The Philosophers' Library: Books that Shaped the World (Liber Historica) [Illustrated] 0711253099, 9780711253094

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The Philosophers’ Library

The Philosophers’ Library Books that Shaped the World

ADAM FERNER & CHRIS MEYNS

First published in the UK in 2021 by Ivy Press An imprint of The Quarto Group The Old Brewery, 6 Blundell Street London N7 9BH, United Kingdom T (0)20 7700 6700 www.QuartoKnows.com Text copyright © 2021 Adam Ferner and Chris Meyns Copyright © 2021 Quarto Publishing plc All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording or by any informat÷n storage-and-retrieval system, without written permiss÷n from the copyright holder. British Library Cataloguing-in-Publicat÷n Data A catalogue record for this book is avaŸable from the British Library. ISBN: 978-0-7112-5309-4 E-book ISBN: 978-0-7112-5310-0 Printed in Singapore 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

CONTE NTS INTRODUCTION

6

1

NATURAL DIVIDES (2500 BCE–300 BCE) 12

2

BOUNDARY CROSSINGS (300 BCE–200 CE) 40

3

ASSIMILATION (200 CE–600 CE) 68

4

REGIMES OF TRUTH (600–1000) 98

5

BALANCED STATES (1000–1450) 124

6

OPEN BORDERS (1450–1850) 168

7

GRAND NARRATIVES (1850–2000) 208 CONCLUSION: POSSIBLE FUTURES (2000–) 244 ADDENDUM 254 GLOSSARY

256

FURTHER READING

258

NOTES ON NAMES AND TRANSLATIONS INDEX

260

PICTURE CREDITS

266

270 ABOUT THE AUTHORS 271 CREDITS 272 ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

259

INTRODUCTION RIGHT

Destruction of Books by Qín Shî Huáng, Eighteenth Century, China Painted on a silk scroll by an unknown artist, the image shows the Chinese Emperor ordering the burning of books as well as the live burial of Rúist scholars. The painting is now housed in the Bibliothèque Nationale in Paris, having been donated by the estate of Henri Bertin, an eighteenth-century, French comptroller of the East India Company. BELOW

Burning of the Library of Alexandria, 1532, Germany. This woodcut by the German designer Hans Weiditz depicts the Library’s supposed founder Ptolemaeus Philadelphus despairing at the conflagration and being forced to choose which books to save. It is found in a text titled On the Remedies of Good and Bad Fortune.

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B

ooks are surprisingly hard to burn. The paper from which they are made is often so tightly compacted that there is insufficient oxygen for them to easily catch. This does not stop people from trying. While the book as we know it today – printed sheaves of paper, bound in covers – is a relatively recent innovation, the burning of literary works has a history as long as it is troubling. Among the first ever recorded burnings are those in 221 bce, ordered by the first Emperor of the Qín dynasty as a statement of his new empire’s anti-Rúist ideology. Scrolls and scripts from around the provinces were burned by the wagonload. Then there is the razing of the Library of Alexandria by Roman forces under the direction of Julius Caesar as part of his campaign against Ptolemaic Egypt. In the twelfth century the supporters of Muhammad bin Bakhtiyār Khaljī set fire to the the library at the Indian Nālandā University, creating a blaze so fierce it supposedly took months to die out. The streets of Florence were coated with ash after the spontaneous ‘Bonfire of the Vanities’ in 1497 and in 1562, Bishop Diego de Landa Calderón ordered the burning of Maya books in the city of Maní, in Yucatán, Mexico. Somewhat later, in 1814, British forces set the Library of Congress in Washington ablaze in retaliation for American attacks in Canada. And in the 1930s the National Socialist ‘Nazi’ party conducted a widespread campaign of ceremonial book burnings throughout Germany and Austria, targeting anti-fascist or socialist literature and works by Jewish authors. Why would anyone want to burn a book? Because books are incendiary – in more senses than one. They are powerful. The printed page can contain radical ideas and as such books can be subject to censure and censorship, even to hatred. They are symbols, ciphers and carriers of explosive and challenging philosophies that other groups may seek to suppress. Book burnings stand alongside similar forms of cultural assault, such as the destruction of archaeological sites and attacks upon religious monuments. They play as important a role in warfare today as they did in days past; witness the damage sustained by the Iraq National Library and Archive in Baghdad during the 2003 invasion of Iraq by the United States and allied forces. The 8,000 rare texts burned when militant group Dā‘esh (ISIS, the so-called ‘Islamic State’) detonated a bomb in Mosul Public Library in 2015 are among the most recent losses – but they will not be the last. It is the power of books that makes book burnings themselves demonstrations of power. They are threats and expressions of force, as well as a marking of both territorial and cultural borders. At the same time that the Nazis were throwing banned books – philosophical or otherwise – on

Introduction { 7 }

ABOVE

Adolf Hitler, cover of Mein Kampf, People’s Edition, 1933, Franz Eher Verlag: Munich, Germany. Mass-produced at the start of the Second World War, this propagandising fascist text Mein Kampf – or My Struggle – was used to promote the dictator’s Nazi ideology. It was printed and distributed by the Nazi Party’s central publishing house, Eher-Verlag.

ABOVE

Portrait of Ludwig Wittgenstein, 1930, Cambridge, UK. This photograph of the Austrian-British philosopher was taken during his time teaching at Cambridge and is currently in the Austrian National Library. By way of strange coincidence, the young Wittgenstein was in the same class as Adolf Hitler at a school in Linz.

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to bonfires, they were handing out copies of Adolf Hitler’s Mein Kampf (printed in the hundreds of thousands by the state). In so doing they demarcated the ideological space within which their movement lived; this, they were saying, is what falls within; that is what falls without. This is acceptable; that is forbidden. This practice of cultural and philosophical demarcation also takes other, less inflammatory forms. Linda Nochlin, Charles Mills and Michael Apple have shown that the suppression of literature also occurs in the creation of literary canons, curricula, syllabi and lists of Great Works. This process is less eye-catching than the fire and fury of burning books, but it is consequently more pernicious and less easily arrested. By subtle and insidious means certain figures are pushed to the margins of history, even as others are celebrated, championed, their names inscribed on the façades of learned institutions. It is all part of a system of subtle ‘memory management’, of which book burnings are simply the most visible manifestation. One question we have encountered in the writing of this book is why some works are deemed ‘Classics’ of philosophical literature. Another intimately related question is what makes a work of philosophical literature and – rippling out from this – the question of what, exactly, is ‘philosophy’. Maybe there is no single essential feature, nor even a determinate collection of features, that makes a text a work of philosophy. Perhaps, to use a concept developed by Ludwig Wittgenstein, we group works of philosophy by ‘family resemblance’. Members of the group partake of some set of a series of overlapping similarities, but no single feature needs to be shared by all. While it might be hard to lock down exactly what constitutes a work of philosophy, we know one when we see it. Unfortunately there are serious issues with a method that relies, in whole or in part, on statements that individuals ‘look the same’ or claims that ‘you can just tell’. These are issues that Wittgenstein, as a Jewish man living through the rise of Nazism and as a queer man forced to hide his sexual identity, would have been more sensitive to than many. Individual biases flourish, and any list born from this method will reveal more about who is doing the looking, and who is doing the telling, than about philosophy itself. As European authors, educated in an Anglophone tradition, we have been trained (without always being aware of it) to have a very specific and local view of philosophical history. Part of this education involved being told that our history is neither specific nor local, but monolithic and impartial. We have been fed Eurocentric reading lists and introductory texts that reinforce an image of philosophy as a series of ‘great works’ by ‘great men’ (typically European and typically racialised as white). Our ‘Classics’ reflect what Peter Linebaugh calls ‘philhellenism’, the love of Hellenic culture: Socrates, Plato and Aristotle figure prominently. This is no accident. We find compelling Martin Bernal’s observations that the British love of Hellenic literature arose at the peak of the Atlantic slave trade, when the British Empire was heavily invested in disparaging the cultural output of the Nile Valley and the African peoples they were enslaving. Philosophical catalogues are deeply enmeshed with projects of empire. In compiling our selection of books, we have tried to examine the generally unspoken understanding of what makes a text ‘properly philosophical’. We raise questions about why certain texts rise to prominence at certain times while others are left languishing. The

canons of philosophical literature are sites of domination and resistance. Philosophical texts are remembered for socio-political reasons. This connects to a broader point about the cultural politics of philosophy as a discipline. Philosophical thought is important. Philosophical puzzles are not like the puzzles at the back of a newspaper; they are not simply mind games to be pondered at leisure. Despite philosophers’ attempts to remove themselves from everyday life – working in seclusion in seminar rooms and behind the veils of technical jargon – even the most abstruse, abstract theories are of political relevance. The consequence of an unstoppable force meeting an immovable object, for instance, may seem the subject of idle musing. Yet when we realise that the unstoppable force is God and the immovable object is a law of logic, we see a very real political quandary about the investment of epistemic authority: do we trust institutions of reason or institutions of revelation? Philosophy, no matter how much it pretends to the contrary, is politically active. None of these thoughts is especially original, of course. The belief of Audre Lorde, philosopher-activist and poet, that ‘There are no new ideas’ bears repeating at the start of a book about philosophical innovations. As Kristie Dotson has explained, the LEFT

Portrait of Jean-Baptiste Belley, 1797, France. Jean-Baptiste Belley played a crucial role in the Haitian Revolution as a captain of infantry fighting against the colonists. The painting, which shows Belley leaning nonchalantly on a bust of the French philosopher G.T. Raynal, was the work of the artist Anne-Louis Girodet de Roussy-Triosont and emphasises the connections between theory and revolution.

Introduction { 9 }

ABOVE

Egyptian papyrus, c. 1250 bce, Egypt Known as the ‘Papyrus of Ani’, this scroll was found in the Tomb of Ani and depicts the god Anubis ‘weighing the heart of the deceased’. Like many of the works illustrated in this book, it was smuggled out of the place of origin by antiquarians and currently resides in a museum of the imperial power that took it – in this case, the British Museum.

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fetishisation of newness and originality is both misdirected and politically tied to the ‘newness’ of the ‘New World’ – the marking out of ancient spaces for colonisation and exploitation. Instead of spontaneous novelty, this book aims to emphasise shifts and reconfigurations. Descartes’ ‘cogito’, for example, is the retelling of an argument found in Ibn Sīnā (and reformulated in earlier works), which allows the former to distance himself from the Aristotelian scholasticism of dominant contemporaries. Leibniz’s theodicy, which reiterates notions found as far back as the Babylonian Kōhelet, defends the status quo as ‘the best possible world’; it thus carries a particular weight in the context of his employ by the House of Brunswick of the Holy Roman Empire. Relatedly, we want to challenge the idea that thoughts emerge, complete and discrete, from single and singular minds. The notion of a lone ‘genius’, producing radically new ideas in isolation, is narratively helpful but historically vexed. More often the evidence points to individuals who develop ideas in concert with their contemporaries, predecessors, collaborators and intellectual opposites. Instead of abstracting individuals out of their broader contexts, we try to highlight the rich intellectual communities and co-authoring projects of which they were so often a part. The bias towards individual scholars also connects with the privileging of written, rather than oral traditions – and while the focus here is on books, we attempt to incorporate literal as well as literary conversations.

The following chapters are ordered roughly chronologically and consider constellations of concepts that appear throughout philosophical literatures. Rather than one single, linear, grand narrative, they lay out multiple, fascinating, interweaving patterns of philosophy’s history. Chapter One, ‘Natural Divides’, covers the early period stretching from 2500 to 300 bce; it examines the conceptual moves by which local concerns are rendered global – ‘naturalisation’ – which occurs in the very earliest philosophical texts of the Vedas and the Dàodé Jīng. Chapter Two, ‘Boundary Crossings’ (300 bce–200 ce), spans the start of the first millennium. It considers the works that lent legitimacy to the imperial projects of the Persian and Macedonian Empires, as well as the revolutionary epistemologies of Siddhārtha Gautama and Mahāvīra in Ancient India. In Chapter Three, ‘Assimilation’ (200–600 ce), we discuss the ways in which works of radical critique are neutralised by governing bodies who absorb them into mainstream culture – a process apparent in Roman, Vedic and Rúist society. During the period covered in Chapter Four, ‘Regimes of Truth’ (600–1000 ce), we turn our attention to the ‘Islamic Golden Age’; here we explore the different truth-telling bodies and the books they produced to defend different conceptions of reality. Chapter Five, ‘Balanced States’ (1000–1450), continues this theme and articulates a tension in the texts of Christian, Islamic and Jewish scholars between deference to the laws of revelation and to the laws of reason. In Chapter Six, ‘Open Borders’ (1450–1850), we consider how narratives about reason and ‘natural philosophy’ begin to displace the modes of older institutions, giving rise to more ‘scientific’ establishments while simultaneously legislating colonial expansion on ‘objective’ grounds. Our final chapter, ‘Grand Narratives’, brings us up to the year 2000. In this we examine the way in which philosophical themes shift in relation to world events such as the World Wars, the Cold War, decolonisation and liberation. Book burnings evoke a special kind of horror. All ideas bear remembering – even, and perhaps especially, the more troubling ones – and it is for this reason that the bibliographic histories on which this book is based are so important. Even when they contain disturbing, confrontational, or ‘impolitic’ ideas, books best bring light, warmth and excitement not when they are in flames but when they are read. With that in mind we hope that you enjoy our book and the tapestries and colours of the histories it contains.

ABOVE

Portrait of Audre Lorde, 1983, Florida, USA. The writer, feminist, poet and civil-rights activist poses for a photograph during her residency at the Atlantic Centre for the Arts in New Smyrna Beach, Florida. On the blackboard we see the words: ‘Women are powerful and dangerous’.

Introduction { 11 }

1

NATURAL DIVIDES (2500 BCE–300 BCE)

1 Begin at the beginning?

W

BELOW

Proto-Cuneiform tablet, c. 3100–2900 bce, Mesopotamia. The pictographs on this Sumerian clay tablet record details of barley distribution and include an impression of a male figure, hunting dogs and boars. The marks were drawn in the clay with a pointed implement, perhaps a reed pen or a stylus with a wedge-shaped tip. It is currently housed in the Metropolitan Museum of Art after it was purchased from the collection of the Swiss antiquarians Marie-Louise and Hans Erlenmeyer. The routes by which these objects fall into public or private ownership are fascinating and often troubling, but unfortunately largely outside the ambit of this book.

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here should a book about books begin? The first printed paper books only start to appear at the very end of the first millennium of the Common Era. Beginning there, we would neglect a whole range of philosophical texts from Babylonia, Greece, the Indian subcontinent and many other places besides. But how far back can we feasibly reach? There is no ‘dawn of civilization’: humans have gathered into sophisticated social groups for hundreds of thousands of years, right back to and beyond the Sangoan culture in present-day Uganda in 65,000 bce. Yet the further back we stretch the more gestural our histories become. Artefacts from the earliest human cultures are few and far between; the stories they tell are partial and often ambiguous. Histories start stabilising (relatively speaking) around 3000 bce. Thanks to new archaeological methods, we are beginning to get a much better sense of this period. We know, for instance, that the islands we call ‘Britain’ were little more than a network of swamps populated by a few people and some hardy boars. North America was much the same, though with more bison than boars, and slightly less bog. On the continent of Africa, however, technologically developed societies already had an impressive cultural output. Nubian kingdoms, in the region of modern-day Sudan and southern Egypt, had already been around for centuries. Further north, Pharaoh Mnj (‘Menes’ or ‘Narmer’) and his court were ushering in the Dynastic Period of Egyptian history, from which emerged the pyramids, hieroglyphic writing and the Sphinx of Giza. The Nile played a significant part in the east African economy, making the region immensely fertile and rendering it the ‘breadbasket’ of the world. Around the same time, the Sumerian and Akkadian Empires were established in Mesopotamia, a region covering present-day Iraq. Here the empires expanded and contracted along the similarly fertile Tigris and Euphrates rivers. Further east, in modernday Pakistan, the Harappān civilization was spreading throughout the Indus Valley and traces of its deep roots still remain today. These were highly advanced civilisations with their own cities, political systems and distinctive cultures. They should give pause for thought to those seduced by the idea of history as a process of linear progression from lesser societies to more advanced ones. These empires were far from ‘primitive’, and their cultural and social procedures shape much of the so-called modern world. Among the technologies developed at the time was writing. Tally systems and pictograms have existed for millennia, but the emergence of these vast governing bodies, alongside the associated expansion of cities, meant that record keeping had to adapt to keep pace with trade. Writing systems became more and more complex. The Sumerians used a wedge-like script called cuneiform, which by the middle of the third millennium bce had shifted from pictograms to more abstract figures, closer to the characters in which this book is written. The Egyptians employed hieroglyphs and a cursive writing system called hieratic, often

ABOVE

The Seated Scribe, c. 3800–1710 bce, Egypt. This Egyptian statue portrays an unknown figure in a white kilt, holding a partially rolled papyrus scroll. The inlaid eyes consist of redveined white magnesite with truncated rock crystal. Taken out of Egypt by the French archaeologist Auguste Mariette in the nineteenth century, it is currently housed in the Louvre. LEFT

written with reed quills on papyrus. And it is from papyrus, a material produced from the malleable pith of the papyrus plant, that our first philosophical text, The Maxims of Ptahhotep, was made.

2 Divine instructions One of the world’s earliest examples of systematic ethical thought hails from the Nile Valley in north Africa, in the Old Kingdom of ancient Egypt (or ‘Kemet’). It involves sets of instructions or teachings (sebayt) and offers both theoretical insight and a guide to practical action, with the aim of moral and spiritual uplift. The intention was to encourage people to speak truly, act correctly and contribute to the community. The Maxims of Ptahhotep (c. 2000 bce) was written by pth-htp, or ‘Ptahhotep’, a high-ranked official, for his son (also named Ptahhotep). It provides practical, ethical guidelines for proper conduct. What should you do, for instance, if someone behaves aggressively towards you? Show restraint and humility, advises the author. Avoid behaving in ways that might irritate others. Be humble. Take responsibility if friends entrust things to you. Do not be selfish or greedy. Do not gossip. Foreshadowing today’s self-help manuals, the Maxims recognize the value of self-promotion. ‘If you give heed to these things about which I have spoken to you’, says the author, ‘all your affairs will be successful.’

Detail from the Stele of Zezen-nakht, c. 2000 bce, Egypt A ‘stele’ is an upright stone slab, which typically bears a commemorative inscription or relief design. This one, uncovered in Naqādah, is rendered in stucco and paint and portrays the nobleperson Zezen-nakht, wearing a curled wig, sandals and a white kilt. It presently resides in the Toledo Museum of Art.

NATURAL DIVIDES { 15 }

A core concept that underpins these instructions is that of ‘Ma’at’. Ma’at is concerned with moral values and doing what is right; it means truth, justice and uprightness. However, the word also means evenness, straightness and correctness, and as such reflects the order and regularity in the world. An ethical and a metaphysical principle, Ma’at upholds both the laws of the universe and of human society. Great is Ma’at, and its foundation is firmly established It has not been shaken since the time of Osiris And he who violates the laws must be punished. We are told in the Maxims that the wise are lovers of Ma’at. Their learning allows them to gain insight into the natures of things. As a result, they are well placed to provide instructions about how to behave, revealing that order in nature and order in society are intertwined. But who exactly are ‘the wise’ here? In the tradition of the time (as in many subsequent ages), those with the luxury to engage in abstract theorising were mainly the nobility and powerful officials. The scholar and architect Imhotep, who lived in the second millennium bce, was also a high priest. The great Pesešet was a doctor, instructor and funerary priestess, while her near-contemporary Hordedef was a prince associated with the prestigious Giza pyramids. Akhenaten, also known as Amenhotep IV (d. c. 1335 bce), was a king. Written instructions about the cosmic legitimacy of the status quo were delivered by people at the top. Our next text shows what happens when someone tries to question social orthodoxy. Anglophone scholars typically refer to this work as the ‘Babylonian Theodicy’.

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LEFT

Portrait of Ptahhotep, c. 2400 bce, Egypt. This light relief is found in the mastaba or ‘tomb’ of Ptahhotep in the north-west part of the necropolis of Saqqara. This detail from a larger image shows Ptahhotep sitting before an offering table, drinking from a beaker.

ABOVE AND LEFT

Ptahhotep, Maxims of Ptahhotep, c. 2000 bce, Egypt. This is the only surviving copy of the Maxims, which forms a part of the so-called ‘Papyrus Prisse’, found inside the coffin of Pharaoh Sekhemre-Wepmaat Intef and appropriated by Émile Prisse d’Avennes in 1847. In this section, Ptahhotep warns his interlocutor against being excessively proud of learning. As a result of Prisse’s endeavours, it now resides in the Bibliothèque Nationale de France.

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3 Gods, kings and theodicies Babylonia was the ancient kingdom that grew to prominence around 1850 bce in Mesopotamia, in the middle of the ‘fertile crescent’ around the Euphrates and Tigris rivers (the ‘rivers of Babylon’). Babylonian society was contiguous with the cultures that came before, and many of their technological and artistic developments were built on those of the Sumerian and Akkadian peoples who had previously ruled in the region. This includes the cuneiform Akkadian language in which the Theodicy is written. Sometimes referred to as the Babylonian Kōheleṯ (c. 1000 bce), the structure of the theodicy is dialogic. We read about two people who are discussing suffering. Neither is given a name, but scholars typically refer to them as the ‘Sufferer’ and the ‘Friend’. The Sufferer, the grumpier of the two, bemoans the unfairness of the world. Why do bad people prosper? Why do good people suffer? Why do the gods let this kind of unfairness persist? RIGHT

Fragment of the Babylonian Theodicy, c. 1000 bce, Mesopotamia. As we see time and again with these ancient texts the tablet on which the Babylonian Kōhelet is inscribed was itself the subject of imperial plunder. Taken by British antiquarians it now resides in the British Museum, an institution whose hoards are the centre of constant controversies about repatriation.

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The author of this text did not call it a ‘theodicy’. That term was popularised much later by the seventeenth-century German thinker Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz, who combined two ancient Greek words – theós (meaning god) and díkē (meaning justice) – to form the title of his last book. In essence a theodicy is a defence of a divine being (or beings), often in relation to perceived worldly injustice or unfairness. Why does crime pay? Why do innocents die when the Supreme Being could organise things otherwise? In the Kōheleṯ, the Sufferer talks specifically about societal injustice and his own penury. He is a pious person, he says, and devoted to the gods. If they are so powerful and so good, why do they not reward him with health and riches? Why, instead, do they let impious, wealthy people persecute him? (The speaker is so piqued by this injustice that he considers turning to a life of crime.) This story recurs throughout the history of philosophy. We see it in another text from the late second millennium, a work known as the Poem of the Righteous Sufferer (Ludlul bēl nēmeqi, Akkadian for ‘I will praise the lord of wisdom’), and again in the Hebrew Bible’s Book of Job. In the Kōheleṯ, the Friend offers what has become a canonical response to his companion’s concerns. Yes, it seems unfair, he says, but this is simply because mere mortals are constitutionally unable to understand the plans of the gods. Theodicies are often treated as purely theological or metaphysical puzzles. They are construed as having an almost paradoxical flavour: if God is omnipotent and omni-benevolent, how can evil exist in the world? However, theodicies also perform a powerful political function. In defending the gods and the divine order, they serve to uphold a specific social structure. I, Saggil-kīnam-ubbib, the incantation-priest, am the one who worships the gods and the king. Revealed by an acrostic as the author of the Theodicy, Saggil-kīnam-ubbib declares his allegiance both to the gods and the monarch. It is a common partnering; monarchies are often justified by ‘the divine right of kings’, which maintains that a monarch’s political legitimacy is underwritten by one or more supreme beings (similar in tone to the ‘mandate of heaven’ considered later; see page 29). In Babylonia, for example, we see this special relationship invoked by King Hammurabi, a ruler whose authority was grounded, in part, in his supposed endorsement by the god Marduk. Given the association of gods and kings, theodicies inevitably carry a particular political resonance. A defence of a god becomes a defence of the monarch and, by extension, of their governance. When the Sufferer describes his concerns about social injustice, his Friend assures him that he is worrying about nothing. The gods (and the king) do have a plan, but it is one that eludes his understanding. Philosophical debate blurs very quickly into political activity.

ABOVE

Fragment of The Way of a Pilgrim, c. 600 bce, Mesopotamia. Written in Akkadian with a hard-tipped stylus, this text was found in the Library of Ashurbanipal in Nineveh and describes the misfortunes of the nobleperson Šubši-mešrêšakkan and his recovery due to the blessings of Marduk. The clay tablet is currently housed in the Louvre, on loan from the British Museum.

NATURAL DIVIDES { 19 }

4 Order and sacrifice At roughly the same time that the Babylonian Kōhelet was being pressed into a block of wet clay, authors were carving our next set of texts, the Vedas, into birch bark and palm leaves in the Punjab region of the Indian subcontinent. The Vedas figure variously as religious scriptures, speculative metaphysics, political documents, epic poems and instruction manuals. Written in the Indo-European language of Sanskrit, they are perhaps best described as transcribed rather than created; the Vedic texts are the written form of a much older oral tradition that emerged during the period known as the Indus Valley Civilization (sometimes called the ‘Harappān Civilization’). This advanced Bronze Age culture flourished in the basins of the Indus river, around the sprawling cities of

RIGHT

Fragment of the Shukla Yajurveda, 1735, India. An ancient Vedic Sanskrit text, this version of the Shukla Yajurveda is preserved at the Lalchand Research Library in Chandigarh, India. This is an eighteenth-century reproduction of the 3000-yearold text, with Arabic numerals in the top margin.

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Mohenjo-daro and Harappā, c. 2600–1700 bce. From the few artefacts that survive, we know that the Harappāns routinely traded with the Mesopotamians. Otherwise information is scant. Indeed, linguists cannot even decipher the surviving instances of Indus script. Some historians, however, speculate that many of the Harappān social modes were incorporated into the culture of the Kuru kingdom, established following Aryan migrations to the Indus Valley from Central Asia, after c. 1200 bce – and about this culture we know a good deal. The official religion of the Kuru kingdom was Vedism, the precursor of presentday Hinduism. It revolves around the idea of Brahman, an infinite cosmic soul. The

NATURAL DIVIDES { 21 }

Vedas – the written records of the Vedic tradition – appear at first to fall firmly within the sphere of religious scripture. The word veda roughly translates as ‘knowledge’ or ‘wisdom’, and the Vedas are often configured as spiritual instruction. Yet their conceptual boundaries are hard to define. Written as hymns or verses, the Vedas deal with deities (and how to praise them), but they also examine further-reaching metaphysical and social questions. The Vedas are split into four texts: the Ṛgveda, the Yajurveda, the Sāmaveda and the Atharvaveda. The Rgveda is the oldest, containing scripts dating from around 1200 bce (and a system of belief from much earlier). It is composed of ten books, each in turn composed of around a hundred hymns, consisting of mantras (sacred

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chants), expressions of metaphysical theses, speculations on cosmology and instructions on ritual sacrifice. All of these overlap and interweave in ways that defy rigid classification. Consider the famous description of the horse sacrifice found at the start of the Ṛgveda. Priests are given complex instructions about how to treat a horse before, during and after its sacrifice: the steed should be allowed to roam free before being offered as oblation (a gift to the gods); the priests should collaborate closely with the king in its dissection; its bones must be arranged in a special order and the body parts must be named as they are laid out. The horse sacrifice falls firmly within the realm of religious ritual, but also reveals detailed metaphysical and ethical reflection.

LEFT

Papyrus Oxyrhynchus 29, c. 200 bce–640 ce, Egypt. The ‘Oxyrhynchus Papyri’ are a collection of manuscripts discovered in an ancient rubbish dump near Oxyrhynchus. Dating from the Ptolemaic and Roman periods, the scrolls include administrative texts as well as fragments of works by Plato and, in this instance, Euclid’s Elements. Some of the Greek texts are ‘boustrophedon’, meaning the lines read alternately left-to-right, then right-to-left.

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RIGHT

Bṛhadāraṇyaka Upaniṣad, 700 bce, India. These pages, from the first folio (from the Latin ‘folium’, meaning ‘leaf ’) of the ‘Great Forest’ Upaniṣad are stored in the Schoenberg Institute for Manuscript Studies at the University of Pennsylvania. The institute is one of many such organisations, which takes its name from wealthy benefactors. Lawrence J. Schoenberg was a business person in the computer industry and a collector of manuscripts. In 2011, he and Barbara Brizdle Schoenberg donated 287 manuscripts, worth over $20 million, to the Pennsylvania Libraries.

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5 Laws of nature The texts of the Vedas can be obscure and elusive. The meaning of passages, such as those pertaining to sacrificial practices, is drawn out by extended commentaries known as the Upaniṣads. In their earliest form these texts date from around the seventh century bce. Originally preserved through oral tradition, the texts of the Upaniṣads are written on bark and cloth, composed as extended anecdotes, dialogues and poems. Their aim is to unpick the secret teachings of the complex Vedas. One thought that recurs throughout the Upaniṣads is that the patterns we find in the animal world correspond to those of the cosmos. This idea figures prominently in the oldest of the Upaniṣads, the Brhadāraṇyaka or ‘Great Forest’ Upaniṣad, which discusses the ritual of the horse sacrifice described on page 21. The authors of the Brhadāraṇyaka claim that the Ṛgveda draws connections between the parts of the sacrificial horse and parts of the cosmos: the head of the horse is the dawn, its flesh the clouds, its back the sky. The ritual encapsulates a sophisticated cosmology with an associated method for metaphysical inquiry: studying the structure of these earthly bodies grants insight into the structure of all things, including the cosmic ordering of primary elements and celestial bodies. Since the horse’s body parts stand in a one-to-one relation to the parts of the cosmos, a ritual sacrifice can effect a re-ordering of the world. In the tradition of the Ṛgveda, a sacrifice is not simply a gift to the gods (and there are a variety of conflicting beliefs about the importance of deities such as Śiva, Viṣṇu, Lakṣmi and Brahmā, and to whom one should offer oblation). The religious instructions overlap an intricate metaphysical system that sees direct correlations between the microcosmic and the cosmic. We also see the correspondence between natural and social in the verses of the Ṛgveda known as the Purusa Sūkta. According to the Purusa Sūkta, the universe is the result of the self-sacrifice of a Cosmic Person (identified as Visnu or Śiva). The text describes how the Cosmic Person was dissected into four castes: the head became the Brahmins (priests), the arms the Kṣatriya (aristocratic warriors), the thighs the Vaiśya (traders) and the feet the Sūdra (labourers). Social hierarchy is thus presented as a cosmic fact: warriors are ‘higher’ than merchants, priests are ‘higher’ than labourers, and it is no surprise that the Sūdra are excluded from Vedic rituals. This ‘naturalisation’ – where social status is presented as a cosmic or natural fact – recurs throughout the history of global thought. We see it in Immanuel Kant’s reification of racial hierarchies and in Catholic condemnations of supposed ‘unnatural acts’. Over and again the claim that the natural world is ordered in a specific way is given as justification for prevailing orthodoxies. In Vedic metaphysics, this deference to a natural order appears to have privileged the Brahmin and Kṣatriya over the Sūdra.

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Oracle Bone, c. 1400 bce, China. This petrified pale buff tortoise shell is inscribed with oracle bone ‘seal’ text, possibly dating from the Shāng dynasty. ‘Seal script’ is a style of writing Chinese characters. It may be assumed that writing technologies have improved in a linear fashion, but few materials are quite so durable as this millennia-old shell.

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6 Cosmic balance

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Oracle Bones, c. 1400 bce, China Polished, burned and carved with inscriptions, these segments of tortoise plastrons (the flat part of the tortoise shell) and oxen bones date from the Shāng dynasty and would have been consulted in ethical and administrative matters (as depicted in the illustration on the facing page).

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In ancient China comparable cosmological musings were informing public policy. Unlike Harappā and Babylonia, the Neolithic tribes of ancient China existed in relative isolation. The Yăngsháo and Dàwènkǒu cultures, present before and during the ‘Jade Age’ (3000–2000 bce), centered around the Shāndōng region of eastern China. Like the Lóngshān culture that followed (2500–1700 bce), these societies spread along the Lower Yellow River Valley, but not so far that their trade routes intersected with the Harappāns’. The Yǎngsháo and Dàwènkǒu peoples possessed their own thriving economies, and archaeologists have uncovered a wealth of turquoise, ivory, jade and pottery artefacts dating from these epochs, finds which indicate monarchical, dynastic forms of rulership and small, frequently warring polities. After the Lóngshān, the Shāng dynasty came to dominate the Lower Yellow River Valley between 1600 and 1046 bce. Alongside bronze, jade and ceramic artefacts they have left us, we have some of the earliest examples of Chinese writing. Foremost among these are the divination texts inscribed on the famous ‘oracle bones’ – the bases for our next philosophical text. The cosmologies carved into these bones, typically turtle shells and ox scapulae, found determinate form in the Yìjīng (also known as I Ching, or the Book of Changes). This divination manual was compiled shortly after the Shāng rule, during the period known as the Western Zhōu. Historians consider the society of the Western Zhōu (1046–771 bce) to be similar to the feudal societies of Europe in the ‘Middle Ages’ many centuries later. It was hierarchical, with power over disparate provinces dispensed to regional lords by monarchs, such as the legendary King Wǔ of Zhōu. It possessed centralised governance and thereby achieved greater standardisation of cultural output, of which the Yìjīng is the best-known example. Widely consulted and widely reproduced, it came to stand as one of the defining texts of the era and laid the foundations for much of later Chinese philosophy. The Yìjīng is not intended to be read cover to cover (early versions would have been scrolls, rather than covered books). Using a randomiser – a cracked turtle shell, stalks of the yarrow plant or a roll of the dice – a qualified professional would identify one of its 64 hexagrams (figures composed of six stacked horizontal lines). They would use this as a basis to foretell the future or guide moral decision-making. Statements in the Yìjīng are interpreted in terms of the principles of yīn and yáng. It is here that we first get a sense of the importance of the concept of balance in the Chinese tradition. The tàijí symbol, which features a black comma nestled into a white comma, describes a cosmic balance between opposites. The yīn, which refers to the ‘shady side of a hill’, is associated with notions of passivity, femininity, weakness, darkness, and wetness; the yáng, which refers to the ‘sunny side of a hill’, is associated with notions of action, masculinity, strength, light and dryness. Even here we see how cosmological associations can be politically biased. It is no surprise, for example, that a patriarchal society would associate masculinity with strength and femininity with weakness.

LEFT

ABOVE

Yìjing, c. 960–1279, China.

Portrait of Genghis Khan, 1928, France.

This page comes from an edition of the Yìjing dating from the Song dynasty and features emboldened text of different sizes, for emphatic effect. It is housed in the National Central Library in Taipei, whose Rare Books Collection is one of the leading collections of Chinese antique books in the world.

This twentieth-century ‘Chinese-style’ engraving of Genghis Khan shows the Emperor consulting oracle bones to determine his destiny. It is found in the book Grandeur and Supremacy of Peking by Alphonse Hubrecht.

The Western Zhōu was succeeded by the Eastern Zhōu, a period traditionally split into two parts: the Spring and Autumn (770–476 bce) and the Warring States (475–221 bce). The Eastern Zhōu was an age of widespread cultural expansion and political tension. As its name suggests, the Warring States period saw societal breakdown, which led to a flourishing of Chinese philosophy, often referred to as the ‘Hundred Schools of Thought’. The Zhōu kings lost power to their regional lords, who were eclipsed in turn by ministerial lineages. Governance became less centralised since there was no longer a structure to support a single, monolithic school of thought. What emerged, instead, was an intellectual pluralism – and a pressing need for political analysis. The Eastern Zhōu saw the burgeoning of many schools, including those that would become known as Rúism (or ‘Confucianism’), Dàoism, Legalism, Yīnyáng cosmology, Agriculturalism and Mòhism (and many other ‘-isms’ besides).

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ABOVE

Portrait of Kǒngzǐ, Date unknown, China. The philosopher is pictured in a state of calm contemplation, the hint of a smile on his lips, the tip of his index finger appearing out of his sleeve as if on the point of instruction.

The Analects, or ‘selected sayings’, is the work of our first ‘big name’ philosopher: Kǒngzǐ (c. 551–479 bce). Living in the Shāndōng province of China, Kǒngzǐ (‘Master Kong’, also known by the Latinised name, ‘Confucius’) worked as a governor and itinerant teacher. He travelled the country lecturing his coterie of disciples, who in turn diligently recorded his sayings and compiled them into a single text. The Analects is a mixture of ethical and political rumination, focused on questions of sage rulership and social harmony. What are these things? How are they realised? It stands as a clear response to the political crises of the time. As China entered the age of the Warring States, the thinking of Kǒngzǐ – whose followers are known as ‘Rúists’, from the term rú, for ‘scholar’ – became increasingly relevant. One thread woven throughout the Analects is the idea that a solution to social disunity lies in the past. Kǒngzǐ thought that the Western Zhōu, which had ended some centuries earlier, was a ‘Golden Age’ in which harmony flourished under the guidance of legendary sage kings, such as Wǔ or his father King Wén. Political unity, he thought, could be achieved through a return to the social modes of the past and a careful study of the characters of these exemplary rulers. Loyalty, filial piety and adherence to proper rites are high up on Kǒngzǐ’s ethical qualities to cultivate.

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Kǒngzǐ, The Analects, Sixth Century bce, China. This copy of the Analects is housed in The Museum of Far Eastern Antiquities located in Stockholm. The museum was founded by Johan Gunnar Andersson, an archaeologist and one-time advisor to the Chinese government, and one of the reasons many Chinese artefacts are now found in Sweden. RIGHT

Dàodé Jing, Second Century bce, China. Discovered in the Măwángduī tomb, Chángshā in the Hunan Province of China, this version of the Dàodé Jing is rendered in ink on a silk scroll and demonstrates the kinds of deterioration these texts are subject to. Chinese script is written vertically in columns going from top to bottom and ordered right to left.

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7 One way or another We see a comparable focus on the past in the work of Mòzǐ (c. 470–391 bce), another ‘big name’ whose sayings are collected into the text known simply as Mòzǐ. In this text, Mòzǐ describes a semi-mythical period of Chinese history in which social turmoil was kept in check by ‘the worthiest and most able [person]’, the ‘Son of Heaven’, someone capable of founding a centralised and uniformly ruled universal state. Like Kǒngzǐ, Mòzǐ saw a single, all-powerful monarch as the solution to the chaos of the Warring States. The Mòzǐ and the Analects are works of political theory. In examining the qualities of good rulership, however, they are also works of ethics, and consider issues of personal virtue. What makes a capable and worthy leader? Who might become the ‘Son of Heaven’? In considering these questions Kǒngzǐ, Mòzǐ and their contemporaries asked themselves: what is the best way to live? The word ‘way’, in this context, has a particular technical meaning. ‘Way’is the English translation of the Chinese word dào. At its most basic, dào means a path to follow or a method for doing something. As it appears in the Analects, the term refers to a way of living, a way of life, closely connected to the concept of dé, meaning virtue. Kǒngzǐ was interested in what constituted a virtuous way of life, and his views were grounded in cosmological assumptions about the nature of the universe. For Kǒngzǐ dé, or virtue, is bestowed by heaven, and it is a person’s duty to properly cultivate it. ‘Heaven’ in this tradition is different from the concept commonly found in the West. It is not the realm of some omniscient deity (Kǒngzǐ rarely mentions gods), but is closer to the notion of cosmic order or, more generally, the universe – a phenomenon that exists, at its best, in a harmonious and balanced state. The notion of the ‘mandate of heaven’, referred to by both Kǒngzǐ and Mòzǐ, describes the authority conferred on a ruler. Both King Wén and King Wǔ, for instance, led with the mandate of heaven. In contrast to the ‘divine right of kings’, however, this authority is not granted by a god-like authority. Instead it emerges when an individual stands in the correct and balanced relation to the cosmos. Balance is key when it comes to nurturing virtue. For Kǒngzǐ, the dynamic is similar to that required when cultivating flowers. If you want flowers to grow, you provide them with balanced diets of water and sunshine; too much sunshine and they will wilt, too little water and they will dry up.

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The kind of balance depicted in the Yìjīng, and captured by the tàijí symbol, comes to the fore in another classic of this era, the Dàodé Jīng (The Book of Dào and Dé). Like Kǒngzǐ, the authors of the Dàodé Jīng were interested in living in harmony with the flow of the universe. Unlike Kǒngzǐ, however, they resisted the idea that virtue could be actively nurtured. The Dàodé Jīng holds that a virtuous life involves a degree of passivity. Balance is achieved by ‘going with the flow’; human nature should blossom naturally, rather than be forced into certain directions. Consequently, the ‘Dàoists’ advocate wú wéi, meaning ‘non-action’ or ‘action in keeping with the natural way of things’. As it says in the Dàodé Jīng, a person can ‘through stillness, gradually make muddied water clear’. This is the ethical manifestation of a cosmological theory. It finds form in the political sphere in the Dàoist belief that the perfect ruler is a monarch who fades into the background: ABOVE

Statue of Lǎozǐ, 1438, China. Lǎozǐ is the quasi-historical author of the seminal Dàoist text, the Dàodé Jing. This gilt brass statue, created by the artist Chen Yanqing, resides in the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York.

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The greatest of rulers is but a shadowy presence… Again we see abstract cosmological claims – about the balance of opposites – overlapping political directives. We also see how these metaphysical claims may be used to bolster a conservative political outlook. As the historian of science Lorraine Daston puts it, there is an ‘understandable fear that grounding norms in nature can lead to an unthinking conservatism: if the norms come from nature, and nature is unchanging, then so are the norms’. Whether through deference to a universal balance (as in Dàoism) or to historical institutions (as in Rúism), the background thought organising these texts is that the world works and has always worked in a single specific way – one that we deviate from at our peril. Throughout history philosophers (and many others) have justified the social privileges of some – men but not women, rich but not poor, one social group but not another – by deferring to some unassailable ‘natural order’.

LEFT

Sappho, Fragments, c. 200 bce–640 ce, Egypt

8 Love, actually Throughout history men have been accorded privileges and social status denied to others. This is as true within philosophical literature as anywhere. Think, for instance, of the ‘big names’ regularly listed for ancient Greek philosophy: Socrates, Plato, Aristotle. Standard lists do not always show that women were performing this kind of intellectual labour as well. Yet closer historical attention reveals that one of the earliest thinkers working in the Aegean region – encapsulating Greece and modern-day Turkey – was the philosopherpoet Sappho (c. 610–570 bce). She came from a wealthy family on the island of Lesbos. The few fragments that remain of her work speak to a sophisticated theory of emotions that focuses on love. Sappho’s Ode to Aphrodite was part of an oral tradition of lyric poetry (poems performed to the sound of the lyre), so we are lucky that any written records have survived. It presents a conception of emotions as concrete and sensual – love is a physical event – rather than something abstract. Yet Sappho resists reducing love entirely to its physical sensations (a theme that Plato would later take up in his Symposium). Love stands in a complex three-way relationship with beauty and goodness. When, in another poem, Sappho ponders, ‘What is most beautiful?’, she replies that it is whatever someone loves best. And goodness can generate beauty too (and consequently love). As she puts it, ‘… whoever is good will be beautiful as well’. Sappho stands at the vanguard of a new cultural movement, an intellectual shift that resulted, in part, from the increasing economic and political stability of the region. In the

Another contribution to the ‘Oxyrhynchus Papyri’ discovered in Egypt, these fragile sheets are among the few extant copies of Sappho’s work. They offer tantalising hints of the completed work. The final lines run: ‘Everywhere in the streets there were ... bowls full of wine, and cups, myrrh and cassia, frankincense, fragrances all pell-mell…’ FAR LEFT

Lǎozǐ Delivering the Dàodé Jing, Sixteenth Century, China A delicate ink drawing on paper, the scene depicts Lǎozǐ sat in a pastoral setting, delivering the teachings of the Dàodé Jing. From the Ming dynasty, the original is sometimes attributed to the artist Li Gonglin, and it is now housed in the Freer Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C.

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ABOVE

Portrait of Sappho, c. 50 ce, Italy. Found in the ruins of Pompeii, the person pictured in this fresco is understood to be Sappho, holding a book and a stylus for writing. Preserved by the volcanic ash cloud that encompassed Pompeii in 79 ce, the painting is now housed in the National Archaeological Museum in Naples.

centuries following the Dorian invasion of mainland Greece in 1100 bce, Greek colonies began to spring up around Ionia. Over time, booming agriculture meant city-states such as Miletus thrived, flourishing alongside the (relatively) tolerant Persian or Achaemenid Empire (which overthrew the Babylonian Empire in 539 bce). Another often-overlooked thinker of this period is Theano of Croton. Little is known about Theano (so little, in fact, that she is sometimes dismissed as a literary construct), but the evidence suggests she lived in the sixth century bce in what is now southern Italy. Her three daughters Arignote, Myia and Damo all followed in their mother’s footsteps, and her partner was reportedly Pythagoras of Samos (c. 580–500 bce) (after whom the theorem is named). Theano is perhaps best known as the author of a text called Advice for Women. On one level Theano’s Advice functions as a guide to domestic practice, explaining how to raise children and govern households. Reflecting social mores, Theano suggests starving, freezing and shaming children to harden them to the vicissitudes of society and inculcate virtue. Interwoven with these severe instructions, however, are hints of a broader metaphysical project relating to the concept of harmony. …imitate musical instruments and think over what sounds they make when they are loosened too much, and how they break when they are over-tightened. It is just the same with your servants. Excessive slackness creates dissonance in respect for authority, but a tightening always causes a natural break. You must think on this: the right amount is best in everything. Theano’s attitude to domestic labourers, like her attitude to children, is condemnable, but her reference to ‘the right amount’ is indicative of her view of nature as something that conforms to a special order or harmony. Like Pythagoras, and the cults that grew up around him, she believed that this order could be expressed numerically. Musical harmonies resonate with mathematical harmonies, which in turn resonate with the harmonies we find in nature. If everything belongs to an overall order, then the family home is itself a microcosm of this order.

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9 First principles This period of Aegean thought sees an increasing interest in the fundamental structure of reality. What grounds what? What is the most fundamental stuff, the matter from which everything else is made? Answers to this question normally referenced one of the elements. Thales of Miletus (c. 624–545 bce), for instance, maintained that the ‘first principle’, or archḗ in Greek, is water. It is not quite as outlandish as it sounds: all life-forms on earth contain something watery. Moreover, the quality of water – its fluidity – represents the fundamental dynamicity of the world. From the fragments of his work On Nature, it appears that Thales’s student Anaximander (c. 610–546 bce) believed that the substance on which everything else stands was ‘the unlimited’ (ápeiron in Greek). This too makes a certain sort of sense. Most things – such as trees, ducks, handkerchiefs and so on – have limits and since limits are, by definition, restrictions, they must be restrictions of something else: that which has no limits, ápeiron. Is this philosophy or science? Such a question is born out of an intellectual framework ordered around modern disciplinary divides. These thinkers saw no distinction between the two. Nor did Heraclitus of Ephesus (c. 535–475 bce) or Parmenides of Elea (c. 515–460 bce), authors of the not-so-imaginatively titled On Nature and On Nature. Both poems examine metaphysical issues manifesting in the biological realm. In addition

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Portrait of Anaximander, Third Century, Italy. This Roman mosaic (an image composed of an arrangement of small pieces of stone or tile) depicts the seated figure of the philosopher Anaximander holding a sundial and gazing at the heavens.

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to thinking (dramatically) that everything was fire, Heraclitus was also interested in nature’s inherent instability. In one fragment we see him claim: You cannot step twice into the same river: for fresh waters are ever flowing upon you. On one level, this is palpably false. One can step into the Congo river today, and do exactly the same tomorrow. On another level, it is clear that the water that makes up the Congo is in a constant state of flux; it is a dynamic, ever-changing thing. Heraclitus thought the same, is true throughout nature, even when it comes to human beings (and given what modern medicine tells us about metabolic turnover, we may be inclined to agree). Maybe everything is fire, where fire is understood to be change and flux? Parmenides, in contrast, held that change is impossible. It sounds radical, but when one considers his poem one finds a surprisingly convincing argument. Imagine you build a house. Yesterday: no house. Today: house. This means house came from no house. But what is no house? A ‘no house’ is not a thing. But nothing can come from no thing, and houses cannot appear from nowhere. To Parmenides, following this chain of logic, the concept of change was conceptually unsound: RIGHT

Scene from Plato’s Symposium, 1648, Italy Engraved by the Italian printmaker Pietro Testa, this illustration depicts the famous gathering described in Plato’s Symposium. Alcibiades stands, naked, in a contrapposto pose, on the far left. The inscription on the wall behind Alcibiades translates: ‘Wine weighs down banquets / wisdom nourishes the soul’.

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I shall not let you say nor think that I came from what is not; for it can neither be thought nor uttered that anything is not. Nature just is, always and unchanging.

