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.

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.

Early Modern Philosophy, 1600-1750

Philosophy ◽  
2016 ◽  
Author(s):  
Antonia LoLordo
Keyword(s):  
Modern Philosophy ◽  
Early Modern ◽  
21St Century ◽  
Western Europe ◽  
18Th Century ◽  
Natural Philosophy ◽  
The Other ◽  
Early Modern Philosophy ◽  
The United Kingdom ◽  
Academic Philosophy

In 21st century academic philosophy, “early modern philosophy” refers to the study of texts written in a specific time and place, and understood as works of philosophy in that context. The time is, roughly, the 17th century and the first half of the 18th century. This article is limited to philosophers who published or wrote most of their major works between 1600 and 1750, thus including Hume and Condillac but omitting near-contemporaries like Rousseau. The place is often described as Western Europe, but this is a bit misleading: with very few exceptions, the philosophers discussed here were from France, Holland, or what is now the United Kingdom. The traditional canon of Early Modern philosophers was very small: Locke, Berkeley, and Hume on one side of the English Channel; Descartes, Leibniz, and Spinoza on the other. In the last decades of the 20th century and first decades of the 21st century, the canon was expanded significantly. Two main factors drove the expansion of the canon. One was increased attention to works of what was then called natural philosophy, like Newton’s Philosophiae Naturalis Principia Mathematica. The other was increased attention to the work of women. This bibliography aims to capture some of this expansion, but still, hundreds of other works could have been included—and more will be as time goes on.

Anne Conway’s Response to Cartesianism

2019 ◽  
pp. 706-720
Author(s):  
Christia Mercer
Keyword(s):  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
Modern Philosophy ◽  
Early Modern ◽  
History Of Philosophy ◽  
Early Modern Women ◽  
History Of ◽  
Radical Ideas ◽  
Insight Into

Anne Conway (1631–79) was an English philosopher whose only work, The Principles of the Most Ancient and Modern Philosophy, was published posthumously in 1690. Conway’s arguments against Descartes’s account of matter constitute a cutting criticism of his views and offer significant insight into an important and under-studied anti-Cartesian trend in the second half of the seventeenth century. Conway’s response to Descartes helps us discern some of the more original and radical ideas in her philosophy. Like so many other significant early modern women, Conway was left out of the history of philosophy by later thinkers.

Introduction

2019 ◽  
pp. 1-18
Author(s):  
Tim Stuart-Buttle
Keyword(s):  
Modern Philosophy ◽  
Early Modern ◽  
Moral Philosophy ◽  
David Hume ◽  
John Locke ◽  
Moral Theology ◽  
Philosophical Tradition ◽  
Recent Scholarship ◽  
Historical Relationship ◽  
The Relationship

This chapter introduces the key themes and questions to be explored in the work. In particular, it discusses the tendency of much recent scholarship on early-modern philosophy to emphasize the importance of two late Hellenistic philosophical traditions: the Stoic and the Epicurean. It indicates that three important British writers—John Locke, Conyers Middleton, and David Hume—deliberately and explicitly aligned their approaches with Cicero, as the representative of an alternative philosophical tradition: academic scepticism. This, they argued, offered the conceptual resources more satisfactorily to address a question that contemporaries recognized to be particularly pressing: the relationship between moral theology and moral philosophy. It further yielded highly distinctive narratives of the historical relationship between classical moral philosophy and the Christian moral theology which had appropriated and displaced it. These narratives were in turn challenged by Shaftesbury and Mandeville, who placed themselves (respectively) within the Stoic and Epicurean traditions.

scholarly journals O trzech rodzajach abstrakcji

2020 ◽  
Vol 15 (3) ◽  
pp. 7-16
Author(s):  
Damian Leszczyński
Keyword(s):  
Modern Philosophy ◽  
Early Modern ◽  
Natural Sciences ◽  
Early Modern Philosophy ◽  
The Third ◽  
The Subject ◽  
Classical Philosophy ◽  
Method Of Abstraction ◽  
Insight Into

The article discusses three ways of applying the method of abstraction in philosophical research. The first is related to classical philosophy and Aristotle’s method, the second to early modern philosophy referring to mathematics and natural sciences as a model, and the third one to broadly understood transcen-dental philosophy, using a specific type of insight into the structure of the subject.

