Priestley in Germany

ABSTRACT

The paper focuses on the reception of Priestley in Germany, which is remarkable for the huge and assiduous interest it raised in different philosophical milieus. Priestley’s dynamical conception of matter, his explanation of the functioning of the brain, and of the production of material ideas are at the basis of the new form of materialism that develops in Germany in the late 1770s, and which differs completely from the model of mechanical materialism Germany was used to in earlier decades. Indeed, the German reception of Priestley’s ideas begins surprisingly early, just one year after the publication of his edition of Hartley’s Observations on Man (1775), and traverses the two final decades of the eighteenth century with a considerable number of reviews and references in the main philosophical journals and works of the time. In 1778, his introduction to the Observations was translated into German and presented in the form of a manifesto of a new materialistic philosophy compatible with the claims of morals and religion. Within a few years, Priestley became the unavoidable reference point for the most relevant theological and philosophical discussions concerning the nature of matter and spirits, the place of God, the possibility of human freedom, and the legitimacy of free thinking.     

德国罗腾堡 浪漫的欧洲千年古城

正罗腾堡是陶伯河上的一颗明珠,这里也是德国"浪漫之路"和"古堡之路"的交汇点。罗腾堡深居山林、躲避了绵延的战火,至今还保留着一千年前建城时的古朴风貌,拥有整个欧洲最特别的风情。世界罕见的"廊桥城墙"从古老的文化城市维尔茨堡开始,经过中世纪古城丁克尔斯北尔,内德林根,延伸至路德维希二世的新天鹅堡所往地非森,一路看过无数古镇。听说下一站罗腾堡(Rothenburg)又是古镇,神色便有些不屑,然而眼前蓦然出现一座城池!称它做城池,因为你绝对无法用古镇、城堡这样的字眼来形容第一     

德国宝马中心：城里的轿车

宝马中心由世界顶级建筑师蓝天组的W0lf D．Prix教授设计,是一座集新车交付中心、技术与设计工作室、画廊、青少年课堂、休闲酒吧等为一体的综合性多功能建筑。它新颖独特的双圆锥形设计风格,像极了轿车内部的汽缸,充满了动感美。     

Writers and politics in West Germany

This article argues that Archibald Campbell's Necessity of Revelation (1739) can be viewed as the first application of the ‘science of human nature’, a characteristic branch of the Scottish Enlightenment, to the study of religious belief. Adopting Baconian and Newtonian methodological principles, Campbell set hypotheses, collected historical data, and inferred conclusions about the capabilities of human nature to come to fundamental religious ideas without the aid of revelation. He did so not only to reject the ‘deist’ position on the powers of unassisted human reason, associated with Matthew Tindal's Christianity as Old as the Creation (1730), but also to refute Campbell's conservative critics within the Church of Scotland who had earlier tried him for heresy. Campbell's example is that of a university professor using the experimental study of religion to defeat both radical freethinking and Calvinist orthodoxy. His work is another instance of the complicated relationship between science and religion within eighteenth-century Scotland.