Abstract
William Enfield published an abridgement of Jacob Brucker’s Historia Critica Philosophiae (1742–4) in 1791. It was not an accurate abridgement, but written rather as a tool of Christian apologetics, replacing Brucker’s sympathy for skepticism with Enfield’s hostility. Enfield’s purposes included both Dissenter confessionalism and revolutionary politics. Joseph Priestley, John Adams, and Thomas Jefferson each drew on it for their own purposes, surely unaware of its departures from the original.
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Notes
- 1.
The book was reprinted in 1792 (in Dublin, probably a piracy), 1819, 1837, 1839, and 1840. See Francesco Bottin, “La storiografia filosofica nell’area britannica” in Italo Baldo et al., Il secondo illuminismo e l’età kantiana, vol. 3.2 of Giovanni Santinello (ed.), Storie delle storie generali della filosofia, Padua, Antenore, 1988, p. 573; Helmut Zäh, “Verzeichnis der schriften Jacob Bruckers” in W. Schmidt-Biggemann and Theo Stammen (eds.), Jacob Brucker (1696-1770): Philosoph und Historiker der europäischen Aufklärung, Berlin, Akademie, 1998, pp. 348–51 (does not include an 1840 edition). Martin Fitzpatrick reports that “It was reprinted twice” in “William Enfield 1741–1797”, Thoemmes Press, Encyclopedia of the History of Ideas, p. 2. In his text, Fitzpatrick observes, correctly, that Enfield’s version was abridged, but in his bibliography he describes it as “6 vols”. A reprint of the 1837 edition contains an introduction by Knud Haakonssen: William Enfield, The History of Philosophy From the Earliest Periods: Drawn Up From Brucker’s Historia Critica Philosophiae, Bristol, Thoemmes Press, 2001, pp. v–xii.
- 2.
Martin Fitzpatrick, “The Enlightenment, politics and providence: some Scottish and English comparisons” in Knud Haakonssen, (ed.), Enlightenment and Religion: Rational Dissent in Eighteenth-century Britain, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1996, p. 85.
- 3.
Fitzpatrick, “William Enfield 1741–1797”, op. cit. p. 2.
- 4.
Anthony Lincoln, Some Political and Social Ideas of English Dissent 1763–1800, New York, Octagon, 1971, p. 73.
- 5.
R. K. Webb, “The emergence of Rational Dissent” in Haakonssen (ed.), Enlightenment and Religion, op. cit., p. 38.
- 6.
John Seed, “Rational Dissent and political opposition, 1770–1790” in Haakonssen (ed.), Enlightenment and Religion, op. cit., p. 159.
- 7.
Fitzpatrick, “The Enlightenment, politics and providence”, op. cit., p. 87.
- 8.
William Enfield (ed.), The History of Philosophy, From the Earliest Times to the Beginning of the Present Century: Drawn up from Brucker’s Historia Critica Philosophiae, London, Dove, 1819, p. vii; see also I.30. (Hereafter cited from this edition in parentheses in the text.)
- 9.
Quoted in Fitzpatrick, “The Enlightenment, politics and providence”, op. cit., p. 85.
- 10.
Ibid.
- 11.
Ibid.
- 12.
See Schmidt-Biggemann and Stammen (eds.), Jacob Brucker (1696–1770), op. cit.; Mario Longo, “Le storie generali della filosofia in Germania” in F. Botin, M. Longo, and G. Paia, Dall’età cartesiana a Brucker, vol. 2 of Giovanni Santinello (ed.), Storia delle storie generali della filosofia, Brescia, La Scuola, 1979, pp. 527–635, esp. 605 ff.; Lucien Braun, Histoire de l’histoire de la philosophie, Paris, Ophrys, 1973, pp. 100–119; cf. Martial Gueroult, Histoire de l’histoire de la philosophie, 3 vols., Paris, Aubier, 1984–8.
- 13.
See J. C. Laursen, “Skepticism and the History of Moral Philosophy: The Case of Carl Friedrich Stäudlin” in J. van der Zande and R. Popkin (eds.), The Sceptical Tradition around 1800: Scepticism in Philosophy, Science, and Society, Dordrecht, Kluwer, 1998, pp. 371–2.
- 14.
