The English Deists

The English Deists

Author: Wayne Hudson

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2015-10-06

Total Pages: 213

ISBN-13: 1317316339

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Interprets the works of an important group of writers known as 'the English deists'. This title argues that this interpretation reads Romantic conceptions of religious identity into a period in which it was lacking. It contextualizes these writers within the early Enlightenment, which was multivocal, plural and in search of self definition.


Reason, Grace, and Sentiment: Volume 2, Shaftesbury to Hume

Reason, Grace, and Sentiment: Volume 2, Shaftesbury to Hume

Author: Isabel Rivers

Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Published: 2000-03-09

Total Pages: 407

ISBN-13: 1139425005

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This volume completes Isabel Rivers' widely acclaimed exploration of the relationship between religion and ethics from the mid-seventeenth to the later eighteenth centuries. She investigates the effect of attempts to separate ethics from religion, and to locate the foundation of morals in the constitution of human nature. Focusing on moral philosophy and the educational institutions in which (or in spite of which) these ideas were developed, the book pays close attention to the movement of ideas through the British Isles, in particular the spread of Shaftesbury's thought from England to Ireland and Scotland, and the varied reception of Hume's scepticism north and south of the border. It also demonstrates the enormous influence of Shaftesbury's moral thought and the ultimate triumph of the English interpretation of Shaftesbury with the rise of Butler. Meticulously researched and accessibly written, this volume makes a vital contribution to our understanding of eighteenth-century thought.


Eleusis and Enlightenment

Eleusis and Enlightenment

Author: Ferdinand Saumarez Smith

Publisher: BRILL

Published: 2024-03-21

Total Pages: 252

ISBN-13: 9004692304

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The age of Enlightenment – the so-called age of reason – was also, paradoxically, the age of the Eleusinian mysteries. By attempting to reveal Demeter's secret cult, British, French, and German thinkers and freemasons of the eighteenth century revealed more than they bargained for: the pagan origins of Christian doctrines such as the Trinity and the afterlife, and through the mythical gift of law and agriculture to Eleusis an alternative narrative of the origins of civilisation to that found in the Bible.