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Plato, page from Symposium, c. 200 bce–640 ce, Egypt. These tissue-thin fragments are among the earliest versions of Plato’s text and were found, along with contributions from Sappho and Euclid, in the Oxyrhynchus Papyri.

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10 The ladder of love

BELOW

Bust of Socrates, 400 bce, Greece. Despite racist stereotypes that began to equate whiteness with beauty and taste, this sculpture would most likely have been painted. Unlike the marble, however, the delicate paint pigments have not weathered the passing of time.

One of the most prolific literary puppeteers of the period was the playwright and political theorist we know as Plato (c. 424–348 bce). He wrote dialogues, primarily, featuring friends and associates, whose thoughts he recorded – or perhaps distorted. Was he a diligent archivist, a plagiarist or a cunning ventriloquist? Whatever he was, the thinker hailing from the city-state of Athens has become perhaps the biggest name in Western thought. For centuries he has been celebrated for his political, metaphysical and ethical treatises, and recognised as a grand system-builder, drawing subtle connections between these different fields. The Symposium (c. 384–369 bce) is one of Plato’s most famous dialogues. It tells of a rowdy banquet, hosted by the poet Agathon. All the great and the good of Athenian society are there and while making merry, Agathon challenges them to offer orations in praise of Eros. Like Sappho, who Plato cites, the characters of the Symposium are interested in love. As is often the case in Plato’s dialogues, the character of his teacher Socrates offers some of the most sophisticated contributions. And – as is also often the case – he does so by conveying the thoughts of others. In this instance, the thoughts are those of his teacher, Diotima of Mantinea. Diotima, we are told, was not so much interested in what love is, but in the issue of what we love. Love, she held, can lead people from looking at pretty faces to true insights into the nature of all things. As Diotima tells it (… according to Socrates … according to Plato), love is excited by beauty; and the more you consider beautiful things (flowers, shiny fabrics, etc.), the surer your grip becomes on what beauty actually is. You begin to appreciate beauty in the sciences, and in institutions and laws. At the top of this ladder of understanding is beauty itself: [The lover] arrives at the notion of absolute beauty, and at last knows what the essence of beauty is. The highest rung on this ladder is commonly, and perhaps unfairly, known as ‘Platonic’ rather than ‘Diotiman’ love. It is a love that reaches beyond worldly things to a higher plane, figuring it as a response to beauty, where beauty is an aspect of goodness (good things are necessarily beautiful). Plato’s texts are uplifting. Love leads you to absolute beauty and goodness. They also contain what we might think of today as socially progressive attitudes. Consider, for instance, the queer elements in the Symposium. Gay relationships take centre stage, exemplified by the love between Socrates and his beautiful student Alcibiades. But to twenty-first century eyes these texts are also

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riddled with sexism and misogyny. The ladder of love, described above, positions the intellectual union between men as inherently more valuable than the supposedly base physical, reproductive union that can occur between men and women. Moreover, Plato completely ignores lesbian loves as portrayed by Sappho. In his political treatise The Republic, women are routinely given more menial roles than men and described as ‘deformed and misshaped’. Nor are these instances of sexism aberrations. Plato’s texts systematically present women as being naturally lesser than men. This is a view that Plato’s student Aristotle takes up and runs with – in a major way. Born in 384 bce in Macedonia, now a part of northern Greece, Aristotle of Stagira (384–322 bce) studied at Plato’s Academy before working as a tutor and adviser to aspiring politicians. He produced a vast corpus of works including the Physics, the Poetics, the Rhetoric, the Politics, the Metaphysics and Nichomachean Ethics. His wide-ranging interests included the biological and social world. In On the Soul and Metaphysics (so-called because it was written after, metá, his Physics), Aristotle presents his ‘hylomorphic’ conception of the universe. Hylomorphism, simply put, is the view that every single thing (this cat or that panda) is made up of two metaphysical ingredients: matter (hylē) and form (morphḗ). To use a slightly rough analogy, a bronze statue of Aristotle is made out of matter (bronze) and has a specific form (the form of Aristotle). The same is true for all things, natural or artefactual. A thing’s form, Aristotle believed, does not just tell us its nature (what kind of thing it is). It also reveals the thing’s function, or what the thing is for. In ‘functions’, Aristotle saw a handy tool for determining how to live a good life. Like Kǒngzǐ, he was deeply concerned with living well and virtuously. In the Nichomachean Ethics (named after its putative editor, and Aristotle’s son, Nichomachus) he focuses on questions of the ‘good life’. For Aristotle, living well involves living according to our natures. He holds that, in the same way that hammers have a specific function and are at their best when used with this function in mind, humans flourish when they do their distinctively human thing. This involves such things as thinking and talking and reasoning. We are at our best when we live according to our rational nature. Aristotle went to great lengths trying to present certain social arrangements as natural. In his Politics, for example, he suggests that it is good for certain people to be enslaved because they supposedly have a lesser capacity for reasoning. His attempts to naturalise his misogyny lead him to sometimes bizarre and patently false statements, such as the claim in the History of Animals that men have more teeth than women. If this teaches us anything, it is to beware the ‘natural’.

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Bust of Aristotle, 320 bce, Rome, Italy. Aristotle is often depicted with a fulsome beard, which was taken to indicate maturity. In keeping with their appropriation of Greek culture, this bust is a Roman copy of a Greek original.

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RIGHT

Aristotle, page from Nicomachean Ethics, Tenth Century, Italy Found in the Biblioteca Medicea Laurenziana in Florence, this is a page from a copy of Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics. Built in the sixteenth century, the Biblioteca, or ‘Laurentian Library’, was intended to emphasise its patrons’ ascension from merchants to members of literary and ecclesiastical society. Ownership of literary works like the Ethics were markers of distinction.

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11 Big names In the history of philosophy, certain figures – like Kǒngzǐ, Plato and Aristotle – have been accorded a greater status than others. The works considered in this chapter encourage us to ask (as all good philosophy should ask): why? If so many of these works contain great ideas, why do we choose to raise some up and obscure others from view? Why are some poems considered philosophy, others science and still others ‘just’ literature (if that)? Why do some thinkers become Big Names while others remain in lower case? Why, for instance, is Kǒngzǐ so prominent in the Chinese tradition? His ideas are unapologetic re-workings of thoughts that prevailed in earlier centuries. ‘I transmit but do not innovate,’ he claimed. He offers nothing original – and his one great contribution to literature, the Analects, was written by other people. Does this mean that we need not bother about originality? Why is Socrates, who never wrote anything down, positioned as an era-defining thinker, before whom there were simply ‘pre-Socratics’? Perhaps the most important question here, in a book about books, is why there is such a determinate focus on authors. If nothing else, the discussion above demonstrates that great works are produced in a vast number of ways. Texts such as the Vedas and the Upaniṣads show us how canonical works can be the product of multiple different thinkers, all talking, thinking, writing and listening in concert. Think too of the epic Mahābhārata, which contains the 700-verse Sanskrit scripture the Bhagavad-gītā. It was purportedly collated, but not authored, by Vyāsa (‘the Compiler’). The same is true for the Analects and the Mòzǐ and the Ode to Aphrodite. These books disturb the myth of big names writing down big ideas in intellectual solitude. They call us to investigate this focus on authors and suggest that the celebration of some figures over others is political. This is amply demonstrated in the next chapter by the ways in which we refer to Aristotle’s most famous student – a man known to some as Alexander the Great, yet to others as Alexander the Accursed.

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2

BOUNDARY CROSSINGS (300 BCE–200 CE)

1 Persian exports

T BELOW

Portrait of Zarathuštra, Ninth Century, Germany. In this miniature, we see Zarathuštra through ninthcentury European eyes. Represented as a ruler on a throne, Zarathuštra sports a red robe and sceptre, in conversation with two colourfully dressed people identified as oracles. It appears in a manuscript copy of On the Nature of Things by the Frankish Benedictine monk Rabanus Maurus (c. 780–856).

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he third century bce was a time of dramatic cultural exchange and resistance, during which both physical and intellectual boundaries were negotiated and renegotiated by imperial powers. Over the preceding centuries the Persian Empire had established vast networks of well-serviced trade routes – the famous ‘Silk Roads’ – connecting the Aegean to the Persian heartland and China. Under Darius the Great (550–486 bce) they developed sophisticated infrastructures supported by complex systems of book-keeping and taxation. Many of the Persian king’s successes were achieved not through crushing subjugation (though there was some of that), but through cultural sensitivity and tolerance. The Persian ‘Behistun inscription’, commissioned by Darius, on the top of Mount Behistun attests to this; it is trilingual, written in ancient Persian, Elamite and Akkadian, recognising the linguistic needs of a diverse populace. In spite of common assumptions to the contrary, ‘globalisation’ is far from a modern phenomenon. In addition to exchanges of material goods, the Persian Empire also facilitated a mass exchange of ideas. Among their major exports was Zoroastrianism. As with Vedism and Rúism, Zoroastrianism resists modern disciplinary attempts to separate religion from philosophy; its foundational text, known as the Avesta, focuses as much on metaphysics as it does on ethics and spiritual instruction. One of the few extant examples of the Avestan language, the work purports to collect together the sayings of the religion’s founder Zarathuštra, or ‘Zōroástrēs’ to the Greeks (c. 1500–1200 bce). Readers are introduced, via hymns or gathas, to a complex cosmology in which a single deity, Ahurā Mazdā, creates twin spirits: one represents truth, goodness, creation and existence, the other untruth, wickedness and destruction. The Avesta is one of the first and clearest formulations of a monotheistic world-view, encapsulating a binary model of good and evil. Unlike its polytheistic contemporaries, this text offers a monolithic ethical model, oriented around a single god and presenting an elegantly simple framework for decisionmaking. It foregrounds agency: whether or not we turn to one twin or the other is ultimately up to us, as individuals. Various versions of the Avesta would have circulated the trade routes. Its core message, about Ahurā Mazdā and individual choice, rang clear and far. The Avesta’s influence can be seen in Buddhist, Jewish and Christian thought (centuries later Friedrich Nietzsche’s Thus Spake Zarathustra (1883) is written as an explicit homage to this hugely influential figure). Its emphasis on personal choice would have marked the rules of Darius and Cyrus the Great. Subjects would doubtlessly have been seen as responsible for their own moral development; ethical choice was not, ultimately, a matter of imperial concern. This would also have fed into more permissive social attitudes. Rather than enforcing a statesanctioned religion, Persian rulers tolerated a variety of ethico-religious perspectives (with inevitable fluctuations, of course).

LEFT

Videvdād Sādah, 1647, Iran. This ornate page is found in a seventeenth-century copy of the Videvdād Sādah, a liturgical text, based on a Zoroastrian legal work. Written using red and black ink in the ancient Iranian Avestan language, it is framed by a rich geometric border in red and can be read from multiple angles (Avestan script is written from right to left).

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RIGHT TOP

Videvdād Sādah, 1647, Iran Amid the running text of this Zoroastrian manuscript the copyist, identified as Mihrban Anushirvan Bahram, included a colophon (a statement of authorship and printing) in Persian. RIGHT BELOW

Videvdād Sādah, 1647, Iran. While Zoroastrian manuscripts are usually not illustrated, this copy of the Videvdād Sādah contains various colour pictures, such as these images of trees in red and green.

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2 Campaign trails As linguistic and cultural boundaries became more porous, philosophical trading thrived. The economy of ideas received a significant boost with the expansion of the Macedonian Empire during the reign of the conqueror known to some as Alexander the Great and to others as Alexander the Accursed. Having secured the throne in 335 bce, the young Alexander of Macedon (356– 323 bce) began one of history’s most ambitious imperial projects. Ignoring the Lowlands, Gaul and other western states, the Macedonian Empire spread eastwards, taking over Babylon, defeating Darius III in the Persian heartland of what the Macedonians called ‘Gaugámēla’ (modern-day Iraqi Kurdistan) and extending into the Indus Valley. For millennia, African dynastic rule had enjoyed relative stability in Egypt. However, following successive incursions by Persian and then Macedonian forces the character of this ancient African nation began to change. After Alexander’s invasion a new Ptolemaic dynasty was established (named after one of Alexander’s soldiers and friends, Ptolemy); it ushered in a prolonged period of cultural enterprise, with a particular focus on texts by Greek thinkers. The city immodestly named ‘Alexandria’ was founded and came to host the famous Library of Alexandria, which at its height housed tens if not hundreds of thousands of scrolls. Among them were Pythagorean Principles of Music by Ptolemais of Cyrene (fl. third century bce) and Harmonics by Claudius Ptolemy (c. 100–170 ce), which attest to the continuing interest in the intersection of mathematics and music and the analysis of tonal algorithms. This was the lighter side of Greek thought. Yet the untrammelled expansion of Macedonian territory also needed conceptual and ethical backing. It found this in the texts of Alexander’s former tutor, Aristotle. It was Aristotle’s work and the work of his contemporaries that legislated the invasions and imperial occupations of the ‘Great’ Macedonian king. Take, for instance, Aristotle’s championing of courage. The Nichomachean Ethics is devoted to this singular virtue, celebrated as the glorious mean between recklessness and cowardice. As with all Aristotelian virtues, courage was to be cultivated through habituation or practice; the only way to genuinely practise being courageous, Aristotle tells us, is in war. Alexander took this idea to heart, conducting a decade of relentless military campaigning until (perhaps predictably) his premature death at the age of 34. This form of virtue education goes hand-in-hand with another Aristotelian view articulated in the Politics: some communities (by which Aristotle meant the Greeks) are naturally meant to dominate others. The hierarchy described above – in which the Greeks believed themselves to be

ABOVE

Bust of Claudius Ptolemy, Date unknown. This bronze bust of Claudius Ptolemy (c. 90–168 ce) has brown inlaid gemstone eyes, and stands on a stone pedestal. Ptolemy is represented with a melancholic expression, mouth closed, eyes gazing into the distance. Busts like this one, owned by the Royal Geographical Society, are used to reinforce historical narratives. LEFT

Bust of Alexander of Macedon, First or Second Century, Italy. This marble bust of Alexander of Macedon shows the young emperor, mouth slightly open as if to speak, eyes blank. The sculpture is a first- or secondcentury copy of an earlier Greek work in bronze.

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ABOVE

Ptolemy’s map of the world, Fifteenth Century, Florence, Italy Intricately coloured with blue pigment, this manuscript is based on a world map found in Ptolemy’s Geography (c. 150 ce). The map shows rivers and location names in China, the island of Sri Lanka, as well as the Mediterranean region. Given the lack of satellite imaging, it is remarkably accurate.

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naturally superior to other nations, and men to women, and free persons to enslaved people – is a conceptual requirement for this kind of expansionist project. Of course, Alexander’s exploits did not always align with the writings of his erstwhile teacher. Elsewhere in the Politics Aristotle comments that the middle-class should be empowered in the realm of politics, since they are best placed (in the middle) to decide policies to the benefit of everyone. The despotic Macedonian king was clearly less committed to this view than to Aristotle’s other ideas. Zoroastrian authors of the Ardā Wīrāz Nāmag, or Book of the Righteous Wīrāz, acknowledged the staggering ruthlessness of his empire; on the receiving end of his brutal campaigning, they gave him the name of ‘gizistag eskandar’ (‘cursed Alexander’).

3 Supplementary reading Few original documents from this period survive, even fewer in their entirety. Most have been lost, destroyed or rendered fragmentary by time’s vicissitudes (including the razing of the library of Alexandria by Julius Caesar in 48 bce). Writers today rely on careful research by historians of philosophy, who are themselves relying on the work of earlier historians, many from before the first millennium. The story you find here is built on a series of nested texts in a historiographical mise en abyme that can leave one feeling slightly vertiginous. Plutarch’s Lives of the Noble Greeks and Romans and Diogenes Laërtius’s Lives and Opinions of Eminent Philosophers were written in the first and second century ce respectively. These authors hail from Greece and Anatolia. The Lives of Plutarch (c. 46–120 ce) stands as one of the first examples of historical biography. The Greek philosopher’s historical accounts thread together the lives of 48 Greek and Roman rulers and thinkers. Much of what we know about Alexander, for instance, we learn from Plutarch. Nor is the Lives simply a compendium of dates and names of battles. Plutarch, like his predecessors, was interested in character. What virtues did Alexander exhibit? How did he cultivate them? In a move that might seem somewhat self-serving, Plutarch declares that Alexander’s successes relied on his high regard for philosophers. Aristotle, inevitably, is cited as an influence; we are told that the king kept copies of his teacher’s works under his pillow, alongside a ready dagger. The king also admired Homer’s Iliad, ‘a handbook to the art of war’, as well as the tragedies of Aeschylus and Euripides. Another of Socrates’ students, Xenophon of Athens, is also thought to have been an inspiration. Xenophon’s Anabasis (The March Up Country, c. 370 bce) is an account of the poet-soldier’s military exploits, detailing his expeditions through Persia. Plutarch tells us that Alexander’s attention to this and other ethnographic works would have stood him in good stead in pursuit of his colonial endeavours. Lives of the Noble Greeks and Romans also describes Alexander’s strategic adoption of local customs – the same tactic of tolerance deployed by the Persians. Bloody as his campaigns were, part of the Macedonian king’s success rested on this sensitivity to regional culture. While expanding his territories, Alexander also accommodated the needs of his new subjects – defending them, for example, from the tribes of the Steppes – and honoured local traditions. Plutarch tells us that when in Persia Alexander would wear Persian clothing and engage in proskýnēsis (a court custom that involved kissing the hands of officials). The Macedonian king and his army were thus able to forge stable connections with regional elites, who were in turn persuaded to perform offices for the empire. One effect of this strategy was a broad mixing of literary and religious traditions. Historians of philosophy point to striking parallels between the cultures brought into contact by Alexander’s empire; ancient Greek and ancient Indian philosophies display almost identical forms of argumentation, constructed in remarkably similar dialogic forms. Even the list of ‘fundamental elements’ – earth, wind, fire and water – are the same (in contrast to those posited by Zoroastrians and in ancient China). However, while

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RIGHT

Scene from Homer’s Iliad, First Century ce, Pompeii, Italy. A mosaic in red and brown tints, this image depicts an episode from Homer’s Iliad in which Achilles draws his sword to quarrel with a seated King Agamemnon, while an onlooking third party tries to intervene. Given their durability, stone or glass mosaics were often used as floor or wall decoration in ancient Rome.

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LEFT

Scene from Xenophon’s The March Up Country, 1508–1509, France In this sixteenth-century illuminated manuscript, we see Xenophon and the Greek army posing next to a pile of slaughtered bodies, their encampment shown in the background. The scene and texts below, with an elaborate ‘historiated’ initial, are enclosed by a border with rich foliage and curious, whimsical animals.

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the resemblances are strong, the direction of travel is considerably less clear. The Macedonians clearly exported Greek theology to their new territories, evidenced by statuary remains and coinage that feature Greek gods, but which ideas travelled the trade routes back to Athens? BELOW

Buddha figure, Third Century, Khyber Pakhtunkhwa, Pakistan. Carved out of schist, this sculpture of a Buddha stands on a pedestal with multiple smaller carved figures below. The Buddha is represented smiling gently, arms slightly raised in benevolence, clothing draped splendidly around his body.

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4 Philosophical radicals In the histories of global thought, few bodies of literature have been quite so influential as the Pāli Canon. Compiled in the first century bce, the books of the Canon collect together teachings of the Indian thinker Siddhārtha Gautama (c. 563–483 bce), also known as ‘the awakened one’ or ‘Buddha’. Born in northern India into the aristocratic kṣatriya social caste, Gautama abandoned his inherited wealth to lead a life of ascetic restraint; the teachings we find in the Canon are clear indictments of the spiritual and social hierarchies of Vedic culture. As with other such movements, there are multiple interpretations of Gautama’s teachings, around which different schools have coalesced. Of these schools, the two largest are Theravāda and Mahāyāna Buddhism. In Pāli (the Indo-Aryan language in which the Canon is written), Theravāda means ‘School of the Elders’ – and Theravāda Buddhism is indeed the older of these two traditions. According to Theravāda Buddhists, a council of scholars was created shortly after Gautama’s death to preserve his wisdom. His teachings were codified and passed on in oral form before being transcribed into the Pāli Canon, the earliest contributions of which were the Vinaya Piṭaka and the first four volumes of the Sutta Piṭaka. The Mahāyāna tradition emerged slightly later, towards the start of the Common Era. For the Mahāyānas, the Lotus Sūtra is one of the central texts. Varied as these works are, each contains the same central ideas of kamma, saṃsāra, dukkha, nibbāna and anattā – concepts that in combination present a powerful alternative to the orthodox Vedism of the Upaniṣads. ‘Kamma’ (or its Sanskrit equivalent, ‘karma’) refers to a universal organising principle, a balancing force that connects good deeds to good fortune and bad deeds to bad fortune. For Buddhists, kamma is the force that determines human destiny and spiritual ascension. And for both Theravāda and Mahāyāna Buddhists, as for Vedic contemporaries, spiritual ascension is a necessary step to escape saṃsāra, the endless cycle of reincarnation, or mokṣa. A person exists, we are told, not for one lifetime but for many. Buddhists see the endless cycle to be a painful, unpleasant form of suffering (dukkha), from which liberation is to be sought. In the Pāli Canon we learn that through good deeds and extended spiritual reflection an individual can adjust the karmic balance in order to ascend spiritually through different realms of being and so progress towards a state of spiritual release called nibbāna. A central step in this journey, which culminates in an escape from saṃsāra, is the realisation of the truth of anattā. Loosely, anattā means ‘no self ’ or ‘non-self ’, and it stands as one of Buddhism’s most influential innovations. According to this thesis, despite appearances none of us possesses a determinate spiritual core. The being to which the first-person pronoun ‘I’ refers is an illusion. Anattā provides a dramatic and radical solution to the problem of reincarnation. The endless cycle of rebirth is stopped by the soul’s recognition of its nonexistence.

Finding a way to understand and embrace the doctrine of anattā is one of the central aims of Buddhism. It manifests in practices described in the Canon, which focus attention away from egocentric desires. These practices include celibacy, isolation, yogic meditation and the relinquishing of material possessions. They are spiritually engaged but also politically radical. Buddhist thought is deeply inimical to the social stratification of the caste system, with its unequal – and naturalised – distribution of wealth and privilege. The central tenet, exemplified by Gautama’s relinquishing of his kṣatriya privileges, is that wealth presents a tangible obstacle to enlightenment. In the same period we find a similar response to Vedism in the teachings of Mahāvīra, codified in Sanskrit texts such as the Ācārāṅga Sūtra. Mahāvīra (c. 540–468 bce), like Gautama, was born into aristocratic society; he similarly abandoned his life of inherited wealth to pursue a programme of self-reflection. The Ācārāṅga Sūtra and related works such as the Sūtrakṛtāṅga and Sthānāṅgasūtra, compiled at the turn of the millennium, form the foundation of Jainism – another spiritual system with far-reaching influence. Jainism also strongly opposes the Vedic belief that spiritual progress depends on the performance of caste duties, status and priestly rituals. Like Buddhism, it focuses on withdrawal from worldly affairs. Through ascetic practices, Jains aspire towards the dissolution of passions such as anger, pride, deceit and greed. While Alexander was extending his imperial reach into the Indus Valley, Buddhist and Jaina thinkers were turning away from worldly desires.

BELOW

Mahāniddesa, Date unknown, Myanmar. On these three fragments of a Burmese-Pali version of the Buddhist text Mahāniddesa, we see different types of Burmese script in black framed by a red border, as well as rich red lacquer decoration. The pages are housed in the Wellcome Collection in London, one of the largest repositories of ancient literature in the world, due to the purchasing power of the nineteenth-century pharmaceutical magnate, Henry Wellcome.

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RIGHT

U Khandi, selections from the Tipiṭaka, 1913, Mandalay, Myanmar. This stone tablet, inscribed with passages from the Tipiṭaka (or Pāli Canon), is found in the Sandamuni pagoda in Myanmar. The pagoda was commissioned in 1874 by King Mindon Min. In 1913 the Buddhist philosopher U Khandi (1868–1949) carved Sutta, Vinaya and Abhidhamma from the Tipiṭaka, with added explanations, into some 1,772 stone slabs. FAR RIGHT

Uttarādhyayana Sūtra, sixteenth century, India. This page, from the Uttarādhyayana Sūtra, has a larger central script written in Ardhamāgadhī Prakrit, surrounded by commentary in Sanskrit, both using black and red ink. The rich illustration depicts spiritual teacher Mahāvīra lecturing from a seated position surrounded by decorative architecture, with two other, smaller, figures listening. Ink, or ‘masi’, has been a common writing material in India since the third century bce.

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ABOVE

Manuscript cover, Twelfth Century, Gujarat, India Rendered in watercolour on wood, this manuscript cover of a Jain text shows twelve colourfully dressed figures in three-quarter profile, holding weapons, jewellery and food, against a red background. It would have been connected to other leaves by a peg running through the hole in the middle, a binding process which would have allowed readers to view multiple pages simultaneously.

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5 Suspending judgement The ascetic Buddhists and Jains are almost certainly the gumnosophistaí (‘naked wise people’) described in the Lives and Opinions of Eminent Philosophers by Diogenes Laërtius (c. 180–280 ce). This biographical anthology neglects to give the gumnosophistaí an entry of their own, but includes them in a section on Pyrrho of Elis. According to Laërtius, the Peloponnesian Pyrrho (c. 360–270 bce) accompanied Alexander’s army to the Indus Valley where he met these spiritual thinkers. Pyrrho’s thought, especially his style of ‘Pyrrhonian Scepticism’, is clearly marked by this encounter. While Pyrrho’s own writings are lost, the Outlines of Pyrrhonism by Sextus Empiricus (c. 160–210 ce) grants us some insight. Through it we learn that one of the characteristic features of Pyrrho’s view was his focus on ataraxía – a state of undisturbedness or equanimity, which manifests as a withdrawal from the passions. For Pyrrho, this peacefulness is achieved through epoché or suspension of judgement. This is the sceptical part of Pyrrhonian Scepticism: one must be wary of dogmatic judgements and choose instead to have ‘no view’. In so doing, Pyrrho tells us (via Empiricus), we can escape from the tumult of the passions and find peace. Given the partial nature of the available histories, it is hard to know exactly how much Pyrrho interacted with the Indic philosophers, but intellectual historians like Peter Adamson and Jonardon Ganeri see tangible connections between early Buddhist and Jain thought and this Greek-branded scepticism. Consider, for instance, the logical form known as the tetrálēmma, which sees statements to be assessable as true, false, both true and false or neither true or false. This logical form was prevalent in Indic epistemology,

LEFT

Diogenes Laërtius, title page of The Lives, Opinions, and Remarkable Sayings of the Most Famous Ancient Philosophers, 1688, Edward Brewster: London, England. The engraved portrait on the left page of this printed book shows Diogenes Laërtius with a cosy hat and beard, enclosed in an oval frame, staring directly at the reader. He is frowning and smirking slightly. On the right, or ‘recto’, we see the title page, stating it was written in Greek, but ‘Made English by Several Hands’, indicating the collaborative enterprise of translation.

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BELOW

Portrait of Hipparchia of Maroneia, First Century, Rome, Italy. This detail from a Roman wall painting shows Hipparchia of Maroneia, represented in profile, carrying a closed box on her head. It is rendered as a ‘fresco’, a manner of painting on freshly (fresco) laid lime plaster, which enhances the pigment’s durability.

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featuring as a key element in the work of Nāgārjuna (c. 150–250 ce) (p.79). It also plays a key role in the arguments for Pyrrhonian epoché. Close readings of Laërtius’s Lives, Empiricus’s Outlines of Pyrrhonism and the Pāli Canon tell a story of overlapping intellectual trends and border crossings in the realms of ideas. This happened within cultures as well as between them; Pyrrhonian Scepticism undoubtedly influenced the Cynic school that was popular in Alexandria and Athens at this time. Today cynicism is associated with pessimism and an unduly negative view of the world. At the start of the new millennium, however, the word had a different meaning. Deriving from the Greek word kyōn, meaning dog, the Cynics were a group of philosophers who abjured the trappings of the civilised world and preferred instead to live ‘like dogs’ on the street. Unfortunately, one upshot of the Cynics’ world-view was a reluctance to engage with literary establishments; there are consequently very few early Cynic texts. Most of what we know of these thinkers we learn from Laërtius’s Lives, which includes entries on Hipparchia, Crates and Diogenes of Sinope. Hipparchia of Maroneia (c. 350–280 bce), the only woman to have a biographical entry in the Lives, was one of the Cynic school’s most committed adherents. Together with her partner Crates of Thebes, Hipparchia enacted her theoretical commitments on the streets of Athens, vehemently rejecting conventional expectations of the ‘good life’ (wealth, money, decorous behaviour) to live instead as naturally and self-sufficiently as possible. Hipparchia had few possessions, ate simply and trained herself – through a process known as áskēsis – to endure deprivation and pain. By doing so she aimed to become indifferent to the whims of Fortune, and so achieve a state of peace and tranquil equanimity. Laërtius also tells us of Diogenes of Sinope (c. 412–323 bce) who, at the time of the Macedonian conquests, was said to have lived in an empty wine barrel in a thoroughfare in Athens. In one story we are told that Diogenes was once approached by Alexander, who asked him his heart’s desire. In reply, Diogenes is said to have muttered to the emperor: ‘My heart’s desire is that you stand out of my light.’ Like the Sceptics and the Indic philosophers, the Cynics sought liberation from worldly concerns, cultivating indifference and pursuing programmes of self-deprivation. These Cynical and Sceptical positions contrast with the hedonism we find in the works of Arete of Cyrene (fl. fourth century bce). Or at least they would, had any of the forty books she supposedly wrote survived. As it is, the contrast can only be drawn with the impression we have of Arete, who lived in modern-day Libya, through the works of her intellectual successors and the students of the school she founded. For Arete, life was about pleasure. Our lives, she believed, are nothing but the sum of our experiences, so all we can do is maximise pleasure and minimise pain. Heavily influenced by

LEFT

Scene with Alexander of Macedon, Fourth to First Century bce, Luxor, Egypt. This scene, depicted in relief on a wall in the Temple of Amun, shows a clean-shaven Alexander of Macedon in profile, arms raised in worship. He faces the bearded pharaoh-god Amun-Min, who is wearing elaborate headwear and carries a staff. The scene is enveloped in pictographic writing, which to modern eyes will emphasise the historical contingency of the distinction between text and image. BELOW

Bust of Epicurus of Samos, First to Second Century ce, Italy.

this Cyrenaic philosophy, Epicurus of Samos (341–270 bce) wrote in his Letter to Menoeceus that ‘we must exercise ourselves in the things which bring happiness, since, if that be present, we have everything, and, if that be absent, all our actions are directed toward attaining it’. Even here, however, the calmness and equanimity prized by the Cynics and Sceptics is not far from view. Despite modern usage, hedonism does not refer exclusively to excess. Like Arete, the Epicureans thought that the best way to maximise pleasure was to assume a general attitude of calm indifference. Calm reflection is the easiest way to avoid disappointment. The Sceptics withdrew from the world on epistemic grounds (the suspension of judgement), while the Cynics pursued ascetic programmes as a way of coping with life’s slings and arrows. However, in the vast intellectual tapestries of this era these traditions interwove, tangled and contributed to a distinctive pattern of thought that, like Buddhism and Jainism, emphasises abnegation and self-discipline. Fully consonant with this approach is the attitude found in the fascinating On the Moderation of Women, written by Phintys of Sparta around the third century bce. In the surviving fragments of this work we find Phintys championing order and moderation; she advises people to be pious, reserved, decorous and tidy. Like the Cynics and Sceptics, Phintys is set against luxury. She specifically singles out silk, in the form of ‘transparent or embroidered robes’, as damaging to virtue:

Carved out of marble, this bust of Epicurus shows the philosopher with short hair, a full beard, and a slight frown on their wrinkled forehead. The sculpture is another Roman copy of a Greek original, demonstrating again the frequency of intercultural exchanges and appropriations.

The woman of moderation must embellish her appearance not with imported and alien ornament, but with the natural beauty of the body.

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RIGHT

Sīmǎ Tán and Sīmǎ Qián, page from Records of the Grand Historian, 1171, Cai Mengbi: Jianyang, Fujian Province, China. In this twelfth-century manuscript copy of the Records of the Grand Historian by Sīmǎ Tán and Sīmǎ Qián, we see the script size varies for emphasis, and seal impressions are printed in red ink. BELOW

Portrait of Sīmǎ Qián, Date unknown. Arms folded within a robe, the historian gazes calmly outside the picture frame. As in many societies, Hàn Dynasty hats and headgear conveyed multiple meanings relating to status and profession. Sīmǎ Qián appears to be wearing a ‘jin’, wrapped around a topknot, a common head-covering for scholars.

This quotation is interesting for a number of reasons. Though plain and practical, Phintys’s advice is grounded in an aesthetic ethic that prizes simplicity over excess; like the Cynics, she abjures the trappings of ornament and fripperies. This is also one of the earliest examples of philosophical interest – both literal and figurative – in cloth and clothing (a thread picked up later by Hrosvitha of Gandersheim). Phintys’s remark also reveals thinly veiled xenophobia about ‘imported and alien ornament’ and a concern about foreign products. In this case, the alien ornament is almost certainly silk – the material, exported from China, that gave the Persian trade routes their name…

6 One for all and all for one In 221 bce Qín Shǐ Huáng oversaw one of the most effective unification projects in history. Through a combination of military and ideological strategies, he united China’s disparate ‘warring states’ into one of the dominant empires of the age. While Qín rulership was itself short-lived, the Hàn dynasty that succeeded it ushered in centuries of peace, stability and prosperity. This was achieved in no small part through the ideological preparations of the ‘Hundred Schools’ (p.27). Though their approaches differed, each

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system was focused on the realisation of political unity. While Legalist texts such as The Book of Lord Shāng by Shāng Yāng (390–338 bce) and Hán Fēizǐ by Hán Fēi (c. 280–233 bce) emphasise strong, tactical leadership in order to foster unity, and the Analects and Dàodé Jīng focus on character development and virtue, The Commentary of Zuŏ pursues a slightly subtler strategy. Attributed to Zuǒ Qiūmíng (556–451 bce), this work is notable for articulating the all-important concept of huáxià, the ‘civilized world’, which distinguishes a region from the lands and peoples beyond its borders. Meanwhile Records of the Grand Historian is significant in using the concept of history itself to generate social cohesion. Started by Sīmǎ Tán and completed by his descendent Sīmǎ Qián (c. 145–86 bce), the gargantuan Records made from bamboo slips, is said to have weighed over forty kilograms (88 lbs). It chronicles events across several empires of ancient China, arranging the different schools into a single coherent narrative, a national story. The Book of Hàn is another important addition to this genre. Its primary author, the prolific Bān Zhāo (c. 45–116 ce), offers a unified history of the Western Hàn Empire. Like Plutarch and Diogenes Laërtius, Bān Zhāo also includes examples of great lives’, revealing a Rúist interest in history, ancestry and character. The development of a univocal imperial narrative, also seen in the Biographies of Eminent Women by Lià Xiàng (77–76 bce), was furthered by the policies of Bān Zhāo’s patron and student, the Empress Dèng Suí (81–121 ce). Following her teacher’s lead, the empress was a strong advocate for historical scholarship; she played a central role in standardising the ‘Five Classics’ (the five canonical texts of the Yìjīng, the Spring and Autumn Annals, the Book of Documents, the Book of Odes and the Book of Rites). The empress’s scheme to promote historical education was aided in no small part by her official adoption of a central technological innovation by a court official Cài Lún: paper. Though industrial paper mills have refined the process, the principles of papermaking have not changed substantially from the days of the Hàn dynasty. Papermakers would collect rags and other plant fibres, then pound them in water to create a thick pulp. This could then be spread out thinly on mats and dried for use. The shift from silk, papyrus and bamboo to a cheaper alternative allowed these texts to be disseminated more widely, and to become more accessible, than ever before. After the political chaos of the Warring States, the region began to forge a coherent state identity. It is not surprising, therefore, that cultural borders were policed with an eye on unity. Foreign incursions and influences were viewed with suspicion, be they tribal raids from the Steppes, material goods from the trade routes or new, potentially subversive ideas. Among the latter, we find a familiar cultural export from India: the philosophy of Siddhārtha Gautama.

ABOVE

Zuǒ Qiūmíng, pages from The Commentary of Zuǒ, c. 1620–1644, Qing Yun Guan, China. These page fragments from a seventeenth-century copy of The Commentary of Zuǒ reveal several layers of script of varying sizes, in both red and black, framed by a border with organic-style decorations.

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TOP RIGHT AND FAR RIGHT

Zuǒ Qiūmíng, pages from The Commentary of Zuǒ, Seventeenth Century, Fu Shan, China. Framed in a large album, these pages from Zuǒ’s Commentary are a fine example of Chinese calligraphy, an artform that emphasises the manner, speed and fluidity with which characters are written and framed. BOTTOM RIGHT AND FAR RIGHT

Papermaking, 1600, China. These five woodcuts outline the major steps in the process of papermaking as described by Cài Lún in the early second century ce. From left to right, we see the cutting and moisturising of bamboo shoots; the boiling of bamboo; the casting of the paper pulp; the pressing of the paper; and the drying of the sheets of paper on a wall.

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7 Trade embargoes

LEFT

Xúnzǐ, extract from the Xúnzǐ. Before 1796, China. The seal script used to transcribe the XÚnzǐ onto this scroll is an ancient style of writing Hànzì. The Hànzì characters, which are still used today, are ‘logograms’, representing a word or morpheme. RIGHT

Portrait of Mèngzǐ’s mother. Fifteenth or Sixteenth Century, China. Rendered in ink and colours on a hanging silk scroll, the image shows Mèngzǐ, an elder, and a household assistant, moving house. It is painted by the artist and poet, Wu Shi’en.

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The exact dates of Buddhism’s arrival in China are unknown, but by the first century ce Gautama’s teachings (p.50) had been carried to the labouring classes by itinerant monks. Following the recommendations of the Pāli Canon, the monks had dispossessed themselves of their belongings and left their families to disseminate their message of asceticism and anattā along the winding Silk Roads. Here they found uptake – but also resistance. Buddhism aroused particular suspicion in Chinese society because of its advocacy of celibacy and the severing of familial ties. Both practices ran against the belief, central to much Chinese thought, that harmonious families were the essential building blocks of a properly unified society. Indeed the concept of family is deeply intertwined with concepts of unity and nation. It is an ever-present theme in Rúist texts such as the Mèngzǐ by Mèngzǐ (c. 371–289 bce) and Great Learning, disseminated by Zēngzǐ (505–435 bce). Such works present the family, with its carefully codified systems of roles, as the arena for nurturing and honing virtues and virtuous conduct, including those necessary for good leadership. We see a similar focus in the Xúnzǐ, a text attributed to Xúnzǐ (c. 300–230 bce) and compiled around 20 bce from 322 bamboo bundles unearthed by a palace librarian. This text tells us that a ruler should care for their subjects as a parent cares for their children.

Another of Bān Zhāo’s texts is relevant here. Her Lessons for Women – a work of moral instruction – had enormous impact on aristocratic families of the time and throughout successive dynasties. Its instructions are specifically intended to promote harmonious family relations: Bān condemns boasting and gossip and recommends rising early. She has a strict view of family hierarchy, writing that one must obey one’s mother-in-law ‘even if what she says is wrong’. Bān Zhāo also thought social cohesion was fostered through learning and scholarship. To this end she vigorously defended a woman’s right to an education, particularly in historical studies. She praises her parents for having educated her and criticises those who do not do the same for their daughters. The family is both the symbol and the site of social unification. Against this conceptual backdrop, Buddhism was seen as a destabilising influence. Its popularity grew among the working classes, but it was only with the rise of Chán Buddhism in the sixth century (p.85) that conceptual shifts allowed Gautama’s teachings to be incorporated into the Chinese academic mainstream.

ABOVE

Poem and portrait of Bān Zhāo, from Famous Women, 1799, China. This poem, by the calligrapher Cáo Zhēnxiù and the minimalist illustration, by Găi Qíi, capture the philosopher Bān Zhāo writing history. Two sheets of ink on paper, the pairing is part of a cycle of sixteen illustrated poems about famous women.

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8 All roads lead to…

ABOVE

Portrait of Zeno of Citium, Date unknown. In this medallion-shaped portrait, Zeno is shown in a shaded environment avoiding the viewer’s gaze and looking outside the picture frame. The pose is reminiscent of those found on coins and paper money, a connection that emphasises the philosopher’s rank and importance.

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While Rúist thinkers focused on protecting their borders and India exported Buddhism near and far, a new global trading power was beginning to emerge in the western Mediterranean. Due to heavy military investment and agricultural successes, the republic of Rome was becoming a powerful player. By the second century, the Italic city-state had displaced the Afro-Greek polities of Carthage and Syracuse as the dominant power in the region. It spread into Egypt – taking Alexandria and burning its library – and further north into Spain, the Low Countries and even the boggy island of Britannia. In these early days, this regime possessed considerable military strength but little distinctive sense of Roman huáxià. For this reason the Romans (while transitioning into an empire) appear to have actively appropriated the cultures and ideas of their new subjects and peers. So enamoured were the Romans of Greek culture that a thriving publishing industry arose to translate and summarise Hellenic thought. The most famous of these works are those of the Roman statesman and political theorist Marcus Tullius Cicero (106–43 bce). His legal speeches (such as On the Republic) and translations (of Plato’s Timaeus, for example) heavily contributed to a burgeoning Greco-Roman philosophical tradition. Cicero is also known for his Stoicism – a system of thought that takes its name from the stoá poikílē, the painted porch in Athens where the Stoics would congregate. It was closely connected to Cynicism and one of its founders, Zeno of Citium (c. 335–263 bce), was tutored by Hipparchia and Crates. Like the Cynics, the Stoics emphasised wisdom and virtue over pleasure, but their approach, found in Zeno’s work and transmitted to Rome by Cicero, was much less abstemious. While they advocated the abolition of temples and traditional systems of education, they were less interested in walking about barefoot and shunning societal norms. The Stoics’ Roman membership came to include figures from all sectors of society. Epictetus, the author of the Enchiridion, was born in enslavement in Phrygia (modern-day Turkey) around 60 ce. He achieved manumission (release from enslavement) and went on to become a minister of Emperor Nero, living first in Rome, then Nicopolis in what is now western Greece. By contrast Marcus Aurelius (121–180 ce) was a Roman emperor. His writings, known to us as the Meditations, were composed as notes to himself during his campaigns; they discuss good leadership and strategies for virtuous living. In both the Meditations and the Enchiridion we find the same themes: pleasure is without value and the realisation of apátheia can make one immune to misfortune. Figuring prominently in Epictetus’s works, this concept of apátheia is related to the English word apathy, though it lacks the negative connotations. It is freedom from passion and a constituent of happiness. Like the Cynics and the Buddhists, the Stoics sought peace through detachment and equanimity. And – again like Cynicism and Buddhism – Stoicism is not merely a body of knowledge, but a way of life. Like nibbāna and ataraxía, apátheia could be achieved, ultimately, through the practice of spiritual exercises.

LEFT

Cicero, page from the Orations, 1480–1490. This elaborately decorated miniature features the opening words of Marcus Tullius Cicero’s Orations. The Latin text, rendered in red and blue, is supported by a detailed illustration of a crowd listening to a speech, and is framed by a border of putti in various poses (demonstrating the artist’s skill and inventiveness), organic elements and fictive architecture.

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RIGHT

Portrait of Marcus Aurelius, 1560, Rome, Italy. This engraving by Nicolas Beatrizet shows Marcus Aurelius in a horse-drawn carriage at the front of a triumphal procession, announced with fanfare and subject to admiring gazes. Beatrizet demonstrates his technical skill by depicting illusionistic (quadratura) reliefs of virtuous figures on Aurelius’s carriage.

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9 The Haves and Have-nots In the 500 years covered in this chapter, this tendency towards asceticism was shared by many. This intellectual trend was not only a matter of theoretical or spiritual concern – it was political too. In some respects the ascetic stance is empowering for the dispossessed. This was how Buddhism figured in relation to the Brahmanical hierarchies. Life’s riches are not to be measured in actual riches, but in spiritual ascension. Moreover, the Sceptical approach associated with these views holds that learning and education – typically the preserve of the wealthy (the Brahmins and the Greek and Roman aristocracy) – does not in fact lead to more determinate forms of knowledge. Scepticism is in some ways a leveller; it positions the rich, educated elite on the same plane as the disenfranchised. A farm labourer knows just as much as the aristocrats studying in the Lyceum. Philosophical thought, however, is politically malleable. As we see from the popularity of Stoicism in the upper echelons of Greek and Roman society, the calls for modesty and self-restraint were not taken to be incompatible with the high life. Indeed, these philosophies were useful in actually defending the status quo, with its stark and troubling material inequalities. They presented a way for the elite to rationalise, even celebrate the deprivations of those from lower socio-economic brackets. Self-deprivation thus emerges as both a privilege enjoyed by the wealthy and a reality endured by the poor. As will become increasingly clear, few ideas – even radical ones – are immune to appropriation by the ruling power.

LEFT

Portrait of Epictetus, 1715, Oxford, England. In this engraving by Edward Ivie, a muscular, barefoot Epictetus is shown seated at a writing desk, pen in hand, distractedly glancing over a shoulder into the surrounding shadows. The crutch, held between elbow and thigh, marks an interesting early representation of disability in philosophy. RIGHT

Epictetus, page from Handbook, 1554, Johannes Oporinus: Basel, Switzerland. The first page of Angelo Poliziano’s Latin translation of Epictetus’s Handbook features an elaborately decorated initial capital ‘E’, containing a chase scene.

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3

ASSIMILATION (200 CE–600 CE)

1 Old school

I

deas are wonderfully resistant. They can pass from one person to another with little, if any, effort – and once an idea is lodged in your head it is hard, if not impossible, to get rid of it. Some ideas, however, are more challenging than others. They might threaten a certain way of life or form of governance. At the start of the first millennium, political bodies such as the Roman Empire invested heavily in technologies that restricted the promulgation of what they saw as dangerous ideas, such as those found in the radical teachings of Jesus of Nazareth (4 BCE–30 or 33 CE), also known as ‘Christ’. Foremost among these methods was the institutionalisation of learning and the creation of educational curricula. Prior to this era there had been a variety of varyingly formal and informal systems of education. Ideas were disseminated by itinerant teachers like the scholars of the Hundred Schools, and by personal tutors, such as Bān Zhāo. We see Cynic and Stoic collectives forming in the streets of Athens and Rome, while intellectual elites gathered in the courts described in the Upaniṣads and the villas of the Syrian thinker and empress consort Julia Domna (160–217 ce). Before the first millennium specific centres of learning, like the academy of Takṣaśilā in Achaemenid territories or Plato’s Academy in Athens, were a rarity. However, as Rome grew, as the Northern Wèi took hold in China and the Gupta Empire spread through India, these academic institutions multiplied at a previously unparalleled rate. In the Mediterranean Marcus Aurelius (121–180 ce) set a trend for imperial involvement in state education by establishing four Chairs of philosophy at the School of

RIGHT

Scene with Hypatia of Alexandria, Nineteenth Century, England. Rendered in watercolour and brown ink, this painting by Robert Trewick Bone portrays Hypatia at the steps of a Doric temple, hand raised to indicate speech, surrounded by an attentive crowd, the supposedly ideal form of academic congress.

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Athens. These days it is hard to imagine an emperor involving themselves with the minutiae of academic appointments, but Marcus Aurelius was keenly aware of the political utility of doing so. These Chairs corresponded to specific philosophical schools – Aristotelianism, Platonism, Epicureanism and, predictably given Aurelius’s own intellectual background, Stoicism. All four came to enjoy a certain institutional legitimacy. The exclusion of the unruly Cynics was a delegitimising move – and an effective one it seems, given how few Cynical texts survive from that period. Over the following centuries we see academies springing up all over the Roman Empire. In earlier times the Romans had focused on expanding territory, but after finding themselves with vast borders to defend and not enough people to secure them, they withdrew and consolidated their power. The empire began to establish cultural institutions similar to those it prized so highly in others. In Rome the Egyptian thinker Plotinus (c. 205–270 ce) created an academy to teach and develop his own brand of Platonic thought. And in fifth-century Egypt an institute known as the Mouseion was founded by another Platonist, Hypatia of Alexandria (c. 370–415 ce). At the same time that these institutions were being created, we see the appearance of distinct Greek and Latin curricula, similar to the canons established in Vedic and Buddhist thought. The four Chairs created by Marcus Aurelius marked specific traditions as worthy of attention. Hypatia’s Mouseion and Plotinus’s Academy directed attention to Plato’s works, and to works by his intellectual successors. Much like curricula today, these systems created an intellectual milieu in which students shared points of reference. They also functioned as a licensing mechanism, authorising some ideas and delegitimising others. Students were thus directed towards specific authors and implicitly discouraged from reading potentially controversial texts. Constructing a curriculum – combined with the process of deciding which works are ‘important’ and which are not – can be a profoundly political process. It is also one of the reasons why writing a book about ‘important’ philosophy books can be such a difficult and divisive task.

