- [UNTITLED]
- Preface
- Notes on Contributors
- Introduction
- Locke and His Influence
- Newton and Newtonianism in Eighteenth-Century British Thought
- The Idea of a Science of Human Nature
- Rhetoric and Eloquence: The Language of Persuasion
- Perception and The Language of Nature
- Language and Thought
- The Understanding
- Mind and Matter
- Passions, Affections, Sentiments: Taxonomy and Terminology
- Reason and the Passions
- Liberty and Necessity
- The Government of the Passions
- Self-Interest and Sociability
- Moral Judgment
- The Nature of Virtue
- Practical Ethics
- The Pleasures of the Imagination and the Objects of Taste
- The Faculty of Taste
- The Pleasures of Tragedy
- Genius and the Creative Imagination
- The Origin of Civil Government
- Forms of Government
- Reform and Revolution
- Luxury, Commerce, and the Rise of Political Economy
- Causation, Cosmology, and the Limits of Philosophy: the Early Eighteenth-Century British Debate
- Philosophy, Revealed Religion, and the Enlightenment
- Religion and Morality
- Index
Abstract and Keywords
In a manner reflecting the spirit of the Age of Enlightenment many philosophers in the British Isles wondered whether a sound intellectual underpinning could be provided for revealed religion. The chapter contains an account of the difficulties they identified and of the attempts they made to resolve them. First the chapter describes the spirit of the Age of Enlightenment, then states why the Enlightenment thinkers had such a lively interest in revealed religion, and finally attends to significant texts by Scottish and English philosophers, in particular Locke, Hume and George Campbell, in order to show how their broader philosophical doctrines shaped their response to claims made on behalf of the validity of alleged religious revelations. It will become evident that these claims produced dramatically different responses within the Enlightenment philosophical community.
Keywords: Locke, Hume, Campbell, Enlightenment, revealed religion, Calvinist, miracle
Alexander Broadie was Professor of Logic and Rhetoric at Glasgow University and is now an honorary professorial research fellow there. He is Principal Investigator of the Leverhulme project 'Scottish philosophers in 17c Scotland and France'. Among his eighteen books are The Scottish Enlightenment: The Historical Age of the Historical Nation (rev. edn, Edinburgh, 2007), A History of Scottish Philosophy (Edinburgh, 2010), and Agreeable Connexions: Scottish Enlightenment Links with France (Edinburgh, 2012).
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- [UNTITLED]
- Preface
- Notes on Contributors
- Introduction
- Locke and His Influence
- Newton and Newtonianism in Eighteenth-Century British Thought
- The Idea of a Science of Human Nature
- Rhetoric and Eloquence: The Language of Persuasion
- Perception and The Language of Nature
- Language and Thought
- The Understanding
- Mind and Matter
- Passions, Affections, Sentiments: Taxonomy and Terminology
- Reason and the Passions
- Liberty and Necessity
- The Government of the Passions
- Self-Interest and Sociability
- Moral Judgment
- The Nature of Virtue
- Practical Ethics
- The Pleasures of the Imagination and the Objects of Taste
- The Faculty of Taste
- The Pleasures of Tragedy
- Genius and the Creative Imagination
- The Origin of Civil Government
- Forms of Government
- Reform and Revolution
- Luxury, Commerce, and the Rise of Political Economy
- Causation, Cosmology, and the Limits of Philosophy: the Early Eighteenth-Century British Debate
- Philosophy, Revealed Religion, and the Enlightenment
- Religion and Morality
- Index
