Introduction

In October 2023, a conference in honor of Kenneth P. Winkler was held at Yale University to mark the occasion of his retirement, organized by Michael Della Rocca, Bridger Ehli, and Zoltán Gendler Szabó. This volume collects many of the papers presented at that conference (although not all of them, and not exclusively). While the conference had no official theme, almost all of the presentations took up some aspect of British philosophy in the so-called long eighteenth century. Conventionally, the long eighteenth century is understood to encompass the period of time running approximately from the Glorious Revolution in 1688 to the end of the Napoleonic Wars in 1815. Philosophically, and for the purposes of this volume, it is the period of time in which John Locke’s An Essay Concerning Human Understanding , the first edition of which was published in 1689 (but dated 1690) immediately following the Glorious Revolution, decisively shaped the agenda and vocabulary of British philosophy. This influence is evident in each of the figures studied in this volume—including Mary Shepherd, whose two principal works weren’t published until 1824 and 1827, respectively.