Dmitri Levitin
Biographic Data
| ID | 461669 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Dmitri Levitin |
| GIVEN NAMES | Dmitri |
| FAMILY NAME | Levitin |
| SIGNATURE | LEVITIN D |
| AFFILIATIONS | Utrecht University |
| ORCID | 0000-0002-0383-8103 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 18 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 37 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 18 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2010 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2025 |
| H-INDEX | 4 |
Reply to critics: Studying Early Modern Philosophers as if They Were Human Beings
The early modern knowledge precariat and the precariousness of ‘orthodoxy’ in Martin Mulsow’s knowledge lost
Kingdom of Darkness: Volume 1
The Kingdom of Darkness: Bayle, Newton, and the Emancipation of the European Mind from Philosophy
In 1500, speculative philosophy lay at the heart of European intellectual life; by 1700, its role was drastically diminished. The Kingdom of Darkness tells the story of this momentous transformation. Dmitri Levitin explores the structural factors behind this change: the emancipation of natural philosophy from metaphysics; theologians' growing preference for philology over philosophy; and a new conception of the limits of the human mind derived fr…
Early Modern Biblical Criticism and the Republic of Letters: Nicholas Hardy, Criticism and Confession: The Bible in the Seventeenth Century Republic of Letters; Dirk Van Miert, The Emancipation of Bib…
Newton on the Rules of Philosophizing and Hypotheses: New Evidence, New Conclusions
This essay provides solutions to the puzzles surrounding the meaning and development of Isaac Newton’s famous “Rules of Philosophizing.” It charts afresh the shift from the “Hypotheses” of the first edition of the Principia (1687) to the “Rules” of the second (1713). A completely new rule of philosophizing from an intermediate stage, when the rules were to be called “Axioms,” is presented: it contains Newton’s first ever planned attack on “hypoth…
What Was the Comparative History of Religions in 17th-Century Europe (and Beyond)? Pagan Monotheism/Pagan Animism, from T’ien to Tylor
When faced with the spectacular outpouring of seventeenth-century texts that seem to provide something that looks like the comparative history of religions, it is tempting to adopt one of two positions. One is condemnatory: the reduction of these texts to the ‘polemical’ contexts that inspired them. The other is celebratory: to announce that the seventeenth century witnessed the flowering of the ‘modern’ study of religion. The following investiga…
The Territories of Science and Religion, by Peter Harrison
The aim of Peter Harrison’s ambitious book is to destroy once and for all ‘the idea of a perennial conflict between science and religion’ (p. 5). There can be no doubt that there was no such conflict, but this will come as little surprise to any even semi-serious historian of science, being the preserve only of figures such as the former biologist and current professional internet provocateur Richard Dawkins—and even the most devout zealots of th…
Newton and scholastic philosophy
This article examines Isaac Newton's engagement with scholastic natural philosophy. In doing so, it makes two major historiographical interventions. First of all, the recent claim that Newton's use of the concepts of analysis and synthesis was derived from the Aristotelian regressus tradition is challenged on the basis of bibliographical, palaeographical and intellectual evidence. Consequently, a new, contextual explanation is offered for Newton'…
Ancient Wisdom in the Age of the New Science: Histories of Philosophy in England, c . 1640–1700
Seventeenth-century England has long been heralded as the birthplace of a so-called 'new' philosophy. Yet what contemporaries might have understood by 'old' philosophy has been little appreciated. In this book Dmitri Levitin examines English attitudes to ancient philosophy in unprecedented depth, demonstrating the centrality of engagement with the history of philosophy to almost all educated persons, whether scholars, clerics, or philosophers the…
Egyptology, the limits of antiquarianism, and the origins of conjectural history, c. 1680–1740: New sources and perspectives
This article introduces some previously unknown Egyptological discussions written in Britain between 1680 and 1740. They are significant in their own right: the last of them, a manuscript ‘Essay towards illustrating the History, Chronology, and Mythology of the Ancient Egyptians’ by the Aberdonian antiquary Alexander Gordon, has a claim to being the most important European Egyptological tract of the period, even if its contents are currently enti…
Made Up from Many Experimentall Notions”: The Society of Apothecaries, Medical Humanism, and the Rhetoric of Experience in 1630s London: Fig. 1
