964). De Beauvoir’s pioneering feminist work, The Second Sex (1949), comes at the height of the existentialist group’s fame and its period of most intense political activity. Independent credit for creativity goes only to those individuals who mark out a distinctive turf; de Beauvoir, who had long contributed anonymously to the energy of the Sartre circle, now finds a niche in which its themes of authenticity and rebellion can be applied without forcing her into a break with her friends. Camus and Merleau-Ponty, by contrast, find the path to independence only at the cost of splitting from the group.

15.This account is drawn from numerous sources (Boschetti, 1985: 88; Lacouture, 1975: 163–165; Lebesque, 1960: 165; Cohen-Solal, 1987: 111–116). Groethuysen, originally Dutch, had studied under Dilthey at Berlin, and from the 1920s directed Gallimard’s pacesetting literary magazine, Nouvelle Revue Française; he was an intimate friend of the chief literary figures of the 1920s and 1930s, Gide and Malraux, and acted as political-intellectual inspiration to the latter. It was the Gallimard intellectuals who shaped Sartre’s path, turning the manuscript of his first novel from a naturalistic shocker in the style of Céline, full of raw sexuality,

1024 • Notes to Pages 776–778

into a metaphysical novel. Sartre’s original psychological title, Melancholia, was changed to Nausea by the Gallimard staff to play up the theme of ontological unfoundedness.

16.Perhaps it is no surprise that Durkheim, who first formulated the general theory of the group worshipping sacred symbols of itself, was also a product of the ENS.

17.It was in Koyré’s journal, Recherches philosophiques that Sartre published his first philosophical work, “The Transcendence of the Ego,” in 1936. Within the main line of French academic philosophy, Sartre, Merleau-Ponty, Aron, and most others in the group had been taught by Léon Brunschwicg (who earlier had also taught Koyré and Piaget). Brunschwicg had a career similar to Bergson’s: a pupil of Boutroux at the ENS, he spent 19 years teaching at one of the elite Paris lycées and was active in the group involved in academic reform in the early 1900s, before arriving at the Sorbonne. Brunschwicg taught the French lineage of spiritualism and Idealist epistemology descending from Renouvier, Maine de Biran, and Ravaisson; it was against the Idealism of this position that Sartre’s generation rebelled. Sources on these network connections (Wagner, 1983: 156, 161; Lindberg, 1990: 14–18; Boschetti, 1985: 83–92, 210; Fabiani, 1988: 20, 100, 116; EP, 1967: 2:545, 7:482; Spiegelberg, 1982).

18.Merleau-Ponty ([1945] 1962: xiv) makes the same point in his existential revision of phenomenology: “The most important lesson that reduction teaches us is the impossibility of a complete reduction.”

19.“The result of our inquiry so far is therefore as follows: in relation to a possible object, the pure self-reverting activity of the self is a striving; and as shown earlier, an infinite striving at that. This boundless striving, carried to infinity, is the condition of the possibility of any object whatsoever: no striving, no object” (Fichte [1794–1797] 1982: 231). Immediately preceding, Fichte had stated that the self never can conform to the not-self, since that would overturn the original negation.

20.Another version of this dialectic had been enunciated in France only a few years before Sartre. Meyerson, a German-trained scientist whose circle included Brunschwicg, Lévy-Bruhl, and Koyré, in well-known works published in 1908 and 1921 had argued that science expresses the inexhaustible drive of the human mind to make reality intelligible, although nature always remains independent; the empirical is ultimately irrational. Furthermore, the essence of rational explanation is causality, the principle of sufficient reason; and “the principle of causality is simply the principle of identity applied to the existence of objects in time” (quoted in Copleston, 1950–1977: 9:282). To establish causality fully would be to deduce every phenomenon from its antecedents, which would be equivalent to removing the independent standing of entities and reducing them to a timeless Parmenidean immutability. (Thus far Meyerson resembles Dharmakirti’s Buddhist dissolution of entities through omni-causality.) But this is impossible; the human mind, expressed in its most rational form in science, strives for an unattainable unity. In his 1921 work Meyerson explicitly relates his argument to Hegel’s philosophy of nature.

