Paul Schuurman | Erasmus University Rotterdam (original) (raw)

Papers by Paul Schuurman

War in History, 2021

Prussian professional wargames (Kriegsspiele in German) came into existence during the Napoleonic... more Prussian professional wargames (Kriegsspiele in German) came into existence during the Napoleonic Wars. I argue that the success of these wargames after the Wars of German Unification (1864-1870) was firmly connected with their role as integrative training solutions for the disintegrative tendencies of the novel leadership concept of mission tactics (Auftragstaktik). Both professional wargames and mission tactics were actively sponsored by the Great General Staff under Moltke the Elder, and I argue that both were jointly pushed forward by a technological context that included the dramatic increase in nineteenth-century firepower and the military use of Germany’s railroad network.

‘Models of War 1770-1830: the Birth of Wargames and the Trade-off Between Realism and Simplicity’, 2017

The first sophisticated wargames (military board games) were developed between 1770 and 1830 and ... more The first sophisticated wargames (military board games) were developed between 1770 and 1830 and are models of military conflict. Designers of these early games experimented fruitfully with different concepts that were formulated in interaction with the external dynamics of the military systems that they tried to represent and the internal dynamics of the design process itself. The designers of early wargames were confronted with a problem that affects all models: the trade-off between realism and simplicity, which in the case of wargames amounts to the trade-off between realism and playability. I try to show how different game concepts were developed as an answer to this problem, and how these seemingly arcane concepts form a relevant topic of investigation in the history of ideas. Moreover, a direct offshoot of this conceptual experimentation between 1770 and 1830 was the 'free' German wargame (Kriegsspiel), which became an integral part of German operational planning in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, thus adding another chapter to the story of the influence of ideas on human history.

Paul Schuurman, ‘Locke and Descartes on Truth’, in John Locke: les idées et les choses. Avec le manuscrit inédit Notes upon Mr. John Locke’s Essay Concerning Human Understanding de William Whiston fils, ed. Luisa Simonutti (Paris: Éditions Mimésis, 2019) 91-101, 2019

Outline. Herbert Spencer was a proponent of the strong paradox of war, i.e. he believed that in t... more Outline. Herbert Spencer was a proponent of the strong paradox of war, i.e. he believed that in the course of human history war, in spite of its immediate horrendous consequences, had shown benign influences in the longer term. War had been functional during the ‘militant’ social type, but had become increasingly disfunctional during the ‘industrial’ type. Spencer was not the first to discuss the function of war in stadial terms, but he used the unique framework of an evolutionary general systems theory. He analyzed the functionality and disfunctionality of war in terms of evolving social functions and structures, and for this he used not one but two accounts of biological evolution: direct equilibration (adaptation) in the form of Lamarckian evolution by acquired characteristics, and indirect equilibration in the form of Darwinian natural selection. These two form of evolution have different bearings on war in the militant social type and peace in the industrial type; and the function of the rigid typological distinction itself is clearly connected to Spencer’s liberalism. His distinct analysis of war forms an important but much neglected contribution to similar treatments of war in contemporary big history. http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/17496977.2016.1220734

What-If at Waterloo. Carl von Clausewitz's use of historical counterfactuals in his history of the campaign of 1815, Journal of Strategic Studies, 40:7, 1016-1038, 2017

In this article, I analyze the use of historical counterfactuals in the Campaign of 1815 by Carl ... more In this article, I analyze the use of historical counterfactuals in the Campaign of 1815 by Carl von Clausewitz (1780-1831). Such is the importance of counterfactuals in this work that its gist can be given in a series of 25 counterfactuals. I claim that a central role is played by evaluative counterfactuals. This specific form of counterfactuals is part of a didactic method that allows Clausewitz to teach young officers a critical method that prepares them for the challenge of decision-making in real warfare. I conclude with the enduring relevance of Clausewitz's use of evaluative counterfactuals for contemporary military historiography.

