«Diciottesimo Secolo» is the official international open-access journal of the Società Italiana di Studi sul Secolo XVIII (SISSD). It is dedicated to fostering critical debates covering the full range of eighteenth-century subjects: from literature to history, from law to religion, from philosophy to science, from anthropology to the fine arts, from linguistics to ethics, and from theatre to music. The journal also serves as a resource for up-to-date information on current Italian research in eighteenth-century studies. Published annually and subject to double-blind peer review, «Diciottesimo Secolo» features several sections, including “Dossier”, “Articles”, “Critical Notes” and “Reviews”. Editors-in-Chief: Andrea Gatti, Università di Bologna, Italy Rolando Minuti, Università di Firenze, Italy ISSN ONLINE 2531-4165 Recently the Content Selection & Advisory Board (CSAB) approved our application for indexing «Diciottesimo Secolo» in Scopus. FUP and «Diciottesimo Secolo» teams are very proud of this result and wish to share this announcement with the authors, readers, editors and reviewers of the journal. With their contributions we achieved this remarkable goal. Diciottesimo Secolo is a Diamond Open Access Journal Diciottesimo Secolo is indexed in:
Authors retain the copyright and grant the journal right of first publication with the work simultaneously licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International Public License (CC-BY-4.0) that allows others to share the work with an acknowledgment of the work's authorship and initial publication in DICIOTTESIMO SECOLO This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License
What the "Workshops of Nature" should represent in the Eighteenth century
What happens when we explore the link between working on site and working in workshops? In such a framework, it makes sense to bridge a various set of practices not restricted to science: a local site is the constantly evolving product of the practices, imaginations, and negotiations of the users (scholars, travelers, artists, inhabitants) of a given place. In any case, our idea is that it is the scholar’s task to relate the experience of a site en plein air to the atelier phase of knowledge production, by which nature can be recreated (painters), transformed (laboratories), classified (collectors) etc. Workshops and sites of natural interest are hybrid fields of material and knowledge production, places where materials are often transformed by means of knowledge and where knowledge is transformed by the materials involved in its development. Moreover, this continuous exchange is the means by which borderline scientific disciplines (for example the chemistry, mineralogy and geology of the second half of the 18th century) can be cultivated in a site that is not simply the theatre of these transformations but an active element of transformation too. This essay also aims to provide a review for the Italian public of studies about savoirs opératoires et lieux de savoirs. Our focus on “sites” of knowledge makes it easier to show how the production of material knowledge is represented; but it also allows us to assess how the material (re)production of knowledge in images, literature and collections is constructed and curated.
Copyright (c) 2025 Corinna Guerra, Marie-Aline Thebaud-Sorger https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0
Lumières alpines et sciences de la montagne: le cas du Mont-Blanc, 1740-1820
This article analyses the role of local scholars, amateurs and folks in the fabric of natural history and physical knowledge about the Mont Blanc massif in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century. Besides the interests of the Sardinian and French states for cartography and mineral resources, various cultural factors increased the curiosity of foreign travellers and of a few scholars living in Geneva, Turin, Lausanne or Chambéry for a better knowledge of the Alps of Savoy. Under their influence and through their initiatives, local amateurs, provincial notables, guides and hunters were in turn mobilised to collect specimens and to provide descriptions, illustrations and further data about the massif. The contribution of each group of actors to the development of a scientific approach initially depended on their social status, geographic location and cultural level. But as time went on, the growing interactions between foreign naturalists or physicists and indigenous populations, helped by the mediation of local amateurs and a few artists, reduced the gap between Enlightenment scholarship, travel literature and popular beliefs.
