Digby, Kenelm (1603–65)

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Christia Mercer
Keyword(s):  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
Vegetative Growth ◽  
Royal Society ◽  
John Locke ◽  
The Political ◽  
Material World ◽  
Mechanical Philosophy ◽  
Wide Range ◽  
Exhaustive Study ◽  
Mechanical Physics

Seventeenth-century English Catholic, original member of the Royal Society, and one of the first philosophers to produce a fully developed system of mechanical philosophy, Sir Kenelm Digby cut a dashing figure as a poet, privateer and philosopher. As a Catholic and royalist, he spent much of his life in semi-exile on the continent where he conversed with many of the political and intellectual leaders of his time; as a philosopher, he was favourably compared to René Descartes and John Locke. He attempted to wed the philosophy of Aristotle to the new mechanical physics, which maintained that every event in the material world is reducible to matter in motion. His interests and writings cover a wide range, from religion and magic to vegetative growth and literary commentary. The explicit goal of his most significant book, Two Treatises (1644), was to prove the immortality of the human soul. To this end, the first treatise constitutes an exhaustive study of bodies and their features. By showing that all corporeal qualities are to be explained in strictly material terms, he prepares the way for a thorough discussion of the soul. Digby argues that the soul must be immaterial (and hence immortal) because otherwise its features cannot be explained. He went on to apply the mechanical principles which he developed in this work to a variety of topics, including some traditionally associated with the occult. His works on alchemical, medical and religious topics were also widely read.

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.

scholarly journals The separation of church and state as the foundation of religious toleration in Locke’s political thought

2021 ◽  
Vol 64 (3) ◽  
pp. 81-90
Author(s):  
Ivan Matic
Keyword(s):  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
Political Thought ◽  
John Locke ◽  
Church And State ◽  
Final Part ◽  
Freedom Of Religion ◽  
The Political ◽  
Religious Toleration ◽  
The Subject ◽  
The Moment

The subject of this paper will be the analysis of the question of religious toleration in the political thought of seventeenth century English philosopher John Locke. The first part of the paper will discuss the foundational principles of Locke?s political thought, particularly his contract theory. The second part will be dedicated to situating his positions on freedom of religion within the domain of that theory, accentuating the moment of separation between church and state. The final part will analyze the implications of religious toleration, as well as its limits, upon which Locke?s criterion of freedom of religion will be critically examined.

Transregional Reformation: Synods and Consensus in the Early Reformed Churches

2015 ◽  
Vol 2 (2) ◽  
Author(s):  
Patrizio Foresta
Keyword(s):  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
Early Modern ◽  
Turning Point ◽  
The Political ◽  
Local Churches ◽  
Mediating Factors ◽  
The Social ◽  
Wide Range ◽  
History Of ◽  
Reformed Churches

AbstractThis article will explore what might be called the transregional scope and outreach of early modern Reformed synods in a theological as well as ecclesial sense, examining some very few but important moments between the sixteenth and seventeenth century that marked a turning point in the history of the European Reformed Churches and show some particular aspects of the constitutive link between synods and consensus. A transregional level implies a methodological shift towards a more complex and many-sided view of synods, according to which a supposedly unyielding and confessionally adamant institution was affected by the social, geographical, cultural, theological and political stratifications within a wide range of mediating factors and conditions: different local Churches were linked together and crossed the political and ecclesiastical borders through the channels along which persons and ideas passed from region to region, thus creating a mutual exchange through which political, institutional and theological communication took place.

C. B. Macpherson, The Political Theory of Possessive Individualism: Hobbes to Locke

2016 ◽  
Author(s):  
Hugh Breakey
Keyword(s):  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
Early Modern ◽  
Political Theory ◽  
John Locke ◽  
Global Financial Crisis ◽  
Global Capitalism ◽  
The Political ◽  
Possessive Individualism ◽  
Core Idea ◽  
The Global Financial Crisis

C. B. Macpherson’s 1962 The Political Theory of Possessive Individualism: Hobbes to Locke challenged the canonical interpretation of seventeenth-century English political theorists by exploring their allegiance to “possessive individualism,” the idea that man’s normative essence consists in his self-ownership. After surveying the work’s impact, this chapter analyzes Macpherson’s concept of possessive individualism and considers the inter-relations amongst its economic, ontological, and psychological postulates. The chapter argues that—while Macpherson’s exegesis erred in trying to graft the concept onto early modern political theorists like John Locke—his core idea remains significant today. Possessive individualism accurately describes an influential normative perspective increasingly pervading and facilitated by contemporary global capitalism, as exemplified in the global financial crisis of 2007–09.

