An eight-volume series, this collection contains comprehensive introductions, notes that encourage discussion, and extensive bibliographies on the history of philosophy. Eighteenth-Century Philosophy presents readings on the history of philosophy, providing the full scope and impact of Western philosophy from the Presocratics to the important thinkers of the twentieth century. Containing many selections that appear in English for the first time, this series presents extensive and carefully chosen selections that emphasize the ranges and significance (...) of the important philosophers of each period and well as their interrelationships with each other and with the intellectual current of their age. (shrink)

The Eighteenth century is one of the most important periods in the history of Western philosophy, witnessing philosophical, scientific, and social and political change on a vast scale. In spite of this, there are few single volume overviews of the philosophy of the period as a whole. _The Routledge Companion to Eighteenth Century Philosophy _is an authoritative survey and assessment of this momentous period, covering major thinkers, topics and movements in Eighteenth (...) class='Hi'>century philosophy. Beginning with a substantial introduction by Aaron Garrett, the thirty-five specially commissioned chapters by an outstanding team of international contributors are organised into seven clear parts: Context and Movements Metaphysics and Understanding Mind, Soul, and Perception Morals and Aesthetics Politics and Society Philosophy in relation to the Arts and Sciences Major Figures. Major topics and themes are explored and discussed, ranging from materialism, free will and personal identity; to the emotions, the social contract, aesthetics, and the sciences, including mathematics and biology. The final section examines in more detail three figures central to the period: Hume, Rousseau and Kant. As such _The Routledge Companion to Eighteenth Century Philosophy_ is essential reading for all students of the period, both in philosophy and related disciplines such as politics, literature, history and religious studies. (shrink)

More than thirty eminent scholars from nine different countries have contributed to The Cambridge History of Eighteenth-Century Philosophy - the most comprehensive and up-to-date history of the subject available in English. For the eighteenth century the dominant concept in philosophy was human nature and so it is around this concept that the work is centered. This allows the contributors to offer both detailed explorations of the epistemological, metaphysical and ethical themes that continue to stand (...) at the forefront of philosophy, and to voice a critical attitude to the historiography behind this emphasis in philosophical thought. At the same time due sensitivity is paid to historical context with particular emphasis on the connections between philosophy, science, and theology. This judiciously balanced, systematic, and comprehensive account of the whole of Western philosophy in the period will be an invaluable resource for philosophers, intellectual historians, theologians, political theorists, historians of science and literary scholars. (shrink)

More than thirty eminent scholars from nine different countries have contributed to The Cambridge History of Eighteenth-Century Philosophy – the most comprehensive and up-to-date history of the subject available in English. During the eighteenth century, the dominant concept in philosophy was human nature, and so it is around this concept that the work is centered. This allows the contributors to offer both detailed explorations of the epistemological, metaphysical and ethical themes that continue to stand (...) at the forefront of philosophy, and to voice a critical attitude to the historiography behind this emphasis in philosophical thought. At the same time due sensitivity is paid to historical context with particular emphasis on the connections between philosophy, science and theology. This judiciously balanced, systematic and comprehensive account of the whole of Western philosophy in the period will be an invaluable resource for philosophers, intellectual historians, theologians, political theorists, historians of science and literary scholars. (shrink)

The most comprehensive and up-to-date history of the eighteenth-century philosophy available in English.

More than thirty eminent scholars from nine different countries have contributed to The Cambridge History of Eighteenth-Century Philosophy – the most comprehensive and up-to-date history of the subject available in English. During the eighteenth century, the dominant concept in philosophy was human nature, and so it is around this concept that the work is centered. This allows the contributors to offer both detailed explorations of the epistemological, metaphysical and ethical themes that continue to stand (...) at the forefront of philosophy, and to voice a critical attitude to the historiography behind this emphasis in philosophical thought. At the same time due sensitivity is paid to historical context with particular emphasis on the connections between philosophy, science and theology. This judiciously balanced, systematic and comprehensive account of the whole of Western philosophy in the period will be an invaluable resource for philosophers, intellectual historians, theologians, political theorists, historians of science and literary scholars. (shrink)

The most comprehensive and up-to-date history of the eighteenth-century philosophy available in English.

