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(2008) The legacies of Richard Popkin, Dordrecht, Springer.
Richard H. Popkin' concept of the third force and the Newtonian synthesis of theology and scientific methodology in Isaac Newton and Samuel Clarke
pp. 73-108
In 1960, Richard H. Popkin published his paradigm-shattering History of Scepticism from Erasmus to Descartes in which he described the effects of the rediscovery of the writings of the Greek Pyrrhonian sceptic, Sextus Empiri-cus, upon the intellectual ferment of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Popkin showed both how early modern adaptations of Sextus' arguments subverted the possibility of obtaining certain knowledge from the senses, reason, or authority and how some early modern philosophers in the rationalist and empiricist traditions addressed the ensuing 'sceptical crisis' in religion, philosophy, and science. By 1981, when he was the Willam Andrews Clark Library Professor at UCLA, Popkin was embarked upon the project of widening his historical analysis beyond the canonical rationalists and empiricists of the traditional schools of early modern philosophy. He began to analyze non-traditional writers who characterized a strand of early modern thought which he christened the "Third Force." Popkin showed how a wide variety of reinterpreted, traditional, early modern thinkers, as well as non-traditional, early modern thinkers, attempted to defeat scepticism by combining elements of traditional philosophy with arguments and ideas drawn from such supposedly non-rational, non-philosophical arenas as Jewish messianism, Christian millenarianism, eschatology, and the interpretation of biblical prophecy.
Publication details
DOI: 10.1007/978-1-4020-8474-4_6
Full citation:
(2008)., Richard H. Popkin' concept of the third force and the Newtonian synthesis of theology and scientific methodology in Isaac Newton and Samuel Clarke, in , The legacies of Richard Popkin, Dordrecht, Springer, pp. 73-108.
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