Chapter 9 illustrates the immediate counterblast to which Price’s critics were subjected by a number of writers who continued to insist that liberty is a matter of possessing an independent will, not merely of not unrestrained from acting as you choose. Some leading Anglicans took up this position in their support of Price, including Richard Watson and Peter Peckard. But it was Price himself who answered his critics most fully. He admitted (although not explicitly) that he had given too broad a definition of slavery, but forcefully denied that he had confused the state of being at liberty with that of possessing security for your liberty. He countered that, unless you are free from the possibility of being restrained, you are not in possession of your liberty, because you remain in a condition of subjection and servitude. The chapter concludes by noting that this way of thinking about liberty gained much additional support after the outbreak of the French Revolution in 1789. Burke denounced the revolution, but he was in turn denounced by Catharine Macaulay, Mary Wollstonecraft and Thomas Paine, all of whom saw in the revolution a successful uprising against arbitrary and despotic power in the name of liberty as independence.

Hegel’s Philosophy of Nature is integrated into the fabric of his system. We absorb into our thinking the concepts and relationships that have survived the successes and failures of experience (Phenomenology). Through disciplined thought we articulate the internal logic of those concepts (Logic). By working out what the world beyond thought would be like, seeing how the world instantiates those expectations, and then building those discoveries into our next ventures, we develop a systematic picture of the stages of natural complexity and human functioning (Philosophies of Nature and Spirit). Since Hegel’s time, however, we have discovered that nature has a history; time and space are no longer absolutes; the discoveries of science have expanded in both breadth and detail; and our comprehensive explanations for the way the world functions are continually being falsified by the discovery of new facts. A philosophy of nature, then, needs to reshape the way reason functions. Adopting the strategies we use to solve problems and that science uses to develop and test hypotheses, we broaden our perspective to cover multiple domains in nature and search for patterns that show how and why they fit together as they do.

This chapter argues that Hegel’s aim in his philosophy of nature is not to compete with natural science but to show that there is reason in nature – reason that science cannot see but that works through the causal processes discovered by science. It considers first the transition from Hegel’s logic to his philosophy of nature and argues that the latter continues the project of the former, starting with reason, or the “absolute idea”, as nature, as sheer externality. It then argues that Hegel derives nature’s categories logically – a priori – from the idea-as-externality, and subsequently matches them with empirical phenomena (rather than constructing categories to fit the latter). It provides an abridged account of Hegel’s physics in order to show how the categories of physical (as opposed to mechanical or organic) nature are derived from one another and how they are embodied in physical phenomena, such as sound, heat, and magnetism. It then concludes by arguing that, contrary to appearances, Hegel’s conception of light complements, and is not simply at odds with, that presented by quantum physics.

This chapter discusses the famous Plotinian image of the transparent, luminous sphere, appearing in several versions in different treatises. Psychic contemplation is divided into two levels: imaginative and dianoetic. The first corresponds with the level of Nature by virtue of our higher imagination, while the second one corresponds with the level of the World Soul by virtue of our reason. At the imaginative level, we overcome the sense that we are located in our head and experience a sort of the expansion of our self, in which we feel ourselves permeating the whole of the sensible world. At the dianoetic level, we find ourselves to be present everywhere in a completely non-localised and non-extended way. Our reason becomes the transparent sphere in which we see all the sensible world, but this doesn’t mean that we use discursive thinking or that we analyse the world. Reason is an intuitive, “transparent eyeball”, in which we see everything as united and through which we see the sensible qualities in their archetypes, the higher logoi in the World Soul. It is freedom from anything spatial, temporal, and sensible. The world is seen as existing in ourselves, but we are not the world.

The Cambridge Platonists’ philosophy of religion might be summed up as a tension between their commitment to the fixed nature of reason and goodness on the one hand and a commitment to freedom and distaste for all forms of tyranny and imposition on the other. This last chapter contends that the Cambridge Platonists not only acknowledge this tension, but embrace it, revelling in the paradoxical way that absolute fixedness and absolute freedom come together at the highest levels of being. This is made possible by what Stephen Darwall (writing specifically of Cudworth) has identified as an early theory of ‘practical reason’. This Platonic theory of practical reason draws together all the elements of the Cambridge Platonists’ outlook considered in earlier chapters – moral realism, divine communicative intent, and participatory epistemology, illustrating the extent to which this Platonic outlook binds together not only the thought of Whichcote, More, Cudworth and Smith but also runs through each of their views on different philosophical topics such as obligation, freedom and pedagogy.

The Cambridge Platonists’ anti-Calvinism was undergirded by a Platonic epistemology of participation – an epistemology on which the faculty of reason allowed the soul to participate in, and thereby come to know, the nature of God. This epistemology, drawn largely from Plotinus, enabled them to defend and articulate their reasons for rejecting the arbitrary, voluntarist picture of God propagated by their Calvinist contemporaries, and defend their own, rival conception of God as unswervingly committed to communicating his overflowing goodness to all his creatures. The central component of this Platonic epistemology is a high view of human reason as a direct participation in the divine nature, where beauty, goodness and truth are inseparably united. This chapter introduces the Cambridge Platonists’ religious epistemology by highlighting the ways in which they make conformity to God, both through purity of mind and virtuous action, a precondition for knowledge of God, resulting in a distinctive combination of Plotinian epistemology and Puritan spirituality.

