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The Mind Is a Collection
John Locke described the mind as a cabinet; Robert Hooke called it a repository; Joseph Addison imagined a drawer of medals. Each of these philosophers was an avid collector and curator of books, coins, and cultural artifacts. It is therefore no coincidence that when they wrote about the mental work of reason and imagination, they modeled their powers of intellect in terms of collecting, cataloging, and classification.
The Mind Is a Collectionapproaches seventeenth- and eighteenth-century metaphors of the mind from a material point of view. Each of the book's six chapters is organized as a series of linked exhibits that speak to a single aspect of Enlightenment philosophies of mind. From his first chapter, on metaphor, to the last one, on dispossession, Sean Silver looks at ways that abstract theories referred to cognitive ecologies-systems crafted to enable certain kinds of thinking, such as libraries, workshops, notebooks, collections, and gardens. In doing so, he demonstrates the crossings-over of material into ideal, ideal into material, and the ways in which an idea might repeatedly turn up in an object, or a range of objects might repeatedly stand for an idea. A brief conclusion examines the afterlife of the metaphor of mind as collection, as it turns up in present-day cognitive studies. Modern cognitive theory has been applied to the microcomputer, and while the object is new, the habit is as old as the Enlightenment.
By examining lived environments and embodied habits from 1660 to 1800, Silver demonstrates that the philosophical dualism that separated mind from body and idea from thing was inextricably established through active engagement with crafted ecologies.
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Fielding's Prepositions: Eighteenth-Century Historiography and the Novel
When Frederick the Great found \"no maxim . . but is defective in some particular Cases,\" he signaled a new interest in tracing historical events to complex systems of cause. This essay positions the midcentury British novel in that tradition. It establishes a relationship between the new historiography and a philosophy of grammar, which viewed prepositions as the sign of history. And it offers readings of Tristram Shandy and Tom Jones to locate the new historiographic preference at the level of narrative style. Relevant theorists include Reinhart Koselleck (and Laurence Sterne) on mid-century historiography, John Locke and James Harris on grammar, and Étienne Souriau and Michel Serres on the prepositional philosophy.
Journal Article
Gilbert Ryle, Jane Austen, and Thick Description
Jane Austen’s novels are interested in concepts. This much is clear from their titles. But the relationship between concept and narrative can be unclear, despite a tradition of reducing one or more characters to types of a Theophrastian sort. This essay turns to a triad of Gilbert Ryle’s late-career essays for an alternative account. Ryle was a leading midcentury metaphysician, and a lifelong reader of the divine Miss Jane. Late in his career, while pondering the relationship between action and thought, he coined the term “thick description” subsequently popularized by Clifford Geertz. This essay argues for Austen’s employment of concepts as descriptive thickeners in the Rylean and Geertzean sense, and against attempts to attach Austen’s characters (or characters in the way we usually mean the word) to Theophrastian types. Its example is “pride” in Pride and Prejudice.
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The Emergence of Texture
Crucial to accounts of complexity is the history of the concept of emergence. Pride of place is generally given to G. E. Lewes, who in 1879 offered a theory of \"emergents,\" of the unpredictable and incommensurate effects which follow from the crossing of causes. This essay recovers an earlier tradition; it focuses on experiments in seventeenth-century materials science, which explain emergent properties through an appeal to microstructural \"texture.\" A full appreciation of the modern turn to complexity, of our own ecological embeddeness and the interrelationship of things, requires therefore a return to the warp and weft of seventeenth-century artisanal practice.
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The Prehistory of Serendipity, from Bacon to Walpole
During the past four decades there has developed a burgeoning literature on the concept of serendipity, the name for sudden insights or conceptual breakthroughs that occur by chance or accident. Studies repeatedly note that it was Horace Walpole, the eighteenth-century man of letters, who coined the word. None of them, however, notice that Walpole’s term is itself indebted to a much older tradition, invoking a formula developed by Francis Bacon. Recovering the prehistory of the term suggests that “serendipity,” rather than being a name for a special mode of discovery invented by Walpole, has all along accompanied empiricism as the name for an essential gap in its epistemology. Serendipity bears directly on the “induction problem,” or what has more recently been called the “conceptual leap.” Though Walpole gave it its current name, versions of the concept have all along isolated a critical gap in the method of the sciences inaugurated by Bacon.
