Science and Industry in the Eighteenth Century

Inventing human science: eighteenth-century domains

Michael MacDonald's piece on the social history of suicide-represent summaries of an author's previous, more detailed scholarship. A number provide preliminary offerings of new ideas and information, which the reader imagines will go on to appear with elaboration in larger scholarly form. Examples of this last category are Ian Dowbiggin's brief study of theories of paranoia in French mental med...

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...

The audience for science in eighteenth century Edinburgh.

Allegory and Enlightenment in the Eighteenth Century

In a reading of William Blake's frontispiece to “There is no Natural Religion” that draws largely on the history of the allegorical mode, I offer a narrative that explores the creative ways in which Blake illuminated his ideas about the value of Enlightenment thought.

In the shadow of the Enlightenment. Occultism and Renaissance science in eighteenth-century America