Adam Ferguson (1723-1816) was a major figure of the Scottish Enlightenment whose thought was, in many respects, original and distinctive. This book is a study of his ideas and of the intellectual forces that shaped them. Though somewhat overlooked in the nineteenth century, Ferguson was rescued from obscurity in the first half of the twentieth century by scholars interested in the origins of sociology and early critiques of modernity. Ferguson's interest in the mechanics of social life and especially social change led him to many groundbreaking insights. In fact, he is sometimes identified as...

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...

John Cottingham In the anglophone philosophical world, there has, for some time, been a curious relationship between the history of philosophy and contemporary philosophical - quiry. Many philosophers working today virtually ignore the history of their s- ject, apparently regarding it as an antiquarian pursuit with little relevance to their "cutting-edge" research. Conversely, there are historians of philosophy who seldom if ever concern themselves with the intricate technical debates that ll the journals devoted to modern analytic philosophy. Both sides are surely the poorer for this strange...

Published in English for the first time, this is the translation of "Dall'eta cartesiana a Brucker," the second installment of the monumental multi-volume "Storia delle storie generali della filosofia." It follows on from the first volume, translated from the Italian by C.W.T. Blackwell and published by Kluwer in 1993, which covered the subject from its origins in the Renaissance to the Historia Philosophica. This volume guides the reader from the Cartesian rejection of the philosophical past that found voice in the work of Malebranche, right up to the establishment of a critical history of...

The volume will consist of a series of interpretative studies of Locke s philosophical and religious thought in historical context and consider his contributions to the Enlightenment and modern liberal thought."

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...

The writing of the second part of this book presented a peculiar difficulty. On the one hand I had the great advantage of having found the first rough draft of the manuscript La Religion du Chretien, corrected and often recorrected. Authorship could eventually be established beyond shadow of doubt, and in the corrections one could see de Vallone changing his opinions as he wrote. On the other the sheer length of the manuscript - about 140,000 words - plus the num ber of corrections - well over 3,000, many of them lengthy - the enormous number of references in the text to the Classics, to the...

It is generally agreed that great men transcend their time while ordinary men remain rooted in it. This is why, if we want to know what life was like in days gone by, we must study those who were most representative of their age, those individuals who, though they may have achieved a modicum of fame or notoriety, are now, because of their limited abilities and outlook, largely forgotten. The great figures involved in the political and religious controversies that took of the seventeenth century and the beginning place in Holland! towards the end of the eighteenth, men such as Bayle, Jurieu,...