- York, United Kingdom
Tim Stuart-Buttle
University of York, Department of Politics, Faculty Member
- International Relations, Political Science, Art History, History, Epistemology, Intellectual History, and 23 moreHistory of Political Thought, History of Philosophy, History of Religion, Moral and Political Philosophy, Education, John Locke, Thomas Hobbes, Bernard Mandeville, Lord Shaftesbury, Francis Hutcheson, Cicero, Ciceronianism, Classical Reception Studies, David Hume, Richard Hooker, William Chillingworth, Ecclesiology, Philosophy, Literature, Cultural Studies, Languages and Linguistics, Ethics, and English Literatureedit
- I am Lecturer in Political Theory at the University of York. My focus is on European theories of society from the mid... moreI am Lecturer in Political Theory at the University of York. My focus is on European theories of society from the mid-seventeenth to the early nineteenth century, with a particular attentiveness to early modern philosophers' increased emphasis on the individual's craving for the approval of others in explaining social co-ordination and the development of moral consensus. I am researching a monograph, provisionally entitled 'Recognition and Respect in Early Modern Philosophy: From Hobbes to Hegel and Beyond', which shows how Rousseau was very far from the first to appreciate the transformative (and deeply ambivalent) consequences which flowed from seeing one's self through another's eyes (that is, from processes of socialisation).
My first monograph, published by Oxford University Press in July 2019, is entitled 'From Moral Theology to Moral Philosophy: Cicero, Christianity and Visions of Humanity from Locke to Hume'. Based on my doctoral thesis (undertaken at the University of Oxford, 2009-13), I attempt to explain why Cicero was such a presiding presence in British moral philosophy from Locke to Hume and beyond. British philosophers, I argue, were particularly drawn to the distinctive texture of Cicero's scepticism - and to his concerted interest in the relationship between religion, ethics and politics: both of which were held to carry important implications for many of the questions which most concerned contemporary moral and political philosophers.
From 2017-2020, I was a Post-doctoral Research Associate on Tim Stanton's Leverhulme Trust-funded project, 'Rethinking Civil Society: History, Theory, Critique' (2017-2022), and based at the University of York. Previously (2014-17) I was a postdoc on the ERC-funded interdisciplinary project, 'Crossroads of Knowledge in Early Modern England: The Place of Literature', based at the University of Cambridge (2014-19), and a Junior Research Fellow at Clare Hall, Cambridge.edit
The seventeenth and eighteenth centuries represent a period of remarkable intellectual vitality in British philosophy, as figures such as Hobbes, Locke, Hume and Smith attempted to explain the origins and sustaining mechanisms of civil... more
The seventeenth and eighteenth centuries represent a period of remarkable intellectual vitality in British philosophy, as figures such as Hobbes, Locke, Hume and Smith attempted to explain the origins and sustaining mechanisms of civil society. Their insights continue to inform how political and moral theorists think about the world in which we live. The aim of this book is to reconstruct a debate which preoccupied contemporaries, but which seems arcane to us today. This concerned the relationship between reason and revelation as the two sources of mankind’s knowledge, particularly in the ethical realm: to what extent, they asked, could reason alone discover the content and obligatory character of morality? This was held to be a historical, rather than a merely theoretical question: had the philosophers of pre-Christian antiquity, ignorant of Christ, been able satisfactorily to explain the moral universe? What role had natural theology played in their ethical theories – and was it consistent with the teachings delivered by revelation? Much recent scholarship has drawn attention to the early-modern interest in two late Hellenistic philosophical traditions – Stoicism and Epicureanism. Yet in the English context, three figures above all – John Locke, Conyers Middleton, and David Hume – quite deliberately and explicitly identified their approaches with Cicero as the representative of an alternative philosophical tradition, critical of both the Stoic and the Epicurean: academic scepticism. All argued that Cicero provided a means of addressing what they considered to be the most pressing question facing contemporary philosophy: the relationship between moral philosophy and moral theology.
