ABSTRACT In this article I examine Edward Stillingfleet’s last published work and the critique of Rene Descartes’s natural philosophy therein which appeared in 1702 as an incomplete appendix to the revised edition of his well-known Origines Sacrae to explore the depiction of God’s power that underwrote his assessment of Cartesianism mechanical philosophy and its inclination to atheism. I consider both Stillingfleet’s characterization of God’s relationship with the creation and the contextual sources he used to support it, to show that his (...) refutation of Descartes’s work was wrapped in the language of voluntarist theology. (shrink)

Historians have often argued that from the mid‐sixteenth century onward Italian science began to decline. This development is often attributed to the actions of the so‐called Counter‐Reformation Church, which had grown increasingly intolerant of novel ideas. In this article, I argue that this interpretation of the history of science is derived from an Italian liberal historiographical tradition, which linked the history of Italian philosophy to the development of the modern Italian state. I suggest that although historians of science have appropriated (...) parts of this distinctive narrative to underpin their account of Italy's seventeenth‐century scientific decline, they have not always fully appreciated its complexity. In this article, I consider the work of two scholars, Francesco de Sanctis and Benedetto Croce. Both explicitly suggested that although the actions of the Church caused Italy to enter into a period of decline, they in fact argued that science represented one of the few areas in which Italian intellectual life actually continued to thrive. (shrink)

Atheism has achieved renewed vigor in the West in recent years with a spate of bestselling books and growing membership in secularist and rationalist organizations, but what exactly is the nature of this peculiar form of non-belief? This article sets the context for the emergence of the ‘New Atheism’ with a review of the dominant theory of atheism’s dialectical and theological origins, and an examination of major historical episodes in atheistic thought. The author argues that a significant development has received (...) insufficient attention: the 19th-century split in atheism that produced two distinct streams of criticism. The first is scientific atheism, closely associated with Darwinism and Enlightenment rationalism. The second is humanistic atheism, aligned with the rise of the social sciences and pioneered by Marx and Feuerbach. The contemporary atheist movement is primarily rooted in the scientific tradition, excluding the humanistic approach on epistemological and political grounds, though emerging tensions within the movement suggest that the humanistic tradition still plays a role. The relationship between these two approaches within the movement should be a focus of future research. (shrink)

In discussions about the existence of God, it is sometimes claimed that the progress of science has removed the need for God. This paper uses a Bayesian analysis of Ockham’s razor to formulate and evaluate this argument, which is referred to as the science explains away God argument. Four different strategies for responding to this argument are presented and evaluated. It is argued that one of these strategies highlights how difficult it is to show that the conditions for applying Ockham’s (...) razor are satisfied and hence why SEAGA is very unlikely to succeed. (shrink)

The aim of this essay is to analyze the ideas about commercial society among Spanish and Spanish American intellectuals from the second half of the eighteenth century to the first decades of the following century. Special attention is paid to some relevant concepts like “amor propio” or “interés”. We are also specially interested in the knowledge of political economy and its moral implications for the idea of commercial society. My proposal is to consider the possibilities of a Catholic enlightenment as (...) the expression of the combination of some intrinsic principles of the enlightened thought with Catholic confessionalism. This is significant not only for the understanding of the enlightenment in the Spanish World but also for a correct interpretation of the first constitutionalism. (shrink)