464. Howard Hotson on the Republic of Letters

This question of the Republic of Letters as strictly critical, with participation the prerogative of initiates, as opposed to pedagogical, is interesting insofar as it does touch on the university today. You brought up undergraduate versus doctoral study, the latter an innovation of the Germans in the 19th century. If the university as faculties of law, medicine, and theology becomes the research institution which privileges the natural sciences, understood to be the contemporary incarnation of natural philosophy, then where does this leave philosophy proper? It is understood that biology, physics, chemistry, yield to the experimental method, are subject to mathematization as in Newton's Principia, with its incredible demonstration of its effectiveness, but in what way is philosophy experimental, or mathematical?

It seems to me that it isn't, and that in a way, the parents and politicians whom they elect, who say that the university should be preparation for a job, are not without justice on their side, because the university not only no longer is educating a privileged elite who have leisure ad infinitum for republican letters, but we ourselves inveigh against such a university system as facilitates legacy admissions and a culture of "the gentleman's C." It seems to me that, as little as we like to admit it, philosophy, as a matter of truth, has got to subsist on the margins, has got to be liminal with respect to the university in a time of secular universality, when all are held to be equal, in principle, if not in fact.

How much is the whole institution of the Republic of Letters a product of the then still persistent religious and other thought persecution? I would suggest a hypothesis (without absolutely any knowledge of relevant facts) that at the moment a censorship is lifted a large share of the volume of the intellectual communication shifts from letters to the printed materials, e.g., when England abolished censorship in the late seventeenth/early eighteenth century, most of that communication moved to pamphlets and printed materials.

Although, it is interesting that the form of a letter persisted long after the medium was in fact a book. The Burke’s key essay is called in full “Reflections on the Revolution in France, and on the proceedings in certain societies in London relative to that event: in a letter intended to have been sent to a gentleman in Paris.”, but I know there is a discussion whether some actual letter was mailed. And some replies to it (e.g., Wollstonecraft’s “Vindication of the Rights of Men”) still pretend to be letters, although I am quite certain they were never actually mailed, but Paine’s “Rights of Man” didn’t even bother to pretend any more.