This chapter surveys associationist theories of emotion leading up to Darwin’s Expression. These theories analyze emotions as sequences of thoughts, feelings, and actions, linked together by principles of association. Thomas Hobbes contributes to this tradition the idea that emotions can be analyzed as “trains of thoughts.” John Locke contributes the idea that these trains are connected by the “association of ideas.” David Hume contributes the idea that association can occur via contiguity, resemblance, or cause and effect. David Hartley puts these ideas together to present the first full-fledged associationist theory of mind and emotion. Harley’s ideas are developed further by Joseph Priestley, Erasmus Darwin (Charles’s grandfather), Thomas Brown, James Mill, Alexander Bain, and Herbert Spencer, among others. This tradition in the philosophy of emotion has never before been described or analyzed.

Hume clearly distinguishes between better and worse causal inferences, notably in his “Rules by which to judge of causes and effects” in Treatise 1.3.15. Although Hume describes these rules as “all the logic I think proper to employ” in his philosophy (Treatise 1.3.15.11), the literature has paid relatively little attention to it. This chapter will investigate these eight rules, as well as their basis in Hume’s discussion of general rules. The paper then examines two controversial causal inferences in light of these rules by which to judge of causes and effects: first, the postulation of the calm passions; second, the missing shade of blue. As Hume himself recognizes, the correct application of these rules can be an enigmatic affair. Nevertheless, I find that there is reason to think that while Hume abides by these rules in his postulation of the calm passions, the missing shade of blue constitutes a gross violation of these same rules.

In this introductory chapter, I will outline what this book is about and aims to achieve, which is to continue what I started in a prequel book, A Mind for Language: An Introduction to the Innateness Debate (ML). Both books share the same central theme, namely the so-called Innateness Hypothesis for language, which is the conjecture proposed by the linguist Noam Chomsky many decades ago that children acquire language guided by an innate, genetically based mental system that is specifically dedicated to this task. Both ML and this book critically examine the arguments that have been used, or could be used, to support this idea. Where ML considered arguments coming from linguistics proper, the present book delves into arguments from neighboring fields that overlap with linguistics in various ways, including cognitive science and neurolinguistics. The chapter concludes with a review of the linguistic arguments in support of Chomsky’s innateness hypothesis that formed the focus of ML.

In philosophy of science, Mach’s account of thought experiments is more often described as relevant for contemporary usage than Ørsted’s. In this chapter, I survey recent Kantian accounts of thought experiment, arguing that the leading views inspired by Kant in philosophy of science remain broadly empiricist. This tendency may be due to their focus primarily on the role of thought experiments in the sciences. In later chapters, I will argue – against recent Kantian views – that Kant understood cognition more broadly to include not only sensory perception but also mathematical construction. Acknowledging that cognition does not always require empirical fulfillment opens new ways of understanding how thought experiments work in philosophy, which may rightly differ from their use in the sciences.

Rather than thinking of nature versus nurture it is better to think about interactions between genes and the environment. The Santa Barbara School of evolutionary psychology proposed that human cognition is the result of innately specified domain-specific mental modules. Babies have certain expectations of the way that the physical world operates. Infants of at least three months of age have the knowledge that objects exist independently of their ability to perceive them. Babies have preference for face-like stimuli from birth and learn the details of human faces rapidly. Young children have an understanding of the role of mental states as a cause of behaviour. This skill, known as theory of mind, becomes more sophisticated as children develop. It is measured by a number of tasks such as false belief task and the eyes test, in which participants are required to judge how people feel from looking at their eyes.

This chapter explores Locke’s theory of language in the Essay Concerning Human Understanding and its history of influence on judicial thinking about hearsay evidence. Hearsay is distrusted because it is language all the way down – testimony based on second-hand narrative – rather than language grounded in the empirical world. The chapter analyzes three contemporary US Supreme Court opinions using this framework, Ohio v. Roberts (1980), Crawford v. Washington (2004), and Davis v. Washington/Hammon v. Indiana (2006).

The chapter reviews an approach to the development of a ‘scientific philosophy’ that developed in the early decades of the twentieth century in Central Europe. Logical empiricists combined an interest in using the resources of formal logic and an empiricist orientation to propose ways of distinguishing meaningful scientific discourse from what they regarded as cognitively meaningless metaphysical statements. In so doing, they articulated important and influential ideas about how to characterize the relationship between observations serving as evidence and the theories for which they are relevant. The chapter also examines their assumptions about the nature and structure of physical theories and how those shaped efforts such as Rudolf Carnap’s development of a theory purporting to quantify how much a particular body of evidence confirms a particular theory.

This chapter explores the political significance of experience. Imperial authorities and political writers deemed experience as one of the major attributes of a good ruler, and imperial officials acquired it thanks to their mobility and by serving in different places across the world. By integrating the study of the political theory with the actual practices of the officials, the chapter reveals how officials’ expertise was gained, valued, and transferred across the different imperial locations – not only from Europe to America but also the other way around. Officials’ experience, which was logged in their informaciones de méritos y servicios, spawned a new epistemological milieu that privileged direct knowledge and sensorial experimentation.