Making Kew Observatory: the Royal Society, the British Association and the politics of early Victorian science

2015 ◽  
Vol 48 (3) ◽  
pp. 409-433 ◽  
Author(s):  
LEE T. MACDONALD
Keyword(s):  
Royal Society ◽  
British Association ◽  
The Political ◽  
Physical Sciences ◽  
Victorian Britain ◽  
John Herschel ◽  
Wide Range ◽  
Victorian Science ◽  
George Iii

AbstractBuilt in 1769 as a private observatory for King George III, Kew Observatory was taken over in 1842 by the British Association for the Advancement of Science (BAAS). It was then quickly transformed into what some claimed to be a ‘physical observatory’ of the sort proposed by John Herschel – an observatory that gathered data in a wide range of physical sciences, including geomagnetism and meteorology, rather than just astronomy. Yet this article argues that the institution which emerged in the 1840s was different in many ways from that envisaged by Herschel. It uses a chronological framework to show how, at every stage, the geophysicist and Royal Artillery officer Edward Sabine manipulated the project towards his own agenda: an independent observatory through which he could control the geomagnetic and meteorological research, including the ongoing ‘Magnetic Crusade’. The political machinations surrounding Kew Observatory, within the Royal Society and the BAAS, may help to illuminate the complex politics of science in early Victorian Britain, particularly the role of ‘scientific servicemen’ such as Sabine. Both the diversity of activities at Kew and the complexity of the observatory's origins make its study important in the context of the growing field of the ‘observatory sciences’.

‘Do You See This?’ The Politics of Attention in Shakespearean Tragedy

2016 ◽  
Author(s):  
Steven Mullaney
Keyword(s):  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
Public Sphere ◽  
Greek Tragedy ◽  
Social Thought ◽  
The Political ◽  
Audience Member ◽  
Wide Range ◽  
Conditions Of Possibility ◽  
Printed Word ◽  
Shakespearean Tragedy

Affective agency, popular and performative sovereignty, the dissemination of a wide range of information and perspectives to the large part of the populace that could not access them through the written or the printed word—these are some of the conditions of possibility for the emergence of a genuine public sphere, composed of multiple and conflictual publics and counter-publics, in late sixteenth- and early seventeenth-century England. In theatre, however, it is the cognitive and affective agency of the audience that produces the critical social thought necessary for those publics to emerge. Tragedy is good to think with, as Rita Felski said of Greek tragedy. It is a form of embodied social and affective thought, produced at moments of ‘attention’ when an audience member might realize, make-real as well as make-conscious, that ‘I am involved’—a necessary participant in the political and public sphere.

Early Whig Ideology, Ancient Constitutionalism, and the Reverend Samuel Johnson

1993 ◽  
Vol 32 (2) ◽  
pp. 139-165 ◽  
Author(s):  
Melinda Zook
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
John Locke ◽  
Samuel Taylor Coleridge ◽  
Samuel Johnson ◽  
Political Elite ◽  
The Political ◽  
Radical Politics ◽  
Political Opposition ◽  
Political Ideas

In 1833, Samuel Taylor Coleridge wrote, “I do not know where I could put my hand upon a book containing so much sense with sound constitutional doctrine as this thin folio of Johnson's works.” The “Johnson” to whom Coleridge referred was not the celebrated Doctor Samuel Johnson of the eighteenth century but instead the late seventeenth-century Whig clergyman, the Reverend Samuel Johnson. Reverend Johnson's single volume of complete works impressed Coleridge; he scribbled laudatory remarks throughout the margins of a 1710 edition. Coleridge admired the directness of Johnson's style and his persuasive method of argumentation. Johnson would have appreciated Coleridge's comments. They reflected the way he himself understood his work—as sound constitutional doctrine, plainly put.Yet for all its clarity and consistency, Johnson's political thinking was not always appreciated by England's political elite of the 1680s and 1690s. The implications of Johnson's political ideas—much like those of his contemporary John Locke—were understood as far too revolutionary and destabilizing. However, Johnson's fiery prose and sardonic wit often proved useful to the political opposition: from the Whig exclusionists of the early 1680s, to the supporters of William and Mary in 1688/89, to the radical Whigs and country Tories of the 1690s and early eighteenth century.Johnson's career as a Whig propagandist spanned 1679 to 1700. Among his contemporaries, he was undoubtedly most renowned for his strident anti-Catholicism and for the brutal punishments that he endured for his radical politics.