21.Here too Sartre betrays his conviction that only the artist lives a life of authentic freedom and meaning; it is beauty and art which is the union of essence and existence, and thus the only equivalent to God (Sartre, 1943: 244).

Notes to Page 779 • 1025

22.“It was unthinkable: to imagine nothingness you had to be there already, in the midst of the World, eyes wide open and alive; nothingness was only an idea in my head, an existing idea floating in this immensity: this nothingness had not come before existence, it was an existence like any other and appeared after many others. I shouted ‘filth! what rotten filth!’ and shook myself to get rid of this sticky filth, but it held fast and there was so much, tons and tons of existence, endless: I stifled at the depths of this immense weariness. And then suddenly the park emptied as through a great hole, the World disappeared as it had come, or else I woke up.” (Sartre, [1938] 1964: 134). Camus’s Myth of Sisyphus explicitly refers to Sartre’s nausea as the absurd, following Sartre’s lead (Sartre, [1938] 1964: 129), and succinctly sums up the nub of Sartre’s position (without attributing it to him): “These two certainties—my appetite for the absolute and for unity and the impossibility of reducing this world to a rational and reasonable principle—I also know I cannot reconcile them” (Camus, [1942] 1955: 38). This was published in 1942, before Sartre had finished his 1943 masterwork, and before Camus personally knew Sartre. The materials for combining the literary and philosophical traditions must have been in the air. Sartre had already formulated the literary version of metaphysical omni-contingency and unfoundedness in his 1938 novel, before he had acquired the Hegelian and Heideggerian tools worked out in L’Être et le Néant. For both authors, subsequent creativity was a matter of working out further consequences from this starting point: for Camus, a lineage of literary and political rebellion; for Sartre, a full-scale phenomenological dialectic of self-deception and authenticity.

23.Maritain’s 1948 Existence and the Existent (which he published at age 66) argues that Thomism is the only authentic existentialism (Herberg, 1958: 26–28, 155– 157; EP, 1967: 5:153–155, 160–164; Boschetti, 1985: 89; Friedmann, 1981–1983). Among the theologians retrospectively labeled “existentialist,” Buber is the most idiosyncratic. His academic parentage was mainline, as pupil of Brentano and Dilthey at Vienna and Berlin at the turn of the century. As editor of a Zionist journal during 1901–1926, he promoted Hasidism as the distinctively Jewish contribution to universal religious experience. Buber balanced uneasily between political Zionists and the secular Jewish assimilationists, writing in a universalistic vein on the classics of Eastern and Western mysticism. After 1913 he converted from mysticism to a religion of everyday Existenz (what Weber would call “innerworldly mysticism”), then shifting to the dialogue of I and Thou, which Buber drafted in 1916 and published in 1923. Again, it was only in the late 1940s that Buber became famous as an existentialist, and published in his old age works (Between Man and Man, 1947; Eclipse of God, 1952) which brought out that identification. Originally Sartre branched off from the network of this same theological transformation. Raised by his maternal grandparents, of the Alsatian Schweitzer family of liberal Protestants involved for generations in secular pedagogy, Sartre would have known from childhood of the family’s intellectual star, his cousin Albert Schweitzer. Schweitzer’s Search for the Historical Jesus in 1906 had demolished the liberal interpretation of Jesus as an ethical teacher in favor a historical picture of Christ as apocalyptic prophet. Schweitzer was trained by the

1026 • Notes to Pages 779–794

main German networks in theology and philosophy, as pupil of Windelband at Strasbourg and of Harnack, Simmel, Paulsen, and Stumpf at Berlin. Like his younger cousin, Schweitzer was a hybrid across fields, combining academic scholarship with eminence as a musician and as a medical missionary.