This article presents a new model for the development of Carl von Clausewitz’s thinking on the fa... more This article presents a new model for the development of Carl von Clausewitz’s thinking on the factors that constrain warfare. The model posits three stages in his thinking that are determined by two system theoretic dimen- sions. The three stages are friction as a constraint on the effectiveness of the execution of military plans on paper, suspension as a constraint on the intensity of military action and political objectives as a constraint on military objectives. The two dimensions consist of an interactive perspective in the form of causal feedback loops and a holistic perspective in the form of a political system that forms the context of the military subsystem. http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/01402390.2014.933316

Kant on War and the Idea of Progress.

The philosophical, economic, political, military, and diplomatic aspects in Pieter de la Court’s ... more The philosophical, economic, political, military, and diplomatic aspects in Pieter de la Court’s Political Maxims of the State of Holland have all been noted. An appreciation of both the descriptive and the prescriptive elements of his approach is not lacking either. I argue that these aspects and elements together form a remarkably consistent grand strategy for Holland in relation to its Dutch allies and the European powers. I present an outline of this strategy that was built around the accomplishment and defence of commercial goals; I sketch a historical context that takes into account the general historical shift from tribute-taking agrarian societies towards commercial wealth-generating polities, and also the violent contemporary military and ideological background against which De la Court’s strategy stands out; I try to reach a better understanding of his strategy through the use of three basic concepts taken from game theory (prisoner’s dilemma, assurance game and free-riding); and I stress the distinctive character of De la Court’s work, by comparing the practical and strategic use of these concepts in the Maxims with the function of the same concepts in the philosophical contract theories of Thomas Hobbes and Benedict de Spinoza. I explain why a social contract theory along Hobbesian lines must have shown little promise to De la Court when he tried to grapple with the problem of Holland and its free-riding Dutch allies, while the case of Holland’s relations with it European neighbours is even starker; here a contract not only had little to offer but, from De la Court’s point of view, was diametrically opposed to Holland’s interests. http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/01916599.2014.965783

http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/10402659.2014.937995

Docent Wijsbegeerte Paul Schuurman vindt dat 'NWO-aanvragen nog maar weinig te maken hebben met h... more Docent Wijsbegeerte Paul Schuurman vindt dat 'NWO-aanvragen nog maar weinig te maken hebben met het echte wetenschappelijke bedrijf', en vindt dat 'extra geld in het vervolg moet worden ontvangen op grond van daadwerkelijk geleverde prestaties in het verleden, niet op grond van toekomstplannen'.

Montesquieu’s Considérations sur les causes de la grandeur des Romains et de leur décadence (1733... more Montesquieu’s Considérations sur les causes de la grandeur des Romains et de leur décadence (1733/1734) is a methodological exercise in causal explanation on the meso-level applied to the subject of the military rise and fall of Rome. Rome is described as a system with contingent initial conditions that have a strong path-determining effect. Contingent and plastic initial configurations become highly determining in their subsequent operation thanks to self-reinforcing feedback loops. Montesquieu’s method seems influenced by the ruthless commitment to efficient causality and the reductionism of seventeenth-century mechanicist philosophy; but in contract to these predecessors he is more interested in dynamic processes than in unchangeable substances, and his use of efficient causality in the context of a system approach implies a form of holism that is lacking in his predecessors. The formal and conceptual analysis in this article is in many ways complementary with Paul Rahe’s recent predominantly political analysis of the Considérations. At the same time, this article points to a problem in the works on the Enlightenment by Jonathan Israel: his account stresses a one-dimensional continuum consisting of Radical, Moderate and Counter-Enlightenment. This invites the author to place the combined religious, political and philosophical views of each thinker on one of these three points. This scheme runs into trouble when a thinker with moderate religious and political views produces radical philosophical concepts. Montesquieu’s Considérations is a case in point. http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/09608788.2013.771612

History of European Ideas, Jan 1, 2011

In his novel The Adventures of Telemachus, François de la Mothe-Fénelon (1651-1715) presents a ut... more In his novel The Adventures of Telemachus, François de la Mothe-Fénelon (1651-1715) presents a utopian society, Boetica, in which the role of luxury, war and trade is extremely limited. In unreformed Salentum, on the other hand, Fénelon shows the opposite image, one in which the three elements reinforce each other in a fatal feedback-loop. I analyse the relationship between luxury, war and trade in the Telemachus and I sketch the background to Fénelon’s views, with special attention to the military expansion and the mercantilism of Louis XIV, Fénelon’s quietist spirituality, and the development of the concept of self-interest in the seventeenth philosophy by mechanicist philosophers and economic thinkers.

