The Works of Samuel Clarke

Résumé du livre

'This edition contains everything of any philosophical or theological significance by Clarke--and provides useful biographical material.' -- Routledge Encyclopedia of PhilosophySamuel Clarke (1675-1729) was one of the leading intellectual figures Image of eighteenth-century Britain, considered in his day to be of comparable stature to John Locke. In traditional terms, if Locke is the chief Empiricist of British philosophy, Clarke is the main representative of its Rationalist wing. After an education at Cambridge, where he became a friend and disciple of Isaac Newton, Clarke took holy orders and quickly established a great reputation as a preacher. In his sermons he sought to reconstruct religion and ethics on the basis of Newtonian science and the power of human reason. Clarke was chosen to deliver two series of Boyle Lectures from the pulpit of St Paul's Cathedral in 1704 and 1705. Later, while serving as a chaplain to Queen Anne, he engaged in a very extensive and important correspondence with Leibniz. Clarke spent the last twenty years of his life as Rector of the fashionable St James's Church in Piccadilly, from where he made highly influential contributions to various key the logical debates of the time.Hoadly's 1738 edition remains the only complete edition of Samuel Clarke's major works. It includes both sets of Boyle Lectures, in which Clarke presents what is considered the most powerful version of the Cosmological Argument for the existence of God ever mounted. The edition also contains the famous correspondence with Leibniz; here -- in a dispute that foreshadows those among twentieth-century physicists -- Clarke defends the Newtonian view of space and time as absoluteentities rather than mere relations between objects and events. Included too are Clarke's many