24.“There were those idiots who came to tell you about will-power and the struggle for life. Hadn’t they ever seen a beast of a tree? This plane-tree with its scaling bark, this half-rotten oak, they wanted me to take them for rugged youthful endeavour surging towards the sky . . . Impossible to see things that way. Weaknesses, frailties, yes. The trees floated. Gushing towards the sky? Or rather a collapse; at any instant I expected to see the tree-trunks shrivel like weary wands, crumple up, fall on the ground in a soft, folded, black heap. They did not want to exist, only they could not help themselves . . . For every existing thing is born without reason, prolongs itself out of weakness and dies by chance” (Sartre, [1938] 1964: 133).

25.The balance between unbelief and religion comes off best in Beckett’s Waiting for Godot, a popular production in 1956 when existentialism was dying. Beckett, who came from the old anglophone émigré circle of James Joyce, suppressed existentialist political resonances in favor of religious nostalgia. Sartre’s protégé Genet exploited Camus’s track in the other direction, making metaphysical rebellion a primarily political theme in The Balcony (1958), The Blacks (1959), and The Screens (1961), which plays up the Algerian rebellion, a subject that Camus had avoided.

26.Camus ([1951] 1956: 22). He comments (p. 8) that the experience of the absurd is “the equivalent, in existence, of Descartes’ methodical doubt.”

27.Separation between Sartre and Merleau-Ponty, too, came ultimately from divergent interests in intellectual space. Both discovered the same cultural capital, Husserlian phenomenology; in extracting opposite uses from it they were able to create distinctive pathways for themselves. “One day, [Merleau-Ponty] discovered what he had been looking for, intentionality . . . The same year, in Berlin, I also came across intentionality in [Husserl’s] Ideen, but what I wanted from it was more or less the opposite of what Merleau-Ponty had been looking for: I wanted it to rid consciousness of all its slags, of all its ‘states’” (Sartre, quoted in Cohen-Solal, 1987: 343). Merleau-Ponty, by contrast, used intentionality as grounds for his own conception of human spontaneity, a rival to what would become Sartre’s dialectic of freedom through negation. Merleau-Ponty’s chief phenomenological works were published in 1942 and 1945, very close to the appearance of Sartre’s masterwork in 1943. Merleau-Ponty came into fully independent standing in the attention space only after he ceased collaborating with Sartre in editing Les Temps Modernes, with his Adventures of the Dialectic (1955) and Signs (1960).

15.Sequence and Branch in the Social Production of Ideas

1.Dharmakirti describes a student learning philosophy by reading a text at his teacher’s house, repeating it, and learning it by heart (Stcherbatski, [1930] 1962:

Notes to Pages 796–807 • 1027

523); this method of teaching was going on at the height of innovation in Buddhist philosophy.

2.Gibbon, with characteristic eloquence and bias, puts it: “A cloud of critics, of compilers, of commentators, darkened the face of learning, and the decline of genius was soon followed by the corruption of taste” (The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire; Gibbon, [1776] 1956: 52).

3.The arithmetic formulated in the early Roman Empire, at the same time as numerology, and indeed connected with the concerns for occult divination in a universe of numerological correspondences, also made substantive advances in number theory. This shows that there was a combination of two processes; their overlap in the case of Nicomachus led to some mathematical discovery, whereas in other parts of the Greek Cabalistic world and in the correlative cosmologies of China, the result was primarily occultist classification.

4.There are processes of conceptual development within mythology which I will make no attempt to deal with here. Lévi-Strauss’s structuralism emphasizes interactions across the border between humans and animals. These themes are characteristic of relatively unstratified, kinship-structured tribal and band societies, in which totemic animals are emblems of group membership. The mythologies of high gods, as in the Vedic and Greek pantheons, are typical of politically organized societies with ruling kings. Here the fragmentary and episodic narratives of tribal myth give way to longer coherent narratives stressing the psychological motivations of their characters, implying the working of professionalized entertainers, whose minds are made sophisticated by the frontstage Goffmanian settings on which they perform (Schneider, 1993: 83–113). Thus a degree of abstraction and reflexivity emerges already within the sequence of mythologies, although we know little about what kinds of networks among mythology specialists were responsible.

