Dec 2, 2014

Vital themes in Europe's Enlightenment project included a new cosmopolitanism rooted in a growing awareness of other world cultures, an interest in forms of natural religion, and efforts to find a new foundation for social ethics apart from the moral laws and teachings of Christianity. In this lecture, Stewart J....

Nov 18, 2014

In this wonderfully rich talk, Norman Vance explains how three interpretations of the Irish hymn 'The Breastplate of St Patrick', from Catholic, Episcopalian, and Presbyterian perspectives, are a pathway to studying the wider context of Irish intellectual history, taking in aspects of literary history, musicology,...

Nov 14, 2014

One of the themes of recent historiography in Enlightenment Studies focuses on how political economy gathers up so many of the key themes of the philosophers and reformers of the age into a discourse that crosses boundaries, national, institutional and linguistic. In this lecture Tim Hochstrasser examines this...

Nov 4, 2014

At the end of the seventeenth century, corpuscularianism, the mechanical philosophy, and mechanics (as a branch of applied mathematics) were all rising in importance. In this paper, John Milton provides a definitive account of these three concepts, how they relate to each other, and explains why they became popular.

Oct 21, 2014

The political theorist James Harrington transformed and deployed many aspects of ancient thinking about the ethical character of the state in his political thought. In this paper, Rachel Foxley analyses Harrington's use of the correspondence between the city and the soul, arguing that this is a crucial mechanism...