Update cookies preferences

Kingdom of Darkness: Bayle, Newton, and the Emancipation of the European Mind from Philosophy [Hardback]

(University of Oxford)
  • Format: Hardback, 980 pages, height x width x depth: 236x158x56 mm, weight: 1530 g, Worked examples or Exercises
  • Pub. Date: 31-Mar-2022
  • Publisher: Cambridge University Press
  • ISBN-10: 110883700X
  • ISBN-13: 9781108837002
Other books in subject:
  • Hardback
  • Price: 114,85 €
  • This book is not in stock. Book will arrive in about 2-4 weeks. Please allow another 2 weeks for shipping outside Estonia.
  • Quantity:
  • Add to basket
  • Delivery time 4-6 weeks
  • Add to Wishlist
Kingdom of Darkness: Bayle, Newton, and the Emancipation of the European Mind from PhilosophyLarger Image
  • Format: Hardback, 980 pages, height x width x depth: 236x158x56 mm, weight: 1530 g, Worked examples or Exercises
  • Pub. Date: 31-Mar-2022
  • Publisher: Cambridge University Press
  • ISBN-10: 110883700X
  • ISBN-13: 9781108837002
Other books in subject:
Permanent link: https://www.kriso.ee/db/9781108837002.html
Keywords:
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.

This book offers a transformative account of early modern European intellectual history, culminating in new interpretations of two of its leading minds: Pierre Bayle and Isaac Newton. It charts the process by which speculative philosophy was gradually excluded from the European system of knowledge, not least via new genealogies of global thought.

Reviews

'This truly monumental study calls for a Copernican revolution in our understanding of Modernity: the European Mind, Levitin argues, was not transformed by the triumph of philosophy but by emancipation from it. The evidence and acumen with which Levitin advances his bold thesis are extraordinary and will provoke debate for years to come.' Maria Rosa Antognazza, King's College London 'In his extraordinarily erudite and broad-ranging study, Levitin compels us to rethink historiographic categories such as the Scientific Revolution, the Enlightenment and the rise of modernity in Europe by charting the contingent historical conditions that prompted a momentous, yet overlooked, disciplinary reconfiguration of early-modern natural philosophy and theology; namely, the emancipation of both scientific and religious thought from traditional metaphysics and philosophical rationalism.' Niccolò Guicciardini, Università degli Studi di Milano 'This is one of the most important publications in European intellectual history, not just of this year, but of the last decade.' Noel Malcolm, Books of the Year 2022, Times Literary Supplement ' Levitin makes a powerful case for the need to reconceptualize understanding of the Enlightenment and its subsequent history and influence on modern thought. The book is a paradigm of academic scholarship. The author's research and presentation are comprehensive and extensive Essential.' D. B. Boersema, Choice ' a remarkably erudite and important study with a highly intricate argument that requires slow and careful reading if one is fully to grasp its insights and nuances.' Daniel Woolf, Marginalia Review of Books

