The intellectual origins of the Royal Society-London or Oxford?

1968 ◽  
Vol 23 (2) ◽  
pp. 144-156 ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
Intellectual History ◽  
Royal Society ◽  
Invisible College ◽  
English Revolution ◽  
Intellectual Origins ◽  
History Of ◽  
John Wilkins ◽  
Oxford Group ◽  
The Invisible

The Royal Society was founded in 1660 at Gresham College. Even in the seventeenth century divergent views arose among its founders as to its intellectual origins and the events which led up to its foundation. So it is not surprising that echoes of these divergences were heard when the Society was celebrating its Tercentenary in 1960. The main points in debate were the extent of Francis Bacon’s influence on its foundation, and the respective contributions of the related groups in London and Oxford. Miss Syfret had already successfully challenged Thomas Birch’s view that the ‘Invisible College’ mentioned by Boyle and centring round Hartlib was in any direct way linked with the foundation of the Royal Society. Professor Douglas McKie in Origins and Founders brought both the London and Oxford groups into his account, and his and Miss Syfret’s interpretations seemed to fit one another (1). However, a booklet from Oxford written by Miss (now Dr) Margery Purver and Dr E. J. Bowen claimed that John Wilkins and the Oxford group were the only begetters of the Royal Society, and rejected John Wallis’s claims for the earlier London group around Gresham College. Dr Purver has elaborated the arguments in favour of this view in a recently published book (2). The Editor of Notes and Records has now asked me to put on record my own views, since I had already discussed this aspect of the intellectual history of the period in my Intellectual Origins of the English Revolution (1965).

scholarly journals The visit of Comenius to London in 1641-1642 and its bearing on the origins of the Royal Society

1940 ◽  
Vol 3 (1) ◽  
pp. 159-160 ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Royal Society ◽  
Scientific Method ◽  
Scientific Research ◽  
Great Society ◽  
Invisible College ◽  
Oxford University ◽  
Important Stage ◽  
Universal Language ◽  
John Wilkins ◽  
The Invisible

Miss Dorothy Stimson, Dean of Groucher College, U.S.A., in an article in Isis for 1 September 1935, tried to traverse the view stated in the Introduction to my Comenius in England (Oxford University Press (1932)), pp. 6-7, that the visit of Comenius (Komensky) to London in 1641-1642 marked an important stage in the development in England of the idea of a great society for scientific research which resulted in the organization of the informal ‘Invisible College’ by Theodore Haak and others in 1645, and prepared the way for the foundation of the Royal Society in 1662. She was however unable to explain away the fact that Theodore Haak, who was one of the most active supporters of Komensky’s plan for a Scientific College in 1641, was in 1645 the virtual founder of the informal ‘Invisible College,’ the precursor of the Royal Society. Miss Stimson stresses the contrast between the universal speculative plan of Comenius as outlined in his Via Lucis (1642), and the empirical and specialized activities of the Invisible College. Miss Stimson however has completely overlooked the fact that John Wilkins (1614-1672), Warden of Wadham College, Oxford, whom she rightly regards as one of the most active members of the Invisible College, held views very similar to those of Comenius on scientific method and on the desirability of a universal language.

Samuel Hartlib’s influence on the early history of The Royal Society

1953 ◽  
Vol 10 (2) ◽  
pp. 101-130 ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Royal Society ◽  
Early History ◽  
Circumstantial Evidence ◽  
Invisible College ◽  
History Of ◽  
Scientific Group ◽  
The Invisible

In a valuable article 1 on ‘The origins of the Royal Society’ Miss R. H. Syfret considers various possible influences on the foundation of the Royal Society, among them that of John Amos Comenius and his group of friends in England, particularly Samuel Hartlib and Theodore Haak. She mentions also J. V. Andreae, to whose writings Comenius owed much, but comes to the conclusion that he was only one of many influences on the schemes of what she calls the Comenian group and that his connexion with the Royal Society, depending as it does on his relation to the Comenian group and then on their relation to the Royal Society, is at best remote and indirect. 2 She then considers the question of the connexion between the Comenian group and the group that in 1645 began the meetings which led to the foundation of the Royal Society, and finds enough circumstantial evidence to show some connexion between the two groups.3 She holds that the publication of Comenius’s Via Lucis in 1668 and its dedication to the Royal Society supports, in a general way but by no means exclusively, the supposition of a connexion between the two groups. 4 She believes that, if the Invisible College were indeed, as has always been assumed, Dr Wallis’s scientific group, this fact would point quite conclusively to the Royal Society’s origins in the schemes of Samuel Hartlib ; but, after considering various points about the Invisible College, she concludes that it seems that it was something quite different from that group. 5

scholarly journals Seventeenth-Century ‘double writing’ schemes, and a 1676 letter in the phonetic script and real character of John Wilkins

