Description
Book SynopsisThis volume completes a widely acclaimed exploration of religion and ethics in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. It investigates attempts to separate ethics from religion, and instead to locate the morals in human nature. Meticulously researched and accessibly written, this study makes a vital contribution to our understanding of eighteenth-century thought.
Trade Review'Isabel Rivers … offers a beautifully organised and lucidly written account of the movement of ideas in the period 'from Shaftesbury to Hume' - her two key figures … A splendid book for the scholarly library.' Michael Wheeler, Church Times
'This is a magisterial book, intricate, coherent, learned, lucid, luminously fair minded.' Review of English Studies
'This is an exemplary scholarly study that provides rich insights into the complex and sometimes subtle debates on religion and on morality that make the later seventeenth and the eighteenth centuries such a fascinating period in the history of thought and is a most welcome addition to Isabel Rivers's previous volume on the subject.' David A. Pailin, Journal of Theological Studies
'Isabel Rivers has concluded her important book on the seventeenth- and eighteenth-century discourses about the connection, or lack thereof, between religion and ethics. Her second volume is informed by the same wide learning, sustained balance, and encompassing generosity that distinguished its predecessor.' Robert Sullivan, Eighteenth-Century Studies
'Rivers does an exceptional job … This richly detailed book makes a substantial contribution to our understanding of the moral philosophy and religious thought of the period.' The Virginia Quarterly Review
'Will remain essential reading for students of history, theology and literature for many years.' Literature and History
Table of ContentsIntroduction; 1. The true religion of nature: the freethinkers and their opponents; 2. Shaftesbury and the defence of natural affection; 3. Defining the moral faculty: Hutcheson, Butler, and Price; 4. The ethics of sentiment and the religious hypothesis: Hume and his critics; 5. The conflict of languages in the later eighteenth century.
