The Principles Of The Philosophy Of The Expansive And Contractive Forces Or An Inquiry Into The Principles Of Modern Philosophy

This book presents, for the first time in English, a comprehensive anthology of essays on Christian Wolff's psychology written by leading international scholars. Christian Wolff is one of the towering figures in 18th-century Western thought. In the last decades, the publication of Wolff's Gesammelte Werke by Jean École and collaborators has aroused new interest in his ideas, but the meaning, scope, and impact of his psychological program have remained open to close and comprehensive analysis and discussion. That is what this volume aims to do. This is the first volume in English completely devoted to Wolff's efforts to systematize empirical and rational psychology, against the background of his understanding of scientific method in metaphysics. Wolff thereby paved the way to the very idea of a scientific psychology. The book is divided into two parts. The first one covers the theoretical and historical meaning and scope of Wolff's psychology, both in its internal structure and in its relation to other parts of his philosophical system, such as logic, cosmology, aesthetics, or practical philosophy. The second part deals with the reception and impact of Wolff's psychology, starting with early reactions from his disciples and opponents, and moving on to Kant, Hegel, and Wundt. The Force of an Idea: New Essays on Christian Wolff's Psychology shows not only that Wolff's psychological ideas have been misinterpreted, but also that they are historically more significant than traditional wisdom has it. The book, therefore, will be of interest to historians and philosophers of science, historians of philosophy and psychology, as well as to philosophers and psychologists interested in understanding the roots of scientific psychology in 18th and 19th century German philosophy.

This volume includes methodological considerations and descriptions of some of the texts compiled in The Corpus of English Philosophy Texts (CEPhiT), together with a number of pilot studies that demonstrate how the corpus can be used to investigate English philosophy writing in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, from a synchronic and a diachronic perspective. CEPhiT is part of the Coruña Corpus of English Scientific Writing (CC). The sampling method employed requires the collection of extracts of ca. 10,000 words. This method has been followed in CETA and CEPhiT, with samples from 40 different authors in the latter, both from Europe and North America. Text selection is based on some extralinguistic criteria, such as year of publication, sex, geographical provenance and text-types/genres. The corpus contains samples belonging to six different genre categories. This taxonomy, as well as some other extralinguistic information, can be used to search the corpus. CEPhiT, together with the Coruña Corpus Tool purpose-designed software by IrLab, was originally made available with the volume on CD-rom. As of late 2018, these are also accessible online at the Repositorio Universidade Coruña: CCT at http://hdl.handle.net/2183/21850 and CEPhiT at http://hdl.handle.net/2183/21847

Robert Schofield explores the rational elements of British experimental natural philosophy in the 18th century by tracing the influence of two opposing concepts of the nature of matter and its action—mechanism and materialism. Both concepts rested on the Newtonian interpretation of their proponents, although each developed more or less independently. By integrating the developments in all the areas of experimental natural philosophy, describing their connections and the influences of Continental science, natural theology, and to a lesser degree social and institutional changes, the author demonstrates that mechanistic concepts dominated interpretations from about 1687 to 1740, when they were replaced by materialistic concepts. A revival of the mechanistic approach early in the next century made England a fertile field for ideas on the dynamic interaction of forces. Originally published in 1970. The Princeton Legacy Library uses the latest print-on-demand technology to again make available previously out-of-print books from the distinguished backlist of Princeton University Press. These editions preserve the original texts of these important books while presenting them in durable paperback and hardcover editions. The goal of the Princeton Legacy Library is to vastly increase access to the rich scholarly heritage found in the thousands of books published by Princeton University Press since its founding in 1905.