Abstract
John Toland (1670–1722) is known as one of the most extraordinary and bright representatives of the early British and certainly of the Western European Enlightenment as a whole. He is recognisable for his controversial religious-philosophical and natural philosophical ideas, usually qualified as deistic, materialistic, pantheistic. The historiography of Toland’s religious-philosophical views is quite extensive. As a rule, Russian and Western specialists emphasise deistic, materialistic-atheistic, pantheistic attributes of Toland’s religious-philosophical ideas, criticism and subversive nature of this ideas – orientation either against any Christian religious and theological doctrines, or against religion in general. The focus of this article is Toland’s natural philosophical views on matter and motion, as expressed in the fourth and fifth letters (addressed to an unnamed Dutch Spinozist) of the work Letters to Serena (1704). In general terms, Toland’s natural philosophical materialism has been and still is evaluated by many Russian and Western specialists only as a forerunner of modern forms of natural-scientific materialist discourse, as a predictable complement to his subversive religious-philosophical ideas. Toland is also predominantly identified as a thinker who sought to liberate natural philosophical views on matter and motion from theological constructs as much as possible. Vivid examples of the embodiment of such and similar interpretative attitudes when reading Toland’s reflections on matter and motion are presented in the studies of B.V. Meerovskiy and J. Brown. However, the author of this article is inclined to take the side of those scholars who, when interpreting Toland’s deistic and materialistic views, prefer to fix the presence of meaning-forming theological foundations in these views in a reasoned and justified manner. Such scholars include, for example, J. Champion and J. R. Wigelsworth. The article reviews a number of fragments of the fourth and fifth letters of Letters to Serena, which contain Toland’s conceptual judgements on matter and motion. The main ideas and propositions of these judgements are also highlighted. This allowed to identify and objectify some basic explicit (outlined directly in Letters) theological premises of Toland’s natural philosophical views on matter and motion.
Published Version
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