Studies of hermeneutics have rarely dealt with eighteenth-century British thought, yet during this period debates over the interpretation of texts plagued and invigorated religious, intellectual, and political life in England. This important book is the first to deal with hermeneutical issues in British scriptural, legal, historical, political, and literary interpretation. Examining the work of Swift, Locke, Toland, Bolingbroke, Hume, Reid, Blackstone, and Burke, Joel C. Weinsheimer discusses common philosophical problems of understanding, concentrating especially on their theories about the (...) application of taste to discern interpretive truth. Weinsheimer's approach is primarily philosophical. In each area of hermeneutic endeavor, he asks such questions as why it is necessary to interpret, what it means to interpret, what does not need interpreting, what constitutes the signs of right understanding, and what accounts for the multiplicity of interpretations. He concludes that hermneutics in eighteenth-century England became the site of a contest and possible reconciliation between reason and history. Driven by the need to escape rationalist formalism as well as an opposite though equally sterile antiquarianism, interpretation offered a new way of thinking about truth, as belonging to reason and history together. (shrink)

Plato and Platonism held a significant place in British intellectual inquiry in the eighteenth century. Louise Hickman enters this largely unexplored territory with a valuable study of select elements in the theological and political arguments of certain British divines. She is particularly concerned to expose the limitations of familiar and narrowly-rational arguments that in the eighteenth century supported natural religion and theology, and to bring to the fore a countervailing rational theology that discovers in and for (...) the human mind the eternal and immutable truth that is divine.The principal figure in Hickman’s study is Richard Price, rational dissenting minister, friend of liberty and America, and author of... (shrink)

The Cambridge History of Eighteenth-Century Philosophy is a massive achievement, and in more than one sense. The most obvious is its sheer bulk: two volumes totalling 1400 pages, including over 150 pages of bibliography and index and another 100 pages of biobibliographical appendix. This last item, as its name suggests, provides thumbnail biographies of all the main figures referred to in the volumes together with a list of all their main publications with publication dates and also a (...) short list of main secondary sources—and so can be expected to be a lifesaver for harassed scholars desperately trying to track down a missing reference. It is also a pleasure to record that, in an age when production standards... (shrink)

This new history of Scottish philosophy will include two volumes that focus on the Scottish Enlightenment. In this volume a team of leading experts explore the ideas, intellectual context, and influence of Hutcheson, Hume, Smith, Reid, and many other thinkers, frame old issues in fresh ways, and introduce new topics and questions into debates about the philosophy of this remarkable period. The contributors explore the distinctively Scottish context of this philosophical flourishing, and juxtapose the work of canonical philosophers (...) with contemporaries now very seldom read. The outcome is a broadening-out, and a filling-in of the detail, of the picture of the philosophical scene of Scotland in the eighteenth century. (shrink)

The aim of this paper is to understand why empiricist philosophers of language did not try to refute the Leibniz-Beauzée argument, which questioned the genetical priority of proper names. It is shown that, within the semantic theory which underlies the empiricist doctrine, one may assume that all general terms derive from particular names, while conceding that every proper name can be etymologically traced back to the ancestor of a common noun.

This essay employs Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1712-1778) as a vehicle to explore love in eighteenth-century French moral philosophy and theological ethics. The relation between love of self and love of God was understood variously and produced contrasting models of the relation between the public and the private. Rousseau, perhaps more than any other figure in the eighteenth century, wrestled with the complex, competing traditions of love, and in doing so he probed and articulated the tension between (...) and the harmony of life alone and life together. Using as ideal types a set of historical models of private and public vice and virtue, the author describes Rousseau's three contradictory proposals for dealing with the corruption of social institutions and the human heart and discloses their underlying cohesion. (shrink)

Philosophy is cosmopolitan and immune to the influence of the idea of nation; it does not depend on some specific linguistic heritage, and, anyway, tends to be in contrast to the various nationalisms. Nevertheless, in front of the crisis of the very idea of national identity, not only the Ueberweg dedicates an entire volume to the Italian philosophy of the Eighteenth century, but also he reconstructs it on a regional level, following the catchment areas of the (...) single universities, academies and scientific societies as a unit of measurement. The volume shows the usefulness of joining the approach of the philosophical history of philosophy, the traditional history of philosophy, together with the historical history of philosophy, according to the interdisciplinary method of survey developed by the history of ideas yesterday and by the intellectual history today. (shrink)

Among all the isms worthy of examination in any study of eighteenth-century German philosophy, Wolffianism is undoubtedly among the worthiest. Broadly defined as adherence to teachings of Christian...

