Dmitri Levitin, PhD

Project

The Western Mind: The Origins of a Myth

At the end of the 18th century, German thinkers started offering genealogies of modernity running from Classical Athens (especially its philosophers), through early Christianity (considered a Greek rather than a Jewish phenomenon, at least in spirit), to modern “enlightened” Protestantism. A century earlier, this genealogy would have been unthinkable. For in 1700, every European intellectual would have agreed that Greek philosophy was not qualitatively different from its “oriental” counterpart, and that Christianity had emerged directly from Judaism.
Combining intellectual and social history, my project will provide a new account of how this peculiar Eurocentrism emerged, and why it proved so successful, coming to be deployed in political debates about Jewish emancipation and the abolition of Atlantic slavery. It will suggest that explanations that simply explain the phenomenon as a product of European imperialism are not convincing, and that a more complex account is required. In the process, the project will identify the origins of some long-lasting concepts and ideas: (1) the distinction between “Pauline” and “Jewish” Christianity; (2) the distinction between “pre-” and “post-Socratic” philosophy; (3) a “Greek miracle” in intellectual history; (4) the earliest full conspiracy theory about a Jewish politico-economic plot to take over the world; (5) the first fears of a “Great Replacement” of native Europeans by immigrants. It will suggest that the parallel appearance of these concepts was not unconnected.

Recommended Reading

Levitin, Dmitri. Ancient Wisdom in the Age of the New Science. Cambridge University Press, 2015.
Hardy, Nicholas, and Dmitri Levitin, eds. Confessionalisation and Erudition in Early Modern Europe: An Episode in the History of the Humanities. Oxford University Press, 2019.
Levitin, Dmitri. The Kingdom of Darkness. Cambridge University Press, 2022.

Colloquium, 16.12.2025

Ivory Towers – Or, Was There Really Anything Special About the Sciences and Humanities in Early Modern Europe?

Since the late 18th century, early modern Europe (c.1450–1700) has often been portrayed as the quintessential moment of intellectual revolution. Its ‘great thinkers’—Copernicus, Galileo, Bacon, Descartes, Spinoza, Newton, etc.—remain well known, as do those supposed transformations of the mind: ‘the Renaissance,’ ‘the Scientific Revolution,’ and ‘the Enlightenment.’ It is no surprise that Kuhn found his archetypes of crisis, incommensurability, and paradigm shifts in early modernity. Unfortunately, this vision of the period’s singularity doesn’t fit the facts. Moreover, it has its origins in teleological genealogies of modernity that are uncritically Eurocentric (and sometimes racialized) and that systematically underplayed the dynamism of other systems of knowledge.

This talk asks whether early modern Europe can still claim any special place in western Eurasian intellectual history. I will suggest that its relative vitality was the product not of any specifically European ‘achievement’ or cultural shift, but of pedagogical structures: wide access to the universities, and the peculiarly non-utilitarian studies pursued within them. These structures were generated by contingent social forces that had nothing to do with ‘modernity’—the system of knowledge remained fundamentally medieval. A properly contextual history reveals that the humanities—especially the religious humanities—were the ‘Big Science’ of the time and spawned remarkable new scholarship, not least about extra-European societies. Changes in science, meanwhile, were not the result of revolutionary rupture, but of long-term trends in medical and mathematical education. In the last part of the talk, I shall introduce two fascinating recent discoveries on which I am working at the Wiko: the only known verbatim transcript of a university disputation, and the notebook of Isaac Newton’s university roommate of 20 years. Both help illuminate the underlying structures of early modern intellectual life.

Publications from the Fellow Library

Levitin, Dmitri (Cambridge, 2025)

The kingdom of darkness : Bayle, Newton, and the emancipation of the European mind from philosophy

Levitin, Dmitri (Leiden, 2021)

The worlds of knowledge and the classical tradition in the early modern age : comparative approaches Scientific and learned cultures and their institutions ; volume 33

Levitin, Dmitri (Oxford, 2019)

Confessionalisation and erudition in Early Modern Europe : an episode in the history of the humanities Proceedings of the British Academy ; 225

Levitin, Dmitri (Cambridge, 2017)

Ancient wisdom in the age of the new science : histories of philosophy in England, c. 1640-1700 Ideas in context ; 113