The ‘Digital Locke Project’ is a pilot project that makes a start with a scholarly text edition o... more The ‘Digital Locke Project’ is a pilot project that makes a start with a scholarly text edition of the manuscripts of the British philosopher John Locke (1632-1704) in the form of an XML-encoded database that is used simultaneously for an online version and the printed version of the manuscripts. Locke’s most influential work is An Essay concerning Human Understanding. He produced several drafts of this work in the nearly two decades prior to its publication and he continued producing additions, corrections and other related material after the first edition had appeared in 1689. In its first phase the ‘Digital Locke Project’ has focussed on the philosophical manuscripts produced after the first publication of the Essay, until Locke’s death in 1704. The transcriptions of these manuscripts are currently available in a database on the present website. The database includes a transcription of the manuscripts with text-critical apparatus, historical and philosophical notes, a precise description of all relevant manuscripts, and a reconstruction of the genesis of the texts. The database reflects the often complicated structure of a single text that is based on more than one manuscript, and one single manuscript containing several texts. The database is accessible in the present online version and provides tools for accessing text-critical information and sophisticated text searching. At the same time, the database will be a major source for the printed version, Of the Conduct of the Understanding and Other Writings on Philosophy, eds Paul Schuurman and Jonathan Walmsley. Clarendon Edition of the Works of John Locke (Oxford, Oxford University Press). See http://www.digitallockeproject.nl

Locke’s epistemological agnosticism about God, mind and matter drove both his attack on Malebranc... more Locke’s epistemological agnosticism about God, mind and matter drove both his attack on Malebranche’s Vision in God and his defence of the possibility of thinking matter against Stillingfleet. This article explores the similarities between Locke’s argumentative strategies in these debates. In addition, the author argues that there may be a direct connection between the content of Locke’s arguments in favour of the possibility of thinking matter and against the Vision in God.

Since most eighteenth century encyclopaedias pay generous attention to the sciences, and since ma... more Since most eighteenth century encyclopaedias pay generous attention to the sciences, and since many of these works of reference show a general presence of Locke’s “way of ideas,” encyclopaedias are promising media for an assessment of Locke’s influence on natural science. Eighteenth-century science was empiricist, corpuscular and mechanicist, but Locke was not the only philosopher to have defended these views. In order to establish his particular influence we must be clear about the particular features of his brand of empiricism. Amongst these special traits, his all-pervasive doubt about the possibilities of certain scientific knowledge of bodies deserves special notice. Locke’s pessimism is at odds with the distinctly more optimist epistemological views in most eighteenth-century encyclopaedias. A similar point can be made about his scientific method: insofar as it is original, it only partially answers the needs of natural science as described in eighteenth-century encyclopaedias. Firstly, Locke’s “Historical, plain Method” does not provide rules for a theory of induction. Secondly, even if his historical method can be regarded as a form of induction, than this would still amounts to only a partial contribution to the eighteenth-century Newtonian paradigm of successful scientific method, which consists of an inductive stage and a deductive mathematical stage. Locke’s Essay does not contain a method in which both elements are integrated; yet this integrated approach carried the day in eighteenth-century encyclopaedias. Finally, by the time Locke had developed his philosophical empiricism, empiricist science had embarked on successful development that seemed to reduce the need for any philosophical justification at all.

