Ancient Wisdom in the Age of the New Science
Histories of Philosophy in England, c. 1640–1700

A groundbreaking, revisionist account of the importance of the history of philosophy to intellectual change - scientific, philosophical and religious - in seventeenth-century England.

Dmitri Levitin (Author)

9781107105881, Cambridge University Press

Hardback, published 15 September 2015

696 pages
23.6 x 15.6 x 4.2 cm, 1.12 kg

'To the extent that we might be prepared to conceive historiography as a science rather than an art, it is difficult to imagine a more skilful example of it than Ancient Wisdom, which makes most other efforts seem lazy and amateurish by contrast. The result is one of the most important and original books on early modern intellectual history of the past thirty years.' Anthony Ossa-Richardson, Erudition and the Republic of Letters

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 Drawing on a vast array of sources, Levitin challenges the assumption that interest in ancient ideas was limited to out-of-date 'ancients' or was in some sense 'pre-enlightened'; indeed, much of the intellectual justification for the new philosophy came from re-writing its history.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.

1. Introduction: histories of philosophy between 'Renaissance' and 'Enlightenment'
2. Ancient wisdom I: the wisdom of the East: Zoroaster, astronomy and the Chaldaeans, from Thomas Stanley to Thomas Hyde
3. Ancient wisdom II: Moses the Egyptian?
4. Histories of natural philosophy I. Histories of method
5. Histories of natural philosophy II. Histories of doctrine: matter theory and animating principles
6. Philosophy in the early church
7. Conclusion.

Subject Areas: History of ideas [JFCX], Early modern history: c 1450/1500 to c 1700 [HBLH], British & Irish history [HBJD1]