Francis Lodwick FRS (1619-94) was a prosperous merchant, bibliophile, writer, thinker, and member of the Royal Society. He wrote extensively on language, religion, and experimental philosophy, most of it too controversial to be safely published during his lifetime. This edition includes the first publication of his unorthodox religious works alongside groundbreaking writings on language. Following an extensive introduction by the editors the book is divided into three parts. Part One includes A Common Writing (1647), the first English attempt at an artificial language, and the equally pioneering phonetic alphabet set out in An Essay Towards an Universal Alphabet (1686). Part Two contains a series of linked short treatises on the nature of religion and divine revelation, including 'Of the Word of God' and 'Of the Use of Reason in Religion', in which Lodwick argues for a new understanding of the Bible, advocates a rational approach to divine worship, and seeks to reinterpret received religion for an age of reason. The final part of the book contains his unpublished utopian fiction, A Country Not Named: here he creates a world to express his most firmly-held opinions on language and religion, and in which his utopians found a church that bans the Bible. The book gives new insights into the religious aspects of the scientific revolution and throws fresh light on the early modern frame of mind. It is aimed at intellectual and cultural historians, historians of science and linguistics, and literary scholars - indeed, at all those interested in the interplay of ideas, language, and religion in seventeenth-century England

This is the first complete edition of the writings of the merchant, scholar, and F.R.S. Francis Lodwick (1619-94). He wrote extensively on language, religion, and experimental philosophy, much of it too controversial to be published during his lifetime. This edition includes an introduction, a commentary, and primary and secondary bibliographies.

There are many debates about utopia - What constitutes a utopia? Are utopias benign or dangerous? Is the idea of utopianism essential to Christianity or heretical? What is the relationship between utopia and ideology? This Very Short Introduction explores these issues and examines utopianism and its history. Lyman Sargent discusses the role of utopianism in literature, and in the development of colonies and in immigration. The idea of utopia has become commonplace in social and political thought, both negatively and positively. Some thinkers see a trajectory from utopia to totalitarianism with violence an inevitable part of the mix. Others see utopia directly connected to freedom and as a necessary element in the fight against totalitarianism. In Christianity utopia is labelled as both heretical and as a fundamental part of Christian belief, and such debates are also central to such fields as architecture, town and city planning, and sociology among many others Sargent introduces and summarizes the debates over the utopia in literature, communal studies, social and political theory, and theology. ABOUT THE SERIES: The Very Short Introductions series from Oxford University Press contains hundreds of titles in almost every subject area. These pocket-sized books are the perfect way to get ahead in a new subject quickly. Our expert authors combine facts, analysis, perspective, new ideas, and enthusiasm to make interesting and challenging topics highly readable.

This book explores the utopian imagination in contemporary American poetry and the ways in which experimental poets formulate a utopian poetics by adopting the rhetorical principles of negative theology, which proposes using negative statements as a means of attesting to the superior, unrepresentable being of God. With individual chapters on works by such poets as Susan Howe, Nathaniel Mackey, Charles Bernstein, and Alice Notley, this book illustrates how a strategy of negation similarly proves optimal for depicting the subject of utopia in literary works. Negative Theology and Utopian Thought in Contemporary American Poetry: Determined Negations contends that negative statements in experimental poetry illustrate the potential for utopian social change, not by portraying an ideal world itself but by revealing the very challenge of representing utopia directly.

Theoretically informed scholarship on early modern English utopian literature has largely focused on Marxist interpretation of these texts in an attempt to characterize them as proto- Marxist. The present volume instead focuses on subjectivity in early modern English utopian writing by using these texts as case studies to explore intersections of the thought of Jacques Lacan and Michel Foucault. Both Lacan and Foucault moved back and forth between structuralist and post-structuralist intellectual trends and ultimately both defy strict categorization into either camp. Although numerous studies have appeared that compare Lacan’s and Foucault’s thought, there have been relatively few applications of their thought together onto literature. By applying the thought of both theorists, who were not literary critics, to readings of early modern English utopian literature, this study will, on the one hand, describe the formation of utopian subjectivity that is both psychoanalytically (Oedipal and pre-Oedipal) and socially constructed, and, on the other hand, demonstrate new ways in which the thought of Lacan and Foucault inform and complement each other when applied to literary texts. The utopian subject is a malleable subject, a subject whose linguistic, psychoanalytical subjectivity determines the extent to which environmental and social factors manifest in an identity that moves among Lacan’s Symbolic, Imaginary, and Real.

For the decade that followed the end of the cold war, the world was lulled into a sense that a consumerist, globalized, peaceful future beckoned. The beginning of the twenty-first century has rudely disposed of such ideas—most obviously through 9/11and its aftermath. But just as damaging has been the rise in the West of a belief that a single model of political behavior will become a worldwide norm and that, if necessary, it will be enforced at gunpoint. In Black Mass, celebrated philosopher and critic John Gray explains how utopian ideals have taken on a dangerous significance in the hands of right-wing conservatives and religious zealots. He charts the history of utopianism, from the Reformation through the French Revolution and into the present. And most urgently, he describes how utopian politics have moved from the extremes of the political spectrum into mainstream politics, dominating the administrations of both George W. Bush and Tony Blair, and indeed coming to define the political center. Far from having shaken off discredited ideology, Gray suggests, we are more than ever in its clutches. Black Mass is a truly frightening and challenging work by one of Britain's leading political thinkers.

Very few thinkers have traveled the heretical path that François Laruelle walks between philosophy and non-philosophy. For Laruelle, the future of philosophy is problematic, but a mutation of its functions is possible. Up until now, philosophy has merely been a utopia concerned with the past and only provided the services of its conservation. We must introduce a rigorous and nonimaginary practice of a utopia in action, a philo-fiction—a close relative to science fiction. From here we can see the double meaning of the watchword, a tabula rasa of the future. This new destination is imposed by a specifically human messianism, an eschatology within the limits of the Man-in-person as antihumanist ultimatum addressed to the History of Philosophy. This book elucidates some of the fundamental problems of non-philosophy and takes on its detractors.