Swift specialised in playing with distinctions between reason and unreason. This chapter focuses on two major works, A Tale of a Tub (1704) and Gulliver’s Travels (1726), in which Swift’s blurs the line between reason and unreason: firstly in ‘A Digression concerning the Original, the Use and Improvement of Madness in a Commonwealth’, and secondly in Gulliver’s fourth voyage to the Yahoos. Swift repeatedly engages in a sleight of hand, obliging readers to appreciate the ease with which reason can slip into madness. But in the voyage to the Yahoos, this chapter argues, readers find Gulliver’s self-loathing and misanthropy to be a step too far. Swift’s skill is to make his reader question their own perspectives and their own balance between reason and unreason.

This chapter explores the intersection of normative theory, pragmatism, and education. Philosophers have long argued that ethics and moral development are the central aims of good education. But this vision has been eclipsed by economic instrumentalism and workforce demands. Ethics education provides a potent reason-based alternative, one that promises to promote pluralism through the application of universal principles, foster democratic processes, and advance the common good. But if we hope to realize the moral purposes of education, we must begin by offering courses in normative ethics for educators in education programs and schools. And in doing so, we will promote the moral growth of individual educators, their students, and the institutions and communities in which they live, work, and study.

Given the fact that in humans the communication of information about emotional states is ubiquitous, people might be forgiven for assuming that pragmatic accounts of linguistic communication would include quite well-developed views of not only the role of emotion in inference, but also how information about emotional states is communicated. However, for a range of reasons, those working in pragmatics have tended to persist with the view that the mental processes behind reason and passions exist in somehow separate domains. As a result, the emotional dimension to linguistic communication has tended to play very much a subordinate role to the rational or cognitive one. Indeed, in many accounts it plays no role at all. This chapter provides an overview of the issues discussed in the book. These all point towards our principal motivation: our belief that emotional or expressive meaning, along with other affect-related, ineffable dimensions of communication, play such a huge role in human interaction that any pragmatic theory worth its salt must account for them.

The transatlantic intellectual movement today called “the Enlightenment” took particular forms in British North America during the American Revolution. This essay explores four interlocking Enlightenment concepts as used by eighteenth-century Americans to describe their political revolt against British monarchical rule: nature, progress, reason, and revolution. Americans appealed to nature to delegitimize claims to authority that rested on history, custom, divine access, and lineage. Dispensing with cyclical ideas of history and decline narratives from the Bible, they invented the new idea of progress as a way to describe social and political improvements resulting from human reason. They described reason, in turn, as a distinct mode of knowledge resulting from sensory data, opposing it to knowledge resting on belief or the passions alone. Finally, they described their own break with Britain as a revolution because it seemed to show the reality of progress toward a better world of reason, natural rights, and government by the people. The essay also surveys the historiography on “the American Enlightenment,” a term invented by Americans during the Cold War era amid fears of Soviet-style totalitarianism. Eighteenth-century people themselves spoke of “enlightenment” as a never-ending process rather than a finished project.

As soon as newspapers, catering to England’s new urbane peoples, began describing common executions, the crowds attending them were seen as indifferent to their moral message. By the middle of the eighteenth century, execution rituals seemed equally problematic. Critics perceived hangings to be so frequent, so large-scale and so brutalizing to an even minimally refined sensibility as to defeat their deterrent purpose. In 1783, London officials sought to redress these problems by devising a new execution ritual, staged immediately outside the prison and courthouse. Within four decades, this quintessentially urban execution ritual had been adopted in almost all other English counties, even as cities on the continent pointedly moved executions outside urban centres. Yet still executions seemed ineffective. Following a particularly intense crisis in the 1780s, England’s traditional ruling elites sought to preserve the “Bloody Code” by reducing the scale of hangings to historically low levels.

The transition from one culture of governance to another explains the character and timing of changes in the nature, location and scale of English executions from 1660 to 1900. Traditional landed elites adhered both to a “Bloody Code,” whose enforcement against common criminals could be regularly adjusted through consultations between trial judges and themselves, and to the occasional use of prolongedly agonizing execution rituals against traitors. The men who dominated England’s uniquely extensive and steadily expanding urban realms, and embraced new cultures of desacralization, feeling and reason, increasingly viewed the purposes, numerical extent and staging of executions differently. As the numbers and power of urbane people grew, first the extent and finally the practices of execution were adjusted accordingly. The many paradoxes of “feeling”, however, ensured their continued commitment to execution for murder, and some measure of hypocrisy in their views of executions and the people who attended them.

“This chapter focuses on the two main philosophical questions raised by Swift in Gulliver’s Travels. First is the problem of perspectivism, the idea that objectivity is impossible because knowledge is circumscribed by human subject positions. Differences between the four parts of Gulliver’s Travels suggest that Swift recognized no stable relationship between truth ‘in itself’ and what individuals believe about the world, but only comparisons in quality or scope between different perspectives. Second is a question about the relative validity of two different positions in Christian ethics: the optimistic neo-Stoicism espoused by Swift’s friend Alexander Pope, and the pessimistic Augustinianism preferred by Swift himself. In Gulliver’s Travels, Swift gave eloquent expression both to his scepticism about the beneficence of God and nature and to his narrow estimation of the limits of human reason.”

Chapter 4 explains how in traditional liberalism, autonomy as the ability to reason has been recognised as the foundation for personhood, thereby excluding adults with cognitive disability. Interpretations of Article 12 that require the abolition of decision-making by substitutes refashion autonomy from being marked by rationality and independence to being marked by shared personhood and interdependence so as to include adults with cognitive disability. I argue that these refashionings ultimately fail because despite avowals to the contrary, they perpetuate the privileging of rationality and of the bounded, independent individual. They also fail to recognise the interdependency of Article 12 with other rights in the CRPD, especially socio-economic rights. I argue that a concept of autonomy as achievement, as the development of autonomy competencies, as demanding the availability of a range of options and as demanding recognition of the indivisibility of human rights is the autonomy underpinning Article 12 and the CRPD.