Scepticism and Irreligion in the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries

Scepticism and Irreligion in the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries PDF Author: Richard Henry Popkin
Publisher: BRILL
ISBN: 9789004095960
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 394

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Book Description
This volume seeks to clarify and understand the challenges made to both the framework of thinking about God and religion in the 17th and 18th centuries and to the intellectual systems that had supported religious thinking earlier. Ample attention is given to early-modern interpretations of ancient Pyrrhonism and to biblical criticism.

Scepticism and Irreligion in the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries

Scepticism and Irreligion in the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries PDF Author: Richard Henry Popkin
Publisher: BRILL
ISBN: 9789004095960
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 394

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Book Description
This volume seeks to clarify and understand the challenges made to both the framework of thinking about God and religion in the 17th and 18th centuries and to the intellectual systems that had supported religious thinking earlier. Ample attention is given to early-modern interpretations of ancient Pyrrhonism and to biblical criticism.

Scepticism in the Eighteenth Century: Enlightenment, Lumières, Aufklärung

Scepticism in the Eighteenth Century: Enlightenment, Lumières, Aufklärung PDF Author: Sébastien Charles
Publisher: Springer Science & Business Media
ISBN: 9400748108
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 392

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Book Description
The Age of Enlightenment has often been portrayed as a dogmatic period on account of the veritable worship of reason and progress that characterized Eighteenth Century thinkers. Even today the philosophes are considered to have been completely dominated in their thinking by an optimism that leads to dogmatism and ultimately rationalism. However, on closer inspection, such a conception seems untenable, not only after careful study of the impact of scepticism on numerous intellectual domains in the period, but also as a result of a better understanding of the character of the Enlightenment. As Giorgio Tonelli has rightly observed: “the Enlightenment was indeed the Age of Reason but one of the main tasks assigned to reason in that age was to set its own boundaries.” Thus, given the growing number of works devoted to the scepticism of Enlightenment thinkers, historians of philosophy have become increasingly aware of the role played by scepticism in the Eighteenth Century, even in those places once thought to be most given to dogmatism, especially Germany. Nevertheless, the deficiencies of current studies of Enlightenment scepticism are undeniable. In taking up this question in particular, the present volume, which is entirely devoted to the scepticism of the Enlightenment in both its historical and geographical dimensions, seeks to provide readers with a revaluation of the alleged decline of scepticism. At the same time it attempts to resituate the Pyrrhonian heritage within its larger context and to recapture the fundamental issues at stake. The aim is to construct an alternative conception of Enlightenment philosophy, by means of philosophical modernity itself, whose initial stages can be found herein. ​

Contesting Religious Identities

Contesting Religious Identities PDF Author: Bob E.J.H. Becking
Publisher: BRILL
ISBN: 9004337458
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 315

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Book Description
Religion is a hot topic on the public stages of ‘secular’ societies, not in its individualized liberal or orthodox form, but rather as a public statement, challenging the divide between the secular neutral space and the religious. In this new challenging modus, religion raises questions about identity, power, rationality, subjectivity, law and safety, but above all: religion questions, contests and even blurs the borders between the public and the private. These phenomena urge to rethink what are often considered to be clear differences between religions, between the public and the private and between the religious and the secular. In this volume scholars from a range of different disciplines map the different aspects of the dynamics of changing, contesting and contested religious identities.

Experiment, Speculation and Religion in Early Modern Philosophy

Experiment, Speculation and Religion in Early Modern Philosophy PDF Author: Alberto Vanzo
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 0429663625
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 296

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Book Description
Experimental philosophy was an exciting and extraordinarily successful development in the study of nature in the seventeenth century. Yet experimental philosophy was not without its critics and was far from the only natural philosophical method on the scene. In particular, experimental philosophy was contrasted with and set against speculative philosophy and, in some quarters, was accused of tending to irreligion. This volume brings together ten scholars of early modern philosophy, history and science in order to shed new light on the complex relations between experiment, speculation and religion in early modern Europe. The first six chapters of the book focus on the respective roles of experimental and speculative philosophy in individual seventeenth-century philosophers. They include Francis Bacon, Robert Boyle, Margaret Cavendish, Thomas Hobbes, John Locke and Isaac Newton. The next two chapters deal with the relation between experimental philosophy and religion with a special focus on hypotheses and natural religion. The penultimate chapter takes a broader European perspective and examines the paucity of concerns with religion among Italian natural philosophers of the period. Finally, the concluding chapter draws all these individuals and themes together to provide a critical appraisal of recent scholarship on experimental philosophy. This book is the first collection of essays on the subject of early modern experimental philosophy. It will appeal to scholars and students of early modern philosophy, science and religion.

The Right to Believe

The Right to Believe PDF Author: Dariusz Lukasiewicz
Publisher: Walter de Gruyter
ISBN: 3110320169
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 244

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Book Description
In the twentieth century, many contemporary epistemologists in the analytic tradition have entered into debate regarding the right to belief with new tools: Richard Swinburne, Anthony Kenny, Alvin Plantinga, Nicholas Wolterstorff, Peter van Inwagen (who contributes a piece in this volume) defending or contesting the requirement of evidence for any justified belief. The best things we can do, it seems, is to examine more attentively the true notion of “right to believe”, especially about religious matters. This is exactly what authors of the papers in this book do.