Copyright (c) 2025 René Sigrist https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0
«Lire dans les cassures»: the production of knowledge in Faujas de Saint-Fond’s Recherches sur les volcans éteints du Vivarais et du Velay (1778)
In his Recherches sur les volcans éteints du Vivarais et du Velay, the French geologist Barthélemy Faujas de Saint-Fond (1741-1819) engages in innovative fieldwork in his quest to confirm the volcanic nature of basalt in the extinct volcanoes of south-eastern France. Following Jean-Etienne Guettard (1715-1786) and Nicolas Desmarest (1725-1815), Faujas conceives of ‘nature’ as both a site of knowledge and an autonomous agency deploying its own practices of production. As a field chemist, Faujas is similarly at once a producer of knowledge and merely one of its organic instruments. As his primary materials are prismatic basalt columns, Faujas’s knowledge production privileges rock form over rock formation – sectioning rocks physically and landscapes diagrammatically. This constitutes an epistemological extraction modelled on the material extraction of rocks identified primarily by their crystal structures. Yet this empirical production of knowledge is further inflected by ethnographic reflection (travel narrative), aesthetic stylization (illustrations) and its re-inscription into local, national and European networks of correspondence.
Copyright (c) 2025 David McCallam https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0
Techniques mimétiques et productions volcaniques. L’art du pinceau, les sciences de la nature et la question de l’imitation dans les beaux-arts
If art is to imitate nature, then many eighteenth-century landscape painters, in choosing to paint what is real, were often content to represent what is plausible. At a time when the resurgence of Vesuvius activity in Naples was accompanied by an increase in the Grand Tour phenomenon and its market, several painters working for demanding scholars and collectors specialised in faithful representations of Vesuvius. Using these eruptions and geological specimens, from working on site to carefully reworking them in the studio, they experimented with new techniques capable of best restoring the materiality of the specimens and the effects of the phenomenon. Painters, collectors and scientists thus pooled their skills to understand and represent, in the laboratory and the studio, a phenomenon that had yet to be deciphered. Before the divorce between artistic representation and scientific illustration began in the nineteenth century, what was at stake for the artist and the scientist in this mimicry of pictorial technique?
Copyright (c) 2025 Émilie Beck Saiello https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0
Imagining the Enlightenment: triumph or exploration? The frontispiece of the Encyclopédie and other programmatic images
How can the concept of ‘Enlightenment’ and its achievements be visualised? This question is worth asking both in relation to our present day and with regard to the protagonists of the historical Enlightenment. The article identifies two ideal types of images of the Enlightenment: one triumphant and one exploratory. As contradictory as they may seem, on closer inspection they prove to be closely related, because both stage the ‘power’ of light and in doing so never appear to be entirely free from the perspective of the other type. What both types demonstrate is the Enlightenment self-image that thinkers and artists of the 18th century already cultivated. From the perspective of historical sources, there is no reason to abandon the historiographical term ‘Enlightenment’, as has recently been called for.
Copyright (c) 2025 Daniel Fulda https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0
Jean Ehrard, who passed away in 2023, was a leading scholar in the history of ideas of the Age of Enlightenment, and the author of a massive and important work on the idea of nature in 18th-century France. Starting from a re-reading of his major work and its reception in France, this essay focuses on Ehrard’s methodological reflections, connected to the debate on the history of ideas in the 1960s and 1970s and to international trends of historiography in this field.
Copyright (c) 2025 Rolando Minuti https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0
Looking for a «Patriot King» Scholar of the «Science of Politics»: The English Translation of Jacques-Joseph Duguet’s Institution d’un Prince in the Walpole Era
This article analyses the English translation of Jacques-Joseph Duguet’s Institution d’un Prince (1739). The Institution of a Prince, published in 1740 by Robert Dodsley, was the result of an editorial project orchestrated by the Patriot Opposition with two main objectives. First, to use the contents of the Institution to criticise the Walpole government by exposing the political, economic and moral shortcomings that were leading Great Britain into decline. Second, to use the work as a tool to educate Frederick, Prince of Wales, ensuring that – unlike his father, George II – he would become a true «patriot king». This article also underscores that those who imported Duguet’s text were careful to emphasise that the Jansenist abbot advocated an absolutist model of «pure» and «irresistible» monarchy – an aspect at odds with the Glorious Revolution’s principles of limiting royal prerogative and sharing power between the king and Parliament. By addressing this apparent paradox, this case study contributes to the scholarship on the active role played by recipient entities in cultural transfers, implying that interpretation can be highly flexible and creative. Indeed, the English disseminators of the Institution d’un Prince did not treat the text with reverential awe; rather, through the use of a hugely significant paratext and a ‘creative’ translation, they critiqued and selected Duguet’s heterodox content to serve a political and intellectual agenda of which he himself would never have approved.
