scholarly journals Demonstration and Damnation

2018 ◽  
Vol 18 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Joshua Schouten de Jel
Keyword(s):  
John Locke ◽  
Francis Bacon ◽  
Natural Religion ◽  
Isaac Newton ◽  
Life Itself ◽  
Personal Eschatology ◽  
Creative Vision

In Blake’s mythopoeia, as well as his personal eschatology, belief is the source of life itself; all creative acts, all visionary episodes, stem from an individual’s belief. “Eternal Death,” which is the cycle of Generation, is the result of unbelief. Francis Bacon, Isaac Newton, and John Locke were, for Blake, the triumvirate of culpable votaries for the propagation of rational reductionism which had led to the reification of “Natural Religion” in the form of Deism and Rational Dissent in England and, with the addition of Rousseau and Voltaire, of the apotheosis in France of the Cult of Reason. The French philosophes and the English empiricists were not only at fault for forming the wheels which turned the “dark Satanic Mills?” (M 514 1.8) of man’s cognizance but, and what Blake considered their primary offence, of unbelief. This paper will discuss how unbelief is the main cause of division in Blake’s universe, accentuated “by the cruelties of Demonstration” (M 578 29.36) of empiricists who “Doubt Doubt & dont believe without experiment” (NB 609 5–9), and how the Limits placed upon man’s fall(s) act as one possible mode of redemption which allows for the return of belief and the individual’s creative vision.

scholarly journals English Philosophers and Scottish Academic Philosophy (1660–1700)

2017 ◽  
Vol 15 (2) ◽  
pp. 213-231 ◽  
Author(s):  
Giovanni Gellera
Keyword(s):  
John Locke ◽  
Natural Philosophy ◽  
Thomas Hobbes ◽  
Francis Bacon ◽  
Scottish Enlightenment ◽  
Robert Boyle ◽  
Isaac Newton ◽  
Academic Philosophy ◽  
Henry More

This paper investigates the little-known reception of Thomas Hobbes, Henry More, Francis Bacon, Robert Boyle, Isaac Newton, and John Locke in the Scottish universities in the period 1660–1700.The fortune of the English philosophers in the Scottish universities rested on whether their philosophies were consonant with the Scots’ own philosophical agenda. Within the established Cartesian curriculum, the Scottish regents eagerly taught what they thought best in English philosophy (natural philosophy and experimentalism) and criticised what they thought wrong (materialism, contractualism, anti-innatism).The paper also suggests new sources and perspectives for the broader discussion of the ‘origins’ of the Scottish Enlightenment.

scholarly journals Molyneux's Problem in the Scottish Enlightenment

2019 ◽  
Vol 45 (3) ◽  
pp. 22-41
Author(s):  
Charles Bradford Bow
Keyword(s):  
John Locke ◽  
Francis Bacon ◽  
Scottish Enlightenment ◽  
Philosophical Thinking ◽  
Sir Isaac Newton ◽  
Isaac Newton ◽  
Natural Knowledge ◽  
Long Eighteenth Century ◽  
The Mind ◽  
Taste And Smell

This article examines the “progress” of Scottish metaphysics during the long eighteenth century. The scientific cultivation of natural knowledge drawn from the examples of Sir Francis Bacon (1561–1626), John Locke (1632–1704), and Sir Isaac Newton (1642–1727) was a defining pursuit in the Scottish Enlightenment. The Aberdonian philosopher George Dalgarno (1616–1687); Thomas Reid (1710–1796), a member of the Aberdeen Philosophical Society known as the Wise Club; and the professor of moral philosophy at Edinburgh University Dugald Stewart (1753–1828), contributed to that Scottish pattern of philosophical thinking. The question of the extent to which particular external senses (sight, hearing, touch, taste, and smell) might be improved when others were damaged or absent from birth attracted their particular interest. This article shows the different ways in which Scottish anatomists of the mind resolved Molyneux’s Problem of whether or not an agent could accurately perceive an object from a newly restored external sense.

Thomas Reid on the Improvement of Knowledge

2019 ◽  
Vol 17 (2) ◽  
pp. 125-139
Author(s):  
Christopher A. Shrock
Keyword(s):  
Natural Philosophy ◽  
Social Progress ◽  
Francis Bacon ◽  
Thomas Kuhn ◽  
Traditional Religion ◽  
Scottish Enlightenment ◽  
Thomas Reid ◽  
Isaac Newton ◽  
Religion And Ethics ◽  
Compare And Contrast

Thomas Reid often seems distant from other Scottish Enlightenment figures. While Hume, Hutcheson, Kames, and Smith wrestled with the nature of social progress, Reid was busy with natural philosophy and epistemology, stubbornly loyal to traditional religion and ethics, and out of touch with the heart of his own intellectual world. Or was he? I contend that Reid not only engaged the Scottish Enlightenment's concern for improvement, but, as a leading interpreter of Isaac Newton and Francis Bacon, he also developed a scheme to explain the progress of human knowledge. Pulling thoughts from across Reid's corpus, I identify four key features that Reid uses to distinguish mature sciences from prescientific arts and inquiries. Then, I compare and contrast this scheme with that of Thomas Kuhn in order to highlight the plausibility and originality of Reid's work.