A Commerce of Knowledge

A Commerce of Knowledge PDF Author: Simon Mills
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0192576674
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 353

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Book Description
A Commerce of Knowledge tells the story of three generations of Church of England chaplains who served the English Levant Company in Syria during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Reconstructing the careers of its protagonists in the cosmopolitan city of Ottoman Aleppo, Simon Mills investigates the links between English commercial and diplomatic expansion, and English scholarly and missionary interests: the study of Middle-Eastern languages; the exploration of biblical and Greco-Roman antiquities; and the early dissemination of Protestant literature in Arabic. Early modern Orientalism is usually conceived as an episode in the history of scholarship. By shifting the focus to Aleppo, A Commerce of Knowledge brings to light the connections between the seemingly separate worlds, tracing the emergence of new kinds of philological and archaeological enquiry in England back to a series of real-world encounters between the chaplains and the scribes, booksellers, priests, rabbis, and sheikhs they encountered in the Ottoman Empire. Setting the careers of its protagonists against a background of broader developments across Protestant and Catholic Europe, Mills shows how the institutionalization of English scholarship, and the later English attempt to influence the Eastern Christian churches, were bound up with the international struggle to establish a commercial foothold in the Levant. He argues that these connections would endure until the shift of British commercial and imperial interests to the Indian subcontinent in the second half of the eighteenth century fostered new currents of intellectual life at home.

Models of the History of Philosophy

Models of the History of Philosophy PDF Author: Giovanni Santinello
Publisher: Springer Science & Business Media
ISBN: 9048195071
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 617

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Book Description
This volume is the translation of "Dall'età cartesiana a Brucker", the second volume of the multi-volume work "Storia delle storie generali della filosofia". It guides the reader from the Cartesian rejection of the ‘philosophical past’ that found voice in the work of Malebranche, to the establishment of a ‘critical’ history of philosophy by 18th century thinkers A.-F Boureau-Deslandes and J.J. Brucker. The latter pair investigated philosophy from its most ancient origins up to the contemporary age, and oversaw the transformation of the history of philosophy into a genre in its own right, thus spawning dozens of works that made a major contribution to the culture of the Enlightenment. Through careful analysis of more than 36 separate works, the authors show how in the span of a single century the theoretical and methodological techniques used to assess the history of philosophy were refined and developed.

After Certainty

After Certainty PDF Author: Robert Pasnau
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0198801785
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 393

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Book Description
No part of philosophy is as disconnected from its history as is epistemology. After Certainty offers a reconstruction of that history, understood as a series of changing expectations about the cognitive ideal that beings such as us might hope to achieve in a world such as this. The story begins with Aristotle and then looks at how his epistemic program was developed through later antiquity and into the Middle Ages, before being dramatically reformulated in the seventeenth century. In watching these debates unfold over the centuries, one sees why epistemology has traditionally been embedded within a much larger sphere of concerns about human nature and the reality of the world we live in. It ultimately becomes clear why epistemology today has become a much narrower and specialized field, concerned with the conditions under which it is true to say, that someone knows something. Based on a series of lectures given at Oxford University, Robert Pasnau's book ranges widely over the history of philosophy, and examines in some detail the rise of science as an autonomous discipline. Ultimately Pasnau argues that we may have no good reasons to suppose ourselves capable of achieving even the most minimal standards for knowledge, and the final chapter concludes with a discussion of faith and hope.

The Georgians

The Georgians PDF Author: Penelope J. Corfield
Publisher: Yale University Press
ISBN: 0300265069
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 339

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Book Description
A comprehensive history of the Georgians, comparing past views of these exciting, turbulent, and controversial times with our attitudes today The Georgian era is often seen as a time of innovations. It saw the end of monarchical absolutism, global exploration and settlements overseas, the world’s first industrial revolution, deep transformations in religious and cultural life, and Britain’s role in the international trade in enslaved Africans. But how were these changes perceived by people at the time? And how do their viewpoints compare with attitudes today? In this wide-ranging history, Penelope J. Corfield explores every aspect of Georgian life—politics and empire, culture and society, love and violence, religion and science, industry and towns. People’s responses at the time were often divided. Pessimists saw loss and decline, while optimists saw improvements and light. Out of such tensions came the Georgian culture of both experiment and resistance. Corfield emphasizes those elements of deep continuity that persisted even within major changes, and shows how new developments were challenged if their human consequences proved dire.

Pierre-Daniel Huet (1630–1721) and the Skeptics of his Time

Pierre-Daniel Huet (1630–1721) and the Skeptics of his Time PDF Author: José R. Maia Neto
Publisher: Springer Nature
ISBN: 3030947165
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 227

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Book Description
This book offers a detailed and scholarly historical and philosophical examination of French scepticism from Descartes to the beginning of the Enlightenment by examining the views of Pierre-Daniel Huet (1630–1721). It shows the crucial role played by Huet in the modification of the early modern sceptical tradition: from a practical perspective closer to ancient scepticism, mostly presented by Montaigne and Charron, to an epistemological and metaphysical perspective strongly influenced by Descartes’s doubt. The book examines and gives original interpretations of the various sceptical (and semi-sceptical) views held in the period and their connections to Huet’s own scepticism. Besides known philosophers such as Descartes, Gassendi, Pascal and Bayle, the book also accesses sceptical views held by secondary figures such as La Mothe Le Vayer and Simon Foucher and others who have not thus far been connected to the sceptical tradition such as Jean-Baptiste du Hamel and Madeleine de Scudéry. The book is useful for scholars in the field of early modern ideas: philosophical, religious and scientific.