scholarly journals Richard Baxter and the Mechanical Philosophers

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
David S. Sytsma
Keyword(s):  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
Early Modern ◽  
Royal Society ◽  
Devotional Literature ◽  
Robert Boyle ◽  
Knowledge Of God ◽  
Mechanical Philosophy ◽  
The People ◽  
Early English ◽  
Henry More

Richard Baxter, one of the most famous Puritans of the seventeenth century, is generally known as a writer of practical and devotional literature. But he also excelled in knowledge of medieval and early modern scholastic theology, and was conversant with a wide variety of seventeenth-century philosophies. Baxter was among the early English polemicists to write against the mechanical philosophy of René Descartes and Pierre Gassendi in the years immediately following the establishment of the Royal Society. At the same time, he was friends with Robert Boyle and Matthew Hale, corresponded with Joseph Glanvill, and engaged in philosophical controversy with Henry More. This book is a chronological and thematic account of Baxter’s relation to the people and concepts involved in the rise of mechanical philosophy in late seventeenth-century England. Drawing on largely unexamined works, including Baxter’s Methodus theologiae christianae (1681) and manuscript treatises and correspondence, this book discusses Baxter’s response to mechanical philosophers on the nature of substance, laws of motion, the soul, and ethics. Analysis of these topics is framed by a consideration of the growth of Christian Epicureanism in England, Baxter’s overall approach to reason and philosophy, and his attempt to understand creation as an analogical reflection of God’s power, wisdom, and goodness, understood as vestigia Trinitatis. Baxter’s views on reason, analogical knowledge of God, and vestigia Trinitatis draw on medieval precedents and directly inform a largely hostile, though partially accommodating, response to mechanical philosophy.

scholarly journals Division of Property and Expansion of Rights of Political Participation: primogeniture and the Rebuttal of Patriarchalism in James Tyrrell and John Locke

2021 ◽  
Vol 1 (38) ◽  
pp. 223-236
Author(s):  
Cláudia Elias Duarte
Keyword(s):  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
Political Participation ◽  
Present Article ◽  
John Locke ◽  
Political Power ◽  
The Political ◽  
Political Rights ◽  
Considerable Part ◽  
The Status

The political writings of two English philosophers of the seventeenth century – James Tyrrell and John Locke – devote a considerable part of their thought to the rebuttal of Sir Robert Filmer’s patriarchalism. Both defend, as an alternative to an absolute political power based on the paternal right of the king, a government established by the consent of those who are governed; and both assume the topic of primogeniture as central in their counter-arguments against patriarchalism. The present article intends to focus on the anti-patriarchalism arguments devoted to the second topic. Mainly, it tries to identify the reason that may be behind the choice of Sir Robert’s critics to deny a right of primogeniture, when that right was in force in their country in the seventeenth century. Departing from the assumption that, then, the exercise of political rights relied of the status of proprietary, then the defense of the end of primogeniture, and the consequent possibility of the division of property by the various members of one family, may open the door to an expansion of the rights of political participation.

“Christians Love the Jews!” The Development of American Philo-Semitism, 1790-1860

1996 ◽  
Vol 6 (2) ◽  
pp. 225-259 ◽  
Author(s):  
Robert K. Whalen
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
The United States ◽  
The Political ◽  
Religious Literature ◽  
Revolutionary Era ◽  
Early National Period ◽  
Early National ◽  
Social Views ◽  
British Research

Philo-Semitism is America's enduring contribution to the long, troubled, often murderous dealings of Christians with Jews. Its origins are English, and it drew continuously on two centuries of British research into biblical prophecy from the seventeenth Century onward. Philo-Semitism was, however, soon “domesticated” and adapted to the political and theological climate of America after independence. As a result, it changed as America changed. In the early national period, religious literature abounded that foresaw the conversion of the Jews and the restoration of Israel as the ordained task of the millennial nation—the United States. This scenario was, allowing for exceptions, socially and theologically optimistic and politically liberal, as befit the ethos of a revolutionary era. By the eve of Civil War, however, countless evangelicals cleaved to a darker vision of Christ's return in blood and upheaval. They disparaged liberal social views and remained loyal to an Augustinian theology that others modified or abandoned.

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