Despite the later prominence of apocalypticism in John Dee’s ‘angelic conversations’ in the years 1583–85, his correspondence with Roger Edwardes in 1580 about the correct interpretation of eschatological passages in the bible has received surprisingly little attention in Dee scholarship. In this article I give an account of Edwardes’s ill-fated political career, and the apocalyptical writings which he sent to divines in England and Germany for validation. These apocalyptical reflections, which Dee called ‘the boke of Domes Day’, were the subject (...) of the Dee–Edwardes correspondence. Whereas the divines with whom he corresponded were largely lukewarm, Edwardes found a sympathetic reader in Dee. I conclude by considering the significance of the Dee–Edwardes correspondence for Dee’s increasingly apocalyptical outlook, which began in 1564 with prophecies concerning the Habsburg dynasty in his Monashieroglyphica, and reached a fever pitch in the 1580s when he began working with the ‘skryer’ Edward Kelley. The careers of Dee and Edwardes have in common a belief in inspired exegesis and prophetic singularity, and I show that one can detect traces of Edwardes’s concern for the redemption of the Jewish people in Dee’s angelic writings. (shrink)

For all of his failures to secure patronage, John Dee was successful compared with his contemporaries. We know more about his patronage relations than those of any other natural philosopher in Tudor England. Only by comparing him with other English client practitioners can we understand how unusual and even productive were Dee’s relations with his patrons. This article makes those comparisons and offers an overview of Dee’s patronage, but in the main it explores three of the unusual aspects.The first is (...) Dee’s good relationship with female patrons and patronage brokers, notably Queen Elizabeth. The second is the kind of office that Dee sought. His greatest efforts were aimed at securing the headship of a collegiate institution such as Eton College or the Hospital of St Cross. Not only did they fit his aspiration to set up a research institute, but all were offices in the Queen’s direct gift, and so played to Dee’s strengths. Nevertheless, Dee was frustrated at nearly every turn. It is suggested that a major cause was the young Dee’s links with both Sir John Cheke’s network of Protestant humanists, who became Marian exiles, and with ‘Louvainist’ Catholic exiles opposed to Edward VI and Elizabeth. We see how Dee was consistently passed over in favour of other members of these circles. Notwithstanding this, it is concluded that Dee was relatively successful, given the English court’s refusal to patronise speculative natural philosophy, even that offered by Thomas Digges, William Gilbert or Francis Bacon. Finally, some of Dee’s supposed failings as a client, such as the sparseness of printed works, are shown to have been systemic. (shrink)

This paper investigates John Dee’s relationship with two kinds of alchemist: the authorities whose works he read, and the contemporary practitioners with whom he exchanged texts and ideas. Both strands coincide in the reception of works attributed to the famous English alchemist, George Ripley. Dee’s keen interest in Ripley appears from the number of transcriptions he made of ‘Ripleian’ writings, including the Bosome book, a manuscript discovered in 1574 and believed to have been written in Ripley’s own hand. In 1583, (...) Dee and his associate Edward Kelley left England for East Central Europe, taking with them a proportion of Dee’s vast library, including alchemical books—the contents of which would soon pique the interest of continental practitioners. Kelley used Ripley’s works, including the Bosome book, not only as sources of practical information, but as a means of furthering his own relationships with colleagues and patrons: transactions that in turn influenced Ripley’s posthumous continental reception. The resulting circulation of texts allows us to trace, with unusual precision, the spread of English alchemical ideas in the Holy Roman Empire from the late sixteenth century. (shrink)

Stephen H. Daniel's novel approach interprets the thought of Jonathan Edwards thorough semiotics, the theory of signs. He explicates the theory of signs that pervades Edwards' thought and associates it with elements of post-modernist semiotics in Foucault, Kristeva, and Peirce. He contends that Edwards himself developed a viable alternative to the classical-modern philosophical outlook by drawing explicitly upon the pre-modernist Renaissance propositional logic of Peter Ramus.

Presents an analysis of Jonathan Edwards' theological position. This book includes a study of his life and the intellectual issues in the America of his time, and examines the problem of free will in connection with Leibniz, Locke, and Hume.

This volume examines the role and influence of multiculturalism in general theories of international law; in the composition and functioning of international ...

This is an interview with Edward S. Casey, conducted by Donald A. Landes.

Since neither of these two inordinately long responses deals seriously with what I said in “An Ideology of Difference” , both the Boyarins and Griffin are made even more absurd by actual events occurring as they wrote. The Israeli army has by now been in direct and brutal military occupation of the West Bank and Gaza for twenty-one years; the intifadah, surely the most impressive and disciplined anticolonial insurrection in this century, is now in its eleventh month. The daily killings (...) of unarmed Palestinians by armed Israelis, soldiers and settlers, numbers several hundred; yesterday two more Palestinians were killed, the day before four were killed. The beatings, expulsions, wholesale collective punishments, the closure of schools and universities, as well as the imprisonment of dozens of thousands in places like Ansar III, a concentration camp, continue. A V sign flashed by a young Palestinian carries with six months in jail; a Palestinian flag can get you up to ten years; you risk burial alive by zealous Israel Defense Forces soldiers; if you are a member of a popular committee you are liable to arrest, and all professional, syndical, or community associations are now illegal. Any Palestinian can be put in jail without charge or trial for up to six months, renewable, for any offense, which needn’t be revealed to him or her. For non-Jews, approximately 1.5 million people on the West Bank and Gaza, there are thus no rights whatever. On the other hand, Jews are protected by Israeli law on the Occupied Territories. In such a state of apartheid—so named by most honest Israelis—the intifadah continues, as does the ideology of difference vainly attempting to repress and willfully misinterpret its significance. Edward W. Said is Parr Professor of English and Comparative Literature at Columbia University. His most recent contribution to Critical Inquiry is “Representing the Colonized: Anthropology’s Interlocutors”. (shrink)

Prepared by editors of the distinguished series The Works of Jonathan Edwards, this authoritative anthology includes selected treatises, sermons, and autobiographical material by early America’s greatest theologian and philosopher.

