Scene Setting

Author(s):  
Emily Thomas

Absolute Time studies roughly a century of British metaphysics, starting from the 1640s. This chapter contextualizes this period of history, both philosophically and more widely. It opens with a speedy and extremely selective Cook’s tour of the history of philosophy of time leading up to seventeenth-century philosophy, emphasizing the work of Aristotle and Plotinus. It continues by describing the metaphysics of time found in a variety of early seventeenth-century British philosophers. The final part of this chapter enters into the wider history of the period, discussing non-philosophical reasons that may have played a role in increasing early modern interest in time: horology, chronology, and apocalypse studies.

2016 ◽  
Vol 2 (3) ◽  
pp. 365-383 ◽  
Author(s):  
LISA SHAPIRO

ABSTRACT:I reflect critically on the early modern philosophical canon in light of the entrenchment and homogeneity of the lineup of seven core figures: Descartes, Spinoza, Leibniz, Locke, Berkeley, Hume, and Kant. After distinguishing three elements of a philosophical canon—a causal story, a set of core philosophical questions, and a set of distinctively philosophical works—I argue that recent efforts contextualizing the history of philosophy within the history of science subtly shift the central philosophical questions and allow for a greater range of figures to be philosophically central. However, the history of science is but one context in which to situate philosophical works. Looking at the historical context of seventeenth-century philosophy of mind, one that weaves together questions of consciousness, rationality, and education, does more than shift the central questions—it brings new ones to light. It also shows that a range of genres can be properly philosophical and seamlessly diversifies the central philosophers of the period.


Author(s):  
Christia Mercer

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.


Author(s):  
Matt Waldschlagel

This paper examines an important episode in the history of early modern physics – the Leibniz-Clarke correspondence of 1715-16, an exchange that occurred at the intersection of physics, metaphysics and theology – before turning to questions of interpretation in the historiography of physics.  Samuel Clarke, a disciple of Isaac Newton, engaged in a dispute over Newton’s commitment to absolute space and absolute time with Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz, who criticized Newton’s views and advanced a rival account.  I clarify the positions at stake in the Leibniz-Clarke correspondence, define a variety of terms – absolute space, absolute time, substantivalism, and relationalism – endogenous to the exchange, and reconstruct key elements in the philosophical dimension of the dispute.  I then use the Leibniz-Clarke exchange as a springboard from which to examine interpretive considerations in the historiography of physics.  I argue that the history of physics can benefit from reassessing its historiographical commitments by borrowing or appropriating some of the intellectual resources used by philosophers working in the history of philosophy.  This historiographical reassessment, I contend, will not only shed new light on the Leibniz-Clarke exchange but may also reinvigorate the history of physics.


Religions ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 12 (8) ◽  
pp. 570
Author(s):  
James W. Watts

Leviticus 25:39–46 describes a two-tier model of slavery that distinguishes Israelites from foreign slaves. It requires that Israelites be indentured only temporarily while foreigners can be enslaved as chattel (permanent property). This model resembles the distinction between White indentured slaves and Black chattel slaves in the American colonies. However, the biblical influence on these early modern practices has been obscured by the rarity of citations of Lev. 25:39–46 in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century sources about slavery. This article reviews the history of slavery from ancient Middle Eastern antiquity through the seventeenth century to show the unique degree to which early modern institutions resembled the biblical model. It then exposes widespread knowledge of Leviticus 25 in early modern political and economic debates. Demonstrating this awareness shows with high probability that colonial cultures presupposed the two-tier model of slavery in Leviticus 25:39–46 to naturalize and justify their different treatment of White indentured slaves and Black chattel slaves.


2015 ◽  
Vol 26 (1) ◽  
pp. 226-242
Author(s):  
Strahinja Djordjevic

McTaggart?s explanation of the human understanding of time, which uses the time series, is a significant moment in the history of philosophy, and his attempt to prove time?s unreality had strong but diverse reactions. The majority of thinkers who wrote after him agree that time is indeed real, but the intellectual division that was created around the question of which part of the paradox in dispute will dominate philosophy of time in the 20th and 21st century. It can be concluded that both major theories within this field have an undeniable influence on the division of time series which McTaggart made. After analyzing the paradox, the focus will be on clarifying the debate between tensed and tenseless theorists. The former dispute the claim that the A-series is contradictory and argue that the tensed time is the proper determination of events in time, while the latter claim that the B-series is independent and that time can be determined only by temporal relations. By recognizing the differences between these two lines of thought, it will become easier to understand the nature of their relationship to the time series, namely by considering the ways in which they defend their own and attack the contrary view.


2018 ◽  
Vol 4 (2) ◽  
pp. 157-160
Author(s):  
Jorge Ledo

The aim of this volume is not to offer a comprehensive overview of the multifarious aspects of fiction and its implications for early modern philosophy, but to be an invitation, from the standpoint of the history of philosophy, to survey some of the fundamental problems of the field, using six case-studies written by some of the finest international scholars in their respective areas of Renaissance studies. Although perhaps not evident at a first reading, these six studies are linked by common concerns such as the theoretical relationship between (literary) history, rhetoric, poetics, and philosophy; the tensions between res, verba, and imago; and the concept of enargeia. They have been arranged according to the chronology of the corpus each one considers.


Sederi ◽  
2009 ◽  
pp. 153-174
Author(s):  
Javier Ruano García

The analysis of regional dialects in the Early Modern period has commonly been disregarded in favour of an ample scholarly interest in the ‘authorised’ version of English which came to be eventually established as a standard. The history of regional ‘Englishes’ at this time still remains to a very great extent in oblivion, owing mainly to an apparent scarcity of sources which supply trustworthy data. Research in this field has been for the most part focused on phonological, orthographical and morphological traits by virtue of the rather more abundant information that dialect testimonies yield about them. Regional lexical diversity has, on the contrary, deserved no special attention as uncertainty arises with regard to what was provincially restricted and what was not. This paper endeavours to offer additional data to the gloomy lexical scene of Early Modern regional English. It is our aim to give a descriptive account of the dialect words collated by Bishop White Kennett’s glossary to Parochial Antiquities (1695). This underutilised specimen does actually widen the information furnished by other well known canonical word-lists and provides concrete geographical data that might help us contribute to complete the sketchy map of lexical provincialisms at the time.


The Perraults ◽  
2018 ◽  
pp. 1-14
Author(s):  
Oded Rabinovitch

The introduction sets the story of the Perraults against the backdrop of early modern France. It covers the transformation of French culture in the seventeenth century (in its different dimenstion: geographical, social, and institutional, including the rise of academies and salons, the court at Versailles), the history of intellectual families, notions of family strategy, and the use of networks in historical analysis. It also includes an outline of the chapters.


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