See Lincoln, op. cit, p. 78.
- 15.
Bottin, op. cit., p. 580.
- 16.
Michael R. Watts, The Dissenters: Vol. 2: The Expansion of Evangelical Nonconformity, Oxford, Clarendon Press, 1995, p. 96.
- 17.
Lincoln, op. cit., p. 54.
- 18.
Fitzpatrick, “The Enlightenment, politics and providence”, op. cit., p. 86, quotes the same wording from William Enfield, Remarks on Several Late Publications, London, 1770, p. v: “Possibly, the time may not be far distant when an end will be put to fruitless controversy, by distinctly ascertaining the limits of the human understanding”.
- 19.
Quoted in Fitzpatrick, “The Enlightenment, politics and providence”, op. cit., p. 86; see also Martin Fitzpatrick, “Varieties of Candour: English and Scottish Style”, Enlightenment and Dissent, vol. 7, 1988, pp. 35–56.
- 20.
See J. C. Laursen, “Kant in the History of Skepticism” in Martyn P. Thompson (ed.), John Locke und Immanuel Kant: Historische Rezeption und gegenwärtiges Relevanz, Berlin, Duncker & Humblot, 1991, pp. 254–268; J. C. Laursen, “Stäudlin, Carl Friedrich (1761–1826)” in H. Klemme and M. Kuehn (eds.), The Dictionary of Eighteenth-Century German Philosophers, London, Continuum, 2010, pp. 1122–1125.
- 21.
Although many commentators have claimed that Enfield’s work was a mere summary of Brucker’s, Francesco Bottin notes that it was “ben lungi dall’essere una semplice traduzione dell’opera del Brucker” [a long way from being a simple translation of Brucker’s work], Bottin, “La storiografia”, op. cit., p. 574; see also p. 581 for G. H. Lewes’s contempt for Enfield.
- 22.
In “The Enlightenment, politics, and providence”, Martin Fitzpatrick says that “Brucker’s eclectic attitude toward truth is indicated by his method of writing the history of modern philosophy without acknowledging divisions into different schools” (p. 86). Perhaps he borrowed this from Enfield, II.470: “Instead therefore of attempting, as some writers have done, to divide modern philosophy into distinct schools, we shall content ourselves with a more simple arrangement…”. But it is rather obviously wrong to anyone who has read Brucker, who has long chapters on the modern stoics, epicureans, sceptics, and so forth. It is true that Enfield’s Brucker favors what he calls the eclectics in Book X, where he rejects the division into schools, but Enfield has chapters on the modern stoics, epicureans, sceptics, theosophists, scriptural philosophers, and so forth (Books VIII and IX).
- 23.
Bottin, “La storiografia filosofica”, makes the same point with regard to Enfield’s abridgement of Brucker on Aristotle: eliminating much of the erudition and adapting Brucker’s vocabulary to English philosophy changes the picture of Aristotle (p. 578). Translating Brucker’s history of the early Church with the language of “fancy” and “wonder” puts it in the vocabulary of Hume, Smith, and the Scottish Enlightenment (p. 579).
- 24.
It is worth noting that Jefferson described himself as a medical sceptic in a letter to Benjamin Rush of August 17, 1811: “I acknowledge facts in medicine as far as they go, distrusting only their extension by theory” (Albert Ellery Bergh (ed.), The Writings of Thomas Jefferson, Washington, Thomas Jefferson Memorial Association, 1907, vol. 13, p. 75).
- 25.
Iacobi Bruckeri, Historia critica Philosophiae, Lipsiae, 1742–4, vol. II, pp. 631–6. Hereafter cited in parentheses in the text.
- 26.
See C. W. T. Blackwell, “Jacob Brucker’s theory of knowledge and the history of natural philosophy” in Schmidt-Biggemann and Stammen (eds.), Jacob Brucker (1696–1770), op. cit., pp. 207–8; C. W. T. Blackwell, “Skepticism as a sect, skepticism as a philosophical stance: Johann Jakob Brucker versus Carl Friedrich Stäudlin” in van der Zande and Popkin (eds.), The Sceptical Tradition around 1800: Scepticism in Philosophy, Science, and Society, op. cit., pp. 343–363.
- 27.