2 Literary form Alongside the institutionalisation of learning, we see the emergence of new referencing and writing systems, often designed with pedagogy in mind. This period witnessed the arrival of innovative literary forms and tablature expressly designed to present ideas in an accessible way. Take the standardisation of language in Indic literature. The preference for Sanskrit over Prakrit negated the need for multiple translations. Simultaneously the appearance of the sūtra and bhāṣya forms paved the way for the conceptual systems-building that characterises much of Indian philosophy. This distinction involves a literary separation between a sūtra – a short, often aphoristic statement – and a bhāṣya – an explanatory commentary. The combination of the two leads to tantra, meaning (roughly) ‘warp’. The idea was that the sūtras and bhāṣyas could be woven, like threads, into a cohesive, coherent body of knowledge, each part of which would connect with another. Given imperial expansion, the creation of curricula also intersected with issues of

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RIGHT

Saddharmapuṇḍarīkasūtra, Date unknown, South Turkestan. The writing on this manuscript fragment is from the Saddharmapuṇḍarīkasūtra (Lotus Sūtra). The script, written in the black ink common to the region, is Sanskrit, in an early form of the Brāhmī text used in ancient India. RIGHT BELOW

Lotus Sūtra, Date unknown, China. Scrolls, like this one which contains text from the Lotus Sūtra, are portable and easily stored. However, unlike the codex, they pose a problem for the scholar who wants to read different sections simultaneously. It’s not possible to have your fingers on different pages at the same time.

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translation. As we saw in the work of Cicero, the Romans invested in the conversion of Greek into Latin. In northern China, where Buddhist thought was growing more popular, literary forms such as the géyì provided scholars with tools for exegesis. The géyì form, prominent in the third and fourth centuries, was a method of ‘concept-matching’ in which Buddhist ideas were paired with familiar Dàoist or Rúist ones. The Buddhist term dharma, for example, was typically rendered as dào, while the term nirvāṇa was twinned with the concept of wú wéi. Tables were drawn up by Chinese translators which allowed these ‘foreign’ concepts to be seen in familiar terms, and so encouraged accessibility and engagement. Translation is a laborious process: then as now, translators and patrons were often confronted with difficult choices over which works to preserve. Then as now, curricula tended to be formed around the works that were accessible to students; those which failed to be selected for translation dropped off the syllabus. Other works disappeared as a result of innovations in record keeping. Already in the second century ce, Bān Zhāo had overseen the copying of works in the Hàn court library from their original bamboo slips onto paper. Greco-Roman scholars of late antiquity followed this model. Where Sappho’s

Ode to Aphrodite would have been written on papyrus, unwieldy to use and difficult to transport, Greek and Latin texts were beginning to appear in the codex form: leaves of paper, folded and sewn together and placed between covers. This shift led to further tweaks to the ‘canon’. For every flaking papyrus roll in the Athenian libraries, a choice had to be made about whether it was worth preserving. Just as not all vinyl records have been converted onto CD, and not all CDs have been uploaded to the Cloud, not all papyrus texts survived these processes of updating. Often it depended on what the archivists in question thought was important. In the Mediterranean tradition we have a number of Stoic and Epicurean texts and almost half the surviving works from this period are commentaries on Plato and Aristotle. This is a consequence of the archivists’ philosophical and political inclinations. Recall the Chairs Marcus Aurelius established in the 170s: many of these archivists and librarians were Stoics, Epicureans, Aristotelians and, following Plotinus and Hypatia, Platonists. The creation of new institutions, combined with new writing technologies, led to a sharpening of focus on some works and the exclusion of others. It was through such systems that political bodies could champion their own ideas and marginalise or reframe those that threatened their authority.

3 A picture worth a thousand words Given difficulties with translation and fluctuations in literary styles, some writers began to place greater emphasis on image making. Consider one of the most stunning books of the period: the Ārzhang. Also known as The Picture Book, this text is the work of the Babylonian thinker Mānī (c. 216–274 ce), who lived in what would have been part of the Parthian, later Sasanian, Empire of Persia. At its height the Sasanian Empire encompassed present-day Iran, Iraq, Eastern Arabia, the Levant, the Caucasus, Egypt and Turkey, as well as much of Central Asia and Pakistan. As in the preceding centuries, Zoroastrianism stood as the dominant ideology. However, the Zoroastrian creed was a tolerant one that allowed other beliefs and ideologies to flourish. Among them was the Manichaeism found in the Ārzhang. Written in Syriac – an Aramaic dialect – the text is produced alongside a series of illuminated images. Both elements are integral to the work. Through the combination, Mānī develops his multi-dimensional world-view in a compelling and readily accessible format. Building on the sharp dichotomy found in Zoroastrianism, the work describes the mortal realm as containing two basic, opposing principles – good and evil – locked in continuous struggle. However, while Zoroaster situated the opposition within the world, Mānī located the struggle within ourselves. The Ārzhang tells us that our soul has a good, even divine, eternal nature. By contrast our body, a material being, is evil and base. According to Mānī, this co-mingling of body and soul is the reason for mortal suffering. The Ārzhang also offers a remedy for this unhappy state. Mānī articulates a two-stage process. First, we must recognise the truth of our condition and distance ourselves from these corrupt bodies. Second, this truth should be reflected in our work and life. We should pursue ascetic lifestyles, exemplified by the practices of fasting and chastity, that turn attention away from our gross materiality.

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ABOVE

RIGHT

Mani, selection from The Picture Book, Tenth to Twelfth Century, Turpan, Xīnjiāng, China.

Manichaean diagram of the universe. 1280 ce, Southern China.

Written in Uighur, this vellum sheet appears in a miniature copy of Mānī’s The Picture Book. The painting shows Manichaean priests at their writing desks amid fruitbearing trees. The fragment was found during a German archaeological expedition in Idikut Shahri.

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Painted on silk, this beautiful vertical cross-section depicts the Manichaean spiritual topography. At the top we see paradise with a multilayered heaven, then the earthly realm, and below that the hellish underworld. It is a structure emulated by many of the major world religions.

The overlaps with Zoroastrianism and Buddhist asceticism are intentional here. In addition to his artistic verve, Mānī understood the appeal of syncretic systems that incorporated the popular elements of other traditions; Manichaeism is designed to be conceptually flexible and to appeal to as many people as possible. Its illustrations also factor; while the sourcing of pigments would have been costly, the clear, geometrically delicate illustrations served to make the work both appealing and accessible to people from a variety of cultural and linguistic backgrounds. No translation was required. As we will see from the illuminated manuscripts of medieval Christianity, this combination of image and text was to become a much-used mode in the centuries and millennia that followed (including the book you are currently holding).

4 Assimilation We see a similar kind of doctrinal openness in the Enneads (c. 270 ce) of Plotinus, a series of texts edited and compiled by the writer’s student, Porphyry of Tyre (c. 232–303 ce). Arranged into groups of nine – or enneás in Greek – the 54 treatises were probably written as responses to Plotinus’s students. They lead from ethical issues to natural philosophy, then onwards to psychology and epistemology before finishing with an analysis of causation and a ‘first principle’, referred to by Plotinus as ‘The One’. The metaphysical picture, grounded in a model found in Plato’s Timaeus, is austere. Instead of attributing cosmic movements to different causes, like the interactions of elements, Plotinus argues that everything is the effect of a single, unitary, self-caused principle. All explanations of worldly phenomena can, in the end, be given in reference to The One – a thesis with strong resonance at a time when monotheistic religions, especially Christianity, were on the rise. In previous centuries, the Roman Empire had been dominated by polytheism. Monotheistic Christians had been persecuted, tortured, crucified and routinely thrown into gladiatorial arenas for bloody entertainment. Despite this (or perhaps because of it), Christ’s teachings found support among the labouring classes and by the third century they were beginning to gain traction among Plotinus’s peers in the upper echelons of Roman society. It was a gradual process, but with the rule of the Christian Emperor Constantine (272–337 ce) the religion was officially sanctioned and started to become a unifying force in the empire. Its ascendency was due in no small part to the kind of conceptual openness found in the Enneads, which offered a bridge between Platonism and Christian theology. Such a bridge was to be well-traversed in the later writings of Augustine of Hippo (354–430 ce). Augustine’s work follows in the wake of earlier Christian thinkers such as Vibia Perpetua (c. 182–203 ce) and Felicitas (d. 203 ce), who refused to compromise to the Platonic mainstream or renounce their Christian beliefs. The Passion of St Perpetua, St

ABOVE

Scene with Mānī, Eighth Century, Turpan, Xīnjiāng, China. This tri-coloured fragment of a wall painting depicts Mānī, with a faint beard and a gentle smile, standing before a group of elect followers, who are represented at a smaller size to highlight their lower status.

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BELOW LEFT

Sculpture of Constantine I, 325–370 ce, Rome. Captured in marble, this is the stylised likeness of the Roman Emperor Constantine. He stares impassively at the viewer, immortalised in stone, face untroubled by earthly passions. BELOW RIGHT

Fragment of a marble tomb, Late Fourth Century, Rome Several figures appear in the arched alcoves of this marble relief, found on the side of a Roman tomb. Ravaged by time or vandalism, one of the figures stands, defaced, raising their arm in speech, perhaps representing Christ giving the law.

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Felicitas and their Companions – a posthumously published text by Perpetua, written in diary form – documents the costs of doing so; imprisonment, in one case while heavily pregnant, and death in the gladiatorial arena. Faced with such persecution, Christian thinkers began to reconfigure the more radical elements of their beliefs and to couch these in familiar Platonic or Stoic terms. In his Against Praxeas, for example, the Amazigh writer Quintus Septimius Florens Tertullianus (c. 155–240 ce) drew on Stoic substance theory to explain the idea of a divine ‘Trinity’, demonstrating how one substance might combine three different natures. Similarly, On First Principles by the Alexandrian Origen Adamantius (c. 185–254 ce) builds on Platonic notions of pre-existence and the transmigration of souls. It also repackages the Stoic concept of apokatástasis, or ‘restoration of all things’, into what would later be known as the ‘Messianic Age’. Augustine would doubtlessly also have been influenced by On the Soul and Resurrection by Macrina the Younger (c.330–379 ce), transcribed by her brother Gregory of Nyssa (335–395 ce). This short text records Macrina’s deathbed musings, where she reframes the Platonic notion of an immortal soul. The soul, she states, is a complete, indivisible unity – it cannot be destroyed, since whatever lacks parts cannot be dissected or perish. Hers is an elegant argument, rendered particularly vivid by the use of textile metaphors; our ‘bodily garment’ may be dissolved by death, but shall ultimately be ‘woven again’ more subtly and delicately at the End of Days. It was against this intellectual backdrop that the Numidian thinker Augustine wrote his Confessions. The work recounts the sins of his youth in Numidia (which covers modern-day Algeria, Tunisia and Libya), including his stint as a Manichaean and his sexual escapades. It then moves on to more abstract considerations. Following Tertullian, Origen and Macrina, his consideration of ‘free will’ appears within a distinctly Platonic framework. Augustine posits a first principle which, like the demiurge in Plato’s Timaeus, acts as a prime mover. This prime mover – God – is eternal and creates in a spirit of love and good will. Augustine states that God’s eternal nature means his act of creation does not occur in time. Our experience of time is a limited, mortal one and its apparent linear progression results from this. God decides, and therefore knows before the constitution of

ABOVE

Fragment, 1535, Sucevița, Romania, Found on the walls of the Sucevița Monastery in Romania, this fragment of coloured fresco depicts Porphyry of Tyre wearing a crown and red robe, holding up a written document and staring skywards. This, supposedly, is a detail of what is known as the ‘Tree of Jesse’, a genealogical illustration of Christ’s ancestry. LEFT

Marsilio Ficino, page from Commentary on Plotinus, Sixteenth Century, Florence, Italy. In this beautifully intricate illuminated manuscript page, we see Latin text framed by a bustling border of foliage and putti. The nobles pictured in the roundels might well be patrons of the work. At the top of the page, we see the crest of the Medici family.

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BELOW LEFT

Augustine of Hippo, Confessions. Eleventh Century, France. In the top scene of this frontispiece for an eleventhcentury copy of the Confessions Augustine kneels at the feet of an enthroned Christ, while in the lower register a scribe, identified as ‘Alardus’, humbly holds up a scroll to the Frankish bishop Saint Vaast (d. 540 ce). BELOW RIGHT

Augustine of Hippo, Confessions. Eleventh Century, England. This is one of the earliest versions of Augustine’s Confessions produced in England.

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the world who will, and who will not, find their way into heaven. Thus Augustine’s Platonic re-workings issue in the thesis of predestination: human destinies are predecided by God. This thesis, conflicts with the notion of free will, and creates a tension in Augustine’s work that has puzzled theologians since its conception: How can human actions be meaningful if our spiritual fates are already decided? The Confessions is, by modern standards, an eclectic text; it blends doctrine, metaphysics, spiritual instruction and autobiography. The last element served a specific purpose; before formalised citation practices (footnotes, endnotes and bibliographies), autobiographical asides allowed authors to acknowledge the influence of others on their work. It is no accident that Augustine’s book records the views of Monica of Hippo (c. 332–387 ce), of Amazigh society in Thagaste. Monica, Augustine’s mother, was a fervent supporter of Christianity, and an advocate of the virtues of moderation and asceticism, going so far as to restrict children’s access to water in order to teach them self-control. She was doubtlessly central to Augustine’s conversion to Christianity.

5 Systems theory While Christianity was transfusing African and Mediterranean literature, Buddhism was continuing to spread throughout the Indus Valley. At the start of the Common Era Gautama’s thoughts were already widespread, but they enjoyed even wider uptake with the official backing of the Kuṣāṇa Empire. Stretching from northern India to encompass much of central Asia, the Kuṣāṇa rulers, such as Emperor Kaniṣka (127–150 ce), actively used Buddhist thought to justify social hierarchies. In a bid to cement their authority, the Kuṣāṇas claimed direct connection to the divine, explicitly positioning themselves as ‘saviours’ and ‘spiritual leaders’. Here we find another iteration of the divine right of kings, and a decisive shift in Buddhist thought. The once exclusively introspective forms of Buddhism gave way to a system of spiritual education that required advice, help and therefore third-party influence (the Kuṣāṇa rulers). Simultaneously the Kuṣāṇas began sponsoring the building

ABOVE

Numismatic portrait of Kaniṣhka, c. 130 ce, Gandhāra, Pakistan. Since coins would circulate widely, having one’s portrait minted was an effective way of reminding one’s subjects who was in charge. Here we see a gold coin, impressed with the likeness of the Kushan ruler Kaniṣhka I, with an inscription in the ancient Kharoṣṭhī script along the edges. LEFT

Buddha figure, Second or Third Century, Gandhāra, Pakistan, Carved in grey phyllite, this seated Buddha was produced in the Kushan Dynasty. The Buddha is in the ‘Lotus position’, hands folded in the lap, with a serious, calm look. It is kept at the Davis Museum in Wellesley College, but like many of these artefacts is ‘not on view’.

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of temples. Wealthy monasteries began to appear across the region and Buddhist texts were collected in vast libraries, to be reproduced by teams of dedicated monks. Until this period formal education had largely been a matter of private tutors or courtly discussions, itinerant teachers or the system known as ‘gurukula’ – a residential school, often supported by public donations, where students would live and study under a guru. Some institutions and sites of learning had been established, such as the academy of Takṣaśilā from the time of the Achaemenid Empire, but the Kuṣāṇa Empire saw even greater investment in education, with the creation of Nālandā in northeastern India (427 ce). Dedicated to Buddhist scholarship, the Nālandā curriculum also included astronomical, political and mathematical works. Its buildings boasted extensive dormitories for students and a nine-storey library, which remained active in some form or other until the thirteenth century. Such centres formed the research wing of the empire, producing and reproducing texts that substantiated Gupta authority, weaving together conceptions of rulership and divinity. At the same time Buddhism was itself becoming standardised. During this ‘Age of the Sūtra’ (as Jonardon Ganeri calls it), Nāgārjuna (c. 150–250 ce) composed his Fundamental Verses on the Middle Way. In this work Nāgārjuna defends the idea that all existing things are ‘empty’, declaring them to lack intrinsic natures or essences. In saying this, Nāgārjuna went beyond the common Abhidharma Buddhist view that there is no such thing as a self (though dharmas, or phenomena, do have some form of reality). Instead Nāgārjuna advocated a so-called doctrine of ‘absolute emptiness’: all phenomena lack a true and stable nature. Nāgārjuna is considered to be the founder of the Mādhyamaka school of Mahāyāna philosophy – a system that, some centuries later, was to influence two brothers, Vasubandhu and Asaṅga (fl. fourth to fifth fifth century), active in the kingdom of Gandhāra in the Peshawar region of today’s northwest Pakistan. This system also raises fascinating questions. Even if there is no independent reality, Vasubandhu asks, must not our apprehending consciousness be real – and, therefore, not ‘empty’? This question formed one of the central pillars of the Yogācāra school, which dominated Buddhism for centuries thereafter. The etymology of abhidharma is slightly opaque: abhi can be interpreted as ‘higher’ or ‘about’, and dharma as ‘teaching’ or ‘principles’. However it is translated, these texts are forms of meta-commentary, examining the doctrinal material of the Buddhist sūtras. This wide process of systematisation saw Buddhism develop from an oral tradition to one focused on a selection of key texts (found in the Pāli Canon), then to an extensive and wide-ranging body of scholarship. These works were translated by monks from the Sanskrit into Chinese, Tibetan, Mongolian and Uighur, then carried westwards to the Mediterranean and northwards across Asia into China.

6 Niche carving In order to keep pace with these developments in Buddhism, Vedic thought began to modernise. In the third century, during the expansion of the Brahmanic Gupta Empire, it started codifying its teachings and incorporating certain Buddhist features. Though still

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LEFT

Patañjali, pages from Yoga Sūtra, Eighteenth Century. These sheets – from an eighteenth-century version of the Yoga Sūtra, with Sanskrit bhāṣya (commentary), by Patañjali – are written in black ink, with notes in the margin and certain sections accented with orange-saffron powder. They are currently housed in the University of Pennsylvania.

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RIGHT

Jain murals in Armamalai cave, Eighth Century, Malayampattu, Tamil Nadu, India. Protected from the elements in the famous Armamalai Cave, these paintings are rendered on stone and depict scenes from core stories of Jainism. They are similar in style to those found in the Sittanavasal Cave in Tamil Nadu, which, like Armamalai, has functioned for centuries as a Jain temple.

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grounded in the Vedas and Upaniṣads, the Sāṃkhya and Yoga schools began to fuse their own Vedic systems with Buddhist ones in order to keep up with this increasingly popular movement. In Patañjali’s Yoga Sūtra, for instance, we find the suggestion that adherents can escape the cycle of saṃsāra by eliminating desire. Compiled between the second and fourth centuries, this aphoristic text is one of the central works of the Yoga school; it outlines ascetic paths to spiritual liberation in a move away from Brahmanic thought and towards Buddhist self-abnegation. Far removed from the appropriated forms of ‘yoga’ practised in today’s Western health spas, this discipline involves profound mental introspection and bodily control (to the point, as we learn in the sūtras of the Vibhuti Pada, where one can achieve supra-normal abilities). This was a conscious move by Patañjali to incorporate Buddhist asceticism and withdrawal from worldly affairs into Vedic thought. Around the same time Īśvarakṛṣṇa (fl. fifth century ce) was writing the Sāṁkhyakārikā, one of the foundational texts of the Sāṃkhya school. The text codifies Vedic thought in a series of enumerated lists, detailing central concepts and principles. Distinctively organised, the Sāṁkhyakārikā introduces its readers to the dualism between puruṣa and prakṛiti, a dichotomy similar to that found in Mānīchaeism. Puruṣa figures as pure consciousness, the subject underlying all states of awareness, while prakṛiti is closer to nature or primordial matter. We are told by the Sāṁkhyakārikā that by grasping this distinction, one may extinguish evil desires (grounded in matter) and gain spiritual liberation – a thought, again, with clear Buddhist resonances. In the Jaina tradition we find comparable attempts at systematisation. Accepted as authoritative in both its Digambara and Śvetāmbara schools is the Tattvārthsūtra by Āchārya Umāsvāmi (fl. c. second to fifth century ce). In this text Umāsvāmi lays out an integrated Jaina philosophy, encapsulating a metaphysics of souls, ascetic practices and practical ethics. Central to this is Umāsvāmi’s formulation of the ‘three jewels’ of Jainism: how holding the right views, having the right knowledge and observing the right conduct paves the way to the soul’s liberation. We see, then, not a shift in the content of Jaina thought, but rather in the form, complemented by the creation of heuristics to clarify the message and engage readers.

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Buddha Dīpankara, 489–95 ce, Datong, China. Carved in sandstone and touched with traces of pigment, this is a statue of a Buddha identified as Dīpankara, a thinker who lived before Siddhārtha Gautama. With a calm smile and one arm lowered, it is surrounded by smaller figures who, based on their dress may represent Xiānbēi people who lived in north-eastern China during the Northern Wei dynasty.

7 Family matters Despite the systematisation of Vedic and Jaina thought, the reach of Buddhism was unrivalled. The first millennium saw its expansion into the provinces along the trade routes interweaving the Pamir mountains. At first it was practised by a small number of Sogdian traders. During the third and fourth centuries, however, China was (again) divided by interstate conflict. Rúism receded to the Hàn territories, leaving the northern provinces ideologically open. The northern rulers, known as the Tuòbá or ‘Northern Wèi’ (386–534), were keen to differentiate themselves from their political rivals. Buddhism, as

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an alternative ideology, offered clear political advantages; it was not of Chinese origin, so its teachers were, on the whole, ‘foreigners’, which meant that the Tuòbá did not have to rely on Hàn Chinese scholars for education. As with the Kuṣāṇa, the Northern Wèi used and promoted the spread of Buddhism in order to underline their own legitimacy. Like Kaniṣka, they positioned themselves as figures within the divine cycle. Through the erection of monasteries, shrines and statues of the Buddha (for instance at Píngchéng, today known as ‘Dàtóng’, and at Luòyáng), they framed their military triumphs as cosmic victories. Once again the grass-roots movement was co-opted by a political body in order to substantiate territorial expansion. As Buddhism’s popularity grew, more and more Buddhist Chinese texts were produced. Many of these were organised by the géyì system of exegesis described above, in which concepts from Buddhism were paired with more familiar notions in Rúism and Dàoism. However, by the fourth century the géyì was falling out of favour. It was thought to lead to misinterpretation of original concepts and an unfair assessment of Buddhist philosophical innovation: if its ideas could be translated directly into pre-existing Dàoist thought, they could hardly be original. Around this time Buddhist notions began to find expression in a series of apologetic works, intended to defend Buddhism to Chinese audiences. Works such as Móuzǐ’s Disposing of Error, dating from the late second century ce, do not attempt to reduce Buddhist thought to Rúism. They seek rather to demonstrate how it coincides with indigenous views and to explain the doctrines that Rúism or Dàoist readers might find confrontational. In Disposing of Error Móuzǐ deals with the ‘foreignness’ of Buddhist thought, its practice of head-shaving, its conceptions of death and rebirth and the celibacy of Buddhist monks. As we have seen, celibacy was considered to be alien to Rúist thought and inimical to the Chinese way of life. However, Móuzǐ attempts to show how it accords with Chinese tradition. He appeals to authority, noting that both Lǎozǐ and

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Kǒngzǐ issue statements that might be read as complementing such customs. It is a rhetorical tactic similar to the one deployed by Christian thinkers invoking Plato. Just as the Northern Wèi co-opted Buddhism’s ideological momentum, Buddhist thinkers such as Móuzǐ adapted their thought to appeal to as wide an audience as possible.

8 Found in translation Chinese Buddhist literature took another turn in 401 ce, when the Buddhist monk Kumārajīva (344–413 ce) arrived in Cháng’ān. Historians tell us that, with the support of a royal patron, Kumārajīva established an extensive research group, dedicated to translating and commenting on the central texts of the Mahāyāna tradition. Thus we see a shift from the apologetics towards the kind of multilayered commentary being produced in India. His commentaries on the Diamond Sūtra, Lotus Sūtra and Amitābha Sūtra – just like those by Hypatia or Asclēpigéneia of Athens (430–485 ce) – are more than merely ‘supplementary’ texts; they provide the literary and conceptual framework in which other works can live, and literary traditions can thrive. Kumārajīva’s work paved the way for the uptake of Vasubandhu’s texts in works such as A Treatise in the Establishment of Consciousness-only, by Xuánzàng (602–664 ce). This Treatise exists in ten volumes. It lays out the essence of Yogācāra doctrine for Chinese readers: everything is empty because it is only a product of the mind and objects possess no reality save from the mind. Chinese scholars were not, of course, simply transcribing and translating Indian texts. The cultural climate required changes to doctrine to make it more amenable to local audiences. Thus distinctive schools of Chinese Buddhist thought began to emerge in the third and fourth centuries. Prime among these was Chán Buddhism (the word is shortened form of chánnà, a phonetic translation of the Sanskrit dhyāna, meaning,

FAR RIGHT

Stele with Buddha and patrons, 528 ce, China. This limestone sculpture shows a Buddha flanked by bodhisattvas, monks and animals. Other figures include important patrons who commissioned the sculpture. The central scenes are bordered by highly detailed organic and architectural carvings, as well as narrative text. BELOW

Lotus Sūtra, Between 960 and 1279, China, On the far left of this scroll, we can see a scene from the Lotus Sūtra in which a figure kneels for a seated Buddha figure in a leafy garden. On the right, the text, with red stamps and red framing, varies between standard size and huge calligraphic characters for emphasis and aesthetic effect.

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BELOW AND FOLLOWING PAGES

Lotus Sūtra, Between 960 and 1279, China. The scholar Kumārajīva who was active during the fifth century ce, has been identified as the Chinese translator of this version of the Lotus Sūtra. The text is abutted by a delicate illustration, in an isometric layout which provides the reader with a ‘God’s eye view’.

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ABOVE AND PREVIOUS TWO PAGES

Excerpt from the Diamond Sutra, 868 ce, Gansu, China, This ninth-century Buddhist scroll, which contains the Diamond Sūtra, has been identified as the earliest complete surviving printed book. It contains both neat framed woodblock text and intricate illustrations of scenes with a central Buddha figure. LEFT

Excerpt from the Diamond Sutra, 868 ce, Gansu, China. This copy of the Diamond Sūtra is one of the British Library’s so-called ‘Treasures’. Discovered by a Chinese monk called Wáng Yuánlù in 1900, it was taken from China in 1907 by the British archaeologist Aurel Stein.

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ABOVE

Scene with Xuánzàng, Ninth Century, Gansu, China. The Buddhist philosopher and traveller, Xuánzàng, is shown in this painting travelling the Silk Road, carrying scrolls with which he can teach others Buddhist thought. He is accompanied by a tiger and wafts the air with a ‘fly-whisk’ (or fly-swat). OPPOSITE TOP RIGHT

Portrait of Anicius Manlius Severinus Boëthius c. 1130, Canterbury, England Found in a twelfth-century copy of Boëthius’s book On Music, this detail shows the seated author – who believed that music a method for communing with the divine – operating an instrument.

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broadly, ‘meditation’). The school is better known to Anglophone audiences by its Japanese-derived name, Zen Buddhism. One of the earliest sources for Chán Buddhist philosophy is the Treatise on the Two Entrances and Four Practices (also, for obvious reasons, known as the Long Scroll). The text is often attributed to a fifth- or sixth-century monk named Bodhidharma, though modern scholars debate whether the sage is a literary construct. Taking an anti-scholarly stance, Bodhidharma warns against immersing oneself too deeply in books. Instead liberation is reached either through grasping Buddhist principles directly (the ‘entrances’ from the title) or through practice. And Bodhidharma’s practice takes a highly psychological form: one must train oneself to accept suffering, to avoid desires and to conform one’s thinking to the natural order. This approach appears even more concretely in the work of Dàoshēng (c. 360–434 ce), especially his commentaries on the Lotus Sūtra and the Nirvana Sūtra. In these texts Dàoshēng fuses together aspects of Buddhist and Dàoist thought; he acknowledges non-being, for instance, but simultaneously advocates continued engagement with the world (resisting the withdrawal endorsed by Mahāyānan monks). His most distinctive contribution is his discussion of language. For centuries Dàoist thinkers had been concerned about the inadequacy of language in capturing the ineffability of wisdom. Dàoshēng redeploys the sort of imagery found in the Dàoist Zhuāngzǐ, likening words to fish-traps, to be cast aside once the fish is caught. He applies this idea within the Buddhist scheme in a way that is fully consonant with the notion of an unstable self. As later chapters discuss, this stream of philosophy was to sweep even further east, into Japan, eventually becoming first Buddhism in the Asuka period (538–710 ce) then Zen Buddhism in the Kamakura Period (1185–1333).

9 New world order Academic institutions are not apolitical bodies. The institutionalisation described above constitutes a proper part of an imperial project. Academies and their curricula legitimate pre-existing social orders and, as we see in these conceptual wranglings, this involves either delegitimising or absorbing intellectual challenges. Radical ideas can be transplanted into established frameworks. Just as Buddhism was used by the Kuṣāṇa empire and the Northern Wèi to establish their dominance, so the Roman Emperors harnessed the popularity of Christ’s teachings to unify their empire. It is costly, however, for an empire to defend both conceptual and geographical borders. By the fifth and sixth centuries ce the Roman and Sasanian Empires were overstretched. Christian unification was not enough to prevent the Roman Empire’s decline. In 407 ce it withdrew from Britannia – the first step in a withering of territories that saw the ‘Sack of Rome’ in 410 ce (an event that prompted Augustine, in shock, to write his City of God, arguing that Christianity was not responsible for the city’s

downfall). This sudden dissolution of Rome’s global power was in part due to the growing political strength of the nomadic people of the Steppes, including the Huns (lead by Attila) and the Goths. Eventually northern incursions forced the Romans into an uneasy truce with the Sasanians. Inevitably, the collapse of the Roman Empire occasioned a shift in its literary output. The Consolation of Philosophy by Anicius Manlius Severinus Boëthius (c. 480–524 ce) is emblematic of the social and spiritual malaise that settled on the Roman world. The aristocratic Boëthius had been involved in public life and learning. He had entertained hopes of translating Aristotle and Plato into Latin, but these ambitions were frustrated by his imprisonment in Pavia, in 524 ce, by Theodoric, the Ostrogothic emperor who had become king of Italy in 493 ce. Having spoken in defence of Theoderic’s detractors Boëthius found himself imprisoned and sentenced to death. The Consolations is written as a dialogue between the incarcerated Boëthius and the figure of ‘Philosophy’, who visits him in his cell and offers words of consolation. Channeling the Stoics, Philosophy tells Boëthius there is little point lamenting his situation; the Wheel of Fortune spins and there is no use bemoaning where it stops. She offers musings in the mode of a theodicy, explaining that although it seems as if evil people prosper, in the grand scheme of things they surely will not. She suggests taking comfort in the flourishing of his family and in the idea that suffering is a test for the righteous. The text ends with Boëthius, harking back to Augustine, asking whether future events are necessary. It appears they must be, since God knows what they are. This belief, however, troubles the idea that humans can act freely – a ‘freedom of the will’ which Boëthius attempts to preserve. He tells us that God is a unique kind of knower who does not know future events as events, since the divine being never changes and sees all things as a single simultaneous idea. Our epistemic orientation is very different and our freedom is grounded in our position as temporal beings. Boëthius’s argument expresses a desperate hope about an unavoidable future. His concerns about his own imminent execution, and Philosophy’s consolations, would have had profound resonance with his readers, experiencing what they saw as the fall of their empire and the invasion by ‘barbarian hoards’. With civilization disintegrating, state-sponsored ideology can still serve a purpose, even if it is only palliative. This societal turmoil was to accelerate in coming centuries. Both Roman and Sasanian Empires were increasingly riven by internal and external tensions. Further east, meanwhile, an influx of new radical ideas inaugurated what has come to be called the ‘Islamic Golden Age’.

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Emanuele Tesauro, The Sack of Rome 1664, Turin, Italy This engraving, which appears in a larger work titled ‘The Kingdom of Italy Under the Barbarians’, shows how people in seventeenth-century Italy imagined earlier times.

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RIGHT TOP AND BOTTOM

Anicius Manlius Severinus Boethius, page from The Consolation of Philosophy. Fourteenth Century, France Housed first in the monastery of the Carthusian monks of Mainz, these pages from Boëthius’s Consolations are justified, sporadically separated into columns, with marginal notes and historiated capitals. FAR RIGHT

Anicius Manlius Severinus Boëthius. page from The Consolation of Philosophy. Fifteenth Century, England Geoffrey Chaucer, author of the Canterbury Tales, also worked as a translator. Among the texts he parsed into English was Boëthius’s Consolations. This work, in Gothic script, has a heavy initial capital in blue and red and includes foliate motifs.

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LEFT

Anicius Manlius Severinus Boëthius, title page of The Consolation of Philosophy. 1477, France Presumed to be by the artist Jean Colombe, these miniatures appear in a Latin and French version of the Consolation. The artist plays with perspective and borders to incorporate different episodes without making the page too busy. In the top right, Boëthius leafs through a book while considering a death-bed scene. In the lower register, red- and blue-winged putti hold up the title-page text.

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4

REGIMES OF TRUTH (600–1000)

1 Islamic expansion

O BELOW

Qur’ān, Mid-Seventh Century, Medina, Saudi Arabia. Written in the early Arabic Ḥijāzī script, the inked

passages on this piece of parchment are from the Qur’ān. The manuscript is a ‘palimpsest’; new passages have been written over older ones which have been largely effaced.

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ne of the most influential books of this era, and indeed any era, is the Qur’ān. Written in Arabic and organised into chapters or sūrah, the Qur’ān is the central text of Islam, comprised of revelations that Muslims believe were transmitted to the Prophet Muḥammad at the start of the seventh century. At a time of widespread social upheaval in the Arabian peninsula, caused in no small part by the breakdown of the Roman and Sasanian Empires, the Qur’ān contains a bold and coherent message, offering both spiritual and social salvation. It preaches a doctrine of unity, which at the time enabled Muḥammad and his followers to draw the tribes of southern Arabia together into a single bloc that spread into neighbouring states. The region swiftly became home to one of the most extensive and culturally rich empires the world has ever seen. Part of their success rested in the concept of ummah, meaning ‘community’. The Qur’ān emphasises tolerant attitudes similar to those that served the Macedonian and Persian Empires. Muslims declared solidarity with the monotheistic Christians and Jews, and created a coherent social identity that intentionally reached across linguistic and state divides to bind its adherents together. Nor was Islam exclusively concerned with spiritual matters; economic policies that apportioned greater shares of new territories to Muslims over non-Muslim compatriots, for example, incentivised religious membership which led to a positioning of Islamic empires as new and formidable global powers. Their successes helped to persuade the undecided about the truth of Muḥammad’s message. As the Qur’ān states, ‘Allāh may reward the truthful for their truth, and punish the hypocrites’. Military might – and success – was taken as an indication of divine favour. By the end of the sixth century, the Perso-Roman wars had led to the sharp contraction of the Roman and Byzantine Empires. The combination of economic depression, bubonic plague and constant incursions on northern borders by the Franks, Goths and Huns did little to soothe these troubled waters. Soon once-dominant powers began to dwindle, leaving a vacuum into which Islamic empires could expand. Through careful diplomacy and sophisticated military tactics, the Islamic forces spread without disrupting local infrastructure. Their new cities were well-ordered, with roads, drainage and even postal systems. As such, their populaces could be easily taxed. The increasingly large revenue from this monetised empire led to the rise of the Rāshidūn (632–661) and the ʾUmayyad Caliphates (661–750), which reached across the Caucasus into central and south Asia, northern Africa and southern Spain. Their expansion inaugurated a period of dramatic cultural and intellectual flourishing.

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Qur’ān, provenance unknown, between 568 and 645  Written in Ḥijāzī script with flourishing decoration, these two pages contain parts of sūras eighteen to twenty from the Qur’ān. The parchment is currently held by the University of Birmingham, in the UK, where it was radiocarbon dated. RIGHT

Qur’ān, Ninth to Tenth Century, Central Islamic Lands The Qur’ānic text, in black ink with red diacritics, is written in an early, angular kūfic Arabic script used for decorative calligraphy. The title of the third sūra is contained in the golden frame, or ‘cartouche’ at the bottom.

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Qur’ān, Late Ninth to Tenth Century, North Africa or Central Islamic Lands. This is a ‘bifolium’ spread of a Qur’ān written in Kūfic script in black ink with red diacritics. (‘Bifolium’ is a pair of conjugate leaves.) A decorative medallion is placed at the top of the right page, to indicate authenticity. RIGHT

Qur’ān, Late-ninth to Mid-tenth Century, Tunisia. This leaf, from a copy of the Qur’ān produced in North Africa, is clearly a marker of wealth; the parchment is indigo-dyed, while the beautiful script is in luxurious gold.

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LEFT

Qur’ān, Ninth Century, Central Islamic Lands. The red dyed-parchment of this example would have substantially added to the cost of the text and is an indicator of the largesse of the patron and of the value of the message it contained. BOTTOM

Qur’ān, Ninth Century. Here we see a leaf from a Qur’ān in golden Kūfic script, framed in a red and dark ink border with foliage and geometric patterning. On the right, the text shows the opening of sūra 53. Calligraphic artistry became especially prominent in Islamic texts, due to the prohibitions on visual religious representation..

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2 Science of words Where there is money and stable governance, investment in the arts and education shortly follows. ‘Culture’, however, is not simply an inert run-off, but rather a way for political bodies to consolidate power. This is where the regimes of truth are constructed: normative attitudes to what constitutes truth-telling, what truth is and who has the authority to declare it. The Islamic empires funnelled resources into discussions that built on, and defended, the ideas found in the Qur’ān. Many of the philosophical texts of the seventh and eighth centuries focused on exegesis, examining wide-ranging metaphysical and ethical issues as they appeared therein. Unfortunately a good number of these early works are either lost or exist only in fragmentary form. More is known about the intellectual movements that coincide with the rule of the ʿAbbāsid Caliphate (750–1258), in particular the tradition of kalām (from ʿilm al-kalām or the ‘science of words’). Kalām scholars (known as mutakallimūn) sought systematically to clarify and explain doctrines of Islam. They focused on apparent contradictions between statements found in the Qur’ān, the revealed word of Allāh, and the Ḥadīth, the collected sayings and actions of the Prophet Muḥammad. While both sources contained forms of ‘revealed’ truths, the mutakallimūn aimed to shore these truths against the strictures of reason and logic. The highest-profile movement within kalām is the Muʿtazilah school, founded in the early eighth century by Wāṣil ibn ʿAṭāʾ (c. 700–748). While many of the Muʿtazilah texts are also lost or incomplete, we know they placed a heavy emphasis on human rationality. Revelation grants insight into divine nature, but it is not the sole determinant of what can be known. These texts claimed that natural reason, properly applied, is well positioned to discern truth from falsehood. This marks an important distinction in the history of Islamic thought: a tension between truth revealed in scripture and truth revealed through reason. It is a tension that appears in the theodicies of the Muʿtazilah school. Theists believe as an item of faith that God, Allāh, is omniscient and all-powerful. Yet reason tells us this belief is inconsistent with the evil we observe in the world. Where then should we place our trust? In the Babylonian Kōheleṯ the Friend suggests that humans simply cannot grasp nuances of the gods’ plans (p.18); in doing so, it chooses faith over reason. The Muʿtazilah scholars, by contrast, argue that the presence of evil shows humans to have free will, allowing them to make bad choices. Thus, they say, there is no inconsistency. Allāh may possess all those attributes, and yet evil can exist. Here revelation is substantiated through rational deliberation.

3 House of wisdom During the expansions and renegotiations of the ʿAbbāsid Caliphate, and the ʾUmayyad and Idrisid dynasties, the centre of commercial and intellectual gravity in the Islamic world moved from Damascus to the newly founded city of Baghdad. It is there that Caliph al-Manṣūr (r. 754–775) is believed to have founded the palace library known as the bayt al-ḥikma, the ‘House of Wisdom’.

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Scene with the ʿAbbāsīd Caliph al-Maʾmūn, c. 1593, India. Found in the History of the Millenium, commissioned by the Mughal emperor Akbar, this page contains captioned text and a water-coloured illustration of subjects paying allegiance to Abbāsīd Caliph al-Maʾmūn. Due to its layout, the image is not grasped in its entirety at first glance, but rather leads the viewer to follow the queue around the page. The text is justified with the use of ‘kashida’, or lengthened characters.

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Abū Muḥammad al-Qāsim ibn Alī ibn Muḥammad ibn ʿUthmān al-Harīrī, illustration from the Meetings, c. 1240, Basra, Iraq. This illustration, in gouache on paper, shows scholars in a library being enraptured by the words of the verbally skilled Abū Zayd. It appears in a copy of the Meetings by Abū Muḥammad al-Qāsim ibn Alī ibn Muḥammad ibn ʿUthmān al-Harīrī. It currently resides in the Bibliotheque Nationale de France.

The House of Wisdom is famed not only for its colossal collection of books and original research, but also for its programme of translation. The ‘translation movement’, which parsed foreign works into imperial Arabic, represents one of the period’s largest systematic projects of cultural exchange. The library reissued the Persian texts collected during conquests in Sasanian territories, as well as Sanskrit works focused on mathematics and astronomy. There was an abiding interest in Greek books coming from Byzantium, north Africa and what had once been the Roman Empire. Included in the library’s output we find almost the entirety of Aristotle’s corpus, innumerable commentaries on Aristotle, a huge variety of Greek mathematics (from Euclid and Archimedes), astronomy (from Ptolemy) and medicine (from Galen). There was less of an appetite for explicitly ethical or political treatises, on which topics the librarians and their patrons appeared to prefer texts born from their own socio-cultural context. However, Plato’s Republic was included in their catalogue, as well as summaries of some of his other dialogues. Attribution of historical works is not always easy and the scholars at the bayt al-ḥikma, while skilled, were not infallible. For a long time Books IV–VI of Plotinus’s Enneads (p.75) circulated as The Theology of Aristotle. Another translated work attributed to Aristotle was Proclus’s influential Elements of Theology, which appeared in Arabic as Book of the Pure Good and in Latin as the Book of Causes. Only through the perceptiveness of a reader named Thomas Aquinas was this error later corrected. In reading and conducting translation, one engages with other linguistic groups and dissolves barriers to understanding. While fraught with difficulties, the process of translation involves seeing the world from multiple perspectives; scholarship is enriched when there are wider varieties of sources to draw on. The book you are reading, for instance, is restricted by the linguistic abilities of its authors. There is less work on the Ethiopian philosophy than we would have liked, for example, partly because of the scarcity of translated texts from the region. That the scholars of the bayt al-ḥikma put such a premium on translation demonstrates a conceptual openness very much in line with communitarian and tolerant attitudes articulated in the Qur’ān.

4 Eternal puzzles The ultimate book for the tenth-century bibliophile is the Catalogue Book (987). Written by a Baghdadi copyist and bookseller, Abū al-Faraj Muḥammad ibn Isḥāq al-Nadīm, the Catalogue Book gives us an overview of all the texts known to the author available in Arabic at the time. These lists, which name approximately 10,000 works, show huge interest in a variety of genres from a range of regions and religious perspectives; they include Manichaeism (p.73), doctrines of the Buddhists, Hindus and Chinese. Ibn

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al-Nadīm’s catalogue also documents the growing number of original Arabic works, among them works by the ninth-century Abū Yūsuf Yaʻqūb ibn Isḥāq al-Ṣabbāḥ al-Kindī. Active in the early days of the ʿAbbāsid Caliphate, al-Kindī (c. 801–873) was born in Basra and educated in Baghdad, where he associated with prominent figures in the ʿAbbāsid court. Al-Kindī’s most famous work is probably On First Philosophy, a text that studies the ‘first cause’, namely Allāh, in a wider inquiry into the nature of reality. It also engages with the thought, common to Macedonian, Roman and African philosophy, that the world (that is, the universe and everything in it) is eternal. Eternity presents a puzzle for those monotheists who believe the world was created. How can the world be eternal – both stretching temporally backwards and forwards infinitely – given that it is made by a single creator-god? Al-Kindī had considerable respect for Aristotle (whom he calls ‘the most distinguished of the Greeks in philosophy’) and accepted the fundamentals of his metaphysics of causation. However, when it came to the question of whether the world was eternal, he rejected the Aristotelian position. Instead he declared, like the Muʿtazilah, that the world was created ex nihilo: from nothing. Al-Kindī‘s reasoning is grounded in his conception of the infinite. He states, like Aristotle in fact, that there can be no such thing as an ‘actual infinite’ (an infinity simultaneously present in its entirety). Therefore all bodies, including the universe, must be finite. Applying the same reasoning to temporal infinity, we see that the universe could not always already have existed, but must have been created at a certain point in time.

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Abū al-Faraj Muḥammad ibn Isḥāq al-Nadīm, pages from The Catalogue Book, 987–1000, Baghdad, Iraq. In this spread, from a manuscript copy of Ibn al-Nadīm’s The Catalogue Book, we see a title page with text framed in gold on the left, and a page with body text to the right, in a smaller, rounded Naskh script. Highly legible and quick to write, the Naskh style remains the most commonly used script in the publication of the Qur’ān.

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5 Medical knowledge

RIGHT

Portrait of Abū Bakr Muhammad ibn Zakariyyā al-Rāzī 1964, Iran Based on work by the painter Ḥusayn Bihzād, this geometrically precise and delicately patterned colour print shows Abū Bakr Muhammad ibn Zakariyyā al-Rāzī examining an openmouthed child visiting his surgery. Collected around them are medical implements, piles of books and containers of medicinal liquids, showing different areas of the philosopher’s interest.

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The Catalogue Book lists over 200 treatises by al-Kindī. Some of these discuss metaphysical and theological issues, while others focus on more practical matters, including geometrical optics and physiology. Thinkers of the time were not confined by modern disciplinary distinctions. We see a similarly expansive approach in the work of Abūbakr Muḥammad ibn Zakariyyā al-Rāzī (c. 854–925). Born in Ray near Tehran and educated in Baghdad, al-Rāzī was esteemed for his medical knowledge and his skill as a physician. He was the first to distinguish between smallpox and measles, composing a widely circulated treatise on the subject. His other notable works include his Comprehensive Book, which systematises Arabic, Syrian, Indian and Greek medical knowledge, and the treatise known as The Spiritual Medicine. Al-Rāzī explains ‘spiritual medicine’ in reference to Platonic thought (and to Socrates, whom he calls ‘our imam’ and ‘the Divine Hermit’). It involves the balancing of life by means of arguments and proofs. The Spiritual Medicine tells us that physical health depends on a balance in one’s bodily fluids or humours; a healthy life is one in which nothing is in ‘excess’. The key to achieving this is the distinctively human trait of reason. Like the Platonists, al-Rāzī distinguishes between ‘higher’ rational capacities and ‘lower’ desires and argues that reason should ‘rule’ and suppress desires such as greed and anger, which are prone to excess. He refers us to Alexander of Macedon as an example of spiritual pathology, whose rampant expansion was a symptom of a soul with ‘no other ambition but supremacy and domination’. The Spiritual Medicine is one of the first guides to therapeutic practice. As well as theory, it offers remedies for excessive anxiety (for instance, recommending temporary distraction to soothe a troubled mind). In advocating the virtues of temperance, the text also runs counter to ascetic advice from earlier centuries. Instead of emphasising self-abnegation it teaches all things in moderation. This theme is taken up again in al-Rāzī’s later work, The

LEFT

Abū Bakr Muḥammad ibn Zakarīyā al-Rāzī, The Comprehensive Book c. 1674, Iran. At the top of this page from The Comprehensive Book on Medicine, written in Arabic Naskh script, is a delicate decorative title in gold, pink and blue. Inked in black and red on glazed paper, the page contains marginal notes and a wide gutter on the righthand side.

