The Great Chain of Being

A Study of the History of an Idea

Arthur O. Lovejoy, Arthur O. LOVEJOY

• Publisher: Harvard University Press
• Year: 2009
• Print ISBN: 9780674361539, 9780674361508
• eBook ISBN: 9780674040335
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Philosophy History & Theory

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.

Table of contents

• CONTENTS
• I. Introduction: the Study of the History of Ideas
• II. The Genesis of the Idea in Greek Philosophy: the Three Principles
• III. The Chain of Being and Some Internal Conflicts in Medieval Thought
• IV. The Principle of Plenitude and the New Cosmography
• V. Plenitude and Sufficient Reason in Leibniz and Spinoza
• VI. The Chain of Being in Eighteenth-Century Thought, and Man's Place and Rôle in Nature
• VII. The Principle of Plenitude and Eighteenth-Century Optimism
• VIII. The Chain of Being and Some Aspects of Eighteenth-Century Biology
• IX. The Temporalizing of the Chain of Being
• X. Romanticism and the Principle of Plenitude
• XI. The Outcome of the History and Its Moral
• Notes
• Index of Names and Subjects