Robert Boyle: A Free Enquiry Into the Vulgarly Received Notion of Nature PDF Download

Author: Robert Boyle
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 9780521567961
Category : Nature
Languages : en
Pages : 216

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An important treatise by one of the leading mechanical philosophers of the seventeenth century.

Author: Michael Hunter
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1351893718
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 499

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Book Description
Robert Boyle (1627-91) was the most influential British scientist of the late seventeenth century. His huge archive, which has been at the Royal Society since 1769, has only recently been explored, leading to a new understanding of many aspects of Boyle's thought. This volume brings together the essential materials for understanding the Boyle Papers. It includes a revised version of Michael Hunter's fundamental study of the archive, first published in 1992, which elucidates its history and the way in which handwriting evidence can be used to identify chronological strata within it, thus making it possible to trace the development of Boyle's ideas. Other chapters deal with such components of the Papers as Boyle's 'workdiaries' and his projected Paralipomena; another uses material from the archive to illuminate the making of a key work by Boyle, his Free Inquiry into the Vulgarly Receiv'd Notion of Nature; while another illustrates that, large as the archive is, it is only a part of what existed in Boyle's lifetime. Parts of the content have been published before, but they are here presented in revised and fully indexed form. Lastly, the volume includes a completely revised version of the catalogue of the Boyle Papers, Letters and ancillary manuscripts originally published in 1992, updating it by tabulating the extensive use of the archive made in recent years in connection with the publication of the definitive editions of Boyle's Works and Correspondence (1999-2001). In all, the volume will be indispensable to anyone with a serious interest in Boyle.

Author: Pierre Hadot
Publisher: Harvard University Press
ISBN: 9780674023161
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 440

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Nearly twenty-five hundred years ago the Greek thinker Heraclitus supposedly uttered the cryptic words "Phusis kruptesthai philei." How the aphorism, usually translated as "Nature loves to hide," has haunted Western culture ever since is the subject of this engaging study by Pierre Hadot. Taking the allegorical figure of the veiled goddess Isis as a guide, and drawing on the work of both the ancients and later thinkers such as Goethe, Rilke, Wittgenstein, and Heidegger, Hadot traces successive interpretations of Heraclitus' words. Over time, Hadot finds, "Nature loves to hide" has meant that all that lives tends to die; that Nature wraps herself in myths; and (for Heidegger) that Being unveils as it veils itself. Meanwhile the pronouncement has been used to explain everything from the opacity of the natural world to our modern angst. From these kaleidoscopic exegeses and usages emerge two contradictory approaches to nature: the Promethean, or experimental-questing, approach, which embraces technology as a means of tearing the veil from Nature and revealing her secrets; and the Orphic, or contemplative-poetic, approach, according to which such a denuding of Nature is a grave trespass. In place of these two attitudes Hadot proposes one suggested by the Romantic vision of Rousseau, Goethe, and Schelling, who saw in the veiled Isis an allegorical expression of the sublime. "Nature is art and art is nature," Hadot writes, inviting us to embrace Isis and all she represents: art makes us intensely aware of how completely we ourselves are not merely surrounded by nature but also part of nature.

Author: Mónica García-Salmones Rovira
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1009332139
Category : Law
Languages : en
Pages : 487

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To understand our current world crises, it is essential to study the origins of the systems and institutions we now take for granted. This book takes a novel approach to charting intellectual, scientific, and philosophical histories alongside the development of the international legal order by studying the philosophy and theology of the Scientific Revolution and its impact on European natural law, political liberalism, and political economy. Starting from analysis of the work of Thomas Hobbes, Robert Boyle and John Locke on natural law, the author incorporates a holistic approach that encompasses global matters beyond the foundational matters of treaties and diplomacy. The monograph promotes a sustainable transformation of international law in the context of related philosophy, history, and theology. Tackling issues such as nature, money, necessities, human nature, secularism, and epistemology which underlie natural lawyers' thinking, Dr García-Salmones explains their enduring relevance for international legal studies today.