More info

This transformative account of early modern intellectual life culminates with new interpretations of two of its leading minds: Pierre Bayle and Isaac Newton.
Preface ix
List of Abbreviations and Conventions
xii
General Prologue: A Study in the History of Knowledge 1(16)
1 The Kingdom of Darkness
1(4)
2 This Book
5(12)
PART I Giving Up Philosophy: The Transformation of a System of Knowledge
17(208)
I Prolegomena: Giving Up Philosophy
19(206)
I.1 Emancipating Natural Philosophy from Metaphysics
25(95)
I.1.1 Metaphysics and Natural Philosophy: the Late Medieval Synthesis
27(3)
I.1.2 The Humanist Critique: Common Language, Anti-Essentialism, and the Impossibility of Scientia
30(3)
I.1.3 Italian Natural Philosophy and Medicine and the Rise of Anti-Rationalist Sentiment
33(18)
I.1.4 The Revival and Reinterpretation of Metaphysics
51(9)
I.1.5 Mathematics and Mixed Mathematics: Another Source for the De-Ontologisation of Natural Philosophy
60(22)
I.1.6 The Synthesis (I): a New Metaphysical Physics
82(14)
I.1.7 The Synthesis (II): an Anti-Metaphysical Physics
96(8)
I.1.8 What Was the Study of Nature in the Later Seventeenth Century?
104(12)
I.1.9 Conclusion
116(4)
I.2 Emancipating Theology from Philosophy
120(45)
I.2.1 The Medieval Inheritance
121(2)
I.2.2 Positive Rather than Philosophical Theology: the Catholic World
123(15)
I.2.3 The Protestant World
138(22)
I.2.4 Conclusion: the Myth of Theological `Rationalism'
160(5)
I.3 Reconstructing the Pagan Mind in Seventeenth-Century Europe: A Historico-Philosophical Critique of Pure Reason
165(60)
I.3.1 The Post-Patristic Conception of the Pagan Mind
167(16)
I.3.2 After Vossius (I): Pagan Animism as Imperfect Monotheism
183(8)
I.3.3 After Vossius (II): Pagan Animism as Naturalist Atheism
191(16)
I.3.4 The Global Debate over Pagan Animism
207(9)
I.3.5 Naturalism Without Spinoza
216(5)
I.3.6 Conclusion: the Pagan Mind in Early Modern Europe
221(4)
PART II Pierre Bayle and the Emancipation of Religion from Philosophy
225(272)
II Prolegomena: Pierre Bayle: a Life in the Republic of Letters at the Turn of the Eighteenth Century
227(270)
1 Fideism, Rationalism, Scepticism, and the Non-Existence of the `Bayle Enigma'
227(3)
2 Pierre Bayle, Reactive Man of Letters
230(21)
II.1 Greece, Asia, and the Logic of Paganism: Cartesian Occasionalism as the Only `Christian Philosophy'
251(57)
II.1.1 Bayle on the Logic of Paganism
253(15)
II.1.2 Cartesian Occasionalism as the Only Answer to the Logic of Paganism
268(25)
II.1.3 The Limits of Cartesian Occasionalism
293(8)
II.1.4 Conclusion: Pierre Bayle, Natural Theologian
301(7)
II.2 The Manichean Articles and the `Sponge of all Religions': The Problem of Evil and the Rationality of Reformed Predestinarian Belief
308(67)
II.2.1 Introduction
308(4)
II.2.2 The Manichean Challenge: a Summary
312(5)
II.2.3 Did Anyone in the Seventeenth Century Believe that Pure Reason Could Solve the Problem of Evil?
317(5)
II.2.4 Anti-Philosophical Molinism and the `Sponge of All Religions'
322(10)
II.2.5 The Theological Context (I): the Malebranche--Arnauld Dispute
332(12)
II.2.6 The Theological Context (II): Reformed Arguments on Grace, 1670--1690
344(11)
II.2.7 The Theological Context (III): Jurieu Continues to Set the Agenda
355(8)
II.2.8 The Manichean Articles as a Defence of Reformed Predestinarianism
363(4)
II.2.9 Predestination and Toleration
367(3)
II.2.10 Conclusion: Pierre Bayle, Reformed Lay Theologian
370(5)
II.3 Theological Method and the Foundations of Protestant Faith
375(48)
II.3.1 Fideism or Positive Theology?
375(8)
II.3.2 What Was Bayle's Dispute with the `Rationaux' Really About?
383(21)
II.3.3 Things Above/Contrary to Reason, Transubstantiation, and the Foundations of Protestant Faith
404(17)
II.3.4 Conclusion: Bayle, Reformed Polemicist