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Philosophical Life, in which he condemns practices of self-isolation to which certain Muslims (as well as Hindus, Manichaeans and Christians) aspire. Such attitudes, he holds, are excesses towards lower limits. They are unhealthily extreme in any sphere, including abstract philosophical thought. One should neither study too hard nor slacken off too much. Whatever lies between these two limits is allowable and would not deprive a practitioner of the title of philosopher, but would allow [them] to retain that title. It is often easier to give advice than to abide by it, and al-Rāzī appears to have experienced his own difficulties in achieving balance. In The Philosophical Life he notes as an aside: I spent fifteen years working on one book (…) working day and night to the extent that my eyesight was weakened and I tore a muscle in my hand…

6 Group thought Like al-Rāzī, Abū Naṣr Muḥammad ibn Muḥammad al-Fārābī (c. 872–950) studied in Baghdad. He also travelled widely, spending time in Alexandria, Damascus and Aleppo, and wrote voluminously. Known to his contemporaries as the ‘Second Teacher’, (Aristotle is the first), al-Fārābī produced works on logic, law, alchemy, music and experimental physics. He is best known for his Principles and Opinions of the People of the Virtuous City, also informally called The Perfect State. The Perfect State is one of the few dedicated works of socio-political philosophy written in Arabic in this period. Carefully structured, it lays out an account of causation, then explores theories about the nature of angels and heavenly bodies before moving on to the soul and body. It devotes special attention to the processes of cognition. Al-Fārābī treads a middle ground, holding that humans can, by themselves, only reason so far. To achieve complete understanding requires an additional principle, referred to by al-Fārābī as an ‘active intellect’, that enables them to go from having merely the capacity to grasp things to actually doing so. These are the conceptual foundations for the ‘perfect state’. Humans cannot reach their full potential alone. Co-operation is needed; citywide co-operation may suffice but co-operation on a global scale is even better. Truth, then, is produced as a group. This is less communitarian than first appears; as with a healthy body, in which all limbs work together for the good of the whole, al-Fārābī holds that the perfect state must be ruled by the most noble part, the heart – or, by analogy, a political ruler. Here we see the philosopher-king from Plato’s Republic transposed into the Arab world. For al-Fārābī the ruler is the focal point of the state’s collaborative intellectual efforts. He is a prism, a figure with the right dispositions dedicated to developing intellectual capacities in order to receive revelations from Allāh. In the right context (that is, a functioning state), the ruler becomes a ‘visionary prophet: who warns of things to come and tells of particular things which exist at present’. Through this divine

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connection, the ruler-prophet is well placed to direct citizens towards true happiness. What seems at first to be an inclusive account of collective reasoning turns out to be another doctrine of the ‘divine right of kings’. While the connection to Allāh is the result of collective efforts, al-Fārābī’s ruler still has access to truths that others cannot comprehend. The Perfect State articulates the view that such truths can best be conveyed to the general populace by deploying the symbolic, metaphorical methods common to scripture. Implicit in this advice is the thought that religious revelation is gestural – and that falsafa philosophy, bound by logic and clear argumentation, is a superior mechanism for grasping truth.

7 Revelation While al-Fārābī was certainly not alone in his privileging of reason, many placed greater faith in faith and revelation including Abū Mūsā Jābir ibn Ḥayyān (c. 721–815). Ibn Ḥayyān’s Book of Stones takes its intellectual cues from the esoteric Pythagorean traditions. Here, ‘esoteric’ is used in the technical sense, to identify a system that presents mystical methods for divining truth. The work exemplifies a strand of the Ismā‘īlī tradition, whose practitioners worked with ‘sacred geometry’, cycles of prophesy, the mysteries of gnosis and levels of spiritual hermeneutics. The Book of Stones, like Science of Prophecy by Abū Ḥātim Aḥmad ibn Ḥamdān al-Rāzī (811–891), was intended for a select audience, able to grasp through means other than common-or-garden reason the nature and truth of reality. The Book of Beliefs and Opinions by Sa’adia ben Yosef Gaon (882–942) specifically addresses the growing divide between faith and reason. Born in Egypt, Gaon spent most of his working life in Baghdad. He became head rabbi at the Academy of Sura, producing Arabic translations of, and commentaries on, biblical texts as well as treatises on grammar, dictionaries and theological tracts. Written in Judeo-Arabic (that is, Arabic written with Hebrew script), the Book of Beliefs and Opinions (933) explains to its readers

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Portrait of Abū Mūsā Jābir ibn Ḥayyān. Late Fifteenth Century, Padua, Italy. Apparently burned in the top right corner, this tinted portrait portrays the philosopherchemist Abū Mūsā Jābir ibn Ḥayyān (identified as ‘Geber’ in this Latin Miscellany of Alchemy). He stands on a fictive rock pediment, hand gestures symbolising speech.

why [people], in their search for truth, become involved in errors, and how these errors can be removed so that the objects of their investigations may be fully attained.

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Sa’adia ben Yosef Gaon, Book of Beliefs and Opinions, Twelfth Century. The text in this parchment manuscript is Arabic written phonetically using the Hebrew alphabet. There are marginal notes and the text is justified using both spaces and elongated characters.

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For Gaon, this project necessarily involved attention to both reason and revelation. The Book of Beliefs defends the validity of prophecy and divinely revealed truths. It attacks Brahmanism and the Christian and Islamic rejection of the revelations of Judaism. For Gaon, rational inquiry is fully consistent with religious epistemology and he configures revelation as one of multiple legitimate sources of truth (alongside sense perception, reasoning and logical inference). Attempting to appease both al-Fārābī and Ibn Ḥayyān, Gaon argues that revelation can be both true and rationally explicable. In so doing he draws a distinction between ‘laws of reason’ and ‘laws of revelation’ and argues that both can be joint grounds for knowing and living.

8 Self-improvement While the Islamic Empire grew richer and stronger, the Táng dynasty (c. 618–906) was enjoying comparable territorial and intellectual developments. It expanded its borders to include the regions now known as Korea and Japan, coinciding with a widening reach of Buddhist and Rúist thought. Rúism, as we have seen, involves a particular form of historical analysis: the problems of the present can be solved by paying attention to the attitudes of the past. In Rúist works we encounter a methodological focus on the ancestral (rather than revelatory) authority: the ‘law of tradition’. For these thinkers, trust should be placed not in the teachings of monks, but rather in the actions of earlier generations, realised in their traditions and customs. Individuals may not be able to understand exactly why performing a specific ritual is important, but these ancient institutions (according to the Rúists) are considerably more reliable than limited human reason. We see this attitude in Women’s Analects, written by the Táng imperial official and Rúist scholar Sòng Ruòshēn (768–820). Her reflections on self-cultivation and social relations echo thoughts found in Bān Zhāo’s Lessons for Women (p.63), paying marked attention to social etiquette. It describes how to establish reputation, how to ‘submit to in-laws’ and how to receive guests (‘… with light steps and your hands drawn up in your sleeves …’). It also exhorts readers to develop their intellectual abilities by working diligently (and rising early) and demonstrates well the Rúist approach to self-improvement – in which virtues and rational capacities are cultivated through adherence to custom, ritual and good manners. Rúism is one of the cultural items that the Táng dynasty, and the subsequent Five Dynasties, exported to new territories and neighbours further east. We see it in the Seventeen-Article Constitution (c. 604) by Shōtoku Taishi (Prince Shōtoku) (574–622). The Constitution was written against a backdrop of an ancient body of indigenous ideas and practices known as ‘Shintō’. As we know from the Kojiki (Records of Ancient Matters; 712) and Nihon Shoki (Chronicles of Japan; 720), Shintō thought revolves around the assumption that a plurality of kami (powers or spirits) exist in nature. Kami may be elements of landscape, natural forces or even people. Proponents of Shintō believe that individuals should live in accordance with the will of kami, respecting them through ritual practices and personal purification. This framework clearly resonates with aspects of Rúism and Buddhist thought. In the Seventeen-Article Constitution, these systems are fused into a complex and expansive account of good governance. One of the first written constitutions in history, Shōtoku’s treatise lays out the ideal behaviour of government officials: they should be exemplars of impartiality, unbribable, and their merit (and not heritable status) should be the basis for approbation or blame. Shōtoku states that maintaining harmonious relations between superiors is the best way of enabling truth to flourish; he notes that society is ‘well managed’ when each person knows their role. Like Kǒngzǐ and Sòng Ruòshēn, the performance of social roles is paramount, with inevitable consequences for the distribution of power. Redeploying a tactic of earlier centuries, Shōtoku emphasised the submission of ‘vassals’ to a single, divine sovereign in an attempt to establish a unified Japanese Empire.

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Statuette, Eighth Century, China. This painted piece of pottery depicts a person identified as belonging to the Táng dynasty court. With an elaborate hair arrangement, the figure stands calmly, their hands folded into their sleeves, with a serene facial expression. Hairstyles, like dress and hats, often symbolised social status. For instance, young women of the Táng dynasty might have worn their hair down to show they were unmarried.

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RIGHT AND FAR RIGHT

Scenes with Shōtoku Taishi, Fourteenth Century, Japan. Executed in ink and gold leaf on silk, these hanging scrolls are from a set showing sixtytwo biographical scenes from the life of Shōtoku Taishi, with accompanying inscriptions. Scrolls such as these would decorate temples and shrines, accessible to any non-literate worshippers.

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9 Embodied truths As well as Rúist thought, the Constitution incorporates elements of Buddhism, which Shōtoku would have encountered through his tutor, the Korean Buddhist scholar Gwalleuk. The text advocates the ‘Three Treasures’ of Buddhism – Buddha, Buddhist teachings and its monastic order – and this endorsement undoubtedly contributed to the widespread uptake of Buddhism in Japan. Japanese Buddhism offers a conception of truth that relates to bodily experience, a notion that also appears in the work of Kūkai (774–835). Born into an aristocratic family, this controversial thinker wrote on social welfare and pedagogy, as well as composing poetry and producing calligraphic art. After growing disillusioned with the Rúist education of his youth, Kūkai withdrew to the solitude of the mountains, where, removed from the regulation of spiritual practices, he wrote his first treatise, Indications of the Goals of the Three Teachings. In comparing the truth-finding methods of Rúism, Dàoism and Buddhism, Kūkai describes the esoteric meditative practice called the kokūzō-gumonji, which involves the recitation of a mantra, or shingon, thousands upon thousands of times. The Indications states that enlightenment is achieved not through theoretical speculation, but through bodily practice and direct experience. Kūkai was to build on this idea in the Benkenmitsu-nikkyōron (c. 814).

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The Sanskrit word mantra, together with its Japanese equivalent shingon, signifies a ‘secret teaching’ that is inexpressible in ordinary words. ‘Shingon Buddhism’, of which Kūkai was the founder, is characterised by an emphasis on rituals that use such words to coax both body and mind towards an immediate ‘experience of the ultimate’. The Benkenmitsu-nikkyōron describes public or ‘exoteric’ forms of Buddhism, which it distinguishes from mikkyō (‘secret’ or ‘esoteric’ Buddhism). For Kūkai, exoteric Buddhism lacks a practical method for experiencing truth; it emphasises instead the study and comprehension of doctrines set out in the canonical sūtras. Shingon Buddhism, by contrast, provides a body-focused method through which hidden truths can be experienced physically. Through meditative practice rather than scriptural study, the Benkenmitsunikkyōron offered a chance to experience rather than merely conceptualise truth.

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10 Dissolution of categories

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As Japan grew stronger and the Islamic Empire spread through Europe and northern Africa, the Indus Valley saw a rolling series of land-grabs and exchanges among dynastic powers such as the Puṣyabhūti, the Chālukya and the Gurjara-Pratīhāra Empires. At its peak the Gurjara-Pratīhāra Empire spanned the region from the border of Sindh in the west of Bengal to the Himalayas and the Narmadā in the south. Their empire was eventually displaced by the Rāṣṭrakūta and Pāla dynasties in the eighth and ninth centuries, at the same time as the Chola dynasty was gaining ground in southern India in the fertile valley of the Kaveri river. It was there, we are told, that Jayarāśi Bhaṭṭa (fl. c. 850) lived and worked, writing his fascinating Tattvōpaplava-siṁha.

Toneri Shinnō and Ō no Yasumaro, section from the Chronicles of Japan, Ninth Century, Japan. The writing on this handscroll is arranged in elegant classical Chinese script, with some of the inked characters at a smaller size. The coloured paper on the far right would have served as a protective covering for the text when the scroll was rolled up. Portrait of Kūkai. Fourteenth Century, Japan. In this hanging silk scroll, the philosopher Kūkai is depicted as shoelesss and comfortably seated in a large chair. It is overtly opulent, tinged with gold and subtle colours.

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Reclining Buddha figure Between 618 and 907, Dūnhuáng, Gānsù, China The Mògāo Caves, also known as the Thousand Buddha Grottoes, are a massive system of ancient cultural and religious sites found in Dūnhuáng, China. Used as places of Buddhist worship, they contain some of the most well-preserved sculptures and wall paintings from the past millennium, as well as documents found in 1900 in the so-called ‘Library Cave’. Here we see one of the largest figures in the Caves, a brightly coloured Buddha in a reclining pose, surrounded by numerous smaller-scale figures, the walls adorned with delicately painted scenes.

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The oldest extant copy of the Tattvōpaplava-siṁha – typically translated as The Lion of the Dissolution of All Categories – is written on a palm-leaf manuscript, discovered in 1926 in a library in the Nepali city of Lalitpur, formerly Pātan. It contains a sophisticated epistemology that examines the logical limits of knowledge through careful linguistic analysis. A central tenet of the Tattvōpaplava-siṁha is that it is conceptually impossible to achieve true knowledge, since any such inquiry presupposes knowledge of what ‘knowledge’ is and the validity of the mechanisms by which it can be verified. At the heart of Jayarāśi’s arguments is the concept of pramāṇa: ‘a method of knowing’. His contention is that no pramāṇa, neither sense perception nor rational deliberation can be verified except by reference to some other pramāṇa (which would be infinitely regressive) or by reference to itself (which would be circular). Achieving knowledge is therefore impossible. This radical scepticism constitutes a distinct political challenge to the laws of reason, revelation, esoterica and tradition. The Muʿtazilah’s focus on reason was nominally egalitarian (insofar as reason is a capacity shared by all humans). In practice, however, it was geared towards an educated elite. Regimes that deferred to revelation invested authority in divine beings and their earthly proxies (religious leaders), while Rúism saw truth-making as a function of tradition and institutions that privileged rulers over ‘vassals’. Esoteric philosophers, meanwhile, provided ‘secret teachings’ that were specifically designed to exclude. The Lion, however, is explicitly critical of the political hierarchies embedded in such systems, and its sceptical arguments are addressed towards the Brahmanical elites. The text recognises the ways in which political bodies lay claim to truth and calls them into question.

11 Essential reading In the background of The Lion of the Dissolution of All Categories is the Bodhicaryāvatāra. We know frustratingly little about the author of this text, the philosopher-poet Śāntideva, but the poem speaks to a deep engagement with the sceptical Mādhyamaka tradition of Nāgārjuna. Organised into chapters and verses, the Bodhicaryāvatāra contains an antifoundational message similar to Jayarāśi’s later work. At its core is the concept of svabhāva. Translated, this Sanskrit term means ‘intrinsic nature’ or ‘essence’, or perhaps ‘substance’ (interpretations vary), and the Bodhicaryāvatāra’s central claim is that nothing, no single extant entity, has any such thing. There are simply no essences. Śāntideva’s arguments revolve around a set of dilemmas, including a puzzle about bodily existence. It is claimed that the body is a physical object with a specific form – and yet the body changes dramatically, in shape and appearance, between childhood and old age, thus it clearly lacks a specific form. Yet if the body lacks such a form and is taken to be merely an abstraction, how can we engage with it? According to Śāntideva, it is impossible to provide both a theoretical posit for philosophical analysis and a description of the object of our everyday dealings. This impossibility leads him to reject the idea that individual things possess essences – a Sceptical position fully in line with the concept of anattā discussed in chapter 2. Śāntideva’s philosophical outlook might seem a destabilising one. There are no essences and the world around us is a shifting miasma of incomprehensible forces. Yet the author of the Bodhicaryāvatāra did not seek to undermine the systems of knowledge that organise our day-to-day lives. Like Jayarāśi, his aim was to critique scholastic ambitions. To that end, Śāntideva draws a distinction between ‘conventional’ and ‘ultimate’ truth. The former, he writes, supports our ordinary activities and is exempt from critique; the latter is the construct of misguided intellectuals who claim authority over insights into the nature of reality.

12 Theoretical divides Jayarāśi and Śāntideva were responding to the natural categories and essences codified in Vedic thought. They would have taken similar issue with the Aristotelian biologies being constructed, at the time, in the Germanic regions and Britannia. Following the collapse of the Roman and Sasanian Empires, the cultural output of these western provinces had dwindled so much that many, with a Eurocentric focus, still refer to the era as ‘the Dark Ages’. The picture typically evoked is one of warring fiefdoms and plague-ridden populaces. Some of this did occur, of course, yet the north was far from a cultural wasteland. The Germanic ‘Franks’ had grown in influence over the seventh century, and the Frankish or Carolingian Empire reached its height under Charlemagne (748–814). Like many of his predecessors, Charlemagne co-opted institutional religion – the Western Church – to bring a measure of unity to his territories and in December 800 he was crowned ‘Emperor of the Romans’ by the Pope. Though weakened, alliances such as these

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Scene with Charlemagne 1455–1460, France. Artists of this period would often use scenic breaks to show different episodes occurring simultaneously. In the foreground of this miniature by Jean Fouquet (in The Great Chronicles of France), we see the construction of the palace of Aachen inspected by Charlemagne and some well-dressed companions. Meanwhile, in the background, we see the moment the King’s child, Pepin, is forced into a monastery. The completed palace stands in the far distance. BELOW RIGHT

Portrait of Saint John. Eighth Century, Ireland. Produced in the Abbey library of St Gallen, this page from the illustrated Gospels of St Gall shows an impassive Saint John standing in the centre of an intricate ‘knotted’ pattern, used extensively in Celtic art.

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ensured Christianity maintained a firm hold in the region. Forms of Christian Platonism took root even in far-flung places like Britannia and its neighbouring islands. In ninth-century Ireland, known at the time as Scotia Maior, one of the most striking works of Christian thought was written by a thinker known to contemporaries as ‘the Irishman’: John Scotus Eriugena (800–877). The Periphyseon (On Nature, c. 867), is an extended dialogue between a teacher and a student. Its five books engage with the predestination debate and, building on the causal models of the Platonists, posit a single ‘immovable, self-identical One’ that engenders all things. In contrast to Jayarāśi, Eriugena was also firmly committed to the idea that natural items possess essences. He labelled his text a ‘physiologia’: a study of nature and its divisions. A particular concern is human nature, or essence. Continuing a line of questioning stemming from the works of Macrina and Gregory of Nyssa, Eriugena discusses the creation of human nature, the Fall and any division between sexes. In a somewhat neglected passage, the author argues that human nature is undivided, indivisible and therefore sexless. Sexual difference, he contends, if and insofar as it occurs, is the result of the Fall and non-essential. Underlying the Periphyseon, with its studied examination of the metaphysical character of God and God’s creations, is the assumption that a combination of spiritual exegesis and careful reasoning can help us determine the true ‘natural divisions’. It presents a form of Christian wisdom that overlaps work of another Christian thinker active in the province of Gandersheim…

13 Christian wisdom The eighth and ninth centuries saw a welter of northern forces jostling for territory alongside the Franks. The ‘Vikings’, a Scandinavian people, had begun to migrate eastwards, settling in the Kievan Rus’ (a region that encompasses today’s Belarus, Ukraine and parts of Russia), as well as the Khazar Khaganate north of the Black Sea, Britannia and Iceland. As with other empires, their expansion was funded in part through the activity of human trafficking – a system of trade that purportedly takes its modern name from the Slavic people they took captive, ‘slaves’. This inhuman practice was licensed by the same naturalisation of social status found in Aristotle: social categories were taken to correspond directly to natural categories. Thus we find in the Norse poem the Lay of Rígr (Rígsþula in Old Norse) the pointed division of ‘aristocracy, free people and slaves’. Slavery and taxation led to an economic uplift. Nor were the Scandinavians the only ones to benefit. The Germanic Saxons had also risen to prominence, and in the tenth century their king Otto I channelled new wealth into the Christian institutions of the north. Among these was the famous convent at Gandersheim where we find the poet Hrosvitha (c. 935–1000). The oldest extant collection of Hrosvitha’s output is the ‘Munich Manuscript’. It was produced in the 980s by a team of four or five scribes who wrote up Hrosvitha’s notes under

ABOVE

Portrait of John Scotus Eriugena, 1493, Nuremberg, Germany. The original woodcut portrait of John Scotus Eriugena by Michael Wolgemut and Wilhelm Pleydenwurff first appeared in a work known as The Book of Chronicles (or the ‘Nuremberg Chronicle’), among other images of saints, queens and scholars. Embedded in foliage, Eriugena wears a curly beard and modest cap. His hand gestures, with extended forefingers, suggests speaking or declaration.

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ABOVE

Edda, Mid-fourteenth Century, Iceland. In these pages from an Icelandic manuscript known as the Codex Wormianus, we see text from the Prose Edda, describing Nordic mythology. The Codex also preserves passages from the Rígsþula. It is produced in a small, tidy gothic script, with a colourfully decorated initial. It takes its name from the runologist Ole Worm, who ‘obtained’ it in 1628.

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her guidance. The manuscript contains all but one of her works: ten verse narratives, six plays, an apocalyptic poem and prayers, with various prefaces and dedications. One of Hrosvitha’s most original contributions relates to the concept of Christian wisdom and her analysis of philosophy as a discipline. In her ‘Letter to the Learned Patrons’, which appears at the start of the manuscript, she assumes a position of humility in relation to the ambitions and norms of what she sees to be Philosophy. In this intentionally self-referential move, Hrosvitha establishes her grasp of the literature (such as Boëthius’s Consolations, p.95) and reveals a wry sense of humour. Shifting between literary forms, she emphasises that without divine assistance, we humans know a scant nothing: I do not deny that by the gift of the Creator’s grace I am able to grasp certain concepts concerning the arts because I am a creature capable of learning, but I also know that through my own powers, I know nothing. (…) I have tried whenever I could probe, To rip small patches from Philosophy’s robe And weave them into this little work of mine, So that the worthlessness of my own ignorance May be ennobled by the interweaving of this nobler material’s shine…

Her play, Sapientia, builds further on this theme, while reinforcing a distinctly Christian conception of truth. The eponymous Sapientia is the avatar of Christian wisdom, a mother who embodies both reason and spiritual commitment. She stands as an example of integrative knowledge, where the rational gifts bestowed by God can only be actualised within a Christian framework. For Hrosvitha, as with many of her intellectual descendants, truth and knowledge are not borne exclusively from our cognitive capacities: they must be underwritten by a Christian God. While humans have the ability to analyse and reflect, the authority to declare what is true and what is not rests ultimately with the divine being and God’s representatives on earth (including, of course, Hrosvitha’s benefactors). As the Islamic Empire blossomed around the Arabian peninsula and the Chola dynasty took hold in India, we see territorial expansions and retractions in the realms of knowledge and truth. Over these 400 years, thinkers around the world established and refined what the twentieth-century French theorist Michel Foucault called ‘Regimes of Truth’, marking out territories not just in physical space but also in the maps of the mind.

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Hrotsvitha of Gandersheim title page from Songs of Hrotsvitha. Eleventh Century, Germany. Written in red ink on parchment, this decorative text is found in the only surviving copy of Hrotsvitha of Gandersheim’s complete work. . ABOVE RIGHT

Scene with Hrotsvitha of Gandersheim, 1501, Sodalitas Celtica: Nuremberg, Germany In this detailed engraving by Albrecht Dürer, Hrotsvitha kneels in plain clothes to present her work to a lavishly dressed Holy Roman Emperor and his niece, the Abbess Gerberga II.

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5

BALANCED STATES (1000–1450)

1 Faith and Reason

F

RIGHT

Ibn Sīnā, page from the Canon of Medicine, Fourteenth Century, Syria. This reproduction of Ibn Sīnā’s Canon is written on vellum, animal skin (typically calfskin), bleached and stretched on a frame. It has a number of striking visual elements, including the illustration of a skull and the diagrammatic layout of the text. It is housed in the National Museum, Damascus, Syria.

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or thinkers of earlier eras, doctrines of faith were intimately interwoven with questions about the structure of reality and the nature of knowledge. Indeed, the modern distinction between ‘theology’ and ‘philosophy’ would have seemed almost nonsensical. In chapter 4, however, we witnessed a slight parting of the ways as scholars began to examine different methods of truth finding. Some explored truths disclosed through revelation, believing that mystical experience or scripture might convey information about the structure of the cosmos. Such sources were seen to be in some way resistant to human reasoning. Others built their systems around the truths revealed by rational argument. They maintained that the laws of logic could demonstrate the truth or falsity of propositions, and that empirical observation would allow ‘natural philosophers’ to develop studies, or ‘sciences’, of the world. In the period covered in this chapter, we see the relationship between theology and philosophy becoming both more clearly defined and more fraught. Thinkers engaged in vociferous, often exclusionary defences of their method and, by implication, the authority of the political bodies that supported them. Others sought to build bridges, to form conceptual coalitions and to demonstrate that the divide between faith and reason need not be a rupture. Among the most famous of the bridge-builders was Abū ʿAlī al-Ḥusayn ibn ʿAbdillāh ibn al-Ḥasan ibn ʿAlī ibn Sīnā (980–1037), often referred to by his Latinised name, ‘Avicenna’. Born in Bukhārā in modern-day Uzbekistan, Ibn Sīnā was a towering figure in

the history of philosophy – by his own lights as much as anyone else’s. In various autobiographical asides he informs his readers of his brilliance. As a mere child, he writes, he memorised the entire Qur’ān and mastered all medical sciences. Arrogant or not, he went on to write era-defining texts. His Canon of Medicine (1025), for instance, was to remain a standard medical textbook well into the fifteenth century. The Book of Healing (1027) is one of Ibn Sīnā’s best-known works, titled because it aims to ‘heal the soul of its ignorance’. The book is split into four parts, corresponding to the traditional elements of the Islamic academic curriculum; it covers logic, natural sciences, mathematical sciences (including astronomy and music) and metaphysics. The work is heavily indebted to Aristotelian thought, and Ibn Sīnā’s innovative distinction between essence and existence is grounded in Aristotelian modality. ‘Modality’ refers to the different ‘modes’ of existence. Some beings exist necessarily; that is, they must exist. Others exist contingently, meaning that they might not have existed. Yet other beings do not exist and could not have existed: they are impossible. Ibn Sīnā explains modality through reference to essence, where the essence of a thing is its characteristic nature. Claiming that it is possible for a human to be a philosopher, for example, means that philosophising is compatible with the human essence. Existence is similarly compatible with the human essence. However, humans are contingent beings because their essences are compatible with existence and non-existence (you might not have existed).

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Ibn Sīnā, pages from The Book of Healing, Date unknown. These days we are encouraged not to write in books. In previous centuries, however, margins were considered more than merely aesthetic; they were spaces for readers to make notes and discuss interpretations of the central text. This is a good example of reader engagement.

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RIGHT

IbnʿArabī, pages from The Ringstones of Wisdom, 1395, Morocco. This double-page spread contains Arabic text written in Naskh script, a small, round script of Islamic calligraphy. Due to its easy legibility, it is commonly used for transcribing books and writing administrative documents. Again, we see the copious marginal notes, contributed by different owners of the text.

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In this context, humans are distinguishable from, for instance, round-squares. By definition squares simply cannot be round, so existence is incompatible with the essence of a round-square. The Book of Healing uses these modal claims to support a cosmological argument for the existence of God. Ibn Sīnā notes that a chain of contingent beings cannot go back ad infinitum. ‘…Contingent things [like humans] terminate in a cause that exists necessarily.’ The ‘Necessary Existent’ – the being whose essence is incompatible with non-existence – is, of course, Allāh. Deferring to reason to support religious doctrine, The Book of Healing was not welcomed by everyone. Among Ibn Sīnā’s fiercest critics was the Baghdad-based Abū Ḥāmid Muḥammad ibn Muḥammad al-Ṭūsī al-Ghazālī (1058–1111). His Incoherence of the Philosophers is one of the clearest expressions of anti-philosophical and antiAristotelian sentiment of the period. Al-Ghazālī’s critique takes as its target the speculative metaphysics of Ibn Sīnā and al-Fārābī (p.110) and their endorsement of Aristotelian causal models. The Book of Healing describes chains of material causation, in which one thing causes another (and another, and then another, and so on). Al-Ghazālī believed this mechanical causation sidelined divine influence; it was, he claimed, a tenet of Islam that Allāh was involved in the creation of every event. It may seem to be a matter of cause and effect when a piece of cotton catches alight after being touched by flame, but for al-Ghazālī the cotton’s combustion is ultimately caused by Allāh’s influence rather than the fire. The Incoherence of Philosophers tells us that claims to the contrary are nothing short of heresy.

Al-Ghazālī’s work falls within a mystical tradition of Sūfī thought. Sūfīsm emerged in Islam’s early history, but in the run-up to the new millennium grew in popularity, in part as a response to the excesses of wealth under the ʾUmayyad Caliphs. It emphasised asceticism, devotion and solemn reflection. Alongside The Incoherence of Philosophers, Sūfī texts of the twelfth and thirteenth century included The Philosophy of Illumination (1186) by Abū al-Futūḥ Shihāb al-Dīn Yaḥyā ibn Ḥabash ibn Amīrak al-Suhrawardī and The Ringstones of Wisdom (1229) by Abū ʿAbd Allāh Muḥammad ibn ʿAlī ibn Muḥammad ibn ʿArabī al-Ḥātimī aṭ-Ṭāʾī. In the latter, Ibn ʿArabī (1165–1240) explicitly incorporates prophecy and revelation into his methodology. In the former, Suhrawardī (1154–1191) presents an epistemology that is centred around knowledge through imagination, or ‘illumination’, rather than conventional processes of analysis. These works were both organised by a revelatory rather than rationalistic methodology.

2 Incoherence Ḥayy ibn Yaqẓān (literally, ‘Alive son of Awake’) by Abū Bakr Muḥammad ibn ʿAbd al-Malik ibn Muḥammad ibn Muḥammad ibn Ṭufayl al-Qaysī (c. 1105–1185) is one of the many responses to The Incoherence of the Philosophers. This philosophical novel speaks of a person living on an island, alone save for an antelope (who is duly eaten). It describes how, through minute observation and reasoning, the protagonist, Alive, or ‘Ḥayy’, discovers the ultimate truths of natural science, philosophy and religion. Part way through the book he encounters a wise character called Asāl, who tells Ḥayy about religious scripture. Ḥayy concludes that such metaphorical devices may be helpful for the masses, rendering complex information accessible, but are not essential in the search for truth.

… both he and his friend Asāl knew that this tractable, but defective sort of people, had no other way of salvation; and that if they should be raised above this to the realms of speculation, it would be worse with them, and they would not be able to attain to the degree of the blessed, but would waver and fall headlong, and make a bad end. Ibn Ṭufayl’s depiction of a solitudinous life is clearly influenced by The Rule of the Solitary, a work written by his teacher, the Almoravid thinker Abū Bakr Muḥammad ibn Yaḥyā ibn al-Ṣā’igh al-Tūjībī ibn Bājja (c. 1085–1138). The Rule of the Solitary argues that a hermitic existence helps to guard against social corruption. Ibn Bājja suggests that a fulfilling spiritual life can be achieved through pursuing science and truth, and that one should clear the ‘weeds’ (as he calls the ignorant city dwellers) from the path to knowledge. Like Ibn Ṭufayl, he recognises the utility of religious metaphor in making sophisticated ideas comprehensible to the masses. The best-titled response to The Incoherence of the Philosophers is The Incoherence of the Incoherence. Written as a dialogue by the Crdoba-based Abū al-Walīd Muḥammad ibn ʾAḥmad ibn Rushd – whom Latinists named ‘Averroes’ (1126–1198) – The Incoherence of the Incoherence argues that reason harmonises with Muslim faith. The pivot around which these discussions turn was the question of the world’s creation and the familiar theme of

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Ibn Bājja, pages from The Rule of the Solitary, Eleventh Century, Spain, This eleventh-century text, by the Saragossan philosopher Ibn Bājja (also known as Avempace) is a treatise detailing the ways its readers can acquire and preserve ‘spiritual health’. The only extant copy of the Arabic text is kept in Oxford University’s Bodleian Library. BELOW LEFT

Mustafa ibn Yusuf al-Bursawi, pages from the Treatise on The Incoherence of Philosophers, Fifteenth-century, Turkey, Ibn Rushd was not the only philosopher to engage with al-Ghazālī’s text. This treatise by the Ottoman theologian Mustafa ibn Yusuf al-Bursawi (also known as Khwajah’zadah) is one of two rebuttals of The Incoherence of Philosophers, commissioned by Sultan Mehmed II.

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eternity. In The Incoherence of the Philosophers al-Ghazālī criticises Ibn Sīnā for claiming that the world is eternal and eternally in motion, and that it is this way as a matter of necessity. Referring to the Qur’ān and to Ashʿarite teaching (that of Abu al-Hasan al-Ashʿari, c. 874–936, and his followers), al-Ghazālī denounces this view as heresy, claiming that it (once again) sidelines Allāh. For al-Ghazālī, Allāh is the divinely powerful, ultimate agent; the creation (and potential destruction) of the world is well within the ambit of divine will. Suggestions otherwise are calumnies against Allāh’s power. A substantial portion of The Incoherence of the Incoherence is devoted to demonstrating mistakes in al-Ghazālī’s text. According to Ibn Rushd, his predecessor’s critique rests on an erroneous view of causation. For mortal beings, the process of creation involves deciding to create, then doing so. Given Allāh’s omnipotence and timelessness, this causal model makes no sense; there is no temporal gap between decision and action. According to Ibn Rushd, al-Ghazālī’s claims about divine creation are incoherent. It is tempting to see these discussions as heated exchanges about interesting, but ultimately inconsequential doctrines of faith. Such metaphysical wranglings, however, have real-world effects. Nowhere is this more obvious than in legal theories of the time. Ibn Rushd, like many of his contemporaries, was trained as a lawyer; he was born into a family with a long and well-respected history of legal and public service and enjoyed a wide-ranging education in jurisprudence. While lawyers today may see theology as far removed from the business of court, for Ibn Rushd divinity stood at the heart of legal process. The Incoherence of the Incoherence is a book about law-making and about the basis for juridical authority. Where do laws come from? On which authority – revelation or reason – should we ground our legal system? Another striking example of the intersection of faith and law is the Ethiopian text known as the Fetḥa Nagast (Law of the Kings), which was compiled around 1240. Adapted into Ge’ez from an earlier Arabic compilation by the Coptic Christian ‘Abul Fada’il Ibn al-‘Assal, the Fetḥa Nagast examines questions about debt, punishment and supposed moral basis for enslavement within the framework of Christian thought. The work indicates that limits to personal liberty are permissible in certain circumstances (in war, for instance). However, it also states that nonChristians may never enslave Christians. Then, as now, certain rights are accorded based on religious and racial grounds. Human laws emerge from seemingly divine ones.

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Illustration from the Liber de Herbis, Fourteenth Century, Spain. Here we see an imagined exchange between Ibn Rushd and Porphyry of Tyre. The illustration is typical of the time in its inclusion of text, enriching the depiction of dialogic exchange, not dissimilar to ‘speech bubbles’ found in today’s comics and cartoons.

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3 Cultural hubs Many of these conversations were conducted during the last days of the ʿAbbāsid Caliphate. After the Turkic Seljūk siege of Baghdad in 1157 (the city where many of these books were produced), the conversants began to move elsewhere. Ibn Rushd, for instance, was among those working in Córdoba, in Andalusia (now southern Spain), one of the new cultural capitals of the Muslim world. Controlled by the ʾUmayyad Caliphate, Córdoba played host to dynamic intellectual groups such as the philosophical circle run by Wallāda bint al-Mustakfī (c. 1001–1091). Al-Mustakfī brought thinkers together to discuss questions of legal, ethical, metaphysical and worldly matters; she also produced original work of her own. Continuing a tradition reaching back to Sappho, al-Mustakfī concentrated her attention on love. Although few of her works survive, the snippets of verse capture a puzzling tension between strong individualism (expressed in the first person, in powerful statements like ‘I am, by Allāh, fit for high positions / And am going my way, with pride!’) and the controlling effects of emotion:

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Portrait of al-Rāzī, Date unknown. Sketched by an unknown artist, this charcoal portrait of the physician and philosopher is housed in the Wellcome Collection in London, and depicts the philosopher deep in thought.

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Destiny has hastened on what I used to fear, The nights pass while I see no end to my separation, Nor does patience free me from the bondage of passion… Thanks to the ʾUmayyad’s tolerance of other faiths, Jewish philosophy also blossomed in Andalusia. To the north and south of Córdoba, in Toledo and Malaga, Jewish thinkers Judah Halevi (c. 1075–1141) and Solomon ben Yehuda ibn Gabirol (c. 1022–1058) were engaging with the same issues that had perplexed al-Ghazālī and Ibn Rushd. Written in Arabic, Halevi’s The Book of Proof and Evidence in Support of the Abased Religion (1140) takes the form of a dialogue between a rabbi and a non-Jewish interlocutor who asks the rabbi for instructions in Judaism. Like al-Ghazālī, Halevi argues that truth is best accessed through religious practice and study: philosophical speculation is at best pointless and at worst damaging to its practitioners. Here he was responding to Ibn Gabirol’s Source of Life (written c. 1050), which contains a similar dialogue between teacher and pupil, but focuses instead on examining the benefits of (Platonic) metaphysical speculation. Such books were popular and widely circulated; they also appeared in various translations. While the House of Wisdom in Baghdad (p.104) had fallen into disrepair, the cathedral library of the central Iberian city of Toledo had risen. City records show that from the 1150s onwards scholars from Tunis, Italy, Germany and even Scotland flocked to this bustling cultural hub. There, with the sponsorship of the Church, groups of translators and scriveners had begun to parse works from Arabic into Latin, as well as vernacular languages such as Castilian. Copies of translated works found their way to major cities throughout the kingdoms of the continent we now call ‘Europe’. Previously inaccessible books – by Ibn Sīnā, al-Ghazālī and Ibn Gabirol, as well as Aristotle, Ptolemy, Galen and later Platonic texts – began to appear in the libraries and on the curricula of the newly founded universities.

LEFT

Aristotle, page from the Physics, Thirteenth Century, Italy. Gerard of Cremona’s Latin manuscript contains his translations of Aristotelian works on natural philosophy, including the Physics and On the Heavens, as well as Nicholas of Damascus’s On Plants. The detail and dynamicity of the page is startling; the main text bleeds into illustrative images, surrounded by careful commentary in the margins.

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4 Rambam BELOW

Maimonides, illuminated page from Guide for the Perplexed, Fourteenth Century, Catalonia. This Hebrew version of Maimonides’ Guide contains eye-catching illuminations made from costly pigments. The central image features the scholar in dialogue (captured in the text-box), and a variety of birds (grouse, cockerel, pheasant and peacock) in the patterned border. Unlike Latin, Hebrew reads from right to left.

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The cross-pollination of Muslim and Jewish thought was hindered in the 1150s with the arrival of the Almoḥad Caliphate. Up to that point, Córdoba had been broadly tolerant of religious diversity. The situation changed in 1147 when the Berber Almoravid Empire fell to the Almoḥad Caliphate. The Almoḥads abolished the status of dhimmī, state protection for certain marginalised groups including Jewish people. These groups were forced to choose instead between assimilation or exile. It was a precarious time for Jewish communities – and it was into this turmoil that Moses ben Maimon (1135–1204) was born. The Jewish thinker, referred to by his Latinised name ‘Maimonides’ and known affectionately as ‘Rambam’ (an acronym using the initials of his full title, Rabbi Moses Ben Maimon), was a Sephardic Jew, born in Córdoba but forced into exile. His work is an attempt to defend and fortify Jewish thought, to help it survive in a hostile intellectual climate. In his Mishneh Torah, Maimonides aimed to both extrapolate and clarify rabbinic law and to shore up the governance laws of the Jewish community, while simultaneously making them accessible to a general readership. To this end the Mishneh Torah collects together the ideas contained in the foundational texts of Jewish legal theory: the first five books of the Torah, its commentaries (the Mishnah) and commentaries on the commentaries (the Talmud). It offers clear guidance for the devout, as well as an analysis of general principles. Using rational argument to support and explain scriptural directives, Maimonides swam in the same conceptual waters as Ibn Sīnā and Ibn Rushd. Al-Ghazālī would have frowned on his method and would certainly have disapproved of his attempts to reconcile Aristotelian virtue ethics with legal theory. Positioning himself against thinkers such as al-Ghazālī and Halevi, Maimonides attempted to dissolve the conflict between Jewish law and virtue development, between spiritual devotion and Aristotelian virtue. This approach achieved fuller form in the Guide for the Perplexed (1190). Written in Judeo-Arabic and dedicated to his student Joseph, the book is (as the title suggests) a guidebook for those perplexed by the contradictions that appear between the revealed truths of religion and those discovered through rational deliberation. According to Maimonides, one can reach truths about the nature

ABOVE

Maimonides, Introduction to the Mishneh Torah, Fifteenth Century, Portugal. This illuminated version of the Mishneh Torah is overtly ostentatious. The rich and complex border designs, highlighted with gold-leaf, are intended as markers both of its owner’s regard for learning and their wealth. BELOW

Maimonides, draft of a legal code, c. 1180, Egypt. This double-page spread, putatively in Maimonides’s own hand, was found in the genizah (storeroom) of the Ben Ezra Synagogue in Fusṭāṭ, Egypt and is now housed along with many other manuscripts as part of the so-called ‘Cairo Genizah’ collection in the Bodleian Library.

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LEFT

Maimonides, double pagespread from the Mishneh Torah, 1457, Italy. Attributed to the Italian bookmaker known as the ‘Master of the Barbo Missal’, this version of the Mishneh Torah is highly ornate and carefully printed. This illustration of jousting knights and a row of judges is rendered in tempura and gold leaf on parchment. Tempura is a technique of painting in which pigments are bound in a water-soluble emulsion such as egg yolk.

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TOP RIGHT

Maimonides, pages from The Guide for the Perplexed, Fifteenth Century, Yemen. No inch of space is spared in this Yemeni version of the Guide and it is easy to imagine readers perusing the book, the comments, and then entering comments of their own, contributing to a unique and detailed marginal discussion of the text. At a time before newspapers and journals, this would often be where reviews appeared BELOW LEFT

Maimonides, page from The Guide for the Perplexed, 1423, Yemen. This Yemini edition of the Guide features an index of biblical passages with geometrical decorations and carefully coloured lettering. As with many of these texts, the pages are water-damaged and incredibly fragile. BELOW RIGHT

Maimonides, page from The Guide for the Perplexed, c. 1202, France. This page is taken from Samuel Ibn Tibbon’s edition of the Guide, which includes a glossary of terms, captured in a tabulated format. Ibn Tibbon is also known for producing the first Hebrew versions of Aristotle and Ibn Rushd. This text is housed in the British Library in London.

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of God through step-by-step logical analysis. The Guide presents a rationalist conception of the Supreme Being, figuring God as simple, perfect and immaterial. This contrasts with biblical descriptions of an anthropomorphised deity who sits on a throne and is gendered male. Like Ibn Ṭufayl, Maimonides writes that the dissonance arises because of an attempt to read literally that which, for pedagogical purposes, was symbolic. Once again religious texts were understood to democratise knowledge, rendering it intelligible to the general populace.

5 Nomadic knowledge As a scholar in exile, Maimonides was deprived of a home and the pleasure of institutional support and stability. His works, however, while subject to a certain degree of censorship, soon began to collect in the protected spaces of university libraries. There, like many such texts produced in the period, both beautiful and costly, they would have been chained to the shelves and attended by assiduous archivists. Without these acts of preservation, histories of the kind you are now reading would be very different beasts. It is worth mentioning here the historian’s innate prejudice against nomadic peoples. The prejudice is not a malicious one, but an unfortunate function of the discipline’s method. Historians need subjects to study, and their work is made possible by artefacts from the period of interest. Nomadic peoples leave fewer traces of artefacts than those of settled states; if your community moves around as a matter of course, it will invest less in fixed repositories of cultural knowledge and more in oral technologies (such as rhyme schemes and memorable meter), which allow members to carry information with them. We should not infer from the absence of evidence that itinerant groups did not possess sophisticated systems of thought. The nature of these systems remains the focus of speculation by philosophers and intellectual historians alike. One such people were the Mongols. In the late twelfth century this nomadic group rose to power in the Steppes. Under Genghis Khan (c. 1162–1227) and his descendants, the Mongol Empire came to rule a territory stretching from the Caucasus and Russia to north India and much of central Asia. The Mongols combined efficient administration and strategic alliances with outbursts of intense and very public violence (of the kind seen under Alexander) to subordinate their subjects. Like their imperial predecessors, the Mongols’ sights were set not on the West, but on the East, and the wealth of the Islamic Empire and the Chinese dynasties. It was the Mongols who finally delivered the fatal blow to the ʿAbbāsid Caliphate in 1258, when they seized Baghdad and razed its extensive complex of libraries to the ground. Shortly afterwards they defeated the Mamlūk dynasty in Egypt before turning to China. There, after making gains in the northern Uighur territory, they overthrew the ruling Jīn and established the dynasty of Yuán. Their assimilationist policies, combined with their nomadism, make it hard to distinguish specific schools of Mongol thought, yet their activities raise deep and far-reaching questions about the very possibility of historical practice. Are the modes by which we conduct histories systemically compromised? Without wishing to sink too deeply into self-critique, we suspect the answer is probably yes.

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The Siege of Baghdad, c. 1430–34, Iran. Found in the Bibliothèque Nationale de France, this double-page spread by artist Sayf al-Vāhedī shows the city of Baghdad under siege by the Mongol leader Hulagu. In the foreground we can see cavalry and engines of war such as trebuchets.

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6 Intellectual inheritance Prior to the arrival of the Mongols, the central provinces of China had been ruled by the Sòng dynasty. Improvements in agriculture and population growth had bolstered the economy, which in turn had led to advances in military technologies (including the fabrication of a new compound, gunpowder). These years saw widespread urbanisation, with associated flourishing of intellectual, social and artistic life. Simultaneously the invention of presses with moveable type drastically sped up book production and circulation, allowing for even greater systematisation of knowledge. This era in Chinese philosophy is primarily characterised by the consolidation of Rúism. We see a profusion of texts aimed at codifying the metaphysical and ethical foundations of Rúist thought. In Correcting the Ignorant (1076), Zhāng Zài (1020–1077) postulates that qì, understood as (shapeless) breath, is the basic elemental substance out of which everything else is formed. Thus the text explicitly rejects Buddhist views of absolute emptiness (p.79). Meanwhile, the siblings Chéng Hào (1032–1085) and Chéng Yí (1033–1107) were developing the view – found in their Surviving Works, committed

to print in the seventeenth century – that while qì was the cause of entities coming into being, lǐ (universal order) was the central organising principle of reality. Such accounts were synthesised in Reflections on Things at Hand (1175) by Zhū Xī (1130–1200), serving to bolster the state-endorsed philosophy. The metaphysical debates within Rúism (rather than across scholastic divides) grew ever more rich. Zhū also contributed to standardising the Rúist curriculum, adding the ‘Four Books’ to the existing selection of ‘Five Classics’ (the foundational texts of Rúist thought, p.59). These were the Analects, the Mèngzǐ, Great Learning and Doctrine of the Mean (the latter two being sections of the Book of Rites, circulated as independent publications). By the time of the Míng dynasty, the Four Books and Five Classics had become the primary focus of state testing and examinations (by which subjects were selected for civil service). In 1271 Kublai Khan, a successor to Genghis, appointed himself Emperor of China, establishing the Yuán dynasty. The Yuán Mongols held sway until the mid-fourteenth century, when Central Asia was wracked by successive plagues and the Míng dynasty came to power. The Míng were to rule for another three centuries, ushering in a period marked by widespread investment in infrastructure and defence (rebuilding, among other things, China’s Great Wall), population growth and increased wealth, the consequence of bolstered trade routes to the silk-hungry populaces in the West. Theoretical currents remained constant. In addition to work done in metaphysics, the Míng period saw developments in Rúist virtue ethics, in texts such as Instructions for LEFT

Zhū Xī, pages from Collected Writings, Date unknown. This double-page spread from the ‘Literary Collection’ of Zhū Xī displays an interesting design feature: a vertical lined grid that contains the passages. Some of the text appears to have been lost in the gutter.

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Zhū Xī, pages from The Four Books, Between 1644 and 1912, China. Included in this edition of The Four Books is a ‘Collection of Comments’, or ‘Replies’, a common practice to help readers keep abreast of the latest philosophical discussions. This copy was likely produced during the Qing Dynasty.

Inner Quarters. Written by the Empress Xú (1362–1407), also known as Empress Rénxiàowén, the Instructions is a guide for self-cultivation and moral growth aimed especially at women. For Empress Xú, as with her Rúist forebears, virtuous conduct was bound up with the cultivation of the self: For a person to master sagehood, nothing is more crucial than nourishing one’s moral nature so that one is able to cultivate one’s self. Virtue is grounded in self-cultivation. Morality, Xú declares, ‘is not something that comes from the outside but is rooted in our very selves’. For this reason, individuals must be attentive to their comportment in their environment, and must guard the self from external influences: …if the eye looks at evil sights, then one becomes confused inside; if the ear listens to lewd music, one disturbs one’s innate virtue; if the mouth utters boastful talk, arrogance takes over the mind. These are all dangers to the self. In contrast to the debate between human reason and divine revelation, the Rúist

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Qiú Yīng, A Literary Gathering, sixteenth sentury, China. Found in the Bibliothèque des Arts Décoratifs in Paris, this painting by Qiú Yīng depicts famous poets of the eleventh century visiting the son-in-law of the Chinese emperor at his villa. A scroll is inspected while a musical implement is played. LEFT

Portrait of the Yǒnglè Emperor, Between 1368 and 1644, China.

