scholarly journals Rational and natural theology in Anne Conway's Principia

2021 ◽  
Vol 74 (1) ◽  
pp. 41-51
Author(s):  
Jonathan Head
Keyword(s):  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
Natural Theology ◽  
Natural World ◽  
Philosophical Theology ◽  
Religious Epistemology

AbstractThis paper gives an account of the religious epistemology and theological working methods used in Anne Conway's Principia Philosophiae antiquissimae et recentissimae (1690). It is argued that the epistemic foundations of Conway's philosophical theology are rooted in a personal revelation of the existence and nature of God, which forms a framework through which the natural world can be approached and studied as creation. In this way, we can clarify both the place of Conway's work in the intellectual currents of the seventeenth century and various aspects of her metaphysical system, such as her account of creation.

The botanical works of Nehemiah Grew, F. R. S. (1641-1712)

1973 ◽  
Vol 27 (2) ◽  
pp. 219-231 ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
Natural World ◽  
Material Things

NEHEMIAH GREW was the first English plant anatomist. He was one of that closely knit group of amateur scientists of the seventeenth century who were consciously applying Baconian principles to the exploration of the natural world. The questions they were asking about material things were new questions, of limited and precise range. The answers they found helped to define the scope and content of new sciences, one by one. In this way Grew mapped out the science of botany. In the writings of these men are to be found a strenuous reaching towards a rational view and an attempt to discard the speculations and superstitions of past ages. Yet their work often showed a curious ambivalence, despite their brave words. They were men of both worlds and the old lies embedded undetected beside the new in their philosophy.

Fate of the Flesh

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Daniel Juan Gil
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
World View ◽  
Natural World ◽  
Social Identities ◽  
The Body ◽  
The Self ◽  
Avant Garde ◽  
Scientific World ◽  
The Social

In the seventeenth century, the hope for resurrection starts to be undermined by an emerging empirical scientific world view and a rising Cartesian dualist ontology that translates resurrection into more dualist terms. But poets pick up the embattled idea of resurrection of the body and bend it from a future apocalypse into the here and now so that they imagine the body as it exists now to be already infused with the strange, vibrant materiality of the “resurrection body.” This “resurrection body” is imagined as the precondition for the social identities and forms of agency of the social person, and yet the “resurrection body” also remains deeply other to all such identities and forms of agency, an alien within the self that both enables and undercuts life as a social person. Positing a “resurrection body” within the historical person leads seventeenth-century poets to use their poetry to develop an awareness of the unsettling materiality within the heart of the self and allows them to reimagine agency, selfhood, and the natural world in this light. In developing a poetics that seeks a deranging materialism within the self, these poets anticipate twentieth-century “avant-garde” poetics. They do not frame their poems as simple representation nor as beautiful objects but as a form of social praxis that creates new communities of readers and writers that are assembled by a new experience of self-as-body mediated by poetry.

Laws of God or Laws of Nature?

2019 ◽  
pp. 58-76 ◽  
Author(s):  
Peter Harrison
Keyword(s):  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
Laws Of Nature ◽  
Natural World ◽  
Natural Order ◽  
The World ◽  
Divine Commands ◽  
Theological Understanding ◽  
Will Of God

The appeal to laws of nature as an explanatory principle is often regarded as fundamental to naturalism. Yet when the idea that there were immutable, mathematical laws of nature first rose to prominence in the seventeenth century it was deeply connected to a theological understanding of natural order. Descartes thus imagined laws of nature to be divine commands, and attributed their immutability to the immutability of their divine source. For Descartes, Boyle, and Newton, the invariable uniformity of nature was understood as a consequence not of God’s withdrawal from the world, but of his direct and incessant engagement with it. It followed that the world was to be investigated empirically, because this was the only way in which the otherwise inscrutable will of God could be discerned. Over the course of the following centuries, however, laws came to be reimagined as simply observational generalizations, or brute features of the natural world.

Some Firsts

2021 ◽  
pp. 17-30
Author(s):  
Graham Mitchell
Keyword(s):  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
Old Testament ◽  
Thirteenth Century ◽  
Natural World ◽  
Northern Africa ◽  
Julius Caesar ◽  
The Public ◽  
Pliny The Elder ◽  
History Of ◽  
Public Lives

Although the public lives and history of giraffes have been well recorded in many books, the story of giraffes told in this book would be incomplete without a brief review of how giraffes first entered into the consciousness of those humans who did not live in Africa. They did so via art and literature. The first appearance of giraffes in literature is probably in the Old Testament, but after that, many other authors wrote of them, in particular Pliny the Elder. Their appearance in art begins with rock paintings in southern and northern Africa, and artwork in Egypt over the period 6000 to 3000 BC. More modern images began appearing ~AD 500 in the first texts that dealt with the natural world. Julius Caesar brought the first living giraffe to Europe, followed by Lorenzo de Medici in the thirteenth century. By the late seventeenth century they had disappeared from public view in Europe except as a stellar constellation.