5.The notorious burning of the books which took place just before the founding of the Han dynasty is an extreme example of external political forces intruding to deny the autonomy of the intellectual attention space. It is no surprise that Han intellectuals responded by moving in a particularistic direction.

6.As I noted in Chapter 10, note 5, the use of the modern term “science” is anachronistic. But all abstract terms which we use for analyzing history are to some degree anachronistic. The point is to be clear on what we are talking about. The present discussion makes the relevant distinctions.

7.That is not so say that developments in scientific theories never change the level of abstraction. Most Kuhnian paradigm shifts (Ptolemaic to Copernican astronomy, phlogiston to oxygen chemistry) stay at the same level of abstraction; but some new theories shift to higher abstract levels and occasionally introduce reflexivity (Maxwell’s non-representational electromagnetic equations, Einsteinian relativity, Heisenberg quantum mechanics). This kind of shift occurs primarily when scientific theories are based on higher mathematics, a field which has its own abstraction-reflexivity sequence.

8.This is one of the characteristics of occultism: once formulated, it remains fixed at

1028 • Notes to Pages 810–822

a constant level of the abstraction-reflexivity sequence, changing if at all by accretion of concrete contents in its systems of divination and correspondence.

9.Cases emerging from the analytical camp include Robert Nozick’s Philosophical Explanations (1981) and David Lewis’s On the Plurality of Worlds (1986), which turns possible-worlds logic into a metaphysics of “modal realism”—all possible worlds really exist.

10.I am using the term “skepticism” in the specific sense of an omni-critical view against the possibility of knowledge, a stance often manifested in the display of unresolvable paradoxes. I do not use “skepticism” in the loose sense of opposition to magical superstition or religious supernaturalism; it is better to reserve the term “secular rationalism” or “naturalism” for such attitudes.

11.Krishna (1991: 42) notes that the conception of doubt, as it arises in debates, is integral to the very definition of philosophy in the Indian tradition. “Doubt or samshaya arises because there is vipratipatti, i.e. two opposite positions seem to be supported by equally weighty arguments. It is true that the word ‘philosophy’ is not a Sanskrit word, but there is no reason to suppose there is no Sanskrit analogue to it in the Indian tradition.”

12.The question of possible transmission of influences is not a significant one for our purposes, since the cogito is used in different contexts and for different purposes.

13.In Kant’s case, the backdrop is Hume’s more limited skepticism regarding causality. In Royce’s, the catalyst is Peirce’s criticism that Cartesian doubt is impossible, since human consciousness is always in the midst of a chain of sensations and signs, within which clear-cut doubt is an artificial construction.

14.Unlike other deep troubles, especially the problems of being and plurality, or substance and its relations, which are discovered quite early in the network sequences and recycle repeatedly thereafter at each higher level of abstraction, the cogito starts off in the mid-periods of these sequences. That is because the cogito hinges on the recognition not merely of abstract concepts, but of a considerable degree of reflexivity.

15.This is a theme not much explored in the West, where Platonic influence labeled negation mere privation of being. After the collapse of Neoplatonic influence, negation was finally made prominent in the dialectic of Fichte and Hegel, paving the way for the ontological use of negation by Heidegger’s and Sartre’s existentialism. An episodic parallel to Dignaga is the medieval Christian philosopher Henry of Ghent, who in order to avoid using matter as the source of individuation described individuation as a double negation: negation of all differences within the particular thing, and negation of identity with other things. A generation later Eckhart made negation central to his non-Platonic formulation of Christian mysticism: God is so far above being that we can say nothing about him; human existence is so low that it is virtually nothing; and these two nothings converge in a divine spark. Apart from these ontological uses of negation, a parallel to Bhartrihari’s and Dignaga’s theories of language shows up in the structuralism of Saussure, in which words are arbitrary markers of difference within a system of language. (There is a further parallel insofar as Bhartrihari gives ontological precedence to what Saussure called parole, the acts of speaking, over langue, the

Notes to Pages 825–831 • 1029

formal system of oppositions, which Bhartrihari and Dignaga regard as the source of illusion.) The structuralist-postmodernist emphasis on “difference” adds an ontological tone that is not far from the original Buddhist conception of world illusion arising through name-and-form.