2018 ◽  
Vol 72 (1) ◽  
pp. 7-23 ◽  
Author(s):  
William Poole
Keyword(s):  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
Royal Society ◽  
Artificial Language ◽  
Real Character ◽  
Robert Hooke ◽  
History Of ◽  
John Wilkins ◽  
First Time

Royal Society Classified Papers XVI contains a letter written in not one but two seemingly mysterious scripts. As a result, this letter has remained until now effectively illegible, and has been miscatalogued. These scripts are rare examples of the written forms devised by John Wilkins to accompany his proposals for an artificial language, published under the auspices of the Royal Society in 1668. This article therefore first correctly identifies and decodes this letter, which is shown to be from the Somersetshire clergyman Andrew Paschall to Robert Hooke in London in 1676, and then surveys other surviving texts written in Wilkins's scripts or language. Finally the article addresses the contents of the letter, namely its author's attempt to build a workable double writing device, in effect an early ‘pantograph’. Designs for such instruments had been much touted in the 1650s, and the complex history of such proposals is unravelled properly for the first time.

James Harrington

2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
Rachel Hammersley
Keyword(s):  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
Intellectual History ◽  
Political Debate ◽  
History Of Political Thought ◽  
English Revolution ◽  
Relevant Today ◽  
Literary Figure ◽  
History Of ◽  
Philosophical Debates ◽  
Political Thinker

James Harrington was a significant political and intellectual figure of the mid-seventeenth century, whose life and works embody the complex and contested web of political, religious and cultural ideas that lay at the heart of the English Revolution. His innovative constitutional proposals exercised a profound influence on political debate during that period and for at least two centuries thereafter, and his insights - particularly on democracy - remain relevant today. The complexity of Harrington’s thought has been under-appreciated by scholars in recent years due to the tendency to view him solely from the perspective of republicanism. While research into English republicanism has enriched accounts of seventeenth-century England and the history of political thought, it has also narrowed and obscured our perspective on Harrington. This book offers a broader account of Harrington’s life and work. It addresses Harrington’s contributions to the parliamentary cause and his role as the English agent of Charles I’s nephew, the Prince Elector Palatine. It takes seriously Harrington’s role as a literary figure and his engagement with historical, religious, scientific, and philosophical debates. It puts the case for Harrington as a radical political thinker, committed to democracy and social mobility. It also shows that in a variety of areas he deliberately pursued a middle path, or a balance, between different positions so as to promote reconciliation among a variety of groups. The broader view of Harrington offered here has implications both for our understanding of the seventeenth century and for the discipline of intellectual history.

Political Science

2018 ◽  
pp. 104-133
Author(s):  
Tita Chico
Keyword(s):  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
Political Institutions ◽  
Royal Society ◽  
Natural Philosophy ◽  
The Political ◽  
The Core ◽  
Gulliver's Travels ◽  
Experimental Project ◽  
History Of ◽  
Natural Philosophers

Late seventeenth-century natural philosophers inherited the conjunction of politics and science at the core of Francis Bacon’s experimental project. Thomas Sprat’s The History of the Royal Society, Margaret Cavendish’s The Blazing World, and Jonathan Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels use the conventions of literary knowledge to express their scientific-political visions, insisting that natural philosophy cannot be understood apart from the political institutions enabling and enabled by its practice and promulgation. These writers use the experimental imagination to envisage, in turn, civil government, absolutist monarchy, and imperialism. Sprat advances scientific triumphalism and a model for schooling gentlemen into civil society.

‘Philosophical’ grammar in John Wilkins’s ‘Essay’

1975 ◽  
Vol 20 (2) ◽  
pp. 131-160 ◽  
Author(s):  
Vivian Salmon
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
Royal Society ◽  
Natural Philosophy ◽  
Real Character ◽  
Philosophical Language ◽  
John Wilkins ◽  
Century Thought ◽  
Insight Into

Recent studies of John Wilkins, author ofAn essay towards a real character, and a philosophical language(1668) have examined aspects of his life and work which illustrate the modernity of his attitudes, both as a theologian, sympathetic to the ecumenical ideals of seventeenth-century reformers like John Amos Comenius (DeMott 1955, 1958), and as an amateur scientist enthusiastically engaged in forwarding the interests of natural philosophy in his involvement with the Royal Society. His linguistic work has, accordingly, been examined for its relevance to seventeenth-century thought and for evidence of its modernity; described by a twentieth-century scientist as “impressive” and as “a prodigious piece of work” (Andrade 1936:6, 7), theEssayhas been highly praised for its classification of reality (Vickery 1953:326, 342) and for its insight into phonetics and semantics (Linsky 1966:60). It has also, incidentally, been examined for the evidence it offers on seventeenth-century pronunciation (Dobson 1968).

