Introduction
Theory and Practice in Eighteenth-Century Philosophy was an Exploratory Workshop funded by a grant from the Peter Wall Institute for Advanced Studies at the University of British Columbia awarded to Principal Investigators Alexander Dick and Christina Lupton, Department of English.
It is customary to think of the British empricists John Locke, David Hume, and Thomas Reid as pioneers of the philosophy of mind. But what do the material contexts for the philosophy of mind, its rhetoric, scholarly networks, and methods of dissemination, tell us about its goals and purposes? In the last decade, scholars in a number of fields have produced readings of philosophical texts and their contexts provoking a new understanding of the ways in which these thinkers engaged in an exterior world – an exterior defined by the practices of communication, social life, and disciplinarity – rather than only an interior world defined by mind, thought, and sense.
Theory and Practice 2007 explored this juncture by bringing together literary critics skilled in rhetorical and cultural analysis, philosophers skilled in analyzing empirical and common sense philosophy as structures of thought, sociologists skilled in assessing the dynamics of intellectual and academic institutions, and historians skilled in the intellectual legacy of Enlightenment philosophy. Over the course of two full days of papers and responses, panel presentations, and rigorous, collegial discussion, participants debated the extent to which the philosophy of mind changes in accordance with discoveries about its material origins and what kinds of methodologies are available or necessary to account for that change. The workshop provided a significant forum for considering not only the intellectual heritage of the West, but also for examining the continuing relevance of the humanities to the University and beyond.