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Portrait of Empress Xú, Between 1368 and 1644, China.

Sometimes Latinized as the Yonglo Emperor, the Yǒnglè Emperor – Zhū Dì – was the third Emperor of the Ming dynasty, reigning from 1402 to 1424. He is depicted here, enthroned and wearing his ceremonial robes of office.

Empress Xú was the third Empress of China’s Míng dynasty, known for her prodigious literary output and active engagement in court politics. Here she is pictured in a highly ornate court headdress.

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The Great Canon of Yǒnglè, c. 1562–7, China. Originally commissioned by the Yǒnglè Emperor in 1403, the Canon or Encyclopedia was completed in 1408 and comprises over twenty thousand manuscript rolls, only four hundred volumes of which survive today. For six centuries, it was the largest

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general encyclopaedia – until the arrival of Wikipedia. Unlike comparable texts, it is not ordered by subject, but by the dictionary ‘rhythm system’, closer to an alphabetical arrangement. This copy is housed in the British Library.

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Instructions grounds authority in tradition. Attendance to established roles and the practices of one’s ancestors – rather than god-given instruction or rational argument – was seen by Empress Xú to be the surest guide to good living. The Míng rulers sought to circulate these ideas by cataloguing them in impressive encyclopaedias, such as the Great Canon of Yǒnglè or the Yǒnglè Encyclopedia commissioned by Xú’s partner, Emperor Zhū Dì (1360–1424).

7 Assorted writings BELOW

Portrait of Sei Shōnagon, Japan. In this rendering of Sei Shōnagon, the poet and author of The Pillow Book is depicted by the artist Kikukawa Eizan as a ‘beautiful person’ (bijin), a subgenre in woodblock printing popular with the early-nineteenth-century middle class, emphasising looks rather than literary output.

Further east, relative prosperity had spurred Japan to assert greater independence from mainland China. The island state began to turn inwards and the openness of the early Heian era, which had welcomed Dàoist, Rúist and other Chinese systems, came to an end. The Japanese began suspending missions to the mainland and placed heavy restrictions on Chinese imports (both material and intellectual). We see a related shift in the literature composed in this era towards texts written in the vernacular, in hiragana (a script ‘of the people’), as well as the traditional kanji, with a distinctively Japanese focus. Works in this form include The Pillow Book (c. 1002) and The Tale of Genji (c. 1010). Composed largely in hiragana, The Pillow Book collects essays, free reflections and poems by Sei Shōnagon (c. 966–1025), who served at the imperial court as an assistant to Empress Consort Fujiwara no Teishi. A member of the powerful Fujiwara family, Sei philosophised about issues arising in her day-to-day imperial duties, from moral behaviour to the virtues of letter writing and ‘things that make one nervous’. The Pillow Book also contains interesting resonances with the debates about reason and religion. Sei insists on the importance of acquiring knowledge for oneself and appears sceptical about the efficacy of prayer and revealed religion; ‘You have to feel sorry for a god who is said to “answer each and every prayer”,’ she observes.). Possibly Sei’s greatest contribution is to the literary form. The Pillow Book was not written to be published, but was rather the author’s diaristic attempt to capture her own wide-ranging thoughts. After its circulation the format grew in popularity, carving out a new genre, zuihitsu (assorted writing), in Japanese philosophical literature. In this literary mode an author presents associative, personal essays and observations in response to their environment. The form of The Tale of Genji is also noteworthy. We know little of the book’s author beyond their pen-name, ‘Murasaki Shikibu’ and their status as an assistant at the Heian court. However, the style with which the Genji is written is distinctive. It is a fictional, novelistic account that narrates the life of the high courtier and ‘shining prince’ Hikaru Genji and his descendants, discussing interpersonal relationships and morality. In contrast to Rúism, the prince’s story demonstrates that ‘there is no necessary relationship between public order and the personal character of a ruler’. The narrative is also permeated with Buddhist thought, conveyed by the shining prince himself. I was very soon taught what a mistake it is to be fond of anyone. I tried to make sure that I had no strong ties with the world…

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This isolationist attitude was beginning to infuse both philosophical literature and Japanese foreign policy. Buddhism in Japan was also undergoing changes. From the twelfth century, and especially following the 1185 overthrow of the Imperial court by shōgun military, new schools began to thrive alongside Kūkai’s Shingon school, as well as the Tendai school founded by Saichō (767–822). Several of these were associated with Pure Land Buddhist philosophy, a branch of Mahāyāna Buddhism that believes pure, incorrupt existence to be unfeasible in this world. Pure Land Buddhists – whose central texts, the ‘Three Pure Land Sūtras’, include the Sukhāvatīvyūha Sūtras and the Amitāyurdhyāna Sūtra – hold that practitioners must concentrate on reaching the incorrupt realm or ‘pure land’ of the Amitābha Buddha in another existence. A prominent branch of Pure Land Buddhism was founded by the monk Hōnen (1133–1212). His Passages on the Selection of the Nembutsu in the Original Vow (1198) includes extensive quotations of these key sūtras, as well as his own explanation of their core teachings. Hōnen placed strong emphasis on nembutsu, the recitation of the name of the Buddha, which would enable practitioners to be reborn in the pure land. This approach, and that of the Pure Land school more generally, was infused with thoughts

ABOVE

Sei Shōnagon, pages from The Pillow Book, date unknown, Japan. This version of The Pillow Book (Makura no Sõshi) is handwritten and contains notes interspersing the vertical lines and was likely not intended for public display. The book is roughly categorized into three parts; the first focuses on court narratives, the second consists of the author’s musings, and the third features various lists of, for example, ‘hateful things’ or ‘things of beauty’.

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Fifty-Four Scenes from the Tale of Genji, Seventeenth Century, Japan. Produced in the Edo period, these six folding screens display scenes from the famous eleventh-century Tale of Genji, rendered in ink and gold leaf on paper. The artist has used an isometric layout to capture various episodes from the Tale, giving the impression of three dimensions without compromising on detail. The artist has also used the device of fukinuki yatai (or ‘blown-off roof ’) to give a tantalising glimpse inside the buildings (most of which are aristocratic mansions).

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Murasaki Shikibu, The Tale of Genji, Seventeenth Century, Japan. Housed in the British Library, this illustrated version of the Tale sets out each chapter alongside a poem by members of the Japanese court aristocracy. The pages are inserted into an ‘album’, a blank book (from the Latin albus, meaning ‘white’).

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Murasaki Shikibu, The Tale of Genji, Seventeenth Century, Japan. This edition of the Tale was produced in the midseventeenth century by Yamamoto Shunshō. Prior to this, it had circulated in manuscript form primarily among the social elite. It was only at the start of the Edo period that it became more widely accessible, as digests and handbook-style synopses began to be printed, first in movable type, then in more affordable woodblock-printed versions. Shunshō’s edition, with these beautiful cloud-like borders, was one of the earliest massproduced editions to include woodblock illustrations.

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similar to those found in al-Ghazālī’s texts (p.128): intellectualising ultimately only issued in a form of analysis paralysis. The Pure Land Buddhists pursue a non-rational, practicebased route to spiritual fulfilment. In the Treasury of the True Dharma Eye (completed around 1253), Dōgen Zenji (1200–1253) offers a similar Sōtō Zen perspective on topics ranging from virtues and language to monastic practice. As with his earlier work, General Advice on the Principles of Zazen (1227), the instructions in Shōbōgenzō are resolutely practical. At its heart is the principle of zazen, or sitting meditation, which Dōgen saw as key to proper Zen philosophy. After offering instructions on what to wear and how to place your sitting mat, he writes: ABOVE

Portrait of the monk Hōnen, c. 1310–20, Japan. Pictured in a contemplative pose, this illustration of the founder of the Pure Land school appears in an illustrated biography of Hōnen, currently residing in the Metropolitan Museum of Art.

Sit with the stillness of a mountain, and let what you are thinking about be based on not deliberately trying to think about any particular thing. How can what anyone is thinking about be based on not deliberately thinking about something? Simply, by not making ‘what I am thinking about’ the point of your meditation. Unlike al-Ghazālī, Dōgen makes no immediate appeals to divine revelation. However, there is an anti-intellectual stance in his work which manifests in the occasional acid remark such as: ‘Seated meditation is a practice and not something for intellectual study’.

8 Conceptions of God Where do the Christian thinkers of this period stand on reason and revelation? Christian lands had been suffering a socio-economic downturn, and during this era the fortunes of Byzantium fell further. Constantinople remained relatively stable throughout the eleventh century, but in the twelfth century the city fell to the Turkic Seljūks. European Christians staged multiple uprisings (or ‘Crusades’) seeking dominance in the Levant, but these proved ineffective. In the fifteenth century Byzantium finally crumbled, broken by the Seljūks’ successors, the Ottoman Empire. The Latinate Western Church fared better. It had officially split from the Greekspeaking Eastern Church in 1054 and during the eleventh century populations in its territories increased. This led in turn to settlements and resettlements in the lands of the north and the west. The French descendants of the seafaring Scandinavians, now known as Normans, allied themselves with the pope and continued their conquests into Britain. Here, at the Battle of Hastings in 1066, the Saxon kingdom fell into their hands. Building on the ruins left by the Romans, the Normans began cultural and economic investment in their new territory. Among the scholars who took up residence was a Benedictine monk called Anselm (1033–1109). Travelling to Canterbury, the spiritual epicentre of Britain, Anselm shortly became Archbishop and the author of the Proslogion (c. 1077). This text, also known as Discourse on the Existence of God, sees a Christian scholar engaging in the same debates that had troubled their Muslim, Jewish and Buddhist counterparts. Anselm argues, like Ibn Sīnā had done (p.126), that reason offers an important insight into spiritual truths.

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To this end he offers his ‘ontological argument’ (so-called because it examines matters to do with ón, or being, in Greek) for God’s existence. The argument is premised on the metaphysical claim that an existing thing is, fundamentally, greater than a non-existing thing. Think of an ice-cream. On a hot day an ice-cream that exists, which you can eat, is much better than the mere idea of an ice-cream. For Anselm, God is by definition ‘the greatest being that can be conceived’. Nothing is greater – indeed, it is impossible to conceive of anything that could be greater. And since, as Anselm says, existence in reality is greater than existence in the mind, a being ‘than which none greater can be conceived’ must exist in reality. Anselm contends that, through logical argument, his Proslogion contains proof of God’s existence.

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Anselm, page from the Proslogion, Twelfth Century, Normandy.

Portrait of Anselm of Canterbury, 1584, France.

This version of Anselm’s theological treatise is included in the Harley collection in the British Library (a collection named after the eighteenthcentury aristocrats who compiled it). The work, which contains decorated initials of the scrivener, is copied in a script with identifiable Norman spelling and calligraphy.

This profile portrait of the stubbled eleventh-century theologian holding a small book, which he doesn’t appear to be reading, was engraved by the Franciscan priest and artist André Thevet.

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9 The Ox BELOW

Aquinas, page from the Summa Contra Gentiles, thirteenth century, Italy. Found in the Biblioteca Malatestiana in Cesena, this illuminated text contains a ‘historiated initial’, an enlarged initial letter ‘C’ containing an image of a person, perhaps Aquinas, presenting a book to the reader. The appearance of authors holding their texts was a common feature of such works (much like author photographs today).

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We see a similar approach in the work of another monk, hailing from the town of Roccasecca near Naples. Born into the wealthy Aquino family, Thomas of Aquino or ‘Aquinas’ (1224–1274) was, as the youngest of four brothers, destined for a religious career. He was among the first to study in the newly built University of Naples, where he trained in the new field of theology, studying grammar, logic, rhetoric, arithmetic, geometry, music and philosophy. Not the most communicative of students, he was known to his peers as ‘the Ox’. His teacher, however, was said to have commented that ‘one day, the Ox would produce such a bellowing it would be heard around the world’. Explicitly building on the Aristotelian work of Ibn Sīnā and Maimonides, Aquinas continued Anselm’s development of Christian rationality. His voluminous writings formalised the debate, systematising the positions in idealised dialogues, or ‘disputations’. Like the Catholic catechism, these dialogues present claims and counterclaims in a conceptual balancing act aimed at achieving reflective equilibrium. In his unfinished Summa Theologiae (c. 1265) and his Summa Contra Gentiles (c. 1259), Aquinas adds to Anselm’s ontological argument and attempts to show how belief in God’s existence can be placed on rational foundations. More specifically, inspired by Ibn Rushd, Aquinas aimed to demonstrate the compatibility of Aristotelian metaphysics with religion, in ways that allowed for the wide-reaching systematisation of ethical systems, causal models and varieties of natural and divine laws. This articulation of theology and philosophy is his most enduring contribution to the history of philosophical thought. Unlike ‘theologians’, for whom God is the first and most important premise of any argument, ‘philosophers’ start with the created world. Their arguments emerge from the combined efforts of natural reason and the physical senses. The theologian claims that reasoning is reliant on illumination from God. For philosophers, however, the light of reason derives from God but may be realised naturally by humans. Aquinas acknowledges that rationality has limits: it cannot offer insight into God’s divine character or nature. Nevertheless, it can still establish the ‘preambles of faith’, such as the existence of God. Maybe more than any other medieval Christian thinker, Aquinas reinforced the pre-existing religious and social hierarchies of the Western Church. In so doing, he rendered it one of history’s most

ideologically robust institutions. The combination of revelatory and rational authority allowed him to substantiate and naturalise effective – but damaging – systems of dominance. In the Summa Theologiae, for instance, we see the redeployment of Aristotle’s notion of a natural hierarchy. Aquinas holds that social roles are the inevitable upshot of natural laws (which are the result of divine legislation); he argues not only that women and individuals called ‘natural slaves’ are properly dominated by ‘masters’, but that to be so mastered is to their benefit. Social order is not simply divinely stipulated, but distinctly reasonable. To modern readers, such comments may seem out of place in a philosophical work. Yet Aquinas and his contemporaries were working at a time when shifts in labour laws were having considerable impact. Enslavement, previously rife in the lands of Europe, had begun to transform into systems of ‘serfdom’, or forced agricultural servitude. As a result, institutional bodies needed to find different ways to source free labour. The idea that certain people – mostly, anyone not identified as a man or as white – were metaphysically and biologically inferior offered economic advantages to governing bodies. As we will see in chapter 6, these and related ideas were to power the European states’ imperial expansion in the centuries that followed.

10 Mystics The dissonance created by ‘rational’ defences of an unjust social hierarchy may well have led women scholars to position themselves within a tradition that embraced the suprarational; it is unsurprising that many of their texts bear a distinctly mystical flavour. For instance, Lallēśvarī (1320–1392), also known as ‘Lal Ded’, of Kashmir province in India, renounced the materialist life and worked as a travelling poet and teacher in the spiritual Śaivist tradition. In her Vākhs, or sayings, she regularly reflects on self-negation: Would you understand what oneness is? It has turned me into nothingness.

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Portrait of Hildegard of Bingen, 1642, England. This print of Hildegard, by the engraver William Marshall, shows her reading a book with an enigmatic smile. The legend reads: ‘Hildegardis: A Virgin Prophetess, Abbess of St Ruperts Nunnerye. She died at Bingen  1180 aged 82 years’. ABOVE CENTRE

Portrait of Julian of Norwich, 1912. In this delicate watercolour by Stephen Reid (found in W.M. Letts, The Mighty Army, Wells Gardner, Darton & Co.: London, UK), we see Julian of Norwich in quiet contemplation of scripture, in contrast to the hustling crowds outside her window. ABOVE RIGHT

Self-portrait of Herrad of Landsberg, c. 1180, Alsace, Germany. One of the many visual whimsies of the Garden of Delights, this self-portrait shows Herrad holding a box of text she herself has written.

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Among the most visually stunning of these mystical works is a book known as the Scivias (1151) – from the Latin sci vias Domini, ‘know the ways of the Lord’ – by Hildegard of Bingen (1098–1179). Hildegard claimed to have been commanded to write by the ‘voice of heaven’. Her book describes a series of visions focusing on, among other things, the divisive topic of the creation of the world. The original manuscript consisted of around 235 parchment pages with illuminations. One version, the famous Rupertsberg manuscript, was compiled under Hildegard’s own supervision; it was much copied before being lost in Dresden during the Second World War. Its original production would have been far from straightforward, partly because Hildegard’s deference to religious authority required her to ask for papal permission to verify it as a product of divine command. The Mirror of Simple Souls by the French mystic, semi-monastic ‘Beguine’ Marguerite Porete (d. 1310), is an example of a text that failed to pass muster in the Vatican court. The work is notable in using the language of courtly and romantic love to discuss issues of divinity. Love in this book layeth to souls the touches of his divine works privily hid under dark speech, so that they should taste the deeper draughts of his love and drink… The Mirror tells us that love offers a path to salvation. The ‘annihilated soul’ has given up everything for the love of God – including reason which, according to Porete, is poorly equipped to grasp the subtleties and glory of God. Porete was intent on spreading her message as widely as possible. Writing in Old French, rather than the Churchendorsed Latin, and speaking in terms of erotic love, she was condemned by the Vatican court as a ‘heretic of the Free Spirit’. The Mirror was denounced by the Bishop of Cambrai, who ordered it removed from circulation. Porete, later caught reproducing it, was imprisoned and burned at the stake. In England Julian of Norwich (1342–1416) also wrote about her visions or ‘shewings’ in the vernacular, and Revelations of Divine Love (c. 1373) constitutes one of the oldest surviving books in the English language. She was spared Porete’s fate since her texts were unpublished during her lifetime and only circulated after the Protestant Reformation. Like Porete and Hildegard, Julian uses the language of love to talk about a variety of theological concerns. This move is often made when women break out of conceptual ghettoes to discuss matters deemed to be the purview of men. Julian is noteworthy in focusing not on courtly romance but on maternal and paternal love, positioning Christ in the role of a mother. As truly as God is our Father, so truly is God our Mother. Not all of the texts produced by abbesses and beguines were mystical in quality. The Garden of Delights, by the twelfth-century Alsatian nun and abbess Herrad of Landsberg (1130–1195), is one of the most comprehensive surveys of scientific and theoretical knowledge of the period: it is also utterly resplendent. Written in Latin and comprised of 324 sheets of parchment, the Garden is a compendium of all the sciences studied at the

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Hildegard, pages from Scivias, c. 1220, Heidelberg, Germany. This double page-spread appears in a thirteenth-century copy of the Scivias found in the collection of the Library of the Ruprecht Karl University and features a miniature ‘Annus’, a circular image depicting notable points in a year. On the right, Christ stands surrounded by a circle of saints.

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Hildegard of Bingen, page from the Scivias, c. 1927–1933, Benedictine Abbey of St. Hildegard: Eibingen, Germany. This striking image, a twentieth-century manuscript facsimile of a twelfth-century version of the Scivias, housed in the Benedictine Eibingen Abbey, is known as ‘The Choir of Angels’. It consists of a repeating pattern of colourful seraphs and faces circling a sun-like interior.

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Hildegard of Bingen, page from the Scivias, c. 1927–1933, Benedictine Abbey of St. Hildegard: Eibingen, Germany. The Eibingen Abbey manuscript also contains this image, known as ‘The Redeemer’, featuring roundels of angels, birds and beasts. The Scivias is structured in three parts, the first chronicling the order of creation, the second describing the order of redemption and the arrival of Christ the Redeemer. The third part restates the history of salvation.

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ABOVE LEFT

Julian of Norwich, pages from Revelations of Divine Love, c. 1675, R.F.S. Cressy: Cambrai, England or Paris, France. The Revelations of Divine Love, which describe the religious experiences Julian experienced during a near-fatal illness, are written down in two forms, the ‘Short Text’, composed shortly after Julian’s recovery from the illness, and the ‘Long Text’, composed decades later, the pages of which appear here and are housed in the British Library. TOP RIGHT

Julian of Norwich, page from Revelations of Love, c. 1675, R.F.S. Cressy: Cambrai, England or Paris, France. Here we see the delicately handwritten title page of the first chapter of the Revelations of Divine Love in the ‘Long Text’, which shows the work of at least one editor. The earliest surviving versions we have were probably copied down by a Benedictine nun, Anne Clementine Cary, in the seventeenth century.

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FAR LEFT

The Amherst Manuscript, c. 1413–1435, England. The ‘Amherst Manuscript’ (bought by Lord Amherst Sale and donated to the British Library) includes Julian of Norwich’s Revelations, copied down by a Carmelite scribe. LEFT

Herrad of Landsberg, page from the The Garden of Delights, 1818, J.G. Cotta: Stuttgart and Tübingen, Germany. Christian Maurice Engelhardt’s nineteenth-century copy of the twelfth-century text depicts the so-called ‘Ladder of Virtues’. Similar to the ‘Wheel of Fortune’, the ladder was widely illustrated in medieval art. As the mortals ascend the ladder, they grow closer to the ‘Crown of Life’. They are knocked off the ladder by grinning demons with bows and arrows.

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time, interspersed with guide notes and poems, often set to music (to aid memorisation). Written for the women in her convent, the images in of Landsberg’s novel and eyecatching book – like those in the Scivias, the Yǒnglè Encyclopedia (p.146) and the Ārzhang (p.73) – are more than mere illustrations. Through visual metaphor and allegory they render complex ideas comprehensible, developing technologies of data collation and visualisation. Works such as Christine de Pizan’s The Book of the City of Ladies (1405) and Teresa of Ávila’s The Interior Castle (1588) carried forward such mystical, often highly illustrated philosophy in later centuries.

RIGHT

Christine de Pizan, page from The Book of the Queen, c. 1410–1414, Paris, France. Written in French, this gorgeously detailed page opens the ‘100 Ballads of the Lover and the Lady’ and is illustrated with a picture of the author writing in her study. The manuscript was likely produced under her direct supervision and is dedicated to Isabeau of Bavaria, the queen consort of France.

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11 Differing perspectives Many of the books produced between 1000 and 1450 were shaped by a continual back and forth between thinkers allying themselves with reason and those allying themselves with religious revelation. Some philosophers sought to demonstrate how these different bodies of knowledge, though distinct, might nevertheless complement each other. This form of ‘syncretic’ epistemology found distinctive form in Indian philosophy, especially Jainism (p.51). At the start of the new millennium, southern India had been ruled by the Cholas (also active in Sri Lanka and the Maldives) and the Chālukyas, who had brought administrative stability and trade to the subcontinent. In the thirteenth century the Delhi Sultanate rose in influence in the north and the Vijayanagara Empire came to control the south. The Delhi Sultanate was established by nomadic Turkic Muslims. Incorporating its new territories into its international network (assisted by the labour of enslaved peoples), they fused elements of Vedic and Islamic culture. Under conditions of on-and-off toleration and religious persecution, disciples of Gurū Nānak (1469–1539) and later Gurus, promulgated the religion now known as Sikhism. It was in Jainism, however, that we see syncretism – the collation of seemingly opposing points of view – achieve determinate form. In the Yogaśāstra of Hemacandra (1088–1173) and the Pramāṇa-naya-tattvālokālaṃkāra (or The Ornament of the Light of the true nature of the Pramāṇa and the Naya) of Vādi Devasūri (c. eleventh century), we find the development of the Jainist position known as anekāntavāda: the theory of many-sidedness (sometimes referred to as ‘standpoint theory’). Building on central insights of Mahāvīra, these Jaina thinkers aimed to broker truce between different ‘regimes of truth’ by emphasising its perspectival nature. Rather than defending a single school, books such as Devasūri’s Pramāṇa-naya-tattvālokālaṃkāra encouraged readers to accept all available points of view, or standpoints. In so doing they could avoid ‘onesidedness’ and recognise the contributions of different traditions. Consider the divisive question that had so troubled philosophers further west. Is the world eternal? Jaina epistemology was sufficiently sophisticated to accommodate apparent contradictions. ‘Is the world eternal? No.’ ‘Is the world eternal? Yes.’ Both positive and negative answers express a partial truth about the world, as indicated by the use of the Sanskrit word syāt, meaning ‘conditionally’ or ‘maybe’. Whether or not the proposition is true depends on the nyāya – the ‘standpoint’ of the questioner. In some sense the world is not eternal, because it is constantly changing and thus has no permanent existence. Yet at the same time there is something about it that persists – so it is not unreal and in some sense is eternal. Crucial here is the idea, implicit in the use of syāt, that our statements about reality are asserted in particular ways and in particular modes. Ibn Sīnā, Devasūri and Hemacandra are interested in ‘modal operators’, which indicate how a proposition is true. Is it conditional on a standpoint? Is it necessary? In the Jaina philosophy of the period, the possibilities of Possibility were becoming apparent, and the distinctions between types of existence and truth were only to grow in importance…

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ABOVE

Yogaśāstra, Twelfth Century, India. Written by the monk Hemacandra, only the final eight chapters of this Jain text survive. Composed in Sanskrit it describes the rules of conduct for laymen and ascetics, according to Śvētāmbara Jainism. It is currently housed in the Cambridge University Library.

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6

OPEN BORDERS (1450–1850)

1 Pressing concerns

A

BELOW

The Bible in Latin, c. 1454-55, Johann Gutenberg: Mainz, Germany. The ‘Gutenberg Bible’ is an edition of the Latin Vulgate, printed in the 1450s by Johannes Gutenberg. It is large; the paper is ‘double folio’, with two pages printed on each side, and consists of 1,286 pages, usually bound in two volumes.

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fter millennia of playing bit parts on the world stage, the region now known as Europe began to gain prominence. Like their predecessors, the European kingdoms pursued brutal and destructive imperial projects, colonising ‘New’ (in fact, very ancient) worlds and replacing philosophical histories of the colonised with their own. Ironically, these exploits occurred at the same time as an upsurge in egalitarian movements. Like Jainism in India and Buddhism in China, European citizenry began to open up and inhabit new democratic spaces. The authority of the Church was challenged in the geopolitical reorganisation of the Reformation. Greater emphasis on rationality – the faculty seen to be shared by ‘all’ – in theory could divest greater power to the public, away from priests and the aristocratic elite. These political shifts are inseparable from the developments in philosophical research and book production. More texts were being written in the vernacular, rather than the exclusionary Latin of the Church. In the mid-fifteenth century European printing technologies advanced dramatically with Johannes Gutenberg’s printing press. The German blacksmith’s main innovation was to replicate centuries-old Chinese and Korean technologies for the European market. Block printing (in which panels of hand-carved

woodblocks are used to impress text on paper) had been standard in China for centuries, while moveable type (blocks of individual letters that could be moved around) had been popular since the time of Bì Shēng (970–1051). Gutenberg devised a system of replicacasting to create small metal blocks of moveable type, while also synthesising an ink that stuck to metal more easily. The resulting printing machine, launched in 1450, facilitated the mass production of books, enabling the cheap and swift sharing of ideas. As the Western Church soon realised, many of these ideas were to tangibly challenge the status quo. In 1501 Pope Alexander VI threatened to excommunicate anyone who printed manuscripts without the Church’s approval. This order was broken in grand style by the publication of the works of the radical Christian philosopher Martin Luther (1483–1546).

2 Ecumenical matters Martin Luther is said to have nailed the text of his Ninety-five Theses (1517) to the door of a church in Wittenberg. The work contains a biting critique of Catholicism, especially the practice of ‘plenary indulgences’ – certificates issued by Church officials, which congregants could buy in order to reduce the time the deceased would spend in purgatory (a penitential space of purification where souls are said to rest before gaining access to heaven). Indulgences offer a striking example of theological and metaphysical theories intersecting with real-world economics, and Luther and his supporters protested, vehemently, against the idea that officers of the Church could sell ‘moral purity’ (thus earning the name of ‘Protestants’). Luther’s critique sparked the revolutionary fire of the Reformation, which tore its way through Christendom in the sixteenth century (and still burns today). The Ninety-five Theses challenged the spiritual and epistemic authority of the Church and shifted political and intellectual fault lines in Europe. Nor was it alone in doing so; this age saw a profusion of books seeking to unseat scholastic orthodoxy (or even the Church itself ). Written during a sojourn in London, at the house of Thomas More (more of whom to follow), Desiderius Erasmus’s In Praise of Folly (1509) satirically attacked fustian institutionalism. In an ironic text, laced with thinly veiled criticism, Erasmus gave short shrift to the excesses of monks, priests and the papal monarchy while wryly praising the goddess Folly. Further uproar was caused by the Christian Bible – or, more precisely, by translations of the Christian Bible into the vernacular (rather than the Church-endorsed Latin) by figures such as Luther and William Tyndale (1494–1536). Two thousand copies of Luther’s German-language text were printed and distributed in the 1520s. The word of God became accessible to the masses (a process that in turn greatly stimulated literacy rates). As the Reformation movement grew, papal documents and books of Catholic law were burned in street protests. Despite these upheavals, however, the sixteenth century also saw Christendom gain a foothold in vast swathes of territory in a ‘New World’ to the west…

ABOVE

Illustration of a printing press, 1508, Jodocus Badius Ascensius: Paris, France. Based on a woodcut by Jodocus Badius Ascensius, this shows the process by which pages are inserted and then ‘pressed’ with the woodcut or engraving.

ABOVE

Portrait of Martin Luther, 1533, Germany. Painted when Luther was fifty years old, this work by Lucas Cranach the Elder shows ‘the Reformer’ in distinctive black Protestant clothes. It is likely the original was joined with a portrait of Luther’s collaborator, Philipp Melanchthon.

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RIGHT

Scene with Martin Luther. c. 1850, Rudolf Besser: Gotha, Germany. In this illustration by Gustav König, featured in his illustrated guide – Dr Martin Luther the German Reformer – Luther is surrounded by scholars and secretaries taking notes, including Melanchthon, Bugenhagen and Dr Justus Jonas. The impression is of a bustling intellectual moment during which ideas can barely be contained in books. BELOW RIGHT

Martin Luther, Pages from The Ninety-Five Theses, 1517, Basel, Germany. This Latin copy of Luther’s text is found in the Deutsches Historisches Museum in Berlin. The titular theses, which appear here in pamphlet form, are listed with roman numerals.

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LEFT

Martin Luther, page of Bible, that is: The Entire Holy Writ, German, c. 1560–61, Hans Lufft: Wittenberg, Germany. This is the title page of Luther’s German translation of the Bible, featuring a detailed pictorial border dramatically rendered in a woodcut print by Lucas Cranach the Younger. Much like the ‘teasers’ in modern cinema, this medley of images – including the Garden of Eden and the Crucifixion – function to draw the reader in.

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ABOVE

William Tyndale, pages from The New Testament as it was written, c. 1526, Peter Schöffer: Worms, Germany. Here we see one of the few surviving copies of William Tyndale’s English translation of the Bible, opened at the start of the Gospel of St Mark. ABOVE RIGHT

Martin Luther, title page of The Old Testament, German, c. 1523–24, Melchior Lotter: Wittenberg, Germany. Featuring an illustration by Lucas Cranach the Elder, ‘Das Alte Testament’ is Luther’s translation of the Hebrew Bible. RIGHT

Martin Luther, pages from The Old Testament, German, c. 1523–24, Melchior Lotter: Wittenberg, Germany. Opened at the Book of Joshua, this German edition was translated by Martin Luther and illustrated by Lucas Cranach the Elder.

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ABOVE

Martin Luther, pages from Passional Christi und Antichristi, c. 1521, Wittenberg, Germany. Lucas Cranach the Elder, court painter to the Electors of Saxony, was an enthusiastic supporter of the Reformation and collaborated extensively with the translators and printers of the Germanlanguage bible. RIGHT

Desiderius Erasmus, title page of In Praise of Folly, 1536, Gilles de Gourmont: Paris, France. Kept in the British Library, this title page provides an excellent example of sixteenth-century branding. The woodcut print, by an unnamed artist, is the emblem or ‘device’ of the printers who produced the book, Gilles de Gourmont.

ABOVE

Portrait of Desiderius Erasmus, 1604–1608, Antwerp, Belgium. Produced by Philip Galle, this etching of Erasmus is based on the portrait painted by Hans Holbein the Younger.

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RIGHT

Frontispiece of The Byble, which is all the holy Scripture: in whych are contayned the Olde and Newe Testament truly and purely translated into Englysh, 1537, Antwerp, Belgium. In this frontispiece illustration from ‘Thomas Matthew’s’ (a pseudonym used by William Tyndale and John Rogers) English translation of the Bible, we see Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden, with the Christian deity framed by an aurora of clouds. Eve points towards the Tree of Knowledge, while Adam looks on.

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LEFT

Title page of The Byble, which is all the holy Scripture: in whych are contayned the Olde and Newe Testament truly and purely translated into Englysh, 1537, Antwerp, Belgium. The full-colour title page of this English edition of the Bible includes a medley of scenes, contained in a single border image. In the top left, Moses receives the tablets of stone while in the bottom right Lazarus emerges from the tomb. At the bottom runs the legend: ‘Set forth with the Kinges most gracyous lyce[n]ce’, a helpful endorsement given the political and religious disturbances of the time.

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3 ‘New’ worlds BELOW

Bernadino Ribeira de Sahagún, pages from Universal History of the Things of New Spain, sixteenth century, Mexico. In these pages from Ribeira de Sahagún’s ethnographic study, we see beautifully tinted illustrations by Nahúa artists of indigenous rituals and practices. The manuscript, known as the ‘Florentine Codex’, consists of roughly 2,400 pages, and is organised into twelve books and written in both Spanish and Nāhuatl.

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Under Emperor Charles V (1500–1558), the Holy Roman Empire expanded from its base in west-central Europe into the lands now known as the ‘Americas’. The European imperial project, like those before and since, proved ruinous to the colonised peoples. Unlike the more tolerant Babylonians and Ottomans, the Europeans aimed to subjugate indigenous populations through murderous military campaigns and cultural devastation. Prior to the Europeans’ arrival, South America had been the site of rich and complex systems of thought reaching back to well before the Common Era. The Maya civilisation, with its sophisticated mathematics and astronomy, had been active from 2000  in the areas we now call Mexico, Guatemala and Belize. The Olmec Empire, based around the Gulf of Mexico, flourished after the seventeenth century . More recently the Inca Empire dominated the Andes region in the thirteenth century , while the Nāhuatlspeaking people of Mēxihcah expanded their territory further north in the century that followed.

However, in 1519 groups of well-armed militants arrived from overseas. Through vicious tactics and unintended biological warfare (due to the European diseases they carried), the battle-ready invaders captured Motēcuhzōma Xōcoyōtzin, ruler of Tenōchtitlan. Two years later they conquered the territory’s capital city. The society began to crumble, with the self-styled Spanish ‘Conquistadores’ claiming this territory as the ‘Viceroyalty of New Spain’. Under their rule local populations swiftly declined. Survivors were forced to convert to Christianity and their ‘heathen’ cultural records systematically destroyed. The process of reconstructing Nahúa philosophy is heavily, and problematically, dependent on the work of Spanish archivists such as the Codex Mendoza (1541). Commissioned by local Viceroy Antonio de Mendoza y Pacheco, the Codex chronicles Nahúa histories up to the destruction of Tenōchtitlan. It also details the ethical systems that governed everyday life, emphasising social productivity and communitarian projects. The richly illustrated text is punctuated with extended discussions of human sacrifices and the role they played in Nahúa society. Histories written by colonising forces are inevitably biased. Spanish evangelist Bernardino Ribeira de Sahagún (1499–1590), who cofounded the Colegio Imperial de Santa Cruz de Tlatelolco, acknowledged as much by encouraging Indigenous scholars to document their own culture. The resulting Universal History of the Things of New Spain (c. 1545–90), written in Nāhuatl and Spanish, consists of 2,000 sheaves of prose and illustrations; it discusses polytheism, creation myths and astronomy, as well as rhetoric and morality. The History also offers an insight into Nahúa metaphysics, which revolves around the concept of teōtl – a single, dynamic, cosmic force that permeates nature (the heavens, earth and humans) and is manifest in the various gods. In addition to capturing the philosophies of newly colonised subjects, Spanish thinkers also debated the rights and wrongs of their territorial expansion. A Second Democritus: On the Just Causes of War with Indians (1550) by Juan Ginés de Sepúlveda defends genocidal missions by invoking the ‘natural hierarchies’ of Aristotle; the Nahúa people were, the author calmly claimed, ‘naturally’ suited to enslavement. By contrast A Short Account of the Destruction of the Indies (1552) by Bartolomé de las Casas argues that

BELOW

Bartolomé de las Casas, title page of A Short Account of the Destruction of the Indies, 1552, Sevilla, Spain. Published a decade after it was written, the Short Account was compiled for Prince Philip II of Spain, whose coat of arms appears above the title. It was intended to caution the ruler against untrammelled colonial ransacking, but proved ineffective.

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Indigenous people were eminently able to self-govern and he likens the colonisers to ‘devils’. A delight to European high society, such debates did little to halt the campaigns of destructive expansion into the ‘New’ World. BELOW

Thomas More illustration from Utopia 1518, Johann Froben: Basel, Switzerland. This semi-cartographic illustration of More’s island Utopia is taken from the first Swiss edition of the work and was engraved by Ambrosius Holbein. Colour was added at a later date.

4 Utopian visions As new territory was amassed, the ‘utopia’ concept expanded. Thomas More’s book Utopia (1516) falls within a tradition of world-building literature that encompasses al-Fārābī’s Perfect State (p.110) and Plato’s Republic (p.37), and is undoubtedly accented by the colonial projects in South America. Written in Latin, as a nested dialogue, it describes an island off the coast of Brazil, which he calls ‘Utopia’. This island, for More, is idyllic. The Utopians have no conception of private property, they share their produce and enjoy access to communal storage spaces. Their working day lasts a mere six hours. On their views of ‘happiness’, he comments: …They seem, indeed, more inclinable to that opinion that places, if not the whole, yet the chief part of a man’s happiness in pleasure… More’s story examines the idea of an ideal society – and whether such ideals are possible. The ‘-topia’ in utopia comes from the Greek topos, meaning place, but the ‘u-’ hovers precariously between eû, meaning ‘good’ in Greek, and ou, meaning ‘not’. A utopia is thus both a ‘good place’ and a ‘not-place’, raising the question whether such a society is a genuine prospect or a dream. A ‘good place’ for some may be a difficult one for others. The Utopia described by More possesses colonies; the Utopians colonise to cope with overpopulation and enslave other people to further Utopian ends. These practices are part and parcel of More’s vision. His rhetoric licenses slavery by demonstrating its function in a more ‘natural’ utopian society. Few among More’s readers would have objected to his view of slavery, but he was not without critics. Utopia, with its implicit endorsement of communitarian projects, ruffled the feathers of the English monarch, Henry VIII – and undoubtedly contributed to More’s death on 6 July 1535, when he was beheaded by order of the Crown.

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LEFT

Thomas More, pages from Utopia, 1518, Johann Froben: Basel, Switzerland. More wrote Utopia in 1515 and 1516. His friend, Desiderius Erasmus, helped edit the work before it was first published in Louvain in late 1516. Erasmus also sent a copy to Johann Froben, who subsequently published the book in Basel. It was subsequently translated into Italian in 1548, French in 1550 and English in 1551, six years after More’s execution.

5 Innate ideas While Europe rose, other global powers fell. Following tumultuous relations with the Mongols, the Míng dynasty had implemented severe austerity measures in China. Unlike the Spanish and Portuguese, they stopped sponsoring colonial explorations, instead installing punitive systems of taxation. Combined with trouble from Japanese ‘pirates’ and concerns about corruption, dissent started to spread. It was against this backdrop that the works of Wáng Yángmíng (or ‘Wáng Shǒurén’) (1472–1529) appeared. During the sixteenth century Rúism was still the dominant ideology in China, reinvigorated by the works of Zhū Xī and the Chéng siblings. Wáng, however, thought Zhū too heavily dependent on tradition and rote learning, on acquiring knowledge for knowledge’s own sake. His Instructions for Practical Living (1518) and Inquiry on The Great Learning (1527) are rationalist and practical in tone, indicative of Wáng’s training in military strategy. In these works he emphasises the integration of knowledge and action, and the active aspects of mental life. In the Instructions he observes [Y]ou are now to have a discussion with me. … Is there a mind within you to take care of this discussion? When you are talking and your mind concentrates on being serious, it is the same mind as when you are engaged in sitting meditation. The task is a continuous and unified one. What is the need of making up the mind on top of it? One must be trained and polished in actual affairs of life.

ABOVE

Portrait of Thomas More, 1527, England.

Hans Holbein the Younger’s oak panel painting of More was produced during the artist’s stay in London. Despite the opulence of the setting, the shimmering velvet sleeves and the Tudor Rose necklace, Holbein has managed to capture a certain nervousness in More’s face as he looks to his left, avoiding the viewer’s gaze.

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BELOW

Scene with a person resembling Anne Conway, c. 1670, The Hague, Holland. This piece by the Dutch painter Samuel van Hoogstraten, titled Perspective View with a Woman Reading a Letter, is sometimes taken to depict Conway because of the similarities between the subject’s face and a miniature of the philosopher. It is currently on display in the Mauritshuis in The Hague.

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His Inquiry also presents a position often referred to as ‘innatism’. Wáng holds that certain ideas are ‘innate’: some concepts are simply baked into human minds and one of the tasks of philosophers is to articulate them. This is a doctrine with direct political relevance; it holds that knowledge can be present in human minds of whatever kind or inclination, and is therefore as accessible to the peasantry and to women as much as to aristocratic men. Given Rúist orthodoxy, and the strict control of the Míng-ruled state, it was perhaps inevitable that the more egalitarian aspects of Wáng’s philosophy failed to gain momentum. A century later, however, and further west, ideas very similar to these were to become the intellectual standard.

6 Liberated reason In earlier times thinkers from Islamic and Christian traditions had discussed the relative merits of reason and revelation in obtaining knowledge. By the sixteenth century rational deliberation, rather than mystical experience, had become the epistemic norm and an increasing number of (non-religious) books satirised the new intelligentsia, who bowed to Reason rather than to God. Earthy and humorous, the Essays (1590) of the French writer Michel de Montaigne (1533–1592) satirises academic elites as having too high an opinion of their rational faculties. Montaigne frequently engages in ‘theriophily’, the celebration of non-human animals and their cognitive capacities, to undermine what he saw as mistaken beliefs about human supremacy (and academic elitism). Cats can debate just as well as humans if you care to listen to them. Such works prompted vigorous rebuttals from scholars, including René Descartes (1596–1650). Active in France and the Netherlands, Descartes is well known for his ‘proofs’ of the existence of God (similar to those of Anselm, p.154) and his innatism (similar to that of Wáng Yángmíng). In texts such as Discourse on Method (1637) and the Meditations (1641), Descartes argues, against Montaigne and in line with his own ‘mechanical’ philosophy, that non-human animals are in some ways little more than clocks that bark and meow. The Discourse and Meditations also contain Descartes’ famous ‘cogito’. Restating a classic argument found in Ibn Sīnā, Descartes offers readers a grounding thought: cogito ergo sum (I think therefore I am). While sceptical doubt may corrode all other thoughts, it cannot corrode this fundamental one. Even the process of doubting, Descartes claims, presupposes a being (‘I’) who doubts.

The Cogito in turn stimulates Cartesian dualism, a metaphysical position that sees mind and body as distinct things – since the body, unlike the mind, may still be doubted. These books revere the rational mind so highly that they position it as metaphysically different from every other item in the universe. Descartes’s extreme views about human rationality have been the subject of considerable debate. Among his contemporaries, Anne Conway (1631–1679) offers a Platonic response. Her Principles of the Most Ancient and Modern Philosophy (c. 1671–1677) draws on Platonic metaphysics and posits a single, infinitely good, wise and just source of all being (God). Rejecting Descartes’ mechanism, she sees the world as populated by living, motile beings whose existence flows from and reflects the glory of the One. Few of Descartes’ critics were quite as incisive as Elisabeth von der Pfalz (Princess of Bohemia) (1618–1680). Her views appear most clearly in a series of letters, published in

ABOVE

Michel de Montaigne, title page of the Essays, 1580, S. Millanges: Bordeaux, France. With an elaborate headpiece and a historiated capital letter, this is the second-state title page of the first volume of the first edition of Montaigne’s text. ‘Second state’ refers to a first edition subject to a minor printing change, such as a correction or change in binding colour.

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RIGHT

René Descartes, title page of Meditations on First Philosophy, 1641, Michael Soly: Paris, France. On the title page of this Latin edition of the Meditations we find the phrase ‘Apud Michaelem Soly’. The Latin, ‘apud’, means ‘in the presence of ’ and can be used to cite a reference at a remove, suggesting this version was either copied from Soly’s edition or (more likely) printed at his shop. FAR RIGHT

Portrait of Descartes, c. 1687–1691, Johannes Tangena: Leiden, Holland. This portrait of Descartes by the Dutch engraver Cornelis A. Hellemans shows him in three-quarter view, in the process of writing, with one foot symbolically placed on what could well be a sheaf of out-dated material (the works of Aristotelian scholastics).

book form nearly two centuries after her death. In these she challenges Descartes’ dualism, arguing that an absolute distinction between mind and body raises serious problems for causation. How, if the immaterial mind is so separate, can it affect the material body? Von der Pfalz was not alone in pursuing this line. We find similar comments in the texts of the Ghanaian philosopher known to Europeans as ‘Anton Wilhelm Amo’.

7 Trans-continental reason ABOVE

Portrait of Elisabeth, 1912, Manchester, UK. A twentieth-century so-called ‘cigarette miniature’, after a painting in oil on panel by Gerrit van Honthorst, this portrait depicts the philosopher in pearls, jewellery that symbolises affluence and high social rank.

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By the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries Christianity and Islam had gained footholds throughout Africa; Greek, Arabic and Latin texts were housed in the continent’s libraries and universities. Often imports from the east and north found uptake among local peoples. For example, in the Christian Kingdom of Aksum, in modern-day Ethiopia, we find compilations such as The Book of Wise Philosophers (1510), which examine many of the same questions that vexed academics in Europe. Written in the Ethiopic Ge‘ez language by the priest Abba Mikael, the book contains a collection of philosophical pronouncements that synthesise ethical and theological topics born from Arabic and Greek thought.

Africa witnessed similar religious struggles to those that had riven Europe and the Middle East. A century after Mikael’s text, we see the publication of The Life-Struggles of Wälättä P̣eṭros (1672). Based on oral testimonies, this work records the moral reflections of the philosopher-nun Wälättä P̣eṭros (1592–1642). Raised and educated in the Ethiopian Orthodox Christian Church, P̣eṭros was a vocal Orthodox critic of the Catholicism imported by the Portuguese. The book details her resistance to Sūsenyōs I’s endorsement of the ‘foreign’ ideas. P̣eṭros’s contemporary Zer’ā Yāʿiqōb (c. 1599–1692) hailed from northern Ethiopia. Like P̣eṭros he was exiled from his lands for resisting state-imposed Catholicism, and is said to have lived for several years in a cave. While starved of company he was hardly starved of inspiration and it was in exile that Zer’ā Yāʿiqōb conceived his book Ḥatäta (Inquiry) (1667). The Ḥatäta is a fascinating work, not least in demonstrating the coincidence of intellectual trends north and south of the Nile Delta. Zer’ā Yāʿiqōb proposes a philosophy centred around an individual’s capacity for natural reasoning. All people are equal; they have equal intelligence and hence all can trust their ability to discover truth through reflection. To the person who seeks it, truth is immediately revealed. Indeed, he who investigates with the pure intelligence set by the creator in the heart of each man and scrutinizes the order and laws of creation, will discover the truth. This work, and that of Zer’ā Yāʿiqōb’s student Walda Hèywat (The Treatise of Walda Hèywat), still have very few translations into European languages. Cultural exchange can be wildly asymmetric and the routes by which philosophers and their works travelled from Africa to Europe were often deeply disturbing. The life of Anton Wilhelm Amo is a case in point. In western Africa, the Ashanti Empire had control of the borders of the Akan Kingdom of Bonoman. Anton Wilhelm Amo ‘Afer’ (c. 1703–1759) was born in the coastal town of Axim, in present-day Ghana, but would not have been known by that name at birth. Only after he had been kidnapped as a child by affiliates of the Dutch West India Company and ‘gifted’ to a Prussian duke did he receive this more Europeansounding name. Despite displacement, Amo excelled at the education offered him. In the 1720s he exceeded racist expectations by obtaining a doctorate from the University of Wittenberg. Amo’s now-lost dissertation, On the Rights of Moors in Europe (1729), defended Black rights in Europe. It was followed by On the Impassivity of the Human Mind (1734), in which the author targets inconsistencies in Cartesian dualism. If, as Descartes held, the human soul is immaterial, it cannot have sense perception: No spirit senses material things; and yet the human mind is a Spirit, therefore it does not sense material things. Amo wrote widely, on ‘sober and accurate’ philosophising, before returning to Ghana, but his critique of Descartes received the widest readership.

