22 found
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  1. Voltaire on Liberty.David Wootton - 2022 - Journal des Economistes Et des Etudes Humaines 28 (1):59-90.
    This article sets forth Voltaire’s philosophy of liberty. Contrary to generally accepted readings, which take Voltaire at face value rather than considering the environment in which he wrote, Voltaire had a clear normative political thought. He was an early proponent of rule of law, ordered liberty, freedom of conscience and expression, and the right to prudent rebellion against tyranny. At the root of his political theory lay a rejection of slavery, and hence of all forms of subjugation.
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  2.  10
    Voltaire: from Newtonianism to Spinozism.David Wootton - 2024 - History of European Ideas 50 (6):917-938.
    The question of Voltaire’s belief in (or lack of belief in) God is a vexed one. René Pomeau’s classic study of 1956 argued that Voltaire believed in a God who would punish and reward in the next life. More recently Gerhardt Stenger has shown that, at least after 1764, Voltaire adopted a moderated form of Spinozism. He consistently rejected a materialist atheism on the grounds that the universe showed evidence of intelligent design, and appealed to Spinoza against d’Holbach. This article (...)
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  3.  13
    Falsifying history: Voltaire’s lost reply to David Boullier on Pascal and Locke.David Wootton - 2025 - History of European Ideas 51 (2):185-197.
    This article argues that Voltaire’s supposed letter to ’s Gravesande of 1741 was written for publication after ’s Gravesande’s death. It is thus Voltaire’s reply to David Boullier’s critique of the Lettres philosophiques. The willingness of Voltaire scholars to mistake this for a genuine letter results from a naïve desire to avoid acknowledging Voltaire’s habit of falsifying the historical record. An appendix argues that Letter Twenty-Five of the Lettres philosophiques, on Pacal, was influenced by a reading of Pope’s Essay on (...)
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  4. The Coming of the Book: The Impact of Printing, 1450-1800.Lucien Febvre, Henri-Jean Martin, David Gerard, Geoffrey Nowell-Smith & David Wootton - 1978 - Science and Society 42 (1):119-120.
     
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  5.  6
    The Invention of Science: A New History of the Scientific Revolution.David Wootton - 2016 - London: Allen Lane.
    We live in a world made by science. How and when did this happen? This book tells the story of the extraordinary intellectual and cultural revolution that gave birth to modern science, and mounts a major challenge to the prevailing orthodoxy of its history. David Wootton's landmark book changes our understanding of how this great transformation came about, and of what science is.
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  6. Hume's ''Of Miracles'': Probability and Irreligion'.David Wootton - 1990 - In Michael Alexander Stewart, Studies in the philosophy of the Scottish enlightenment. New York: Oxford University Press. pp. 191--229.
  7.  7
    The Enlightenment’s most dangerous woman: Emilie Du Ch'telet and the making of modern philosophy.David Wootton - forthcoming - Annals of Science.
    Emilie Du Châtelet (1706–1749) is the author of the Institutions de physique (1740; revised 1742), and of a two-volume translation of Newton’s Mathematical Principles of Natural Philosophy accompan...
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  8.  15
    Divine Right and Democracy: An Anthology of Political Writing in Stuart England.David Wootton - 2003 - Hackett Publishing Company.
    The seventeenth century was England’s century of revolution, an era in which the nation witnessed protracted civil wars, the execution of a king, and the declaration of a short-lived republic. During this period of revolutionary crisis, political writers of all persuasions hoped to shape the outcome of events by the force of their arguments. To read the major political theorists of Stuart England is to be plunged into a world in which many of our modern conceptions of political rights and (...)
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  9.  1
    Power, Pleasure, and Profit: Insatiable Appetites from Machiavelli to Madison.David Wootton - 2018 - Boston: Harvard University Press.
    A provocative history of the changing values that have given rise to our present discontents. We pursue power, pleasure, and profit. We want as much as we can get, and we deploy instrumental reasoning—cost-benefit analysis—to get it. We judge ourselves and others by how well we succeed. It is a way of life and thought that seems natural, inevitable, and inescapable. As David Wootton shows, it is anything but. In Power, Pleasure, and Profit, he traces an intellectual and cultural revolution (...)
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  10. David Hume: "the historian".David Wootton - 1993 - In David Fate Norton & Jacqueline Taylor, The Cambridge Companion to Hume. New York: Cambridge University Press. pp. 281--312.
     
