Contents

Acknowledgements

Notes on the Editors

Notes on the Contributors

List of Illustrations

Introduction: Instances of Impartiality

1. Prehistories of Impartiality

Taking Sides and the Prehistory of Impartiality

Reasons for Holding Back in Two Essays of Montaigne

2. News and Impartiality

Parteylichkeit and the Periodical Press

Exporting Impartiality

3. Literature, Politics, and the Law

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

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

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

4. Impartiality in Controversy

Impartiality and Disingenuousness in English Rational Religion

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

Objectivity, Impartiality, and Hermeneutics in the Leibnizian-Wolffian Debates between 1720 and 1750

5. Impartiality and the History of Scholarship

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

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

6. A View from Nowhere: Impartiality and Moral Philosophy

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

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

7. Impartiality and the Art of Observation

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

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

Index