Early Modern Atheism from Spinoza to d’Holbach by Mori, Gianluca

 

ISBN

978-1-800-34815-8

Pages

368

Format

Paperback

Price

Price

£65.00

Description

Examining the birth and development of early modern atheism from Spinoza’s Tractatus theologico-politicus (1670) to d’Holbach’s Système de la nature (1770), this study considers Spinoza, Hobbes, Cudworth, Bayle, Meslier, Boulainviller, Du Marsais, Fréret, Toland, Collins, Hume, Diderot, Voltaire, and d’Holbach and positions them in a general interpretive scheme, based on the idea that early modern atheism is itself an unwanted fruit of early modern metaphysics and theology.

Breaking with a long-standing tradition, Descartes claimed that it was possible to have a "clear and distinct" idea of God, indeed that the idea of God was the "clearest and most distinct" of all ideas accessible to the human mind. Humans could thus obtain a scientific knowledge of God’s nature and attributes. But as soon as God became an object of science, He also became the object of a thoroughgoing scientific analysis and criticism.

The effortlessness with which early modern atheists managed to turn round their adversaries’ arguments to their own favour is a sign that the new doctrines of God which emerged in the seventeenth-century, each based in its own way on principles and dogmas related to the new science of nature, were plunging headfirst towards the precipice under their own steam.

Author Information

Gianluca Mori is a professor in the History of Philosophy at UPO (Università del Piemonte Orientale), Vercelli, Italy. His main areas of research include Descartes and cartesianism, Pierre Bayle, early modern atheism and free thought from the middle of the seventeenth century to the end of the eighteen century, and David Hume's philosophy of religion.

Ancients and Moderns in Europe

 

Ancients and Moderns in Europe

Comparative Perspectives

• Bullard, Paddy
• Tadié, Alexis
• 

  
  

  Oxford University Studies in the Enlightenment, 2016:06

  June 7th, 2016

  
  

  ISBN

  978-1-789-62721-3

  Language

  English

  Pages

  329

  Format

  eBook

  Other Formats

  • 9780729411776 (Paperback)

  Price

  Price

  £60.00

• Description

  The Querelle des Anciens et des Modernes, or Battle of the Books as it was known in England, famously pitted the Ancients on the one side and the Moderns on the other. This book presents a new intellectual history of the dispute, in which authors explore its manifestations across Europe in the arts and sciences, from the sixteenth to the eighteenth centuries.
  By paying close attention to local institutional contexts for the Querelle, contributors yield a complex picture of the larger debate. In intellectual life, authors uncover how the debate affected the publication of antiquarian scholarship, and how it became part of discussions in London coffee houses and the periodical press. Authors also position the Low Countries as the true pivot for a modernistic realignment of intellectual method, with concomitant rather than centralised developments in England and France. The volume is particularly concerned with the realisation of the Querelle in the realm of artistic and technical practice. Marrying modern approaches with ancient sympathies was fraught with difficulties, as contributors attest in analyses on musical writing, painting and the ‘querelle du coloris’, architectural practice and medical rhetorics. Tracing the deeper cultural resonances of the dispute, authors conclude by revealing how it fostered a new tendency to cultural self-reflection throughout Europe. Together, these contributions demonstrate how the Querelle acted as a leading principle for the configuration of knowledge across the arts and sciences throughout the early modern period, and also emphasise the links between historical debates and our contemporary understanding of what it means to be ‘modern’.

  Reviews

  'This volume makes a valuable contribution to scholarship on the Ancients and Moderns debate. In shifting attention away from the more polemical episodes of the dispute and moving beyond national perspectives, it sheds light on the long-term impacts of comparisons between antiquity and modernity on European intellectual life, particularly its impact on the development of disciplinary practices in various fields.'
  - Intellectual History Review