The main debates about nationalism during the past two decades have concentrated on the effects of changing means of communication and processes of de- and reterritorialization. The entangled web of relations which traversed national boundaries did not produce “the utopia of a post-national history,” but the “stabilization and territorialization of the nation-state,” in Sebastian Conrad’s view.1 Whereas the dynamics of nationalism have generally been located within nation-states, as “imagined communities,” “invented traditions,” or reactions to modernization, Conrad’s own case studies show that “the shifts and changes in the discourse of nationalism … appear not only as effects of internal trajectories, as the familiar picture would suggest, but just as much of the larger process we retrospectively call globalization.”

Some years ago, the intellectual historian Bronisław Baczko noted that a crucial feature of eighteenth-century thought was its all-pervasive desire for a “return to origins,” a fixation emerging through a quasi-obsessive quest for the beginning of all sorts of social, political, and religious institutions as well as moral principles.1 Indeed, Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s Discours sur l’origine de l’inégalité (1754), Edmund Burke’s Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful (1757), Johann Gottfried Herder’s Abhandlung über den Ursprung der Sprache (1772), and the Essai sur l’origine des connaissance humaines (1778), by the abbé de Condillac, are just a few works that testify, by their titles alone, to the eighteenth-century preoccupation with “origins.” But many more could be added. From the late seventeenth century onwards, innumerable scholars across Europe produced a plethora of tracts, pamphlets, articles, and books to investigate and dissect the origins of languages, knowledge, feelings, prejudice, and, importantly for us, nations.

In this chapter Chris Meckstroth explains how Immanuel Kant responded to the urgent political question of the 1780s and 1790s, how to understand the collective agency of the people or nation, with a novel conception of history. Kant thought we must believe progress is possible if we are to sustain a commitment to acting justly. To this end he re-worked arguments of Leibniz and Pope, who had tried to show that we live in the best of all possible worlds, thereby absolving God of responsibility for evil and saving the coherence of moral duty from scepticism. Kant, however, did not pitch his argument to the religious conscience of individuals. He aimed at political rulers whose authority derived from representing the general will of an entire people. His political thought focussed on principles a ruler must respect to count as that sort of representative. To these his philosophy of history added a concern for improvement over time, which he made plausible by drawing on a mechanism of unsocial sociability familiar in authors such as Pope. The result was a new, secular theodicy of progress favouring peace and republican politics, and designed to contain conflict in an age of democratic reform.

This chapter begins with a survey of the young Newton’s early exposure to experimental philosophy and then turns to the emergence of experimental pedagogy in the last years of the seventeenth century and its rapid expansion in the early decades of the century that followed. The proliferation of courses in experimental philosophy, both public and university-based, in Oxford, Cambridge, London, and St Andrews, is testimony to its success and legitimacy. So much so, we argue, that when his commitment to universal gravity came under attack by Continental detractors, Newton openly and very strategically aligned himself with experimental philosophy, in part because of the credibility that this approach to natural philosophy already possessed. This is not to claim that every Newtonian was partial to experimental philosophy, and in this chapter we examine the views of one opponent, the Oxford natural philosopher John Keill. We document the process by which Newton publicly declared himself to be an experimental philosopher in the second edition of the Principia of 1713, and then go on to examine his role in the eclipse of Baconian natural history.

Does Kant regard mathematical inference as a nonanalytic mode of inference relying essentially on pure intuition, or rather as advancing through strict conceptual analysis from synthetic premises? Commentators have found textual support for both readings, leading to incompatible accounts of the synthetic character of mathematical judgment. This paper develops a new argument establishing that Kant views mathematical inference as essentially dependent on extraconceptual resources. The paper also establishes that Kant employs “analysis” and its cognates in a number of senses in the critical period. In particular, he recognizes a notion of analysis directed to intuitions, thus distinct from conceptual analysis. This finding leads to a new reading of his famous description of mathematical inference as “proceeding in accordance with the Principle of Contradiction” (B14). Kant’s choice of the B14 formulation is explained as reflecting his desire to distance his own antilogicist theory of mathematical inference with its essential dependence on pure intuition from C. A. Crusius’s antiformalist theory of inference grounded in thinkability.