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:Women and Philosophy in Eighteenth-Century Germany ed. by Corey W. DyckJulia BorcherdingCorey W. Dyck, editor. Women and Philosophy in Eighteenth-Century Germany. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2021. Pp. 272. Hardback, $85.00.In more ways than one, this volume constitutes an important contribution to ongoing efforts to reconfigure and enrich our existing philosophical canon and to question the narratives that have led to its current (...) shape. To start, while there is a growing amount of research dedicated to recovering the contributions of women to early modern philosophy, much of this work focuses on the seventeenth century, and geographically centers on England, France, and Italy. By turning the spotlight on eighteenth-century Germany, this volume broadens the scope of these efforts in an important way. Further, with the historiography of this period still shaped by a long-standing dismissive treatment of post-Leibnizian German philosophy and by the long shadow cast by the success of Kant's Critical philosophy, which eclipsed many of the thinkers opposed to it, challenges to its traditional narratives seem especially important. The editor's earlier collection (coedited with Falk Wunderlich) on Kant and his German contemporaries already succeeded in mounting such a challenge by showing that German philosophy throughout the eighteenth century in fact presents us with an extraordinarily rich tableau of intellectual life (Kant and His German Contemporaries. Vol. 1: Logic, Mind, Epistemology, Science and Ethics [Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2018]).The present volume stands as a further valuable contribution to relativizing the still dominant narrative of German philosophy as the story of a select few brilliant minds. It successfully dispenses not only with the idea that those minds were few, but also with the equally persistent one that they were exclusively male. Already in the nineteenth century, we find historians such as Karl Joël explicitly casting the new age of German philosophy inaugurated by Kant as its "masculine epoch"—an image undoubtedly furthered by its main protagonist, who cast philosophical acumen in decidedly male terms when he observed that "[a] woman who has a head full of Greek, like Madame Dacier, or one who engages in debate about the intricacies of mechanics, like the Marquise du Châtelet, might just as well have a beard; for that expresses in a more recognizable form the profundity for which she strives" (Karl Joël, Die Frauen in der Philosophie [Hamburg, 1896], 48; Immanuel Kant, Beobachtungen über das Gefühl des Schönen und Erhabenen [Königsberg, 1764], translation in Londa Schiebinger, The Mind Has No Sex? Women in the Origins of Modern Science [Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1989], 146; both cited in Eileen O'Neill, "Disappearing Ink: Early Modern Women Philosophers and Their Fate in History," in Philosophy in a Feminist [End Page 154] Voice: Critiques and Reconstructions, ed. Janet A. Kourany [Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1997], 17–62). Yet as the contributions to this volume forcefully illustrate, women in the period did—in spite of the numerous severe social, religious, and political obstacles they faced—in fact manage to gain access to its intellectual sphere, and actively shaped its philosophical landscape.While the papers collected here are of high quality throughout, they do vary in their approach. Many chapters, especially in the earlier parts of the volume, investigate female figures as philosophers in their own right, and carve out their self-standing contributions to prominent philosophical movements and debates. Focusing on Sophie of Hanover's correspondence with Leibniz, Christian Leduc's chapter begins by examining her metaphysical views and argues, against standing interpretations, that her main aim is to defend a version of the doctrine of physical influence as an account of mind-body interaction while rejecting metaphysical commitments regarding the nature of the soul in favor of a more agnostic, Lockean empiricist approach. In chapter 3, Stefanie Buchenau shows how women engaging with Wolffian Schulphilosophie began to view themselves as more than teachers and translators and started to claim the title of philosophers. Using the example of Johanna Charlotte Unzer, Buchenau convincingly argues that despite the "feminine," aesthetic garb of her thought, Unzer in fact offers a serious critique and revision of the Wolffian model of... (shrink)