Locke has often been hailed as the father of an empiricism that provided a philosophical basis to... more Locke has often been hailed as the father of an empiricism that provided a philosophical basis to natural science in the Age of Enlightenment. In this article his empiricism is compared with that of the little known Dutch Aristotelian professor Gerardus de Vries. There are striking parallels between Locke’s brand of mechanicist empiricism and the pragmatic and flexible Aristotelianism of De Vries. These parallels put strictures on both the archaic character of the Aristotelianism embraced by De Vries and on the modern and forward-looking character of Locke’s philosophy of science. http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.histeuroideas.2007.01.001

War in History, 2021

‘Models of War 1770-1830: the Birth of Wargames and the Trade-off Between Realism and Simplicity’, 2017

What-If at Waterloo. Carl von Clausewitz's use of historical counterfactuals in his history of the campaign of 1815, Journal of Strategic Studies, 40:7, 1016-1038, 2017

Kant on War and the Idea of Progress.

http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/10402659.2014.937995

History of European Ideas, Jan 1, 2011

Concepts of War, 1650-1900: From Free-Rider Strategies to Survival of the Fittest, 2023

Why do people wage war? How can wars be won? How has warfare been an engine of change for h... more Why do people wage war? How can wars be won? How has warfare been an engine of change for human civilization—for better and for worse? In this book Paul Schuurman shows how some of the best Western minds between 1650 and 1900 tried to answer these questions in an epoch when European developments became a matter of global concern. In eight wide-ranging essays he discusses the key concepts that philosophers and generals of this era developed to grasp and influence the dramatic phenomenon of war. Their concepts remain fresh and relevant down to the present day.

John Locke (1632-1704) was a leading seventeenth-century philosopher and widely considered to be ... more John Locke (1632-1704) was a leading seventeenth-century philosopher and widely considered to be the first of the British Empiricists. One of the most influential Enlightenment thinkers, his major works and central ideas have had a significant impact on the development of key areas in political philosophy and epistemology. This comprehensive and accessible guide to Locke's life and work includes more than 90 specially commissioned entries, written by a team of leading experts, covering every aspect of ...

The seventeenth century was a period of sweeping philosophical change that did not stop at the ga... more The seventeenth century was a period of sweeping philosophical change that did not stop at the gates of logic. Modern scholars have long remained impervious to the phenomenon of change and development in early modern logic. In 1962 William and Martha Kneale still placed the seventeenth century in the middle of a 400-year period in the history of logic that saw ‘scores of textbooks but very few works that contain anything at once new and good’. Since then, historians of logic have mitigated the severe judgement of the Kneales. In his monumental Die Logik der Neuzeit (1964-1970), Wilhelm Risse presented the picture of a century that from 1640 onwards witnessed fundamental changes in the conception of logic that were caused by developments in philosophy in general. Similarly, in his preliminary article on logic for the Cambridge History of Seventeenth-Century Philosophy (1998), the late Gabriel Nuchelmans pointed to ‘a marked discontinuity’ between traditional forms of logic, dominated by Aristotelian variants, and views on logic that were influenced by the novel systems of Bacon, Hobbes, Descartes and Gassendi.

The point about a rupture between old and new logic was not lost on such contemporaries as William Molyneux (1656-1698), who in the dedicatory letter to his Dioptrica Nova, published in 1693, wrote: ‘Logick has put on a Countenance clearly different from what it appeared in formerly: How unlike is its shape in the Ars Cogitandi, Recherches de la Verite, &c. from what it appears in Smigletius, and the Commentators of Aristotle? But to none do we owe for a greater Advancement in this Part of Philosophy, than to the incomparable Mr. Locke, Who, in his Essay concerning Humane Understanding, has rectified more received Mistakes, and delivered more profound Truths, established on Experience and Observation, for the Direction of Man’s mind in the Prosecution of Knowledge, (which I think may be properly term’d Logick) than are to be met with in all the Volumes of the Antients.’