16.In other words, Indian intellectual life incorporated into about 200 years a range of arguments that spread over 600–700 years in Europe. This should cast doubt on our image of the West as uniquely dynamic intellectually. Everywhere the pace of argument on the abstraction sequence is stalled from time to time by external factors. Such periods occur not only in the East (e.g., in India, the period after 1500) but in the West as well, where the Renaissance period, 1400–1600, is largely a diversion from the abstract philosophy of the medieval Christian universities. European philosophy after 1600, its own ideological assertions to the contrary notwithstanding, to a large extent revived and continued the higher levels of abstraction attained by medieval scholasticism. We can add to this interruption the 1300s, when the higher levels of scholasticism were obscured from being transmitted further by conditions which are explained in the Coda to Chapter 9. To make the comparison fair, we should take account of the fact that the parallels to modern European philosophy begin in India around 550–750, the time of Bhartrihari, Dignaga, Dharmakirti, Prabhakara, and Shankara. Indian philosophy from about 800 to 1100 seems in a slowdown compared to the half-dozen generations preceding and following, probably owing to external conditions affecting the base of intellectual life (discussed in Chapter 5 in relation to the conditions for the popularity of tantric magic). If we could subtract the dead spots from both sequences, we might say that the parallel between India around 500–1300 and Europe about 1200–1900 boils down to a comparable number of generations in each during which the networks had enough continuity to keep the abstraction-reflexivity sequence moving.

17.Thus Heidegger’s and Sartre’s radical particularism was constructed in reaction to Husserl’s radical realism of universals, so to speak—Husserl’s program of searching for the deepest levels of formal ontological structures framing experience. This is a typical case of innovation by split within a creative network, and of creation by negating a rival’s central premise.

18.The question of the sincerity of faith sometimes raised about famous figures on the religious-philosophical divide is doubly useless. To ask whether Ockham or Descartes was sincere in his professions of religious faith or only adopting a protective mask is to ignore the structural situation which such individuals occupy: it is precisely because they are transforming the deep troubles of the argument space that they are not easily categorized on one side or the other. From a micro-sociological viewpoint, the question of sincerity is naive. Thinking takes place by the flow of emotional energies focused in intellectual networks, recombining within a thinker’s mind ideas representing membership in particular camps. The creative thinker is making and transforming alliances in the realm of symbols. In struggles of faith versus reason, creative developments fuse concepts which cut across both sides of the struggle. It is possible, of course, that a philosopher’s internal conversation might include discussions about what it would be politic to say

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in public. But prolonged hiding of one’s inner thoughts is difficult, above all in the intellectual world, where rituals of communication are the taps controlling its energy flow. When the philosopher publicly states a position—such as the double truth, or the compatibility of conceptual innovations with religious orthodoxy— the ritualistic process of repeating it before an audience generates further emotional energy, which makes these ideas still more dominant in the internal conversation. Successful thinkers cannot be Machiavellian about their creativity for very long; as their ideas become publicly known, the result is self-indoctrination.

