Paul Schuurman

Ideas, Mental Faculties and Method

This is the first comprehensive study of the early modern logic of ideas, whose main representative were Descartes and Locke. It is also a profound contribution to our understanding between Aristotelianism and the new philosophy, between rationalism and empiricism, and between French, English and Dutch philosophers.

LOCKE'S LOGIC OF IDEAS IN CONTEXT: CONTENT AND STRUCTURE

Conduct of the Understanding by John Locke, ed. Paul Schuurman (doct. diss., University of Keele, 2000). I would like to thank my supervisor Prof. G. A. J. Rogers and Prof. M. A. Stewart, University of Lancaster, for their extremely generous advice and criticism; useful remarks were also made by my colleagues at the Faculty of Philosophy, Erasmus Universiteit Rotterdam. 2 W. Kneale and M. Kneale, The Development of Logic (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1984) 298. 3 Op. cit. (Stuttgart: Frommann, 1970) Vol. II, p. 11. 4 P. Nuchelmans, ‘Logic in the Seventeenth Century’, in: D. Garber and M. Ayers, eds., The Cambridge History of Seventeenth-Century Philosophy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998) Vol. I, p. 104. LOCKE’S LOGIC OF IDEAS IN CONTEXT: CONTENT AND STRUCTURE1

Determinism and Causal Feedback Loops in Montesquieu's Explanations for the Military Rise and Fall of Rome

Montesquieus Considérations sur les causes de la grandeur des Romains et de leur décadence (1733/1734) is a methodological exercise in causal explanation on the meso-level applied to the subject of the military rise and fall of Rome. Rome is described as a system with contingent initial conditions that have a strong path-determining effect. Contingent and plastic initial configurations become highly determining in their subsequent operation, thanks to self-reinforcing feedback loops. Montesquieus method seems influenced by the ruthless commitment to efficient causality and the reductionism of seventeenth-century mechanicist philosophy; but in contrast to these predecessors, he is more interested in dynamic processes than in unchangeable substances, and his use of efficient causality in the context of a system approach implies a form of holism that is lacking in his predecessors. The formal and conceptual analysis in this article is in many ways complementary with Paul Rahes recent predominantly political analysis of the Considérations. At the same time, this article points to a problem in the works on the Enlightenment by Jonathan Israel: his account stresses a one-dimensional continuum consisting of Radical, Moderate and Counter-Enlightenment. This invites Israel to place the combined religious, political and philosophical views of each thinker on one of these three points. His scheme runs into trouble when a thinker with moderate religious and political views produces radical philosophical concepts. Montesquieus Considérations is a case in point.

Fénelon on Luxury, War and Trade in the Telemachus

Summary In his novel The Adventures of Telemachus, François de la Mothe-Fénelon (1651–1715) presents a utopian society, Boetica, in which the role of luxury, war and trade is extremely limited. In unreformed Salentum, on the other hand, Fénelon shows the opposite image, one in which the three elements reinforce each other in a fatal feedback-loop. I analyse the relationship between luxury, war and trade in the Telemachus and I sketch the background to Fénelons views, with special attention to the military expansion and the mercantilism of Louis XIV, Fénelons quietist spirituality, and the development of the concept of self-interest in seventeenth-century philosophy by mechanicist philosophers and economic thinkers.

Continuity and change in the empiricism of John Locke and Gerardus de Vries (1648–1705)

Locke has often been hailed as the father of an empiricism that provided a philosophical basis to natural science in the Age of Enlightenment. In this article his empiricism is compared with that of the little known Dutch Aristotelian professor Gerardus de Vries. There are striking parallels between Lockes brand of mechanist empiricism and the pragmatic and flexible Aristotelianism of De Vries. These parallels put strictures on both the archaic character of the Aristotelianism embraced by De Vries and on the modern and forward-looking character of Lockes philosophy of science.

What-If at Waterloo. Carl von Clausewitz’s use of historical counterfactuals in his history of the Campaign of 1815

ABSTRACT In this article, I analyze the use of historical counterfactuals in the Campaign of 1815 by Carl von Clausewitz (1780–1831). Such is the importance of counterfactuals in this work that its gist can be given in a series of 25 counterfactuals. I claim that a central role is played by evaluative counterfactuals. This specific form of counterfactuals is part of a didactic method that allows Clausewitz to teach young officers a critical method that prepares them for the challenge of decision-making in real warfare. I conclude with the enduring relevance of Clausewitz’s use of evaluative counterfactuals for contemporary military historiography.

Models of war 1770–1830: the birth of wargames and the trade-off between realism and simplicity

ABSTRACT The first sophisticated wargames (military board games) were developed between 1770 and 1830 and are models of military conflict. Designers of these early games experimented fruitfully with different concepts that were formulated in interaction with the external dynamics of the military systems that they tried to represent and the internal dynamics of the design process itself. The designers of early wargames were confronted with a problem that affects all models: the trade-off between realism and simplicity, which in the case of wargames amounts to the trade-off between realism and playability. I try to show how different game concepts were developed as an answer to this problem, and how these seemingly arcane concepts form a relevant topic of investigation in the history of ideas. Moreover, a direct offshoot of this conceptual experimentation between 1770 and 1830 was the ‘free’ German wargame (Kriegsspiel), which became an integral part of German operational planning in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, thus adding another chapter to the story of the influence of ideas on human history.