Copyright (c) 2025 Aris Della Fontana https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0
Jean Barré de Saint-Venant et les Lumières caribéennes. Colonisation nouvelle, économie politique et modernisation à Saint-Domingue (1776-1802)
The aim of this article is to explore the intellectual and political trajectory of the Dominguan planter, scientist, and agronomist Jean Barré de Saint-Venant (1737-1810). As a member of the Circle of the Philadelphes and of the Chamber of Agriculture of Le Cap Français, between the end of the Old Regime and the Napoleonic period, Barré de Saint-Venant outlined in his mémoires and printed works a Creole path to agricultural, economic, and institutional progress in the plantation society of Saint-Domingue. By blending philosophy, racial theory, colonial history, scientific experiments, and empirical knowledge, his reflection and action within the imperial administration demonstrate the active participation of Barré de Saint-Venant and other Dominguan colonists in the pursuit of a so-called «colonisation nouvelle», based on expertise in the service of the legislator, technological and governmental modernisation, the promotion of an enlightened public sphere, and the exploitation of the enslaved African. Barré de Saint-Venant’s ideas and reform projects invite us to reflect further on the notion of «Caribbean Enlightenment».
Copyright (c) 2025 Giulio Talini https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0
Le proprietà estetiche e la natura linguistico-cognitiva della sopravvenienza estetica. A ritroso: da Jerrold Levinson a Thomas Reid
The relationship between aesthetic and non-aesthetic properties is the subject of theoretical investigation by Jerrold Levinson and Thomas Reid. According to Reid, non-aesthetic properties are perceptual properties that are inherent to so-called natural signs and require cognitive processing that is internally varied and connected to the qualitative dimension of the mind. Reid also leans towards the solution of supervenience, but unlike Levinson, he places this solution against a background marked by the presence of an agent consciousness. This justifies both the aesthetic interpretation of non-aesthetic properties and the supervenience that is its most eloquent synthesis. This article aims to compare Levinson’s model with Reid’s. This will be done by showing how Reid’s model can be used to respond to some recent objections to Levinson’s approach. Finally, the question of supervenience will be addressed from a cognitive and linguistic point of view. Aesthetic properties are to be understood as the outcome of a cognitive and linguistic structuring that presents different levels of elaboration starting from natural signs (protolanguage). It is a theoretical framework that permits a more comprehensive examination of the strategic role of Reid within Eighteenth-Century philosophy than had previously been acknowledged.
Copyright (c) 2025 Maurizio Maione https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0
Rivoluzionari di frontiera: stranieri e patrioti a Nizza (1792-1794)
Most recent studies on the Italian exile community during the revolutionary and Napoleonic era have clearly expressed the need to overcome periodizations and evaluations still influenced by implicit political and national paradigms. In fact, reconstructions of political dynamics in their concrete development and the qualitative attention to biographies push to overcome the “hindsight” of Nation-State centred visions, to put into focus the complex and non-linear development of the parameters of political contemporaneity. The county of Nice between 1792 and 1794 represents an interesting case study to deepen the discourse on the development of revolutionary practices. Although recognized as one of the centres of Italian revolutionary exile (Rao, 1991; Addante, 2024), Nice experienced a considerable migratory flow even before the exodus of Italian patriots in 1794, since its occupation by French troops in October-November 1792. The article aims to overturn the judgment on Italian expatriation in France as a phenomenon exclusively tied to the history of Italian Risorgimento, and to interrogate the experience of national borders in order to understand the revolutionary phenomenon in its transnational dimension. Through the documents of the local institutions and of the Jacobin society of Nice, I will outline the experience of a revolutionary cosmopolitanism worthy of further investigation.
