36 The New York Review
Aztec^2 traditions devoted to systematic
reflection on what the world is made of
and how humans should live—ques-
tions that clearly belong to the Western
categories of metaphysics and moral
philosophy. Philosophical reflection
has existed in many societies and has
been pursued in the occluded groups
that Rée mentions. All of these cur-
rents of thought deserve a history.But how these histories should be
written is a different question from
whether philosophers have been (con-
trary to their own view) construct-
ing works of art rather than pursuing
truth. One can accept that the history
of philosophy has been written in a
narrow and at times exclusionary way
and still see it as a succession of at-
tempts to answer recurring questions
such as whether the world is composed
of one or many substances or made
up of events and processes, whether
the good life for humans comes in
one or many different forms, and how
answers to these questions might be
determined.
A history of philosophy that does not
view the subject in this manner needs
some other way of telling its story. This
need not be a story of an advance toward
some grand system of ideas of the sort
that Rée attributes to G.W. F. Hegel,
who thought that philosophers were
designing “a beautifully constructed
building.” But there need to be some
continuing questions and themes, or
else a history of philosophy will not be
much more than a miscellaneous col-
lection of anecdotes.
What is notable in Rée’s list of alter-
native histories quoted above is that
each of them deals with the contribu-
tion of a group, an area of human expe-
rience, or a manner of structuring ideas
and events that conventional historians
have undervalued or ignored. By con-
trast, Rée’s book has no unifying sub-
ject matter, aside from the period to
which it is limited and its focus on the
English language. Why does the survey
begin at the start of the seventeenth
century, rather than earlier or later?
The first section of the book is en-
titled “1601: Philosophy Learns En-
glish” and considers the movement
away from the study of classical texts
that occurred in England around that
time. Rée does not explain why his
story should start over a half- century
after Baldwyn’s book was published, or
how he has selected the writers he goes
on to examine. He discusses Cervantes
and Spinoza, but it is unclear why
these non- English- language figures are
included.
Readers will discover much they did
not know about the variety of people
who practiced philosophy from the
early seventeenth to the mid- twentieth
century and about the wide range of
circumstances in which they did so. A
section of the book on Puritans relates
how disaffected English ministers of
religion crossed the Atlantic with their
followers to start a new life in Massa-
chusetts Bay, where they aimed to prac-
tice a purer version of their faith. By
the middle of the seventeenth century,
Rée tells us, New England was home tomore than a hundred Cambridge grad-
uates, together with thirty from Ox-
ford. It is salutary to be reminded how
these earnest divines saw themselves.
Their mission was not only to cultivate
their own faith but to “gospellize the
Indians.”
For John Eliot, who had studied at
Jesus College, Cambridge, teaching his
faith to Native Americans involved in-
structing them in philosophy. In addi-
tion to presenting them with a printed
version of the Ten Commandments, the
Lord’s Prayer, and an entire Bible in
Algonquin, Eliot taught them logic. In
1672 he printed a thousand copies of a
miniature primer on the subject. Logic,
he declared, was an “Iron Key” that
would open to the Indians “the rich
Treasury of the holy Scriptures.”
Rée features some delightful images
of pages of Algonquin text from Eliot’sLogick Primer for the Indians. A few
years later, Eliot’s Algonquin Bibles
and logic primers were consumed in
flames when his settlement for “pray-
ing Indians” at Natick, fifteen miles
west of Boston, was destroyed in a
raid. The millenarian mission of which
he dreamed—“the Kingdom of Jesus
Christ upon Earth... is now beginning
to be set up where it never was be-
fore”—lost momentum. But his under-
standing of philosophy remained clear:
the truths of religion could be revealed
by applying a branch of philosophy to
biblical texts.
Rée discusses the “Quixo-
Philosophy” satirized in Miguel de
Cervantes’s History of Don Quix-
ote—published in Spanish in 1605
and 1615 and translated into English
in 1620—in which the “witty knight-
errant” appears to embody “the fatuity
of philosophizing.” Rée goes on to con-
sider the view of Thomas Hobbes, the
author of Leviathan (1651), that what
distinguished human beings from “all
other Animals” was not attributes such
as freedom or reason but “the privilege
of absurdity,” a capacity for talking
nonsense that was nowhere more devel-
oped than in “old Philosophers” such
as Aristotle. Rée explores the complex
interactions of philosophy with religion
in the work of Spinoza—Rée reports
that he kept a copy of the Koran on
the same shelf as his Bible—and the
defense of Christianity mounted by
René Descartes by reference to “in-
nate notions and ideas” rather than
holy scriptures.Many lesser- known figures ap-
pear in the book, including the
learned rural rector and member of
the Royal Society Joseph Glanvill,
who, in order to defend the popular
belief in witchcraft, deployed a radical
version of skepticism about the ability
of human beings to gain knowledge
of cause and effect. (Rée might have
noted that a quote claiming to be from
Glanvill’s writings was used as the epi-
graph to Edgar Allan Poe’s short story
“Ligeia,” though its exact source has
not been found.) Rée discusses the
“way of ideas” of John Locke, noting
Locke’s difficulties in providing an ac-
count of personal identity that allowed
the possibility of the mind surviving
the death of the body (as his Christian
beliefs required) in a philosophy that
focused on continuity in sensations
and memories rather than immaterial
substances.
Later, the philosopher and novelist
William Godwin used Locke’s belief
that the human mind does not come
into the world with preexisting ideas
to argue that humankind is “essen-
tially progressive.” The perfectibility
of the human species, he argued, is not
a mere hope but a rational necessity.
Part of this perfectibility, as Godwin
saw it, would be the abolition of sleep,
and then of death, at which point the
survival of the species would no longer
require either posthumous existence
or further generations of humans. We
would become “a people of men and
not of children.”
Godwin omitted the involvement
of women in this process. He wrote a
memoir of his marriage to the feminist
writer Mary Wollstonecraft, who died
of septicemia after the birth of their
daughter, Mary, but the memoir fo-
cuses on her life more than her ideas.
It would have been useful if Rée had
told us more of Wollstonecraft, whose
contributions to philosophy were not
defined by her relationship with God-
win.^3 He notes that her Vindication of
the Rights of Men contained a strong
criticism of Edmund Burke’s “roman-
tic spirit” and a defense of “common
sense” in his celebrated Reflections on
the Revolution in France (1790). But
Rée does not explore how Wollstone-
craft’s defense of reason against feeling
may have differed from Godwin’s more
utopian visions.
Rée moves on to Scotland, where
in October 1751 a young man named
Adam Smith started work as professor
of logic in the arts faculty of the Univer-
sity of Glasgow. Smith had spent six un-
happy years at Oxford, where Aristotle
was still taught, while—in the famous
words of the historian Edward Gibbon,
which Rée quotes—most of the mas-
ters had “absolved their conscience”
of “the toil of reading or thinking, or
writing” and passed their days in eat-
ing, drinking, and gossip. Smith was a
central figure in moving Scottish phi-
losophy from the study of Greek and
Latin texts to a more “experimental”
discourse in English. Exercising this
new way of writing, philosophers in
Scotland found themselves in conflict
with the churches; the skeptic David
Hume was repeatedly attacked as an
unbeliever.Democritus, the laughing philosopher;
engraving by Christian Le Blon from
the 1628 edition of Robert Burton’s
Anatomy of MelancholyBritishLibrary(^3) For more on Wollstonecraft, see Mi-
randa Seymour, “Promethean Women,”
The New York Review, February 25,
2021.
(^2) See James Maffie’s seminal study
Aztec Philosophy: Understanding a
World in Motion (University Press of
Colorado, 2014).
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