Witcraft: The Investigation of Philosophy in English, by Jonathan Rée (United Kingdom: Penguin, 2019, ISBN: 978-0300247367). 726+ xii pp. Hardcover, $37.50.

Jonathan Rée’s book Witcraft: The Investigation of Philosophy in English has as its scope “philosophy in English.” But this is not to say that Rée confines himself to distinctly English traditions. When discussing David Hume, for example, Rée says Hume believed he was living through the “most exciting philosophical epoch since ancient Greece, and moreover that the new golden age was specifically English.” But Rée hastens to clarify that “The Englishness of the tradition is of course questionable.” Rather, “philosophical Englishness” is nonexistent in that philosophy in any given language can’t help but be multilingual. What the philosophers that Witcraft covers have in common is their use of the English language as a “medium for philosophy, and … an interest in informal literary methods and in humour as a means of argumentation.” With this understanding, Rée is intent on showing that “philosophy in English contains far more variety, invention, originality and oddity” than that for which it typically gets credit.

Largely on account of the laity’s access to philosophy in early seventeenth-century England, it was a time and place in which an increasing number of readers felt a potential for philosophy and for whom the classic texts were less “venerable antiques” and more “amiable companions in their own quest for wisdom.” Rée encourages us to appreciate Francis Bacon as the person who “produced the first philosophical work in English that was neither a commentary, nor a compilation, nor a translation. By a long and circuitous route, philosophy was starting to speak English.” When Francis Bacon’s New Atlantis appeared in French in 1631, it influenced René Descartes.

In the case of Cambridge University, although there was a contempt for philosophy at the seventeenth century’s inception, Descartes’s works were making an impact by the middle of that century. For someone such as Henry More, atheism was becoming “very seasonable for the times wee are in,” and Descartes resorted to “innate notions and ideas” and “natural faculties” in defending religion rather than on sacred books.

Although discussions of first-string modern British philosophers are readily available in standard histories of philosophy, Rée’s book gives helpful information about modern Britain’s lesser known thinkers, such as the “rational Christians” John Toland and William Hazlitt. Rée also discusses Edmund Burke, Joseph Priestley, and Richard Price. Witcraft makes more of a foray into Robert Boyle and the Royal Society than other histories of philosophy. Furthermore, Glasgow’s thinkers, Anthony Ashley, third earl of Shaftesbury; Bernard Mandeville; Francis Hutcheson; and Adam Smith enjoy more space in this book than most histories provide. For all the rest, Rée covers familiar territory but with a genuine flair.

It is noteworthy that Rée’s express plan for Witcraft is to divide his discussion into eight approximately fifty-year periods ranging from 1600 to 2000. But the review copy of the book, at least, does not treat of any “philosophy in English” after the 1950s. In any event, in 1930, an “International Congress of Philosophy” assisted in drawing a “map of contemporary philosophy which soon became canonical.” A lesson of this Oxford congress was that “the balance of philosophical power had shifted from Europe to America.” John Dewey and Morris Cohen, for example, were preserving and developing the legacies of William James and Josiah Royce. Alfred North Whitehead was by then an honorary American and professor at Harvard. Rudolph Carnap’s trip to the United States in 1935 and employment at the University of Chicago the next year prompted Cohen to remark that “the crusade against reason in Europe was making the United States the world’s center for the development of logic.” Other associates of the Vienna circle followed Carnap’s example.

In the book’s concluding pages, we learn that, for many years, Cambridge had stood for “clear analysis” and Oxford for “edification and ‘cloudy synopsis.’” But, come the 1950s, with Gilbert Ryle’s designs on making Oxford an “international centre of philosophical power” and Ludwig Wittgenstein’s influential philosophical activity, Oxford underwent a “philosophical renaissance,” becoming prominent in analytic philosophy. (The book seems to devote more space to Wittgenstein than to any other thinker.)

Committed to eschewing the “condescending complacency of traditional histories,” Rée aspires to show the “ordinariness of philosophy” but without losing sight of its “magnificence and its power to change people’s lives.” For him, ideally, his readers would appreciate philosophy as a “carnival rather than a museum: an unruly parade of free spirits, inviting you to join in and make something new.” The book is concerned not with the exigencies of rigorous scholarship and minutiae but with the leisurely depiction of the atmospheres in which philosophies were spun and the cast of characters engaged in the spinning. The author opts for sketches and stories rather than anything in the way of a “single continuous narrative.” The present reviewer appreciates the book’s rich contextual detail and the way it enables the reader to sense the aura of the thinkers’ milieux and reflections.