Considering eighteenth-century prophecy as transformative work

Eighteenth-century chemistry as an investigative enterprise

14 articles, the most reflective is that of an outsider, Jane Lewis of the London School of Economics, who in an overview of the literature suggests, somewhat at odds with the other contributors, that "it is a mistake to see women as passive recipients [of obstetrical care] or as victims of these changes". Essays in the volume edited by Valerie Fildes continue this celebratory note of women's e...

Eighteenth-Century Europe

Chapter 6: Varieties of the Public Sphere To this point, we have encountered changes, as well as continuity, in European politics, economics, society, and thought. Each of these developments contributed to a transformation that some consider the most fundamental transformation of the century -the emergence, between the state sector and private economic sphere, of autonomous institutions of civi...

Eighteenth-Century Europe

Psychology as a natural science in the eighteenth century.

Psychology considered as a natural science began as Aristotelian “physics” or “natural philosophy” of the soul. C. Wolff placed psychology under metaphysics, coordinate with cosmology. Scottish thinkers placed it within moral philosophy, but distinguished its “physical” laws from properly moral laws (for guiding conduct). Several Germans sought to establish an autonomous empirical Psychology as...

Literature of the Eighteenth Century

Eighteenth century in England was an age equal to the age of Augustus Caesar, when the Roman society had reached the peak of its glory. The name Augustan Age was chosen by writers who saw in Pope, Addison, Swift, Johnson and Burke the modern parallels to Horace, Virgil and Cicero, and all that brilliant company who made Roman literature famous in the day of Augustus. Past ages of England were l...