Women Philosophers of Seventeenth-Century England

2019 ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Early Modern ◽  
John Locke ◽  
Natural Philosophy ◽  
Early Modern Period ◽  
Moral Theology ◽  
Philosophical Discussion ◽  
Intellectual Context ◽  
And Gender ◽  
Women Philosophers ◽  
Henry More

This volume is an edited collection of private letters and published epistles to and from English women philosophers of the early modern period (c. 1650–1700). It includes the letters and epistles of Margaret Cavendish, Anne Conway, Damaris Cudworth Masham, and Elizabeth Berkeley Burnet. These women were the correspondents of some of the best-known intellectuals of the period, including Constantijn Huygens, Walter Charleton, Henry More, Joseph Glanvill, John Locke, Jean Le Clerc, and Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz. Their epistolary exchanges range over a wide variety of philosophical subjects, from religion, moral theology, and ethics to epistemology, metaphysics, and natural philosophy. The volume includes a main introduction by the editor, which explains the significance of the letters and epistles with respect to early modern scholarship and the study of women philosophers. It is argued that this selection of texts demonstrates the intensely collaborative and gender-inclusive nature of philosophical discussion in this period. To help situate each woman’s thought in its historical-intellectual context, the volume also includes original introductory essays for each principal figure, showing how her correspondences contributed to the formation of her own views as well as those of her better-known male contemporaries. The text also provides detailed scholarly annotations, explaining obscure philosophical ideas and archaic words and phrases in the letters and epistles. Among its critical apparatus, the volume also includes a note on the texts, a bibliography, and an index.

Reason of State(s) and Reasons of Church

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Stefania Tutino
Keyword(s):  
Early Modern ◽  
Natural Philosophy ◽  
Moral Theology ◽  
The Political ◽  
Early Modern Europe ◽  
Natural Philosopher ◽  
Political Rivalry ◽  
Recent Developments ◽  
History Of ◽  
Intellectual Context

This chapter uses the case of the French Jesuit natural philosopher and moral theologian Honoré Fabri as a lens through which we can analyze the polemical, political, ecclesiological, and theological battles between Jesuits and Jansenists that exploded in the second half of the seventeenth century, especially after the publication of Pascal’s Provincial Letters. This chapter shows that the debates on moral theology must be seen within a wider intellectual context, including the recent developments in the realm of natural philosophy, and were inextricably linked to the political history of early modern Europe, and especially to the political rivalry between France and Spain.

Introduction

2019 ◽  
pp. 1-8
Keyword(s):  
Modern Philosophy ◽  
Early Modern ◽  
Natural Philosophy ◽  
Moral Theology ◽  
Strong Sense ◽  
Margaret Cavendish ◽  
Strong Indication ◽  
And Gender ◽  
Theology And Philosophy ◽  
Insight Into

The introduction provides a succinct overview of the main philosophical themes and issues in the selected letters and epistles of four early modern English women: Margaret Cavendish, Anne Conway, Damaris Cudworth Masham, and Elizabeth Berkeley Burnet. It is argued that their correspondences make a valuable contribution to the study of early modern philosophy. To begin with, they provide a strong sense of the collaborative, dialogical, and gender-inclusive nature of the philosophical enterprise in this period in England (c. 1650–1700). They also give a strong indication of women’s own original philosophical viewpoints, as well as some insight into the genesis and development of each figure’s mature thought in her later published work. The introduction concludes with a brief survey of the main philosophical themes in the texts, ranging from metaphysics, epistemology, and natural philosophy, to ethics, moral theology, and philosophy of religion more generally.

Quakers, Christ, and the Enlightenment

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Madeleine Pennington
Keyword(s):  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
Early Modern ◽  
John Locke ◽  
Religious Groups ◽  
Baruch Spinoza ◽  
Intellectual Engagement ◽  
The Enlightenment ◽  
Intellectual Milieu ◽  
Henry More ◽  
Central Belief

The Quakers were by far the most successful of the radical religious groups to emerge from the turbulence of the mid-seventeenth century—and their survival into the present day was largely facilitated by the transformation of the movement during its first fifty years. What began as a loose network of charismatic travelling preachers was, by the start of the eighteenth century, a well-organized and international religious machine. This shift is usually explained in terms of a desire to avoid persecution, but Quakers, Christ and the Enlightenment argues instead for the importance of theological factors as the major impetus for change. In the first sustained account of the theological motivations guiding the development of seventeenth-century Quakerism, the volume explores the Quakers’ positive intellectual engagement with those outside the movement to offer a significant reassessment of the causal factors determining the development of early Quakerism. Tracing the Quakers’ engagement with such luminaries as Baruch Spinoza, Henry More, John Locke, and John Norris, the volume unveils the Quakers’ concerted attempts to bolster their theological reputation through the refinement of their central belief in the ‘inward Christ’, or ‘the Light within’. In doing so, the study challenges persistent stereotypes of early modern radicalism as anti-intellectual and ill-educated—and indeed, as defined either by ‘rationalist’ or ‘spiritualist’ excess. Rather, the theological concerns of the Quakers and their interlocutors point to a crisis of Christology weaving through the intellectual milieu of the seventeenth century, which has long been underestimated as significant fuel for the emerging Enlightenment

