Great Chain of Being

A Study of the History of an Idea

Häftad, Engelska, 2010

389 kr

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From later antiquity down to the close of the eighteenth century, most philosophers and men of science and, indeed, most educated men, accepted without question a traditional view of the plan and structure of the world.In this volume, which embodies the William James lectures for 1933, Arthur O. Lovejoy points out the three principles—plenitude, continuity, and graduation—which were combined in this conception; analyzes their origins in the philosophies of Plato, Aristotle, and the Neoplatonists; traces the most important of their diverse samifications in subsequent religious thought, in metaphysics, in ethics and aesthetics, and in astronomical and biological theories; and copiously illustrates the influence of the conception as a whole, and of the ideas out of which it was compounded, upon the imagination and feelings as expressed in literature.

Produktinformation

Utgivningsdatum2010-09-26
Mått140 x 206 x 28 mm
Vikt375 g
FormatHäftad
SpråkEngelska
SerieWilliam James Lectures
Antal sidor400
FörlagHarvard University Press
ISBN9780674361539

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1. Introduction: the Study of the History of Ideas 2. The Genesis of the Idea in Greek Philosophy: the Three Principles 3. The Chain of Being and Some Internal Conflicts in Medieval Thought 4. The Principle of Plenitude and New Cosmography 5. Plenitude and Sufficient Reason in Leibniz and Spinoza 6. The Chain of Being in Eighteenth-Century Thought, and Man's Place and Rocle in Nature 7. The Principle of Plenitude and Eighteenth-Century Optimism 8. The Chain of Being and Some Aspects of Eighteenth-Century Biology 9. The Temporalizing of the Chain of Being 10. Romanticism and the Principle of Plenitude 11. The Outcome of the History and Its Moral Notes Index of Names and Subjects

The Great Chain of Being, employed as a title, would have suggested…what was 'probably the most widely familiar conception of the general scheme of things'—the idea of a world in which every being was related to every other in a continuously graded scale, with no possible form of diversity missing. Pursuing the biography of this idea through more than two thousand years, the distinguished author of these lectures makes clear its amazing influence on the thought and history of the Western World… Intellectual vigor, critical precision and an amazing knowledge of what mankind has thought and desired in other ages distinguishes this book. No student of the history of literature, science, or philosophy may well neglect it.