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

by Lovejoy, Arthur O.
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ISBN: 9780674361539
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Overview

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.
  • Format: TradePaperback
  • Author: Lovejoy, Arthur O.
  • ISBN: 9780674361539
  • Condition: Used
  • Dimensions: 8.12 x 1.04
  • Number Of Pages: 400
  • Publication Year: 1971

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