In this book twelve outstanding historians of early modern philosophy undertake a study of the philosophy of Johannes Clauberg (1622-1665). Clauberg was not only among the first followers of Descartes (whose philosophy he taught from 1650 in Herborn and from 1652 until the end of his life in Duisburg) but also assured its survival as an academic philosophy by giving it a more traditional and more didactic expression. A first group of articles deals with Clauberg's early metaphysics as it found its expression in his Ontosophia of 1646 (republished with very considerable changes in...

From a variety of perspectives, the essays presented here explore the profound interdependence of natural philosophy and rational religion in the long seventeenth century' that begins with the burning of Bruno in 1600 and ends with the Enlightenment in the early Eighteenth century. From the writings of Grotius on natural law and natural religion, and the speculative, libertin novels of Cyrano de Bergerac, to the better-known works of Descartes, Malebranche, Cudworth, Leibniz, Boyle, Spinoza, Newton, and Locke, an increasing emphasis was placed on the rational relationship between...

Sir Isaac Newton's pre-eminence in the history of science remains ?xed, yet the picture which we have of the whole man, and of the in?uence of his wide-ranging intellect, has been changing rapidly as scholars have incre- ingly taken cognizance of those aspects of Newton's thought hitherto hidden in his unpublished manuscripts. At the start of the third millennium, we ?nd ourselves poised to launch the greatest revolution yet in Newton studies as an international team of scholars has been assembled to publish all of Newton's widely scattered unpublished papers. The William Andrews Clark...

The study features the five most important and most efficacious themes of Western spirituality in their ancient historical origins and in their unfolding up to early modernity: Divine names, Microkosmos-Makrokosmos, theories of creation, the idea of spiritual spaces, and the concepts of eschatological history.

commentary, but by selection and accretion. Those inspired by Plato form as intrinsic a part of Platonism as Plato himself these are the so-called Neo-P- tonists (a divisive latter-day term which implies discontinuity between Plato and 6 his later followers to the disadvantage of the latter). In the process of its long course of development, Platonism has gathered a long tradition of interpr- ers, whose contributions have been enriched by other philosophical strands for example Stoicism, which is an important element in the philosophy of Plotinus. To this it must be added that so much of the...

Toutes ces belles contro[yen]erses Sur les religions di[yen]erses N'ont jamais produit aucun bien: Chacun s' anime pour la sienne; Et que fait-on pour la chretienne? On dispute, et l'on ne fait rien. - Saint-E[yen]remond, 1614-1703. This book asserts, contrary to Saint-E[yen]remond, that religious controversy on the eve of the Enlightenment was far from sterile or antichristian. In reconstructing a French religious debate of the era of the revocation of the Edict of Nantes, it shows how the debate allowed both lay and clerical thinkers of the late seventeenth century to discuss the critical...

On 18 August 1572, Marguerite de Valois, sister of King Charles IX, was married in Paris to Henri de Navarre, "first prince of the blood" and a Protestant. This union, which was to cement the provisions of the Peace of St. Germain (1570) ending the third of the French wars of religion, was the occasion of an extraordinary influx of French Calvin- ists into the notoriously Catholic capital. Hundreds of Huguenots had journeyed to Paris to honor their titular leader and participate in the wedding celebrations. Tensions were already running high when the court made the fatal decision to take...

Among the myriad of changes that took place in Great Britain in the first half of the nineteenth century, many of particular significance to the historian of science and to the social historian are discernible in that small segment of British society drawn together by a shared interest in natural phenomena and with sufficient leisure or opportunity to investigate and ponder them. This group, which never numbered more than a mere handful in comparison to the whole population, may rightly be characterized as 'scientific'. They and their successors came to occupy an increasingly important place...

This book is the study of a man who caught my interest both because of his own character and of the variety of his activities. It is an attempt to see him in his relationship, intellectual and literary, with the Europe of his day, to gauge his position in the development of Seventeenth and Eighteenth century thought, to examine the origins of his ideas and their effect and to place him in the social context of the England of the early Eighteenth century. The period in which he lived, coming at the beginning of the Enlightenment, was seminal for our own world and the man himself is of...

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