Herbert Spencer and the paradox of war

War is a paradoxical phenomenon. The idea that a willingness to wage war can serve as a guarantee for peace has had adherents from Antiquity down to the present era; the Latin dictum si vis pacem para bellum and the observation that the post-1945 nuclear standoff between NATO and the Warsaw Pact directly contributed to an era of peace and prosperity in the Western world are all instances of the same paradox. In his recent War: What Is It Good For? (2014) Ian Morris posits an even stronger paradox: war itself, rather than merely a preparedness for war, has had massively benign effects for mankind. Morris claims that in spite of the horrendous immediate impact of war, in the long run “productive” warfare put a premium on cooperation and created larger and more organized societies that have dramatically reduced the risk that their members will succumb to violence, while it has vastly increased their wealth. Moreover, he claims that no other activity in history has been better at producing peaceful and prosperous societies than war. Morris was not the first to articulate this strong paradox of war. In this article I will analyse an earlier and neglected version, formulated by the Victorian philosopher Herbert Spencer (1820–1903). He had a very keen eye for the on-going process of carnage and warfare “among all sentient creatures” on both the biological and the human level. His evolutionary sociology analyses the survival of the fittest societies in their struggle for existence. The phrase “survival of the fittest” was indeed coined by him and contributed to his image as a bloody-minded Social Darwinist. At the same time, there had always been a rather more peaceful image. While many nineteenth-century philosophers crossed the border between military is and ought with breath-taking ease, Spencer was very careful with such steps. Actually, his pacifist stance against contemporary forms of jingoism is well-documented and he often, and eloquently, depicts the horrors of war including those perpetrated by the expanding British Empire, and especially when conquest went hand-in-hand with religious hypocrisy. Spencer was an extremely prolific writer and his theory of evolution amounts to a “theory of everything”. Warfare looms large in his sociology, including his three-volume Principles of Sociology (1874–1896) and his Study of Sociology (1873); but his views on warfare can only be understood in connection with his Principles of Biology (1864–1867), while both his sociology and his biology are part of the broad canvas sketched in his First Principles (1862). A study of these latter works provides the context for Spencer’s equally clear and ambivalent answer to the question, “War, what is it good for?” This question will be formulated and answered here in terms of functionality: when according to Spencer is war functional, when is it dysfunctional, and what is the function in his sociology of this distinction itself?

The Cat's Grand Strategy: Pieter de la Court (1618–1685) on Holland and the Challenges and Prospects of Free-Riding Behaviour during the General Crisis of the Seventeenth Century

Summary In the present article it is argued that Pieter de la Courts Political Maxims of the State of Holland presented a remarkably consistent grand strategy for Holland in relation to its Dutch allies and the European powers. I present an outline of this strategy, which was built around the accomplishment and defence of commercial goals; I sketch a historical context that takes into account the general historical shift from tribute-taking agrarian societies towards commercial wealth-generating polities, and also the violent contemporary military and ideological background against which De la Courts strategy stands out; I argue that his strategy can be understood by his use of three basic game theoretic concepts (prisoners dilemma, assurance game and free-riding); and I stress the distinctive character of De la Courts work, by comparing the practical and strategic use of these concepts in the Maxims with the function of the same concepts in the philosophical contract theories of Thomas Hobbes and Benedict de Spinoza.

Clausewitz on Real War

Carl Philip Gottfried von Clausewitz was born in 1780 in Burg in the Kingdom of Prussia. He entered the Prussian army in 1792 and saw his first action in 1793 in the turmoil that swept over Europe after the outbreak of the French Revolution. After France and Prussia had signed a separate peace, Clausewitz was regimented near Berlin. In 1801 he was admitted to the Institute for Young Officers, where he attended lectures in philosophy, history, and military science and theory. He became aide-de-camp to Prince August, nephew of King Frederick William III, whom he accompanied in the battle of Auerstäd. Near this place and near Jena the French utterly crushed the Prussian army in 1806. Clausewitz became a captive of the French and after his release was passionately involved with the reform movement that tried to regenerate the forces of his defeated nation. In 1812, the year of Napoleon’s ill-fated invasion of Russia, Clausewitz transferred his services to the Russian army. He participated in the Wars of Liberation in 1813–1814 and also in the Waterloo campaign of 1815. He probably started work on On War around 1816. The Prussian king never quite forgave him the temporary transfer of his allegiance to the tsar, but in 1818 he was appointed head of the Prussian War College and promoted to the rank of brigadier general. In this period he also produced numerous historical writings on the campaigns of Napoleon. In 1830 his intellectual pursuits were interrupted by his appointment as chief of staff to the army that was formed for the eventuality of an intervention in Poland. He fell victim to the great cholera outbreak in 1831.