Science, Philosophy and Religion in Age of Enlightenment: British and Global Contexts

Description

Taking as its focus the wide-ranging character of the Enlightenment, both in geographical and intellectual terms, this second collection of articles by John Gascoigne explores this movement's filiation and influence in a range of contexts. It emphasises the evolutionary rather than the revolutionary character of the Enlightenment and its ability to change society by adaptation rather than demolition. It refers, firstly, to developments in Britain tracing the changing views of history in relation to the Biblical account, the ideological uses of science (and particularly the work of Newton) and their connections to developments in moral philosophy and teaching. The collection then turns to the wider global setting and the way in which the Enlightenment served to provide a justification for European exploration and expansion, and explores the interplay between the experience of Pacific contact and currents of thought in Enlightenment Germany. Introduction; 'The wisdom of the Egyptians': and the secularisation of history in the age of Newton; From Bentley to the Victorians: the rise and fall of British Newtonian natural theology; Sensible Newtonians: Nicholas Saunderson and John Colson; Science, religion and the foundations of morality in Enlightenment Britain; The teaching of philosophy within the British universities and learned societies of the 18th century; Motives for European exploration of the Pacific in the age of the Enlightenment; Joseph Banks, mapping and the geographies of natural knowledge; Blumenbach, Banks and the beginnings of anthropology at Göttingen; The German Enlightenment and the Pacific; The Royal Society, natural history, and the peoples of the 'New World(s)', 1660-1800; Index.