Dutch Reformed pastor Balthasar Bekker (1634-1698) has long been recognized as a key figure in the end of the witchcraft persecutions in early modern Europe. With the publication of his monumental four-volume work The World Bewitched Bekker argued against the temporal activity of the devil and evil spirits as well as against the reality of witchcraft, sorcery, and spirit possession. Yet Bekker's ideas drew opposition from Dutch Reformed clergymen who charged that his use of Cartesian philosophy to reject the temporal activity of spirits threatened much of traditional religious faith....

Despite the importance of Leibniz's mature philosophy, his early work has been relatively neglected. This collection begins with an overview of his formative years and includes 12 original papers by internationally-known scholars. The contributions reflect the wide range of the young Leibniz's philosophical interests and his interests in related subjects, including law, physics and theology. Some chapters explore his relationship to other philosophers, including his teachers in Leipzig and Jena and his Paris friend Tschirnhaus, as well as Hobbes and Spinoza. Others focus on particular...

Exciting the Industry of Mankind is the first comprehensive book about George Berkeley's revolutionary views on money and banking. Berkeley broke the conceptual link between money and metallic substance in The Querist, a work published between 1735 and 1737 in Dublin, consisting entirely of questions. Exciting the Industry of Mankind explains what economic and social forces caused Berkeley to write The Querist in response to a major economic crisis in Ireland.
Exciting the Industry of Mankind falsifies the view that Berkeley has...

Linnaeus' mature theodicy, his attempt to reconcile the suffering and evil of the world with the omnipotence and goodness of God, is presented in a condensed form in the final editions of his Systema Naturae (1758/68). In this comprehensive compendium of our knowledge of the three great realms of organic nature, he outlines the significance of the sub-conscious, social awareness and theological orientation in the spiritual life of man, and indicates how fate, fortune, and Providence interrelate within his conception of the Deity.
In the Nemesis Divina this...

Thanks to the work of legions of scholars, the millenarian expectations within large segments of the population in Cromwellian England have been carefully examined. The widespread belief that England, with its messianic leader 1 Cromwell, heralded the millennium is well known. Less well examined, perhaps, has been the cultural conceptions of the role of millenarian and messianic ideas in the "long" eighteenth century. Especially during the stable Hanoverian era - until the American and French Revolutions - the common place millennial expectations of the English Civil War appeared to recede....

The book describes the innovations that enabled botany, in the Eighteenth century, to emerge as an independent science, independent from medicine and herbalism. This encompassed the development of a reliable system for plant classification and the invention of a nomenclature that could be universally applied and understood. The key that enabled Linnaeus to devise his classification system was the discovery of the sexuality of plants. The book, which is intended for the educated general reader, proceeds to illustrate how many aspects of French life were permeated by this revolution in botany...

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...

Although Descartes' natural philosophy marked an advance in the development of modern science, many critics over the years, such as Newton, have rejected his particular relational' theory of space and motion. Nevertheless, it is also true that most historians and philosophers have not sufficiently investigated the viability of the Cartesian theory.
This book explores, consequently, the success of the arguments against Descartes' theory of space and motion by determining if it is possible to formulate a version that can eliminate its alleged problems. In essence, this book comprises the...

Royal Instructions for Scientific Exploration . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 15 The French Gardener Overseas . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .; . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 33 The Voyage of La Perouse: Part 1, From Brest to Monterey Bay . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 51 Part 2, From Monterey Bay to Botany Bay . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 73 Adventures and Misadventures: The Bizarre Story of the Dupetit-Th9uars...

This collection of articles (the Vercelli conference proceedings) places the theme of scepticism within its philosophical tradition. It explores the English philosophical thinkers, the French context, as well as major Italian figures and Spanish culture. It pays special attention to the relationships between history of philosophical ideas and the problems rising from the history of sciences (medicine, physics, linguistics, historical scholarship) in the 17^th and the18^th centuries.