{"title":"Liberalism and the Metaphysical Society","authors":"A. Vincent","doi":"10.1093/oso/9780198846499.003.0004","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780198846499.003.0004","url":null,"abstract":"The initial scholarly and, in fact, only comprehensive study of the Metaphysical Society was by Alan Willard Brown, The Metaphysical Society: Victorian Minds in Crisis 1869–1880 in 1947. For Brown, the central unifying theme of the Society was an underlying robust sense of liberalism. This chapter examines the diverse conceptions of liberalism within the membership of the Society in the 1870s through the lens of illustrative papers by members. These diverse conceptions encompass ideas of, for example, utilitarianism, evolutionary theory, intuitionism, rationalism, Whiggism, and idealism. Contra Brown’s reading, it is argued that there is no one singular accepted narrative on liberalism in the Society debates. Further, the decade of the 1870s—the heyday of the Metaphysical Society—is seen to coincide with a moment of cultural turbulence particularly over issues such as the rise of both natural science and democracy. In consequence, the diverse liberalisms and labyrinthine metaphysical debates of the Society are seen to both embody and reflect a broader sense of crisis in conceptual and social meanings in Victorian society.","PeriodicalId":194796,"journal":{"name":"The Metaphysical Society (1869-1880)","volume":"4 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2019-08-08","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"128098706","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"The Personalization of Intellectual Combat","authors":"Bruce Kinzer","doi":"10.1093/oso/9780198846499.003.0002","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780198846499.003.0002","url":null,"abstract":"James Fitzjames Stephen—prominent barrister, prolific journalist, pugnacious polemicist, and older brother of Leslie Stephen—was elected a member of the Metaphysical Society in 1873. He presented seven papers between his election and his last appearance in 1879, making him one of the Society’s most active members. Alan Brown, in his monograph on the Metaphysical Society, says that Stephen’s papers ‘are the most coherent, consistent, and closely reasoned body of opinion contributed by a single member’. This coherence and consistency, this chapter argues, stem from the identity of those Stephen considered his intellectual adversaries within the Metaphysical Society, adversaries whose views he deemed badly flawed and utterly repugnant. These were its Catholic members, whom Stephen did not regard as true Englishmen. The chapter explains Stephen’s animus and analyses the means he employed to demonstrate the faulty nature of the beliefs held by those he chose to attack. It also examines the impact of his conduct on the health of the Metaphysical Society. Brown asserts that Stephen ‘was in many ways the dominating figure in the latter half of the Society’s history’. This domination, the essay contends, had as much to do with the manner of his doing battle as with the substance of the arguments he set forth. Stephen’s impact, on balance, was harmful, his belligerence discouraging rather than aiding the exchange of ideas and spirit of inquiry the founding members of the Metaphysical Society had sought to foster.","PeriodicalId":194796,"journal":{"name":"The Metaphysical Society (1869-1880)","volume":"6 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2019-08-08","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"131674071","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Postscript","authors":"Richard England, B. Lightman, Catherine Marshall","doi":"10.1093/oso/9780198846499.003.0013","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780198846499.003.0013","url":null,"abstract":"This chapter deals with the last meeting of the Society and why the Society came to an end. The goals of the Society were being met in other ways and the divisions between different groups, such as the scientific naturalists and the conservative Christians, were too great to bridge. There is also a discussion of the legacy of the Metaphysical Society through the founding of other intellectual associations, in the publications of its members, and in the creation of a more open public space for discussion of controversial ideas. The papers of the Society were preserved by librarians despite many obstacles. This chapter concludes with a brief discussion of how the papers still speak to us today in a post-truth age witnessing a revival of interest in metaphysics.","PeriodicalId":194796,"journal":{"name":"The Metaphysical Society (1869-1880)","volume":"12 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2019-08-08","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"128756988","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Hodgson, Clifford, and the Unseen Universe","authors":"W. Mander","doi":"10.1093/oso/9780198846499.003.0008","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780198846499.003.0008","url":null,"abstract":"The Metaphysical Society debates were largely between those espousing religious commitment to the transcendent and those defending scientific naturalism. However, this paper highlights a third strain of thought to be found among the Society’s proceedings, one which regarded philosophy – and especially metaphysics – as an autonomous discipline with its own method