Thomas Hobbes and His Mechanistic Physiology
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The Physician and Witchcraft in Restoration England
THE PHYSICIAN AND WITCHCRAFT IN RESTORATION ENGLAND by GARFIELD TOURNEY THE YEAR of 1660 witnessed important political and scientific developments in England. The restoration of the monarchy and the Church of England occurred with the return of Charles II after the dissolution of the Commonwealth and the Puritan influence. The Royal Society, after informal meetings for nearly fifteen years, was established as a scientific organization in 1660 and received its Royal Charter in 1662. During the English revolution, and for a short time during the Commonwealth, interest in witchcraft mounted. Between 1645 and 1646 Matthew Hopkins acquired the reputation as the most notorious witch-finder in the history of England.I His activities in Essex and the other eastern counties led to the execution of as many as 200 witches. In Suffolk it is estimated that he was responsible for arresting at least 124 persons for witchcraft, of whom 68 were hanged. The excesses soon led to a reaction and Hopkins lost his influence, and died shortly thereafter in 1646. There then was a continuing decline in witchcraft persecutions, and an increasing scepticism toward the phenomena of witchcraft was expressed. Scepticism was best exemplified in Thomas Hobbes' (1588-1679) Leviathan, published in 1651.2 Hobbes presented a materialistic philosophy, emphasizing change occurring in motion, the material nature of mental activity, the elimination of final causes, and the rejection of the reality of spirit. He decried the belief in witchcraft and the supematural, emphasizing -
Social Contract As Bourgeois Ideology Stephen C
Social Contract as Bourgeois Ideology Stephen C. Ferguson II John Rawls (Photo © Steve Pyke.) Since the publication of John Rawls’ magnum opus A Theory of Justice in 1971, there has been a significant resurgence of philosophical work in the tradition of contractarianism. The distinguished bourgeois political philosopher Robert Nozick has argued that A Theory of Justice is one of the most important works in political philosophy since the writings of John Stuart Mill. “Political philosophers,” Nozick concludes, “now must either work within Rawls’ theory or explain why.”1 It is not far from the truth that Rawls single-handedly not only gave life to analytical political philosophy, but also resuscitated contractarianism, a philosophical tradition that — in many respects — had been lying dormant in a philosophical coma. In fact, social contract theory has become the hegemonic tradition in liberal social and political philosophy. As the Afro-Caribbean My thanks for advice, guidance and/or invaluable criticism of earlier drafts to John H. McClendon III, Ann Cudd, Rex Martin, Tom Tuozzo, Robert J. Antonio and Tariq Al-Jamil. I would also like to extend a hearty thanks to Greg Meyerson and David Siar for their invaluable editorial comments. And, lastly, thanks to my wife, Cassondra, and my two sons, Kendall and Trey, for your unqualified love and support in times of tranquility as well as times of crisis. 1 Robert Nozick, Anarchy, State and Utopia (New York: Basic Books, 1974): 183. Copyright © 2007 by Stephen C. Ferguson and Cultural Logic, ISSN 1097-3087 Ferguson 2 philosopher Charles Mills has put it, contract talk is, after all, the political lingua franca of our times.2 In this essay, we will examine the ideological character and theoretical content of contractrarianism as a philosophical tradition beginning with its classic exposition in the works of Thomas Hobbes, John Locke, Jean-Jacques Rousseau and, finally, culminating in the work of John Rawls. -
Newton.Indd | Sander Pinkse Boekproductie | 16-11-12 / 14:45 | Pag