This article examines an important new manuscript discovery: a set of lectures delivered at the Society of Apothecaries in 1634 by four members of the Society. No evidence of the intellectual and methodological assumptions of the apothecaries in this period has previously been known; the article contextualizes the lectures, and identifies the authors-a prominent group of apothecaries centered on the controversial John Buggs and the botanist Thoma…
Republicanism, Sinophilia, and historical writing: Thomas Gordon (c. 1691–1750) and his “History of England”
Thomas Gordon (d. 1750) was a major political writer in Augustan England, for generations celebrated by whig historians (the heart of the new DNB entry still consists of that written by Leslie Step
Rethinking English Phyisco-theology: Samuel Parker’s Tentamina de Deo (1665)
Recent historiography has claimed that a radically new, non-dogmatic physico-theology gained prominence with, and simultaneously promoted, the new science. This article challenges this view by focusing on an important physico-theological work by the young Oxford cleric Samuel Parker, published in 1665. It received a glowing review in the first volume of the Philosophical Transactions and gained its author election to the Royal Society, yet has be…
Halley and the eternity of the world revisited
Since the publication in Notes and Records of the Royal Society of an article by Simon Schaffer in 1977, it has been a historiographical commonplace that there was an ‘underlying unity’ to the religio-philosophical opinions of Edmond Halley, specifically on issues concerning the age of the world. This article (i) argues that the evidence adduced for this claim—specifically the account of a lecture given by Halley to the Royal Society in 1693—has …
From Sacred History to the History of Religion: Paganism, Judaism, and Christianity in European Historiography From Reformation to ‘Enlightenment
This essay is a critical historiographical overview of the recent literature on the writing of sacred history (history of the biblical Jews and early Christians) and history of religion in early modern Europe. It considers the rise of interest in this branch of intellectual history in the last decade, placing it in the context of the rise of the history of scholarship as a historical discipline. It then charts how the characterization of early mo…
Matthew Tindal's Rights of the Christian Church (1706) and the Church–state Relationship
Matthew Tindal' s Rights of the Christian church (1706) , which elicited more than thirty contemporary replies, was a major interjection in the ongoing debates about the relationship between church and state in late seventeenth- and early eighteenth-century England. Historians have usually seen Tindal's work as an exemplar of the ‘republican civil religion’ that had its roots in Hobbes and Harrington, and putatively formed the essence of radical …
Reconsidering John Sergeant's Attacks on Locke's Essay
The Catholic polemicist John Sergeant published three major works of philosophy towards the end of his literary career, The Method to Science (1696), Solid Philosophy (1697) and Metaphysics (1700). They were highly critical of what Sergeant saw as the idea‐grounded epistemology of the Cartesians and John Locke, whom he labelled ‘ideists’. Previous scholars have interpreted Sergeant's texts as manifestations of his lifelong obsession with certaint…
From Sacred History to the History of Religion: Paganism, Judaism, and Christianity in European Historiography From Reformation to ‘Enlightenment
This essay is a critical historiographical overview of the recent literature on the writing of sacred history (history of the biblical Jews and early Christians) and history of religion in early modern Europe. It considers the rise of interest in this branch of intellectual history in the last decade, placing it in the context of the rise of the history of scholarship as a historical discipline. It then charts how the characterization of early mo…
Matthew Tindal's Rights of the Christian Church (1706) and the Church–state Relationship
Matthew Tindal' s Rights of the Christian church (1706) , which elicited more than thirty contemporary replies, was a major interjection in the ongoing debates about the relationship between church and state in late seventeenth- and early eighteenth-century England. Historians have usually seen Tindal's work as an exemplar of the ‘republican civil religion’ that had its roots in Hobbes and Harrington, and putatively formed the essence of radical …
Rethinking English Phyisco-theology: Samuel Parker’s Tentamina de Deo (1665)
Recent historiography has claimed that a radically new, non-dogmatic physico-theology gained prominence with, and simultaneously promoted, the new science. This article challenges this view by focusing on an important physico-theological work by the young Oxford cleric Samuel Parker, published in 1665. It received a glowing review in the first volume of the Philosophical Transactions and gained its author election to the Royal Society, yet has be…