421(2)
II.4 Virtuous Atheism, Philosophic Sin, and Toleration
423(74)
II.4.1 The Pensees diverses in Context
424(28)
II.4.2 Returning to Idolatry and Atheism: the Addition (1694), Dictionnaire, and Continuation (1705)
452(20)
II.4.3 Philosophic Sin, Anti-Pelagianism, and Toleration
472(17)
II.4.4 Conclusion: Bayle's Kingdom of Darkness
489(8)
PART III Isaac Newton and the Emancipation of Natural Philosophy from Metaphysics
497(320)
III Prolegomena: The Formation of Newton's Natural-Philosophical Project, 1664--1687
499(20)
1 Introduction: Recovering the Historical Newton
499(7)
2 The Formation of Newton's Conception of Natural Philosophy: Towards an Experimental-Mathematical Science of Properties
506(13)
3 The 1671 Hydrostatical Lectures (`De gravitatione')
519(24)
4 The Development of Newton's Interest in Theology
543(8)
5 Towards the Principia
551(21)
6 Conclusion: the Principia as a Manifestation of Disciplinary Reconfiguration
572(245)
III.1 After the Principia: Justifying a Science of Properties and the Invention of `Newtonianism'
577(76)
III.1.1 Newton's Historico-Philosophical Vision in the Mid-1680s: `Theologiae gentilis origines philosophicae' and `De motu corporum (liber secundus)'
580(6)
III.1.2 The 1690s: the Classical Scholia and Contemporary Texts
586(20)
III.1.3 The New regulae philosophandi: Atomism, Transduction, and the Analogy of Nature
606(28)
III.1.4 Rational Mechanics and the Mathematisation of Natural Philosophy
634(3)
III.1.5 Gregory and Keill: Aggressive Newtonianism in 1690s Oxford
637(14)
III.1.6 Conclusion: `Newtonianism' in the 1690s
651(2)
III.2 The Queries to the Optice (1706): An Intelligent God, the Divine Sensorium, and the Development of an Anti-Metaphysical Natural Theology
653(50)
III.2.1 The Queries to the Optice (1706): a New Natural Theology
654(10)
III.2.2 The Influence of Samuel Clarke: Predicating an Intelligent God
664(15)
III.2.3 The Debts to George Cheyne: Gravity Like the Circulation of the Blood
679(8)
III.2.4 Space as the Divine Sensorium
687(10)
III.2.5 Conclusion: Newtonian Disciplinary Demarcation, c. 1705
697(6)
III.3 The General Scholium: A Non-Metaphysical Physics
703(63)
III.3.1 The Methodological Statements in the General Scholium: Demarcating the Bounds of Natural Philosophy
705(20)
III.3.2 Clarke and the God of Dominion
725(15)
III.3.3 Clarke, Collins, and `Substantial' Omnipresence
740(17)
III.3.4 Newton Self-Interprets the General Scholium
757(3)
III.3.5 Conclusion: Newton's Conception of a Non-Metaphysical, Mathematical Physics, c. 1715
760(6)
III.4 Newton's Kingdom of Darkness Complete
766(51)
III.4.1 `Of the Church' and Newton's Kingdom of Darkness
767(14)
III.4.2 The Leibniz-Clarke Correspondence
781(6)
III.4.3 The Newton-Conti Correspondence and Some New Definitions for the Principia
787(10)
III.4.4 The `Avertissement'
797(5)
III.4.5 `Tempus et locus'
802(6)
III.4.6 Conclusion: Newton's Kingdom of Darkness
808(9)
PART IV The European System of Knowledge, c.1700 and Beyond
817(36)
IV Conclusion
819(34)
1 Summary
819(13)
2 The European System of Knowledge, c.1700 and Beyond
832(21)
Bibliography 853(82)
Index 935
Dmitri Levitin is a Research Fellow at All Souls College, Oxford. He works on the history of knowledge: philosophical, scientific, medical, and humanistic. He has previously held positions at Trinity College, Cambridge and at the Folger Shakespeare Library in Washington DC. His first book, Ancient Wisdom in the Age of the New Science (Cambridge, 2015) was a Times Literary Supplement Book of the Year. He writes regularly for the London Review of Books, Times Literary Supplement, and The Literary Review. In 2016, he was awarded the inaugural Leszek Kolakowski Prize for the world's leading early-career historian of ideas.