A collection of ten specially commissioned essays addressing five themes central to any study of the Scottish Enlightenment: one, the place (both physical and cognitive) of science and medicine in the Scottish Enlightenment; two, the institutionalization of enlightenment in the universities; three, the cultivation of the different branches of "the science of man" in the Scottish Enlightenment; four, the national and international contexts of enlightenment thought in Scotland; and five, the historiography of the Scottish Enlightenment. Taking up these themes, the editor and contributors...

This work is an attempt to understand the nature of the object of Eros in Plato's writings. In the first chapter certain considerations based on a passage in Plato's Symposium lead to a discovery and characterization of the nature of that object and several of its features. Then it is realized that the chief problem or mystery about the nature of the object of Eros is how it arises. The book then explores the Lysis and the Phaedrus, which both address how the object arises, in two different ways, the Socratic and the Platonic. Alfred Geier is Associate Professor of Religious and Classical...

This book explores the reception of David Hume's political thought in eighteenth-century America. It presents a challenge to standard interpretations that assume Hume's thought had little influence in early America. Eighteenth-century Americans are often supposed to have ignored Hume's philosophical writings and to have rejected entirely Hume's -Tory- History of England. James Madison, if he used Hume's ideas in Federalist No. 10, it is commonly argued, thought best to do so silently -- open allegiance to Hume was a liability. Despite renewed debate about the impact of Hume's political ideas...

This edition of Bishop Joseph Butler's (1692-1752) complete works is the first newly edited version to appear in a century, and is the only one to include a single, analytic index to the whole works. The editor's introduction presents Butler's ethics and philosophy of religion as a single, comprehensive system of pastoral philosophy and surveys the vast influence Butler exerted, especially in the nineteenth century. Included here are all fifteen published sermons from Butler's tenure as Preacher at the Rolls Chapel, the only sermons in English routinely studied by secular ethicists to this...

This history of early modern Western philosophy takes its inspiration from Kant's claim that the battle between the metaphysics of matter and that of spirit is the principal axis around which modern philosophy up to his time, in all its aspects, has revolved. The empiricist-materialist trend that dominates in England is first examined in the progressively unfolding works of Hobbes, Locke, Berkeley, Hume, and Adam Smith. A contrasting and competing dialectic develops in the rationalist/spiritualist trend in the continental philosophy of Descartes, Leibniz, and Rousseau. Framing this history is...

Pascal's Pensees afford a deeply penetrating view of the human condition (or predicament) as a prelude to a luminously reasoned defense of the Christian faith. His Provincial Letters are best remembered as a wickedly funny satire of -obliging and accommodating- Jesuit moral theologians who, guided by policy rather than piety, are willing to put virtue and salvation within the easy reach of all but the diabolical. Both works are landmarks of French prose that have fascinated readers of all sorts from his day to ours. The eight essays in Fire in the Dark, two of which are new and four of which...