bodies of thought science religion and the soul in the early enlightenment sep 2008

[...]... chapter begins Heterodox thought, in particular Socinianism, denunciations of ‘priestcraft’ and the campaign against unbelief, ‘deism’, and ‘atheism’ are linked to the crisis within the Church of England and political faction in the 1690s The complex religious and political confrontations help to account for the emergence of the debate on the soul and show that the intentions of the authors of these particular... the ending of the Licensing Act in 1695, beginning with Henry Layton’s confidentially circulated works in the 1690s and continuing with Dr William Coward’s books from Second Thoughts on the Soul in 1702 to The Just Scrutiny in 1706 and John Toland’s Letters to Serena in 1704, and ending with the Henry Dodwell affair and its ramifications The issue at stake in these books was the existence of a separate... rudimentary, of human behaviour and intelligence in terms of the workings of the material brain.² In addition, Antonio Damasio has identified in Spinoza’s philosophy elements of his own approach to feeling, studied in terms of brain functioning, in structuring intelligence.³ The present work looks at some of these attempts to break down the wall between matter and mind and explain human nature by the physical... reconstructing as far as possible the circumstances of the debate It is an attempt to recover the principal conditions in which the authors produced their texts and to which they were responding, the assumptions they shared with their contemporaries, and the constraints on their utterances More than simply situating the ideas in their intellectual context, decoding the thought structures of the authors of. .. many of the marks of completed secularization’ and that in 1700 religion was very much in the thoughts of English men and women’.⁶⁹ These statements, together with his emphasis on the relatively late secularization of thought, are relevant to the subject of this book, and his analysis can help us to understand the reaction of theologians to the debate on the soul and its impact within the Church of. .. medicine together with the biological sciences in general never fitted into the received historiography of the Scientific Revolution.⁷¹ Recent studies of medicine in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries pay particular attention to the link between medicine and religion. ⁷² The soul was part of the common ground between medicine and religion, and with changes in natural philosophy and religious doctrine... the ‘French Prophets’, and the working out of French materialism was accompanied in the 1720s and early 1730s by the extraordinary spectacle presented by the ‘miracles’ and crucifixions of Jansenist ‘convulsionnaires’ in Saint-M´dard Cemetery in Paris The effect of these ‘inspired’ scenes e was to encourage both scepticism about miracles and divine inspiration and reflection on the relation of mind and. .. page intentionally left blank 1 Introduction In his recent work on human nature the psychologist Steven Pinker lists the elements of what he calls the of cial theory’ concerning human nature; he calls them The Blank Slate’, The Ghost in the Machine’, and The Noble Savage’, all inherited according to him from the Enlightenment While admitting the gradual undermining of this trilogy, he claims that there... useful reminder of the seventeenth-century discussion of a minimal religion see Lagr´e, La Raison ardente e 8 Introduction of a tightly-knit group than as a wider questioning of certain doctrines in the name of true Christianity and in the light of scientific developments Instead of two coherent opposing camps we can identify a range of opinions This blurring of boundaries is also brought out in certain studies... physical workings of the body It studies an important debate which took place in a series of interconnected episodes, essentially in Britain (mainly England), France, and the French-speaking community in the Dutch Republic,⁴ in the period loosely termed the early Enlightenment In this period, characterized by the investigation of physical nature, rehabilitation of the body, and celebration of sensuality, . place in a series of interconnected episodes, essentially in Britain (mainly England), France, and the French-speaking community in the Dutch Republic,⁴ in the period loosely termed the early Enlightenment. . conditions in a different culture. Instead of pinpointing in uences’, it looks at how far the debate in England, the issues aired there, and the agendas of those who transmitted them interacted ⁵. ideas.³⁶ While the link between Freemasonry and deism has often been pointed out, so has the Trinitarian zeal of James Anderson, author of the Constitutions of the Grand Lodge of England;³⁷ in addition,