Within eighteenth-century debates on animal cognition we can distinguish at least three main theoretical positions: (i) Buffon’s mechanism, (ii) Reimarus’ theory of instincts, and (iii) the sensationalism of Condillac and Leroy. In this paper, I adopt a philosophical perspective on this debate and argue that in order to fully understand the justification Buffon, Reimarus, Condillac, and Leroy gave for their respective theories, we must pay special attention to the theoretical virtues these naturalists alluded to while justifying their position. (...) These theoretical virtues have received little to no attention in the literature on eighteenth-century animal cognition, but figure prominently in the justification of the mechanist, instinctive, and sensationalist theories of animal behavior. Through my philosophical study of the role of theoretical virtues in eighteenth-century debates on animal cognition, we obtain a deeper understanding of how theoretical virtues were conceptualized in eighteenth-century science and how they influenced the justification of theories of animal cognition. (shrink)

Analyses in detail the accounts given respectively by Locke and by Hume of the mental factors such as pleasure, pain, uneasiness, and desire, which they see as causing all human actions. Foot argues that this enterprise was misconceived. Philosophers should no more try to describe a mechanism underlying acting on a reason (as e.g. a prudential or moral reason) than a mechanism underlying believing on a reason. Practical and theoretical reasoning are here on a par, the first issuing in action (...) and the second in belief. (shrink)

Women and Philosophy in 18th Century Germany gathers for the first time an exceptional group of scholars with the explicit aim of composing a comprehensive portrait of the complex and manifold contributions on the part of women in 18th century Germany. Amidst the re-evaluation of the place of women in the history of early Modern philosophy, this vital and distinctive intellectual context has thus far been missing. As this volume will show, women intellectuals contributed crucially (directly (...) and indirectly) to the development of German philosophy in the period, and this in spite of profound institutional, cultural, and religious obstacles. The volume's various contributions will show that we as historians and students of the period have much to learn from not only studying the published contributions of these neglected figures, but also from attending to the diverse and ingenious ways which they found for engaging (particularly) with their male contemporaries on the issues of the time. (shrink)

"Recent years have seen a growing interest among scholars of 18th-century German philosophy in the period between Wolff and Kant. This book challenges traditional interpretations of this period that focus largely on post-Leibnizian rationalism and, accordingly, on a depreciation of the contribution of the senses to knowledge about the world and the self. It addresses the divergent ways in which eighteenth-century German philosophers reconceived the notion and role of experience in their efforts to identify, defend, and (...) contest the contribution of foundational a priori principles and empirical data to the various branches of metaphysics, the natural sciences, and emerging disciplines such as psychology and aesthetics. The chapters are organized according to the four major schools that defined the various phases of German Enlightenment philosophy: Wolff and Wolffianism, Eclecticism and Populärphilosophie, the Berlin Academy, and Kant. Each chapter is devoted to one or more philosophers, several of whom are seriously under investigated or even unknown outside small circles of specialists. By framing the period in terms of the notion of experience, this book presents a more nuanced understanding of the German reception of British and French ideas and theories, dismisses the prevailing view that German philosophy was largely isolated from European debates, introduces a number of relatively unknown, but highly relevant philosophers and developments to non-specialized scholars, and contributes to a better understanding of the richness and complexity of the German Enlightenment"--. (shrink)

The eighteenth century was a time of brilliant philosophical innovation in Britain. In Of Liberty and Necessity James A. Harris presents the first comprehensive account of the period's discussion of what remains a central problem of philosophy, the question of the freedom of the will. He offers new interpretations of contributions to the free will debate made by canonical figures such as Locke, Hume, Edwards, and Reid, and also discusses in detail the arguments of some less familiar (...) writers. Harris puts the eighteenth-century debate about the will and its freedom in the context of the period's concern with applying what Hume calls the "experimental method of reasoning" to the human mind. His book will be of substantial interest to historians of philosophy and anyone concerned with the free will problem. (shrink)

This collection of essays explores the rise of aesthetics as a response to, and as a part of, the reshaping of the arts in modern society. The theories of art developed under the name of 'aesthetics' in the eighteenth century have traditionally been understood as contributions to a field of study in existence since the time of Plato. If art is a practice to be found in all human societies, then the philosophy of art is the search (...) for universal features of that practice, which can be stated in definitions of art and beauty. However, art as we know it - the system of 'fine arts' - is largely peculiar to modern society. Aesthetics, far from being a perennial discipline, emerged in an effort both to understand and to shape this new social practice. These essays share the conviction that aesthetic ideas can be fully understood when seen not only in relation to intellectual and social contexts, but as themselves constructed in history. (shrink)

