Evans’s career as a philosopher, the ideas that influenced her, and her engagement with the other philosophers of her time are some of the subjects of Jonathan Rée’s unorthodox history of philosophy in the English language. It is unusual, first of all, because many of the people whose stories he tells are not now regarded as philosophers and are never mentioned in standard histories of philosophy. The English-speaking philosophers who feature in these histories – Hobbes, Locke, Hume, and Mill – are present in Rée’s book, but they appear in the company of other intellectuals of their times who had preoccupations that, in some cases, had little to do with the reasons for which they are now celebrated. Adam Smith, whom we meet in 1751 at the beginning of his career as a professor at Glasgow University, was a philosopher with a historical bent. The book for which he is famous, The Wealth of Nations, was a digression from work he regarded as more important.

Portrait of John Locke by Godfrey Kneller (photograph via Wikimedia Commons)

Witcraft is also unusual because it has no plot. Rée objects to histories of philosophy that progress through the ideas of a canonical set of philosophers, explaining why they were wrong. The usual effect, he says, is to persuade readers that philosophy is a waste of time. Each chapter of Witcraft describes, at fifty-year intervals beginning in 1601, what people were doing in the name of philosophy, and the social circumstances in which they were thinking and writing. The result could have been a boring catalogue of ideas, but Rée is a good storyteller, as much concerned with the idiosyncrasies and relationships of the people he discusses as with their philosophical doctrines.

An account of philosophy that takes a snapshot approach to its history is inevitably packed with people and their ideas. Rée imposes order on the material he has collected by focusing on the intellectual development of particular individuals – not necessarily the most important thinkers of their time – and their relationships. William Hazlitt Sr, who in 1801 is sitting for a portrait painted by his son, John, is a preacher influenced by followers of Locke and a member of a circle of radicals, including Joseph Priestley, who advocated a Christianity free from superstition. Their radical Christianity put them on the side of American and French revolutionaries. Meanwhile, William Hazlitt Jr – later the famed essayist and critic– struggles to write down his ideas about personal identity, encouraged in his efforts by Samuel Coleridge. Readers may forget many of the details, but they will get Rée’s point: philosophy is a social activity dependent on historical influences and interactions between people.

Philosophical communication needs a language, and the development of philosophy in the English language is one of Rée’s main concerns. In 1601, when humanists were challenging the ossified Aristotelian syllabus taught in universities, they were also struggling with the task of translating philosophy into the vernacular. Inventing philosophy in English required a translation of philosophical terms into a language that was not a direct descendant of Latin. One translator proposed that ‘dialectic’ should be called ‘witcraft’, a conditional sentence should be an ‘ifsay’, a negation a ‘naysay’. But most translators preferred to import Latin or Greek terms into English, and new words like ‘aristocracy’, ‘democracy’, ‘axiom’, and ‘cynic’ found their place in the language.

The ideas of foreign philosophers also made their way into English. In 1651 the Puritan academic Anthony Tuckney fulminated in vain against the growing popularity of the ideas of ‘a newfangled French papist by the name of Rene Des Cartes’. German philosophy came into fashion in the nineteenth century. Coleridge did his best to come to grips with ‘the most unintelligible Emanuel Kant’. Evans translated Strauss and Feuerbach, both with a reputation for promoting atheism. Ralph Waldo Emerson, attacked for being ‘a transcendental purveyor of the enemies of religion, Kant and Hegel’, decided that ‘transcendentalist’ was a good description of the ideas of his philosophical circle.

The meaning of ‘philosophy’ itself is a product of its times. In the seventeenth century, concerns of philosophy and theology were indistinguishable. Under the influence of Descartes and Robert Boyle, philosophy became a means of obtaining truth unblemished by superstition. For Locke and his followers, the job of philosophy was to chart the limits of human knowledge by explaining how our ideas are derived from experience. Adam Smith believed that philosophy was essentially historical. Hazlitt and his friends thought that it was a means of liberation. Mill, enthused by the ideas of Auguste Comte, equated philosophical radicalism with social and scientific progress.

Others believed that philosophy was primarily a source for personal growth. For Evans, it was a means of taking possession of an intellectual heritage from as many perspectives as possible. Emerson’s transcendentalism focused on the progress of the human soul. Philosophy, according to William James and his friend Thomas Davidson, was rooted in real life and cultivated in people ideals necessary to democracy. James feared that philosophy was developing into an academic discipline of interest only to other academics, and Rée gives us reason to think that his prediction had indeed come true by the mid-twentieth century.

If there is a story embedded in Rée’s history, it is a tale of how philosophy freed itself from academic irrelevance and then, after a few centuries of creative diversity, found itself back in the same predicament. As a philosopher, I recognise the truth in this reading of history, but philosophy, even in the academy, has always managed to escape pessimistic dismissals of its value. If we were to extend Rée’s history to 2001, perhaps we would find signs of vigour in interdisciplinary collaborations, applications of philosophy to social and moral problems, and the movement to teach philosophy to children.