omslag Newton.indd | Sander Pinkse Boekproductie | 16-11-12 / 14:45 | Pag. 1 e Dutch Republic proved ‘A new light on several to be extremely receptive to major gures involved in the groundbreaking ideas of Newton Isaac Newton (–). the reception of Newton’s Dutch scholars such as Willem work.’ and the Netherlands Jacob ’s Gravesande and Petrus Prof. Bert Theunissen, Newton the Netherlands and van Musschenbroek played a Utrecht University crucial role in the adaption and How Isaac Newton was Fashioned dissemination of Newton’s work, ‘is book provides an in the Dutch Republic not only in the Netherlands important contribution to but also in the rest of Europe. EDITED BY ERIC JORINK In the course of the eighteenth the study of the European AND AD MAAS century, Newton’s ideas (in Enlightenment with new dierent guises and interpre- insights in the circulation tations) became a veritable hype in Dutch society. In Newton of knowledge.’ and the Netherlands Newton’s Prof. Frans van Lunteren, sudden success is analyzed in Leiden University great depth and put into a new perspective. Ad Maas is curator at the Museum Boerhaave, Leiden, the Netherlands. Eric Jorink is researcher at the Huygens Institute for Netherlands History (Royal Dutch Academy of Arts and Sciences). / www.lup.nl LUP Newton and the Netherlands.indd | Sander Pinkse Boekproductie | 16-11-12 / 16:47 | Pag. 1 Newton and the Netherlands Newton and the Netherlands.indd | Sander Pinkse Boekproductie | 16-11-12 / 16:47 | Pag. 2 Newton and the Netherlands.indd | Sander Pinkse Boekproductie | 16-11-12 / 16:47 | Pag. -
Leibniz's Ultimate Theory Soshichi Uchii Abstract
Leibniz’s Ultimate Theory Soshichi Uchii Abstract This is a short summary of my new interpretation of Leibniz’s philosophy, including metaphysics and dynamics. Monadology is the core of his philosophy, but according to my interpretation, this document must be read together with his works on dynamics and geometry Analysis Situs, among others. Monadology describes the reality, the world of monads. But in addition, it also contains a theory of information in terms of the state transition of monads, together with a sketch of how that information is transformed into the phenomena via coding. I will argue that Leibniz’s program has a surprisingly wide range, from classical physics to the theories of relativity (special and general) , and extending even to quantum mechanics. 1. How should we read Monadology? Among Leibniz’s papers he completed in his last years, the one that should be regarded as containing the core of his system of knowledge is Monadology (1714). It is a theory of metaphysics, but I take it that Leibniz thought that it is the foundation of dynamics, and he envisaged that dynamics should be combined with his new geometry, called Analysis Situs. There are two firm grounds for the preceding assertion. The first is that Leibniz sketched the relationship between his metaphysics and dynamics, in the two papers New System and Specimen Dynamicum (both published in 1695; English tr. in Ariew and Garber 1989). If we wish to figure out a reasonable interpretation of Monadology, this ground must be taken very seriously. The second ground is the amazing accomplishments shown in The Metaphysical Foundations of Mathematics (written around the same time as Monadology; English tr. -
Henry More, Richard Baxter, and Francis Glisson's Trea Tise on the Energetic Na Ture of Substance
Medical History, 1987, 31: 15-40. MEDICINE AND PNEUMATOLOGY: HENRY MORE, RICHARD BAXTER, AND FRANCIS GLISSON'S TREA TISE ON THE ENERGETIC NA TURE OF SUBSTANCE by JOHN HENRY* The nature of the soul and its relationship to the body has always proved problematical for Christian philosophy. The source ofthe difficulty can be traced back to the efforts of the early Fathers to reconcile the essentially pagan concept of an immaterial and immortal soul with apostolic teachings about the after-life in which all the emphasis is placed upon the resurrection of the body. The tensions between these two traditions inevitably became strained during the sixteenth century when Protestant reformers insisted on a closer adherence to Scripture. Furthermore, even when leaving the problems of Scriptural hermeneutics aside, the dualistic approach to the question, in which soul (or spirit) and body are held to be categorically different in essence, had to overcome a number of intractable philosophical problems. So, it was not simply coincidence that when the new mechanical philosophy began to be formulated in a systematic way in the seventeenth century, it was couched in vigorously dualistic terms. In fact, three of the earliest fully elaborated systems of mechanical philosophy, those of Descartes, Digby, and Charleton, were explicitly intended to provide a philosophical prop for dualist theology.' Moreover, it was because of its usefulness in promoting dualism that Cartesianism was first popularized in England not by a natural philosopher but by the Cambridge Platonist and theologian, Henry More.2 *John Henry, MPhil, PhD, Wellcome Institute for the History ofMedicine, 183 Euston Road, London NWI 2BP. -
