Everything Connects: In Conference With Richard H. Popkin PDF
Preview Everything Connects: In Conference With Richard H. Popkin
BRILL'S STUDIES IN INTELLECTUAL HISTORY General Editor A J. VANDERJAGT, University of Groningen Editorial Board M. COLISH, Oberlin College J.I. ISRAEL, University College, London J.D. NORTH, University of Groningen H.A. OBERMAN, University of Arizona, Tucson R.H. POPKIN, Washington University, St. Louis-UCLA VOLUME 91 Richard H. Popkin, who celebrated his seventy-fifth birthday on 27 December 1998 EVERYTHING CONNECTS: IN CONFERENCE WITH RICHARD H. POPKIN Essays in His Honor EDITED BY JAMES E. FORCE AND DAVID S. KATZ _ __ >* • s ^6SV BRILL LEIDEN · BOSTON · KÖLN 1999 This book is printed on acid-free paper. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data The Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is also available. Die Deutsche Bibliothek - CIP-Einheitsaufhahme Everything connects : in conference with Richard H. Popkin ; essays in his honor / ed. by James E. Force and David S. Katz. - Leiden ; Boston ; Köln : Brill, 1999 (Brill's studies in intellectual history ; Vol. 91) ISBN 90-04^11098-4 ISSN 0920-8607 ISBN 90 04 11098 4 © Copynght 1999 by Koninklijke Bnll NV, Leiden, The Netherlands All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, translated, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without prior watten permission from the publisher. Authonzation to photocopy items for internal or personal use is granted by Bnll provided that the appropriate fees are paid directly to The Copyright Clearance Center, 222 Rosewood Drive, Suite 910 Danvers MA 01923, USA. Fees are subject to change. PRINTED IN THE NETHERLANDS CONTENTS Preface David S. Katz vii Introduction: Warts and All, Part 2 Richard H. Popkin xi 1. Stiernhielm Pythagorizans and the Unveiling of Isis Susanna Akerman 1 2. Unmasking the Truth: The Theme of Imposture in Early Modern European Culture, 1660-1730 Silvia Berti 19 3. Père Richard Simon and English Biblical Criticism, 1680-1700 Justin A. I. Champion 37 4. The Slums of Cosmopolis: A Renaissance in the History of Philosophy? Brian P. Copenhaver 63 5. John Locke and Francis Mercury van Helmont Allison P. Coudert 87 6. "Children of the Resurrection" and "Children of the Dust": Confronting Mortality and Immortality with Newton and Hume James E. Force 115 7. The Batde for "True" Jewish Christianity: Peter Allix's Polemics Against the Unitarians and Millenarians Matt Goldish 143 8. More, Millenarianism, and the Ma'aseh Merkavah Sarah Hutton 163 VI CONTENTS 9. Lying Wonders and Juggling Tricks: Religion, Nature, and Imposture in Early Modern England Rob Iliffe 183 10. An Alternative Path to Modernity: The Sephardi Jews of Amsterdam in Early Modern Times Yosef Kaplan 211 11. La Querelle du Paganisme Jacqueline Lagrée 241 12. Bayle's Academic Scepticism José R. Maia Neto 263 13. Popkin, Scepticism, and the History of Modern Philosophy G. A. J. Rogers 277 14. Religion, Philosophy, and Science: John Locke and Limborch's Circle in Amsterdam Luisa Simonutti 293 15. Spinoza on Theocracy and Democracy Theo Verbeek 325 16. Unnatural Empire: George Buchanan, Anti-Imperialism, and the lö^-Century Syphilis Pandemic Arthur H. Williamson 339 17. "This Due Degree of Blindness": Boyle, Hume, and the Limits of Reason Jan Wojcik 361 PREFACE DAVID S. KATZ There is an old Jewish joke about the man who is found wailing at the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier, weeping for the loss of his friend. "How could you have known him?" asks the onlooker, "this Soldier is supposed to be Unknown". "It's true," explains the mourner, "that as a Soldier he was Unknown; but as a tailor, he was world-famous!" I bring forward this ancient testimony in order to justify the publi cation of a third Festschrift for Richard Popkin, produced by some of the editors of the first and second volumes, respectively. Those books were a tribute to Richard H. Popkin the scholar, the great est living historian of philosophy. The collection before you is a tes timony to Dick Popkin the conference-meister, not the soldier on the frontiers of knowledge, but the man who for many years cre ated tailor-made gatherings of scholars from all over the world. Academic conferences have long suffered from a serious image problem. Arthur Koestler referred to professors as "call girls"—one ring of the telephone and their bags are picked for any destination between Berkeley and Beijing. In David Lodge's very small world, meetings of this kind serve the essential function of providing a venue for them to rubbish their colleagues before a distinguished interna tional audience. This sort of amusing cynicism, coupled with the humiliating difficulty of trying to get funding for travel in some universities, and the automatic ease of obtaining airline tickets in others, has led to a general uneasiness about the value of academic conferences in general. When entire academic papers can be sent along telephone lines almost instantly, who needs to bring the actual authors together at the public expense? Dick Popkin always knew the answer, and to anyone who was lucky enough to be invited to what he sometimes called his "clam bakes", the reasons were so obvious that it never needed to be for mulated. Dick actually believes that there is such a thing as a "Republic of Letters", an international group of scholars who col