Henry More and William Petty: Revisiting an Early Modern Polemic

2018 ◽  
Vol 23 (3) ◽  
pp. 244-264 ◽  
Author(s):  
Mihnea Dobre
Keyword(s):  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
Early Modern ◽  
Natural Philosophy ◽  
Henry More ◽  
Epistolary Exchange

Abstract This paper explores an overlooked aspect of the brief but intense correspondence between William Petty and Henry More, making use of the Hartlib Papers Online. Traditionally, the brief epistolary exchange between More and Petty has been seen in the light of an opposition between Cartesian rationalism and Baconian empiricism. A look at the original manuscripts, however, shows that the opposition was not originally framed in those terms at all. This article draws attention to the actors’ original categories, and places this exchange in the evolving landscape of seventeenth-century natural philosophy.

Bacon’s Novum organum

2021 ◽  
Vol 58 (3) ◽  
pp. 38-46
Author(s):  
Elodie Cassan ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Early Modern ◽  
Scientific Reasoning ◽  
Natural Philosophy ◽  
Early Modern Period ◽  
Direct Access ◽  
Modern Period ◽  
The World ◽  
Two Sides ◽  
The Way

Dan Garber’s paper provides materials permitting to reply to an objection frequently made to the idea that the Novum Organum is a book of logic, as the allusion to Aristotle’s Organon included in the very title of this book shows it is. How can Bacon actually build a logic, considering his repeated claims that he desires to base natural philosophy directly on observation and experiment? Garber shows that in the Novum Organum access to experience is always mediated by particular questions and settings. If there is no direct access to observation and experience, then there is no point in equating Bacon’s focus on experience in the Novum Organum with a rejection of discursive issues. On the contrary, these are two sides of the same coin. Bacon’s articulation of rules for the building of scientific reasoning in connection with the way the world is, illustrates his massive concern with the relation between reality, thinking and language. This concern is essential in the field of logic as it is constructed in the Early Modern period.

Early Modern Theology and Science

2014 ◽  
pp. 607-624
Author(s):  
John Henry
Keyword(s):  
Early Modern ◽  
Natural Philosophy ◽  
Natural Theology ◽  
Laws Of Nature ◽  
Early Modern Period ◽  
Mechanical Philosophy ◽  
The Bible ◽  
Theology And Science ◽  
Natural Philosophers

This chapter surveys prominent aspects of historical relations between theology and science in the early modern period. It argues that the medieval “handmaiden tradition,” in which natural philosophy was seen as a support to theology, continued throughout the period but with apologetic complications caused by the fragmentation of religious authority, and the proliferation of alternative new philosophies. It considers the mechanical philosophy and the concomitant concept of laws of nature, and their impact on mind-body dualism, and the development of natural theology. It also considers the role of natural philosophy in the rise of atheism, arguing that it did not create atheists, but was appropriated by them. Devout natural philosophers played into the hands of atheists by arguing among themselves as to the best way to combat atheism, and by taking a naturalistic line in their arguments, relegating God to the role of a remote primary cause and increasingly denying Providence. Finally, it considers persistent suggestions that Protestantism played a greater role in the promotion of the natural sciences than Catholicism. We consider here claims about millennialism as a stimulus to science; the effect of Protestant attitudes to the Bible and how it should be read,; and the role of Augustinian post-lapsarian anthropology.

The Concept “Fact”: Legal Origins and Cultural Diffusion

1994 ◽  
Vol 26 (1) ◽  
pp. 1-25 ◽  
Author(s):  
Barbara Shapiro
Keyword(s):  
Early Modern ◽  
Natural Philosophy ◽  
Early Modern Period ◽  
Experimental Science ◽  
Social Scientists ◽  
The Third ◽  
Legal Origins ◽  
Cultural Diffusion ◽  
Modern Period ◽  
Fact Finding

Facts are something we take for granted, at least most of the time. As ordinary individuals we assume that there are knowable facts, for instance, that the dog chewed the drapes, that England exists, that it rained yesterday, or that babies cry. If, as scholars, that is as historians, social scientists, and natural scientists, we are more aware of the problematical nature of “facts” we nevertheless tend to establish and use facts rather unselfconsciously in our work. On this occasion I want to look at the evolution of the concept of “fact,” and in particular the way “fact” entered English natural philosophy. I will attempt to show that the concept of “fact” or “matter of fact,” so prominent in the English empirical tradition, is an adaptation or borrowing from another discipline—jurisprudence, and that many of the assumptions and much of the technology of fact-finding in law were carried over into the experimental science of the seventeenth century.My paper has three parts. The first discusses the nature of legal facts and fact-finding in the early modern period, focusing on the distinction between “matters of fact” and “matters of law,” the emphasis on first hand testimony by credible witnesses, the preference for direct testimony over inference, and legal efforts to create and maintain impartial proceedings. The second portion attempts to show how legal methods and assumptions were adopted by early modern historiographers and other fact-oriented reporters. The third section attempts to show how the legally constructed concept of “fact” or “matter of fact” was transferred to natural history and natural philosophy and generalized in Locke's empirical philosophy.

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