Philosophy

A characteristic product of eighteenth-century liberalism, the twenty-eight volumes of French Encyclopedia are here reviewed and reassessed by John Lough.

According to the ancient religions of the Near East, every man possessed a double nature, compounded of physical and psychical elements, each an essential adjunct of his life.

By the year 129 B.C., writes D.R. Dudley, the Stoic philosophy was firmly established among the ruling classes of Rome in a form cut to suit the Roman virtues.

G.R. Potter describe show, during the 15th and 16th centuries the scholarship of the humanists and theologians was fused at Basel into something characteristically Swiss.

S.G.F. Brandon analyses the differences that divide the Eastern and Western views of man’s nature and destiny, concluding as to their urgent significance today, as mankind becomes more closely interrelated and interdependent.

The majestic narrative of the fortunes of the Jewish people, as unfolded in the Pentateuch, incorporates four different strains of literary tradition. Once fused together, writes S.G.F. Brandon, they produced a philosophy of history that has influenced not only Israel itself but the whole of Christian Europe.

Charles Seltman introduces Pythagoras, a man of great personal authority and astonishingly diverse gifts, who founded one of the most influential schools of philosophy in the ancient world.

Jacquetta Hawkes describes how archaeological discoveries have had a profound effect on modern views of human progress. While archaeology has been helping to build the edifice of materialist and progressive history, at the same time it has been working to undermine its foundations.

E. Badian introduces Cicero, the master of Latin rhetoric, who long strove to preserve the traditional Republican oligarchy, but who perished at the orders of a military triumvirate that came to represent “the reality of power” in Rome.

David Layton looks at the influences on Isaac Newtown and analyses the deep effects of his monumental work on both domestic and continental intellectual currents.