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  11.  76
    Helvétius.David Wootton - 2000 - Political Theory 28 (3):307-336.
    It is a remarkable fact that of all the ideas and aspirations which led up to the Revolution the concept and desire of political liberty, in the full sense of the term, were the last to emerge, as they were also the first to pass away. Alexis de Tocqueville.
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  12. Pierre Bayle, libertine?David Wootton - 1997 - In Michael Alexander Stewart, Studies in seventeenth-century European philosophy. New York: Oxford University Press.
     
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  13. Utopia: With Erasmus's "The Sileni of Alcibiades".Thomas More & David Wootton - 1999 - Utopian Studies 10 (2):297-300.
  14. Candide and Related Texts.David Wootton - 2001 - Utopian Studies 12 (2):394-395.
  15. ch. 5. Machiavelli and the business of politics.David Wootton - 2016 - In Timothy Fuller, Machiavelli's legacy: The Prince after five hundred years. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press.
     
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  16.  64
    Deities, Devils, and Dams: Elizabeth I, Dover Harbour and the Family of Love.David Wootton - 2009 - In Wootton David, Proceedings of the British Academy, Volume 162, 2008 Lectures. pp. 45.
    This lecture presents the text of the speech about Elizabeth I Queen of England delivered by the author at the 2008 Raleigh Lecture on History held at the British Academy. It explores the religious movement called the Family of Love and discusses Sir Walter Raleigh's knowledge about the discourse on Dover Harbour, which was later spuriously attributed to him. The lecture provides an excerpt and interpretation of Queen Elizabeth's poem titled On Monsieur's Departure.
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  17. John donnes religion of love.David Wootton - 2005 - In John Hedley Brooke & Ian Maclean, Heterodoxy in Early Modern Science and Religion. Oxford University Press.
     
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  18.  21
    Locke: Political Writings.David Wootton (ed.) - 1993 - Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing Company.
    John Locke's _Second Treatise of Government_ is perhaps the key founding liberal text. _A Letter Concerning Toleration_, written in 1685, is a classic defense of religious freedom. Yet many of Locke's other writings--not least the Constitutions of Carolina, which he helped draft--are almost defiantly anti-liberal in outlook. This comprehensive collection brings together the main published works with the most important surviving evidence from among Locke’s papers relating to his political philosophy. David Wootton's wide-ranging and scholarly Introduction sets the writings in (...)
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  19.  98
    Modern Political Thought: Readings From Machiavelli to Nietzsche.David Wootton (ed.) - 2008 - Hackett Publishing Company.
    The second edition of David Wootton's Modern Political Thought: Readings from Machiavelli to Nietzsche offers a new unit on modern constitutionalism with selections from Hume, Montesquieu, the Federalist, and Constant. In addition to a new essay by Wootton, this unit features his new translation of Constant's 1819 essay "On Ancient and Modern Liberty". Other changes include expanded selections from Machiavelli's Discourses on Livy and a new Hegel selection, all of which strengthen an already excellent anthology.
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  20.  35
    Narrative, irony, and faith in Gibbon's Decline and Fall.David Wootton - 1994 - History and Theory 33 (4):77-105.
    This article is divided into three sections. The first argues that the significance of David Hume's History of England as an inspiration for Gibbon's Decline and Fall has been underestimated, and that Momigliano's famous account of Gibbon's originality needs to be adapted to take account of the fact that Gibbon was, in effect, a disciple of Hume. Hume and Gibbon, I argue, shaped our modern understanding of "history" by producing narratives rather than annals, encyclopedias, or commentaries. Moreover, they made history (...)
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  21.  2
    The Reception of Emilie Du Châtelet: Enlightenment Philosophy and the Patriarchy.David Wootton - forthcoming - History of European Ideas.
    Andrew Janiak has recently claimed that Mme Du Châtelet was “the Enlightenment's most dangerous woman.” There is no evidence that contemporaries regarded her as dangerous. There is no evidence that contemporaries (publishing in French, in France, during her lifetime) took exception to a woman philosopher, or regarded her epistemology as innovative and/or subversive. The claim that she was dangerous is thus a peculiar one, as it is unsupported by any empirical evidence. A consideration of the various meanings of the word (...)
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  22.  27
    Meaning and Context: Quentin Skinner and his Critics. [REVIEW]David Wootton - 1992 - Noûs 26 (3):377-379.
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