The Reception of Hobbes's Leviathan
This is a repository copy of The reception of Hobbes's Leviathan. White Rose Research Online URL for this paper: https://eprints.whiterose.ac.uk/71534/ Version: Published Version Book Section: Parkin, Jon (2007) The reception of Hobbes's Leviathan. In: Springborg, Patricia, (ed.) The Cambridge Companion to Hobbes's Leviathan. The Cambridge Companions to Philosophy, Religion and Culture . Cambridge University Press , Cambridge , pp. 441-459. https://doi.org/10.1017/CCOL0521836670.020 Reuse Items deposited in White Rose Research Online are protected by copyright, with all rights reserved unless indicated otherwise. They may be downloaded and/or printed for private study, or other acts as permitted by national copyright laws. The publisher or other rights holders may allow further reproduction and re-use of the full text version. This is indicated by the licence information on the White Rose Research Online record for the item. Takedown If you consider content in White Rose Research Online to be in breach of UK law, please notify us by emailing [email protected] including the URL of the record and the reason for the withdrawal request. [email protected] https://eprints.whiterose.ac.uk/ jon parkin 19 The Reception of Hobbes’s Leviathan The traditional story about the reception of Leviathan was that it was a book that was rejected rather than read seriously.1 Leviathan’s perverse amalgamation of controversial doctrine, so the story goes, earned it universal condemnation. Hobbes was outed as an athe- ist and discredited almost as soon as the work appeared. Subsequent criticism was seen to be the idle pursuit of a discredited text, an exer- cise upon which young militant churchmen could cut their teeth, as William Warburton observed in the eighteenth century.2 We need to be aware, however, that this was a story that was largely the cre- ation of Hobbes’s intellectual opponents, writers with an interest in sidelining Leviathan from the mainstream of the history of ideas. -
Cotton Mathers's Wonders of the Invisible World: an Authoritative Edition
Georgia State University ScholarWorks @ Georgia State University English Dissertations Department of English 1-12-2005 Cotton Mathers's Wonders of the Invisible World: An Authoritative Edition Paul Melvin Wise Follow this and additional works at: https://scholarworks.gsu.edu/english_diss Recommended Citation Wise, Paul Melvin, "Cotton Mathers's Wonders of the Invisible World: An Authoritative Edition." Dissertation, Georgia State University, 2005. https://scholarworks.gsu.edu/english_diss/5 This Dissertation is brought to you for free and open access by the Department of English at ScholarWorks @ Georgia State University. It has been accepted for inclusion in English Dissertations by an authorized administrator of ScholarWorks @ Georgia State University. For more information, please contact [email protected]. COTTON MATHER’S WONDERS OF THE INVISIBLE WORLD: AN AUTHORITATIVE EDITION by PAUL M. WISE Under the direction of Reiner Smolinski ABSTRACT In Wonders of the Invisible World, Cotton Mather applies both his views on witchcraft and his millennial calculations to events at Salem in 1692. Although this infamous treatise served as the official chronicle and apologia of the 1692 witch trials, and excerpts from Wonders of the Invisible World are widely anthologized, no annotated critical edition of the entire work has appeared since the nineteenth century. This present edition seeks to remedy this lacuna in modern scholarship, presenting Mather’s seventeenth-century text next to an integrated theory of the natural causes of the Salem witch panic. The likely causes of Salem’s bewitchment, viewed alongside Mather’s implausible explanations, expose his disingenuousness in writing about Salem. Chapter one of my introduction posits the probability that a group of conspirators, led by the Rev. -
Title Joseph Glanvill and Some Restoration Climates of Opinions