In Morals By Agreement, David Gauthier concludes that under certain conditions it is rational for an agent to be disposed to choose in accordance with a fair cooperative scheme rather than to choose the course of action that maximizes his utility. This is only one of a number of important claims advanced in that book. In particular, he also propounds a distinctive view concerning what counts as a fair cooperative arrangement. The thesis concerning the rationality of adopting a cooperative disposition (...) is, however, logically independent of his substantive view of a fair cooperative scheme and is itself central to the project as a whole. Gauthier's concern is to establish that certain moral principles are those that fully rational, self-interested persons would agree to take as regulative of their dealings with one another – that a contractarian approach, in this sense, can provide an adequate basis for a theory of morality. (shrink)

Trailblazing marine biologist, visionary conservationist, deep ecology philosopher, Edward F. Ricketts has reached legendary status in the California mythos. A true polymath and a thinker ahead of his time, Ricketts was a scientist who worked in passionate collaboration with many of his friends—artists, writers, and influential intellectual figures—including, perhaps most famously, John Steinbeck, who once said that Ricketts's mind “had no horizons.” This unprecedented collection, featuring previously unpublished pieces as well as others available for the first time in their (...) original form, reflects the wide scope of Ricketts’s scientific, philosophical, and literary interests during the years he lived and worked on Cannery Row in Monterey, California. These writings, which together illuminate the evolution of Ricketts’s unique, holistic approach to science, include “Verbatim transcription of notes on the Gulf of California trip,” the basic manuscript for Steinbeck’s and Ricketts’s _Log from the Sea of Cortez;_ the essays “The Philosophy of Breaking Through” and “A Spiritual Morphology of Poetry;” several shorter pieces on topics including collecting invertebrates and the impact of modernization on Mexican village life; and more. An engaging critical biography and a number of rare photographs offer a new and richly detailed view of Ricketts’s life. (shrink)

v. 1. Freedom of the will -- v. 2. Religious affections -- v. 3. Original sin -- v. 4. The Great Awakening -- v. 5. Apocalyptic writings -- v. 6. Scientific and philosophical writings -- v. 7. The life of David Brainerd -- v. 8. Ethical writings -- v. 9. A history of the work of redemption -- v. 10. Sermons and discourses, 1720-1723 -- v. 13. The "miscellanies" (entry nos. a-z, aa-zz, 1-500) -- v. 15. Notes on Scripture -- (...) v. 17. Sermons and discourses, 1730-1733 -- v. 18. The "miscellanies" (entry nos. 501-832) -- v. 19. Sermons and discourses, 1734-1738 -- v. 20. The miscellanies -- v. 22. Sermons and discourses, 1739-1742 -- v. 24. The "blank Bible" (2 v.). (shrink)

Three of the most venerable objections to anthropomorphic conceptions of the divine are traceable to Xenophanes and his critique of the early Greek gods. Though suitably revised, these ancient criticisms have persisted over the centuries, plaguing various religious communities, particularly those of classical Christian commitment. Xenophanes complained that anthropomorphism leads to unseemly characterizations, noting that both over the ages, the list of unseemly characteristics has expanded somewhat.

New books by Caroline Arscott and Mike Sanders return to the vexed problem of Marxism and aesthetics. For some time, there has been an intense suspicion of aesthetic thought in Marxist circles, where it is perceived as an ideology perpetrating a false resolution of contradictions. Arscott and Sanders understand aesthetics to be at the heart of the communist imagination: Arscott offers a detailed investigation of how the body is inhabited in the art of William Morris and Edward Burne-Jones; Sanders (...) considers the figure of the poet in Chartism as a spur to radicalism. Engaging with these books, this review calls for a Marxist reconsideration of aesthetic thought and artistic practice. (shrink)

This volume contains the editor’s informative “Preface to the Period”, the Quaestio that Edwards submitted in 1723 to complete his master’s degree at Yale, and 19 sermons. Some of the sermons were first preached during 1723 and 1724 in Bolton, Connecticut, but most were composed between 1726 and 1729 in Northampton, Massachusetts while Edwards was junior minister in the church of Solomon Stoddard, his grandfather; a few originated after Stoddard’s death in February, 1729, when Edwards became sole minister of the (...) Northampton congregation. (shrink)

This book presents an innovative analysis of the role of imagination as a central concept in both literary and art criticism. Dee Reynolds brings this approach to bear on works by Rimbaud, Mallarme;, Kandinsky, and Mondrian. It allows her to redefine the relationship between Symbolism and abstract art, and to contribute new methodological perspectives to comparative studies of poetry and painting. The late nineteenth and early twentieth century was a crucial period in the emergence of new modes of representation, and (...) is currently at the forefront of critical enquiry. This is the first book to examine Symbolism and abstraction in this way, and the first to treat these poets and painters together. It is an original contribution to interdisciplinary scholarship in art history, literary history, and comparative aesthetics. (shrink)