A Platonick Song Of The Soul

This is the first complete modern edition of Henry More's long philosophical poem, A Platonick Song of the Soul (1647). This early work, written in Spenserian stanzas, is a sustained literary presentation of the Neoplatonic doctrine of the immateriality and immortality of the soul. The Introduction to this book discusses both the literary background of the work and its varied philosophical and scientific sources, from Plotinus to Ficino and Galileo.

The Science of the Soul challenges long-standing notions of Puritan provincialism as antithetical to the Enlightenment. Sarah Rivett demonstrates that, instead, empiricism and natural philosophy combined with Puritanism to transform the scope of religious activity in colonial New England from the 1630s to the Great Awakening of the 1740s. In an unprecedented move, Puritan ministers from Thomas Shepard and John Eliot to Cotton Mather and Jonathan Edwards studied the human soul using the same systematic methods that philosophers applied to the study of nature. In particular, they considered the testimonies of tortured adolescent girls at the center of the Salem witch trials, Native American converts, and dying women as a source of material insight into the divine. Conversions and deathbed speeches were thus scrutinized for evidence of grace in a way that bridged the material and the spiritual, the visible and the invisible, the worldly and the divine. In this way, the "science of the soul" was as much a part of seventeenth- and eighteenth-century natural philosophy as it was part of post-Reformation theology. Rivett's account restores the unity of religion and science in the early modern world and highlights the role and importance of both to transatlantic circuits of knowledge formation.

A comprehensive survey of mirror-imagery in English literature from the thirteenth to the end of the seventeenth century.

Plato's reflection on the relationship between soul and body has attracted scholars' attention since antiquity. Less noted, but worthy of consideration, is Plato's thought on music and its effects on human beings. This book adopts an innovative approach towards analysing the soul-body problem by uncovering and emphasising the philosophical value of Plato's treatment of the phenomenon of music. By investigating in detail how Plato conceives of the musical experience and its influence on intelligence, passions and perceptions, it illuminates the intersection of cognitive and emotional functions in Plato's philosophy of mind.

The significance of Henry More's vitalist philosophy in the history of ideas has been realized relatively recently, as the bibliography will reveal. The general neglect of the Cambridge Platonist movement may be attributed to the common prejudice that its chief exponents, especially More, were obscure mystics who were neither coherent in their philosophical system nor attractive in their prose style. I hope that this modern edition of More's principal treatise will help to correct this unjust im pression and reveal the keenness and originality of More's intellect, which sought to demonstrate the relevance of classical philosophy in an age of empirical science. The wealth of learning -- ranging as it does from Greek antiquity to 17th century science and philosophy -- that informs More' s intellectual system of the universe should, in itself, be a recom mendation to students of the history of ideas. Though, for those in search of literary satisfaction, too, there is not wanting, in More's style, the humour, and grace, of a man whose erudition did not divorce him from a sympathetic understanding of human contradictions. As for More's elaborate speculations concerning the spirit world in the final book of this treatise, I think that we would indeed be justified in regarding their combination of classical mythology amd scientific naturalism as the literary and philosophical counterpart of the great celestial frescoes of the Baroque masters.

Proceedings of a conference held in Sept. 2004 at Birkbeck College.