Great Chain of Being: A Study of the History of an Idea (Revised)

Title: Great Chain of Being: A Study of the History of an Idea (Revised)
Author: Arthur O Lovejoy
G: 1704070
ISBN: 9780674361539
Publisher: Harvard University Press
Published: 2010
Binding: Paperback
Language: English
Number of Pages: 382
Section: Philosophy | Metaphysics
Condition Note: Clean, unmarked copy with some edge wear. Good binding. Dust jacket included if issued with one. We ship in recyclable American-made mailers. 100% money-back guarantee on all orders.
Publisher Description:

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.