Author: Avihu Zakai
Publisher: Princeton University Press
ISBN: 1400825601
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 368

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Avihu Zakai analyzes Jonathan Edwards's redemptive mode of historical thought in the context of the Enlightenment. As theologian and philosopher, Edwards has long been a towering figure in American intellectual history. Nevertheless, and despite Edwards's intense engagement with the nature of time and the meaning of history, there has been no serious attempt to explore his philosophy of history. Offering the first such exploration, Zakai considers Edwards's historical thought as a reaction, in part, to the varieties of Enlightenment historical narratives and their growing disregard for theistic considerations. Zakai analyzes the ideological origins of Edwards's insistence that the process of history depends solely on God's redemptive activity in time as manifested in a series of revivals throughout history, reading this doctrine as an answer to the threat posed to the Christian theological teleology of history by the early modern emergence of a secular conception of history and the modern legitimation of historical time. In response to the Enlightenment refashioning of secular, historical time and its growing emphasis on human agency, Edwards strove to re-establish God's preeminence within the order of time. Against the de-Christianization of history and removal of divine power from the historical process, he sought to re-enthrone God as the author and lord of history--and thus to re-enchant the historical world. Placing Edwards's historical thought in its broadest context, this book will be welcomed by those who study early modern history, American history, or religious culture and experience in America.

Author: Malcolm Jeeves
Publisher: Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing
ISBN: 0802865577
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 353

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How do the many exciting recent scientific discoveries in neuroscience, psychology, evolutionary biology, genetics and paleoanthropology challenge and complicate but also enrich and illuminate the traditional Christian portrait of human nature? In Rethinking Human Nature an international team of scientists, historians, philosophers, and theologians presents both the wisdom of the past and the cutting edge of present and developing scientific research to explore answers to this vital question. Their discussions examining our brains, our genes, our ancestors, our societies, and more will help us develop a more nuanced and complete understanding of what it really means to be human. Contributors: Evandro Agazzi, R. J. Berry, Alison S. Brooks, Franco Chiereghin, Felipe Fernandez, Graeme Finlay, Joel Green, Malcolm Jeeves, Jrgen Mittelstrass, David G. Myers, Janet Martin Soskice, Fernando Vidal

Author: Steven Nadler
Publisher: John Wiley & Sons
ISBN: 0470998830
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 675

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Book Description
This is a reference for early modern philosophy. Representing the most contemporary research in the history of early modern philosophy, it is organized by thinker rather than theme, and covers every important philosopher and philosophical movement of 16th- and 18th-century Europe.

Author: Sarah Hutton
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1139456059
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 281

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This 2004 book was the first intellectual biography of one of the very first English women philosophers. At a time when very few women received more than basic education, Lady Anne Conway wrote an original treatise of philosophy, her Principles of the Most Ancient and Modern Philosophy, which challenged the major philosophers of her day - Descartes, Hobbes and Spinoza. Sarah Hutton's study places Anne Conway in her historical and philosophical context, by reconstructing her social and intellectual milieu. She traces her intellectual development in relation to friends and associates such as Henry More, Sir John Finch, F. M. van Helmont, Robert Boyle and George Keith. And she documents Conway's debt to Cambridge Platonism and her interest in religion - an interest which extended beyond Christian orthodoxy to Quakerism, Judaism and Islam. Her book offers an insight into both the personal life of a very private woman, and the richness of seventeenth-century intellectual culture.

Author: Victor Nuovo
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 019880055X
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 276

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Early modern Europe was the birthplace of the modern secular outlook. During the seventeenth century nature and human society came to be regarded in purely naturalistic, empirical ways, and religion was made an object of critical historical study. John Locke was a central figure in all these events. This study of his philosophical thought shows that these changes did not happen smoothly or without many conflicts of belief: Locke, in the role of Christian Virtuoso, endeavoured to resolve them. He was an experimental natural philosopher, a proponent of the so-called 'new philosophy', a variety of atomism that emerged in early modern Europe. But he was also a practising Christian, and he professed confidence that the two vocations were not only compatible, but mutually sustaining. He aspired, without compromising his empirical stance, to unite the two vocations in a single philosophical endeavour with the aim of producing a system of Christian philosophy.

Author: Antoine Arnauld
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 9780521483940
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 328

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Book Description
A new translation of the treatise which inspired modern developments in logic and semantic theory.