Copyright (c) 2025 Tazio Morandini https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0
Le Charlatan comme Contre-Identité du Philosophe au XVIIIème Siècle
The Mencke discourses published in 1715 under the title “De Charlataneria Eruditorum” are successful in the academic world and the adjective ‘charlatan’ passes to be used more and more by scholars. Despite notable nuances, the charlatan is considered, in general, as one that, by obscurity or stylistic prolixity (ciarlare), cannot communicate with his colleagues. It is a question here of looking for the mutations of the meaning of the term ‘charlatan’ and its variations in the 18th century, to sketch the possibilities of understanding, by contrast, the identity of the philosopher.
Copyright (c) 2025 Danilo Bilate https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0
«M’accuserez-vous encore d’aimer la petite politique et les demi partis?». An unpublished letter from Louis-Philippe de Ségur to Prince Potemkin.
This article focuses on a previously overlooked letter penned by the Comte de Ségur (1753-1830), shedding new light on his diplomatic maneuvers during his tenure as plenipotentiary minister at the court of Catherine II (1785-1789). Dated October 20, 1787, the letter, addressed to Prince G.A. Potemkin, provides a candid glimpse into Ségur’s role in the delicate dance of Franco-Russian relations amidst the backdrop of the Russo-Turkish War. Contrary to the instructions from the French Minister of Foreign Affairs, Ségur ventured beyond the prescribed boundaries, suggesting the groundwork for a potential Franco-Russian alliance. His plea for secrecy underscores his awareness of transgressing official directives and hints at a guilty conscience. Through a comparative analysis of his Correspondance politique and memoirs, this article unveils Ségur’s clandestine efforts for the alliance, positioning him in the precarious position of deceiving both his own government and subsequent historical narratives. By revisiting this overlooked episode, the article aims to offer fresh insights into the complexities of late Eighteenth Century diplomacy and the role of personal convictions in shaping international relations.
Copyright (c) 2025 Chiara Lerede https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0
La Compagnia di Gesù di Napoli e i suoi queruli vassalli: le controversie feudali a Latronico alla vigilia dell’espulsione dal Regno
The article aims to analyze the disputes between the Neapolitan Society of Jesus and the citizens of Latronico related with the anti-Jesuits behaviours that were growing within the reformist circles. The theme returned in an anonymous report, called Riassunto dello Stato in cui attualmente trovansi le controversie agitate fra l’Università della Terra di Latronico, ed il Barone, o Tenutario pro tempore della medesima dall’anno 1523 sin all’anno 1767. Interesting is the chapter dedicated to the management of pastures, state lands and baronial defenses. Through the analysis of this document, it is possible to focus on the strategies of appropriation of the territory by the feudal power. At the same time, the pleas of Latronico citizens to the defense of their rights highlight the most popular motifs of anti-Jesuit propaganda.