The Curious Eye

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Erin Webster
Keyword(s):  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
Human Vision ◽  
Francis Bacon ◽  
Robert Hooke ◽  
Robert Boyle ◽  
Isaac Newton ◽  
Johannes Kepler ◽  
The Social ◽  
The Subject ◽  
Historical Moment

The Curious Eye explores early modern debates over two related questions: what are the limits of human vision, and to what extent can these limits be overcome by technological enhancement? Today, in our everyday lives we rely on optical technology to provide us with information about visually remote spaces even as we question the efficacy and ethics of such pursuits. But the debates surrounding the subject of technologically mediated vision have their roots in a much older literary tradition in which the ability to see beyond the limits of natural human vision is associated with philosophical and spiritual insight as well as social and political control. The Curious Eye provides insight into the subject of optically mediated vision by returning to the literature of the seventeenth century, the historical moment in which human visual capacity in the West was first extended through the application of optical technologies to the eye. Bringing imaginative literary works by Francis Bacon, John Milton, Margaret Cavendish, and Aphra Behn together with optical and philosophical treatises by Johannes Kepler, René Descartes, Robert Hooke, Robert Boyle, and Isaac Newton, The Curious Eye explores the social and intellectual impact of the new optical technologies of the seventeenth century on its literature. At the same time, it demonstrates that social, political, and literary concerns are not peripheral to the optical science of the period but rather an integral part of it, the legacy of which we continue to experience.

scholarly journals The Myth of Disenchantment: Magic, Modernity, and the Birth of the Human Sciences by Jason A. Josephson-Storm

2021 ◽  
Vol 35 (1) ◽  
pp. 141-154
Author(s):  
Dmitri Cerboncini Fernandes ◽  
Alexander Moreira-Almeida
Keyword(s):  
Immanuel Kant ◽  
Sigmund Freud ◽  
Max Weber ◽  
Scientific Practice ◽  
Vienna Circle ◽  
Francis Bacon ◽  
Arthur Schopenhauer ◽  
Isaac Newton ◽  
Research Fields ◽  
Giordano Bruno

We live in a contradictory world. Self-proclaimed “skeptics”, as the original meaning itself suggests, should first of all strive for proper scientific rationality, for reflective and objective distancing in the apprehension of reality, for methodological caution and for the extended ability to theoretical and philosophical understanding of intricate problems, in practice, too often have entrenched themselves in dogmatic groups. Inquisitors often endowed with the appearance of religious fanaticism, in the worst sense of the term, invest their energies in a crusade of attacks to everyone to whom they attribute mistakes, naivety or even bad intentions. In practice, the universe of those who do not fit in their often restricted, idealized and naïve views of scientific practice. With them, there is hardly any possibility of frank dialogue or opening to research fields that escape their conceptions of what science and philosophy can approach and how they should operate. Charlatans, backward, believers, superstitious; these are some disqualifications generally granted to researchers who dare to go beyond the limits they established for science and rationality. To substantiate their certainties, such self-proclaimed skeptics often claim to base their approach to science on the examples given by highly regarded scientists and philosophers of the past. We speak here of scholars of the stature of Giordano Bruno, Francis Bacon, René Descartes, Isaac Newton, the Encyclopedists, Immanuel Kant, Arthur Schopenhauer, Sigmund Freud, James Frazer, the Vienna Circle, Max Weber, etc. Despite their different approaches, we are talking about many of the very founders of modern Western knowledge. The self-proclaimed contemporary “skeptics” claim their inscriptions in the tradition inaugurated by these illustrious intellectual ancestors. They claim to defend with determination such a rationalist tradition against “pseudoscientists” and “mystic-religious" philosophers who, according to their opinions, wish to corrupt it through insidious insertions in a field that would not rightfully belong to them. This would be their main mission.

The Empiricism of Locke and Newton

1978 ◽  
Vol 12 ◽  
pp. 1-30
Author(s):  
G. A. J. Rogers
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
John Locke ◽  
Mutual Influence ◽  
The Other ◽  
Main Theme ◽  
Major Work ◽  
Isaac Newton ◽  
Difficult Question ◽  
Political Views ◽  
The Relationship

The relationship between John Locke and Isaac Newton, his co-founder of, in the apt phrase of one recent writer, ‘the Moderate Enlightenment’ of the eighteenth century, has many dimensions. There is their friendship, which began only after each had written his major work, and which had its stormy interlude. There is the difficult question of their mutual impact. In what ways did each draw intellectually on the other? That there was some debt of each to the other is almost certain, but its exact extent is problematic. Questions may be asked over a whole range of intellectual issues, but not always answered. Thus their theology, which was in many respects close, and which forms the bulk of their surviving correspondence, may yet reveal mutual influence. There is the question of their political views, where both were firmly Whig. But it is upon their philosophy, and certain aspects of their philosophy in particular, that this paper will concentrate. My main theme is the nature of their empiricism, and my main contention is that between them they produced a powerful and comprehensive philosophy.

THE POLITICAL NEEDS OF A TOOLMAKING ANIMAL: MADISON, HAMILTON, LOCKE, AND THE QUESTION OF PROPERTY

2005 ◽  
Vol 22 (1) ◽  
pp. 1-26
Author(s):  
Paul A. Rahe
Keyword(s):  
North America ◽  
Common Sense ◽  
John Locke ◽  
Natural World ◽  
Francis Bacon ◽  
The Political ◽  
Benjamin Franklin ◽  
American Constitution ◽  
Mother Country ◽  
The Common

When Benjamin Franklin suggested that man is by nature a tool-making animal, he summed up what was for his fellow Americans the common sense of the matter. It is not, then, surprising that, when Britain's colonists in North America broke with the mother country over the issue of an unrepresentative parliament's right to tax and govern the colonies, they defended their right to the property they owned on the ground that it was in a most thorough-going sense an extension of themselves: the fruits of their own labor. This understanding they learned from John Locke, who based the argument of his Two Treatises of Government on the unorthodox account of providence and of man's place within the natural world that Sir Francis Bacon had been the first to articulate. All of this helps explain why the framers of the American constitution included within it a clause giving sanction to property in ideas of practical use.

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