George Berkeley and Early Modern Philosophy

Author(s):  
Stephen H. Daniel

This book focuses on how, for Berkeley, mind is related to its ideas. It does not assume that thinkers like Descartes, Malebranche, or Locke define for Berkeley the context in which he develops his own thought. Instead, it indicates how he draws on a tradition that informed his early training and that challenges much of the early modern thought with which he is often associated. Specifically, this book indicates how Berkeley’s distinctive treatment of mind (as the activity whereby objects are differentiated and related to one another) highlights how mind neither precedes the existence of objects nor exists independently of them. This distinctive way of understanding the relation of mind and objects allows Berkeley to appropriate ideas from his contemporaries in ways that so transform the issues with which he is engaged that his insights—for example, about how God creates the minds that perceive objects—are only now starting to be fully appreciated.

Oxford Studies in Early Modern Philosophy is an annual series, presenting a selection of the best current work in the history of early modern philosophy. It focuses on the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries—the extraordinary period of intellectual flourishing that begins, roughly, with Descartes and his contemporaries and ends with Kant. It also publishes work on thinkers or movements outside of that framework, provided they are important in illuminating early modern thought. The core of the subject matter is philosophy and its history. But the volume’s chapters reflect the fact that philosophy in the early modern period was much broader in its scope than it is currently taken to be and included a great deal of what now belongs to the natural sciences. Furthermore, philosophy in the period was closely connected with other disciplines, such as theology, law and medicine, and with larger questions of social, political, and religious history. Volume 10 includes chapters dedicated to a wide set of topics in the philosophies of Thomas White, Spinoza, Locke, Leibniz, and Hume.


Oxford Studies in Early Modern Philosophy is an annual series, presenting a selection of the best current work in the history of early modern philosophy. It focuses on the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries—the extraordinary period of intellectual flourishing that begins, roughly, with Descartes and his contemporaries and ends with Kant. It also publishes work on thinkers or movements outside of that framework, provided they are important in illuminating early modern thought. The core of the subject matter is philosophy and its history. But the volume’s chapters reflect the fact that philosophy in the early modern period was much broader in its scope than it is currently taken to be and included a great deal of what now belongs to the natural sciences. Furthermore, philosophy in the period was closely connected with other disciplines, such as theology, and with larger questions of social, political, and religious history. Volume 8 includes chapters dedicated to a wide set of topics in the philosophies of Descartes, Hobbes, Spinoza, Locke, Leibniz, Wolff, and Kant.


Oxford Studies in Early Modern Philosophy is an annual series, presenting a selection of the best current work in the history of early modern philosophy. It focuses on the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries—the extraordinary period of intellectual flourishing that begins, roughly, with Descartes and his contemporaries and ends with Kant. It also publishes work on thinkers or movements outside of that framework, provided they are important in illuminating early modern thought. The core of the subject matter is philosophy and its history. But the volume’s chapters reflect the fact that philosophy in the early modern period was much broader in its scope than it is currently taken to be and included a great deal of what now belongs to the natural sciences. Furthermore, philosophy in the period was closely connected with other disciplines, such as theology, law, and medicine, and with larger questions of social, political, and religious history. Volume 9 includes chapters dedicated to a wide set of topics in the philosophies of Descartes, Malebranche, Locke, Leibniz, Hume, and Kant.


Author(s):  
Marjorie Levinson

The Introduction explains the combination of a narrative arc and conceptual structure in the organization of the book. The former, primarily diachronic, discussion is concerned with the development of the field of Romanticism since the 1980s, presented through both a review of scholarship and exemplary readings of well-known lyric poems. The latter, predominantly synchronic, presentation entails an argument for the analytical value of field theories of form—that is, frameworks drawn from early modern philosophy (Spinoza) and postclassical life- and physical sciences, especially models of self-organization. As an alternative to the external, retrospective perspective provided by, for example, Rita Felski in The Limits of Critique, it draws on the work of Martin Heidegger, Pierre Macherey, and the poet-critic J. H. Prynne to offer a conjunctural approach.


Author(s):  
Michael Moriarty

Although the concept “baroque” is less obviously applicable to philosophy than to the visual arts and music, early modern philosophy can be shown to have connections with baroque culture. Baroque style and rhetoric are employed or denounced in philosophical controversies, to license or discredit a certain style of philosophizing. Philosophers engage with themes current in baroque literature (the mad world, the world as a stage, the quest for the self) and occasionally transform these into philosophical problems, especially of an epistemological kind (are the senses reliable? how far is our access to reality limited by our perspective?) Finally, the philosophies of Malebranche and Berkeley, with their radical challenges to so-called common sense, and their explanation of conventional understandings of the world as based on illusion, have something of the disturbing quality of baroque art and architecture.


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