Copyright (c) 2025 Martina Gargiulo https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0
Carlo Borghero, Mitologie cartesiane, Firenze, Le Lettere 2023
Copyright (c) 2026 Gianluca Mori https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0
Francesca Antonelli, Scrivere e sperimentare. Marie-Anne Paulze-Lavoisier, segretaria della “nuova chimica” (1771-1836), Viella, Roma 2022
Copyright (c) 2026 Francesco Baldanzi https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0
Chiara Lo Giudice, Tiepolo restituito: affreschi di Giambattista e Giandomenico Tiepolo coinvolti nei due conflitti mondiali, con contributi di Monica Molteni e Andrea Tomezzoli, Sagep editori, Genova, 2023
Copyright (c) 2026 Serati Ilaria https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0
Matteo Marcheschi, Storie naturali delle rovine. Forme e oggetti del tempo nella Francia dei philosophes (1755-1812), Carocci, Roma 2023
Copyright (c) 2026 Sabrina Consolati https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0
Exciting News! Event, Narration and Impact from Past to Present, edited by Brendan Dooley and Alexander S. Wilkinson, Brill, Leiden-Boston 2024
Copyright (c) 2026 Miriam Campopiano https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0
Amalia Collisani, La musica di Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Neoclassica, Roma 2024
Copyright (c) 2026 Lucio Tufano https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0
Jacques-André Naigeon, Paul-Henri Thiry d’Holbach, Il militare filosofo. Obiezioni sulla religione rivolte a Padre Malebranche, edizione curata e tradotta da Mario Cosenza, Mimesis, Milano-Udine 2023
Copyright (c) 2026 Elena Giorza https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0
David Armando, La repubblica in collegio. Gli scolopi a Roma tra Lumi e Rivoluzione, ISPF Lab-Consiglio Nazionale delle Ricerche, Napoli 2023
Copyright (c) 2026 Maurizio Sangalli https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0
Ernst Cassirer, I problemi istitutivi dell’estetica moderna, a cura di Giovanni Matteucci, Meltemi, Milano 2024
Copyright (c) 2026 Gianni de Nittis https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0
Sine Ira et Studio. Metodo e impegno civile per una razionalità illuministica. Scritti offerti a Dario Generali, a cura di Francesco Luzzini, Mimesis, Milano 2024
Copyright (c) 2026 Paolo Rurale https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0
Gabriella Desideri, Napoli e Amsterdam: relazioni, negoziazioni e traffici nel XVIII secolo, FedOA Press - Federico II University Press, Napoli 2024
Copyright (c) 2026 Alida Clemente https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0
Le stagioni dell’erudizione e le generazioni degli eruditi. Una storia europea (secoli XV-XIX), a cura di Jean Boutier, Fabio Forner, Maria Pia Paoli, Paolo Tinti, Corrado Viola, Clueb, Bologna 2024
Copyright (c) 2026 Franco Arato https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0
Lorenzo Benedetti, I mercanti e l'arcivescovo. L'affermazione dei greci ortodossi a Livorno durante l'episcopato di Francesco Guidi (1734-1778), Pisa, Edizioni ETS, 2023, pp. 188.
Copyright (c) 2026 Jacopo Pessina https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0
Generazioni rivoluzionarie ed Età delle rivoluzioni. Note e riflessioni intorno a un recente studio
Since the second half of the twentieth century, historiography has increasingly tended to view the French Revolution within the broader and more complex framework of an Age of Revolutions with at least a European scope. Although it constitutes a distinct historiographical current, Atlantic History has played a decisive role in fostering an analytical expansion capable of connecting both sides of the Atlantic. In recent years, comprehensive studies have multiplied on a general Age of Revolutions spanning the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, now encompassing even broader scenarios than the Euro-Atlantic world. Beginning with the recent study by Nathan Perl-Rosenthal, The Age of Revolutions: And the Generations Who Made It (New York 2024), and extending the analysis to the principal works that have proposed a similar global perspective based on specific analytical criteria, the paper will offer a critical reflection on the potential and inherent limitations of an approach that appears to challenge not only the traditionally acknowledged exceptional nature of the French epicenter, but also the very modernizing value historically attributed to the Age of Revolutions.
Copyright (c) 2025 Giacomo Carmagnini https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0
La strada per l’utopia è la nostra strada maestra?
This paper develops a reflection on the hermeneutics of utopian ideas elaborated during the twentieth century and recently.