Experimental physiology was exploited as a metaphor and a model for the work of authors and critics. The final two chapters advance the book’s trajectory which takes in increasingly diverse literary forms and traces how vivisection became loosened from its ethical and political contexts. Chapter 7 studies how Émile Zola and August Strindberg drew up principles of naturalism by fashioning themselves as literary vivisectors and presenting the stage and the novel as sites of experimentation. They did so by interrogating the connection between observation and intervention and by cultivating an attitude of objective absence imported from experimental physiology. By reframing their works within the context of the vivisection debates (to which naturalism was deeply indebted), the chapter offers a reconsideration of how these writers sought to uncover physiological and psychological laws that would make literature entirely scientific.

This book describes and explains the discipline of stylistics, the linguistic study of style in language. The authors’ account of stylistics roughly follows its development over time, beginning with its origins in the Russian formalist work of the early twentieth century and ending with the current state of the art as informed by recent research in cognitive and corpus stylistics. The authors’ aim in presenting this account is to establish anew the importance, coherence and achievements of stylistics and to argue for its status as a subdiscipline of linguistics. This opening chapter outlines in general terms what the label stylistics refers to, before going on to explain the necessary steps involved in the linguistic study of style and the main theoretical principles of the field.

Dietterlin and other Renaissance artists supported an empirical approach to architectural image-making, one that emerged in treatises like Dietterlin’s Architectura. Such treatises became sites of conflict between rationalist and empirical mathematical traditions, with Dietterlin’s mixed arithmetic and geometrical design procedures marking a pivotal turn toward empiricism. The development of prints in architectural texts – from geometrical illustrations in masonic incunables to Dürer’s 1525 Lesson on Measurement and archaeological renderings by Sebastiano Serlio, Philibert De L’Orme, and Hans Blum – shows how Dietterlin and his contemporaries increasingly rejected received knowledge in favor of the empirical epistemology also practiced by period artists and natural philosophers. As architectural treatises shifted from rationalist to empirical approaches to architectural design, they aligned architecture with the empirical culture of Renaissance image-making exemplified in Dietterlin’s Architectura.

This chapter contrasts the approach to nature taken by Alexander von Humboldt and Hegel. In particular, it focuses upon the notion of Naturphilosophie and how it is developed in the work of both thinkers. It gives details from the work of Schiller, Goethe, and Schelling in order to provide historical context to the discussion. To clarify some of the contrasts between Humboldt’s and Hegel’s approaches to nature, the chapter focuses upon their approaches to the landscape and people of America. The fate of natural beauty in the work of both thinkers is highlighted. It argues, by reference to Adorno’s critique of Hegel, that while Humboldt gives natural beauty autonomy by not limiting it to what the subject contributes to it, Hegel’s view of nature is as repressed natural beauty, eclipsing it with human reason and human subjectivity. Ultimately, Humboldt’s more empirical approach, balanced with a recognition of the role of freedom, allows nature to come into clearer focus than it does in Hegel’s work. Hegel’s more abstract, speculative approach keeps nature too far from the empirical realm. In the case of our understanding of nature, Hegel’s clean hands become a problem, resulting in a Naturphilosophie that does not bring us close enough to nature or its beauties.

Hegel’s “natural philosophy” is an extension of his overall systematic project having to do with a post-Kantian philosophy that did not rely on Kant’s conception of “pure intuitions.” Instead, Hegel proposed a Logic that as an internally self-enclosed system of pure thoughts required to make sense of making sense. Famously, he concluded his Logic with some not entirely clear ideas about the need to move from it to a Naturphilosophie, a move which he somewhat puzzlingly said was not itself a further logical “transition.” Hegel also defends a non-empiricist study of nature, that is, an explanation not merely in terms of empirically determined regularities, for all such regularities, although existent, are not fully “actual” in that they are not what is doing the real work of explanation. What explains the regularities themselves are the various pure objects of the Naturphilosophie which are involved in working out what “external to pure thought” would mean: the mechanical, the physical, the chemical, and the biological fields of nature, each of which manifests a power (Potenz) that explains why the empirically found regularities in nature actually hold. This chapter suggests that the reason for the transition from Logic to Nature is that pure thought on its own is powerless, and that this has implications for how we think of Hegel’s system as a whole.

This introduction sets out Major’s view of his age, "the experimental century," in relation to curiosity and curation. Although curiosity had been recuperated from a vice to a virtue in early modern Europe, Major continued to relate curiosity to original sin as a faulty, bodily lust for knowledge. This insatiable desire drove all people since Adam, but it did so more than ever in his age when the bounds and divisions set upon knowledge in the traditional encyclopedia were torn down. Curators applied cura or care (from the same root as curiosity) to knowledge. By acknowledging their own flaws, curators could guide the passion for knowledge closer and closer to truth, which, however, always remained out of human reach.