6_f ´+ti. Revista Internacional de Filosofía, nº 58, 2013, 179-184 ISSN: 1130-0507 When Can You Think Something? ¿Cuándo se puede pensar en algo? JOHN CHRISTIAN LAURSEN * This is an essay on how a certain amount of empirical knowledge can help us understand the rise and spread of philosophical ideas. It is a response to the claim that is sometimes made that it was impossible or nearly so to think certain things in eighteenth-century Spain. We shall start with two authors who make assertions to that effect. Then we shall turn to the work of a philosophical historian as the source of the empirical knowledge that will help us critique the two authors. The book that supplies the empirical knowledge is Martín González Fernández’s El Idioma de la Razón: Ilustración e Inquisición en Galicia (1700-1808). 1 The first author to be examined is Javier Fernández Sebastián, whose recent chapter on «The Crisis of the Hispanic World» is a valuable review of the limits on freedom of religion and of speech in Spain and its colonies in the eighteenth and early ninetenth centuries. 2 It starts from the point that «Catholicism was truly the very center of the system, on account of its capacity to inform, shape, and determine the behavior of its adherents», and observes that «even the most enlightened and reformist groups moved within the coordinates of a Catholic dogma that was very rarely questioned» (104). It goes on to remark that «certain general characteristics of the Catholic worldview were shared by nearly everybody» (119). We are all aware that the Inquisition and government censorship did their best to suppress unorthodox and subversive thinking and expression, but Fernández Sebastián asserts that it is more than that: «what led early Hispanic constitutionalists – whether liberals or republicans - solemnly and almost unanimously to proclaim the centrality of Catholicism [e.g. in Article 12 of the Constitution of Cádiz] was neither fear, prudence, nor opportunism, but a more profound yet simpler fact: most of the agents who took part in these events shared a Catholic culture that was so deeply embedded in their societies that an acknowledgement of freedom of conscience was ruled out in advance» (122). The argument seems to be that one could not even think some things at these times and places. * Department of Political Science, University of California at Riverside (johnl@ucr.edu). 1 Martín González Fernández, El Idioma de la Razón: Ilustración e Inquisición en Galicia (1700-1808) (Vigo: Nigratrea, 2008). 2 Javier Fernández Sebastián, «The Crisis of the Hispanic World: Tolerance and the Limits of Freedom of Expression in a Catholic Society» in Elizabeth Powers, ed., Freedom of Speech: The History of an Idea (Lewisburg: Bucknell University Press, 2011), 103-131; and see his «Toleration and Freedom of Expression in the Hispanic World Between Enlightenment and Liberalism», Past and Present 211, 2011, 159-197.