Bulghaith al-Darawi and Barthélemy d'Herbelot: Readers of the Qur'an in Seventeenth-Century Tuscany

2018 ◽  
Vol 20 (3) ◽  
pp. 94-120
Author(s):  
Pier Mattia Tommasino
Keyword(s):  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
Intellectual History ◽  
History Of Reading ◽  
Textual Production ◽  
History Of ◽  
Muslim Scholars

This paper is an exercise in the history of reading and textual production in seventeeth-century Florence. Through the analysis of a very short and fascinating miscellaneous manuscript (BNCF, MS Magliabechi XXXIV.31), this article aims to disentangle the complex and intertwined relations between European orientalism, Italian intellectual history, and Muslim exegesis of the Qur'an in the seventeenth century. Despite its fragmentary nature, the material, linguistic, and doctrinal features of this miscellaneous manuscript shed new light on the study of Oriental languages in seventeenth-century Florence and, especially, on Barthélemy d'Herbelot's (1625–1695) stay in Tuscany between 1666 and 1671, and the Muslim scholars he worked with and learned from during this time.

Nathanael Vincent and Confucius's ‘great learning’ in restoration England

2005 ◽  
Vol 60 (1) ◽  
pp. 35-47 ◽  
Author(s):  
Matt Jenkinson
Keyword(s):  
Intellectual History ◽  
Royal Society ◽  
Chinese Culture ◽  
English Language ◽  
Great Learning ◽  
History Of ◽  
Restoration England ◽  
Charles Ii ◽  
First Time

This paper outlines the sinological activities of Nathanael Vincent (d. 1722), an obscure and elusive fellow of the Royal Society (1683–7; readmitted 1694) who was also fellow of Clare Hall in Cambridge and chaplain in ordinary to Charles II. An amateur scientist operating in the shadow of the great fellows of the early Royal Society, Vincent's involvement ranged from investigating the work of Denis Papin to presenting a manuscript of Isaac Newton's Philosophiæ Naturalis Principia Mathematica . However, his greatest contribution to the intellectual history of the Restoration is located in his 1685 translation of Confucius's ‘Great Learning’, which seems to be the first time that a Confucian book began to be printed in the English language. Hitherto unnoticed, hidden away in an appendix to a court sermon, it nonetheless represented part of the interest in Chinese culture in the circles of the early Royal Society. This paper places Vincent in the context of the activities of the early Royal Society and offers an overview of this interest in sinology. It then considers how Vincent gained access to Confucian texts, how he was able to ‘translate’ from them, and what ramifications the philosophy had for an Anglican divine in Restoration England.

The Wilkins Lecture - The missing link in horological history: a Chinese contribution

1959 ◽  
Vol 250 (1261) ◽  
pp. 147-179 ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Experimental Philosophy ◽  
Invisible College ◽  
Missing Link ◽  
Infinite Space ◽  
New Knowledge ◽  
The Subject ◽  
Formed Part ◽  
John Wilkins ◽  
Definitive Form ◽  
The Invisible

It seems that first of all this Lecturer is in private duty bound to celebrate the name of that revolutionary bishop and oecumenical philosopher John Wilkins (1614 to 1672). He was probably the only man who ever became both Warden of Wadham and Master of Trinity—certainly the only one who married the sister of the Lord Protector and yet was raised to the episcopate under King Charles the Second. The first of all our Secretaries, he had been prominent among the members of the Invisible College in 1645, and occupied the chair at that meeting of 1660 which brought the Society towards its definitive form. ‘At Cambridge’, wrote Burnet, ‘he joined with others who studied to propagate better thoughts, to take men off from being in parties or from narrow notions, from supersititious conceits, and fierceness about opinions. He was a great preserver and promoter of experimental philosophy, a lover of mankind, and had a delight in doing good.’ The subject of this afternoon’s discourse would, I believe, have had the interest of John Wilkins, and his blessing. For his first work, published in 1638 and 1640, bore the title : The Discovery of a World in the Moone; or, a Discourse tending to prove that 'tis probable that there may be another Habitable World in that Planet : together with a Discourse concerning the Possibility of a Passage thither . I cite this title not so much for the strange contemporaneity of its econd half, but because the book formed part of that great movement of thought, led by such men as Bruno and Gilbert, which destroyed the solid crystalline spheres of Aristotelian-Ptolemaic tradition, And elsewhere it has been possible to show that one of the influences here at work was the new knowledge of Europeans that the astronomers of China had always believed in the floating of the heavenly bodies in infinite space.

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