19.There are seven often-used types of proofs of God, together with proofs of another six auxiliary questions (Davidson, 1987; EP, 1967: 2:147–155, 232–237, 324–326, 3:345–348, 6:538–541, 7:84–87; Sextus Empiricus, 1949: 1:13–194). Their distribution throughout world history confirms the importance of the monotheist context. There are two lay-oriented proofs. Common consent of mankind: Cicero, Seneca, Clement of Alexandria; widely used in the 1600s by Cherbury, Gassendi, Grotius, Hooker, and the Cambridge Platonists. In India it appears in the NyayaVaisheshika commentary of Udayana (1000 c.e.). This is a popularistic argument for the laity; it has been applied to defending both polytheism and monotheism, and was attacked as early as the Greek Sophists, Stoics, and Skeptics. Teleology or design (the harmonious order of the world implies a maker): Socrates (as recorded by Xenophon), Plato, the Christian Fathers; included by Saadia, Maimonides, and Aquinas in their compendia; especially emphasized in Europe of the 1700s with Butler and Paley. It has been most prominent in the context of reconciling science and religion. This type of argument does not arise in Asia, as it implies an anthropomorphic God and is senseless in connection with mysticism, which declares the lower world an illusion, or in connection with an immanent world order as in the Chinese cosmologies. Both of these proofs are metaphysically limited, implying nothing about God’s perfection and unity, or about creation of the world ex nihilo.

There are three metaphysical proofs. Cosmological, whose subtypes include from motion: Aristotle’s proof of the existence of an unmoved Mover, Stoics; and from causality: allied with auxiliary arguments, used as proofs of God by medieval Muslims and Jews, Aquinas, Descartes, Locke. From relative perfection (comparative degrees of perfection implies a superlative): early Stoics, Augustine, Anselm, Aquinas, Descartes; Shankara gives an epistemological version. Ontological: Ibn Sina (arguing from contingency); Anselm’s version was widely used, discussed, and rejected in medieval Christian philosophy, revived by Descartes, Spinoza, and Leibniz, and critically discussed down through Frege and Russell. Technical philosophers have found this the most metaphysically stimulating proof because it acutely raises the issue of reflexivity. The ontological proof does not appear in India, owing to the anti-conceptual stance toward the highest reality dominant since the rise of Advaita.

There are two post-metaphysical proofs. Moral: Kant (the ideal of the highest good implies a source outside the human individual). From religious experience: Schleiermacher, James. These arguments result from Kant’s critique cutting off metaphysical arguments, especially the cosmological and ontological proofs.

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Auxiliary proofs: of the unity, perfection, infinity, incorporeality of God; of creation ex nihilo (rejecting the eternity of the world substance); of the immortality of the soul. These proofs are the key to distinguishing arguments for transcendent monotheism from arguments for polytheism and pantheism. Some of these proofs began with the late Christian Neoplatonists; they developed most widely in medieval Islamic and Jewish philosophy.

20.Monotheism is not a primordial concept of popular religion; nor does it come from professional priests, whose politics tends toward compromise into pantheons. It takes the drive toward abstraction in a competitive intellectual community to purify the concept of divinity into ontological monotheism. This is why monotheism tends to appear well into the middle generations of an intellectual sequence. But there is nothing within intellectual dynamics to stabilize at the point of anthropomorphic monotheism. Where it occurs, such monotheism is the result of the combination of internal intellectual trends with external social conditions of the kind noted by Weber and Durkheim. These are, respectively, the dominance of an imperial state (or in the case of the war confederation of ancient Israel, aspiration to such a state), which raises the primary god of a pantheon above the others (Weber), and the universalization which goes with increasing social differentiation (Durkheim). Comparative evidence is presented by Swanson (1962).

21.A deep trouble like the Indian satkaryavada versus asatkaryavada, however, would divide the attention space into only two positions, whereas the law of small numbers provides room for three to six. Deep troubles are the most important of the factors dividing the attention space, but not the only one.

22.For instance Epicureans, dropping to a lower level of concreteness, solved the problem of causal relations among independent atoms by fiat, asserting that the atoms swerved into one another’s courses, thereby setting off the formation of the visible universe.

23.A shift is visible at the point where Christianity began to formulate a theology at a generalized level. The disputes about the relations among the parts of the Trinity, which took up much of the attention between 190 and 530 c.e., were a version on the moderately abstract plane of theology of the deep trouble of the plurality of substances. The first of these disputes, the Monarchian heresy, may be regarded as the discovery of a puzzle space on which an intellectual community of Christian theologians could form. In this light, the outburst of heresy fights was an indication not of the weakness of Christianity, but of its institutionalization.

