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The Great Chain of Being: A Study of the History of an Idea

The Great Chain of Being: A Study of the History of an Idea

Paperback

Series: William James Lectures, Book 1

Philosophy

Currently unavailable to order

ISBN10: 0674361539
ISBN13: 9780674361539
Publisher: Harvard University Press
Published: Sep 26 2010
Pages: 400
Weight: 0.98
Height: 1.04 Width: 5.46 Depth: 8.12
Language: English

From later antiquity down to the close of the eighteenth century, most philosophers and men of science and, indeed, most educated men, accepted without question a traditional view of the plan and structure of the world. In this volume, which embodies the William James lectures for 1933, Arthur O. Lovejoy points out the three principles-plenitude, continuity, and graduation-which were combined in this conception; analyzes their origins in the philosophies of Plato, Aristotle, and the Neoplatonists; traces the most important of their diverse samifications in subsequent religious thought, in metaphysics, in ethics and aesthetics, and in astronomical and biological theories; and copiously illustrates the influence of the conception as a whole, and of the ideas out of which it was compounded, upon the imagination and feelings as expressed in literature.

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Philosophy