Churchmen and Philosophers

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Ian Hall & Lisa Hill

In the modern era, British thinkers have made significant - indeed perhaps even disproportionate - contributions to our understanding of the workings of international relations. This book brings together eleven original essays by an inter-disciplinary team of historians, political theorists and international relations specialists that reconsider some of those contributions and their legacies. It aims to provide new insights into the work of thinkers from Thomas Hobbes and Edmund Burke to Goldsworthy Lowes and Lewis Namier as well as to advance the study of the history of international thought.

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Diana B. Altegoer

"Using the tools of rhetorical and poetic analysis, this study of Baconian science reveals how the construction of scientific and philosophical discourse in early-modern England cannot be separated from literary-rhetorical production and political partisanship. By calling into question the usual way of dividing disciplines into logic, rhetoric, and poetics, Bacon suggested the constructed nature of these disciplines, and of traditional forms of knowledge. Bacon did not call into being a fissure of science and the arts; rather he conceptualized a unique relationship between the two by creating an experimental (and rhetoricized) "logic" that allowed nature to shape and fashion the perceiving mind of the witness in order to advance the political fortunes of Elizabethan and Stuart England."--BOOK JACKET.

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Hent de Vries

Does violence inevitably shadow our ethico-political engagements and decisions, including our understandings of identity, whether collective or individual? Questions that touch upon ethics and politics can greatly benefit from being rephrased in terms borrowed from the arsenal of religious and theological figures, because the association of such figures with a certain violence keeps moralism, whether in the form of fideism or humanism, at bay. De Vries' posing of such questions and rearticulations pioneers new modalities for systematic engagement with religion and philosophy alike.

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G.K. Chesterton

Can you trust yourself when you don't know who you are? In a park in London, secret policeman Gabriel Syme strikes up a conversation with an anarchist. Sworn to do his duty, Syme uses his new acquaintance to go undercover in Europe's Central Anarchist Council and infiltrate their deadly mission, even managing to have himself voted to the position of 'Thursday'. When Syme discovers another undercover policeman on the Council, however, he starts to question his role in their operations. And as a desperate chase across Europe begins, his confusion grows, as well as his confidence in his ability to outwit his enemies. But he has still to face the greatest terror that the Council has: a man named Sunday, whose true nature is worse than Syme could ever have imagined...