The Cambridge Companion to Eighteenth-Century Thought Cambridge Companions to Literature Series

The Cambridge Companion to Eighteenth-Century Thought gives a comprehensive overview of intellectual life in the eighteenth-century Anglophone world at a time when the boundaries of knowledge were growing rapidly in response to a world undergoing radical change. Organised in two parts, the volume begins with four wide-ranging chapters on key areas of thought: philosophy, science, political and legal theory, and religion. The second part comprises shorter chapters that focus on subjects of emerging inquiry, such as aesthetics, economics, and sensibility and emotion, as well as intellectual disciplines undergoing methodological evolution, such as history. A chronology is provided to help situate historical events, important thinkers, key publications, and intellectual milestones in relation to one another, and guides for further reading point the reader to avenues for deeper exploration of the Companion's various topics.

Introduction Frans De Bruyn; 1. Philosophical Thought: Theories of Knowledge and Moral Thought Frans De Bruyn; 2. Science in the Long Eighteenth Century Sara Landreth; 3. Political and Legal Thought Nancy E. Johnson; 4. Religious Thought: The Defence of Religious Establishment Roger D. Lund; 5. Historical Thought Ruth Mack; 6. Wealth and Corruption: Eighteenth-Century Social and Economic; 7. Thought in Four Scandals Robert Sparling; 8. Literary and Aesthetic Theory Philip Smallwood; 9. Sensibility: Passion, Emotion, Affect Julie Murray.

Frans De Bruyn is Professor Emeritus at the Department of English, University of Ottawa. He is the author of The Literary Genres of Edmund Burke (1996), co-editor (with Shaun Regan) of The Culture of the Seven Years' War: Empire, Identity, and the Arts in the Eighteenth-Century Atlantic World (2014), and most recently co-author (with Joyce Goggin) of Comedy and Crisis: Pieter Langendijk, the Dutch, and the Speculative Bubbles of 1720 (2020).