Book Description

This major new publication is the most comprehensive reference source ever on eighteenth-century authors writing in the English language about philosophical ideas and issues. Featuring authors taken from 1689 through to the middle of the nineteenth century, the period beginning with John Locke and ending with Dugald Stewart, the word 'philosophical' is used in a wide, eighteenth-century sense. Thus the Dictionary includes epistemology, ethics, aesthetics, education, politics, rhetoric, science, medicine, biology, geology, chemistry and theology, and many of the authors may more usually be called divines, scientists, doctors, mathematicians, or even poets. In addition to short biographies of the writers, there are detailed expositions and analyses of their doctrines and ideas, bibliographies of their writings and suggestions for further reading. There are also mini-entries on extremely obscure figures and appendices listing anonymous tracts. All the major eighteenth-century philosophers are featured, but the most valuable feature of the Dictionary is its representation of a huge range of less well-known writers. In many cases the Dictionary offers the first scholarly treatment of the life and work of certain writers. This book will be an indispensable reference work for scholars working on almost any aspect of eighteenth-century studies.