This new history of Scottish philosophy will include two volumes that focus on the Scottish Enlightenment. In this volume a team of leading experts explore the ideas, intellectual context, and influence of Hutcheson, Hume, Smith, Reid, and many other thinkers, frame old issues in fresh ways, and introduce new topics and questions into debates about the philosophy of this remarkable period. The contributors explore the distinctively Scottish context of this philosophical flourishing, and juxtapose the work of canonical philosophers (...) with contemporaries now very seldom read. The outcome is a broadening-out, and a filling-in of the detail, of the picture of the philosophical scene of Scotland in the eighteenth century. (shrink)

This paper analyzes debates on animal language in eighteenth-century German philosophy and science. Adopting a history of ideas approach, I explain how the study of animal language became tied to the investigation into the origin and development of language towards the end of the eighteenth century. I argue that for large parts of the eighteenth century, the question of the existence of animal languages was studied within the context of the philosophical question of (...) whether animals possess reason. In Germany, the debate concerning animal reason was influenced by Christian Wolff and was taken up by diverse thinkers such as Winkler, Meier, and Reimarus. I argue that in the second half of the eighteenth century the study of animal language became more loosely related to the question of whether animals possess reason: animal language was studied not only in light of the debate on animal reason but also because it sheds light on the nature of animals, on the differences and similarities between animals and humans, and on the origin and development of language. This systematic study of animal language coincided with the rise of linguistics, anthropology, and biology as independent sciences. (shrink)

This essay employs Jean‐Jacques Rousseau (1712–1778) as a vehicle to explore love in eighteenth‐century French moral philosophy and theological ethics. The relation between love of self and love of God was understood variously and produced contrasting models of the relation between the public and the private. Rousseau, perhaps more than any other figure in the eighteenth century, wrestled with the complex, competing traditions of love, and in doing so he probed and articulated the tension between (...) and the harmony of life alone and life together. Using as ideal types a set of historical models of private and public vice and virtue, the author describes Rousseau's three contradictory proposals for dealing with the corruption of social institutions and the human heart and discloses their underlying cohesion. (shrink)

A History of Scottish Philosophy is a series of collaborative studies by expert authors, each volume being devoted to a specific period. Together they provide a comprehensive account of the Scottish philosophical tradition, from the centuries that laid the foundation of the remarkable burst of intellectual fertility known as the Scottish Enlightenment, through the Victorian age and beyond, when it continued to exercise powerful intellectual influence at home and abroad. The books aim to be historically informative, while at the (...) same time serving to renew philosophical interest in the problems with which the Scottish philosophers grappled and in the solutions they proposed. This is a companion volume to Scottish Philosophy in the Eighteenth Century, Volume I. Where Volume I covered Scottish Enlightenment contributions to morals, politics, art, and religion, this second volume covers philosophical method, metaphysics, and the philosophy of mind. It includes a comprehensive account of the teaching of philosophy in Scottish universities in the eighteenth century. Particular attention is given to Scottish achievements in the science of the mind in chapters on perception, the intellectual powers, the active powers, habit and the association of ideas, and language. (shrink)

CHAPTER I INTRODUCTION: A NEW UNIVERSITY AND THE CHALLENGE OF THE NEW SCIENCE Despite the recent and continuing controversy concerning the proper role of ...