See, e.g., R. J. Hankinson, The Sceptics, New York, Routledge, 1995; Sextus Empiricus, Against the Ethicists, Richard Bett (ed.), Oxford, Clarendon, 1997; Richard Bett, Pyrrho, his Antecedents and his Legacy, Oxford, Oxford University Press, 2000; Charles Brittain, Philo of Larissa: The Last of the Academic Sceptics, Oxford, Oxford University Press, 2001; J. C. Laursen, “Yes, Sceptics Can Live Their Scepticism and Cope with Tyranny as Well as Anyone” in J. Maia Neto and R. Popkin (eds.), Scepticism in Renaissance and Post-Renaissance Thought, Amherst, Humanity Books, 2004, pp. 201–223; J. C. Laursen, “Skepticism, Unconvincing Anti-scepticism, and Politics” in Marc André Bernier and Sébastien Charles (eds.), Scepticisme et Modernité, Saint-Étienne, Publications de l’Université de Saint-Étienne, 2005, pp. 167–188.
- 28.
Bett, Pyrrho, his Antecedents and his Legacy, op. cit.; Emidio Spinelli, Questioni scettiche, Rome, Lithos, 2005.
- 29.
Joseph Priestley, Letters to the Right Honorable Edmund Burke, Occasioned by His Reflections on the Revolutions in France, Birmingham, Thomas Pearson, 1791.
- 30.
See Zoltan Haraszti, John Adams and the Prophets of Progress, Cambridge, Harvard University Press, 1952, pp. 280 ff.
- 31.
See Joseph Priestley, The Doctrines of Heathen Philosophy compared with those of Revelation Northumberland, Pa., Binns, 1804, reprinted New York, Scholars’ Facsimiles and Reprints, 1987, p. viii. Enfield’s History of Philosophy was not in the catalogue of Priestley’s books auctioned after his death, although he did have many volumes of Enfield’s Sermons, Prayers, Hymns, Biographical Sermons, and other works (Catalogue of the Library of the late Dr. Joseph Priestley, Philadelphia, Dobson, 1816, p. 13). Priestley did not have Brucker’s Historia critica, but he did have the short Latin version: Bruckeri institutiones historiae philosophicae (1756) (p. 62).
- 32.
Lester J. Cappon (ed.), The Adams-Jefferson Letters, Chapel Hill, University of North Carolina Press, 1959, p. 368.
- 33.
Annabel Patterson’s essay on “John Adams: reader extraordinary” in Early Modern [English] Liberalism, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1997, pp. 279–305, emphasizes his pre-revolutionary reading, and observes that there is some justice in the charge that he became more conservative in his later days (p. 281). Nevertheless, his interest in Priestley probably indicates something about his renewed openness to radical ideas by 1813. As Patterson notes, as late as 1823 he was also recommending republication of Algernon Sydney, which was hardly a conservative suggestion (p. 305).
- 34.
Haraszti, op. cit., p. 290.
- 35.
Letter of December 25, 1813 in Bergh (ed.), op. cit., vol. 14, pp. 33–40.
- 36.
Cappon, ed., The Adams-Jefferson Letters, op. cit., pp. 383–4.
- 37.
Letter of October 13, 1813 in The Writings of Thomas Jefferson, op. cit., vol. 13, pp. 388–391.
- 38.
Haraszti, John Adams and the Prophets of Progress, op. cit., p. 290.
- 39.
Cappon (ed.), op. cit., p. 424.
- 40.
See Mary Hays, The Idea of Being Free: A Mary Hays Reader, Peterborough, Broadview Press, 2005; Gina Walker, Mary Hays (1759–1843): The Growth of a Woman’s Mind, Williston, Ashgate, 2006.
- 41.
Jonathan Israel, Radical Enlightenment, Oxford, Oxford University Press, 2001; id., Enlightenment Contested, Oxford, Oxford University Press, 2006.
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Laursen, J.C. (2013). Enfield’s Brucker and Christian Anti-scepticism in Enlightenment Historiography of Philosophy. In: Charles, S., J. Smith, P. (eds) Scepticism in the Eighteenth Century: Enlightenment, Lumières, Aufklärung. International Archives of the History of Ideas Archives internationales d'histoire des idées, vol 210. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-007-4810-1_11
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