and authority. To this way of thinking the proper project of the Society was precisely to use such independent and constructive philosophy to seek for reconciliation between the opposed views of religion and science. The paper focuses on the pair of Society members who most strongly embody this point of view, Shadworth Hodgson (1832–1912) and William Kingdon Clifford, (1845–79) analysing their several contributions and, in particular, comparing their different responses to the theory set out in Peter Guthrie Tait and Balfour Stewart’s influential work, The Unseen World. (1875) Both thinkers see merit in the idea of an unseen realm. However, both relativize this ‘unseen’ to a point of view, thereby ruling out of court that which is utterly and completely unknowable. In this respect they are linked together in common opposition to one further widespread philosophy of the day, agnosticism. From an historical perspective neither Hodgson nor Clifford met with much popular or lasting success in their attempts at finding a philosophical reconciliation between religion and science, and the paper concludes by contrasting their efforts with those of the British Idealists who, seemingly, were able to achieve much greater recognition in what was in many respects a similarly motivated ambition.","PeriodicalId":194796,"journal":{"name":"The Metaphysical Society (1869-1880)","volume":"37 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2019-08-08","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"127458064","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Cause, Nature, and the Limits of Language","authors":"R. England","doi":"10.1093/oso/9780198846499.003.0006","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780198846499.003.0006","url":null,"abstract":"James Martineau and Frederick Maurice sought to show that naturalism was philosophically incoherent by showing the inadequacy of its fundamental terms, such as ‘force’, ‘cause’, and ‘nature’. Maurice argued that historical and contemporary uses of ‘nature’ rested on assumptions that required an agency beyond nature. Martineau claimed that the phenomena that suggested ‘cause’ to observers ultimately rested on that which is beyond the senses. Both claimed that the study of nature alone is insufficient to an understanding of the basic language of scientific investigation, and that there must be a realm beyond the physical. These papers show the importance to theists of Kantian categories and an idealist approach to nature. While Maurice and Martineau used epistemological arguments against naturalistic metaphysics, they did not claim that there were additional intuitions that granted access to truths beyond nature.","PeriodicalId":194796,"journal":{"name":"The Metaphysical Society (1869-1880)","volume":"117 2","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2019-08-08","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"120994093","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Intuitionism, Religious Belief, and Proof in the Papers of the Metaphysical Society","authors":"W. Sweet","doi":"10.1093/oso/9780198846499.003.0011","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780198846499.003.0011","url":null,"abstract":"An issue frequently discussed by members of the Metaphysical Society concerned whether and how belief and believing can be justified. This exchange has been regarded as one between ‘empiricists’ and ‘intuitionists’. Here, I examine the responses to the issue of the justification of belief—particularly, religious belief—provided by those called ‘Christian intuitionists’. Little attention, however, has been given to what is meant by this intuitionism, or to the complexities of the Christian intuitionist position. I focus, therefore, on one of the founding members of the Society, the ecclesiastic and theologian, Henry Edward Manning, who arguably provides the most developed account of this view. Determining what Manning understood intuitionism to mean, allows one to see better what these intuitionists took religious belief to be, and how religious belief can be true and, as appropriate, reasonable or justifiable. In doing so, the so-called ‘Christian intuitionist’ position is made clearer.","PeriodicalId":194796,"journal":{"name":"The Metaphysical Society (1869-1880)","volume":"15 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2019-08-08","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"122354995","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Introduction: The Metaphysical Society in Context","authors":"Catherine Marshall, B. Lightman, Richard England","doi":"10.1093/oso/9780198846499.003.0001","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780198846499.003.0001","url":null,"abstract":"The introduction covers a history of the Metaphysical Society, including its aims and membership, role and legacy. After reviewing the previous scholarship on the Society, it lays out the structure of the volume, and introduces some of the figures who formed the membership of the Society, and their widely divergent views on such matters as, miracles, determinism, evolutionary ethics, liberalism. empiricism, intuitionism, and even metaphysics itself. It also discusses how the collection moves beyond past scholarship and draws directly on the papers presented at the Society, detailing the major concepts examined by the contributors, and offering a more detailed analysis of the Society’s inner dynamics and