Although the eighteenth century is not a chief interest of historians of psychology, nor is the history of psychology a main topic of Enlightenment studies, the era has long qualified as what a textbook of modern philosophy called "the century of psychology". The present article examines such a historiographical paradox, and asks in what senses eighteenth-century might deserve that label. For the general historian of the Enlightenment, as for historians of logic, esthetics, moral (...) class='Hi'>philosophy, or education, the label is justified by the psychologization experienced by those domains and others. The historian of the human sciences can agree because, especially in Germany, empirical psychology became during the eighteenth century an autonomous field of academic investigation. Psychology, under that name or otherwise, gained throughout Europe the highest rank in the hierarchy of the sciences. Moreover, insofar as its object was the soul united to, and interacting with the body, and to the extent that human beings were defined precisely by such a union and "commerce", psychology became the crucial anthropological science, on which all other branches of the "science of man" were said to depend. Finally, the development during the Aufklärung of a historical discourse about empirical psychology reveals the self-consciousness attained within the emerging field by the end of the eighteenth century. Weder ist das achtzehnte Jahrhundert für die Geschichte der Psychologie ein Schwerpunkt der Forschung, noch ist die Geschichte der Psychologie ein Hauptthema der Arbeiten über die Aufklärung. Trotzdem wurde diese Ära doch lange Zeit als das qualifiziert, was ein Textbuch der modernen Philosophie als "das Jahrhundert der Psychologie" bezeichnet. Der vorliegende Beitrag untersucht dieses historiographische Paradoxon, und fragt, inwiefern das achtzehnte Jahrhundert die Bezeichnung "Jahrhundert der Psychologie" verdient.Für den "allgemeinen" Historiker der Aufklärung genauso wie für die Historiker der Logik, der Ästhetik, der Moralphilosophie oder der Erziehung rechtfertigt sich die Bezeichnung aus der Psychologisierung, die diese und andere Gebiete erfahren haben. Der Historiker, der sich mit den Geisteswissenschaften beschäftigt, kann ihr ebenfalls zustimmen, da die empirische Psychologie, insbesondere in Deutschland, während des achtzehnten Jahrhunderts ein eigenständiges Feld auf dem Gebiet der akademischen Forschung wurde.Die Psychologie, sei es nun unter diesem oder einem anderen Namen, erreichte in der Hierarchie der Wissenschaften in ganz Europa den höchsten Rang. Darüber hinaus wurde sie zu einer kritischen anthropologischen Wissenschaft, von der gesagt wurde, daß alle anderen "Humanwissenschaften" auf ihr beruhen. Denn ihr Gegenstand war die mit dem Körper eine Einheit bildende und mit ihm zusammen agierende Seele, und in dem Umfang, in dem die Menschen präzise durch diese Einheit und durch das "commercium" beschrieben wurden. Letztendlich spiegelt die Entwicklung eines historischen Diskurses über die empirische Psychologie während der Aufklärung das Selbstbewußtsein wieder, das innerhalb dieses aufstrebenden Bereichs gegen Ende des achtzehnten Jahrhunderts erlangt wurde. (shrink)

A History of Scottish Philosophy is a series of collaborative studies by expert authors, each volume being devoted to a specific period. Together they provide a comprehensive account of the Scottish philosophical tradition, from the centuries that laid the foundation of the remarkable burst of intellectual fertility known as the Scottish Enlightenment, through the Victorian age and beyond, when it continued to exercise powerful intellectual influence at home and abroad. The books aim to be historically informative, while at the (...) same time serving to renew philosophical interest in the problems with which the Scottish philosophers grappled and in the solutions they proposed. -/- This is a companion volume to Scottish Philosophy in the Eighteenth Century, Volume I. Where Volume I covered Scottish Enlightenment contributions to morals, politics, art, and religion, this second volume covers philosophical method, metaphysics, and the philosophy of mind. It includes a comprehensive account of the teaching of philosophy in Scottish universities in the eighteenth century. Particular attention is given to Scottish achievements in the science of the mind in chapters on perception, the intellectual powers, the active powers, habit and the association of ideas, and language. (shrink)

The long eighteenth century is a crucial period in the history of ethics, when our moral relations to God, ourselves and others were minutely examined and our duties, rights and virtues systematically and powerfully presented. Colin Heydt charts the history of practical morality - what we ought to do and to be - from the 1670s, when practical ethics arising from Protestant natural law gained an institutional foothold in England, to early British responses to the French Revolution around (...) 1790. He examines the conventional philosophical positions concerning the content of morality, and utilizes those conventions to reinterpret the work of key figures including Locke, Hume, and Smith. Situating these positions in their thematic and historical contexts, he shows how studying them challenges our assumptions about the originality, intended audience, and aims of philosophical argument during this period. His rich and readable book will appeal to a range of scholars and students. (shrink)

