The Great Chain of Being: A Study of the History of an Idea

by PeterJ.Stanlis (Introduction), Arthur O . Lovejoy (Author)

• New

  Paperback
  2009

  $45.79

  Deals with the historical and philosophical analysis of the twentieth century. This title sees philosophy's history as one of confusion of ideas, a prime example of which is the idea of a 'great chain of being' - a universe linked in theology, science and values by pre-determined stages in all phases of life.

• New

  Paperback
  1976

  $27.69

  From later antiquity down to the close of the eighteenth century, most philosophers and men of science and, indeed, most educated men, accepted without question a traditional view of the plan and structure of the world. In this volume, which embodies the William James lectures for 1933, Arthur O. Lovejoy points out the three principles-plenitude, continuity, and graduation-which were combined in this conception; analyzes their origins in the philosophies of Plato, Aristotle, and the Neoplatonists; traces the most important of their diverse samifications in subsequent religious thought, in metaphysics, in ethics and aesthetics, and in astronomical and biological theories; and copiously illustrates the influence of the conception as a whole, and of the ideas out of which it was compounded, upon the imagination and feelings as expressed in literature.