Copyright (c) 2025 Giuseppina D'Antuono https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0
Gli studi sul XVIII secolo in Giappone: situazione attuale e prospettive future. Riflessioni dal 46° Congresso nazionale della Società Giapponese di Studi sul Settecento
Copyright (c) 2026 Sayano Osaki https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0
Genealogie del senso comune: percorsi settecenteschi
The trajectory of common sense follows the various philosophies that intersect throughout the eighteenth century, from Baumgarten to Kant, from Hume to the different definitions of materialism. The issue is present from the outset in the libertine and clandestine eighteenth century, opening up before history a conflict – also political and revolutionary – that the question of common sense clearly illustrates. On the one hand it is judgment; on the other, the living dimension of desire: no form expresses it, no community embodies it. In this way, one moves beyond the dream of a common law for common sense and perceives in the eighteenth century impulses that surpass its critical meaning, dismantle its normative aspects, and shatter its interpretations. If, then, the search for common sense was one of the century’s aims, capable of generating new and free forms of equally diverse modes of subjectivity and its conceptualizations, there emerges progressively – mirroring that very search – the often destructive need to draw boundaries around one’s own present, destructive because common sense itself shuns the spirit of laws and the order of formal reflection, forcing reason to revolutionize itself, pushing it to confront the dark and negating forces of unreason.
Copyright (c) 2026 Elio Franzini https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0
Vicende del “senso comune” nella filosofia britannica del XVIII secolo
The article reconstructs the diversity of conclusions reached regarding “common sense” in the reflections of Shaftesbury, Reid, and, with decisive contributions, Hutcheson and Hume. Not only do we see an expansion of the range of issues addressed in order to understand the specificity of the appeal to common sense, moving from those of natural sociability, virtue and beauty, considered central by Shaftesbury and Hutcheson, to those that for Hume became questions of the validity of belief on the cause and effect, or the nature of human freedom, or the acceptability of testimonies about miracles. But the very nature of the criterion of common sense is understood in a different way: from a sort of firm reference to the reality of things, as it was for Hutcheson and also for Reid, made possible by the guarantees of the Author of Nature, it is transformed by Hume into a secular reality and therefore nothing more than a series of artificial habits whose genealogy and changes need to be explained.
Copyright (c) 2025 Eugenio Lecaldano https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0
Sensus communis and Critical Judgment in Eighteenth-Century Theories of Taste
The debate surrounding the concept of common sense played a significant role in shaping the major currents of thought and society in 18th-century England. Initially regarded as synonymous with widespread, and sometimes fallacious, opinions, the concept gained epistemological validity during the century’s second half. This shift occurred after the rejection of common sense had led to the development of theories that hindered further intellectual progress, standing in stark contrast to the epistemological insights that would later be considered incontrovertible. This essay examines the nature and effects of the peculiar notion of common sense that emerged in this period, both in theoretical and practical terms, as well as within individual and social contexts. The study aims to analyze the implications and effects of sensus communis as it evolved during this time and investigates the role it plays in articulating certain speculative tendencies underlying eighteenth-century aesthetic inquiries in England.
Copyright (c) 2025 Andrea Gatti https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0
Shaftesbury and Sensus Communis – An Unfinished Project
In the context of current critical debates about the viability of universal categories (e.g. reason, community, justice), this article examines Shaftesbury’s complicated engagement with the ideal of sensus communis, focusing primarily on the three texts that comprise the original first volume of Characteristics (1711): A Letter Concerning Enthusiasm; Sensus Communis, an Essay on the Freedom of Wit and Humour; and Soliloquy, or Advice to an Author. Scholars have often read these less formal works by Shaftesbury through the lens of the more conventionally monologic and declamatory philosophy he articulated in the Inquiry Concerning Virtue or Merit. Against the grain of this tendency, which emphasizes the confident idealism of Shaftesbury’s thinking about sensus communis, this article reveals his deep-seated skepticism about the related projects of defining and achieving the kind of shared understanding and commitment to the public good to which this concept refers.
