The author of the Orphic Argonautica was, except by personal election, no poet. He was, however, a very devout reader of poetry and, had he only been Irradiated by the same Celestial Light, might well have been a Milton, for he went to work in very much the same way. Books, and not personal experience, were his guides. His mind was stored with the lines and phrases of other poets; he read his authors attentively: but he did not always understand (...) them, and he lacked the Miltonic art of giving borrowed gems new value from their setting. (shrink)

The author of the Orphic Argonautica was, except by personal election, no poet. He was, however, a very devout reader of poetry and, had he only been Irradiated by the same Celestial Light, might well have been a Milton, for he went to work in very much the same way. Books, and not personal experience, were his guides. His mind was stored with the lines and phrases of other poets; he read his authors attentively: but he did not always understand (...) them, and he lacked the Miltonic art of giving borrowed gems new value from their setting. (shrink)

R.W. Church was an English churchman and writer. Church was also famous for being the dean of St. Paul's Cathedral in London.Bacon's most famous work is his biography on Francis Bacon, the great English philosopher.

Topic of the book is the project by Francis Bacon, a philosophical plan of the great instauration.

Peter Anstey presents a thorough and innovative study of John Locke's views on the method and content of natural philosophy. Focusing on Locke's Essay concerning Human Understanding, but also drawing extensively from his other writings and manuscript remains, Anstey argues that Locke was an advocate of the Experimental Philosophy: the new approach to natural philosophy championed by Robert Boyle and the early Royal Society who were opposed to speculative philosophy. On the question of method, Anstey shows how Locke's pessimism about (...) the prospects for a demonstrative science of nature led him, in the Essay, to promote Francis Bacon's method of natural history, and to downplay the value of hypotheses and analogical reasoning in science. But, according to Anstey, Locke never abandoned the ideal of a demonstrative natural philosophy, for he believed that if we could discover the primary qualities of the tiny corpuscles that constitute material bodies, we could then establish a kind of corpuscular metric that would allow us a genuine science of nature. It was only after the publication of the Essay, however, that Locke came to realize that Newton's Principia provided a model for the role of demonstrative reasoning in science based on principles established upon observation, and this led him to make significant revisions to his views in the 1690s. On the content of Locke's natural philosophy, it is argued that even though Locke adhered to the Experimental Philosophy, he was not averse to speculation about the corpuscular nature of matter. Anstey takes us into new terrain and new interpretations of Locke's thought in his explorations of his mercurialist transmutational chymistry, his theory of generation by seminal principles, and his conventionalism about species. (shrink)

The perceptual logic of j hintikka and r thomason is imbedded in a more general framework of quantification over individual-concepts. two intensional predicates for physical individuation and perceptual individuation are required in place of thomason's two variable-sorts. objectual perception of x by s is then definable as "for some y there is a perceptually individuated object z, in fact identical with x, such that s perceives that y is z.".

Provides an advanced overview of the issues that are informing research on the subject of British philosophy in the seventeenth century, while at the same time offering new directions for research to take. It covers the whole of the seventeenth century, ranging from Francis Bacon to John Locke and Isaac Newton. The book contains five parts: the introductory Part I examines the state of the discipline and the nature of its practitioners as the century unfolded; Part II discusses the (...) leading natural philosophers and the philosophy of nature, including Bacon, Boyle, and Newton; Part III covers knowledge and the human faculty of the understanding; Part IV explores the leading topics in British moral philosophy from the period; and Part V concerns political philosophy. In addition to dealing with canonical authors and celebrated texts, such as Thomas Hobbes and his Leviathan, it discusses many less-well-known figures and debates from the period whose importance is only now being appreciated. (shrink)

A brief, systematic exposition of the positions of seven classical thinkers on the subject of the logical and/or methodological unity of human knowledge. McRae writes methodically and accurately on a difficult subject.--R. G. M.