The present study, which investigates the influence of the Scottish Enlightenment on Hegel's account of 'civil society' or "biirgerliche Gesellschaft," is based on my PhD thesis, submitted to the University of Cambridge in September 1983. Its publication provides me with a welcome opportunity to acknowledge the help and encouragement I have received over the years from scholars, friends, and relations. At the Ruhr University of Bochum where I began my studies, I am indebted to Professor Otto Poggeler (Director of the Hegel Archives), to the other, past and present members of staff at the...

This volume contains a number of studies on Jewish-Christian re lations, in which special attention is given to the Netherlands and England, and the texts of some recently discovered and other rare documents in the same field. The work originates in a symposium on this subject held on 23 January 1985 at the University of Leiden under the auspices of the Sir Thomas Browne Institute for the study of Anglo-Dutch relations. Various authors have contributed to this volume. Each author is responsible for his own contribu tion; thus, in cases of discrepancies in interpretation, orthography or method...

Richard M. Golden Possibly the most famous event in Louis XIV's long reign (1643-1715) was the Revocation of the Edict of Nantes, issued by the French king on 17 October 1685 and registered five days later by the parlement of _Paris, a sovereign judicial institution having jurisdiction over approximately one-half of the kingdom. The Edict of Fontainebleau (the Revocation's technical name, derived from the palace southeast of Paris where Louis had signed the act) declared illegal the public profession of Calvinist Protestantism and led perhaps as many as 200,000 Huguenots/ as French...

This volume contains the Proceedings of the International Colloqui- um "Newton's Scientific and Philosophical Legacy", that was held at the Catholic University of Nijmegen (The Netherlands) from June 9th to 12th 1987 to celebrate the Tercentenary of the publication of Newton's Philo- sophiae Naturalis Principia Mathematica (1667). Although 1987 was a busy year for Newton scholars, we were happy that five of most prom- inent among them were able to come to Nijmegen and speak on the vari- ous aspects of Newton's thought. They are the Professors I. Bernard Cohen (Harvard), Gale Christianson...

The purpose of the present study is to present the life and work and thought of a remarkable pioneering figure on the Scottish scene over the middle half, broadly, of the eighteenth century, in their dynamic relations with that most extraordinary intellectual awakening and scientific, edu cational, literary and religious development of his time generally known as the "Scottish Enlightenment. " That movement in thought and culture was indeed in more ways than one a unique phenomenon in the history of western culture, comparable, in its own manner and measure, as we shall attempt to point out...

With the decline of the Whig interpretation of history, historians in the past few decades have re-examined the origins and the nature of the English Revolution from various perspectives. The constitutional conflict 1 between the crown and parliament has been analyzed. The Puritan mind 2 has been explored. Social change in England during the century prior 3 to the outbreak of the Civil War has been anatomized. The composition 4 of the Long Parliament has been dissected. Every student of the English Revolution is now well aware that the crisis in seventeenth-century Eng land, like all other...

My purpose in this book is to re-interpret the philosophy of Spinoza to a new generation. I make no attempt to compete with the historical scholar ship of A. H. Wolfson in tracing back Spinoza's ideas to his Ancient, Hebrew and Mediaeval forerunners, or the meticulous philosophical scrutiny of Harold Joachim, which I could wish to emulate but cannot hope to rival. I have simply relied upon the text of Spinoza's own writings in an effort to grasp and to make intelligible to others the precise meaning of his doctrine, and to decide whether, in spite of numerous apparent and serious internal...

The Cambridge Platonists were defenders of tolerance in the political as well as the moral sphere; they held that practical j u d g e m e n t came down in the last instance to individual conscience; and they laid the foundations of our modern conceptions of conscience and liberty. But at the same time they ma intained the existence of eternal truths, and of a Good-in-itself, identical with Truth and Being, refusing to admit that freedom of conscience i m p li e d moral relativism. They were critics of dogmatism, and of the sectarian notion of "enthusiasm" as a source of illumination, on the...

Almost all interpreters of Cartesian philosophy have hitherto focused on the epistemological aspect of Descartes' thought. In his Cartesian Theodicy, Janowski demonstrates that Descartes' epistemological problems are merely rearticulations of theological questions. For example, Descartes' attempt to define the role of God in man's cognitive fallibility is a reiteration of an old argument that points out the incongruity between the existence of God and evil, and his pivotal question whence error?' is shown here to be a rephrasing of the question whence evil?' The answer Descartes...