Philosophy, Science, and Religion in England 1640–1700

by Edited by Richard Kroll , Richard Ashcraft , Perez Zagorin

• ISBN13: 9780521075855
• ISBN10: 0521075858
• Edition: 1st
• Format: Paperback
• Copyright: 2008-08-28
• Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Summary

This collection of essays looks at the distinctively English intellectual, social and political phenomenon of Latitudinarianism, which emerged during the Civil War and Interregnum and came into its own after the Restoration, becoming a virtual orthodoxy after 1688. Dividing into two parts, it first examines the importance of the Cambridge Platonists, who sought to embrace the newest philosophical and scientific movements within Church of England orthodoxy, and then moves into the later seventeenth century, from the Restoration onwards, culminating in essays on the philosopher John Locke. These contributions establish a firmly interdisciplinary basis for the subject, while collectively gravitating towards the importance of discourse and language as the medium for cultural exchange. The variety of approaches serves to illuminate the cultural indeterminacy of the period, in which inherited models and vocabularies were forced to undergo revisions, coinciding with the formation of many cultural institutions still governing English society.

Table of Contents

Preface

Introduction Richard Kroll

The Cambridge Platonists: Philosophy at Mid-Century

Henry More, the Kabbalah, and the

Edward Stillingfleet, Henry More, and the decline of Moses Atticus: a note on seventeenth-century Anglican apologetics Sarah Hutton

Latitudinarians, Neoplatonists, and the Ancient Wisdom

Cudworth, More and the mechanical analogy

Cudworth and Hobbes on is and ought

The Restoration Settlement

Latitudinarianism and toleration: Historical myth versus political history

The intellectual sources of Robert Boyle's philosophy of nature: Gassendi's voluntariam, and Boyle's physico-theological project Margaret

Latitudinarianism and the 'ideology' of the early Royal Society: Thomas Sprat's History of the Royal Society (1667) reconsidered

Locke and the latitude-men: ignorance as a ground of toleration

John Locke and Latitudinarianism

Notes on contributors

Index

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