Search Results

The ruler of Qin conquered his opponents in the year 221 bc and was able to rule over a unified China and called himself the “First Emperor of Qin.” He was able to create an integrated whole out of states that for the most part had been culturally and economically independent. He ordered a common script, common track width (on roads), and common weights and measures, thereby laying the foundation for a lasting exchange of goods and people in his kingdom that was necessary to support the huge new cities in distant parts of the country. The new state organism offered China an experience of being an organism consisting of several units, where each unit contributed to the well-being of the whole. For some philosophers of the time, the effect of this new economic and social organism on their worldview was so profound that they could not avoid internalizing the model as a whole, extending it even to their understanding of the body. The body organism in the new medicine was nothing but the state organism transferred onto the body.

The idea that a body as an organism has self-interest and tries to heal its own wounds and overcome difficult crises on its own is based on the model image of the self-regulating, autonomous polis. The polis had transformed itself from the monarchy and the rule of the noble families into a democratic structure that was optimal for the situation of the time, a democracy in which the citizens were the sovereigns of their own fates through their meetings. The polis was a social organism and it was entirely unavoidable that its structures lent the plausibility needed for the explanatory model of the self-healing powers to find general acceptance. The fact that sickness heals on its own is also described repeatedly in the ancient Chinese literature. The ancient Chinese literature does not contain descriptions of the course of a normally fatal illness taking an unanticipated and unexpected turn for the better. China has never known trust in the self-regulating powers of the pan-societal organism.

This chapter draws out the evolutionary content of “The Subjective Necessity for Social Settlements,” Addams’s first published essay. Addams’s task in this essay is to show how social settlements can bring disparate groups into relations of healthy interdependence. Like her fellow social evolutionary theorists, Addams envisions society as a social organism and is concerned that its interdependent parts function in equilibrium. The chapter presents how the three types of motives for settlement work around which Addams organizes the essay represent three strands of Victorian evolutionary theorizing: evolutionary progress from political democracy toward industrial and social democracy, accounts of the evolution of morality from primitive biological instincts, and Comtean positivists’ account of the evolution of religion into humanism.

This piece includes both Bradley's response to Sidgwick's critique of his Ethical Studies and Sidgwick's reply to that response. Bradley states that he has no pretension to solve the problem of the individual in general, and the origin of the Self in particular. Moreover, he says that he repudiates the doctrine that one's self‐realization is achieved when someone else brings about something one desires. To these and other defences, Sidgwick offers various replies: (1) Bradley scarcely attempts to address the charge that his exposition of the self lacks clarity and coherence; and (2) Bradley misunderstands the position that the social organism of which the individual is said to be an essential part is a relative whole, not an absolute whole.

Examining the cases of two further nineteenth-century empiricists, this chapter begins by considering how G. H. Lewes moved from an early position of neo-Comtean positivism which was avowedly anti-metaphysical to the advocacy of what he described as ‘empirical metaphysics’. An examination is made of five different ways in which Lewes moves beyond simple sensualism to a more sophisticated understanding of ‘the empirical’, before considering in detail three examples of his empirical metaphysics, respecting physical reality, mind, and causation. The discussion of Lewes concludes by reflecting upon the sense in which he remains hostile to what he describes as ‘metempirics’ including the notion of the unknowable thing-in-itself. The chapter concludes with a consideration of Karl Pearson’s philosophy which centre stages sense-impressions and champions both reductionism and scientism. But it is noted that even with Pearson we find willingness to engage in a degree of metaphysical speculation.