Table Of ContentBRILL'S STUDIES
IN
INTELLECTUAL HISTORY
General Editor
A J. VANDERJAGT, University of Groningen
Editorial Board
M. COLISH, Oberlin College
J.I. ISRAEL, University College, London
J.D. NORTH, University of Groningen
H.A. OBERMAN, University of Arizona, Tucson
R.H. POPKIN, Washington University, St. Louis-UCLA
VOLUME 91
Richard H. Popkin, who celebrated his seventy-fifth birthday on
27 December 1998
EVERYTHING CONNECTS:
IN CONFERENCE WITH
RICHARD H. POPKIN
Essays in His Honor
EDITED BY
JAMES E. FORCE
AND
DAVID S. KATZ
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BRILL
LEIDEN · BOSTON · KÖLN
1999
This book is printed on acid-free paper.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
The Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is also available.
Die Deutsche Bibliothek - CIP-Einheitsaufhahme
Everything connects : in conference with Richard H. Popkin ;
essays in his honor / ed. by James E. Force and David S. Katz. - Leiden ;
Boston ; Köln : Brill, 1999
(Brill's studies in intellectual history ; Vol. 91)
ISBN 90-04^11098-4
ISSN 0920-8607
ISBN 90 04 11098 4
© Copynght 1999 by Koninklijke Bnll NV, Leiden, The Netherlands
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PRINTED IN THE NETHERLANDS
CONTENTS
Preface
David S. Katz vii
Introduction: Warts and All, Part 2
Richard H. Popkin xi
1. Stiernhielm Pythagorizans and the Unveiling of Isis
Susanna Akerman 1
2. Unmasking the Truth: The Theme of Imposture
in Early Modern European Culture, 1660-1730
Silvia Berti 19
3. Père Richard Simon and English Biblical Criticism,
1680-1700
Justin A. I. Champion 37
4. The Slums of Cosmopolis: A Renaissance in the
History of Philosophy?
Brian P. Copenhaver 63
5. John Locke and Francis Mercury van Helmont
Allison P. Coudert 87
6. "Children of the Resurrection" and "Children of the
Dust": Confronting Mortality and Immortality with
Newton and Hume
James E. Force 115
7. The Batde for "True" Jewish Christianity: Peter Allix's
Polemics Against the Unitarians and Millenarians
Matt Goldish 143
8. More, Millenarianism, and the Ma'aseh Merkavah
Sarah Hutton 163
VI CONTENTS
9. Lying Wonders and Juggling Tricks: Religion,
Nature, and Imposture in Early Modern England
Rob Iliffe 183
10. An Alternative Path to Modernity: The Sephardi
Jews of Amsterdam in Early Modern Times
Yosef Kaplan 211
11. La Querelle du Paganisme
Jacqueline Lagrée 241
12. Bayle's Academic Scepticism
José R. Maia Neto 263
13. Popkin, Scepticism, and the History of
Modern Philosophy
G. A. J. Rogers 277
14. Religion, Philosophy, and Science: John Locke and
Limborch's Circle in Amsterdam
Luisa Simonutti 293
15. Spinoza on Theocracy and Democracy
Theo Verbeek 325
16. Unnatural Empire: George Buchanan,
Anti-Imperialism, and the lö^-Century Syphilis
Pandemic
Arthur H. Williamson 339
17. "This Due Degree of Blindness": Boyle, Hume, and
the Limits of Reason
Jan Wojcik 361
PREFACE
DAVID S. KATZ
There is an old Jewish joke about the man who is found wailing at
the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier, weeping for the loss of his friend.
"How could you have known him?" asks the onlooker, "this Soldier
is supposed to be Unknown". "It's true," explains the mourner, "that
as a Soldier he was Unknown; but as a tailor, he was world-famous!"
I bring forward this ancient testimony in order to justify the publi
cation of a third Festschrift for Richard Popkin, produced by some
of the editors of the first and second volumes, respectively. Those
books were a tribute to Richard H. Popkin the scholar, the great
est living historian of philosophy. The collection before you is a tes
timony to Dick Popkin the conference-meister, not the soldier on
the frontiers of knowledge, but the man who for many years cre
ated tailor-made gatherings of scholars from all over the world.
Academic conferences have long suffered from a serious image
problem. Arthur Koestler referred to professors as "call girls"—one
ring of the telephone and their bags are picked for any destination
between Berkeley and Beijing. In David Lodge's very small world,
meetings of this kind serve the essential function of providing a venue
for them to rubbish their colleagues before a distinguished interna
tional audience. This sort of amusing cynicism, coupled with the
humiliating difficulty of trying to get funding for travel in some
universities, and the automatic ease of obtaining airline tickets in
others, has led to a general uneasiness about the value of academic
conferences in general. When entire academic papers can be sent
along telephone lines almost instantly, who needs to bring the actual
authors together at the public expense?
