In this major re-evaluation of Isaac Newton's intellectual life, Betty Jo Teeter Dobbs shows how his pioneering work in mathematics, physics, and cosmology was intertwined with his study of alchemy. Directing attention to the religious ambience of the alchemical enterprise of early modern Europe, Dobbs argues that Newton understood alchemy - and the divine activity in micromatter to which it spoke - to be a much needed corrective to the overly mechanized system of Descartes. The same religious basis underlay the rest of his work. To Newton it seemed possible to obtain partial truths from many different approaches to knowledge, be it textual work aimed at the interpretation of prophecy, the study of ancient theology and philosophy, creative mathematics, or experiments with prisms, pendulums, vegetating minerals, light, or electricity. Newton's work was a constant attempt to bring these partial truths together, with the larger goal of restoring true natural philosophy and true religion.

George Berkeley was considered "the most engaging and useful man in Ireland in the eighteenth century". This hyperbolic statement refers both to Berkeley’s life and thought; in fact, he always considered himself a pioneer called to think and do new things. He was an empiricist well versed in the sciences, an amateur of the mechanical arts, as well as a metaphysician; he was the author of many completely different discoveries, as well as a very active Christian, a zealous bishop and the apostle of the Bermuda project. The essays collected in this volume, written by some leading scholars, aim to reconstruct the complexity of Berkeley’s figure, without selecting "major" works, nor searching for "coherence" at any cost. They will focus on different aspects of Berkeley’s thought, showing their intersections; they will explore the important contributions he gave to various scientific disciplines, as well as to the eighteenth-century philosophical and theological debate. They will highlight the wide influence that his presently most neglected or puzzling books had at the time; they will refuse any anachronistical trial of Berkeley’s thought, judged from a contemporary point of view.

The intellectual and cultural battles now raging over theism and atheism, conservatism and secular progressivism, dualism and monism, realism and antirealism, and transcendent reality versus material reality extend even into the scientific disciplines. This stunning new volume captures this titanic clash of worldviews among those who have thought most deeply about the nature of science and of the universe itself. Unmatched in its breadth and scope, The Nature of Nature brings together some of the most influential scientists, scholars, and public intellectuals—including three Nobel laureates—across a wide spectrum of disciplines and schools of thought. Here they grapple with a perennial question that has been made all the more pressing by recent advances in the natural sciences: Is the fundamental explanatory principle of the universe, life, and self-conscious awareness to be found in inanimate matter or immaterial mind? The answers found in this book have profound implications for what it means to do science, what it means to be human, and what the future holds for all of us.

Over the past twenty-five years - since the very large collection of Newton's papers became available and began to be seriously examined - the beginnings of a new picture of Newton has emerged. This volume of essays builds upon the foundation of its authors in their previous works and extends and elaborates the emerging picture of the `new' Newton, the great synthesizer of science and religion as revealed in his intellectual context.

Newton's philosophical analysis of space and time /Robert Disalle --Newton's concepts of force and mass, with notes on the Laws of Motion /I. Bernard Cohen --Curvature in Newton's dynamics /J. Bruce Brackenridge and Michael Nauenberg --Methodology of the Principia /George E. Smith --Newton's argument for universal gravitation /William Harper --Newton and celestial mechanics /Curtis Wilson --Newton's optics and atomism /Alan E. Shapiro --Newton's metaphysics /Howard Stein --Analysis and synthesis in Newton's mathematical work /Niccolò Guicciardini --Newton, active powers, and the mechanical philosophy /Alan Gabbey --Background to Newton's chymistry /William Newman --Newton's alchemy /Karin Figala --Newton on prophecy and the Apocalypse /Maurizio Mamiani --Newton and eighteenth-century Christianity /Scott Mandelbrote --Newton versus Leibniz : from geomentry to metaphysics /A. Rupert Hall --Newton and the Leibniz-Clarke correspondence /Domenico Bertoloni Meli.

The influence of millenarian thinking upon Cromwell's England is well-known. The cultural and intellectual conceptions of the role of millenarian ideas in the `long' 18th century when, so the `official' story goes, the religious sceptics and deists of Enlightened England effectively tarred such religious radicalism as `enthusiasm' has been less well examined. This volume endeavors to revise this `official' story and to trace the influence of millenarian ideas in the science, politics, and everyday life of England and America in the 17th and 18th centuries.

Henri Bergson (1859-1941) was once the most famous philosopher in the world, but his reputation waned in the latter half of the 20th century. Barry Allen here makes the case for Bergson as a great philosopher, one whose thought has much to contribute to contemporary philosophical questions. Living in Time presents chapters on each of Bergson's four major works, explaining his theories of time, perception, memory, and panpsychic consciousness, his innovative concept of virtual existence, his objection to Darwin, his controversy with Einstein, his philosophy of creative evolution, and his social philosophy of closed and open society. In particular Allen focusses on Bergson's powerful ideas on time. Classical arguments for determinism fallaciously apply spatial concepts to consciousness; once we take time seriously, which means acknowledging its reality as duration and its difference from space, Bergson showed that the arguments for determinism become insupportable. Bergson's ideas on time and evolution offer a comparison with Nietzsche, which Allen develops, exposing both philosophical concurrence and systematic difference. The book's conclusion discusses the question of Bergson and naturalism and summarizes the ontology of the virtual that emerges as a core part of Bergson's thought.

We have long been taught that the Enlightenment was an attempt to free the world from the clutches of Christian civilization and make it safe for philosophy. The lesson has been well learned. In today's culture wars, both liberals and their conservative enemies, inside and outside the academy, rest their claims about the present on the notion that the Enlightenment was a secularist movement of philosophically driven emancipation. Historians have had doubts about the accuracy of this portrait for some time, but they have never managed to furnish a viable alternative to it-for themselves, for scholars interested in matters of church and state, or for the public at large. In this book, William J. Bulman and Robert G. Ingram bring together recent scholarship from distinguished experts in history, theology, and literature to make clear that God not only survived the Enlightenment but thrived within it as well. The Enlightenment was not a radical break from the past in which Europeans jettisoned their intellectual and institutional inheritance. It was, to be sure, a moment of great change, but one in which the characteristic convictions and traditions of the Renaissance and Reformation were perpetuated to the point of transformation, in the wake of the Wars of Religion and during the early phases of globalization. The Enlightenment's primary imperatives were not freedom and irreligion but peace and prosperity. As a result, Enlightenment could be Christian, communitarian, or authoritarian as easily as it could be atheistic, individualistic, or libertarian. Honing in on the intellectual crisis of the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries while moving from Spinoza to Kant and from India to Peru, God in the Enlightenment takes a prism to the age of lights.

Newton's theology, his study of alchemy, the early reception of Newtonianism, & the history of Newtonian scholarship are topics included in the eleven essays that comprise this volume.

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