The Sociology of Philosophies

to churches and monasteries. We have already seen (in Chapter 9) the crisis of the universities which set in after 1300, as univ ...

the Jesuits were at the high point of the intellectual creativity which broke out in the Spanish universities. Christian Spain h ...

emphasis on casuistry and situational ethics, a version of relativism. For the Jesuits at this time, it was a liberal position a ...

the scientific predecessors of Descartes. This is no anomaly. Once again crea- tivity breaks out simultaneously on rival sides o ...

mushrooming Jesuit colleges. The universities now consisted almost entirely of theology and law students, seeking places in chur ...

1991). The intellectual and organizational leaders of the new philosophy, Descartes and Mersenne, came from among the students o ...

as an evil magician. Mersenne and Gassendi used skepticism against what they saw as the prime enemy of established religion, the ...

French in 1659—with the help of Cromwell’s troops practicing a Protestant version of realpolitik. Nevertheless, Condé made his p ...

theological struggles had as their most famous result the secular philosophies associated with their retreat at Port-Royal. Jans ...

respect the courage of one’s convictions among the highest of human qualities. But in association with power, fervent ideals mea ...

which everyone focused. Around this were arrayed the occasionalists (Male- branche and others), giving primacy to the spiritual ...

Malebranche came to represent this position in the public eye as he was caught up in a swirl of controversies with his most famo ...

ritual, the theology itself is a simpler monotheism than Christianity. Some claimed that Judaism was the universal religion arri ...

conventional Catholic theology in place so long as he could reorganize phi- losophy along scientific lines. Spinoza took over th ...

and quickly developed them into his own. He learned mathematics from Huygens and from access to Pascal’s unpublished work; from ...

causally independent. This means that each individual essence reflects others from its own perspective; extending links onward, ...

each—its logical definition—contains attributes which make conjunctions with the attributes of others at the same time that it i ...

thereby became less of a world intellectual center from about 1680 to 1740, religious politics in Britain now made it a creative ...

activists overthrew the crown. Drawing on the resources of his intellectual network, Hobbes radicalized the “mechanical philosop ...

Descartes as the enemy of religious faith. Cudworth rejected Descartes’s di- chotomy between spiritual and material worlds, in f ...