lectively are bringing light into darkness and uncovering the hidden connections and correspondences between history and ideas. It would vin PREFACE be difficult to find an appropriate metaphor for Dick Popkin's role in bringing these people together—the sun, the summit of a moun tain, the top of the tower—but it is undeniable even without liter ary support that scholars from all over the known world turn to him for advice and even encouragement, and he sees to it that they meet. We will probably never be sure if history is science or literature or a litde bit of both. Certainly there are many literary elements in history writing, as the postmodernists never tire of taunting us, with everything from the use of language and imagination to the con struction of reality. But it is also a science as well, most importandy in the post-Newtonian sense of being public. The early founders of the Royal Society saw themselves as the representatives of men like themselves, who due to geographical dispersion could not always be present at their deliberations. It was therefore necessary ultimately to conduct their experiments as public demonstrations before what amounted to a group of witnesses whose task it was to testify to the results. Science was public. Dick Popkin's historical science has also always been public. On the personal level, he makes his work available to other scholars the moment it exists. I recall meeting him in various places in Europe when he would plunk down a stack of manila files on the table and say, "this is what I've found recendy", sending me off with his bless ing to photocopy whatever I liked. In this case at least, virtue was its own reward. When Dick's car was mysteriously broken into at Paris in 1986, the thieves taking nothing valuable apart from a case full of his papers, he was able to reconstruct most of his lost work by asking his friends for photocopies of the photocopies. Most importantly, however, Dick Popkin's historical science has always been conducted in the public sphere by means of academic conferences of fellow scholars. David Lodge is right that far too often, the academic conference is a venue for the pursuit of agenda other than that on the programme itself. Popkin's conferences are never like that. For one thing, rather than inviting stars whose research fuel has long been exhausted, Dick always prefers researchers who genuinely have something to contribute, even if they are only at the early stages of writing their doctoral thesis. A number of articles in this present volume were contributed by scholars who first met Dick Popkin while graduate students, sometimes having pursued him to Washington University or UCLA, but also including others who were adopted informally at the beginning of their careers. PREFACE IX Historical research is by its very nature often a solitary affair. We work mostly with books and manuscripts, shrouded by the dulled sounds of the library. Such dialectical synthesis that occurs takes place at a relatively advanced stage of the research, after the finished book or article is published. There are many fields of study in which the collaborative effort comprises the research itself, as in a scientific experiment involving many people and masses of equipment. The benefits of discussion, argument and counter-argument on a regular and even daily basis are largely lost on the silent archival warriors. Dick Popkin saw the darkness and said it was no good. With the support of institutions like the Clark Library (UCLA), the Van Leer Institute (Israel), the Herzog August Bibliothek (Wolfenbüttel), and the Netherlands Institute for Advanced Studies, and the generosity of a patron like Constance Blackwell, Dick began to put together conferences on his favourite themes—scepticism, religion and irreli gion, millenarianism, and the no-man's-land between Christianity and Judaism. The people he brought together always provided the critical mass required for intellectual forward movement at warp speed, and very many of them formed lasting scholarly and personal friendships. Dr. Susanna Akerman, now a distinguished scholar, but once a graduate student who journeyed from Stockholm to study in America with Richard Popkin, recalls the advice he gave her early on in her research: "Everything connects in the end". The editors of this third volume of essays have therefore chosen as its motto Dick Popkin's dictum that "everything connects", for thanks to him, not only ideas but also scholars have made contact. They like to think of them selves as "Popkinites", united by a common belief that the history of philosophy involves discovering and uncovering unnoticed con nections between ideas and those who held them, and that largely based on new and original research in the primary materials left behind. Everyone in this volume apart from myself has contributed an essay and a set of personal remembrances. My own tribute to Dick Popkin comes in the form of a book we are publishing together at the same time as this Festschrift, Messianic Revolution: Radical Religious Politics to the End of the Second Millennium (New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1999). Our aim in this book was to show the connections (that word again!) between Joachim of Fiore in twelfth-century Italy and David Koresh in twentieth-century America, to give a history
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