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8 The New Science In addition to the dualistic world-view and the enthronement of reason, Descartes’ readers responded to his advocacy of a ‘mechanical’ philosophy. Descartes aimed to supplant the Church-endorsed Aristotelianism, which understood the natural world in ‘teleological’ terms; télos means ‘end’ or ‘goal’ in Greek, and scholastics understood all objects as striving naturally towards some natural end. For Descartes most things could be seen as the product of mechanical interactions, of cause and effect. In shifting away from Church orthodoxy, Descartes built on earlier works of natural philosophy. One of these, The New Organon (1620) by the English thinker Francis Bacon, sought to replace Aristotle’s ‘tool’ (órganon in Greek) for scientific practice. Attacking syllogistic reasoning, which relies on abstract concepts, Bacon advocates a new ‘scientific method’, declaring that readers should begin their inquiries with data gleaned through the senses. Only then should they attempt to develop general axioms. This process is known as ‘inductive reasoning’. It contrasts with the ‘deductive reasoning’ common to Aristotelian scholars, which begins with general principles and extrapolates them to explain individual cases. This new method was to become highly influential, eventually separating the discipline of philosophy from the natural sciences. Challenging the authority of the Church came with certain risks. Descartes kept his The World unpublished for fear it would incite the same backlash as Galileo Galilei’s claims about planetary motions, deemed heretical. Meanwhile Bacon largely escaped

ABOVE

Illustrations from the life of Wälättä P̣eṭros, 1672–1673, Ethiopia. In this Ethiopian pictorial manuscript, now held in the Saxon State and University Library in Dresden, we see vividly coloured scenes from the life of Wälättä P̣eṭros, performing miracles, such as saving people from illness, animals and attackers.

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Francis Bacon, title page for Novum Organum, 1645, Wijngaerde and Moiardus: Leiden, Holland. The imagery in this opening image is striking, suggesting the reader is embarking on a voyage, passing through columns into calm seas of possibility. The ‘new organon’ is linked to the colonial framing of the ‘new world’. Along the bottom of the illustration we read the words ‘Multi pertransibunt et augebitur scientia’. ‘Many will pass through and knowledge will be increased’.

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official censure, but was the subject of more literary attacks. The Description of a New World, Called the Blazing-World by Margaret Cavendish (1623–1673) is one of these. Another utopic work, The Blazing-World (1666) tells of a voyage to a parallel dimension. A young scholar is abducted and transported to the North Pole, where she finds her way to an alternate reality, to be appointed ‘World Empress’ by talking ‘bearpeople’. Alongside reflections on a perfect society – with ‘one Sovereign, one Religion, one Law, and one Language, so that all the World might be but as one united Family’ (the conservative Cavendish feared multiculturalism) – she objects to the ‘new’ scientific method. Dialogues between the empress and her subjects suggest that knowledge of the natural world is best achieved through rational reflection, rather than empirical analysis. Scientific equipment, she says, distorts reality; a microscope, for instance, will ‘make a Lowse appear as big as an Elephant’. Cavendish’s critique still resounds in debates about the reliability of data collection and analysis, though it did little to stop the shift in scientific practice.

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Margaret Cavendish frontispiece from The Blazing World, 1671, England. Margaret Cavendish Frontispiece from The Blazing World, 1671, England Commissioned by the author in the 1650s, this engraving by Abraham van Diepenbeeck shows Cavendish surrounded by writing materials, with putti (secular cherubs) placing a poet’s laurel on her head alongside a small crown, which signifies her aristocratic status. She appears, as a solitary, studious ‘melancholic’ thinker. Unlike many author images, there are no books around her, suggesting originality and freedom from influence.

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Portrait of Leibniz, c. 1729, Germany. Rendered in the Baroque style by the German painter Christoph Bernhard Francke, this portrait of Leibniz is currently housed in the Herzog Anton Ulrich Museum. BELOW RIGHT

Gottfried Leibniz, title page of Theodicy, 1710, Isaac Troyel: Amsterdam, The Netherlands. The first printer of the Theodicy, Isaac Troyel removed the controversial concept of ‘natural theology’ from the original title.

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9 Poor discipline While Bacon’s New Organon carved out new disciplinary niches, the sciences – physical, biological and chemical – had yet to be separated from the areas many nowadays think typify philosophical inquiry. ‘Polymathematic’ scholars continued to work in all these fields – and few had quite so wide a skill set as the German philosopher Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz (1646–1716). Within the scientific community Leibniz is known for his intellectual feud with Isaac Newton (over who first invented calculus), as well as his innovations in logical notation and his theories of physical motion. Within academic philosophy he is famous for his metaphysics, theology and his neo-Aristotelian view of living substances. Many of these thoughts intersect in his Monadology (1714).There, he articulates the concept of a ‘monad’, a simple, molecule-like individual, and the idea of ‘pre-established harmony’, which sees these radically independent monads as causally isolated, but still ‘harmonizing’, having been so programmed by God. In his Essays of Theodicy on the Goodness of God, the Freedom of Humans and the Origin of Evil (1710) Leibniz refreshes arguments seen in the Babylonian Kōheleṯ

(p.18), arguing that – despite all the suffering – the world in which we live is ‘the best possible world’. We might try and imagine life differently but, bound by logic, even the divine being could not have improved on what currently exists. Like Devasūri, Leibniz enlarges notions of modal operators, of what is and is not possible, necessary or contingent. His apologetic arguments received varying reviews. Some celebrated them, but in François-Marie Arouet’s (or ‘Voltaire’s) Candide, or Optimism (1759) Leibniz is the subject of satirical caricature in the figure of the prating scientist-philosopher ‘Professor Pangloss’.

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10 Scientific racism

Gottfried Leibniz, pages from the manuscript of the Monadology, 1714, Germany.

In recent years, intellectual historians have analysed how the self-proclaimed ‘New Science’ helped to legitimise racist imperialism. Older systems, such as the Catholic Church, deferred to ‘natural hierarchies’ established by God to defend the subjugation of ethnic groups (and the exploitation of natural resources). However, in this age of ‘new worlds’ and ‘new science’, new rationale was needed: colonisers positioned themselves as superior not by divine decree, but on apparently objective, ‘scientific’ grounds. Loaded

With numerous addenda and erasures, these pages from an early draft of the Monadology are a treasure trove for scholars seeking to understand the philosopher’s philosophical process.

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ABOVE

Portrait of Anne Dacier, date unknown. This colour engraving by Camille Rogier, depicts the writer sitting at her desk. As with many of the other women scholars mentioned in this book, there are far fewer images – painted or otherwise – and a scarcity of information about the ones we have.

surveys in anthropology and ‘natural history’ were taken to show that the societies compiling the data were more developed than the ‘primitive’ ones they studied. Empirical observation was elaborated into general principles, which were then used to license colonising projects. The transatlantic trade in enslaved people – which started in 1526, after a Portuguese ship carried enslaved people from the West African coast to Brazil – was consonant with the intellectual spirit of Europe. As the so-called ‘Enlightenment’ took hold, supposedly ‘rational’ and ‘scientific’ arguments were used to excuse these barbaric practices. Most notable among the imperial philosophers is Immanuel Kant (1724–1804). He helped popularise the term ‘Enlightenment’ (in an essay of 1784, ‘What is Enlightenment?’), seeing secularism as the defining feature of his age. Kant encouraged the shift in power, from the authority of the Church to the authority of reason, in works such as Religion within the Bounds of Reason Alone (1793). He is also known for his pursuit of ethical axioms such as his ‘categorical imperative’. In one formulation this holds that it is, categorically, imperative to treat others as ends in themselves, rather than as means to an end. Kant is also known as a ‘systematic philosopher’. He was a system-builder who aimed to honour the conceptual connections between aesthetics, ethics, metaphysics – and anthropology. In his Anthropology from a Pragmatic Point of View (1798) he builds on scientific racism, arguing that there are different ‘races’ of people, and that of these different races the White European is the most sophisticated and developed. As the twentieth-century philosopher Emmanuel Chukwudi Eze points out, these racist views were understood as the product of ‘neutral’, and thus unassailable, reason. Kant’s work, in effect, ‘colonizes humanity’. Central to this new ‘rational’ edifice was the notion of ‘objectivity’. Kant’s texts aim specifically to transcend local, ‘subjective’ concerns. Through reason the reader could assume the absolute perspective once restricted to God. The conclusions reached within these systems were, to the minds of their practitioners, unquestionable. To modern audiences such claims to objective judgement may sound hubristic, if not ridiculous. Nowhere is this hubris more evident than in the philosophical debates about the objectivity of taste. In his essay ‘Of the Standard of Taste’ (1757) and A Treatise on Human Nature (1738), the Scottish philosopher David Hume argued that broad agreement about beauty suggests there are objective standards of taste. Some artworks are simply more beautiful than others. Moreover, Hume argues these standards can be divined by ‘true judges’, people with refined aesthetic senses (like wine connoisseurs). This elitism is especially troubling when combined with another thought, captured by Anne Dacier in Of the Causes of the Corruption of Taste (1714). She writes that: …taste is an indicator of the level of civilization, both moral and artistic, within a particular culture. We are told that beauty is a matter of objective judgement, dispensed by cultural gatekeepers (who are, predictably, from the same socio-cultural bracket as Hume and Dacier). In addition, the level of beauty of an artwork is an indicator of the level of the

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civilisation in which it was produced. It is little surprise that, as in Kant’s work, Hume’s Treatise is saturated with latent (or not so latent) white supremacist thought.

11 Personal property Simultaneous to these shifts in aesthetics, ethics and metaphysics, we see changing attitudes to ownership, governance and personhood that further empowered the European empires, both overseas and at home. Thomas Hobbes’ Leviathan or The Matter, Forme and Power of a Common-Wealth Ecclesiasticall and Civil (1651) was written in the wake of the defeat of the Royalists in the English Civil War (1642–1651) and the execution of Charles I. Its conservative thesis held that, except when their lives were threatened, citizens should obey governmental authority. Hobbes envisages a presumed ‘social contract’ between citizens and the state, in which the former relinquish certain rights in exchange for protection. The alternative is a pre-social ‘state of nature’ in which, he says, life would be ‘nasty, brutish and short’. In the Two Treatises of Government (1689) John Locke responds to the Leviathan. The first treatise argues against the divine right of kings, while the second re-assesses the ‘state of nature’. Locke rejects Hobbes’s view that subjects have implicitly (and out of fear) ceded all rights and freedoms. Humans, Locke states, have various ‘natural rights’: to life,

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Portrait of Immanuel Kant, Eighteenth Century, Germany. Every detail of this recoloured illustration of Kant is intended to emphasise his dynamic mind. Sat upright in a reclining chair, he is simultaneously consulting an astrolabe, staring in thought and in the process of writing. BELOW

Immanuel Kant, title page from the Anthropology, 1799, Frankfurt, Germany. This German language edition of Kant’s work is held in the Wellcome Collection in London. Like many institutions in the Twenty-First Century, the Wellcome has put scans of the entire book online, rendering fragile texts easily accessible to both researchers and the general public.

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to health, to liberty and to property. His emphasis on liberty positions him as a founding architect of political ‘liberalism’. In its economic form (sometimes called ‘neoliberalism’) it is directed towards deregulated, ‘free’ market policies – the backdrop to the capitalist systems discussed in the next chapter. Relatedly, Locke’s focus on an individual’s right to property helped to justify landgrabs of the kind seen in the Americas. For Locke, every person (‘man’) has absolute ownership of their bodies. By working, cultivating the land and mixing their labours with the earth, they can come to own it. This Lockean account crucially ignores the property rights of nomadic people or non-subsistence societies, such as those of many Native Americans. It also explains the significance of the term ‘New World’. By construing territory as ‘new’ (or, more disturbingly, as ‘virgin’), there was no need to defend expansion. Land that was not owned could not be stolen. Locke’s politics fed directly into his metaphysics, especially into his conception of ‘personal identity’. The revised edition of his Essay Concerning Human Understanding

LEFT

Thomas Hobbes, frontispiece of Leviathan: The Matter, Forme and Power of a Common Wealth Ecclesiasticall and Civil, 1651, Andrew Crooke: London, UK. In this version of a famous engraving by Abraham Bosse, the public are contained within the sovereign body of the monarch, thriving but ultimately under his control.

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ABOVE

John Locke, Frontispiece and title page of An Essay Concerning Human Understanding, 1695, Awnsham and J. Churchill: London, UK.

(1690) discusses how persons persist. What, he asks, makes the entity that started reading this sentence the same as the one who finishes it? His answer (continued consciousness) is perhaps less interesting than his reasons for posing the question. The discrete, bounded, self-owning, rational individual – the liberal human subject – was an essential posit for his accounts of land ownership and commerce. Locke was part of the wave of natural philosophers who saw themselves illuminating mysteries long preserved by the Catholic Church. He was a member of a ‘modern society’ and saw forced ownership – or ‘stewardship’ – of American and African territories as a function of a truly modern enterprise (a conviction evidenced by his role in slave-trading organisations such as the Royal African Company). In some ways his thoughts contrast with those found in The Social Contract (1762) by Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1712–1778), which indicts ‘civilisation’ and its corrupting influences. For Rousseau, modernity bred moral degeneracy. It is worth noting, however, that Rousseau’s account fetishises the ‘primitive’ subject – the ‘Noble Savage’, as he put it – who is corrupted by European influences. His critique of modern life and colonialism is not therefore without its issues.

In the third edition of the Essay, Locke’s frontispiece portrait appears on a fictive, crested pedestal, intended to emphasise his authority and learning. The title page contains an epigraph from Cicero’s De Natura Deorum (On the Nature of the Gods), which translates: ‘How delightful it would be, Velleius, to confess not to know what you did not know, instead of uttering this nonsense, which must make even you disgusted with yourself!’

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RIGHT

Jean Jacques Rousseau, title page from The Social Contract. 1762, Marc-Michel Rey: Amsterdam, The Netherlands. Published by Marc-Michel Rey, the title page features an eclectic illustration with the figure of justice standing in a forest glade, holding a hat on a stick, with a cat by her feet. The opening epigraph from the Aeneid reads: ‘foederis aequas dicamus leges’. ‘Let us set equal terms for the treaty.’ FAR RIGHT

Jean-Jacques Rousseau, title page from The Social Contract, I762, Marc-Michel Rey: Amsterdam, The Netherlands. Marc-Michel Rey, the publisher of this edition, was based in Amsterdam, where he produced a number of books for French philosophers who were elsewhere considered too controversial to publish.

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12 Divine logic During the European economic upturn, the Dutch state invested heavily in trade. In 1602 it founded the Dutch East India Company to manage the import and export of goods (including enslaved people) to and from Mughal India. At the start of the seventeenth century, Dutch control in India was largely unofficial. However, their arrival led to a sharp increase in European colonisation of the subcontinent and brought lasting damage to its societies, cultural output and archives. For a long time India had been a cultural powerhouse. At the start of this period important religious commentaries, such as the Bījak by Kabīr (fl. fifteenth century), were being circulated alongside works of logic like the Tattvacintāmaṇidīdhiti by Raghunātha Śiromaṇi (c. 1477–1547). The Mughal Empire, aided by Ottoman and Safavid forces, overthrew the Delhi Sultanate in the early sixteenth century. Building on the institutions of their predecessors, the new rulers promoted tolerance for open inquiry. The open atmosphere of the officially Hindu Mughal Empire was a boon to Muslim writers such as Muḥibballāh Illāhābādī (1587–1648). A Sūfi thinker inspired by the thirteenth-century Andalusian Ibn ʿArabī (p.129), Illāhābādī wrote commentaries on Ibn ʿArabī’s Ringstones of Wisdom and defended his doctrine of ‘oneness’ in a text known as the Taswīyah (Equalisation). In this work Illāhābādī holds that Ibn ʿArabī’s doctrine of the

oneness (or ‘monism’) should not be interpreted literally, but rather understood as a guide for social relationships. Accenting Ibn ʿArabī’s metaphysics in this way implicitly discouraged the imperial government from discriminating between Muslims and Hindus (since both are part of Allāh’s creation). As well as welcoming diverse philosophies, the Mughal Empire orchestrated trade deals with representatives of diverse nation-states. This proved lucrative for the Dutch Republic (more so than for the Mughals); in fact the ‘Dutch Golden Age’ was largely funded by its exploitative practices in the east. A state well known for its open-minded humanism, which gave shelter to philosophers and political exiles alike, was built on destructive foreign policies. Among those who benefited from Dutch liberalism was Baruch de Spinoza (1632– 1677), the child of Sephardic Jews who had fled the Spanish peninsula after Catholic expulsion. Unlike Illāhābādī and Ibn ʿArabī, Spinoza’s focus was less on reconciling specific theological systems and more on critiquing organised religion in general. His Ethics, Demonstrated in Geometrical Order (1677) is anti-establishment and powerfully reason-driven in tone. Prefiguring Kant, it aims to make religious thought align with the

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Raghunātha Śiromaṇi, pages from the Tattvacintāmaṇidīdhiti c. 1700–1850, India. Kept in the University of Pennsylvania’s Rare Book and Manuscript Library, these pages come from an eighteenth- or nineteenthcentury manuscript on logic composed of twenty foliated leaves, with significant words or phrases highlighted in red.

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Portrait of Baruch de Spinoza, late seventeenth or early eighteenth century, Germany or The Netherlands. This oil-painted portrait of Baruch de Spinoza was produced posthumously, in the century after the author’s death, by an unknown author. He is pictured wearing modest black clothing, with a flat white collar.

strictures of logic. Spinoza opposes anthromorphised views of God, promoting instead the notion of an impersonal divinity, indistinguishable from nature. Whatever is, is in God, and nothing can exist or be conceived without God. Within this framework, ‘prayers’ become meaningless, as there is no individual, temporal entity to answer them. For Spinoza, religious observance is a matter of natural philosophy: rational deliberation brings us closer to God. Developing this argument further, he distinguishes between different ways of viewing the world: either as temporal, bounded beings (sub specie durationis) or from an absolute, eternal perspective (sub specie aeternitatis). The latter ‘view from nowhere’ again feeds into the notion of objectivity, which was to play a central role in the philosophies of later centuries.

13 Dutch-Japanese relations The Dutch Republic’s monopoly on trade with Japan also contributed to its success. After a period of social upheaval and military conflict, early seventeenth-century Japan had been unified under the Tokugawa Shōgunate, which oversaw relative peace and economic growth – but also the controlled closure of borders to suppress the spread of Christianity. Despite its distancing from foreign powers, Japan produced strongly Rúist thought during this Edo period. We see this in the popularity of Dialogue with an Old Man (1646) by Nakae Tōju or ‘Mokken’ (1608–1648), a follower of Wáng Yángmíng. The

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Dialogue focuses on the ethics of filial piety, declaring it to be ‘the supreme virtue’ and ‘the fountainhead of all human actions’. Sketching a vivid post-birth scene, Nakae describes the sacrifices parents make for their children. If the child is sleeping, the mother will not even stretch her body for fear of waking it, and even if her body is dirty and stained with blood, she has no time to bathe or wash her hair. These sacrifices and blessings must be repaid to attain virtue. Mokken states that this position is consistent with Japan’s native Shintō principles; unlike Buddhism, it does not advocate severing family ties. Such an emphasis on social cohesion would have had powerful resonances at this time of increasing isolation. Another trend in Edo philosophy was Samurai scholarship, or bushidō (the code of the warrior). Mixing Rúist, Zen Buddhist and Shintō thought, works such as Miyamoto Musashi’s Book of Five Rings (c. 1645) and Yamamoto Tsunetomo’s Hagakure (c. 1716) consider the place of the warrior class in peacetime. Miyamoto (1584–1645) had been employed as a rōnin, a samurai without a master; his book reflects on the ‘craft of war’ and related questions regarding social relations. Spiritual and practical, its final section, titled ‘Book of Void’, echoes Buddhist considerations of emptiness. Later, as Japan’s isolationist policy grew stronger, the Kokugaku school for the ‘study of national heritage’ brought fresh attention to Japanese classics. With commentaries on the Tale of Genji, Motoori Norinaga (1730–1801) sought to capture indigenous Japanese laws, ideas and the ‘ancient ways’ of Shintō. His work offers a nationalist theory of emotion, introducing the state of mono no aware, a general sensitivity to things and their transience, as ‘typically Japanese’, while dismissing Chinese Rúism as artificial. At this time the Dutch were the only point of Japanese access to European intellectual trends, after they were assigned a trading post on the island of Dejima (literally ‘Exit Island’) in the 1640s. Consequently in seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Japan ‘Dutch’ came to refer to all things from the Far West. We thus see the publication of works such as Sayings of the Dutch (1787) by Morishima Chūryō and Beginning of Dutch Studies (1815), a translation of Dutch anatomical texts lead by Sugita Genpaku. Only in the mid-nineteenth century, with the threatening arrival of the newly established United States, did this special relationship dissolve and the Edo period come to an end.

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Portrait of Nakae Tōju, date unknown. This is a replica of a portrait of the Japanese Rúist Tōju, exhibited in the Shizutani School archives. He wears his hair in the ‘chonmage’ style common to the period.

14 Resistance After its Declaration of Independence (1776), the United States of America established autonomy from Britain and rapidly developed into an important geopolitical presence. Like the Dutch, Spanish, Portuguese and British, the USA’s success depended on self-serving foreign policies and the free labour of people forced into slavery. Some think it unfair to judge these societies by today’s more progressive standards, yet such a view overlooks the variety of books from the time that explicitly critique these practices.

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Portrait of Miyamoto Musashi, c. 1843, Japan. Produced by the ukiyo-e artist Utagawa Kuniyoshi, this dynamic print, which incorporates text and image, pictures Miyamoto Musashi in battle with a scaled dragon. The work is found in Kuniyoshi's A Suikoden of Japanese Heroes.

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Amo’s On the Law of Moors in Europe, stands within a long tradition of resistance literature, with entries from around the globe. The Ladder for Rising to the Knowledge of the Legal Status of Enslaved Black People (or Replies on Slavery) was written in 1608 by Abu al-ʿAbbās Aḥmad ibn Aḥmad al-Takrūrī al-Massūfī al-Tinbuktī (Aḥmad Bābā, 1556–1627). Aḥmad Bābā argues that only ‘unbelievers’ can be enslaved – that is, slavery must be performed along religious, rather than racialised lines. Such a view may not seem especially progressive, but the Replies at least denaturalises slavery and offers the chance of religious manumission (since converts to Islam must be liberated). We find a similar attitude in the work of Nānā Asmā’u bint ‘Uthmān dan Fodīyo (1793–1864), of the Sokoto Caliphate (in present-day Nigeria). Her Hausa-language work Be Sure of God’s Truth (1831, adapted from her father’s original of 1811) examines issues of ethics, rights and responsibilities under Islam. She accepts the enslavement of captives of war, but warns that hell-fire will engulf those who enslave free people in peacetime. In the eighteenth century several other anti-slavery texts emerged out of Africa. Quobna Ottobah Cugoano (c. 1757–1803) was born in the city of Ajumako in the south of present-day Ghana. He was abducted at the age of 13 and endured forced labour in plantations on Grenada, before being ‘purchased’ in England. Here Cugoano was educated, and eventually freed. His Thoughts and Sentiments on the Evil and Wicked Traffic LEFT

Aḥmad Bābā, page from The Ladder for Rising, seventeenth century, Tombouctou, Mali. Written in Arabic and grounded in the work of Islamic legal theorists like Ibn Khaldoun, Aḥmad Bābā’s text discusses slavery in West Africa during the seventeenth century.

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RIGHT

Painting of the Haitian Revolution, 1839, Furne & Cie: Paris, France. Taken from the History of Napoleon, written by Jacques Marquet de Montbreton de Norvins and illustrated by Auguste Raffet, this picture depicts combat between French and Haitian troops. Importantly, viewers witness the battle as seen from the Haitian side.

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of Slavery and Commerce of the Human Species (1787) draws upon biblical and biographical evidence to argue that slavery can never be lawful. Cugoano also reflects on the nature of complicity: if you are not actively preventing the evils of slavery, he maintains, you are responsible for its continuation: Every man in Great Britain [is] responsible, in some degree, for the shocking and inhuman murders and oppressions of the Africans. Cugoano’s work, alongside The Interesting Narrative of the Life of Olaudah Equiano by Olaudah Equiano (1745–1797), appeared at the same time as growing anti-colonial movements, such as the one led by the Vodou priest and leader Dutty Boukman. ‘Voudou’, or ‘Voodoo’, is a philosophical-religious outlook that synthesises West African thought with elements of Roman Catholicism. It was developed in what is now Haiti and the Dominican Republic by victims of slavery from the Kingdom of Dahomey and Kongo. Voudou focuses on metaphysical questions of spirit and on concrete ethical matters too. In 1791 Boukman lectured, together with Cécile Fatiman (fl.1791), on the need for a spiritual uprising. They distinguished between the ‘god of the whites’ and ‘our God’, thereby articulating an anti-colonial, anti-white-supremacist approach to divinity. Working within the Vodou oral tradition, Boukman’s speech made it into print in 1824 in the Voyage dans le nord d’Hayiti by Herard Dumesle. After the erosion of the authority of both Church and Monarchy – a consequence of sustained ‘humanist’ attacks on, among other things, the divine right of kings –

marginalised groups became more empowered. The French Revolution (1789–1799) saw the overthrow of the monarchy and the establishment of a republic. Lands colonised by the Spanish and Portuguese in South America sought independence. Militarist and politician Simón José Antonio de la Santísima Trinidad Bolívar y Palacios Ponte-Andrade y Blanco (1783–1830) wrote in his Letter from Jamaica (1815) that even tyranny by one’s own people is better than rule by foreign might. Like those before him, Bolívar aimed to achieve strength through unity, articulating a common sense of South American identity. Perhaps most striking is the Haitian Revolution (1791–1804). Building on the resistance literature of those such as Cugoano and Boukman, the Constitution of SaintDomingue of 1801 by Haitian general François-Dominique Toussaint Louverture (1743–1803) offers a philosophically informed programme for the renewal of the territory of Saint-Domingue. Its societies had been fragmented by European exploitation and enforced hierarchies based on skin colour. Louverture states that slavery should both be forbidden and impossible (‘There cannot exist slaves on this territory’) and rejects racialised hierarchies, accepting only distinctions based on ‘virtue and talent’. The movement gained momentum and the first and only successful revolution of enslaved people ended with the land gaining independence as the Empire of Haiti in 1804.

LEFT

Olaudah Equiano, frontispiece and title page from The Interesting Narrative of The Life of Olaudah Equiano 1789, T. Wilkins: London, England. In this frontispiece portrait of Equiano, the author meets the reader’s gaze and holds (perhaps) a copy of the book itself. The title page lists the author as ‘Olaudah Equiano or Gustavus Vassa, the African’.

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15 Intersections

TOP

Portrait of Mary Wollstonecraft, c. 1790–91, England. Painted by John Opie, this portrait shows Wollstonecraft with her hair tied back, momentarily distracted from her book by the viewer. Her quill, on the left of the painting, is at the ready.

Civil rights struggles were ongoing elsewhere too. The Learned Maid (1638) by Anna Maria van Schurman, Mary Astell’s two-part A Serious Proposal to the Ladies (1694 and 1697) and Mary Wollstonecraft’s A Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1792) argue for equal access to education. In keeping with the intellectual spirit of the age, these books focus on the democratic potential of reason and hold that this capacity was enjoyed by men and women. By unreasonably excluding certain groups, male ‘luminaries’ failed to live up to their own standards. Nor were these conversations found only in Europe. Based in today’s Mexico City, Juana Inés de Asbaje y Ramírez de Santillana (c. 1648–1695), later known as Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz, defends women’s writing in her Reply to Sister Filotea of the Cross (1691). She supports her point through appeals to religious authority, writing that women who write have won ‘praise from Saint Jerome’. Meanwhile, in the Russian Empire, the Nakaz or Intsruction (1767) by Sophie of Anhalt-Zerbst (1729–1796) – known under her assumed Russian name Yekaterina Alexseyevna, or Catherine the Great – argues forcefully for the equality of all people before the law, as well as condemning torture and the death penalty. Empress Catherine was less critical of slavery, however, and saw it at times as unavoidable. Some advocates of women’s rights saw how they intersected with the rights of enslaved and colonised peoples. Consider Productions of Mrs Maria W. Stewart (1835), which collects the liberatory ideas of the political activist Maria W. Stewart (1803–1879). Stewart exposes the hypocrisy pervading American society and calls for Black liberation. Like Wollstonecraft, van Schurman and Astell, she sought liberation through selfdevelopment: …methinks were the American free people of colour to turn their attention more assiduously to moral worth and intellectual improvement, this would be the result: prejudice would gradually diminish, and the whites would be compelled to say, unloose those fetters!

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Portrait of Anna Maria van Schurman, 1649, Holland. Oil on canvas, this detail is from a painting by Jan Lievens that depicts the philosopher sitting at her desk holding an open book beside an inkwell. It hangs in the National Gallery in London.

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Around this time, in Bengal, Rammohun Roy (1772–1833) wrote his Conference Between An Advocate For and An Opponent Of the Practice of Burning Widows (1818). Published in Bengali and English, and structured in classic dialogue form, the Conference decries the practice of sati, in which a widow was expected to commit suicide by throwing herself on her husband’s pyre. A political declaration, the Conference aimed to protect the rights of women in the region – but it served another purpose as well. Roy was an employee of the British East India Company, and his work achieved prominence in part because of its descriptions of the ‘barbarity’ of Mughal society. Countering sati became a political licence for colonisation, with British rule presented as a moral and civilising force.

LEFT

Illustration of Empress Catherine II with the Instruction, 1778, France. Found in the Collection of State Hermitage in St Petersburg, this engraving by Pierre-Philippe Choffard depicts Sophie of AnhaltZerbst (Catherine the Great) presenting the Instruction to the public, to dramatic angelic fanfare.

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Portrait of Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz, 1750, Mexico. Painted by artist Miguel Mateo Maldonado y Cabrera (1695–1768), this posthumous painting of Sor Juana is rendered in oil on canvas. It pictures the nun in the habit of her religious order, the Jeronymites, wearing a ‘nun’s badge’ showing the Annunciation. ABOVE RIGHT

Catherine the Great, page from the Instruction, 1770, Academy of Sciences: St. Petersburg, Russia. This page contains a dramatic headpiece (the image running across the top of the page) designed by Jacob Stehlin and engraved by Christoph Melchior Roth.

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16 Historical momentum The colonisation and exploitation of the Indian subcontinent provided a substantial boost to the British economy. In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries the country was propelled into a period of technological development commonly referred to as the ‘Industrial Revolution’. British textiles, heavily dependent on exploitatively cheap Indian cotton, benefited from engineering innovations, as coal-powered steam engines dramatically reduced production costs. Further geopolitical shifts, combined with the revolutions in France and the Americas, contributed to a general sense of historical momentum in Europe. Their ‘Modern era’ had begun. Advances in printing and developments in newspaper production brought increased public awareness of these mass movements – and metaphysicians began to examine the ebb and flow of these socio-political trends. The Phenomenology of Spirit (1807) by the Prussian thinker Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel is one of the first Western analyses of historical momentum. The Phenomenology describes a cosmic principle that organises the development of societies. He refers to it as the ‘dialectic’. It involves the oscillation between extremes; societies adjust and readjust, eventually settling on a compromise. We are presented with a thesis, followed by its antithesis and finally a synthesis of the two.

LEFT

ABOVE

Arthur Schopenhauer, title page from The World As Will and Representation. 1819, F. A. Brockhaus: Leipzig, Germany.

Portrait of Arthur Schopenhauer, 1859, Germany.

This is the title page of the first edition of the first volume of Schopenhauer’s World as Will and Representation.

A ‘daguerreotype’, this picture by Johan Schäfer was produced by exposing a sheet of silver-plated copper covered with light-sensitive iodide. Schopenhauer would have had to hold this pose, which emphasises his reading glasses, for up to fifteen minutes.

This idea of a drive for cosmic balance may seem familiar and it will come as no surprise that Hegel was likely influenced by Dàoist thought, which codifies the cosmic principle of the opposing yet interconnected forces of yīn and yáng. Dàoism was not the only non-Western philosophy that found its way into European literature; Buddhist thought permeates The World as Will and Representation (1819) by the Polish–Lithuanian scholar Arthur Schopenhauer. Like the Phenomenology, his book focuses on the nonphysical energies that organise personal and societal development. For Schopenhauer a primary power, a non-rational impulse that he terms the ‘will to life’ (Wille zum Leben), carries forward people and the societies in which they live. This energy can be disruptive and (like his Buddhist predecessors) Schopenhauer sees those who resist this aimless, potentially destructive drive as ‘sages’. Attempts like these, which seek to understand the movements and psychologies of societies and persons, would find fuller form in subsequent years as thinkers around the world were thrown into existential crises through global wars, exploitative labour and continued colonisation.

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7

GRAND NARRATIVES (1850–2000)

1 Making history

I

n many ways the nineteenth and twentieth centuries were much like those that came before. Empires rose and fell, and philosophy was deeply enmeshed with these political movements. However, this period is also accented by the effects of the Industrial Revolution. Among these is the mass production of printed matter: books, journals, newspapers. Information about technological developments, and about domestic and foreign affairs, became more widely available than ever. This profusion of information fed into more complex and sophisticated stories and histories, which in turn fed into the kinds of philosophies of history developed by Hegel earlier in the nineteenth century. One of the most important world events for the philosophies of this period was the subjugation of Mughal India by the British Empire. The self-styled ‘Honourable’ British East India Company had begun trade with Mughal India, as well as the East Indies and Qīng China, in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. The cheap importation of products such as cotton, silk and indigo dye (as well as tea) stimulated British manufacturing. In 1857, Indian workers rebelled against these and other dominating, exploitative, ‘trade’ relations, seeking to liberate themselves from the East India Company. While this rebellion was quashed, the Company’s rule was subsequently transferred to the British Crown, which came to reign in the Indian subcontinent (forming the ‘British Raj’) from 1858 to 1947. One thinker who explicitly engaged with these colonial enterprises was Karl Marx (1818–1883). As well as examining the Empire’s ransacking of India in a series of articles published in the New York Tribune (1853–1858), the Prussian-born political theorist was deeply involved with the British textiles industry via his collaborator and sponsor Friedrich Engels (1820–1895), who worked in his family’s thread-making factory in Manchester. Marx is most famous for his Capital (1867). Profoundly influenced by Hegel, Capital analyses the economics and concepts that underlie class struggle and oppression. According to Marx, society is divided into two groups: the ‘bourgeoisie’ (or ‘capitalist’) class, which owns and controls the means of production, and the ‘proletariat’, who work for the bourgeoisie. The bourgeoisie generate profit by paying labourers less than they charge for the resulting product; the relationship is exploitative, as owners reap the rewards of other people’s labour. Capital also describes how this system is maintained. Those with economic power manage social institutions (such as the legal system and the media), giving them ‘ideological control’. The ideas of the ruling class are presented as commonsensical, encouraging the proletariat to see exploitative relationships as the norm. Marx refers to this as ‘false class consciousness’. The illusions constructed by the bourgeoisie also manifest in the phenomenon of ‘commodity fetishism’: this is where people begin to fetishise products (automobiles, televisions) while ignoring the social relations that produced them. Commodities appear ‘magically’ on the supermarket shelves. Marx and Engels sought to wake people from what they saw as disturbing dream states through workers’ revolutions (of the kind seen in India in 1857).

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ABOVE

Portrait of Karl Marx, 1875, England. This iconic photograph shows Marx at fifty-two, when the philosopher was living in exile in London with the theatre critic and political activist Jenny von Westphalen and their children. LEFT

Karl Marx, title page of Capital: A Critique of Political Economy, 1867, Otto Meisner: Hamburg, Germany. One of the most curious design features in this title page is the number of different typefaces used. There is a mixing of serif and sans serif, the latter being a more recent innovation of the early nineteenth century.

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RIGHT

Karl Marx, title pages of Capital: A Critique of Political Economy., 1867, Otto Meissner: Hamburg, Germany; 1872, Poliakov: St. Petersburg, Russia; 1889, Appleton & Co.: New York, NY, USA Here we see the title pages of different translations of Marx’s text. Originally written in German, it was translated into Russian in 1872 and English in 1887. While the German version sports a floral border, and the English version has a small, boxed illustration, the Russian version – written Cyrillic – is unadorned. (The Cyrillic alphabet was commissioned by the Bulgarian Tsar Simeon I in the Ninth Century to replace the earlier Glagolitic script and denotes a new cultural and political moment.)

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In The Philosophy of Money (1900), Georg Simmel (1858–1918) examines similar questions around capital and society, analysing how money can affect human thought and behaviour. Money can bring freedom, Simmel thinks, by allowing individuals to become independent from personal obligations. But impersonal monetary transactions also draw people into a network of anonymous exchange, leading to social fragmentation and alienation. The phenomena described by these thinkers were intimately related to the overseas projects of European empires. British colonisers generated huge profit from exploiting the labour of Indian workers, yet through the processes of alienation and ideological manipulation, these injustices were normalised and disguised for the benefit of consumers.

2 Historical stages These theories are grounded in a ‘stadial’ view of historical development, according to which societies progress linearly from hunter-gatherer groups to herders to agricultural societies and on to commercial ones. For Marx, like Hegel, the movement from ‘savagery’ through ‘barbarism’ to ‘civilisation’ was propelled by the process of the dialectic. His writings about the British Empire implicitly assume that India was an essentially feudal society experiencing modernisation. This popular stadial view licensed colonial projects by reinforcing the idea that some places were more ‘developed’ than others. Colonisation could thus be seen as a ‘civilising’ force, nudging ‘less-developed’ societies forward. British philosophers Harriet Taylor Mill (1807–1858) and John Stuart Mill (1806–1873) embraced this view. The Mills are probably best known for their book On Liberty (1859); a work that, unfortunately, is sometimes only credited to the latter. The famous ‘harm principle’ from that work states: The only purpose for which power can be rightfully exercised over any member of a civilised community, against his will, is to prevent harm to others. Note the use of ‘civilised’. After the success of his father James Mill’s (1773–1836) History of British India (1818), John had landed himself a well-paid job at the East India Company. His and Harriet’s views about ‘civilisation’ bore direct relation to British colonisation. The ‘harm principle’ implicitly neglects the rights of those who fall outside ‘civilised communities’; power can be exercised over them ‘for their own good’. While the Mills were not uncritical of British rule in India, they objected less to the rule itself than to the method of ruling. They held that abuses of power undermined the legitimacy of the imperial project, but that such abuses could be rectified without the dissolution of the Empire. On Liberty configures the British Empire as ‘civilised’ through a process of ‘othering’. This is a central insight of ‘decolonial’ critiques written in the later twentieth century. In Orientalism (1978) the Palestinian thinker Edward Said (1935–2003) identifies how the idea of a ‘morally superior’ Britain was created by reference to an ‘Other’ which was not ‘Great’. Nineteenth-century British philosophy crafted the ‘Orient’ into an exotic space in need of European order (ignoring, of course, the

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RIGHT

Portrait of Harriet Taylor, 1834, UK. This painting of the young Harriet Taylor (before she married John Stuart Mill) is rendered in the exaggerated Mannerist style by an unknown artist and hangs in the National Portrait Gallery in London. FAR RIGHT

John Stuart Mill, title page of On Liberty, 1864, Longman, Green, Longman Roberts & Green: London, UK. The third edition of On Liberty was published shortly before Mill’s appointment as Lord Rector at the University of St Andrews.Since Mill’s time, the need to have publications to obtain an academic appointment has only further increased.

millennia-old civilisations covered in previous chapters). As Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak notes in her essay ‘Can the Subaltern Speak?’ (1988; later extended in A Critique of Postcolonial Reason, 1999), this story powerfully affects the uptake of counter-narratives. She asks how anyone can accurately represent the perspective of the subaltern (a member of the group that falls outside the hierarchy of colonial power). Colonial biases transfuse both academic studies and the social settings in which subalterns live, hence subaltern experience cannot possibly be accurately taken up (a view with serious consequences for histories, including this one).

3 Civil wars and rights

ABOVE

Edward Said, 1979, New York, NY, USA. This black and white photograph shows the Columbia University Professor sitting at a desk in his office in New York. Said joined Columbia in 1963 as a member of the Comparative Literature faculty and worked there until 2003.

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Shortly after Harriet Taylor Mill’s death and heavily informed by her views, John Stuart Mill published The Subjection of Women (1861). At the time, British women were legally subordinate to men; they were expected to marry, rear children and perform unremunerated domestic labour. The Subjection of Women builds on a long tradition of philosophical defences of equal rights to education. It reflects the Mills’ indebtedness to the ‘utilitarianism’ of Jeremy Bentham (1748–1832); subordinating women is not only wrong in itself but also ‘one of the chief hindrances to human improvement’. Denying women the same opportunities as men impoverishes society as a whole. As Virginia Woolf would later argue in A Room of One’s Own (1929), a woman needs financial and spiritual independence, or ‘... money and a room of her own’, to occupy her place as a writer in society. This thread is picked up again by Fatima Mernissi in Beyond the Veil (1975), where Mernissi argues that women cannot be liberated if they lack access to jobs, resources, canteens and childcare.

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Portrait of Anna Julia Cooper, 1892, USA. This early photograph of the philosopher sitting at a table piled with books is signed by the author herself: ‘Yours sincerely, A.J.Cooper’. LEFT

Anna Julia Cooper, A Voice from the South, 1892, Aldine Printing House: Xenia, OH, USA. One of the most notable features of this title page is the omission of the author’s name. Between the title and the publisher’s details, we see the words ‘By a Black Woman of The South’. It is easy to wonder if this was Cooper’s decision or an attempt by the publisher’s to mobilise her social identity.

Similar conversations were happening further west as well. After widespread liberation movements in South America, the North had declared itself independent of Britain. In the 1860s it began a troubled process of self-definition. The unity of the recently established ‘United’ States proved a pressing concern, spiralling into the American Civil War (1861–1865) between the Confederate South and the Union North. This conflict was as much about moral territory as physical geography. In keeping with the branding concerns of modernity, Unionists argued that a civilised Christian Union would necessarily involve the abolition of slavery. As a result, work by civil rights activists such as Sojourner Truth (c. 1797–1883) and Susan B. Anthony (1820–1906) was promoted, signal-boosted and widely disseminated (helped in no small part by advances in newspaper printing). The Unionists won the war and in 1865 the federal government made slavery unconstitutional (except as a punishment for a crime for which someone has been ‘duly convicted’). In 1870 ratification of the Fifteenth Amendment prohibited states from denying male citizens the right to vote based on ‘race, colour or previous condition of servitude’. Against this backdrop sociologist-activist Anna Julia Cooper (1858–1964) wrote A Voice from the South (1892). Born into slavery in North Carolina, Cooper witnessed first-hand the societal shifts brought about by the achievement of Black suffrage. But she was also keenly aware of the limitations of these new rights. The south was still racially segregated and only men had voting rights. A Voice from the South documents how radicalised economic and political power relations mutated after the abolition of slavery. In contrast to texts such as On Liberty, Cooper’s book recognises how some people may be deprived of rights both as women and on racist grounds. In so doing she builds on

ABOVE

Fatima Mernissi, cover of Beyond the Veil: Male-Female Dynamics in a Muslim Society 1975, John Wiley: New York, NY, USA. This simple but clever cover design, produced for John Wiley Publishers, demonstrates the ways book jackets can be used to entice readers. The design itself creates a veil on which the title is emblazoned. To open the cover is to look behind/beyond the veil.

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Truth’s famous ‘Ain’t I A Woman?’ speech, delivered in 1851. I would beg… to add my plea for the Colored Girls of the South:–that large, bright, promising fatally beautiful class… so full of promise and possibilities, yet so sure of destruction. Cooper’s arguments, powerful and persuasive, are grounded in testimony (the ‘voice’ of the title). In The Souls of Black Folk (1903), William Edward Burghardt Du Bois (1868–1963) similarly discusses the dehumanising effects of racism. Du Bois writes of ‘double consciousness’ – the internal tension between a racially oppressed person’s own sense of self and the corrupted sense of themselves as a result of external racism. The book had a huge impact on later thinkers, such as Frantz Fanon, in the latter’s descriptions of mental colonisation.

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Portrait of W.E.B. Du Bois, 1930, USA. In this sepia-toned photograph, we see the philosopher with his distinctive moustache and goatee (modelled, apparently, on those of Emperor Wilhelm II of Prussia) and an enigmatic smile.

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4 Master plans While the United States of America sought a new sort of stability, Europe continued its projects of imperialism and national unification. Germany, newly consolidated by Otto von Bismarck in 1871, aimed to emulate the perceived ‘successes’ of the British Empire and vied for a seat at the colonial table with other European powers. These projects were conceptually bolstered by philosophical works on national character and identity. Among the richest of these are produced by Friedrich Nietzsche (1844–1900). On the Genealogy of Morality: A Polemic (1887) is composed of three essays and conducts a form of conceptual archaeology – the digging up of long-buried philosophical ideas – of the moral concepts ‘Good’ and ‘Evil’. This archaeological method, or ‘genealogy’, has become incredibly influential in recent times. It involves historical analysis that exposes otherwise seemingly unitary concepts to be collections of thoughts bundled together, born from distinct lineages (like nodes in a family tree). Nietzsche’s Genealogy aims to show how Christian concepts of Goodness and Evil are neither natural nor God-given, but rather emerge out of specific socio-cultural contexts. The Genealogy also defends a more general claim. It declares that the struggles we see throughout history involve the conflict between two types of morality: a noble ‘master morality’, which prizes strength, courage and success, and a ‘slave morality’, which ABOVE

Portrait of Friedrich Nietzsche, c. 1870s, Switzerland. Taken when Nietzsche was a young professor in Switzerland, this photograph shows a tidy man with a trim moustache. Later in life, he grew his moustache much longer, out of deference to the German military tradition. LEFT

Friedrich Nietzsche. Thus Spake Zarathustra: A Book for All and None, 1908, Insel: Leipzig, Germany. There is something hypnotic about the art nouveau curlicues on these pages from Thus Spake Zarathustra. They suggest that mysteries are contained within.

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ABOVE

Portrait of Toviyyah ben Moshe ha-Kohen, 1707, Poland. Author of the Work of Tobias, Toviyyah ben Moshe ha-Kohen is pictured here with an astrolabe, book-shelves and an open book, traditional signifiers of learning. He is wearing a head-covering indoors, as would have been typical for Jewish men of the time.

foregrounds its opposites, such as kindness, charity and sympathy. For Nietzsche, Christianity is a ‘slave’ morality. It warns against the sins of pride, greed, lust, envy, gluttony, wrath and sloth – indulgent, individualistic passions both displayed and celebrated by groups that, historically, oppressed the Christians. For the Romans, for instance, goodness involved bravery, courage, nobility and strength. The subjugated Christians consequently associated this system with oppression (rendering it ‘evil’) and championed opposite values, issuing such statements as ‘the meek shall inherit the earth’. According to Nietzsche, the rise of Christianity (stimulated by Jewish thought) constituted a slave revolt and an inversion of morality. Nietzsche’s views of Jewish ethics frequently slipped into antisemitism, but he saw potential in the associated Christian morality. He thought it was restricted and required reinvigoration; what it needed was hope and aspiration, derived from a ‘master morality’, to drive humanity forward. This could be achieved by the actions of exceptional figures – the Übermensch or ‘superhuman’ spoken of in his Thus Spake Zarathustra (1883). On these grounds, Nietzsche recoiled from Bismarck’s unification projects, which he saw as vulgar and petty ‘blood and soil’ politics. Bismarck was interested in small-minded nationalism, threaded with xenophobia. Nietzsche was concerned with a greater politics: a project of pan-European unification, rather than that of individual countries. Compelling and complex, Nietzsche’s work was, as we will see, to be co-opted and savagely simplified in the mid-twentieth century. Helped by Nietzsche’s sister Elisabeth Förster, the Nazi court philosopher Alfred Bäumler translated these nuanced polemics into fascist invectives of a ‘master race’: the ‘Aryan’ and ‘Übermensch’ who would dominate Europe and through its colonies, the world. This interpretation of Nietzsche was to hold sway for much of the later twentieth century, reinforced by post-war Anglophone readings that aimed to problematise German philosophy.

