Details

Autor(en) / Beteiligte

• Levitin, Dmitri

Titel

The kingdom of darkness : Bayle, Newton, and the emancipation of the European mind from philosophy

Ort / Verlag

Cambridge ; New York ; Port Melbourne ; New Delhi ; Singapore : Cambridge University Press

Erscheinungsjahr

2022

Link zu anderen Inhalten

• Inhaltsverzeichnis

Beschreibungen/Notizen

• Title from publisher's bibliographic system (viewed on 24 Mar 2022)
• General prologue: A study in the history of knowledge -- Prolegomena : giving up philosophy -- Emancipating natural philosophy from metaphysics -- Emancipating theology from philosophy -- Reconstructing the pagan mind in seventeenth-century Europe : a historico-philosophical critique of pure reason -- Prolegomena : Pierre Bayle : a life in the republic of letters at the turn of the eighteenth century (1700) -- Greece, Asia, and the logic of paganism -- The Manichean articles and the 'sponge of all religions' -- Theological method and the foundations of Protestant faith -- Virtuous atheism, philosophic sin, and toleration -- Prolegomena. The formation of Newton's natural-philosophical project, 1664-1687 -- After the Principia. Justifying a science of properties and the invention of 'Newtonianism' -- The queries to the Optice (1706) : an intelligent God, the divine sensorium, and the development of an anti-metaphysical natural theology -- The general scholium : a non-metaphysical physics -- Newton's kingdom of darkness complete
• In 1500, speculative philosophy lay at the heart of European intellectual life; by 1700, its role was drastically diminished. The Kingdom of Darkness tells the story of this momentous transformation. Dmitri Levitin explores the structural factors behind this change: the emancipation of natural philosophy from metaphysics; theologians' growing preference for philology over philosophy; and a new conception of the limits of the human mind derived from historical and oriental scholarship, not least concerning China and Japan. In turn, he shows that the ideas of two of Europe's most famous thinkers, Pierre Bayle and Isaac Newton, were both the products of this transformation and catalysts for its success. Drawing on hundreds of sources in many languages, Levitin traces in unprecedented detail Bayle and Newton's conceptions of what Thomas Hobbes called The Kingdom of Darkness: a genealogical vision of how philosophy had corrupted the human mind. Both men sought to remedy this corruption, and their ideas helped lay the foundation for the system of knowledge that emerged in the eighteenth century