In The Divine Legation of Moses (1738-1741) William Warburton developed a complex theory of writing, suggesting among other things a relationship between hieroglyphic writing and zoolatry. In the same years the abbé Pluche maintained a... more
In The Divine Legation of Moses (1738-1741) William Warburton developed a complex theory of writing, suggesting among other things a relationship between hieroglyphic writing and zoolatry. In the same years the abbé Pluche maintained a singular explanation of the origin of idolatry in his Histoire du ciel (1739). He stated that all pagan religions originally arose from the misinterpretation of hieroglyphics in ancient Egypt. By doing so, he extended the relationship between religion and writing to the entire explanation of idolatry. Warburton's theory of writing was set to obtain a great deal of fortune in France, but also its application to the history of pagan religions by Pluche found some illustrious followers: first among them was Condillac, who reinterpreted it in the light of his own theory of language on the one hand, and of the new Enlightenment's views about the history of religion on the other.
The oft-told story of Leibniz’s doctrine of the best world, or optimism, is that it enjoyed a great deal of popularity in the eighteenth century until the massive earthquake that struck Lisbon on 1 November 1755 destroyed its support.... more
The oft-told story of Leibniz’s doctrine of the best world, or optimism, is that it enjoyed a great deal of popularity in the eighteenth century until the massive earthquake that struck Lisbon on 1 November 1755 destroyed its support. Despite its long history, this story is nothing more than a commentators’ fiction that has become accepted wisdom not through sheer weight of evidence but through sheer frequency of repetition. In this paper we shall examine the reception of Leibniz’s doctrine of the best world in the eighteenth century in order to get a clearer understanding of what its fate really was. As we shall see, while Leibniz’s doctrine did win a good number of adherents in the 1720s and 1730s, especially in Germany, support for it had largely dried up by the mid-1740s; moreover, while opponents of Leibniz’s doctrine were few and far between in the 1710s and 1720s, they became increasing vocal in the 1730s and afterwards, between them producing an array of objections that served to make Leibnizian optimism both philosophically and theologically toxic years before the Lisbon earthquake struck.
