This chapter sets the stage for the volume, describing an approach to Otto Neurath’s last years that weaves together biographical, historical, and philosophical strands. Neurath can also be examined from the angle of ‘exile studies’, enthusiastically adapting to British life and making contributions to philosophy, economics, and visual education that were ahead of his time. The themes of planning and education are introduced as narrative hooks to understand Neurath’s late work.

As an undergraduate studying Literae Humaniores at Balliol College, Oxford, in the 1860s, Hopkins found himself at the centre of the Victorian Platonic revival. This essay charts the contours of classical scholarship in the mid-nineteenth century and the outsize role played by Hopkins’s tutor Benjamin Jowett in promoting Presocratic and Platonic philosophy as the necessary foundation of modern thought. This early encounter with ancient Greek thought provided Hopkins with a philosophical framework through which he could prosecute one of his most fundamental intuitions: that reality is complex, and that it is necessary to pay careful attention to the proper relations between the individual and the whole. It was as he studied these early philosophers that Hopkins first formulated his key concepts of inscape and instress and, more importantly, found the prompt for his own self-consciously modern experiments in verse-writing.

The ecological thinking of the Georgics leads to intricate problems of scale, which Chapter 4 traces. The poem seeks to conceptualize humans’ place in their local environments – epitomized by the bounded space of the farm – while also imagining life at larger scales and attempting to think the world as a coherent whole. The chapter connects these issues to political, geographical, agricultural, philosophical, and poetical questions. This chapter finds in the Georgics a searching exploration of what it means to be local, and whether such a thing is even possible in the age of Jupiter and the time of Caesar. Ultimately, the poem rethinks a more nuanced concept of locality that is intertwined with the global, and is of shifting, unpredictable scale: a concept of fractal locality. At the center of the poem, Vergil places a fitting emblem for a fractally local poetry, the temple he vows in his native Mantua. This temple models Vergil’s achievement as anchored in particular place, and yet in a place that has become local, Roman, Italian, and global all at once.

This chapter concludes by revisiting the importance of genre assessment. The wilderness narrative is not history, but this does not mean it has no historicity. As political allegory that became ever more generically complex, it is deeply implicated in Israel’s history. The literary history that emerged from readings of the complaint episodes is summarized here; it entails a pseudo-biographical version, an annalistic version, a tragic version, a hierocratic version, and a prophetic version. This preliminary literary history should be viewed as a map to guide readings of other texts, not a model to be imposed on them. The result is a history of political thought in action.

This chapter argues that Gissing’s novels offer significant and philosophically sophisticated engagements with the novel of ideas. Gissing’s study of Schopenhauer’s works led him to take a keen interest in post-Kantian idealism and in fundamental questions regarding the irreconcilability of the ‘ideal’ and the ‘real’. These concerns are reflected in the novels Gissing wrote in the 1880s – these books satirize the idealist pretensions of social reformers, and they demonstrate that the philanthropic ideals of the Settlement Movement were bound to fail when confronted with the complex and harsh reality of London’s East End. Gissing’s novels are animated by a set of questions that bear directly on the history of the novel of ideas: are aspirational ideals necessarily external and alien to the literary work, or is it possible for them to be assimilated into the medium of literary form? Is it possible for these ideals to become artistically productive?

This chapter explores theologian and pastor Johann Joachim Spalding’s immensely popular Bestimmung des Menschen (eleven editions between 1748 and 1804), its reverberations throughout the German Enlightenment, and the ways in which it intersected with both philosophical and religious questions about humankind’s place in the world. The chapter discusses the ways in which religious thinkers attempted to provide new “apologies” for Christianity against deism and atheism, how they did so in a modern, literary German that solidified their positions in the public sphere, and how these interventions also shaped philosophical discourse in the eighteenth century.

As well as providing a brief biography of Sophie de Grouchy, the introduction sets out the aims of the book. It describes how A Republic of Sympathy is the tale of how thought could be produced by an eighteenth-century woman in a time of Revolution: with all the possibilities, limitations, and opportunities that this period offered. It outlines how over this period, Grouchy developed her own, unique form of republicanism, by appealing to sympathy as the glue between the individual and the republic. It emphasises that Grouchy’s thought consisted of a series of shifting, adapting ideas, which nevertheless consistently relied on this sentiment. It describes how Grouchy not only experiment with variations of her theory over this period, but with different mediums of expressing her ideas: including pedagogical treatise, journal articles, translated texts, commentaries, collaborative projects, or embodied in her lived relationships. It also highlights Grouchy’s key interlocutors: from Adam Smith, to Jean-Jacques Rousseau, from her husband, the marquis de Condorcet to Benjamin Constant, from Thomas Paine to Jacques Pierre Brissot.

This chapter looks at the rivalry between religion and philosophy in German culture after 1800, starting with the Reformation anniversary of 1817 and concluding with Schleiermacher’s and Hegel’s competing tercentennial celebrations of the Augsburg Confession in 1830. It starts with a discussion of the Wartburg Festival in 1817, in which students and veterans of the Battle of Leipzig (1813) met at Wartburg Castle, where Luther translated the gospels while in hiding after being declared an outlaw and heretic at the Diet of Worms (1521). It then looks at the ways in which new philosophical and historical ideas about the legacy and impact of the Reformation were reflected in popular and accessible writings, specifically Friedrich Keyser’s Reformations-Almanach (1817, 1819). Finally, through an analysis of late-career works by the most famous theologian and the most famous philosopher of the day – the Berlin University rivals Hegel and Schleiermacher – the chapter’s last section shows how the Reformation was constituted in public discourse as a legitimation strategy for intellectuals courting public opinion and official favor.

This chapter provides an overview of the book’s argument. It first shows how the association of Protestantism with modern freedom and German philosophy was an artifact of political and social debates in the eighteenth century, a German version of Butterfield’s famous concept of the “Whig” idea of history. It next explores the evolution of the term “Protestant” from the early days of the Reformation to the eighteenth century, concluding with the diversity of German Protestantism on the eve of the 1717 Reformation anniversary. Third, the Introduction discusses the intellectual contexts in which Protestantism and the Reformation were redefined, providing working definitions for such terms as "religion," "philosophy," "theology," and the "Protestant public sphere." Particular attention is paid to disputes over the boundaries of philosophy and religion in the context of Pietism, Wolffian philosophy, and eclecticism. Finally, the Introduction situates the book in the scholarly contexts of Enlightenment historiography, early modern European history and Church history, and the history of modern philosophy.