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Jonathan Swift and the Millennium of Madness

Author : Kenneth Craven
Publisher : Brill's Studies in Intellectua
Release Date : 1992
ISBN 10 : UOM:39015028409186
Pages : 238 pages
File Format : PDF, EPUB, TEXT, KINDLE or MOBI
Rating : 4./5 ( users download)

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Download Jonathan Swift and the Millennium of Madness book PDF by Kenneth Craven and published by Brill's Studies in Intellectua. This book was released on 1992 with total page 238 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Jonathan Swift and the Millennium of Madness shows for the first time Swift's philosophical challenge to John Locke and challenge to his disciples: John Toland for deism and advocacy of John Milton and the English Revolution; Shaftesbury for confusing self-interest with the public weal, and Peter Browne for right-wing Irish philosophy. Craven demonstrates that Swift's first masterpiece A Tale of a Tub (1704) was his response to lapsing of the Licensing Act in 1695 and the consequent ascendancy of modern priestcraft. Craven's revisionary book does much more than solve riddles that have perplexed Swiftians and historians for centuries. The book reveals Swift's intimate understanding of seventeenth-century science from Bacon and the Invisible College at Oxford to the Newtonian, synthesis, the Paracelsian innovations in medicine, the resurgence of mid-century reform, and the links between the humors traditions in medicine and literature, saturnine melancholy, and the dreaming god Kronos. The book proposes a new view of intellectual history. Swift joins the philosophies of Neoplatonic divine order, Epicurean atomism, and the Reformation as permeated with millennial expectations. As a result, modern information systems remain skewed by a deconstructing scientific millenarian myth. Swift like Aristotle earlier rejects this classical faith in favor of the more somber Kronos myth.