Title Joseph Glanvill and Some Restoration Climates of Opinions Author(s) Rees, Simon Citation 英文学評論 (1987), 54: 26-44 Issue Date 1987-10 URL https://doi.org/10.14989/RevEL_54_26 Right Type Departmental Bulletin Paper Textversion publisher Kyoto University 26 Joseph Glanvill and Some Restoration Climates of Opinions Simon Rees Discussing Joseph Glanvill in The Seventeenth Century Background, Basil Willey used the phrase 'the "Climate of Opinion" ', which he had adapted from a passage in Glanvill's first book, The Vanity ofDogmatizing, to describe how ideas of Reason and Nature could become confused with those of commonsense.1' Glanvill's actual phrase referred to 'the larger Souls, that have travail'd the divers Climates of Opinions', and who are 'more cautious in their resolves, and more sparing to determine'.2' Glanvill certainly included himself among these larger souls, and it is his journey through the different climates of opinions that prevailed in the years of the Restoration that is his most interesting memorial: his work is a meteorological record of the changing fashions of ideas and beliefs, habits of thought and expression, and the conduct of controversies of fact and, if not of law, of doctrine and faith. The first edition of Glanvill's most often reprinted work appeared in 1666 with the title A Philosophical Endeavour towards the Defence of the Being of Witches and Apparitions, just in time for most of the copies to be destroyed in the Great Fire, and was later incorporated into the text of an enlarged edition, Saducismus Triumphatus, published in 1681, a year after Glanvill's death.3' However, the final revision of the text did not appear in this edition, but in a collection of essays that Glanvill published in 1676, called Essays on Several Important Subjects in Philosophy and Religion, under the title 'Against Modern Sadducism in the Matter of Witches and Apparitions. -
The Dissenting Tradition in English Medicine of the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries
Medical History, 1995, 39: 197-218 The Dissenting Tradition in English Medicine of the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries WILLIAM BIRKEN* In England, medicine has always been something of a refuge for individuals whose lives have been dislocated by religious and political strife. This was particularly true in the seventeenth century when changes in Church and State were occurring at a blinding speed. In his book The experience of defeat, Christopher Hill has described the erratic careers of a number of radical clergy and intellectuals who studied and practised medicine in times of dislocation. A list pulled together from Hill's book would include: John Pordage, Samuel Pordage, Henry Stubbe, John Webster, John Rogers, Abiezer Coppe, William Walwyn and Marchamont Nedham.1 Medicine as a practical option for a lost career, or to supplement and subsidize uncertain careers, can also be found among Royalists and Anglicans when their lives were similarly disrupted during the Interregnum. Among these were the brilliant Vaughan twins, Thomas, the Hermetic philosopher, and Henry, the metaphysical poet and clergyman; the poet, Abraham Cowley; and the mercurial Nedham, who was dislocated both as a republican and as a royalist. The Anglicans Ralph Bathurst and Mathew Robinson were forced to abandon temporarily their clerical careers for medicine, only to return to the Church when times were more propitious. In the middle of the eighteenth century the political and religious disabilities of non-juring Anglicanism were still potent enough to impel Sir Richard Jebb to a successful medical career. But by and large the greatest impact on medicine came from the much larger group of the displaced, the English Dissenters, whose combination of religion and medicine were nothing short of remarkable. -
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Original citation: Anstey, Peter R. and Vanzo, Alberto (2016) Early modern experimental philosophy. In: Sytsma, Justin and Buckwalter, Wesley, (eds.) A Companion to Experimental Philosophy. Blackwell Companions to Philosophy Series . Wiley-Blackwell, pp. 87-102. Permanent WRAP URL: http://wrap.warwick.ac.uk/78705 Copyright and reuse: The Warwick Research Archive Portal (WRAP) makes this work by researchers of the University of Warwick available open access under the following conditions. Copyright © and all moral rights to the version of the paper presented here belong to the individual author(s) and/or other copyright owners. To the extent reasonable and practicable the material made available in WRAP has been checked for eligibility before being made