24.Buddhism also developed a theist side. Mahayana added the worship of Boddhisattavas plus a sequence of future and past incarnations of the Buddha, including the doctrine of the Buddha’s three bodies, one of which is the body of the universe. But these movements toward anthropomorphism did not produce the conception of a creator God; and the doctrines of Mahayana philosophies denied that there was any world-substance to be created.

25.The traditional practice of intellectual historians when noting parallels among ideas is to search for ways that influence could have been transmitted (e.g., ways in which Hume could directly or indirectly have heard of al-Ghazali’s discussion of causality). For reasons argued earlier (Chapter 8, notes 6 and 15), such influences

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are usually overstated; this approach also omits consideration of why intellectuals in one community would be motivated to pay attention to arguments from elsewhere. We should notice the difference in the intellectual organization of two scholarly enterprises: historians typically operate on a fairly modest level of the abstraction-reflexivity sequence, with a concrete conception of intellectual causality (an idea is transmitted from one person to another). Sociological analysis operates at a somewhat more abstract level, looking for the general principles which explain intellectual production, and hence taking similarities in ideas as a challenge to find similarities in conditions within intellectual life.

26.A foreshadowing of this came with Cusanus in the mid-1400s, at the very beginning of the mathematical revolution. Cusanus describes the world by extending geometrical forms to infinity, where all forms merge into one another; hence the famous formulation that the universe is a sphere whose circumference is nowhere and its center everywhere. Leibniz turns every physical and logical quality into positions along a continuum: rest is infinitely slow motion; equality is infinitely small differences.

27.Despite the many parallels between the higher levels of the abstraction-reflexivity sequence in India and in Europe, there are no distinctions made between a priori and a posteriori, and between analytical and synthetic, in Indian philosophy (Potter, [1963] 1976: 259). This is a consequence of the divergence between mathematical and philosophical networks in India, and their convergence in Europe.

28.It is more than straws in the wind that Derrida comes from the later generations of the Husserl network and that his first publication (Derrida, 1962) was on Husserl’s work on the philosophy of geometry.

29.There have been no specifically anti-mathematical philosophies in the traditions of China and India because mathematics was never a significant part of those philosophical networks.

Epilogue

1.There are other kinds of thinking, such as in imagery, but these are not at issue here; it is thinking in verbal statements which yields some irrefutably true statements.

2.What this argument does not prove is that space must have three dimensions. The various numbers of dimensions conjectured in physics such as string theory are compatible with the argument so far developed.

3.And since thinking depends on the meaning of concepts, it is impossible to formulate the notion of dreaming unless one is embedded in a discourse which distinguishes dreaming from waking experience. Dreaming could not exist if non-dream- ing did not exist.

4.In medias res passes the test of Cartesian doubt. To deny in medias res is still to affirm an instance of it in the very act of thinking the denial.

5.I am not disputing here whether such translation can in fact always be carried out; the point is merely that translation does not escape from discourse. In social

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experience, translation is a merging between two networks. Quine’s argument, that there is a multiplicity of different possible translations among languages, may well not be applicable to mathematical translations, for reasons that will become apparent.

6.If we do not in fact arrive at the same total, we assume that someone has made a mistake, has carried out the operation wrongly; this is to say that we did not both follow the convention.

7.The comparative sociology of networks casts light on how this conception of mathematics arose. Plato’s faction within the Greek networks was an alliance between mathematicians and philosophers, whose creativity came from tension with opposing factions of empiricists, materialists, and skeptical relativists. Subsequent Platonic and Neoplatonic religions made mutually supporting arguments out of the conception of a transcendent God, a hierarchy of degrees of universality, and mathematical Platonism. This combination of concepts was later taken over by the mainstream of Christian, Islamic, and Jewish philosophers, and has remained available as a tradition for philosophy of mathematics into the secularizing period of European thought. In India and China no such mathematical Platonism arose, even with the prevalence of Idealist philosophy in India in the post-Buddhist period. This is due to the fact (documented in Chapter 10) that the networks of mathematics and of philosophers had very few overlaps in China and India, unlike in Greece and the West.