Molyneux here makes a fundamental distinction between such Aristotelian textbooks on logic as produced by Martin Smiglecki (1564-1618), and such novel works as Arnauld’s L’Art de penser. La logique de Port-Royal, published in 1662 (Ars Cogitandi is the title of the second, and subsequent, Latin translations, 1674), Malebranche’s Recherche de la vérité (1674-1675) and Locke’s An Essay concerning Human Understanding (1689). Another point of note is the broadness of Molyneux’s notion of logic. In addition to Arnauld’s Logique, he also considers Malebranche’s Recherche as a contribution towards the development of a new logic and he even rates Locke’s Essay as the crowning achievement of this process, although neither the Recherche nor the Essay were presented explicitly as systems of logic by their authors.
Taking my clue from Molyneux, I start chapter two with a discussion of Locke’s Essay as a work of logic and make an attempt at a new and extensive assessment of what John Yolton described, as early as 1955, as the ‘logic of ideas’. I shall begin with what I consider the three basic elements of the new logic: ideas (especially clear and distinct ideas), human faculties (e. g. sensory perception, memory, understanding) and method (both rationalist and empiricist) and I shall stress the intimate connection between these topics. Ideas, faculties and method figure in varying degrees in all specimens of the new logic, but none of these deserves the name ‘logic of ideas’ better than Locke’s Essay. Consequently, his work forms a suitable point of departure for a history of the logic of ideas—which does not imply, of course, that the Essay is nothing but a work of logic. I do agree with Molyneux, however, that the Essay is the most outspoken specimen of the new logic and I also hold that an analysis of the Essay as a work of logic can add to our understanding of this immensely rich work.

Once the Lockean paradigm is established, I turn to Locke’s predecessors. I shall argue that some of the elements of the new logic were already introduced by such Aristotelian logicians as Robert Sanderson, but I shall point to Descartes as the greatest source of influence on the new logic. I shall make a detailed comparison between the views of Descartes and Locke on the elements that are central to the new logic. I shall discuss the different epistemolgical thrust that they give to the notion of ‘clear and distinct ideas’ and I shall compare their methods. I shall argue that ascribing a rationalist method to Descartes and an empiricist method to Locke amounts to an oversimplification, and I shall defend the view that they each had two methods, their first method reflecting rationalist and the second empiricist strands.

Although Descartes was of seminal importance for the logic of ideas, he never produced a treatise that brought its main elements together in a single systematic structure. He never faced the task of finding a structure that did justice to the content of the the new logic. In chapter three I shall compare the three different answers given by Arnauld, Malebranche and Locke to the structural problems bequeathed by Descartes.

Taken together, chapters two and three amount to a discussion of the logic of ideas that concentrates on three elements (ideas, faculties and method) and on three wider issues or dimensions: the relation between the old (Aristotelian) and the new logic (of ideas); the discussion between rationalist and empiricist epistemologies and methodologies within the framework of the new logic; and the relation between logical structure and logical content.

With the three elements and the three dimensions of the new logic in place, roughly covering the period between 1630 and 1690, I move forward to the time after the publication of Locke’s Essay. I put the usefulness of my new characterization of the logic of ideas to the test by studying its reception in five logical textbooks that were published between 1690 and 1750 in the Dutch Republic. After an introductory chapter on the Dutch context (chapter four), I devote the remaining chapters (five-nine) to the textbooks of Jean le Clerc, Jean-Pierre de Crousaz, Nicolas Engelhard, Willem Jacob ’s Gravesande and Petrus van Musschenbroek. I shall argue that each of these textbooks was influenced by the three main elements of the logic of ideas and that each has its own unique position on the three axes that are determined by tradition and novelty, rationalism and empiricism, and structure and content.

ABSTRACT The present thesis gives an edition of John Locke's Of the Conduct of the Understanding ... more ABSTRACT The present thesis gives an edition of John Locke's Of the Conduct of the Understanding that is based, for the first time since 1706, on the original manuscripts, MS Locke e. 1 and MS Locke c. 28. The text has been provided with a text-critical apparatus and with historical and philosophical notes. The editor's General Introduction is divided into two parts. The first part,'Context', discusses Locke's analysis of the nature of error, the causes of error and the prevention and cure of error in the Conduct.