The Kingdom of Darkness: Bayle, Newton, and the Emancipation of the European Mind from Philosophy
In 1500, speculative philosophy lay at the heart of European intellectual life; by 1700, its role was drastically diminished. The Kingdom of Darkness tells the story of this momentous transformation. Dmitri Levitin explores the structural factors behind this change: the emancipation of natural philosophy from metaphysics; theologians' growing preference for philology over philosophy; and a new conception of the limits of the human mind derived fr…
Egyptology, the limits of antiquarianism, and the origins of conjectural history, c. 1680–1740: New sources and perspectives
This article introduces some previously unknown Egyptological discussions written in Britain between 1680 and 1740. They are significant in their own right: the last of them, a manuscript ‘Essay towards illustrating the History, Chronology, and Mythology of the Ancient Egyptians’ by the Aberdonian antiquary Alexander Gordon, has a claim to being the most important European Egyptological tract of the period, even if its contents are currently enti…
Republicanism, Sinophilia, and historical writing: Thomas Gordon (c. 1691–1750) and his “History of England”
Thomas Gordon (d. 1750) was a major political writer in Augustan England, for generations celebrated by whig historians (the heart of the new DNB entry still consists of that written by Leslie Step
Reconsidering John Sergeant's Attacks on Locke's Essay
The Catholic polemicist John Sergeant published three major works of philosophy towards the end of his literary career, The Method to Science (1696), Solid Philosophy (1697) and Metaphysics (1700). They were highly critical of what Sergeant saw as the idea‐grounded epistemology of the Cartesians and John Locke, whom he labelled ‘ideists’. Previous scholars have interpreted Sergeant's texts as manifestations of his lifelong obsession with certaint…
Reconsidering John Sergeant's Attacks on Locke's Essay
The Catholic polemicist John Sergeant published three major works of philosophy towards the end of his literary career, The Method to Science (1696), Solid Philosophy (1697) and Metaphysics (1700). They were highly critical of what Sergeant saw as the idea‐grounded epistemology of the Cartesians and John Locke, whom he labelled ‘ideists’. Previous scholars have interpreted Sergeant's texts as manifestations of his lifelong obsession with certaint…
Matthew Tindal's Rights of the Christian Church (1706) and the Church–state Relationship
Matthew Tindal' s Rights of the Christian church (1706) , which elicited more than thirty contemporary replies, was a major interjection in the ongoing debates about the relationship between church and state in late seventeenth- and early eighteenth-century England. Historians have usually seen Tindal's work as an exemplar of the ‘republican civil religion’ that had its roots in Hobbes and Harrington, and putatively formed the essence of radical …
From Sacred History to the History of Religion: Paganism, Judaism, and Christianity in European Historiography From Reformation to ‘Enlightenment
This essay is a critical historiographical overview of the recent literature on the writing of sacred history (history of the biblical Jews and early Christians) and history of religion in early modern Europe. It considers the rise of interest in this branch of intellectual history in the last decade, placing it in the context of the rise of the history of scholarship as a historical discipline. It then charts how the characterization of early mo…
Halley and the eternity of the world revisited
Since the publication in Notes and Records of the Royal Society of an article by Simon Schaffer in 1977, it has been a historiographical commonplace that there was an ‘underlying unity’ to the religio-philosophical opinions of Edmond Halley, specifically on issues concerning the age of the world. This article (i) argues that the evidence adduced for this claim—specifically the account of a lecture given by Halley to the Royal Society in 1693—has …
Republicanism, Sinophilia, and historical writing: Thomas Gordon (c. 1691–1750) and his “History of England”
Thomas Gordon (d. 1750) was a major political writer in Augustan England, for generations celebrated by whig historians (the heart of the new DNB entry still consists of that written by Leslie Step
Rethinking English Phyisco-theology: Samuel Parker’s Tentamina de Deo (1665)
Recent historiography has claimed that a radically new, non-dogmatic physico-theology gained prominence with, and simultaneously promoted, the new science. This article challenges this view by focusing on an important physico-theological work by the young Oxford cleric Samuel Parker, published in 1665. It received a glowing review in the first volume of the Philosophical Transactions and gained its author election to the Royal Society, yet has be…
