Life and Death in Early Modern Philosophy

Abstract

Abstract This book sets out to convey the breadth of early-modern philosophical interest in life and death. It ranges over debates in metaphysics, the life sciences, epistemology, the philosophy of mathematics, philosophical psychology, the philosophy of religion, the philosophy of education and ethics. It aims to illuminate the relationships between the problems explored under these headings, as they shift with the changing intellectual and cultural environments in which philosophers found themselves working. Much of the fascination of early modern discussions of life and death lies in the way apparently disparate commitments merge into strange and unfamiliar outlooks that challenge some of our most deeply rooted assumptions. In recent years there has been a wave of interest in the place of the life sciences within early modern natural philosophy, and biological questions about life and death form part of the subject matter under discussion here. But this book has a further ambition: to link the predominantly theoretical preoccupations associated with the study of organisms to the practical aspect of philosophy. Rather than giving priority to themes that anticipate the preoccupations of modern science, the organisation of the volume aims to remind us that philosophy, as our early modern predecessors construed it, was also about learning how to live and die. This is above all why life and death mattered to them.

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