Research Interests: Scepticism, Enlightenment, Scottish Enlightenment, Intellectual History of Enlightenment, Thomas Hobbes, and 11 moreCicero, John Locke, Adam Smith, David Hume, Philosophy of the Enlightenment, Classical Tradition and Reception, Bernard Mandeville, Epicureanism and Stoicism, Anglicanism, Francis Hutcheson, and Anthony Ashley Cooper, Third Earl of Shaftesbury
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Introduction to a special issue of Hobbes Studies (2024), on Hobbes and Locke (ed. Stanton & Stuart-Butte)
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The intellectual relationship between Hobbes and Locke has long generated frustration, fascination, and fervid speculation among historians of political thought. Locke refrained from engaging explicitly with Hobbes in any of his writings.... more
The intellectual relationship between Hobbes and Locke has long generated frustration, fascination, and fervid speculation among historians of political thought. Locke refrained from engaging explicitly with Hobbes in any of his writings. This essay contends that Locke's policy of non-engagement should be interpreted neither as evidence of his lack of interest in (or ignorance of) Hobbes’s arguments, nor as an extended exercise in elaborate evasion intended to conceal from the uninitiated Locke’s covert Hobbesian commitments. Locke's silence reveals rather than conceals. What it reveals is an absolute determination to “distinguish,” as he puts it in Epistola de Tolerantia, “between the business of civil government and that of religion, and to mark the true bounds between them”. Approached in this way, precisely because Locke’s account of the “business of civil government” says nothing about ecclesiastical government, the second of Two Treatises can be read, in its entirety, as a powerful critical response to Hobbes. To see why, it is necessary to grasp what most modern interpreters of Hobbes have been unwilling to grant: that Part III of Leviathan (“Of a Christian Common-wealth”) is integral to Hobbes's positive argumentative purposes in the work, rather than a massive fig-leaf designed to protect his purely secular theory of sovereignty from accusations that it was an egregious affront to Christian truth.
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An interpretation of Hume's 'four essays on happiness'.
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This essay considers John Dewey's claim, in Human Nature and Conduct (1922), to be continuing 'the tradition of David Hume'. It argues that Dewey turned to Hume to articulate what he took to be the most valuable insights of Hegel's... more
This essay considers John Dewey's claim, in Human Nature and Conduct (1922), to be continuing 'the tradition of David Hume'. It argues that Dewey turned to Hume to articulate what he took to be the most valuable insights of Hegel's philosophy, but in a form that was 'emancipated from the Hegelian garb'. The essay asks two questions. First, what did Dewey consider to be distinctive about the Humean tradition (and why call it a 'tradition', when Hume appeared to be its only representative prior to Dewey himself)? And second, why did he think that it could, when appropriately 'reconstructed', be 'employed' productively to grapple with questions -- not least, regarding the prospects for radical democracy in large-scale industrial societies -- that Hume had not confronted in the eighteenth century?
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In his brief autobiography, Hume recalls how the publication of the heterodox Anglican clergyman, Conyers Middleton’s Free Inquiry caused a ‘furore’ in England in 1748, whereas his own Philosophical Essays were ‘neglected’. This has... more
In his brief autobiography, Hume recalls how the publication of the heterodox Anglican clergyman, Conyers Middleton’s Free Inquiry caused a ‘furore’ in England in 1748, whereas his own Philosophical Essays were ‘neglected’. This has secured Middleton a very marginal place in Hume scholarship. This essay argues that Middleton’s importance at a crucial stage of Hume’s intellectual development, during the Ninewells years (April 1749 – July 1751), was more significant than has been allowed. On his return to Ninewells, Hume reflected on the reasons for Middleton’s success. Section I considers the nature of Middleton’s contributions to English philosophical-theological debate. In Section II, it is argued that this English context illuminates our understanding of both the manner and the matter of Hume’s writings from the Ninewells years, which show a marked concern with the heathen philosophers’ treatments of the relationship between morality and religion. Here, the similarities between Gibbon’s situation in the 1760s and Hume’s from the late 1740s are foregrounded: a period in which both authors confronted the challenge of translating their philosophical insights into an English ‘idiom’. The essay concludes by offering some broader reflections on why intellectual historians have tended to dismiss, rather than to explore the Hume-Middleton connection.
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An introductory essay to Gibbon's life and work, commissioned for inclusion in Bloomsbury History: Theory and Method, ed. Stefan Berger (forthcoming, 2021).
