This third volume in the series completes the known extant correspondence of Richard Price (1732-1791). The letters cover a range of topics including religion, theology, politics, education, liberty, finance, demography and insurance.

It introduces readers to a man largely unknown outside academia but who was considered by his contemporaries to be one of the greatest thinkers of the Enlightenment and who championed, against powerful opposition, many of the rights and liberty’s we take for granted today. As a chronological account it covers and discusses Price’s writing on all the issues which interested him. Among them are political and civil liberty, parliamentary reform, life assurance, mathematics, moral philosophy and the American and French Revolutions. His comments on all these are as important today, and as enlightening, as they were in his time. The book is the first to make extensive use of Price’s correspondence with the likes of Joseph Priestley, Benjamin Franklin, Thomas Jefferson and newly discovered letters from Price’s nephew in Paris during the July 1789 Revolution. This coupled with the chronological approach gives the reader an insight into his thinking and political developments during crucial periods of the eighteenth century Enlightenment and provides a high readable narrative for the general reader.

Richard Brandt is one of the most eminent and influential of contemporary moral philosophers. His work has been concerned with how to justify what is good or right not by reliance on intuitions or theories about what moral words mean but by the explanation of moral psychology and the description of what it is to value something, or to think it immoral. His approach thus stands in marked contrast to the influential work of John Rawls. The essays reprinted in this collection span a period of almost 30 years and include many classic pieces in metaethical and normative ethical theory. The collection is aimed at both those moral philosophers familiar with Brandt's work and at those philosophers who may be largely unfamiliar with his work. The latter group will be struck by the lucid unpretentious style and the cumulative weight of Brandt's contributions to topics that remain at the forefront of moral philosophy.

Eighteenth-Century Dissent and Cambridge Platonism identifies an ethically and politically engaged philosophy of religion in eighteenth century Rational Dissent, particularly in the work of Richard Price (1723-1791), and in the radical thought of Mary Wollstonecraft. It traces their ethico-political account of reason, natural theology and human freedom back to seventeenth century Cambridge Platonism and thereby shows how popular histories of the philosophy of religion in modernity have been over-determined both by analytic philosophy of religion and by its critics. The eighteenth century has typically been portrayed as an age of reason, defined as a project of rationalism, liberalism and increasing secularisation, leading inevitably to nihilism and the collapse of modernity. Within this narrative, the Rational Dissenters have been accused of being the culmination of eighteenth-century rationalism in Britain, epitomising the philosophy of modernity. This book challenges this reading of history by highlighting the importance of teleology, deiformity, the immutability of goodness and the divinity of reason within the tradition of Rational Dissent, and it demonstrates that the philosophy and ethics of both Price and Wollstonecraft are profoundly theological. Price’s philosophy of political liberty, and Wollstonecraft’s feminism, both grounded in a Platonic conception of freedom, are perfectionist and radical rather than liberal. This has important implications for understanding the political nature of eighteenth-century philosophical theology: these thinkers represent not so much a shaking off of religion by secular rationality but a challenge to religious and political hegemony. By distinguishing Price and Wollstonecraft from other forms of rationalism including deism and Socinianism, this book takes issue with the popular division of eighteenth-century philosophy into rationalistic and empirical strands and, through considering the legacy of Cambridge Platonism, draws attention to an alternative philosophy of religion that lies between both empiricism and discursive inference.