It is easier to work out the age of the world than to work out how old Flavius Josephus thought it was. Since the nineteenth century, the former has been the concern of scientists and is now estima...

Many Enlightenment freethinkers undermined the immortality of the soul by declaring that it could not be demonstrated by philosophy, and that its origins were inseparable from ancient superstition. Historians have argued that the key masterminds behind this particular historical-critical attack were the deists Charles Blount and John Toland. However, overemphasis on deist critiques has fostered the idea that it was rare to write about the history of the soul in the seventeenth century. In reality, historical accounts of the immortal soul (...) were ubiquitous in this period. These histories included all the elements in deist histories that scholars have since deemed dangerous. I argue that writing a history of pagan belief in the soul was therefore not an intrinsically subversive move. Instead, Blount and Toland’s histories reworked narratives already available in mainstream scholarship on ancient paganism. It has now become common to argue that anticlerical arguments were forged in orthodox erudition. But if deists were not saying anything different to their contemporaries, why did their work raise such an outcry? I contend that their radical characters, the broader context of their respective oeuvres, and the circumstances in which their works circulated played a critical role in their reception. (shrink)

Today, Thomas White (1593–1676) is remembered as the leader of the “Blackloists” – a renegade Catholic group that took its name from White's sometime pseudonym “Blacklo” – and as the friend and phi...

Hobbes's unusual religious views in his classical work, Leviathan, are often seen as a product of his attempt to reconcile Christianity with his philosophical materialism. Yet given Hobbes's materialistic view in his earlier works too, this explanatory framework alone is not sufficient for grasping distinctive features of Leviathan. This article remedies this lacuna by paying close attention to an understudied aspect of the development of Hobbes's religious theory from The Elements of Law to Leviathan: his treatment of the supernatural and, (...) particularly, of matters of faith known by supernatural revelation as opposed to natural reason. I argue that over time Hobbes developed an epistemological analysis of supernatural revelation and refined his argument about the sense in which matters of faith are supernatural and about the extent to which they are found in the Bible. It was not materialism per se but the more sophisticated analysis of the supernatural in Leviathan that enabled Hobbes to admit the sphere of the supernatural to a much smaller extent than in De Cive and to discuss in detail what he sees as a matter of faith and beyond the scope of philosophy in De Cive. (shrink)