Bears in Eden, or, this is not the garden you're looking for: Margaret Cavendish, Robert Hooke and the limits of natural philosophy

2015 ◽  
Vol 48 (4) ◽  
pp. 583-605 ◽  
Author(s):  
IAN LAWSON
Keyword(s):  
Early Modern ◽  
New World ◽  
Experimental Philosophy ◽  
Natural Philosophy ◽  
Margaret Cavendish ◽  
Robert Hooke ◽  
Useful Knowledge ◽  
Recent Scholarship ◽  
English Society

AbstractThis paper investigates Margaret Cavendish's characterization of experimental philosophers as hybrids of bears and men in her 1666 story The Description of a New World, Called the Blazing World. By associating experimental philosophers, in particular Robert Hooke and his microscope, with animals familiar to her readers from the sport of bear-baiting, Cavendish constructed an identity for the fellows of the Royal Society of London quite unlike that which they imagined for themselves. Recent scholarship has illustrated well how Cavendish's opposition to experimental philosophy is linked to her different natural-philosophical, political and anthropological ideas. My contribution to this literature is to examine the meanings both of bears in early modern England and of microscopes in experimental rhetoric, in order to illustrate the connection that Cavendish implies between the two. She parodied Hooke's idea that his microscope extended his limited human senses, and mocked his aim that by so doing he could produce useful knowledge. The bear-men reflect inhuman ambition and provide a caution against ignoring both the order of English society and the place of humans in nature.

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.

scholarly journals A Duchess “given to contemplation”: The Education of Margaret Cavendish

2021 ◽  
Vol 61 (2) ◽  
pp. 213-239
Author(s):  
E Mariah Spencer
Keyword(s):  
Early Modern ◽  
Natural Philosophy ◽  
Educational Theory ◽  
Mature Female ◽  
Early Modern England ◽  
Detailed Account ◽  
Margaret Cavendish ◽  
Pedagogical Beliefs ◽  
Female Author ◽  
Own Name

AbstractMargaret Cavendish was an unusually public figure in early modern England. She published widely under her own name on several secular subjects, including natural philosophy, inequality of the sexes, and educational theory. This article explores the development of Cavendish's educational theories through a detailed account of her life, which took place in three discrete stages. First, it examines her youth, when she was informally educated by family members and private tutors. It then follows her education as she traveled to Europe with her embattled queen and met her husband, William Cavendish. And finally, it shows that with William's support and patronage, Cavendish returned to England at the Restoration as a confident and mature female author. In doing so, this article addresses questions related to Cavendish's pedagogical beliefs, why those beliefs sometimes differed from her own experiences, and how she communicated these ideas through her literature.

A Trinitarian Natural Philosophy

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
David S. Sytsma
Keyword(s):  
Early Modern ◽  
Natural Philosophy ◽  
Robert Boyle ◽  
Tommaso Campanella ◽  
Theology And Philosophy ◽  
The Trinity

This chapter sets forth the theological motivations and basic contours of Baxter’s theory of nature. In contrast with early modern trends toward separation of the domains of theology and philosophy, Baxter sympathized with a tradition of Mosaic physics popular among early modern Calvinists. Baxter also identified with a medieval tradition of identifying traces of the Trinity (vestigia Trinitatis) in nature. These motivations informed an eclectic reception of the philosophies of Tommaso Campanella and Robert Boyle. Baxter divided reality into passive and active natures, and accommodated Boyle’s corpuscular philosophy in the passive inorganic realm while maintaining Aristotelian and scholastic concepts regarding the soul. His view of active natures and souls was informed by a tradition of reflection on vestigia Trinitatis and the philosophy of Campanella.

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