The Oxford Handbook of British Philosophy in the Seventeenth Century ed. by Peter R. Anstey (review)

The Oxford Handbook of British Philosophy in the Seventeenth Century consists of twenty-six chapters that have been written by a team of international experts on early modern British philosophy. At the beginning of the seventeenth century, Britain was considered to be an intellectual backwater. By the beginning of the eighteenth century, however, British philosophy was becoming increasingly admired by enlightened Europe and this volume maps this dynamic development.

Part I, ‘The Discipline of Philosophy in Seventeenth Century Britain’, consists of a single essay. Richard Serjeantson surveys the development of British philosophy over the course of the seventeenth century. While there were occasional lectures on philosophical subjects, at the beginning of the seventeenth century, neither of the two English universities had chairs in the philosophical disciplines of natural philosophy, moral philosophy, metaphysics, or logic, and the discipline was initially only studied as part of the arts course. Later, it developed outside and beyond the university environment. Another of this century’s dramatic changes was the replacement of Latin with English as the philosophical language of Britain.

Part II, ‘Natural Philosophers and the Philosophy of Nature’, opens with an essay on Francis Bacon whose philosophical ideas of experimentation, metaphysic, social, and utopian philosophies were a fundamental legacy for British philosophers of the seventeenth century. It then turns to Robert Boyle’s work and principles on experimentation, and the influence of Boyle’s experimentation on the work of Isaac Newton. Andrew Janiak, who tackles difficult and controversial topics such as ‘Gravity and God’, reviews the complexity of Newton’s philosophies in a highly informative chapter.

There was an ongoing discussion thoughout the seventeenth century about the relationships between mathematics, medicine, and moral philosophy in areas such as observation and mathematics, substance and essence, and the status of theory and hypothesis. Individual works are discussed in relation to these topics. For instance, in a chapter on the nature of body, Two Treatises by Kenelm Digby and Physiologia Epicuro-Gassendo-Charltoiana by Walter Charleton emphasise the relationship between natural philosophy, medicine, and the theory of matter. Part II ends with a chapter on soul and body that highlights the diversity of ideas on the brain and the self, and fragility and discontinuity in human cognition.

Part III, ‘Knowledge and Human Understanding’, consists of four articles that confirm the importance of John Locke in this area. Locke’s research on understanding is considered in an article that focuses on An Essay Concerning Human Understanding – one of the most important philosophical works ever written – together with the influential Of the Conduct of the Understanding. Topics included in the subsequent articles cover Locke’s Essay on the theory of ideas, reasoning, knowledge, and the important role of the study of logic. The different debates on ideas are surveyed and examined especially in terms of their ‘existence’ and origins. Probability is discussed in relationship to religion, philosophy, science, and the statistical probability of John Graunt and William Petty.

Part IV, ‘Moral Philosophy’, covers complex questions such as free will and motivation, examining the writers associated with the four major schools of thought: John Bramhall, Thomas Hobbes, Ralph Cudworth, and Locke. An article of hedonism and virtue reveals the growing place that is assigned to a moral philosophy on pleasure in the various accounts of motivation and value. The seventeenth-century approach to passion and affection was uniformly practical in its philosophical aims but nevertheless ensures diversity of opinions. While natural law and natural rights cross over both moral and political philosophy, natural law theories are the domain of the will of God while natural rights theories are of the will of man.

The final Part covers ‘Political Philosophy’. An article on sovereignty, Hobbes’s Leviathan, and Locke’s Two Treaties of Government highlights the importance of these two philosophers and in light of the previous parts considers their place in the seventeenth-century...