"The knowledge of ourselves is the most necessary and most useful of the sciences we can acquire."
"Know then thyself; presume not God to scan, The proper study of mankind is Man."
Alexander Pope - An Essay on Man, 1733
Background: "science" and "philosophy"
In the 18th century, what we call today call "science" (e.g. biology, chemistry, physics) was still called "natural philosophy" as it had been for several centuries before that.
"Natural philosophy" became known as "science" in the 19th century (when the word "scientist" came into use).
Although modern science broke away from philosophy at that point, there is still and important field of philosophy called the philosophy of science. It is concerned with the foundations, methods, and implications of science. The central questions of this study concern what qualifies as science, the reliability of scientific theories, and the ultimate purpose of science. This discipline overlaps with metaphysics, ontology, and epistemology, for example, when it explores the relationship between science and truth. In most cases, philosophers of science are not scientists themselves (although some are). Important 20th century philosophers of science include W.V. Quine, Karl Popper, and Thomas Kuhn.
Today's "sciences of man" having roots in the 18th century:
Political science, Economics, Human History
Sociology, Sociocultural anthropology (Social anthropology / cultural anthropology)
Psychology, Cognitive sciences
Chapter points (with some elaboration):
1. David Hume coins the phrase "the science of man" in his 1838 book A Treatise on Human Nature. Hume wanted to apply the empirical approach to science that Isaac Newton used to study motion to the study of human behavior. Hume was not interested in looking for "primary causes" or "ultimate principles" as did the speculative rationalists from Thomas Aquinas to Gottfried Leibniz had. Hume is interested in ideas that are useful, that have what he calls utility. These are ideas we can put to work for the better of mankind. Treating man as an object of science should provide the ability to predict human behavior as Newton's theories could predict the motion of objects.
For Hume, the study of "morals" was not just the study of "right and wrong" or "good and bad." Moral philosophy was also the study of a societies customs, habits, and manners.
For Hume, a society's traditions, including its institutions, are the grounding of morality. This made Hume a politically conservative Enlightenment thinker who upheld monarchy and aristocratic privilege who thought advancements in the human condition should come gradually within these traditions. (Hume did support the American independence but only because he thought the British government had bungled the relationship with the colonies beyond repair).
2. (Most) Enlightenment philosophers were determined to study the mankind from the perspective that there is "no universal difference discernible in the human species." Any apparent differences between peoples developed because of that peoples' particular history. In The Spirit of the Laws (one of the most important books of the Enlightenment on government), Lord Montesquieu held that climates, hot and cold, was the most important factor in establishing those differences. That idea was attacked by Diderot, Hume, Helvetius and others, and today is not upheld. But understanding the general environment (food sources, etc) is today a crucial factor in the development of cultures.
3. On the negative side, the Enlightenment saw the beginnings of "racial biology" (e.g. classifying humans by the shape of their skulls). Some of their theories of racial differences seem rather stupid to us today, and some remarks by major thinkers like Hume and Immanuel Kant are now easily classifiable as racist.
4. Aristotle's idea of the "natural slave" is still upheld by many. Rousseau held that "Slaves loose everything in their shackles, including the desire to escape. They love their servitude as the companions of Ulysses loved their brutishness." Many subsequent events (e.g. the Haitian Revolution) proved Rousseau wrong.
5. The Comte Buffon's 36 volume Natural History and other works suggest that species evolve. There is also the growing idea that humans are mutable creatures; not only do they change biologically, but "human nature" also evolves.
6. While today we consider history to be a part of the "humanities" and not one of the social sciences, the Enlightenment's idea of the "science of history" and its application in understanding mankind was very important. History before the Enlightenment was primarily about great rulers (who Shaftesbury labeled "the great butchers of mankind") and their wars. Jean le Ronde d'Alembert claimed that this type of history was only entertainment and maybe useful for teaching children morals. A new form of history writing developed, one in which Voltaire played a major role. His histories more described the cultural history of a people, which provided more information on how various groups, rather than a few individuals, lived. David Hume's widely read The History of England also focuses on the general customs and traditions in England's history. Histories like these showed the development over time of societies.
Enlightenment thinkers also engaged in theoretical history, such as Jean-Jacques Rousseau's The Origins of Inequality which speculates on what pre-societal man must have been like.
7. The rest of the chapter is primarily about the philosophies of Jean-Jacques Rousseau and Immanuel Kant. We will discuss their philosophies later in the course. This will bring up the point of whether history is teleological. Teleology basically means that history is heading in a specific direction for a with a specific purpose or towards a certain goal. For Enlightenment deists, this meant that the purpose of mankind is somehow defined in nature and nature itself has purpose. However, Enlightenment tended to see nature as random and purposeless, therefore they would pass on teleological explanations of the world and the ability to predict the future of mankind. That generally holds until the 19th century atheistic philosopher Karl Marx develops his views of history.
12 major Enlightenment works about history and the social sciences:
Giambattista Vico - The New Science (1725)
David Hume - Treatise on Human Nature (1739)
Baron de Montesquieu - The Spirit of the Laws (1748)
Comte de Buffon - Natural History (36 vols, 1749 -1789)
Jean-Jacques Rousseau - Discourse on Inequality (1754)
Voltaire - Essay on the Customs and Spirits of Nations (1756)
Claude Adrien Helvétius - De l'esprit (On Mind) (1758)
Adam Ferguson - An Essay on the History of Civil Society (1767)
Baron d'Holbach - The System of Nature (1770)
Guillaume-Thomas Raynal - History of the Two Indies (1770)
Adam Smith - The Wealth of Nations (1776)
Marquis de Condorcet - Sketch for a Historical Picture of the Progress of the Human Mind (1795)
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