available. Copies of full items can be used for personal research or study, educational, or not-for-profit purposes without prior permission or charge. Provided that the authors, title and full bibliographic details are credited, a hyperlink and/or URL is given for the original metadata page and the content is not changed in any way. Publisher’s statement: Published source: Anstey, Peter R. and Vanzo, Alberto (2016) Early modern experimental philosophy. In: Sytsma, Justin and Buckwalter, Wesley, (eds.) A Companion to Experimental Philosophy. Blackwell Companions to Philosophy Series . Wiley-Blackwell, pp. 87-102 Copyright © 2016 by John Wiley & Sons, Link to the full title: http://www.wiley.com/WileyCDA/WileyTitle/productCd- 1118661699.html A note on versions: The version presented here may differ from the published version or, version of record, if you wish to cite this item you are advised to consult the publisher’s version. -
Newton As Philosopher
This page intentionally left blank NEWTON AS PHILOSOPHER Newton’s philosophical views are unique and uniquely difficult to categorize. In the course of a long career from the early 1670s until his death in 1727, he articulated profound responses to Cartesian natural philosophy and to the prevailing mechanical philosophy of his day. Newton as Philosopher presents Newton as an original and sophisti- cated contributor to natural philosophy, one who engaged with the principal ideas of his most important predecessor, René Descartes, and of his most influential critic, G. W. Leibniz. Unlike Descartes and Leibniz, Newton was systematic and philosophical without presenting a philosophical system, but, over the course of his life, he developed a novel picture of nature, our place within it, and its relation to the creator. This rich treatment of his philosophical ideas, the first in English for thirty years, will be of wide interest to historians of philosophy, science, and ideas. ANDREW JANIAK is Assistant Professor in the Department of Philosophy, Duke University. He is editor of Newton: Philosophical Writings (2004). NEWTON AS PHILOSOPHER ANDREW JANIAK Duke University CAMBRIDGE UNIVERSITY PRESS Cambridge, New York, Melbourne, Madrid, Cape Town, Singapore, São Paulo Cambridge University Press The Edinburgh Building, Cambridge CB2 8RU, UK Published in the United States of America by Cambridge University Press, New York www.cambridge.org Information on this title: www.cambridge.org/9780521862868 © Andrew Janiak 2008 This publication is in copyright. Subject to statutory exception and to the provision of relevant collective licensing agreements, no reproduction of any part may take place without the written permission of Cambridge University Press. -
The Grounds for and Excellence of the Corpuscular Or Mechanical Philosophy
The Grounds for and Excellence of the Corpuscular or Mechanical Philosophy Robert Boyle 1674 Copyright © Jonathan Bennett 2017. All rights reserved [Brackets] enclose editorial explanations. Small ·dots· enclose material that has been added, but can be read as though it were part of the original text. Occasional •bullets, and also indenting of passages that are not quotations, are meant as aids to grasping the structure of a sentence or a thought. Every four-point ellipsis . indicates the omission of a brief passage that seems to present more difficulty than it is worth. Longer omissions are reported between brackets in normal-sized type.—This short piece by Boyle opens and closes in the form of a letter; there is no known addressee; and most of the thing reads as though it wasn’t really addressed to any individual.—The section-breaks and -headings are not Boyle’s. First launched: March 2010 Excellence of mechanism Robert Boyle Contents Introduction 1 Four points 2 The versatility of mechanism 3 The world’s soul etc. 6 The top trio 7 Challenges that mechanisms could survive 8 Mechanism isn’t scary 10 Decoding the world 11 Recapitulation 12 Excellence of mechanism Robert Boyle Glossary a priori: When Boyle uses this phrase on page 11 he principle: Throughout the early modern period ‘principle’ isn’t using it in the sense that Kant made famous 80 years (like its cousins in French and Latin) sometimes meant, as it later. That is, he isn’t talking about proving independently does today, a proposition that has some privilege of basicness of all experience that your theory is true.