5 New regimes During the two decades between the end of the First World War and the beginning of the Second, two major empires collapsed, succumbing to internal and external, political and military pressures. The Ottoman Empire had been a central power in the Middle East and North Africa since its foundation in the thirteenth century by Sultan ʿOsmān Ġāzī (1259–1326). Its cultural output was huge and, in the realm of philosophy, encompasses grand encyclopaedic works. These include Removal of Doubt from the Names of Books and the Arts by the author Kātib Çelebi (‘Learned Scribe’, born Muṣṭafa ibn ‘Abd Allāh, 1609– 1657) and Work of Tobias by Toviyyah ben Moshe ha-Kohen (1652–1729), which covers matters ranging from the nature of divinity, health and hygiene to elemental metaphysics. At the end of the eighteenth century, however, loss of territory to the Habsburg and Russian Empires led to an economic and social downturn and privation of religious freedoms. By the late nineteenth century dissenting texts such as The Nature of Despotism by ‘Abd al-Raḥman al-Kawākibī (1855–1902) begin to attack what al-Kawākibī saw as

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tyrannical Ottoman rule. Al-Kawākibī was ultimately assassinated by state authorities. The anti-Ottoman sentiment he expressed, however, combined with heavy defeats during the First World War to lead to the dissolution of this once-powerful empire. Meanwhile the Russian Empire was experiencing a revival of spiritualism. One example of this is The Secret Doctrine, the Synthesis of Science, Religion and Philosophy (1888) by Helena Petrovna Blavatsky (1831–1891). A co-founder of the Theosophical Society (which maintained that divinity can be known through direct intuition or ecstasy), Blavatsky sought to revive ‘hidden’ knowledge, supposedly contained in ancient doctrines of hermeticism and late Platonism. At the same time the Christian-anarchist and aristocrat Lev Nikolayevich Tolstoy (1828–1910) was producing widely circulated books on moral-spiritual philosophy, inspired by Hindu and Chinese thought, as well as some of the major titles of Russian literature. Like the Ottomans, the collapse of the Russian Empire resulted from a similar confluence of internal and external factors. The carnage experienced by the largely working-class army under the direction of Tsar Nicholas led to far-reaching political foment. In 1917, the ‘October Revolution’ culminated in the Russian Revolution and the eventual overthrow of the old regime by the communist Bolsheviks. At the centre of this upheaval was The Development of Capitalism in Russia (1899), a book by the Russian theorist Vladimir Ilyich Ulyanov (1870–1924), or ‘Lenin’. The text, written during his exile in Siberia and published under the pseudonym ‘Vladimir Ilyin’, is an extensively researched Marxist analysis of the state of Russian society. Drawing on a wide variety of political and philosophical monographs, articles and statistical data,

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Helena Petrovna Blavatsky, cover of The Secret Doctrine: The Synthesis of Science, Religion and Philosophy. 1888, Theosophical Publishing Company: London, UK. The cryptic nature of the Secret Doctrine, which supposedly offers spiritual insights into world affairs, is indicated by the symbols on its cover. In the bottom right, we see a variant on the Rod of Asclepius, a serpent-entwined rod, while in the top left we see the Star of David encircled by a snake eating its own tail (the oroburos, symbolising infinity). The Star is also an indicator of Blavatsky’s antisemitic ideas, tying Judaism to the occult. LEFT

Portrait of Helena Petrovna Blavatsky, 1875, New York, NY, USA. This photograph of the Russian-born American theosophist was taken in Ithaca, New York, where she relocated to in 1873, and was produced in the same year she co-founded the Theosophical Society with Henry Olcott.

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Family portrait of the Ulyanovs, 1920, Moscow. This family photo shows Vladimir Lenin in the bottom left, sitting next to his wife, Nadezhda Krupskaya, with his sister Anna Elizarova-Ulyanova on the far right. In the back row, his mother, Maria Ulyanova places a hand on his shoulder. His brother Dmitry Ulyanov holds a large cat, next to Anna Elizarova-Ulyanova’s adopted son, Georgy Lozgachyov-Elizarov. BELOW RIGHT

Photographic portrait of Lev Nikolayevich Tolstoy, c. 1900, Russia. Found in the Collection of the State Museum in Moscow, this photograph of Lev Nikolayevich Tolstoy shows the author in his later years, holding a sheet of paper. In his novels, clothes are often indicators of moral bearing and this choice of a simple black blouse was likely a reflection of his adherence to pacifist asceticism. FAR RIGHT

Vladimir Ilyich Ulyanov ‘Lenin’, title page from The Development of Capitalism in Russia, 1899, A. Leifert: St. Petersburg, Russia. This water-marked title page comes from the first edition of Lenin’s text. The sans serif cyrillic script is in keeping with the ascetic aesthetics associated with Leninism.

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Lenin presents evidence to show the decline of feudalism in Russia and the growing class divisions indicative of capitalism. Lenin advocated a worker – peasant alliance against the capitalist class, a call to arms that received wide support and led to the Bolsheviks’ victory. Under Lenin, the new government aimed to realise the communist ideals described in Marx’s Capital (p.210); it sought to do away with the hierarchies of aristocracy and empower the workers and peasantry. Unfortunately, the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (the USSR) was destined to fall short of these philosophical and political ambitions – as were many of the nation-states that followed in its wake.

6 Formalities A foundational text in mathematically minded philosophy is Principia Mathematica (1910) by Bertrand Russell and Alfred North Whitehead. This work on mathematics and symbolic logic is in turn heavily indebted to the Begriffsschrift (roughly meaning ‘concept-script’) of 1879 and The Foundations of Arithmetic (1893) by the antisemitic German thinker Gottlob Frege. A wider project of formulating strict foundations for philosophy as a science was also the aim of Edmund Husserl’s work. In Ideas for a Pure Phenomenology and Phenomenological Philosophy (1913), Husserl offers a systematic outline for a new philosophical method: phenomenology, or the study of the features and experiential dimensions of consciousness. The Logical Structure of the World (1928) by Rudolf Carnap is one of the most famous texts to emerge from the collection of thinkers known as the ‘Vienna Circle’; other members included Moritz Schlick, Rose Rand, Otto Neurath, Kurt Gödel and Karl Popper. It advocates ‘logical positivism’ (or ‘logical empiricism’), a methodology that draws a sharp distinction between the disciplines of science and philosophy and sees the utility of the latter in relation to the former. Philosophy is best used in the service of science, to logically analyse scientific statements which (unlike those issued by metaphysicians) are verifiable through empirical investigation. In addition to stating how we can systematise scientific knowledge, the book offers readers a tool to identify those meaningful statements worthy of scientific scrutiny: The meaning of a statement lies in the fact that it expresses a (conceivable, not necessarily existing) state of affairs. If an (ostensible) statement does not express a (conceivable) state of affairs, then it has no meaning; it is only apparently a statement. Carnap’s anti-metaphysical, scientific – some would say ‘scientistic’ – method was initially imported to Britain in Logical Positivism and Analysis (1933) by Lizzie Susan Stebbing. It was further popularised in Alfred Jules Ayer’s Language, Truth and Logic (1936). Austrian-born Ludwig Wittgenstein also gained many followers on British shores when his slim but logically precise booklet Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus (1921) – its austere, geometric style reminiscent of Spinoza’s (p.197) – was translated into English. Pursuit of a more ‘scientific’ approach to philosophy would see an uptake in the decades that followed; in certain quarters it continues to this day.

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7 Modern times BELOW LEFT

Nishida Kitarō, cover of An Inquiry into the Good, 1992, Yale University Press: New Haven, CT, USA. Reprinted some eighty years after its original publication, this English-language version of Nishida Kitarō’s text was produced by Yale University Press. The decision to feature a photograph of the philosopher on the cover historicises the work, foregrounding the author’s identity in the nexus of their thoughts.

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The economic (if not moral) successes of the ‘New Imperialism’ garnered attention outside Europe. Other nations sought to emulate British modernisation and colonisation and one of the most successful of these was Japan. The enforced opening up of Japan in the 1850s, together with economic stagnation and famine, contributed to the fall of the Tokugawa Shōgunate. In 1868 the imperial house was reinstated under Emperor Meiji and foreigners conducted business across Japanese borders. This pushed the island nation to assess societal shifts outside its territories. Its 1889 Constitution enforced Western-style governance and supported nationwide industrialisation. Matching European policies, the Japanese also pursued imperial expansion. Their colonial sights were to fall first on Korea, Taiwan and China. While Edo-period reliance on ancient texts seemed at odds with modernisation, Japanese thinkers still sought to preserve a sense of national identity. They did so through a renewed focus on ‘Native Studies’. Shintō and Zen Buddhism formed the

spiritual core of these new systems of thought, which combined ‘Japanese spirituality’ and ‘Western ingenuity’. An Inquiry into the Good (1911) by Nishida Kitarō is a clear example of this synthesising approach. Nishida, founder of the Kyōto school, worked through tensions in Western traditions by subordinating them to a distinctively Japanese system grounded in the Mahāyānan Buddhist notion of nothingness, or mu (wú in Chinese). The Inquiry compares what Nishida perceives to be a distinctively Western metaphysical emphasis on Being (on what is and exists) with what he sees to be a distinctively Eastern orientation to ‘absolute nothingness’ or emptiness. The latter is not just a negation of Being (just as, to those who believe in the afterlife, death is not merely the absence of life). For Nishida, Mahāyāna Buddhism (p.50) provided important resolutions to sophisticated, if misguided, Western philosophical disagreements. Similarly in Rinrigaku (or ‘Ethics’, 1937), Watsuji Tetsurō (a Kyōto School colleague of Nishida) examines the split between mind and body that has dominated European thought. The body, Watsuji notes, has been ignored in the West as a site of knowledge: rather it is something to be known. The Rinrigaku contrasts this view with the Buddhist concept of embodied knowing, seen in meditation practices and the notion of ‘bodymind’: What is not in accord with the concrete facts of experience is the view that something psychological, accompanied by no bodily events, and a process of the physical body entirely unrelated to bodily experiences subsist in the form of an opposition between body and mind existing independent of each other. This philosophical approach proved generative. Nevertheless, in later times the Kyōto School fell out of favour because of its association with Japanese nationalism. It developed a distinctively Japanese world-view, one that in some cases encapsulated notions of racial purity and mythic narratives about Japanese superiority. Much work remains to be done in disentangling these associations – and it is all the more confusing because of these thinkers’ direct and indirect connections to German fascism.

8 Philosophies at war In the 1930s academic relations between Japan and Germany were thriving. Scholars from the Kyōto School such as Tanabe Hajime (1885–1962) travelled to Europe to work with prominent German intellectuals, including a radical metaphysician called Martin Heidegger. Building on the phenomenological method of his teacher Husserl and work by his Japanese counterparts, Heidegger re-envisioned the aim and framing of European metaphysical inquiry. Heidegger’s Being and Time (1927) investigates what it is to be in the world. Unlike non-human animals, he says, humans enjoy self-consciousness; we think, we reflect, we have first- and second-order desires. We have a capacity to grasp the wonder and confusion of what it is to be a mortal being. It is a dense text and often hard to follow – and with good reason, since Heidegger sought to shake off the linguistic shackles of

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Potrait of Watsuji Tetsurō, 1959, Japan. Taken by a photographer for one of Japan’s foremost broadsheets, the Asahi Shimbun, this image shows the moral philosopher, smiling, aged 70. OPPOSITE RIGHT

Nishida Kitarō notes, date unknown, Japan. Found in the Kyoto School Archive, this page contains notes taken by Nishida Kitarō, with crossings-out and marginalia in red ink. The Archive strives to provide users with digital images of manuscripts by prominent Japanese philosophers for analysis and comment.

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Martin Heidegger, cover of Being and Time, 1962, SCM Press: London, UK. Translated by John Macquarrie and Edward Robinson for the Library of Philosophy and Theology, this hefty tome is the first English language edition of Heidegger’s text. The device on the cover, of a crowned cross, belongs to the publisher, the Student Christian Movement Press. FAR RIGHT

Martin Heidegger, cover of Being and Time, 1927, Max Niemeyer: Halle, Germany. Produced by the German publishing house Max Niemeyer Verlag, this is a first edition Germanlanguage version of Heidegger’s contribution to phenomenology.

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earlier conceptual vocabularies. He believed that new ways of thinking about being required new ways of talking. Language, as he wrote in his ‘Letter on Humanism’ (1946), is the ‘house of being’. Many of his concerns coalesce around the subject of technology, understandably, given the consequences of the Industrial Revolution. Being and Time describes how modernisation fosters a particular mindset, a view of the world composed of isolable things rather than interconnected beings. We are too ready to see objects around us – telephones, computers, televisions – as ‘present-to-hand’, discrete artefacts that can be conceptually abstracted from their context. Modern technology overrides the view of objects as ‘ready-to-hand’, as conceptually bound up in the world; it obscures their ‘worldliness’. For Heidegger, the modern mindset is an inauthentic way of being. Being and Time encourages its readers to resist and instead to pursue what he calls ‘poetic dwelling’. Through consideration of nature, for instance, one can subject oneself to the often troubling majesty of existence. As we see in his posthumously published Black Notebooks (2014), Heidegger’s metaphysics are also tightly bound up with his German nationalism and antisemitism. Not only did he believe the Nazi party (of which he was a member) could effect reorientation around the values of German rural life, counteracting the insidious effects of modern technology, but he was also convinced that the German language gave the German people a privileged insight into the genesis of European thought. New terms were needed to express the truth of Being and the German language was linguistically qualified to provide them. Moreover, the Notebooks contain passages of untrammelled antisemitism, including historical suppositions about the connections between ‘World Jewry’ and the damaging effects of Western modernity.

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Martin Heidegger, pages from the Black Notebooks, 1931–41, Germany Written between 1931 and 1941, Heidegger’s handwritten Black Notebooks reveal the antisemitism at the core of his philosophical project. It was only recently, in 2014, that the Notebooks were transcribed by Peter Trawny and published. BELOW LEFT

Photographic portrait of Martin Heidegger, 1933, Germany. This photograph shows the German philosopher at the time he was elected rector of Freiberg University and became a member of the Nazi party. These events happened shortly after he was involved in having his teacher, Edmund Husserl, banned from academic libraries for being Jewish.

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In keeping with the logic of empire, German and Japanese societies unified around notions of national identity and ethno-national superiority. The story often told by Allied philosophers – especially within the Anglophone tradition – is that the Second World War lay causally downstream of these philosophical efforts. The truth is more complex, involving a delicate interplay of influences between philosophical thought and the socio-political setting. But however these causal stories are told, the effects are the same; the Second World War began with the Massacre of Nánjīng in 1937 and the invasion of Poland in 1939. The resulting conflict saw myths of racial purity and national superiority combine into the terrifying genocidal project known as the Holocaust.

9 Philosophies after war RIGHT

Photographic portrait of Mary Midgley, 2012, UK. Taken by Sarah Lee for the Guardian, this photograph of Midgley shows her in her distinctive wide-brimmed black hat, marking up a sheaf of papers. Midgley was a familiar figure for the newspaper’s readers, and saw public engagement as one of the central aims of philosophy. FAR RIGHT

Photographic portrait of Philippa Foot, 1999, Oxford, UK. This photograph of Foot was taken by Steve Pyke in Oxford, where she had studied, then became a lecturer, Fellow and tutor at Somerville College.

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It is not easy to unravel the effects of the Second World War in the global philosophical community, but certain events and trends stand out. The defeat of the Germans and Japanese forces led to the collapse of the systems of thought that had intersected with their war efforts. Heidegger was stripped of his teaching position and became a philosophical pariah. The Kyōto School dissolved. In English-language philosophy (the philosophy of the Allied Forces) we see a widespread move away from the grand systems-building of thinkers such as Hegel and their intellectual inheritors. In some circles, linguistic analysis became a popular method. John Langshaw Austin’s How to Do Things with Words (1962) is a good example of this. This methodology frequently overlapped with a ‘piecemeal’ attitude to philosophical problems, where issues are broken down into constituent parts to be individually solved (an approach that Bertrand Russell tellingly referred to as ‘divide and conquer’). A

focus on logic and language, together with an emphasis on purported ‘common sense’ and a rejection of what were seen as confused and confusing statements about Being and Reality became defining features of anglophone ‘Analytic’ philosophy. This was presented as a modernising move towards a more ‘objectively grounded’, testable methodology. It coincided with a general distrust of open-ended metaphysical musings, seen to have stimulated the rise of fascism. Significantly, 1945 saw the publication of A History of Western Philosophy by Bertrand Russell (1872–1970), by then a noted public intellectual. This was a history with a clear agenda, associating German idealism, and German thought more generally, with fascism. Nietzsche, whose concept of the Übermensch had been appropriated by the Nazis, is cast as a philosophical villain par excellence, and the war is referred to by Russell as ‘Nietzsche’s War’. At the same time as excluding some, the doors of the academic establishment were opening to others. The effects of gendered conscription in the British armed forces meant the once maledominated university halls became more accessible to women. In Oxford this included a group of four friends who, seeing conversation as the true locus of philosophical activity, informally called themselves ‘The Resocratics’. They were Gertrude Elizabeth Margaret Anscombe (1919–2001), known for her book Intention (1957), Iris Murdoch (1919– 1999), novelist and author of The Sovereignty of Good (1970), Philippa Foot (1920– 2010), who criticised Ayer and Richard Mervyn Hare in a plethora of essays and books, and Mary Midgley (1919–2018), best known for her Beast and Man: The Roots of Human Nature (1978). Moreover, movements of migration and refuge from war-torn countries meant a brain drain for the European mainland, but a boon (or ‘brain gain’) for other regions, notably the United States. Albert Einstein, Hans Reichenbach (1891–1953), Rudolf Carnap and Rose Rand (1903–1980) were among those who settled there in the mid-1930s, 40s and 50s. They brought with them an enthusiasm for empirically oriented, logic-heavy philosophy that found uptake in their adopted homelands and issued in texts such as Philosophy in a New Key: A Study in the Symbolism of Reason, Rite and Art (1941) by Susanne Katherina Langer (1895–1985). More socio-politically oriented philosophers became establishment figures. Hannah Arendt (1906–1975), who had studied with Heidegger, made a lasting impact with her work The Origins of Totalitarianism (1951) in which she analyses the character and operation of totalitarian movements. Running against the currents of Analytic philosophy, the Dialectic of Enlightenment (1947), co-authored by Theodor Wiesengrund Adorno and Max Horkheimer, who had been colleagues at the Institute for Social Research in Frankfurt, offered a critical assessment of Enlightenment. They saw it not as some unambiguously positive, liberating force, but as a distorting, over-rationalistic process that generated submissive docility in the general populace (to the benefit of the ruling classes).

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Photographic portrait of Elizabeth Anscombe, 1990, Cambridge, UK. In this double portrait by Steve Pyke, the Cambridge philosopher is pictured with her partner, Peter Geach. While dressed simply here, she was known to wear a boiler suit, a monocle and to smoke cigars. Pyke is known for his distinctive black and white photographs of famous Anglophone philosophers.

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Photographic portrait of Iris Murdoch, 1977, UK. In this portrait the philosopher, art critic and novelist contemplates a ruined bust, which itself meets the gaze of the viewer. It is suggestive of some of the classical and existential themes found in her work BELOW RIGHT

Iris Murdoch, cover of The Sovereignty of the Good. 1971, USA. Published by Schocken Books, this edition of Murdoch’s Sovereignty has a dazzling red cover, in keeping with the publishing house’s arresting designs. FAR RIGHT

Mary Midgley, Cover of Beast & Man, 1980, Routledge: London, UK. This slightly unnerving cover features an illustration of a mythological beast known as a ‘manticore’, taken from Edward Topsell’s 1607 Historie of Foure-Footed Beastes.

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Photographic portrait of Hannah Arendt, 1963, USA. Taken around the time of the publication of Eichmann in Jerusalem and On Revolution, this iconic photograph captures the philosopher smoking in repose. ABOVE LEFT

Hannah Arendt, cover of The Origins of Totalitarianism, 1951, Harcourt, Brace: New York, NY, USA. Published in the year Arendt was naturalised as a US citizen, the first edition of The Origins appeared in this blue cloth dust jacket designed by Schocken Books. Established by Salman Schocken in 1931, Schocken Books publishes specifically religious, and often Jewish, literary works. BELOW FAR LEFT

Philippa Foot, cover of Virtues and Vices, 1979, University of California Press: Berkeley, CA, USA. Depicting a large green question-mark enlarged to the point of abstraction, this edition of Foot’s book was published by the University of California Press, a nonprofit publishing arm of the University, funded by the University and the State. BELOW LEFT

Susanne K. Langer, cover of Philosophy in a New Key, 1948, Penguin, New York, NY: USA. Founded in 1936, the Pelican imprint of Penguin Books specialised in publishing approachable non-fiction for a wide readership. Langer’s 1948 book was among the first books in the UK specifically marketed as ‘popular philosophy’.

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10 No nations?

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Photographic portrait of Simone Weil, 1936, Spain. In this photograph, Weil is pictured in military uniform, with a rifle slung over her shoulder. She was serving as a soldier in the Durruti Column during the Spanish Civil War, and served too in the French Resistance during the Second World War.

The conflicts in the mid-twentieth century also encouraged more circumspection about nationhood and the notion of the nation-state. In her 1942 work Should Nations Survive? Hilda Diana Oakeley (1867–1950) addresses the ‘paradox of nationalism’. While some nations have played key roles in the construction of diverse and welcoming cultures, nationalism – as was well-observed at the time of the book’s publication – also contributed to cultural and societal disintegration. Responding to the titular question, Oakeley answers with a qualified ‘yes’. As she saw it, nations were ‘historic communities’, stretching from the past into the future. She held that people belonging to these distinct communities can coexist peacefully if they are able to grasp certain absolute moral standards. The Open Society and Its Enemies (1945) is the first work of political thought by the philosopher of science Karl Raimund Popper (1902–1994). Like Oakeley, Popper saw liberal democracy, an ‘open society’, as the best possible form of social organisation. In keeping with the anti-metaphysical tendencies of his colleagues from the Vienna Circle (p.221), he offered strong criticisms of totalitarianism, linking it to teleological accounts of historical development (which held that history unfolds according to universal, goal-directed laws). Meanwhile Simone Adolphine Weil (1909–1943) was considering the importance of being ‘rooted’. The Need for Roots: Prelude towards a Declaration of Duties towards Humankind (1949) reflects what Weil saw as the problem of ‘uprootedness’. Losing one’s roots led to the destruction of spiritual and cultural ties to a community. Being rooted is, as the title suggests, not optional, but essential for people to lead a fulfilling moral life. To be rooted is perhaps the most important and least recognised need of the human soul. It is one of the hardest to define. A human being has roots by virtue of their real, active and natural participation in the life of a community which preserves in living shape certain particular treasures of the past and certain particular expectations for the future. Weil’s views here intersect interestingly with her Jewish heritage (and her later admiration for Catholicism). The antisemitic caricature of the ‘wandering Jew’ was a troubling trope in Nazi propaganda and would have informed Weil’s thoughts about the importance of rootedness; so would arguments for a Jewish homeland, which intersected with those by Theodor Herzl in The Jewish State (1896). In the late 1940s these thoughts found determinate form in Britain’s portioning of Palestine, then part of the British Empire, to create an independent Jewish State of Israel.

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11 Decolonial minds Another effect of the Second World War was widespread decolonisation. Those subjugated by colonisers had long argued for liberation. Given Allied rhetoric against German imperialism and racial discrimination, these arguments gained political momentum in postwar years. Liberation movements, such as the one led in India by Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi (1869–1948), began to make gains. In The Story of My Experiments with Truth (1927–1929), conceived largely during his imprisonment for ‘sedition’, Gandhi explains, through biographical examples, his philosophy of selfrestraint and non-violence. The second half of the twentieth century saw the independence of territories from British, French, Portuguese, Belgian, Italian, German and Dutch occupying forces. After centuries of colonial exploitation, newly independent nations found themselves confronting questions of self-governance and self-definition. Much work was directed towards deconstructing the divisive social structures that colonisers had imposed on native peoples. It also considered the traditional hierarchies that oppressive governments had co-opted for organisational purposes, such as the caste structure in India. Annihilation of Caste (1936) by Bhimrao Ramji Ambedkar is an early example. Addressed to a Hindu readership, his book criticises Hindu religious texts; Ambedkar sees the caste hierarchy as so strongly intertwined with religious texts that they must be rejected conjointly (he himself converted to Buddhism). Thinkers in decolonised nations also considered issues of national identity. Unlike their imperial counterparts, however, they focused on how such concepts could repair the ruptures caused by colonial rule. Building on the psychological models of Sigmund Freud, some of the most fascinating work in this area maps out the psychological effects of colonial oppression. One key thinker here is the philosopher and psychiatrist Ibrahim Frantz Fanon (1925–1961). Born in Martinique and heavily involved in the Algerian independence movement, Fanon wrote Black Skin, White Masks in the early 1950s. Published in 1952, the work engages works with Du Bois to discuss what Fanon saw as the colonisation of the mind. Extending these thoughts, in Wretched of the Earth (1961), Fanon describes the forms of violence – physical, conceptual and discursive – perpetrated by colonising forces. He also states that the process of decolonisation is inevitably a damaging one:

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Photographic portrait of Frantz Fanon, date unknown. Fanon trained as a psychiatrist in the early 1950s and his understanding of psychology is central to his works on colonial subjugation. He is pictured here towards the end of his life (he died from leukemia at the age of 36). OPPOSITE LEFT

Simone Weil, Cover of The Need for Roots, 1949, Gallimard: Paris, France. The French publishing house Gallimard published the first edition of The Need for Roots in 1949. Established in 1911, Gallimard’s founder Gaston Gallimard entered a controversial collaboration with the occupying Nazi forces during the Second World War.

[D]ecolonisation is always a violent event. At whatever level we study it – individual encounters, a change of name for a sports club, the guest list at a cocktail party, members of a police force or the board of directors of a state or private bank – decolonisation is quite simply the substation of one ‘species’ of humankind by another. Fanon warns that formerly colonised people must avoid European narratives about universal standards, while simultaneously resisting myths of idealised, ‘pure’ pre-colonial times. He was critical of the négritude movement driven by his colleague and teacher Aimé Césaire, which he thought fell into the trap of romanticising a unified African heritage. The movement, which revolved around a Pan-African sense of self and home,

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Photograph from the funeral of Steve Biko, 1977, South Africa. This photograph shows antiapartheid protesters attending Steve Biko’s funeral ceremony. Shortly after his arrest by security forces, the Black activist was found dead in his prison cell.

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figures prominently in Césaire’s Discourse on Colonialism (1950). Fanon’s points about sociogeny or social genesis – such as the lived experience as a Black person – were later developed by authors including Sylvia Wynter. In South Africa, white-supremacist philosophies and policies of apartheid (‘separateness’) had been countered by Nelson Rolihlahla Mandela (1918–2013), whose Marxist philosophy shifted from non-violence to advocating targeted uprising. Anxious officials condemned Mandela to a lifetime in prison – and he served 27 years before his release and appointment as the country’s president. Ruling powers’ fear of books is also clear in the case of Stephen Bantu Biko (1946–1977), active in the anti-apartheid Black Consciousness Movement. Inspired by Fanon, Biko argued that Black liberation required self-organisation, independently of well-meaning but often paternalistic liberal whites. Banned from publication due to his activism, Biko’s I Write What I Like (1978) appeared in print posthumously, after the author’s brutal murder at the hands of a white police force. These discussions overlap with what Henry Odera Oruka and Kwasi Wiredu articulate as the dangers of ‘ethnophilosophy’. In redefining philosophical cultures after colonisation, indigenous thinkers risk mixing philosophy with ethnography, thus exempting systems of thought from philosophical critique on extraphilosophical grounds. In Cultural Universals and Particulars (1996), Wiredu cautions against the view that ‘recourse to the African vernacular must result in instantaneous philosophic revelation’. We need to know about ‘Sage philosophy’, but not simply because it was uttered by members of an oppressed group.

12 Single minded While processes of decolonisation and psychologies of oppression were framing debates outside Europe and America, ‘Western’ philosophers were turning attention towards the individual subject and ethical questions around ‘complicity’ (a concept with powerful resonance after the atrocities of the Holocaust). Some French theorists returned to Husserl’s phenomenological method (p.221) to try to understand what it means to act authentically. How do we guard against barbarity and self-deception, and so act freely? These thinkers emphasised existence over essence. In doing so they harkened back to the ‘existentialist’ texts of Søren Kierkegaard (1813–1855), whose Fear and Trembling (1843) problematises notions of decision-making in relation to the biblical story of Abraham’s attempted sacrifice of his son Isaac, and of Fyodor Mikhailovich Dostoevsky (1821–1881), in works such as Notes from Underground (1864). One of the most interesting strands of inquiry to emerge from the existentialist movement involves work on gender, sexuality and the self, particularly prominent in the texts of Simone de Beauvoir (1908–1986). One is not born a woman: one becomes one. No biological, psychological, or economic fate determines the figure that the human female presents in society; it is civilization as a whole that produces this intermediary between the male and the eunuch, which is described as feminine. Only the intervention of someone else can establish an individual as an Other. These words come from her two-volume work The Second Sex (1949), which argues that ‘woman’ is not an essential feature, but rather a category into which society places certain people. Specifically, de Beauvoir argues that the designation ‘woman’ is always treated as somehow derivative or secondary to that of ‘man’ (hence the title). A woman is understood as not a man, but as some ‘other’; in this way patriarchal societies restrict women’s choice, agency and freedom. De Beauvoir’s analysis was to instigate important philosophical developments in the texts of feminist philosophy from Judith Butler, Donna Haraway and Luce Irigaray (of whom more in what follows). Being and Nothingness: An Essay on Phenomenological Ontology (1943) by Jean-Paul Sartre presents its readers with the notion of ‘mauvaise foi’ (bad faith). Some agents, we are told, act self-deceptively. They might think of themselves as being something other than what they are (as simply a collection of social roles, for example waiter, son and brother). Or they might think of themselves as lacking freedom, as being mere products of their socio-cultural position. Construing oneself thus, Sartre writes, is to act inauthentically and to perform a damaging self-deception. He endorses a radical form of freedom, where even in the most dire circumstances agents have the ability to choose. The Myth of Sisyphus (1942) by de Beauvoir and Sartre’s friend Albert Camus responds to this with ‘absurdist’ thought. The book considers suicide: if we acknowledge, as we surely must, that life is absurd and meaningless, why not simply quit it? Finding ourselves in the position of Sisyphus, a figure from Greek mythology condemned to repeat forever the same meaningless task, a radical act seems necessary. Disassembling disciplinary

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Mohandas K. Gandhi, cover of An Autobiography: The Story of My Experiments with Truth, 1972, Beacon: Boston, MA,USA. Spanning his life from early childhood to 1921, this text was originally written in weekly instalments published in Gujarati in Gandhi’s journal Navjivan, between 1925 and 1929, before its English translation appeared in instalments in his other journal Young India.

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Aimé Césaire, cover of Discourse on Colonialism, 1972, Monthly Review Press: New York, NY, USA. This edition of the Discourse was published by the Monthly Review Press, an American socialist publisher that put a premium on left-wing titles from marginalised authors.

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Simone de Beauvoir, covers of The Second Sex, 1949, Gallimard: Paris, France. The covers of this limited edition are black cloth with designs by Mario Prassinos. FAR RIGHT

Simone de Beauvoir, title page from The Second Sex, 1949, Gallimard: Paris, France. This title page is from the second volume of de Beauvoir’s text, ‘L’Expérience Vécue’ (‘Lived Experience). RIGHT

Simone de Beauvoir, cover of The Second Sex, 1965, Il Saggiatore: Milan, Italy. FAR RIGHT

Simone de Beauvoir, cover of The Second Sex, 1953, Shinchosha: Tokyo, Japan.

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Photographic portrait of Simone de Beauvoir, 1947, USA. Found in the Hulton Archive, the complete photograph, of which this is a detail, shows de Beauvoir poised to write in a notebook. LEFT

Jean-Paul Sartre, cover of Being and Nothingness: An Essay on Phenomenological Ontology, 1943, Gallimard: Paris, France. Having read Heidegger’s Being and Time as a prisoner of war in 1941, Sartre was prompted to follow the German thinker’s phenomenological lead with his own take on Being and Time. Gallimard, still active due to a deal reached with the Nazis, published the first French edition during the German occupation of France. FAR LEFT

Jean-Paul Sartre, cover of Being and Nothingness, 1957, Methuen: London, UK. This is the cover of the first UK edition of the text, published by Methuen, who initially specialised in producing academic texts. LEFT

Jean-Paul Sartre, cover of Being and Nothingness, 1956, Philosophical Library: New York, NY, USA. The Philosophical Library, who published the first US edition of Being and Nothingness, was founded by Dagobert D. Runes in 1941 to publish the work of intellectuals from the European diaspora.

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OPPOSITE TOP

Poster of a soldier brandishing Quotations from Chairman Mao Zedong. Forbidden Atomic Forbidden Chemistry Forbidden Bacteria, 1971, People's Liberation Army General Staff Department: Beijing, China. OPPOSITE BELOW LEFT

Mao Zedong, frontispiece and epigraph of Quotations from Chairman Mao Zedong. 1966, China. OPPOSITE BELOW RIGHT

Mao Zedong, cover of Quotations from Chairman Mao Zedong, 1964, People's Liberation Army General Political Department: Beijing, China BELOW

Photograph of Simone de Beauvoir and Jean-Paul Sartre with Che Guevara, 1960, Havana, Cuba. This image was taken by the Cuban photographer Alberto Korda, during the French philosophers’ visit to Cuba. While both Sartre and de Beauvoir were initially enthusiastic about the revolution, they would ultimately denounce Fidel Castro for arresting the Cuban poet Herberto Padillo.

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boundaries, Camus and Sartre examined such questions in works of fiction, producing novels and plays such as The Stranger (Camus, 1942) and No Exit (Sartre, 1944).

13 Campaigns A striking 1960 photograph by the renowned Cuban photographer Alberto Díaz Gutiérrez (known as Alberto Korda) shows de Beauvoir chatting with the Argentinian revolutionary Ernesto ‘Che’ Guevara, while Sartre smokes a cigar nearby, French cafésociety intellectuals absurdly mixing with radical politicians. On reflection, the photograph is less surreal than first appears. Both de Beauvoir and Sartre were politically active, condemning, for instance, French atrocities in Algeria, with Sartre penning the preface to Fanon’s Wretched of the Earth. Moreover, Guevara was a sophisticated political theorist who had sought to bring a Marxist revolution to Cuba. The photograph is evidence of the fraught political and philosophical tensions of the period, between ‘Western’ capitalism and Soviet-style socialism. Cuba was not alone in pursuing a Marxist agenda. Citizens of many recently decolonised nations opted for socialist programmes, rather than the market-driven model of their colonisers. With due deference to Marx’s Capital, nation-states enacted radical and often destabilising projects of wealth redistribution and ideological ‘re-education’, mounting attacks on ‘Bourgeois capitalist values’. Quotations from Mao Zedong (1964), popularly known as ‘The Little Red Book’, collects sayings of Mao Zedong (1893–1976), co-founder of the Communist Party of China and one-time Chair of the People’s Republic of China. After occupations by the British and Japanese that lasted for decades, the Chinese public was increasingly receptive to anti-imperial communist ideas. Emulating Lenin’s Development of Capitalism in Russia, The Little Red Book covers questions of democracy, culture and military strategy while also examining the metaphysics of historical development. The text became mandatory reading for people living in China during the Cultural Revolution, with the result that its cumulative readership ran into billions. Its optimistic anti-imperialist message contrasts with the devastation wreaked under Mao’s autocratic rule, which saw totalitarian persecution, forced labour, the destruction of cultural artefacts and the deaths of millions of people. Antagonism between communist countries – such as China, Cuba and the USSR – and the capitalist ‘West’, including the United States and Western Europe, marked global geopolitics of the 1960s and 1970s. Far from a ‘cold’ affair of threats but little actual conflict, the Cold War between communist and capitalist states resulted in bloody military campaigns in Vietnam, Korea, South America and African states, and continues to convulse regions whose militaries were empowered by opposing regimes (such as Afghanistan). In the US and Britain, as in the USSR, this took the form of state-sponsored cultural production. Not just in art,

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where the abstract expressionism of Jackson Pollock and others was promoted to counter Soviet socialist realism, but in theory too. The journal Encounter, for example, welcomed contributions from the likes of Russell, Ayer, Arendt, Sartre, Popper and Murdoch, among many other philosophers, poets and critics during its long run (1953–1991). It turned out to have been bankrolled in part by the British intelligence agency MI6 and the US Central Intelligence Agency, keen to keep an eye on left-leaning thinkers. These operations led to greater ideological polarisation, apparent in the texts produced in this period in the capitalist West.

14 Personal concerns OPPOSITE ABOVE LEFT

Photographic portait of Ayn Rand, 1957, USA. Pictured here in a photograph by Phyllis Cerf, smiling and smoking a cigarette, Rand was a prolific public speaker, who promoted her Objectivist philosophy by giving talks to students at institutions like Yale, Princeton, Columbia and Harvard. OPPOSITE ABOVE RIGHT

Sydney Shoemaker, cover of Self-Knowledge and Self-Identity, 1963, Cornell University Press: Ithaca, NY, USA. Shoemaker taught for almost his entire career at Cornell University and his most famous book is published by Cornell University Press, the first university publishing enterprise in the United States (established in 1869). The relationship between university publishing and academia is an interesting and not unproblematic one.

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While philosophy in socialist countries often focused on cultural critiques of capitalism and on assimilating Marxism with traditional values, much capitalist philosophy turns towards the individual and the fetishisation of technology. This move is perhaps best exemplified in the books of the Russian émigré Alisa Zinovievna Rosenbaum, known under her later name of Ayn Rand. Famous for her unapologetically capitalist novels such as The Fountainhead (1943) and Atlas Shrugged (1957), Rand also produced The Virtue of Selfishness (1964). In this work she praises egoism as rational and virtuous, while portraying altruistic actions as destructive. For Rand, capitalism alone guarantees individual freedom: If one wishes to uphold individual rights, one must realise that capitalism is the only system that can uphold and protect them. Her endorsement of pro-market ‘laissez-faire capitalism’ and celebration of private property made her an iconic figure in the United States, cross-cutting the powerful folk notion of the ‘American Dream’. Individualistic libertarian advocacy of minimal government intervention is later perpetuated in Robert Nozick’s Anarchy, State, and Utopia of 1974 (itself a response to John Rawls’ A Theory of Justice, 1971). In academic philosophy, the neoliberal focus on the individual and technology is perhaps best exemplified in the ‘personal identity debate’, which appears in the works of Sydney Shoemaker and Derek Parfit. In Self-Knowledge and Self-Identity (1963), Shoemaker presents us with the story of a ‘brain transplantation’; an unfortunate individual has his brain transplanted into another person’s body. Parfit’s Reasons and Persons (1984) details a case of ‘teletransportation’ in which an individual is atomised before being teleported elsewhere. These are foundational texts in the literary subgenre of ‘thought experiments’ – science fiction stories intended to ‘test’ (by speculating) what it takes for someone to remain the same person over time. Such works explicitly build on Locke’s Essay Concerning Human Understanding (p.194), and presuppose the idea of a discrete, atomic and often disembodied self. It is telling that Shoemaker’s discussion of bodyswapping ignores race and gender; individuals are abstracted away from social realities, and presented as absolutely autonomous in consciously and freely selling their labour. Nor was metaphysics the only area to exhibit this trend. In line with later Reagan-era and Thatcherite economic policies, ethical theories gather around the choices of the

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Peter Singer, cover of Practical Ethics, 1980, Cambridge University Press: Cambridge, UK. This is the cover of the 1980 edition of Singer’s introduction to applied ethics, first published in 1979 by Cambridge University Press. BELOW CENTRE

Robert Nozick, cover of Anarchy, State and Utopia, 1974, Basic Books: New York, NY, USA. Basic Books, the publishers of the first edition of Nozick’s work, originated as a Greenwich Village book club marketed to psychoanalysts, publishing works on Sigmund Freud and Claude Lévi-Strauss. It expanded to include more philosophical works in 1960 after being subsumed within Harper and Row Publishers. BELOW

Photographic portrait of Robert Nozick, 1975, USA. This photograph, by Martha Holmes,taken when Nozick received the National Book Award in 1975 for Anarchy, State and Utopia.

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‘atomic’ individual; theories that reduce moral contributions to giving money to charities in discrete ‘personal’ choices. Peter Singer’s Practical Ethics (1979) is one example of these, and it remains hugely influential today.

15 Really? In later decades of the twentieth century, an increasing number of thinkers began to examine the political commitments implicit within philosophical practice. If They Come in the Morning: Voices of Resistance (1971), edited by scholar and Black Panther activist Angela Yvonne Davis, considers the politics of incarceration, particularly the abolition of prisons. Theorists such as Michel Foucault, in Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison (1975) and History of Sexuality (1976–84), return to Nietzsche’s genealogical analysis critiquing ‘modern’ notions of persons, truth and reason. The latter work resonates with the philosophy of sexuality in The Erotic of 1911, by Nietzsche scholar and collaborator Lou Andreas-Salomé. In Sister Outsider (1984) Audre Lorde develops a similar kind of intersectional inquiry to that found in the Black feminist Combahee River Collective Statement (1977); both conceive of the self as multitudinous, connected in manifold ways to manifold others. For Lorde, identity does not primarily concern autonomy and personhood, nor even the Black/White divide of Du Bois’ Souls. Instead multiple roles, relations of kinship and community matter. Shoemaker’s story of brain transplantation would be nonsensical within Lorde’s framework. Meanwhile Capitalism and Schizophrenia (1972–1980) by Gilles Deleuze and Pierre-Félix Guattari confronts the role of desire in maintaining a capitalist society. How can individuals desire their own oppression? The authors suggest this dynamic is nurtured in childhood; children are (unconsciously) taught docility and repression, preparing them as passive cogs in the ever-turning capitalist machine. The Marxist historian of science Donna Haraway problematises the notion of a discrete human subject even further in ‘A Cyborg Manifesto’ (1985). ‘A cyborg’, Haraway states, ‘is a cybernetic organism, a hybrid of machine and organism, a creature of social reality as well as a creature of fiction.’ Such a being lacks stable identity or essence. As such, it resists essentialist claims about gender and biological sex. …I would rather be a cyborg than a goddess. Grounded in works such as Haraway’s and de Beauvoir’s, Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity (1990) by Judith Butler argues against the thought that gender is a matter of inborn ‘essences’ of man-ness or woman-hood. There is no fixed, stable subject that can be slotted into universal categories. For Butler, gender should be understood as performance: the sum of those pieces of theatre that people perform in front of others throughout their daily lives. Gender Trouble shows us that sex and gender are both socially constructed; they are meaningful only within specific socio-cultural contexts. The thought that gender categories are contingent and re-interpretable has had considerable influence both inside and outside academia, feeding into popular culture

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just as much as queer theory and LGBTQ+ studies. Trans Liberation: Beyond Pink or Blue (1992) by Leslie Feinberg continues these investigations. Feinberg argues for the conceptual (and practical) liberation of people from oppression faced for defying (often unspoken) norms for gender expression. According to Feinberg, gender exists on a continuum – fixed binaries are a modern invention: Transgendered women and men have always been here. (…) It is passing [as a conventional ‘man’ or ‘woman’] that’s historically new. Passing means hiding. Passing means invisibility. Transgendered people should be able to live and express their gender without criticism or threats of violence. These critiques – of modern notions of personhood, gender and identity – intersect with a reassessment of ‘rational’ epistemic norms and a re-engagement with modes of inquiry often seen as antithetical to reason. We see this in Simone Weil’s rigorous philosophical mysticism, in Gravity and Grace (1942) and in the profusion of Christian philosophical texts following it. Spirituality is also foregrounded in one of the key texts of Latinx feminist philosophy, Frontera/Borderlands (1987) by Gloria Evangelina Anzaldúa (1942–2004). Anzaldúa pulls together threads of feminist, queer and Chicana thought and situates them in the US/Mexico border context. The notion of mixture is central to Frontera/Borderlands. Anzaldúa speaks against an emphasis on purity in favour of the notion of mixed race (una raza mestiza). Seeing the limitations of standard academic discourse, she explores alternative means of knowledge generation through poetry and spiritual practice.

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Michel Foucault, cover of The History of Sexuality, 1979, Viking Press: New York, NY, USA. The first volume of Foucault’s four-volume study of sexuality in the Western World, this English language edition was published by Viking in 1979. LEFT

Photographic portrait of Angela Y. Davis, c. 1970s, USA. In the 1970s, when this photo was taken, Davis was prosecuted and jailed for capital felonies of which she was later completely acquitted. Much of her work revolves around the abolition of prisons.

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Photographic portrait of Audre Lorde, 1983, USA.

Audre Lorde, cover of Sister Outsider: Essays and Speeches, 1984, Crossing Press: Berkeley, CA, USA.

This image of Lorde was taken by the American photographer Jack Mitchell not long after the publication of the autobiographical works, The Cancer Journals (1980) and Zami: A New Spelling of My Name (1982). She stares directly into the camera, drawing the viewer in.

Produced by Crossing Press, a specialist philosophy publisher, this collection brings together ground-breaking essays and speeches, written and delivered between 1976 and 1983.

Witchcraft, Reincarnation and the God-Head (1992) by Sophie Bósèdé Olúwolé similarly analyses commonly held epistemic values. Olúwolé asks: might we believe in the magic and mystery common to Yoruba thought? Reports of witchcraft, she argues, should not be dismissed as ‘unscientific’, but should be taken seriously and documented. They might even offer alternative ways of knowing reality. Some worry about what they see as a turn away from reason and rational discourse. Might ‘alternative facts’ present a threat to democratic freedom? Is this a slippery slope to claims that the earth is flat or to repudiations of medical science? While varied, and sometimes contradictory, these worries often display a shared concern with grand narratives, whether about scientific progress or historical events, the development of philosophy or the heroic achievements of individual thinkers. They offer a caution, which we would echo here at the end of our book, that all such stories contain elements of truth and distortion, and that philosophical practice is often seriously entangled in all of these issues.

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Gloria E. Anzaldúa, cover of Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestiza, 1987, Aunt Lute Books: San Francisco, CA, USA. It is important to recognise the part played by independent publishers in the dissemination of work marginalised by the mainstream. Aunt Lute Books, who published Anzaldúa’s text, was founded in 1982 by Barb Wieser and Joan Pinkvoss, with the aim of producing ‘literature by women whose voices have been traditionally under-represented’. The cover art is by Pamela Wilson. ABOVE RIGHT

Judith Butler, cover of Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity, I990, Routledge: New York, NY, USA. The title font used in this edition of Gender Trouble invokes 1930s movie posters and the kinds of gender performance often found in the cinematic universe. LEFT

Rebecca Pohl, An Analysis of Donna Haraway’s A Cyborg Manifesto: Science, Technology, and Socialist-Feminism in the Late Twentieth Century, 2018, Macat: London, UK.

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CONCLUSION: POSSIBLE FUTURES 2000

A

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Photographic portrait of Marie Kondo, 2019, France. A household name, Kondo is known for her ‘KonMari’ method of organising, grounded in spiritual practices in Shintoism.

t the time of writing we are two decades into the twenty-first century: not yet in a position to identify lasting trends or single out specific books that ‘typify’ the age. We can, however, see certain currents – present in the previous century and the centuries before that – continuing into the new millennium. For one thing, philosophy books are still being written and published. Go into most bookshops, in most countries in the world, and you will find a section devoted to the discipline. Unlike other once-popular subjects, like alchemy or astrology, philosophy’s star continues to shine. Within this apparently thriving discipline, certain strains of nineteenth- and twentieth-century thought continue to dominate. The pro-market, scientistic and individualistic outlook that transfused so much colonial philosophy at the end of the twentieth century still appears in myriad forms – in ethics, for instance, and in metaphysics. Perhaps the best-known English-language ethical position, in modern times, is ‘effective altruism’. Built on the utilitarian foundations laid by Jeremy Bentham in the nineteenth century, and developed by Peter Singer in the 1980s and 90s, William MacAskill’s Doing Good Better (2015) deploys scientific-style reasoning to ‘doing good’. MacAskill argues that individual money-making – and redistribution of accrued wealth – are among the more ‘effective’ responses to inequality. Individualistic approaches are likewise clear in the soaring popularity of lifestyle philosophies. Shorn of its fatalist pantheistic roots, Stoicism has been re-branded in popular philosophy books as a method of de-stressing and coping with business setbacks. The radical notion of ‘no-self ’, central to Buddhist thought, has been transformed it into a sequence of personal mindfulness exercises. As Marie Kondo shows in The Life Changing Magic of Tidying Up (2011), even philosophies of emptiness can be forged into a lucrative commercial empire. Likewise, in the sphere of metaphysics, the ‘personal identity industry’ steams ever onwards, though the focus now is less on questions of brain transplantation and teleportation and more on issues of ‘gene modification’ and ‘human enhancement’ (in books such as Michael Bess’s Make Way for the Super Humans, 2017, or Rosi Braidotti’s The Posthuman, 2013). The tendencies towards philosophical scientism are perhaps most prominent in the burgeoning field known as ‘X-Phi’ (short for ‘experimental philosophy’). Here academics, building on seventeenth-century foundations, attempt to solve quandaries through the application of empirical data – well represented by the work of Tania Lombrozo. Experimental collaboration is just one example of how many of the disciplinary boundaries erected in the earlier centuries are beginning to blur. In the past few years we

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Photographic portrait of Rosi Braidotti, 2013, Utrecht, The Netherlands. Braidotti has been at the forefront of European Women’s Studies, founding inter-university feminist networks and serving on the advisory boards of numerous feminist journals. RIGHT

Rosi Braidotti, cover of The Posthuman, 2013, Polity: Cambridge, UK. An investigation into the limits of traditional humanistic thought about the unity of the subject, Braidotti argues that the posthuman helps us to make sense of multiple identities at a time of vast technological change.

have also seen the appearance of innovative philosophical novels, often auto-fictions such as Sheila Heti’s Motherhood (2018). These works disturb the standard classifications presupposed by many a bookshop, of philosophy and literary fiction, reality and imagination. Philosophical books have long had a ‘global’ focus. As we have seen, the process of globalisation reaches back to, and beyond, the development of the Silk Roads. These days philosophers with a global purview continue to consider issues of colonialism, refuge, national identity and multiculturalism, as we see in works such as Priyamvada Gopal’s Insurgent Empire (2019), Kwame Anthony Appiah’s Cosmopolitanism (2006) and We Are Displaced (2019), edited by Nobel Peace Prize winner Malala Yousafzai. Simultaneously US-based thinkers are beginning to engage explicitly with, and acknowledge their debts to, the rich and extensive philosophical histories from other parts of the world. One of

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Photographic portrait of Kwame Anthony Appiah, Date unknown. Author of numerous books on political and moral theory as well as African intellectual history and the philosophy of language, Appiah currently holds an appointment at the NYU Department of Philosophy.

