ANCIENT WISDOM IN THE AGE OF THE NEW SCIENCE: HISTORIES OF PHILOSOPHY IN ENGLAND, C. 1640-1700.

LEVITIN, Dmitri.

ISBN 10: 1107105889 / ISBN 13: 9781107105881

Published by Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 2015

About this Item

8vo. Pp: xii, 670. First Edition. Blue and peach boards with colour illustrated front cover and white lettering. ISBN: 9781107105881 Near fine, with very slightly bumped head of spine.

Seller Inventory # C71042

Bibliographic Details

• Title: ANCIENT WISDOM IN THE AGE OF THE NEW SCIENCE: HISTORIES OF PHILOSOPHY IN ENGLAND, C. 1640-1700.
• Publisher: Cambridge University Press, Cambridge
• Publication Date: 2015
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 1107105889
• ISBN 13: 9781107105881
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition: 1st Edition

About this title

Synopsis

Seventeenth-century England has long been heralded as the birthplace of a so-called 'new' philosophy. Yet what contemporaries might have understood by 'old' philosophy has been little appreciated. In this book Dmitri Levitin examines English attitudes to ancient philosophy in unprecedented depth, demonstrating the centrality of engagement with the history of philosophy to almost all educated persons, whether scholars, clerics, or philosophers themselves, and aligning English intellectual culture closely to that of continental Europe. Drawing on a vast array of sources, Levitin challenges the assumption that interest in ancient ideas was limited to out-of-date 'ancients' or was in some sense 'pre-enlightened'; indeed, much of the intellectual justification for the new philosophy came from re-writing its history. At the same time, the deep investment of English scholars in pioneering forms of late humanist erudition led them to develop some of the most innovative narratives of ancient philosophy in early modern Europe.

About the Author

Dmitri Levitin is a Fellow of All Souls College, Oxford. Previously, he was a Fellow of Trinity College, Cambridge, and of the Centre for Research in Arts, Social Sciences and Humanities, also in Cambridge. He has also held positions at the Folger Library and at the University of Edinburgh. His research is on the intellectual, religious and cultural history of early modern Europe. Within these fields, he has published work on the history of science, philosophy, scholarship, medicine, theology, church-state relations, and political and legal thought.