The Emergence of Impartiality, hg. von Anita Traninger und Kathryn Murphy, Leiden u.a.: Brill 2014 (Intersections. Interdisciplinary Studies in Early Modern Culture 31).

This volume exposes the contested history of a virtue so central to modern disciplines and public discourse that it can seem universal. The essays gathered here, however, demonstrate the emergence of impartiality. From the early seventeenth century onwards, the new epithet ‘impartial’ appears prominently in a wide range of publications, figuring in the titles of works of history, economy, law, and philosophy, as well as histories of the church and of nascent nation states. The contributions aim to map the contexts in which it emerged as a key tenet of learned practices and public controversy during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, and to suggest the causes and implications of the changing self-descriptions of these different cultures of knowledge. Contributors trace impartiality in various fields: from news publications and polemical pamphlets to moral philosophy and historical dictionaries, from poetry and drama to natural history, in a broad European context and against the backdrop of the religious and civil conflicts of the period. Cumulatively, the volume suggests that the emergence of impartiality is intimately implicated in the epochal shifts in the seventeenth century in epistemology and science, religious and political discourse, print culture, and scholarly practices.

Table of contents

Introduction: Instances of Impartiality
Kathryn Murphy and Anita Traninger

1. PREHISTORIES OF IMPARTIALITY

Taking Sides and the Prehistory of Impartiality
Anita Traninger

Reasons for Holding Back in Two Essays of Montaigne
Richard Scholar

2. NEWS AND IMPARTIALITY

Parteylichkeit and the Periodical Press
Jörg Jochen Berns

Exporting Impartiality
Joad Raymond

3. POETRY, POLITICS, AND THE LAW

‘Partialitie in a Iudge, is a Turpitude’: Partial Judges and Impartial Revengers in Early Modern English Drama
Derek Dunne

‘Out of Books and Out of Themselves’: Invigorating Impartiality in Early Modern England
Nathan Stogdill

The Language of Impartiality and Party-Political Discourse in England, 1680–1745
Christine Gerrard

4. IMPARTIALITY IN CONTROVERSY

Impartiality and Disingenuousness in English Rational Religion
Rhodri Lewis

The Rise of Controversies and the Function of Impartiality in the Early Eighteenth Century
Rainer Godel

Objectivity, Impartiality, and Hermeneutics in the Leibnizian-Wolffian Debates between 1715 and 1750
Hanns-Peter Neumann

5. IMPARTIALITY AND THE HISTORY OF SCHOLARSHIP

Impartiality and the Early Modern ars critica: The Case of John Selden’s Historie of Tithes (1618)
Nick Hardy

Pierre Bayle’s Dictionaire historique et critique: Historical Criticism and Impartiality of Judgement
Anne Eusterschulte

6. A VIEW FROM NOWHERE: IMPARTIALITY AND MORAL PHILOSOPHY

Morals Before Objectivity: On the Relation of Moral Cognition and Moral Philosophy in Hume
Tamás Demeter

Between Impartiality and Parrhesia: Adam Smith’s Figure of the Impartial Spectator
Bastian Ronge

7. IMPARTIALITY AND THE ART OF OBSERVATION

Impartiality in the Matrix of Taxonomy: Carl von Linné and Folklore
Bernd Roling

Truth Rather Than Elegance: A Paradoxical Case of Impartiality in Alexander Cozens’s Principles of Beauty (1778)
Anja Zimmermann