Pride, Manners, and Morals


Book Description

A reading of the Anglo-Dutch physician and thinker’s philosophical project from the hitherto neglected perspective of his lifelong interest in the theme of honour.




A Bibliography of George Berkeley


Book Description

Since the first appearance of this bibliography (1934, Oxford Uni versity Press), which has long been out of print, so much attention has been paid to Berkeley that a mere reprint would be inept. Besides bringing it up to date I have added collations of those editions of Berkeley's writings that were published in his lifetime. In doing so I have used a form of description simple enough for anyone to follow yet sufficient to enable librarians to check their catalogues and to identify copies in which the titlepage is missing or mutilated. As before, I have marked with an asterisk throughout the bibliography every book, edition and article that has not been seen by me or, in a few cases, by a competent friend. My primary interest not being bibliographical in the present-day highly technical sense, but philosophical, I have aimed chiefly at (a) providing advanced students (and their hard-pressed advisers) of Berkeley, or of the subjects on which he wrote, with a guide to the materials for research, and (b) displaying the range in time and place, and the direction, of the attention which he has attracted. These two aims account for the classification of the entries under a few general subject-headings and of the philosophical entries under countries, and for the arranging of the entries in each section or subsection in chrono logical order, the alphabetical ordering of the authors' names being given in the Index. To facilitate reference and cross-reference each entry is numbered.







Free Thoughts on Religion, the Church, and National Happiness


Book Description

Bernard Mandeville was best known for The Fable of the Bees, in which he demolishes the supposed moral basis of society by a Hobbesian demonstration that civilization depends on vice. Today Mandeville is seen as a trenchant satirist of the manners and foibles of his age. He is also seen as a precursor of some of Adam Smith's doctrines, a forerunner in the field of sociology. A prescient analyst of the dynamics of our modern consumer society, Mandeville is author of a striking naturalistic account of the gradual evolution of modern society from its primitive antecedents. His literary signature, in a manner of speaking, is his famous paradox, "private vices, public benefits." This new edition of Free Thoughts is prefaced by a lengthy and informative introduction by Irwin Primer, who recreates not only the literary, political, and religious atmosphere surrounding Mandeville, but also the controversies that surrounded his writing in mid-eighteenth-century England. Primer includes textual notes on the first and second editions of this classic work. To understand Mandeville's Free Thoughts, one needs to situate it within the context of the religious and political controversies, ongoing subversion, fear and dormant warfare of his times. Those would eventually erupt again and for the last time in the bloody Jacobite rebellion of 1745-46. The first five chapters of the book explore religious and theological issues including the nature of belief and knowledge, the significance of rites and ceremonies, and controversies about Christian mysteries such as the Trinity and free will and predestination. The next five chapters explore controversial issues of church politics, including persecution and toleration across the centuries, the basis of Mandeville's anticlericalism. In the eleventh chapter, he turns aside from matters of religion to review the balance of powers in Britain's government, a mixed or limited monarchy. The final chapter is essentially a repetition of Mandeville's pleas for civil and religious peace through mutual toleration by opposing religious parties. Mandeville's work is of continuing interest to students of culture and history, religion and theology, and political science. Irwin Primer is professor emeritus at Rutgers University who has written widely on Mandeville and the Scottish tradition in philosophy.




The Natural and the Human


Book Description

Stephen Gaukroger presents an original account of the development of empirical science and the understanding of human behaviour from the mid-eighteenth century. Since the seventeenth century, science in the west has undergone a unique form of cumulative development in which it has been consolidated through integration into and shaping of a culture. But in the eighteenth century, science was cut loose from the legitimating culture in which it had had a public rationale as a fruitful







A Letter to Dion


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