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Hume's admiration for the Roman philosopher and statesman, Cicero, is well-known. Yet scholars have largely overlooked how Hume's interpretation of Cicero – initially as a Stoic, and subsequently as an academic sceptic – evolved with... more
Hume's admiration for the Roman philosopher and statesman, Cicero, is well-known. Yet scholars have largely overlooked how Hume's interpretation of Cicero – initially as a Stoic, and subsequently as an academic sceptic – evolved with Hume's own intellectual development. Moreover, scholars tend to focus on Hume's debts to Cicero with regard either to his epistemological scepticism or his philosophy of religion. This essay suggests instead that Hume's engagement with Cicero was at its most intense, and productive, when evaluating the relationship between morality and religious belief. Closer attention to the place of Cicero in Hume's writings illuminates our understanding of Hume's intellectual development, particularly in the crucial pre-Treatise years. It also, however, shines light on Hume's interpretation of the history of occidental philosophy (not least the consequences of its engagements with Christian theology), and on how Hume saw his own work to relate to this history.
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A pre-proof version of an essay now published (in e-print form) in a special issue of Global Intellectual History, edited by Giovanni Gellera and Christian Maurer, on 'Contexts of Religious Tolerance: New Perspectives from Early Modern... more
A pre-proof version of an essay now published (in e-print form) in a special issue of Global Intellectual History, edited by Giovanni Gellera and Christian Maurer, on 'Contexts of Religious Tolerance: New Perspectives from Early Modern Britain and Beyond'. You can download the published version for free here: https://www.tandfonline.com/eprint/KSTPTVAYPKIEWJKFUYUI/full?target=10.1080/23801883.2019.1699889
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It is widely accepted that the seventeenth-century natural lawyers constructed the minimal requirement for social coordination between self-seeking individuals animated by the desire for self-preservation. On most interpretations, Grotius... more
It is widely accepted that the seventeenth-century natural lawyers constructed the minimal requirement for social coordination between self-seeking individuals animated by the desire for self-preservation. On most interpretations, Grotius and his successors focused on the ‘perfect’ duties (rules of justice) and had little to say about the ‘imperfect’ duties of love and civility. This paper provides an alternative reading of post-Grotian natural law by reconstructing Pufendorf’s and Locke’s understanding of how the duties of civility and love might be realised in civil society. The paper argues that, for Pufendorf and Locke, the desire for esteem offers an explanation of how people recognize the content of the reciprocal duties of social morality and motivate themselves to act accordingly. The reconstruction of their views on the beneficial effects of esteem-seeking offers a new interpretation of the emergence of interest in an economy of esteem and the social nature of the self prior to their treatment by eighteenth-century authors such as Hume and Smith.
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Locke emphasised that a concern for reputation powerfully shaped the individual’s conduct. Most scholarship suggests that Locke portrayed this phenomenon in negative terms. This article complicates this picture. A concern for reputation... more
Locke emphasised that a concern for reputation powerfully shaped the individual’s conduct. Most scholarship suggests that Locke portrayed this phenomenon in negative terms. This article complicates this picture. A concern for reputation served a constructive role in Locke’s theory of social development, which offered a powerful alternative explanation of the origins of moral consensus and political authority to Hobbes’. Locke nonetheless suggested that misunderstandings engendered in Christian commonwealths regarding the nature of political and religious authority had impacted negatively on the moral regulation of societies. The forces governing society, which once habituated individuals in beneficial ways, now led them astray.
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This article explores the interpretative importance of Shaftesbury's profound classicism for an understanding of his philosophical objectives, and challenges the general tendency of recent scholarship to marginalise or ignore the... more
This article explores the interpretative importance of Shaftesbury's profound classicism for an understanding of his philosophical objectives, and challenges the general tendency of recent scholarship to marginalise or ignore the substantive content of that philosophy. I argue that Shaftesbury’s classicism finds its most important context, and his vindication of Stoicism and contempt for the moral teachings of Christianity its contemporary significance, in Locke’s distinctive treatment of classical moral philosophy. Precisely because scholars have paid scant attention to the latter, they have failed to comprehend the novelty and importance of the former.
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Book review: for the International Association for Scottish Philosophy (http://www.scottishphilosophy.org/aaron-garrett--james-a-harris-eds-scottish-philosophy-in-the-eighteenth-century-volume-1-morals-politics-art-religion.html).