The New Philosophy and Universal Languages in Seventeenth-century England: Bacon, Hobbes, and WilkinsIn all three, a more perfect language comprises both a model and a means for achieving a more perfect philosophy, and that philosophy, in turn, a vehicle for promoting political authority in the state. Those three projects are the new philosophies of Lord Chancellor Bacon, Thomas Hobbes, and Bishop John Wilkins, all of which can be usefully understood in the broader context of the century's cultural politics and in the more specific circumstances of the century's fascination with the construction of a universal language. Bacon, Hobbes, and Wilkins construct philosophies out of deeply held convictions about the need to provide a saving form of knowledge to remedy cultural crises. |
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Contents
Preface | 9 |
The Lamentations of Comenius Reconfiguring the Political in SeventeenthCentury Language Theory | 29 |
Bacon and the Advent of Universal Languages | 53 |
Natural Philosophy and the Politics of Jacobean Intervention | 55 |
Language and the Natural Philosophy of the Lord Chancellor | 87 |
Hobbes and the State of the Universal Language | 113 |
The Universal Philosophy of Politics and Monsters of Metaphor | 115 |
The Logic and Language of Leviathan From Monstrous Metaphor to Civil Philosophy | 145 |
The New Philosophy of the FiscalMilitary State Cultural Politics and the Language of Interest | 179 |
Interest Achieved The Royal Society and the Political Concernments of Communications | 208 |
A Center Inside the Center Wilkins and the Philosophical Language | 228 |
From Lamentations to Laughter | 263 |
Notes | 269 |
Select Bibliography | 322 |
Index | 347 |
Wilkins and the Making of the Universal Language | 177 |
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