Isaiah Berlin Lectures
Isaiah Berlin Visiting Professorship in the History of Ideas, 2011/12
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‘A New World’ – Philosophical Idealism in America Professor Kenneth Winkler is currently a Professor in the Faculty of Philosophy at Yale. His research interests include Early Modern Philosophy, Metaphysics, and American Philosophy. He will deliver the Isaiah Berlin Lectures on Tuesdays of weeks 1-6 at 5 pm on the following days at the Gulbenkian Theatre, St Cross Building, Manor Road. Please note that the venue for the remaining Isaiah Berlin Lectures has changed. The lectures in weeks 3 to 5 will take place in the MBI Al Jaber Building, Corpus Christi College. The week 6 lecture will take place in the Fraenkel Room, Corpus Christi College. |
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| Lecture 1 (17th Jan): | Jonathan Edwards's early proofs of immaterialism |
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| Lecture 2 (24th Jan): | Edwards and continuous creation |
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| Lecture 3 (31st Jan): | Ralph Waldo Emerson's Nature |
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| Lecture 4 (7th Feb): | Henry David Thoreau |
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| Lecture 5 (14th Feb): | Josiah Royce and the argument from error |
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| Lecture 6 (21st Feb): | Personalism, from Bowne and Howison to Martin Luther King |
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I've taken the title for my lectures from a letter by Samuel Johnson: not the Samuel Johnson, but the American Samuel Johnson. The Samuel Johnson responded to Berkeley's idealism with impatient physicality: he kicked a large stone and rebounded from it. The response of the American Samuel Johnson, who was writing to Berkeley himself, was appreciative wonderment, culminating in a plea:
You will forgive the confusedness of my thoughts and not wonder at my writing like a man something bewildered, since I am, as it were, got into a new world amazed at everything about me. These ideas of ours, what are they?
The metaphor of entry into a new world, or of a sojourn into new and wilder country, was one that Berkeley had already made his own. He promised readers of his Three Dialogues a "Return to the simple Dictates of Nature," but it would come, he said, only after a circuit through "the wild Mazes of Philosophy." In the end, he assured them, it would not be unpleasant. "It is like coming home from a long Voyage: a Man reflects with Pleasure on the many Difficulties and Perplexities he has passed through, sets his Heart at ease, and enjoys himself with more Satisfaction for the future." Time spent in a new world, he thought, would make us more comfortable and secure in our possession of the old.
My lectures will be a circuit through two "new worlds": the new world-system that bewildered Johnson, and the new world—the America—in which he lived. I'll be discussing writers who receive little attention from present-day philosophers, even in America: Jonathan Edwards (in Lectures I and II); Ralph Waldo Emerson (in Lecture III); Henry David Thoreau (in Lecture IV); Josiah Royce (in Lecture V); and the "Boston Personalists" (in Lecture VI, which will culminate with Martin Luther King). William James once described the study of literature as "an appreciative chronicle of human master-strokes," and bringing neglected good things to the attention of my listeners is certainly one of the items on my agenda. I'm also eager to combat two misimpressions: that the history of American philosophy is the history of pragmatism (though as I'll try to show, American idealists generally aspired to be practical); and that American idealism rests, as George Santayana claimed, on the "conceited notion that man, or human reason, or the human distinction between good and evil, is the centre and pivot of the universe." Despite the antique and implausible character of some of the arguments for idealism that I'll be examining, and the apparent absence of argument in many of the texts in which idealism is most compellingly asserted or intimated, the thought that the inward has some sort of priority over the outward, and that in our inwardness we make contact with a world less fugitive and more valuable than the world of sense, is not an easy one to shake. It is worth inquiring how successful a certain tradition was in bringing clarity to this thought, and in making it defensible and practical.