(P/B) A COMPANION TO EARLY MODERN PHILOSOPHY - ΣΥΛΛΟΓΙΚΟ

[...] What we tend to think of now as "philosophy," a broad but relatively precise discipline distinct from what we call "the sciences" and "religion" and characterized by certain kinds of (apparently unresolvable) questions, would have struck an early modern thinker as unreasonably narrow. The term "philosophy" included in the seventeenth century a great deal more than it does today, including much of what we take to be the physical and biological sciences. The makeup of the world around us - both the terrestrial and celestial realms - was, in the early modern period, as much an object of the philosopher's attention as the logical structure of an argument, the conception of the good life and metaphysical questions about being. Natural science was, indeed, simply "natural philosophy." Similarly, when studying the thought of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, we would do wrong to separate those figures who are properly "philosophical" from those who are "theologians" or "political theorists" or "jurists." The study of early modern philosophy demands that we pay attention to a wide variety of questions and an expansive pantheon of thinkers: the traditional canonical figures (Descartes, Spinoza, Leibniz, Locke, Berkeley, and Hume), to be sure, but also a large "supporting cast," including Christian apologists, mechanistic chemists, Jansenist polemicists, political pamphleteers, country priests, rabbinical messianists, and intellectually gifted queens, princesses and noblewomen. As the editor of this volume, I have tried to insure that the essays reflect these facts, and that the reader will get a reasonably fair sense of the richness and variety of philosophy in the period. Of course, not all of the philosophers discussed in the chapters that follow are of equal significance. As essential as it is to be ecumenical in deciding whom to include, it would be absurd to treat all figures and movements as being of the same importance. Thus, a number of thinkers are given essays of their own, some longer than others; other thinkers are incorporated into extended discussions of movements or context. Another editor might have done things differently in these regards; and a discussion of that question would be of great value in its own right. [...] (From the publisher)