its wider impact on British society and culture. The contributors to this collection include scholars from different fields and different countries.","PeriodicalId":194796,"journal":{"name":"The Metaphysical Society (1869-1880)","volume":"38 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2019-08-08","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"127226806","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"‘The Cross-Examination of the Physiologist’","authors":"G. Dawson","doi":"10.1093/oso/9780198846499.003.0005","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780198846499.003.0005","url":null,"abstract":"This chapter examines the Metaphysical Society’s ‘most notorious paper ever’, T. H. Huxley’s ‘The Evidence of the Miracle of the Resurrection’ delivered in January 1876, which contended that Jesus’s death upon the Cross was impossible to verify and that his supposed Resurrection was more likely to have been merely a naturalistic revival rather than a supernatural miracle. Drawing on previously unpublished correspondence, the chapter reconstructs the composition, presentation, and aftermath of Huxley’s infamous paper, as well as contextualizing it in relation to the wider revival of the so-called ‘swoon theory’ in the 1870s. By doing so, Huxley’s paper also casts new light on the Metaphysical Society’s internal tensions, even between those members who usually worked together as supporters of scientific naturalism, as well as the discordance between its elitist model of authority and the new age of mass democracy in late Victorian Britain.","PeriodicalId":194796,"journal":{"name":"The Metaphysical Society (1869-1880)","volume":"101 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2019-08-08","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"127512752","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"The Editors of the Metaphysical Society, or Disseminating the Ideas of the Metaphysicians","authors":"Catherine Marshall","doi":"10.1093/oso/9780198846499.003.0003","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780198846499.003.0003","url":null,"abstract":"Twelve out of sixty-two members of the Metaphysical Society were active editors of well-known periodicals or weeklies throughout the eleven years of existence of the Society. Their editorial skills and choices all reveal the complex links between the Metaphysicians, the views they defended, and the periodicals in which they expressed their opinions. These editors published forty-four out of the ninety-five papers given by the members. In so doing, they contributed to some of the changes which were taking place in journalism by finding new ways of generating creative responses to main topics, and they enriched printed controversies, thereby targeting a wider middle-class audience throughout the 1870s. This chapter argues that the Society became—for its editors and other regular contributors—another kind of hub for cooperation that intersected with their editorial interests and that, in so doing, they were the great amplifiers of the debates of the Society in the 1870s.","PeriodicalId":194796,"journal":{"name":"The Metaphysical Society (1869-1880)","volume":"140 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2019-08-08","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"121312677","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Catholics and the Metaphysical Basis of Science","authors":"B. Lightman","doi":"10.1093/oso/9780198846499.003.0012","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780198846499.003.0012","url":null,"abstract":"During the 1870s, the decade during which the majority of the meetings of the Metaphysical Society took place, Catholics were grappling with the new environment created by the growing conservatism of their Church. The Catholic members of the Society such as Henry Manning, William Ward, and St. George Mivart adopted dissimilar strategies for dealing with Rome’s conservative turn. In their papers all three were eager to demonstrate that Catholicism was in no way antagonistic to science while they attempted to undermine the metaphysical basis of scientific naturalism. But whereas Manning defended Catholicism by emphasizing the debt of contemporary science to scholastic philosophy, Ward believed that scientific naturalism had to be confronted on its own terms using more modern philosophical weapons. Both Manning and Ward were staunch defenders of ultramontane conservatism, which advocated supreme papal authority. Since Mivart was a liberal Catholic, as well as a highly regarded scientist who accepted a version of evolutionary theory, it is not surprising that he differed from both Manning and Ward in his approach to critiquing scientific naturalism. Mivart not only argued that science must be conceived of as being within the framework of theism, he also drew attention to the emptiness of Huxley’s and Tyndall’s conception of religion as a matter of emotion. This chapter will discuss how these differences in strategy between Catholic religious figures and intellectuals played out within the meetings of the Metaphysical Society.","PeriodicalId":194796,"journal":{"name":"The Metaphysical Society (1869-1880)","volume":"25 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2019-08-08","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"121656389","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
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