Goodness, perfect

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Linda Zagzebski
Keyword(s):  
Sixteenth Century ◽  
Natural Theology ◽  
Central Place ◽  
Moral Sense ◽  
Philosophical Theology ◽  
Ancient Greek ◽  
Medieval Philosophy ◽  
Divine Attributes ◽  
Moral Concept ◽  
The Difference

The concept of perfect goodness had a central place in ancient Greek and medieval philosophy, and is still frequently discussed in contemporary natural theology. Medieval philosophers adopted the idea from the philosophies of Plato and Aristotle, with the difference that they identified perfect goodness with a personal God. In ancient and medieval philosophy the concept is primarily a metaphysical one, since goodness was thought to be extensionally equivalent to being, but it is secondarily a moral concept referring to the distinctive sort of goodness appropriate to those beings that have wills. Thus it is fundamental to a long tradition on the metaphysical basis of value which lasted from Plato until at least the sixteenth century. In Plato, perfect goodness is the Form of the Good, upon which everything that has being is ontologically and causally dependent. In Aristotle, the good is identified with the end or purpose of a natural being. The good is that towards which all things move for the fulfilment of their natures. By the time of Aquinas, medieval philosophers had identified the good in both the Platonic and Aristotelian senses with the Christian God and had argued that God is both the perfectly good creative source and the perfectly good end of all beings other than himself. The concept of a perfectly good being in Christian philosophical theology faces two major kinds of difficulty. One is the problem that perfect goodness appears to be incompatible with the divine attributes of omnipotence and freedom of the divine will. And if a perfectly good being does not have a will that is free in a morally significant sense, that being seems to lack goodness in the moral sense of goodness. The second kind of problem is that the existence of a being who is both omnipotent and perfectly good seems to be incompatible with the existence of evil. In spite of these problems, there is a strong attraction to the idea of a perfectly good God in contemporary philosophical theology. The category of perfect goodness is therefore one of the most persistent of the concepts in the Platonic legacy.

scholarly journals The Saline Chymistry of Color in Seventeenth-Century English Natural History

2015 ◽  
Vol 20 (4-6) ◽  
pp. 562-588 ◽  
Author(s):  
Anna Marie Roos
Keyword(s):  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
Natural History ◽  
Natural World ◽  
Analytical Tool ◽  
Robert Hooke ◽  
Robert Boyle ◽  
Seminal Work ◽  
Color Changes ◽  
Natural Philosophers

Before Newton’s seminal work on the spectrum, seventeenth-century English natural philosophers such as Robert Boyle, Robert Hooke, Nehemiah Grew and Robert Plot attributed the phenomenon of color in the natural world to salts and saline chymistry. They rejected Aristotelian ideas that color was related to the object’s hot and cold qualities, positing instead that saline principles governed color and color changes in flora, fauna and minerals. In our study, we also characterize to what extent chymistry was a basic analytical tool for seventeenth-century English natural historians.


Painted Gems. The Color Worlds of Portrait Miniature Painting in Sixteenth- and Seventeenth-Century Britain

2015 ◽  
Vol 20 (4-6) ◽  
pp. 428-457 ◽  
Author(s):  
Karin Leonhard
Keyword(s):  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
Natural World ◽  
Painting Technique ◽  
Close Affinity ◽  
Miniature Painting ◽  
Light And Shadow ◽  
Relationship Of ◽  
The Relationship ◽  
Precious Stones

It has been argued persuasively that we should see the art of the portrait miniaturist as being closely related to the art of the goldsmith – with the painted ‘jewel’ of the portrait set into a richly ornamented piece of jewelry. Indeed, there is a close affinity between Nicholas Hilliard’s art of portrait miniature painting and goldsmithery. His Treatise’s famous section devoted to precious stones reflects this idea, as it is concerned with the relationship of those stones to the colors used in the miniatures, colors that can be seen as surrogates for the stones themselves. Color, light and shadow – these three aspects of how to render the natural world into paint are closely related: it is the complexity of the relationship that demanded a painting technique that took care not to create chia­roscuro-effects and specifically not let color be ‘corrupted’ by shadows or ‘mixed’ with other colors.