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the bestselling philosophy books of the last decade was The Path (2016), in which Christine Gross-Loh and Michael Puett consider Rúist thought from an American perspective. Another global issue has risen to prominence too: the climate emergency. Global warming now features as one of the most marketable topics in published philosophy. From Greta Thunberg’s No One Is Too Small to Make a Difference (2019) to This is Not a Drill (2019), published under the aegis of the Extinction Rebellion movement, thinkers – often in co-authorship collaborations – are grappling with the moral, societal and existential implications of a warming planet. One upshot of this new focus is the increased (if still insufficient) attention being paid to Indigenous thinkers in some of the (presently) worst-affected regions, as well as to systems of thought that fall outside the Western industrial model (see, for example, Chelsea Vowel’s Indigenous Writes, 2016, or Daniel R. Wildcat’s Red Alert: Saving the Planet with Indigenous Knowledge, 2009). Epistemology has also seen considerable change in recent years, especially in relation to information technologies. The internet has created a brand new set of puzzles and problems about truth and knowledge, and how they intersect with ethics and politics. We are invited to ponder such matters in works such as Shoshana Zuboff’s The Age of Surveillance Capitalism (2019) and Rana Foroohar’s Don’t Be Evil: The Case Against Big Tech (2019). One question that peppers these texts is whether the old epistemic frameworks, grounded in old systems of knowledge production (such as books), are appropriate in the so-called ‘Digital Age’. LEFT

Photographic portrait of Malala Yousafzai, 2018, Australia. A Pakistani activist for female education, Yousafzai is the youngest Nobel Prize laureate ever. This photograph was taken in Sydney, Australia, in 2018. RIGHT

Malala Yousafzai, cover of We Are Displaced: My Journey and Stories from Refugee Girls Around the World, 2019, Little, Brown and Company: Boston, MA, USA. This bestselling book describes Yousafzai’s childhood experience of being displaced in Pakistani, alongside stories from other displaced people around the world. Starkly written, it stands as an engaged and moving testimony of marginalisation and oppression.

RIGHT

Photograph of Extinction Rebellion, 2020, London, UK. The final day of Extinction Rebellion’s series of ‘mass rebellions’ in London. BELOW LEFT

Daniel R. Wildcat, cover of Red Alert!: Saving the Planet with Indigenous Knowledge, 2009, Fulcrum: Golden, CO, USA. BELOW CENTRE

Greta Thunberg, cover of No One is Too Small to Make a Difference, 2019, Penguin Books: New York, NY, USA. BELOW RIGHT

Photographic portrait of Greta Thunberg, 2019, New York, USA. The young environmental activist became widely known after missing school to protest outside the Swedish parliament for stronger action on climate change.

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Photographic portrait of Rana Foroohar, 2019, California, USA. The American economist Rana Foroohar is one of most trenchant intellectuals grappling with the ethics and epistemic effects of so-called Big Tech companies. FAR RIGHT

Rana Foroohar, cover of Don’t Be Evil: The Case Against Big Tech, 2019, Penguin Books: New York, NY, USA. ‘Don’t Be Evil’ was the original corporate mantra of the tech giant Google and Foroohar’s study examines the ways in which digital companies have departed from this apparent founding philosophy. RIGHT

Shoshana Zuboff, cover of The Age of Surveillance Capitalism: The Fight for a Human Future at the New Frontier of Power, 2019, Public Affairs, Hachette Book Group: New York, NY, USA. The ‘surveillance capitalism’ of the title refers to the forms of capitalism exemplified by the business models of digital companies like Google and Amazon, which surveil their users and collect their data. FAR RIGHT

Photographic portrait of Shoshana Zuboff, 2019, Berlin, Germany. Harvard Professor, Shoshana Zuboff, is known for her work examining the digital revolution and the effects and evolutions of capitalism. She is pictured here, receiving the Axel Spring Award.

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Sara Ahmed, cover of Living a Feminist Life, 2017, Duke University Press: Durham, NC, USA.

Photographic portrait of Sara Ahmed, 2019, Geneva, Switzerland.

Published by Duke University Press to wide acclaim, Living a Feminist Life is a lyrical personal exploration of contemporary feminism, which foregrounds the scholarship of feminists of colour.

In addition to her many printed publications, one of Ahmed’s most important contributions to philosophical discourse is her research blog, feministkilljoys.com.

We are also seeing increasing self-reflection in the discipline, such as it is, and a wider awareness of the indebtedness of its various academic institutions to systems of imperialism and patriarchy. This is true even within the largely isolationist analytic philosophy, though more cynical readers may comment that such work simply constitutes an attempt to neutralise critique. It is worth noting, for instance, that it was only after she left the academy that Sara Ahmed (who had trained in analytic philosophy) wrote her coruscating analysis of institutional racism and sexism, Living a Feminist Life (2017). It is also worth noting, in this connection, that the twenty-first century has seen a number of high-profile cases of sexual harassment and abuse brought against some of the white, male, English-language philosophers championed in the twentieth century. Meanwhile methods of production appear to be changing in response to shifts both in academia and in the publishing industry. Calls for ‘open access’ (which challenge the pay-walls created between philosophers and their readers) have been taken up globally, in a move to more effectively democratise knowledge. In the future we will likely see an increase in ‘print on-demand’ books, and greater sales of eBooks and audiobooks. There may be a reduction in cost of specifically academic works, which can now be priced at over £100 (with very little of that going to the authors). However, this is far from

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Photographic portrait of Ai Weiwei, 2015, London, UK. Ai Weiwei stands in front of his installation of Forever Bicycles in an exhibition titled Bare Life. This refers to Giorgio Agamben’s notion, which appears in Homo Sacer, of human existence stripped of political and legal protection. BELOW LEFT

Photographic portrait of Sarah Bakewell, 2016, Edinburgh, UK. The British philosopher’s first book, a historical novel titled The Smart, was inspired by her work as a curator of early printed books in the Wellcome Library, and her perusal of forgotten fragments and pamphlets. BELOW RIGHT

Photographic portrait of Jacques Rancière, 2011, Paris, France. Professor of Philosophy at the European Graduate School in Saas-Fee, Rancière first became known as the co-author of Reading Capital with Louis Althusser. He is pictured here in a pensive pose.

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Kate Manne, cover of Down Girl: The Logic of Misogyny, 2017, Oxford University Press: New York, NY, USA. First published by the American branch of Oxford University Press, Manne’s up-to-the-minute analysis of patriarchy, sexism and misogyny won the Association of American Publishers PROSE Award in Philosophy, as well as the PROSE Award for Excellence in Humanities.

inevitable, since such texts typically have minimal market appeal (and academic publishers stand to make a lot of money from institutional sales). In an interesting shift, shorter dialogic texts are on the rise – for example, conversations or interviews transcribed (often verbatim) in such works as Ai Weiwei’s Weiwei-isms (2014) or Jacques Rancière and Peter Engelman’s Politics and Aesthetics (2019). These texts, comparatively low on intellectual labour costs, are often written in conversational, colloquial style for a broad audience. They figure in the growth of ‘popular philosophy’, of the kind written by Sarah Bakewell and Julian Baggini. Such books aspire to render academic, overly theoretical language accessible to a general audience. They are, as we learn from Mary Midgley, the inevitable consequence of the increasing specialisation of the discipline which revels in sub-disciplines and sub-sub-disciplines such as ‘metametaphysics’ and the philosophy of the history of the philosophy of biology. Philosophers also appear to be writing books at an increasing rate, often in response to pressing political crises and possibly also in conjunction with institutional calls for greater ‘impact’ (in order to secure funding). The epistemologist Kate Manne’s Down Girl (2017), for instance, a brilliant and timely analysis of misogyny and sexism, is in part a response to the 2016 American presidential election. The work was written in less than a year.

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ABOVE

Storefront for The School of Life, 2019, London, UK. Founded by Alain de Botton in 2008, The School of Life monetizes philosophical thought through its publications and ‘bibliotherapy’ services.

Of course, some of the most important philosophical work is being done outside the covers of books. As we have seen consistently throughout these histories, philosophical work appears in countless forms including, but certainly not limited to, the printed page. Given recent shifts in communication technologies – which have, for instance, made methods of digital recording widely available – it is unsurprising that many people now consume philosophy not in the form of printed books or essays, but online and on their mobile devices. Here, at the start of the new millennium, and at the end of this book about books, it may be helpful to mention some of the other types of philosophical media on offer. In some ways, we are seeing a return to the oral traditions of the kind once widespread around the world but disrupted by colonialism. Audio podcasts figure as a site of much contemporary philosophising. One of the main texts that has inspired and aided the writing of this book is the History of Philosophy Without Any Gaps podcast, created by Peter Adamson. In 20-minute episodes Adamson delves into the intricacies of different philosophical traditions, often conversing with specialists such as Nkiru Nzegwu and Monima Chadha. It is worth mentioning, too, that the scripts for the podcasts have been written up and are available in book form – these media are neither exclusive nor in immediate competition.

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Online forums such as YouTube have created spaces for thinkers, institutionally affiliated or not, to disseminate their work to huge numbers of people. Content creators such as ContraPoints (by Natalie Wynn), 8-bit Philosophy and The School of Life (set up by Alain de Botton) can rack up millions of views for their short, simple, explanatory videos. Often these texts are accompanied with animated visuals that, like the picture book the Ārzhang, are specifically designed for a pedagogical purpose. One of the most recent examples of digitisation is the app Xuéxí Qiángguó (roughly translated as ‘Study the Great Nation’), released in 2019. It is dedicated to the propagation of the thought of the president of the People’s Republic of China, Xi Jinping. The internet has also facilitated mass collaborations, creating virtual spaces in which thinkers from around the world can pool their knowledge to produce something resembling an online ‘House of Wisdom’. Among the most extensive of these online spaces is Wikipedia’s Philosophy Portal, which contains tens of thousands of articles on philosophical affairs. Similarly the Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy and Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (both 1995-) feature hundreds of detailed, freely accessible and intellectually thorough entries written by experts from different parts of the globe (though, so far, only in English). Like Wikipedia and other online texts, these encyclopedias are constantly updated and extended, to the benefit of students and practitioners alike. Philosophers no longer gather in literal marketplaces, as the Ancient Babylonians did, but Twitter, Reddit and Facebook have come to perform similar roles. It is here that a lot of interesting philosophical work is done, by philosopher-activists such as Shaikha al-Jassem, Nathaniel Adam Tobias Coleman and Sara Ahmed, who emphasise engagement and resistance in addition to, or over, printed publications. It was on social media that intellectual movements such as the #RhodesMustFall and #DecoloniseMyCurriculum campaigns began. Inevitably, mainstream academia does not yet properly recognise these forms of philosophical labour. Like the work of the Cynics, which fell outside the ambit of Marcus Aurelius’s faculty system (p.71), there is a chance that ongoing debates in the ‘Twittersphere’ may be lost to future historians because of the vagaries of contemporary archiving processes. In some sense philosophers are creating and disseminating content in profoundly new and unexpected ways. The fact that we can watch an animated four-minute video explaining Du Bois’ concept of double consciousness (p.216) during our commute, is surely a thing of wonder. Yet in another very real sense, these ‘new’ ways are really variations on old discursive forms that run throughout our global histories. One of the oldest of these, and undoubtedly the most durable, is the printed page. The books we have considered here tell histories that are partial, often biased and sometimes conflicting. Nevertheless, book technology is impressively sophisticated and these texts are accessible, reliable at capturing thought and easy to archive. In many ways they have yet to be superseded. Irrespective of what the future holds, it will very probably continue to hold books… and books about books… and possibly books about those books too.

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ADDENDUM

GLOSSARY This brief glossary covers the technical terms that are not explicitly explained in the main text.

Asceticism A way of living in which practitioners avoid forms of excess and indulgence.

Egalitarianism The thesis that people should be treated equally.

Binding The method of holding pages or sheets together with a covering, such as fabric.

Empirical Said of a statement or idea: that is it based on observation or experience.

Colonisation The process of displacing, or establishing control over, the indigenous people of an area.

End paper Often marbled, the paper pasted to the inside of a book cover.

Colophon A statement at the back of a book, containing information about its production. Cosmology The branch of astronomy that considers the evolution of the universe or ‘cosmos’. Decolonisation The process of removing a colonising group from a former colony. Democracy A political system where decisions are made by the public (demos), either directly, or through elected representatives.

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Enlightenment A controversial term used to describe the period of Western thought in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Epistemology The branch of philosophy that examines what we know and how we know it (from the Greek, epistēmē, meaning ‘knowledge’). Ethics A code of moral principles that guides behaviour. The branch of philosophy that studies these codes. Exegesis The critical examination of texts, typically religious scripture.

Despotism A type of government in which a single person – a despot – rules with absolute power.

Flyleaf A blank leaf or page inserted during binding between the end paper and the start or end of the text.

Dichotomy A division between two supposedly opposing things.

Gutter The inner margin of the leaves of a bound book.

Heuristic A method for learning. Ideology A system of ideas, which for example shapes economic or political theory. Karma A metaphysical principle in Hinduism and Buddhism, referring to processes of spiritual cause and effect whereby for instance an individual’s intent influences the individual’s future. Metaphysics The branch of philosophy that deals with the first principles of things. Modernism An intellectual movement responding to societal shifts caused by the “Industrial Revolution” in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.

Post-modernism An intellectual movement which criticises Modernist notions of truth, rationality and reality. Recto The front side of a leaf, or the page on the right. Relativism The view that things like truth, beauty and goodness are relative to a frame or frames of reference and not absolute. Self-abnegation The denial of self; self-sacrifice, or the relinquishing of personal rights or possessions. Totalitarianism A dictatorial system of government which demands total subservience of the state’s citizens.

Monotheism The doctrine that there is only one deity.

Vellum A thin, untanned leather from calf skin.

Morality The branch of philosophy that deals with the distinction between right and wrong.

Verso In an open book, the page on the left.

Numismatic Relating to coins or medals. Ontology The study of existence and which items do and don’t exist.

White supremacy A political system that uses the concept of “race” to systematically privilege and empower white people over everyone else.

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FURTHER READING There are, of course, any number of texts and resources (written and otherwise) which shed light on the traditions described above. Here are a few that have helped in the process of writing this book: Peter Adamson, History of Philosophy Without Any Gaps: https://historyofphilosophy.net/ Julian Baggini. How the World Thinks: A Global History of Philosophy. Granta Books, 2018. The British Library Digitised Manuscripts: http://www.bl.uk/manuscripts/ The British Museum Digital Collection: https://www.britishmuseum.org/collection Patricia Hill Collins. Black Feminist Thought: Knowledge, Consciousness, and the Politics of Empowerment. Hyman, 1990. Lorraine Daston. Against Nature. MIT Press, 2019. Kristie Dotson. “How is this Paper Philosophy?” Comparative Philosophy 3:1 (2013). Peter Frankopan. The Silk Roads: A New History of the World. Bloomsbury, 2015. Jonardon Ganeri. The Oxford Handbook of Indian Philosophy. Oxford University Press, 2017. Lewis Gordon. An Introduction to Africana Philosophy. Cambridge University Press, 2008. Karyn Lai. An Introduction to Chinese Philosophy. Cambridge University Press, 2017. Koselleck-Project, Histories of Philosophy in a Global Perspective: https://www.uni-hildesheim.de/en/histories-of-philosophy/ The Library of Congress Digital Collections: https://www.loc.gov/collections/ Charles Mills. The Racial Contract. Cornell University Press, 1997. The National Gallery Digital Collection: https://www.nationalgallery.org.uk/paintings/search-the-collection Peter K. J. Park. Africa, Asia, and the History of Philosophy: Racism in the Formation of the Philosophical Canon, 1780-1830. SUNY Press, 2013. Mary Ellen Waithe. A History of Women Philosophers, Volumes I-IV. Springer, 1987–1995. The Wellcome Library Digital Collections: https://wellcomelibrary.org/collections/digital-collections/ Lisa Whiting and Rebecca Buxton. The Philosopher Queens: The Lives and Legacies of Philosophy’s Unsung Women. Unbound, 2020

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NOTES ON NAMES AND TRANSLATIONS In referring to different philosophical traditions we have encountered various issues around translation and naming. For reasons of space and consistency, we have decided to give book titles, in most cases, in English or English translation. Where appropriate, full accents have been supplied to clarify pronunciation. With respect to naming, we have attempted to follow the usage and conventions of the traditions in which an individual thinker works. This goes for the names of schools of thought (for example, we opt for ‘Rúism’ rather than ‘Confucianism’, as the former better reflects how scholars working in that tradition would have thought of themselves). It also holds for names of authors themselves. In China, for example, the convention is for the family name to appear before the given name, while in Germany it’s the reverse. We have aimed for consistency within each tradition. (Though, as conventions shift over the four millennia this book covers, occasional exceptions do occur.)

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INDEX Page numbers in italics refer to illustrations A Abba Mikael, The Book of Wise Philosophers 184 Ācārāṇga Sūtra 51 Adamson, Peter 54, 252 History of Philosophy Without Any Gaps 252–3 Adorno, Theodor Wiesengrund 227 Aeschylus 47 Agamben, Giorgio 250 Aḥmad Bābā Replies on Slavery 201, 201 Ahmed, Sara 249, 253 Living a Feminist Life 249, 249 Ahurā Mazdā 42 Ai Weiwei 250 Weiwei-isms 251 Akbar, Emperor, History of the Millennium 105, 105 Akhenaten (Amenhotep IV) 16 Alexander of Macedon 39, 45–6, 45, 47, 51, 54, 56, 57, 108 Alexander VI, Pope 171 Ambedkar, Bhimrao Ramji, Annihilation of Caste 231 Amitabhā Sūtra 85 Amitāyurdhyāna Sūtra 147 Amo, Anton Wilhelm 184–185 On the Impassivity of the Human Mind 201 On the Rights of Moors in Europe 185 Anaximander 33

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On Nature 33 Andreas-Salomé, Lou 240 Anscombe, Gertrude Elizabeth Margaret, Intention 227, 227 Anselm 155, 156, 182 Proslogion 154–5, 155 Anthony, Susan B. 215 Anzaldúa, Gloria Evangelina, Borderlands/ La Frontera 241–2, 243 Appiah, Kwame Anthony 245 Cosmopolitanism 245 Apple, Michael 8 Aquinas, Thomas 106, 156–7 Summa Contra Gentiles 156, 156 Summa Theologiae 156, 157 Archimedes 106 Ardā Wīrāz Namāg (Book of the Righteous Wiraz) 46 Arendt, Hannah 229, 238 The Origins of Totalitarianism 227, 229 Arete of Cyrene 56, 57 Aristotle 8, 31, 37, 37, 39, 45, 47, 73, 95, 106, 107, 110, 121, 132, 157, 179, 187 History of Animals 37 Metaphysics 37 Nichomachean Ethics 37, 38, 45 On the Soul 37 Physics 133 Politics 37, 45, 46 Armamalai Cave 82 Asaṅga 80 Asclēpigéneia of Athens 85 Astell, Mary, A Serious Proposal to the Ladies 204

Augustine of Hippo 75, 76, 95 City of God 94 Confessions 76, 78, 78 Austin, John Langshaw, How to Do Things with Words 226 Avesta 42 Ayer, Alfred Jules 227, 238 Language, Truth and Logic 221 B Babylonian Kōhelet 10, 16 18–19, 18, 20, 104, 190–1 Bacon, Francis, The New Organon 187–9, 188, 190 Badius Ascensius, Jodocus 171 Baggini, Julian 251 Bahram, Mihrban Anushirvan 44 Bakewell, Sarah 250, 251 The Smart 250 Bān Zhāo 63, 70, 72 The Book of Hàn 59 Lessons for Women 63, 113 Bäumler, Alfred 218 Beatrizet, Nicolas 66 Beauvoir, Simone de 235, 236, 236, 240 The Second Sex 233, 234 Behistun inscription 42 Belley, Jean-Baptiste 9 Bentham, Jeremy 214, 244 Bernal, Martin 8 Bhagavad-gītā 39 Bì Shēng 171 Bihzād, Husayn 108 Biko, Stephen Bantu 232 I Write What I Like 232 Bismarck, Otto von 217, 218

Blavatsky, Helena Petrovna 219 The Secret Doctrine 219, 219 Bodhidharma, Treatise on The Two Entrances and Four Practices 94 Boëthius, Anicius Manlius Severinus 95 The Consolation of Philosophy 95, 96–7 Bolívar y Palacios PonteAndrade y Blanco, Simón José Antonio de la Santísima Trinidad, Letter from Jamaica 203 Bone, Robert Trewick 70 Book of Rites 59, 141 Botton, Alain de 252, 253 Bosse, Abraham 194 Boukman, Dutty 202, 203 Braidotti, Rosi 245 The Posthuman 244, 245 Brhādaraṇyaka Upaniṣad 24, 25 Buddha 50, 50, 79, 83, 83, 84, 118, 147 Butler, Judith 233 Gender Trouble 240, 243 C Cá Zhenxiù 63 Caesar, Julius 6, 47 Camus, Albert, The Myth of Sisyphus 233, 236 Carnap, Rudolf 227 The Logical Structure of the World 221 Casas, Bartolomé de las, A Short Account of the Destruction of the Indies 179, 179–80

Catherine the Great (Catherine II) 205, 206 Nakaz 204 Cavendish, Margaret, The Blazing-World 189, 189 Çelebi, Kātib, Removal of Doubt from the Names of Books and the Arts 218 Césaire, Aimé 232 Discourse on Colonialism 232, 232 Chadha, Monima 252 Charlemagne 119, 120 Charles V, Emperor 178 Chaucer, Geoffrey 96 Chen Yanqing 30 Chéng Hào, Surviving Works 140–1, 181 Chéng Yí, Surviving Works 140–1, 181 Choffard, Pierre-Philippe 205 Cholas 165 Chronicles of Japan, 113, 116–17 Cicero, Marcus Tullius 64, 72 On the Nature of Gods 195 Orations 65 Codex Mendoza 179 Codex Wormianus 122 Coleman, Nathaniel Adam Tobias 253 Colombe, Jean 97 Combahee River Collective Statement 240 Constantine, Emperor 75, 76 ContraPoints (Natalie Wynn) 253 Conway, Anne 182, 183 Principles of the Most Ancient and Modern Philosophy 183 Cooper, Anna Julia 215 A Voice from the South 215–16, 215 Cranach, Lucas the Elder 171, 174, 175 Cranach, Lucas the Younger 173 Crates of Thebes 56, 64

Cugoano, Quobna Ottobah 201, 203 Thoughts and Sentiments on the Evil and Wicked Traffic of Slavery 201–2 Cyrus, Prince 42 D Dacier, Anne 192 Of the Causes of the Corruption of Taste 192 Dàodé Jing 11, 29, 30, 30, 59 Dáoshēng 94 Darius I 42 Darius III 45 Daston, Lorraine 30 Davis, Angela Yvonne 241 If they Come In The Morning 240, 241 de Monte Imperiali, Manfredus, Liber de Herbis 131 Deleuze, Gilles and Félix Guattari, Capitalism and Schizophrenia 240 Deng Shirú 62 Dèng Suí, Empress 59 Descartes, René 10, 182, 184, 185, 187 Discourse on Method 182–4 Meditations on First Philosophy 182–4, 184 The World 187 Devasūri, Vādi, Pramana-naya tattavalokalamkara 165, 191 Diamond Sūtra 85, 90–3 Diepenbeeck, Abraham van 189 Diogenes Laërtius, 59 Lives and Opinions of Eminent Philosophers 47, 54–6, 55 Diogenes of Sinope 56 Diotima of Mantinea 36 Dīpankara (Buddha) 83 Dōgen Zenji, General Advice on the Principles of Zazen 154 Treasury of the True Dharma Eye 154

Doctrine of the Mean 41 Domna, Julia 70 Dostoevsky, Fyodor Mikhailovich, Notes from Underground 233 Dotson, Kristie 9–10 Du Bois, William Edward Burghardt 216, 216, 231, 253 The Souls of Black Folk 240 Dumesle, Herard 202 Dürer, Albrecht 123 E Edda 122 Einstein, Albert 227 Encounter 238 Engelhardt, Christian Maurice 163 Engelman, Peter and Jacques Rancière Politics and Aesthetics 251 Engels, Friedrich 210 Epictetus 67 Enchiridion 64, 67 Epicurus of Samos, Letter to Menoeceus 57, 57 Equiano, Olaudah 203 The Interesting Narrative of the Life of Olaudah Equiano 202, 203 Erasmus, Desiderius 175, 181 In Praise of Folly 171, 175 Eriugena, John Scotus 121, 121 Periphyseon 121 Euclid 35, 106 Elements 21 Euripides 47 Extinction Rebellion 247 This is Not a Drill 246 Eze, Emmanuel Chukwudi 192 F Fanon, Ibrahim Frantz 216, 231 Black Skin, White Masks 231 Wretched of the Earth 231–2, 236

Fatiman, Cécile 202 Feinberg, Leslie, Trans Liberation 241 Felicitas, Saint 75–6 Fetḥa Nagast 131 Ficino, Marsilio 77 Foot, Philippa 227, 227 Virtues and Vices 229 Foroohar, Rana 248 Don’t Be Evil 246, 248 Förster, Elisabeth 218 Foucault, Michel 123 Discipline and Punish 240 The History of Sexuality 241 Fouquet, Jean 120 Francke, Christoph Bernhard 190 Frege, Gottlob 221 Begriffsschrift 221 The Foundations of Arithmetic 221 Freud, Sigmund 231 G Galen 106, 132 Galilei, Galileo 187 Galle, Philip 175 Gallimard, Gaston 231 Gandhi, Mohandas Karamchand: The Story of My Experiments with Truth 231, 233 Ganeri, Jonardon 54, 80 Gaon, Sa’adia ben Yosef, Book of Beliefs and Opinions 111–12, 112 Gautama, Siddhārtha (Buddha) 50, 50, 51, 59, 63, 79, 83, 83, 84, 118,147 Genghis Khan 27, 139, 141 Gerard of Cremona 133 al-Ghazālī, Abū Ḥāmid Muḥammad ibn Muḥammad al-Ṭūsī 134, 154 Incoherence of the Philosophers 128, 129, 130, 131, 132 Gödel, Kurt 221 Gopal, Priyamvada,

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Insurgent Empire 245 The Great Canon of Yŏnglè 144–5, 146, 164 Gregory of Nyssa 76, 121 de Gourmont, Gilles 175 Great Learning 62, 141 Gross-Loh, Christine, and Michael Puett The Path 246 Guattari, Pierre-Félix, and Gilles Deleuze Capitalism and Schizophrenia 240 Guevara, Che 236, 236 Gutenberg, Johann 170–1 Gwalleuk 116 H Halevi, Judah, 134 The Book of Proof and Evidence in Support of the Abased Religion 132 Hammurabi, King 19 Hán Fēi, Hán Fēizĭ 59 Haraway, Donna Cyborg Manifesto 233, 240 Hare, Richard Mervyn 227 Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich, The Phenomenology of Spirit 206–7, 210, 213, 226 Heidegger, Martin 223, 225, 226, 227 Being and Time 223–4, 224 Black Notebooks 224, 225 Hellemans, Cornelis A. 184 Hemacandra, Yogaśāstra 165, 166–7 Heraclitus of Ephesus 33–4 Herrad of Landsberg, The Garden of Delights 157, 158, 163, 164 Herzl, Theodor, The Jewish State 230 Heti, Sheila, Motherhood 245 Hildegard of Bingen 157 Scivias 158, 159–61, 164 Hipparchia of Maroneia 56, 56, 64

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Hitler, Adolf Mein Kampf 8, 8 Hobbes, Thomas Leviathan 193, 194 Holbein, Ambrosius 180 Holbein, Hans 175, 181 Homer, Iliad 47, 48 Hōnen 154 Passages on the Selection of the Nembutsu in the Original Vow 147 Honthorst, Gerrit van 184 Hoogstraten, Samuel van, 182 Hordedef 16 Horkheimer, Max 227 House of Wisdom 104, 106, 132, 253 Hrosvitha of Gandersheim 58, 121–3 Sapientia 123 Songs of Hrosvitha 123 Hume, David, A Treatise on Human Nature 192–3 Husserl, Edmund 223, 233 Ideas for a Pure Phenomenology and Phenomenological Philosophy 221 Hypatia of Alexandria 70, 71, 73, 85 I Ibn al-‘Assal, ‘Abul Fada’il 131 Ibn ‘Arabī al-Ḥātimi aṭ-Ṭa’ī, Abū ‘Abd Allāh Muḥammad ibn ‘Ali ibn Muḥammad 196 The Ringstones of Wisdom 128, 129, 196–7 Ibn ‘Atā, Wāşil 104 Ibn Bājja, Abū Bakr Muḥammad ibn Yaḥya ibn al-Ṣa’igh al-Tūjibī, Rule of the Solitary 129, 130 Ibn Gabirol, Solomon ben Yehuda 132

Source of Life 132 Ibn Ḥayyān, Abū Mūsā Jābir 111 Book of Stones 111, 112 Ibn Khaldoun 201 Ibn Rushd, Abū al-Walīd Muḥammad ibn ’Aḥmad (Averroes) 132, 134, 156 The Incoherence of the Incoherence 129, 131, 131 Ibn Sīnā, Abū ’Alī al-Ḥusayn ibn ’Abdillāh ibn al-Hasan ibn ‘Alī (Avicenna) 10, 126–7, 129, 131, 134, 154, 156, 165, 182 The Book of Healing 127–8, 127 The Canon of Medicine 126, 127 Ibn Tibbon, Samuel 138 Ibn Ṭufayl al-Qaysī, Abū Bakr Muḥammad ibn ‘Abd al-Malik ibn Muḥammad ibn Muḥammad 139 Ḥayy ibn Yaqẓān 129 Ibn Yusuf al-Bursawi, Mustafa, Treatise on the Incoherence of Philosophers 130 Illāhābādī, Muḥibballāh 196–7 Imhotep 16 Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy 253 Irigaray, Luce 233 Īśvarakṙṣṇa, Sāṁkhyakārikā 83 Ivie, Edward 67 J al-Jassem, Shaikha 253 Jayarāśi, Bhaṭṭa, Tattvōpaplava-siṁha 117–18, 119, 121 Jesus of Nazareth (Christ) 70, 75, 76, 77, 78, 94, 159, 161 Juana Inés de la Cruz, Sor 206 Reply to Sister Filotea of the Cross 204 Julian of Norwich 157 Revelations of Divine Love 158, 162, 163

K Kabīr, Bījak 196 Kaniṣka, Emperor 79, 84 Kant, Immanuel 25, 192, 193, 193, 197 Anthropology from a Pragmatic Point of View 192, 193 al-Kawākibī, ‘Abd al-Raḥman, The Nature of Despotism 218–19 Khaljī, Muḥammad bin Bakhtiyār 6 Kierkegaard, Søren, Fear and Trembling 233 Kikukawa Eizan 146 al-Kindī, Abū Yūsuf Ya’qūb ibn Isḥāq al-Ṣabbāh 107, 108 On First Philosophy 107 ha-Kohen, Toviyyah ben Moshe 218 Works of Tobias 218 Kondo, Marie 244 The Life Changing Magic of Tidying Up 244 Kŏngzĭ (Confucius) 28, 28, 29, 30, 37, 39, 84, 113 Analects 28, 28, 29, 39, 59, 141 Amun-Min 57 König, Gustav 172 Korda, Alberto 236 Kublai Khan 141 Kūkai 116, 116, 117, 147 Benkenmitsu-nikkyōron 116, 117 Indications of the Goals of the Three Teachings 116 Kumārajīva 85 L Lallēśvari (Lal Ded), Vākhs 157 Landa Calderón, Bishop Diego de 6 Langer, Susanne Katherina, Philosophy in a New Key 227, 229

Lăozĭ 30, 84 Lay of Rígr (Rígsþula) 121, 122 Leibniz, Gottfried Wilhelm 10, 19, 190, 190 Essays of Theodicy 190–1, 190 Monadology 190, 191 Li Gonglin 31 Lià Xiàng, Biographies of Eminent Women 59 Library of Alexandria 6, 6, 45, 47, 64 Lievens, Jan 204 Linebaugh, Peter 8 Locke, John, Essay Concerning Human Understanding 194–5, 195, 238 Two Treatises of Government 193–4 Lombrozo, Tania 244 Lorde, Audre 9, 11, 242 Sister Outsider 240, 242 Lotus Sūtra 50, 72, 84–9, 85, 94 Louverture, François Dominique Toussaint, Constitution of Saint Domingue 203 Luther, Martin 171, 171, 172 Bible, that is: The Entire Holy Writ 171, 173 Ninety-five Theses 171, 172 The Old Testament 174 Passional Christi und Antichristi 175 M MacAskill, William, Doing Good Better 244 Macrina the Younger 121 On the Soul and Resurrection 76 Mahābhārata 39 Mahāniddesa 51 Mahāvīra 51, 53 Maimonides 156 Guide for the Perplexed 134, 134, 138, 139 Mishneh Torah

134, 135, 136–7 Maldonado y Cabrera, Miguel Mateo 206 Mandela, Nelson Rolihlahla 232 Mani, Ārzhang (The Picture Book) 73–5, 74, 75, 164, 253 Manne, Kate Down Girl 251–2, 251 Mao Zedong, Quotations from Mao Zedong 236, 237 Marcus Aurelius 64, 66, 70–1, 73, 253 Meditations 64 Marshall, William 157 Marx, Karl 210, 211, 213 Capital 210, 211, 212, 221, 236 Matthew, Thomas, English Bible 176–7 Medici, House of (family) 77 Mehmed II, Sultan 130 Meiji, Emperor 222 Mendoza y Pacheco, Viceroy Antonio de 179 Mèngz (Mencius) 62, 62 Mèngz’ Mother 62 Mernissi, Fatima, Beyond the Veil 214, 215 Midgley, Mary 226, 251 Beast & Man 227, 228 Mill, Harriet Taylor 214, 214 On Liberty 213, 214 Mill, John Stuart; On Liberty 213, 214 The Subjection of Women 214 Mills, Charles 8 Mindon Min, King 52 Miyamoto Musashi 200, Book of Five Rings 199 Mògāo Caves 118 Monica of Hippo 78 Montaigne, Michel de, Essays 182, 183 More, Thomas 171, 181 Utopia 180, 180, 181 Mouseion 71 Morishima Chūryō, Sayings of the Dutch 199

Motoori Norinaga 199 Móuzĭ, Disposing of Error 84 Mòzĭ 29, 39 Muḥammad, Prophet 100, 104 Murasaki Shikibu, The Tale of Genji 146, 148–53, 199 Murdoch, Iris 228, 238 The Sovereignty of Good 227, 228 al-Mustakfī, Wallāda bint 132 N al-Nadīm, Abū al-Faraj Muḥammad ibn Isḥāq, Catalogue Book 106–7, 107, 108 Nāgārjuna 56, 119 Fundamental Verses on the Middle Way 79, 80 Nakae Tōju, 199 Dialogue with an Old Man 198–9 Nānā Asmā’u bint ‘Uthmān dan Fodīyo, Be Sure of God’s Truth 201 Nānak, Guru 165 Nero, Emperor 64 Neurath, Otto 221 Newton, Isaac 190 Nicholas, Tsar 219 Nicholas of Damascus, On Plants 133 Nietszche, Friedrich 217, 217, 227, 240 On the Genealogy of Morality: At Polemic 217–18 Thus Spake Zarathustra 42, 217 Nirvana Sūtra 94 Nishida Kitarō 222 An Inquiry into the Good 222, 223 Nochlin, Linda 8 Norvins, Jacques de Marquet Montbreton de, History of Napoleon 202 Nozick, Robert 239

Anarchy, State, and Utopia 238, 239 Nzegwu, Nkiru 252 O Oakeley, Hilda Diana, Should Nations Survive? 230 Olúwolé, Sophie Bósèdé, Witchcraft, Reincarnation and the God-Head 242 Opie, John 204 oracle bones 25, 26, 26, 27 Origen Adamantius, On First Principles 76 Oruka, Henry Odera 232 Otto I, King 121 Oxyrhynchus Papyri 21, 31, 35 P Pāli Canon 50–1, 52, 56, 62, 80 Papyrus of Ani 10 Papyrus Prisse 17 Parfit, Derek, Reasons and Persons 238 Parmenides of Elea 33, 34 Patañjali, Yoga Sūtra 81, 83 Perpetua, Vibia 75 The Passion of St Perpetua, St Felicitas and their Companions 75–6 Pesešet 16 Pẹṭros, Wälättä 186–7 The Life-Struggles of Wälättä Peṭros 185 Pfalz, Elisabeth von der 183–4, 184 Philip II, Prince 179 Phintys of Sparta, On the Moderation of Women 57–8 Pizan, Christine de: The Book of the City of Ladies 164 The Book of the Queen 164 Plato 8, 31, 36, 39, 70, 71, 73 84, 85, 95 Republic 37, 106, 110, 180 Symposium 31, 34, 35, 36–7 Timaeus 64, 75, 76 Pleydenwurff, Wilhelm 121

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Plotinus 71, 73 Enneads 75, 106 Plutarch 59 Lives of the Noble Greeks and Romans 47 Poem of the Righteous Sufferer 19 Poliziano, Angelo 67 Pollock, Jackson 238 Popper, Karl Raimund 221, 238 The Open Society and Its Enemies 230 Porete, Marguerite, The Mirror of Simple Souls 158 Porphyry of Tyre 75, 77 Prisse d’Avennes, Émile 17 Proclus, Elements of Theology 106 Ptahhotep 15, 17 The Maxims of Ptahhotep 15–16, 16–17 Ptolemais of Cyrene, Pythagorean Principles of Music 45 Ptolemy, Claudius 45, 45, 106, 132 Geography 46 Harmonics 45 Puett, Michael, and Christine Gross-Loh The Path 246 Purusa Sūkta 25 Pyrrho of Elis 54 Pythagoras of Samos 32 Q Qín Shĭ Huáng, Emperor 7, 58 Qiú Ying 143 Qur’ān 100, 100–3, 104, 106, 127, 131 R Rabanus Maurus, On the Nature of Things 42 Raffet, Auguste 202 Rancière, Jacques 250 Politics and Aesthetics 251 Rand, Ayn 238, 239

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The Virtue of Selfishness 238 Rand, Rose 221, 227 Rashīd al-Dīn Faḍlullāh Hamadānī, al-Rāzī, Abū Ḥātim Aḥmad ibn Ḥamdān, Science of Prophecy 111 al-Rāzī, Abubakr Muḥammad ibn Zakariyyā 108, 108, 132 Comprehensive Book 108, 109 The Philosophical Life 108, 110 The Spiritual Medicine 108 Reichenbach, Hans 227 Reid, Stephen 157 Ṛgveda 22–23, 25 Ribeira, Bernardino de 179 Universal History of the Things of New Spain 179 Rogers, John 176 Rogier, Camille 192 Roth, Christoph Melchior 206 Rousseau, Jean-Jacques, The Social Contract 195, 196 Roussy-Triosont, Anne-Louis Girodet de 9 Roy, Rammohun, Conference Between An Advocate For and An Opponent Of the Practice of Burning Widows 204 Russell, Bertrand 226, 238 A History of Western Philosophy 227 Principia Mathematica 221 S Saggil-kīnam-ubbib 19 Sahagún, Bernadino de Ribeira, General History of the Things of New Spain 178, 179 Saichō 147 Said, Edward 214 Orientalism 213 Śāntideva, Bodhicaryavatara 119 Sappho 31, 31, 32, 35, 36, 37, 132 Ode to Aphrodite 31, 39, 72–3

Sartre, Jean-Paul 236, 236, 238 Being and Nothingness 233, 235 Schlick, Moritz 221 Schopenhauer, Arthur 207 The World as Will and Representation 207, 207 Schurman, Anna Maria van 204 The Learned Maid 204 Sei Shōnagon, 146 The Pillow Book 146, 147 Sepúlveda, Juan Ginés de, A Second Democritus: On the Just Causes of War with Indians 179 Sextus Empiricus, Outlines of Pyrrhonism 54 Shāng Yāng, The Book of Lord Shāng 59 Shoemaker, Sydney 238, 240 Self-Knowledge and Self-Identity 238, 239 Shōtoku Taishi, Seventeen Article Constitution 113, 114–15, 116 Shukla Yajurveda 20 Sīmǎ Qián and Sīmǎ Tan Records of the Grand Historian 58, 59 Simmel, Georg, The Philosophy of Money 213 Singer, Peter 244 Practical Ethics 239, 240 Śiromaṇi, Raghunātha, Tattvacintāmaņīdidhiti 196, 197 Sittanavasal Cave 82 Socrates 8, 31, 36, 36, 39, 47, 108 Sòng Ruòshēn, Women’s Analects 113 Spinoza, Baruch de 197, 198, 221 Ethics, Demonstrated in Geometrical Order 197–8, 198 Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty 214

Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy 253 Stebbing, Lizzie Susan, Logical Positivism and Analysis 221 Stehlin, Jacob 206 Stewart, Maria W., Productions of Mrs Maria W. Stewart 204 Sthānāgasūtra 51 al-Suhrawardī, Abū al-Futūḥ Shihāb al-Dīn Yaḥyā ibn Ḥabash ibn Amīrak, The Philosophy of Illumination 129 Sukhāvatīvyūha Sūtras 147 Sugita Genpaku, Beginning of Dutch Studies 199 sūtras 50-51, 53, 71, 72, 79-80, 81, 83, 85, 84–93, 94, 117, 147 Sutta Piṭaka 50 T Tanabe Hajime 223 Teresa of Ávila, The Interior Castle 164 Tertullianus, Quintus Septimius Florens, Against Praxeas 76 Tesauro, Emanuele 95 Testa, Pietro 34 Thales of Miletus 33 Theano of Croton 32 Advice for Women 32 Theodoric, Emperor 95 Thevet, André 155 Thunberg, Greta 247 No One Is Too Small to Make a Difference 246, 247 Tolstoy, Lev Nikolayevich 219, 220 Topsell, Edward, Treatise on the Two Entrances and Four Practices 94 Troyel, Isaac 190 Truth, Sojourner 215–16

Tyndale, William 171, 176 The New Testament as it was written 171, 174 U U Khandi 52 Ulyanov, Vladimir Ilyich (Lenin) 220 The Development of Capitalism in Russia 219–21, 220, 236 Utagawa, Kuniyoshi 200 Umāsvāmi, Āchārya, Tattvarthsytra 83 Upaniṣads 24, 25, 39, 50, 70, 80 Uttarādhyayana Sūtra 53 V al-Vāhedī, Sayf 140 Vasubandhu 80 A Treatise in the Establishment of Conscious only 85 Vedas 11, 20–3, 20, 25, 39, 83 Vibhuti Pada 83 Videvdād Sādah 43, 44 Vinaya Pitaka 50 Voudou 202 Voltaire (François-Marie Arouet), Candide, or Optimism 191 Vyāsa 39 W Walda Hèywat 185 Wáng Yángmíng 181, 182, 198 Inquiry on The Great Learning 181–2 Instructions for Practical Living 181 ál-Wāsiţī, Yaḥyā ibn Maḥmūd 106 Watsuji Tetsurō, Rinrigaku 223, 223 The Way of a Pilgrim 19 Weiditz, Hans 6 Weil, Simone Adolphine 230, 230

Gravity and Grace 241 The Need for Roots 230, 230 Wén, King 28, 29 Whitehead, Alfred North, and Bertrand Russell Principia Mathematica 221 Wikipedia 253 Wildcat, Daniel R., Red Alert! 246, 247 Wiredu, Kwasi 232 Cultural Universals and Particulars 232 Wittgenstein, Ludwig 8, 8 Tractatus LogicoPhilosophicus 221 Wolgemut, Michael 121 Wollstonecraft, Mary 204 A Vindication of the Rights of Woman 204 Woolf, Virginia, A Room of One’s Own 214 Wǔ, King 26, 28, 29 Wu Shi’en 62 Wynter, Sylvia 232

Z Zarathuštra 42, 42 Zeno of Citium 64, 64 Zēng 62 Zer’ā Yā‘iqōb 185 Ḥatäta 185 Zezen-nakht, stele of 15 Zhāng Zài, Correcting the Ignorant 140 Zhū Dì, Emperor 143, 144, 146 Zhū Xī 141, 181 Collected Writings 141 The Four Books 142 Reflections on Things at Hand 141 Zhuāngzǐ 94 Zuboff, Shoshana 248 The Age of Surveillance Capitalism 246 Zuǒ Qiūmíng, The Commentary of Zu 59, 59, 60, 61

X Xenophon of Athens 47 Anabasis 47, 49 Xi Jinping 253 Xú, Empress 143 Instructions for Inner Quarters 142, 146 Xuánzàng 94 A Treatise in the Establishment of Conscious-only 85 Xuéxí Qiángguó 253 Xúnzì, Xúnzì 62 Y Yamamoto Shunshō 152–3 Yamamoto Tsunetomo, Hagakure 199 Yaḥyā ibn Maḥmūd al-Wāsiṭī 106 Yìjing 26, 27, 30, 59 Yousafzai, Malala 246 We Are Displaced 245, 246

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ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS Our thanks to all the people at Ivy and Francis Cooper for helping make this book a reality. This includes Jennifer Barr, Natalia Price-Cabrera, and perhaps most importantly Tom Kitch, who steered this book through the difficult early stages of production. An especially big thank you to our wonderful readers, Yoko Arisaka, Jonardon Ganeri and Dag Herbjørnsrud, whose comments, encouragement and feedback have been invaluable. We would also like to thank our friends, family and colleagues, Anonymous, Zara Bain, Laurencia Sáenz Benavides, Anna Bennett, Emily Berry, Florence Bullough, Nenna Orie Chuku, Nathaniel Adam Tobias Coleman, James Cox, Darren Chetty, Rageshri Dhairyawan, Maeve Duval, Alexandra Elbakyan, the Ferner-Moss Collective, Alice Franklin, Medi Gwosdz, Beth Hannon, Maya Kalaya, librarians and bookbinders, Lottie Manzi, Luke Massey, Esther McManus, Nadia Mehdi, Jonathan Nassim, Mar Steenhagen, Aaron Swartz, Sem, Mike Smith, Judith Suissa, Will Tattersdill, Liza Thompson, Vivienne Watson, Andy West and Juma Woodhouse. Thanks, also, to you for reading This book is dedicated to Hidé Ishiguro.

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ABOUT THE AUTHORS DR ADAM FERNER has worked in academic philosophy in France and the UK, as well as in schools, youth centres and other alternative learning spaces. Alongside articles in philosophical and popular journals, he has written five books: Organisms and Personal Identity (2015), Think Differently (2016), How to Disagree (with Darren Chetty, 2018), Crash Course: Philosophy (with Nadia Mehdi and Zara Bain, 2019) and Notes from the Crawl Room (2021). DR CHRIS MEYNS Chris Meyns is a poet, developer and architectural conservationist based in Uppsala, Sweden. They have published on the history of data, on Anton Wilhelm Amo’s philosophy of mind, and their edited volume Information and the History of Philosophy will appear in 2021. Their current research focuses on vulnerability in information sharing ecosystems.

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CREDITS EDITORIAL  David Breuer   Tom Kitch   Jennifer Barr  Yoko Arisaka  Jonardon Ganeri  Dag Herbjørnsrud DESIGN   Anna Stevens, Paileen Currie, James Lawrence  Kevin Knight   Katie Greenwood, Bella Skertchly, Sharon Dortenzio  : Maeve Healy

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