Dick Popkin always knew the answer, and to anyone who was
lucky enough to be invited to what he sometimes called his "clam
bakes", the reasons were so obvious that it never needed to be for
mulated. Dick actually believes that there is such a thing as a
"Republic of Letters", an international group of scholars who col
lectively are bringing light into darkness and uncovering the hidden
connections and correspondences between history and ideas. It would
vin PREFACE
be difficult to find an appropriate metaphor for Dick Popkin's role
in bringing these people together—the sun, the summit of a moun
tain, the top of the tower—but it is undeniable even without liter
ary support that scholars from all over the known world turn to him
for advice and even encouragement, and he sees to it that they meet.
We will probably never be sure if history is science or literature
or a litde bit of both. Certainly there are many literary elements in
history writing, as the postmodernists never tire of taunting us, with
everything from the use of language and imagination to the con
struction of reality. But it is also a science as well, most importandy
in the post-Newtonian sense of being public. The early founders of
the Royal Society saw themselves as the representatives of men like
themselves, who due to geographical dispersion could not always be
present at their deliberations. It was therefore necessary ultimately
to conduct their experiments as public demonstrations before what
amounted to a group of witnesses whose task it was to testify to the
results. Science was public.
Dick Popkin's historical science has also always been public. On
the personal level, he makes his work available to other scholars the
moment it exists. I recall meeting him in various places in Europe
when he would plunk down a stack of manila files on the table and
say, "this is what I've found recendy", sending me off with his bless
ing to photocopy whatever I liked. In this case at least, virtue was
its own reward. When Dick's car was mysteriously broken into at
Paris in 1986, the thieves taking nothing valuable apart from a case
full of his papers, he was able to reconstruct most of his lost work
by asking his friends for photocopies of the photocopies.
Most importantly, however, Dick Popkin's historical science has
always been conducted in the public sphere by means of academic
conferences of fellow scholars. David Lodge is right that far too often,
the academic conference is a venue for the pursuit of agenda other
than that on the programme itself. Popkin's conferences are never
like that. For one thing, rather than inviting stars whose research
fuel has long been exhausted, Dick always prefers researchers who
genuinely have something to contribute, even if they are only at the
early stages of writing their doctoral thesis. A number of articles in
this present volume were contributed by scholars who first met Dick
Popkin while graduate students, sometimes having pursued him to
Washington University or UCLA, but also including others who were
adopted informally at the beginning of their careers.
PREFACE IX
Historical research is by its very nature often a solitary affair. We
work mostly with books and manuscripts, shrouded by the dulled
sounds of the library. Such dialectical synthesis that occurs takes
place at a relatively advanced stage of the research, after the finished
book or article is published. There are many fields of study in which
the collaborative effort comprises the research itself, as in a scientific
experiment involving many people and masses of equipment. The
benefits of discussion, argument and counter-argument on a regular
and even daily basis are largely lost on the silent archival warriors.
Dick Popkin saw the darkness and said it was no good. With the
support of institutions like the Clark Library (UCLA), the Van
Leer Institute (Israel), the Herzog August Bibliothek (Wolfenbüttel),
and the Netherlands Institute for Advanced Studies, and the generosity
of a patron like Constance Blackwell, Dick began to put together
conferences on his favourite themes—scepticism, religion and irreli
gion, millenarianism, and the no-man's-land between Christianity
and Judaism. The people he brought together always provided the
critical mass required for intellectual forward movement at warp
speed, and very many of them formed lasting scholarly and personal
friendships.
Dr. Susanna Akerman, now a distinguished scholar, but once a
graduate student who journeyed from Stockholm to study in America
with Richard Popkin, recalls the advice he gave her early on in her
research: "Everything connects in the end". The editors of this third
volume of essays have therefore chosen as its motto Dick Popkin's
dictum that "everything connects", for thanks to him, not only ideas
but also scholars have made contact. They like to think of them
selves as "Popkinites", united by a common belief that the history
of philosophy involves discovering and uncovering unnoticed con
nections between ideas and those who held them, and that largely
based on new and original research in the primary materials left
behind.
Everyone in this volume apart from myself has contributed an
essay and a set of personal remembrances. My own tribute to Dick
Popkin comes in the form of a book we are publishing together at
the same time as this Festschrift, Messianic Revolution: Radical Religious
Politics to the End of the Second Millennium (New York: Farrar, Straus &
Giroux, 1999). Our aim in this book was to show the connections
(that word again!) between Joachim of Fiore in twelfth-century Italy
and David Koresh in twentieth-century America, to give a history