scholarly journals Qohelet's concept of deity: A comparative-philosophical perspective

2013 ◽  
Vol 34 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Jacobus W. Gericke
Keyword(s):  
Religious Pluralism ◽  
Analytic Philosophy ◽  
Problem Of Evil ◽  
Religious Language ◽  
Philosophical Theology ◽  
Religious Epistemology ◽  
Existence Of God ◽  
Philosophical Perspective ◽  
The Problem Of Evil ◽  
Similarities And Differences

This article discusses the concept of deity in the book of Ecclesiastes (Qohelet) from the perspective of issues of interest in analytic philosophy of religion. Of concern are assumptions in the text about religion, the nature of religious language, religious epistemology, the concept of revelation, the attributes of the divine, the existence of God, the problem of evil, the relation between religion and morality and religious pluralism. A comparative philosophical clarification is offered with the aim of discerning similarities and differences between popular views in Christian philosophical theology and what, if anything, Qohelet took for granted on the same issues.

scholarly journals ECO-CRITICISM: HUMAN AND PHYSICAL WORLD RELATIONSHIP IN GULLIVER'S TRAVELS.

2021 ◽  
pp. 70-73
Author(s):  
Arunakumari S
Keyword(s):  
Natural Theology ◽  
English Literature ◽  
Physical World ◽  
Natural World ◽  
Human Beings ◽  
Old English Literature ◽  
Gulliver's Travels ◽  
Travel Books ◽  
Four Books ◽  
Children's Stories

This research paper studies a relationship between literature and the physical world is known as eco-criticism. In English Literature Eco criticism refers to specific types of texts.The word "Eco-criticism" depicts the images of nature, forests, animals, birds, seasons, rivers, cities, and flowers. In addition to novels, eco-criticism contains drama, poetry, travel books,cartoons,fables, short stories,movies, songs,games,children's stories and this is an Old English literature concept that's still trendy today,from Beowulf to the present writer.Animals have existed from the beginning of history. That means animals were depicted in literature since the start of history.When Christianity was introduced to the world, the Holy Bible says God created birds, animals first, at last man, it is called natural theology, and also nature is divine. Critics said,for western people's experience on earth is different from other people on the earth,Westerners believed in "Nature's uncountable sounds... have been deafening." The contrast, which is promoted by social anthropology of animism, highlights an element in contemporary society at large connection towards the physical world which is also gradually becoming a central focus when it comes to the environment."The natural world is a social and cultural category." In animistic traditions, those few who believe that perhaps the natural environment is inspirited, not only human beings, and also for life of animals, trees, and even "inert" entities like stones. Rivers and seas are seen as articulate and sometimes intelligible beings, capable of communicating and interacting with humankind for good and bad.There is also the language of animals,air,horses,lions,seas,trees,in the novel of Gulliver's Travels and in this novel animal world also have politics, rules of their society, they won't allow outsiders, and have own food, medicine, the different body structure of animals,these are the things we can see in Jonathan Swift's Gulliver Travels in all four books.

Leibniz's Key Philosophical Writings

2020 ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Natural Theology ◽  
Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz ◽  
Philosophical Theology ◽  
Modern Period ◽  
Human Understanding ◽  
Middle Period ◽  
Antoine Arnauld ◽  
First Time ◽  
Philosophical Writings ◽  
New System

Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz (1646–1716) is one of the most important and influential philosophers of the modern period, offering a wealth of original ideas in metaphysics, epistemology, ethics, and philosophical theology, among them his signature doctrines such as substance and monads, pre-established harmony, and optimism. This volume contains introductory chapters on eleven of Leibniz’s key philosophical writings, covering youthful works (“Confessio philosophi”, “De summa rerum”), seminal middle-period writings (“Discourse on Metaphysics”, “New System”), to masterpieces of his maturity (“Monadology”, “Discourse on the Natural Theology of the Chinese”), as well as his two main philosophical books (New Essays on Human Understanding, and Theodicy), and three of his most important philosophical correspondences, with Antoine Arnauld, Burcher de Volder, and Samuel Clarke. The chapters, written by internationally renowned experts on Leibniz, offer clear, accessible accounts of the ideas and arguments of these key writings, along with valuable information about their composition and context. By focusing on the primary texts, these chapters enable readers to attain a solid understanding of what each text says and why, and give them the confidence to read the texts themselves. Offering a detailed and chronological view of Leibniz’s philosophy and its development through some of his most important writings, this volume is an invaluable guide for those encountering Leibniz for the first time. However, the chapters also contain much material that will enrich the understanding of those already familiar with Leibniz’s ideas.

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