Copyright (c) 2025 Anthony Pollock https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0
The Sensus Communis and Religion in John Hughes’ The Siege of Damascus (1719)
John Hughes’ tragedy The Siege of Damascus (1720) seeks to bridge the divide between east and west, between Islam and Christianity, by advancing an understanding of a sensus communis in terms of sympathy, honor, and mutual respect. I argue that this articulation of a sensus communis relies on how the play conceptualizes ‘genuine religion’ in global terms. It does this primarily by universalizing the project of Anglican clergy to champion Christianity as a civil religion. The play thus points to the importance of enlightenment efforts to reconceptualize religion for a genealogy of the sensus communis.
Copyright (c) 2025 David Alvarez https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0
Common Sense, the Common Reader, and Human Nature: David Hume’s «kind of Unity»
This article presents a close reading of the three pages of the third section of An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding which were eliminated in the 1777 edition, the first to be published after Hume’s death. These pages deserve attention, since their subject is narrative, an art which Hume had not dealt with elsewhere. Here, after having radically rejected the rules of the past, Hume proposes new rules based on his science of human nature, giving them philosophical foundation. He explains what discursive forms enliven the readers’ imagination and kindle their passions. In short, he discloses a perspective reader response: not of learned readers though, but of all readers, of the common reader of his time. And that reader had an approach to the practice which was different from before, having internalized silent and individual reading. In eighteenth-century Western Europe, as the article concisely illustrates at the beginning, that practice spread among the majority of the literate population. Such is the reader Hume sets at the centre of his inquiry, one whose approach to the narrative text was direct, and no longer mediated by the voice and the gestures of the person reading aloud. Hume’s was the type of reader that contemporary writers of “compositions of genius”, to use a Humean expression, were starting to envisage for their narratives and theories.
Copyright (c) 2025 Rosamaria Loretelli https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0
Scottish Common Sense Philosophy: Twelve Theses
What was Scottish common sense philosophy? Understood in purely historical terms, this question is easily answered: it was a school of thought which came into being during the middle third of the 18th century, and which formed a vital part of that many-sided whole now known as the Scottish Enlightenment. But what was its philosophical content? Answering this question is the raison d’être of the present essay. In what follows, I shall identify twelve theses which are central to the distinctive brand of common-sensism articulated by Reid and Stewart. My modus operandi is simple: after stating each thesis, I shall summarize the principal arguments for it and explain its philosophical significance.
Copyright (c) 2025 Douglas McDermid https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0
Sensatezza del mondo e dimensione pratica del senso comune in Kant
In contrast to the many studies that deal with Kant’s concept of common sense from an aesthetic point of view, I will rather focus on its practical meaning. In this way, my aim is to underline the dimension of commonalty of both taste and healthy human intellect. I will defend the thesis according to which the meaning of the adjective “common” in the expression “common sense” becomes clear only once the practical normativity of reason is emphasized. In order to show this, I will firstly focus on Kant’s third Critique, start from some terminological-conceptual distinctions expressed there, refer to the discussion on the commonalty of feeling, and take the “healthy” (i.e., sound) intellect into consideration. I will secondly turn to Kant’s Anthropology, in order to conclude my argument and highlight the practical, i.e., at the same time moral and political, significance of the yet uncultivated commonalty of sense and intellect.
Copyright (c) 2025 Antonino Falduto https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0
Conference report: Naigeon and the Mémoires historiques et philosophiques sur la vie et les ouvrages de Denis Diderot, 28th March 2025, All Souls College, University of Oxford
Report of the conference «Naigeon and the Mémoires historiques et philosophiques sur la vie et les ouvrages de Denis Diderot», organised by Caroline Warman (Jesus College, University of Oxford) on 28th March 2025 at All Souls College, University of Oxford.
Copyright (c) 2025 Holly Rowe https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0