William Godwin

For his concluding essay, Godwin argues that humanity’s full potential will be reached by a right-​thinking, right-​doing “remnant.”

Our author holds that individuals are universes-​in-​themselves, and social interactions allow for truly cosmic exchanges of intelligence and emotion.

Godwin argues that philosophers and scientists should discover themselves and their own immediate world before casting about the galaxy.

Godwin embraces Enlightenment skepticism and chastises modern astronomers for pretending to be a new oracular class.

Godwin investigates the convincing truths and falsehoods behind one of modernity’s more pernicious pseudosciences: phrenology.

Godwin casts himself-​-​and the ideal social reform advocate-​-​as a constant missionary for reason, truth, and justice.

Godwin recognizes the “obviousness” of voting and representation in the modern era, but carefully notes that democracy is no solution to the problem of coercion.

Godwin takes a linguistic turn to discuss the ethical implications “Of Frankness and Reserve” in our speech and interpersonal dealings.

Our author puts forth a romanticized, mythologized version of history to defend the claim that love is the result of imagination, inequality, and difference.

Godwin expands his theories of education and intellectual development into a theory of youth and age.

Godwin’s next “thought on man” examines the origins of mental atrophy and urges readers to exercise their minds with steady and vigorous Socratic discussion.

If we don’t have free will, could we know it? William Godwin offers some speculative answers and discusses the implications of free will.

If methodological individualists in the social sciences say literally every action is motivated by self-​interest, is there no room for self-​sacrifice?

Godwin compares the rather charmed life of a school boy with the difficult, tedious, taxing drudgery experienced by average Britons.

Godwin believed that most human beings are brute and imitative, making those precious few liberated individual minds all the more important.