Richard Baxter and the Mechanical Philosophers

ISBN-13: 9780190274870 / Angielski / Twarda / 2017 / 352 str.

David Sytsma

Opis

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 who wrote against the mechanical philosophy of Rene 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. In this book, David Sytsma presents 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, Sytsma 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, or 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.

Recenzje

This book is a distinguished work of scholarship, and Sytsma's discussion and contextualization of Baxter's philosophical theology is remarkable. Sytsma's work is a welcome addition to the scholarship of Baxter and Reformed and Puritan theologians in the early modern period, and Sytsma makes a major contribution by analyzing a wide range of Baxter's unexamined theoretical works. I highly recommend it.

O autorze

David Sytsma is an assistant professor at Tokyo Christian University and research curator at the Junius Institute for Digital Reformation Research.