Ancient Wisdom in the Age of the New Science: Histories of Philosophy in England, c . 1640–1700
Seventeenth-century England has long been heralded as the birthplace of a so-called 'new' philosophy. Yet what contemporaries might have understood by 'old' philosophy has been little appreciated. In this book Dmitri Levitin examines English attitudes to ancient philosophy in unprecedented depth, demonstrating the centrality of engagement with the history of philosophy to almost all educated persons, whether scholars, clerics, or philosophers the…
Egyptology, the limits of antiquarianism, and the origins of conjectural history, c. 1680–1740: New sources and perspectives
This article introduces some previously unknown Egyptological discussions written in Britain between 1680 and 1740. They are significant in their own right: the last of them, a manuscript ‘Essay towards illustrating the History, Chronology, and Mythology of the Ancient Egyptians’ by the Aberdonian antiquary Alexander Gordon, has a claim to being the most important European Egyptological tract of the period, even if its contents are currently enti…
Made Up from Many Experimentall Notions”: The Society of Apothecaries, Medical Humanism, and the Rhetoric of Experience in 1630s London: Fig. 1
This article examines an important new manuscript discovery: a set of lectures delivered at the Society of Apothecaries in 1634 by four members of the Society. No evidence of the intellectual and methodological assumptions of the apothecaries in this period has previously been known; the article contextualizes the lectures, and identifies the authors-a prominent group of apothecaries centered on the controversial John Buggs and the botanist Thoma…
Newton and scholastic philosophy
This article examines Isaac Newton's engagement with scholastic natural philosophy. In doing so, it makes two major historiographical interventions. First of all, the recent claim that Newton's use of the concepts of analysis and synthesis was derived from the Aristotelian regressus tradition is challenged on the basis of bibliographical, palaeographical and intellectual evidence. Consequently, a new, contextual explanation is offered for Newton'…
The Territories of Science and Religion, by Peter Harrison
The aim of Peter Harrison’s ambitious book is to destroy once and for all ‘the idea of a perennial conflict between science and religion’ (p. 5). There can be no doubt that there was no such conflict, but this will come as little surprise to any even semi-serious historian of science, being the preserve only of figures such as the former biologist and current professional internet provocateur Richard Dawkins—and even the most devout zealots of th…
What Was the Comparative History of Religions in 17th-Century Europe (and Beyond)? Pagan Monotheism/Pagan Animism, from T’ien to Tylor
When faced with the spectacular outpouring of seventeenth-century texts that seem to provide something that looks like the comparative history of religions, it is tempting to adopt one of two positions. One is condemnatory: the reduction of these texts to the ‘polemical’ contexts that inspired them. The other is celebratory: to announce that the seventeenth century witnessed the flowering of the ‘modern’ study of religion. The following investiga…
Early Modern Biblical Criticism and the Republic of Letters: Nicholas Hardy, Criticism and Confession: The Bible in the Seventeenth Century Republic of Letters; Dirk Van Miert, The Emancipation of Bib…
Newton on the Rules of Philosophizing and Hypotheses: New Evidence, New Conclusions
This essay provides solutions to the puzzles surrounding the meaning and development of Isaac Newton’s famous “Rules of Philosophizing.” It charts afresh the shift from the “Hypotheses” of the first edition of the Principia (1687) to the “Rules” of the second (1713). A completely new rule of philosophizing from an intermediate stage, when the rules were to be called “Axioms,” is presented: it contains Newton’s first ever planned attack on “hypoth…
Kingdom of Darkness: Volume 1
The Kingdom of Darkness: Bayle, Newton, and the Emancipation of the European Mind from Philosophy
In 1500, speculative philosophy lay at the heart of European intellectual life; by 1700, its role was drastically diminished. The Kingdom of Darkness tells the story of this momentous transformation. Dmitri Levitin explores the structural factors behind this change: the emancipation of natural philosophy from metaphysics; theologians' growing preference for philology over philosophy; and a new conception of the limits of the human mind derived fr…
The early modern knowledge precariat and the precariousness of ‘orthodoxy’ in Martin Mulsow’s knowledge lost
Reply to critics: Studying Early Modern Philosophers as if They Were Human Beings
Philosophy (17 works) · History (12 works) · Philosophy (10 works) · Classics (9 works) · Epistemology (9 works) · Law (9 works) · Political science (9 works) · Theology (9 works) · Art (8 works) · Literature (8 works)