Milton among the Philosophers : : Poetry and Materialism in Seventeenth-Century England / / Stephen M. Fallon.

• Superior document: Title is part of eBook package: De Gruyter Cornell University Press Backlist 2000-2013
• VerfasserIn: Fallon, Stephen M.,
• Place / Publishing House: Ithaca, NY : : Cornell University Press, , [2018]; ©2007
• Year of Publication: 2018
• Language: English
• Physical Description: 1 online resource (280 p.)

While Johnson charged that Milton "unhappily perplexed his poetry with his philosophy," Stephen M. Fallon argues that the relationship between Milton's philosophy and the poetry of Paradise Lost is a happy one. The author examines Milton's thought in light of the competing philosophical systems that filled the vacuum left by the repudiation of Aristotle in the seventeenth century. In what has become the classic account of Milton's animist materialism, Fallon revises our understanding of Milton's philosophical sophistication. The book offers a new interpretation of the War in Heaven in Paradise Lost as a clash of metaphysical systems, with free will hanging in the balance.

Table of Contents

Frontmatter -- Contents -- Acknowledgments -- Introduction -- 1. Mechanical Life: Descartes, Hobbes, and the Implications of Mechanism -- 2. The Life of the Soul: The Cambridge Reaction -- 3. Material Life: Milton's Animist Materialism -- 4. Milton and Anne Conway -- 5. Milton's True Poem and the Substance of Epic Angels -- 6. Sin and Death: The Substance of Allegory -- 7. To Shadowy Types from Truth: Satan's Mechanist Descent -- 8. "After Another Method": Sacred War as Philosophical Battle -- Epilogue -- Index -- Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data