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\PALE FIRE\ AND JOHNSON'S CAT: THE ANECDOTE IN POLITE CONVERSATION
Johnson was the London lexicographer and conversationalist who came, in the words of his contemporaries, to exemplify a certain grandeur of style, masculine sensibility, and intellectual firmness; Boswell, his biographer and protege, composed, in the aftermath of Johnson's death, the monument to Johnson's conversational style, which he called The Life of Johnson (1791).2 Characteristic of the literary form Boswell adopts for the Life, the compact narrative episode I quote above is braced between similar moments, one among a series of anecdotes first related by the living Johnson as he held court in his Literary Club, and later recorded by Boswell for posterity.3 As Boswell recalls it, Johnson summons up an anecdote about a young gentleman by way of clinching a dissertation on ethics. [...] a close look at the conversational legacy of Boswell's Johnson suggests that this sort of public pathology, the social turn towards trauma, is endemic to our characteristic conversational form; polite conversation, the conversation of openness, is not so much a substitute for violence as it is structured by its own vexed relationship to contingency - quotidian trauma rerouted as the constitutive opening of academic conversation.
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Hooke, Latour, and the History of Extended Cognition
Cognitive models are generally here-and-now things: interested in how we think right now, and not how we got this way. But recent theories of cognitive processing insist on a more embracing approach, locating habits of thought in complex ecological beds. This essay offers a history of the thesis of extended cognition, the claim that thinking is best conceptualized as an evolving relationship between thinkers and the tools of thought. Thinking, in other words, is distributed among persons and technical objects. One route to this history is a technical gesture practiced by Bruno Latour—the use of a particular navigational instrument—which has emerged in Latour’s writings as a constitutive example of how persons and things think together. It so happens that the person to tinker around with such an instrument, the first such navigational tool, was Robert Hooke. Hooke was part of a group of projectors tinkering in Restoration London; like Latour, this group offered thoughts on how cognition leans on technical objects—a process they called “excogitation.” Recovering Hooke’s practice, therefore, helps establish the history of a modern concept—of thought as an ecological property.
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Locke's Pineapple and the History of Taste
Silver discusses John Locke's Essay Concerning Human Understanding in relation to Bruno Latour's empiricism, highlighting the ideological and aesthetic aspects of taste and the status of sensory experience. Among other things, he opines that Locke does not provide a very good model of what \"empiricism\" has come to mean, or even what Latour characterizes as the ontological status of the empirical fact as such. Considering these, he returns to a specific and famous moment in Locke's Essay to help illuminate a point of intersection between two fields--aesthetic criticism and empirical science--which exist partly because they constitutively refuse to recognize their own moments of overlap. This famous moment, Locke's turn to the pineapple as an example of the object of sense, is a single historical gesture which might be thought to inaugurate both taste as an aesthetic faculty (indeed, an implicitly ideological aesthetic faculty) and taste understood as the effect of a chemical process. Inasmuch as empirical science and aesthetic criticism partly depend for their rhetorical force on disavowing the mutuality of their vocabularies, they are partly depending on a mutual misrecognition of their own shared historical roots. It is here, then, that Locke's thoughts on taste can help qualify Latour's project of empirical \"renewal\"; Latour's \"second empiricism\" may be most satisfactorily inaugurated by a glance at empiricism its first time around.
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The Temporality of Allegory: Melville's 'The Lightning-Rod Man'
On the other hand, for all its historical popularity, the experience of reading \"The Lightning-Rod Man,\" if a survey of the critical response is any indication, is characterized by nothing so much as the sense that all is not as it seems, here.4 For one thing, the salesman and his buyer are talking about a lightning-rod, but their dialogue seems to be orbiting into vocabularies not properly about lightning-rods: about Catholic indulgences, or rosaries, or scepters, tri-forked things, and Leyden jars. For Cicero and Quintillian-the principal classical theorists of allegory-allegory is only \"continued metaphor\"; as Angus Fletcher describes it, the \"analogical symbolism,\" which is allegory in the classical mode, is \"the gathering of many little metaphors into the scope of one larger unifying figure which is also a metaphor\" (ji).& In this sense, the principal metaphor of the allegory, extended, is the disciplining logic that governs the relation between the occurrence of a thing in allegorical narrative and its corresponding idea.
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