8.Since mathematics is also a genealogy of techniques, which took off in its own rapid-discovery revolution in the generations between Tartaglia and Descartes, the development of mathematical-experimental paradigms in modern science has been yet another kind of hybridization among genealogies of techniques. The lineages of mathematics have branched and recombined among themselves, giving rise to a rich ecology of mathematical “species” which have cross-bred in various ways with the similarly cross-breeding “species” of research equipment genealogies.

9.That is, since the telegraph (first in 1837), and subsequently electric motors, telephones, lighting, and so on made it part of banal reality. Electricity had had a more restricted laboratory reality for researchers since the Leiden jar was invented in the 1740s, and especially since the voltaic cell (1799), which produced a reliable continuous current. During the intervening period before laboratory equipment was widely exported into everyday life, there were many popular interpretations of the reality of electricity (e.g., Mesmer’s, as well as religious interpretations), which lacked the sense of banal normalcy electricity was later to acquire.

10.There is a family continuity between one generation of such concepts and the next, although just what constitutes such continuity does not appear to be specifiable in general and in advance. Kuhn (1961) has argued that even in the massive conceptual shifts which he calls paradigm revolutions, the mathematics is preserved. As we have seen in the previous section, mathematics should be regarded as a practical technique for making discoveries about formal intellectual operations; this means that once again what is preserved across the generations is not the ideas per se but the continuity of yet another genealogy of research “equipment.” Mathematical continuity and groundedness of scientific entities is another case of the continuity

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of practical time-space activity. Again we see an epistemological gap between this reliable, materially existing but tacit practice and the verbal constructions and human-sized imagery which include the reified nouns and imputed substances of theoretical scientific entities.

11.Every mathematical article starts off with a verbal title and engages in verbal explanations, however cryptic, of its problems before plunging into manipulating its symbolism; at the other end, successful mathematics becomes part of the verbal discourse by which mathematicians summarize and point toward past accomplishments and future topics. Data illustrating this point for mathematical journals are given in Collins (1984).

12.One version of the sociology of knowledge or sociology of science attempts to reduce knowledge produced by intellectuals to the ideological claims of external groups outside the network, for example, as reflection of class interests in the surrounding society. Knowledge is sometimes constructed in this way. But lay influence is not the main source of the social construction of specifically intellectual knowledge. The ideas of ordinary social discourse are on a lower level of abstraction than ideas produced by intellectuals; and the creativity of intellectual networks comes from creating topics and problems which arise not in the lay world at all but primarily through the dynamics of attention-seeking within their inner social space. The externalist sociology of knowledge began with the conception of ideology, and thus with the tendency to regard sociology as explaining the source of false beliefs. As sociology has begun to study the internal social communities of intellectuals, it has come to encompass the social construction of true beliefs. The suspicion lingers that sociology means reducing true beliefs to false beliefs, although this flatly contradicts what is asserted: the social construction of true beliefs is about true beliefs.

13.Bloor’s “strong programme” (1978) is that of a Wittgensteinian philosopher; the local social constructivism of laboratory studies (e.g., Latour and Woolgar, 1983) derived from a network which branched from the phenomenologists to ethnomethodology, via Schutz and Garfinkel. The earlier sociology of knowledge of Marx and Engels came from the Hegelian circle of the 1840s; Durkheim’s came from his personal confrontation between the neo-Kantianism and empiricist psychology of his immediate predecessors.

14.In one batch of manuscripts for journal review, I have read of the intersection between the conceptions of Max Weber and Dostoyevsky, and between those of Durkheim and Schopenhauer. Further cross-combinations of these and others are obvious. And each generation of literature makes possible new combinations in the following generation.