Phillip R. Sloan - Performing the Categories: Eighteenth-Century Generation Theory and the Biological Roots of Kant's A Priori - Journal of the History of Philosophy 40:2 Journal of the History of Philosophy 40.2 229-253 Preforming the Categories: Eighteenth-Century Generation Theory and the Biological Roots of Kant's A Priori Phillip R. Sloan Situating Kant's philosophical project in relation to the natural sciences of his day has been of concern to several scholars from both the history (...) of science and the history of philosophy. Historians of philosophy have displayed an expanded awareness of, and interest in, the importance of the scientific context of the period in which Kant carried out his "Copernican" revolution. Most commonly among philosophers, this interest has been analyzed in relation to Kant's concerns with the foundations of mechanics, matter theory, and the epistemology of Newtonian science, with the central text of interest being the Metaphysische Anfangsgründe. On the other hand, historians of philosophy and historians of science, interested in the issues of the third Critique and in the several papers of Kant dealing with biological and anthropological issues, have emphasized the unified nature of Kant's inquiries into the natural sciences, and the importance of his continued interest in the life and human sciences alongside his interests in the foundations of the physical sciences. The effort to understand the unity of Kant's.. (shrink)

This book argues that Rasselas can be understoodd most fully if regarded in the context of eighteenth-century philosophical discussions of the nature of the human soul.

The description for this book, Eighteenth-Century British Logic and Rhetoric, will be forthcoming.

The essays which comprise this collection made their first appearance in 1948 to celebrate the one hundred and fiftieth anniversary of the founding of the British science journal, The Philosophical Magazine, which initially published many monographs in which distinguished scientific discoveries were announced. The present edition is a reprint of the supplement to the regular issue of 1948 and is now put out in book form to be more available for students of the history of science. The "natural philosophy" (...) in the title reflects the way in which the meaning of the term "philosophy" has changed over the past two centuries, for all the essays are devoted to science as we now know it, even as The Philosophical Magazine has itself become a journal now devoted mainly to solid-state physics. Thus a succession of chapters details the history of astronomy, physics, chemistry, mathematics, and engineering through the eighteenth century; other topics include the history of The Philosophical Magazine and histories of scientific periodicals generally, of scientific instruments, and of scientific societies throughout the same era. The concluding essay, by F. Sherwood Taylor, is entitled "The Teaching of the Physical Sciences at the End of the Eighteenth Century"; this is a well documented study of syllabi for courses taught in the universities, as well as an account of the educations received by men who figured prominently in eighteenth-century science. The essays, whose authors include such notables as Sir H. Spencer-Jones, Herbert Dingle, J. R. Partington, J. F. Scott, and Douglas McKie, are uniformly good. They will interest mainly historians of science for their detailed coverage of both internalist and externalist aspects of eighteenth-century thought. They will also appeal to philosophers, however, if only to remind them how their own discipline gave birth to the "new science," and indeed gave it a unity in its early stages that it would do well to recover in the present day.—W.A.W. (shrink)

In the first quarter of the eighteenth century, four philosophers independently proposed immaterialist theories. Ontologies of this kind had been absent from the philosophical stage for several centuries, and their sudden and widespread revival suggests that there was something about the intellectual milieu at the turn of the seventeenth to the eighteenth century that made a move to immaterialism a natural step to take. This dissertation examines some of the factors which contributed to its revival. ;In (...) this dissertation, immaterialist theories are placed against the backdrop of a philosophical division between early modern versions of Platonism and Epicureanism, the former accentuating the priority of the infinite over the finite and the latter stressing instead the priority of the finite over the infinite. The twin revivals of these two ancient philosophical systems were instrumental in giving rise to importantly different versions of immaterialism. Part One of the dissertation serves as an introduction to the two subsequent Parts, by laying out some relevant historical and philosophical details regarding Platonism, Epicureanism and immaterialism. In Part Two, it is shown how Berkeley's early theory can be viewed as an Epicurean form of immaterialism. It is suggested that, while coherent as far as it went, the early theory left some crucially important things out---above all, a sound conception of God---and that, for Berkeley to be in a position to incorporate such components into his philosophy, he was compelled to make certain adjustments to it. These adjustments led to his moving quite far, from the Epicureanism of his youth to the Platonism of his old age. ;Part Three culminates with a discussion of the philosophy of Jonathan Edwards. Edwards' own version of immaterialism, like Berkeley's later theory, had a strongly Platonist flavour. But, unlike Berkeley, Edwards drew on a sequence of seventeenth century theories concerning the relation between incorporeal extension and the divine substance. This enabled him to achieve a clearer conception of the divine ideas---the ones doing all the work in a Platonist immaterialist theory---than Berkeley ever managed. (shrink)