The general view of scholars is that the Kabbalah had no meaningful influence on Leibniz's thought. } But on the basis of new evidence I am convinced that the question must be reopened. The Kabbalah did influence Leibniz, and a recognition of this will lead to both a better understanding of the supposed "quirkiness,,2 of Leibniz's philosophy and an appreciation ofthe Kabbalah as an integral but hitherto ignored factor in the emergence of the modem secular and scientifically oriented world. During the past twenty years there has been increasing willingness to recognize the important ways in which mystical and occult thinking contributed to the development of science and the emergence 3 of toleration. However, the Kabbalah, particularly the Lurianic Kabbalah with its monistic vitalism and optimistic philosophy of perfectionism and universal salvation, has not yet been integrated into the new historiography, although it richly deserves to be. On the basis of manuscripts in libraries at Hanover and Wolfenbiittel, it is clear that Leibniz's relationship with Francis Mercury van Helmont (1614- 1698) and Christian Knorr von Rosenroth (1636-1689), the two leading Christian Kabbalists of the period, was much closer than previously imagined and that his direct knowledge of their writings, especially the collection of 4 kabbalistic texts they published in the Kabbala Denudata, was far more detailed than most scholars have realized. During 1688 Leibniz spent more than a month at Sulzbach with von Rosenroth.

It could certainly be argued that the way in which Hegel criticizes Newton in the Dissertation, the Philosophy of Nature and the lectures on the History of Philosophy, has done more than anything else to prejudice his own reputation. At first sight, what we seem to have here is little more than the contrast between the tested accomplishments of the founding father of modern science, and the random remarks of a confused and somewhat disgruntled philosopher; and if we are persuaded to concede that it may perhaps be something more than this - between the work of a clearsighted mathematician and experimentalist, and the blind assertions of some sort of Kantian logician, blundering about among the facts of the real world. By and large, it was this clear-cut simplistic view of the matter which prevailed among Hegel's contemporaries, and which persisted until fairly recently. The modification and eventual transformation of it have come about gradually, over the past twenty or twenty-five years. The first full-scale commentary on the Philosophy of Nature was published in 1970, and gave rise to the realization that to some extent at least, the Hegelian criticism was directed against Newtonianism rather than the work of Newton himself, and that it tended to draw its inspiration from developments within the natural sciences, rather than from the exigencies imposed upon Hegel's thinking by a priori categorial relationships.

This volume examines the New Science of the 17th century in the context of Baroque culture, analysing its emergence as an integral part of the high culture of the period. The collected essays explore themes common to the new practices of knowledge production and the rapidly changing culture surrounding them, as well as the obsessions, anxieties and aspirations they share, such as the foundations of order, the power and peril of mediation and the conflation of the natural and the artificial. The essays also take on the historiographical issues involved: the characterization of culture in general and culture of knowledge in particular; the use of generalizations like ‘Baroque’ and the status of such categories; and the role of these in untangling the historical complexities of the tumultuous 17th century. The canonical protagonists of the ‘Scientific Revolution’ are considered, and so are some obscure and suppressed figures: Galileo side by side with Scheiner;Torricelli together with Kircher; Newton as well as Scilla. The coupling of Baroque and Science defies both the still-triumphalist historiographies of the Scientific Revolution and the slight embarrassment that the Baroque represents for most cultural-national histories of Western Europe. It signals a methodological interest in tensions and dilemmas rather than self-affirming narratives of success and failure, and provides an opportunity for reflective critique of our historical categories which is valuable in its own right. ​

Intellectual History and the Identity of John Dee In April 1995, at Birkbeck College, University of London, an interdisciplinary colloquium was held so that scholars from diverse fields and areas of expertise could 1 exchange views on the life and work of John Dee. Working in a variety of fields – intellectual history, history of navigation, history of medicine, history of science, history of mathematics, bibliography and manuscript studies – we had all been drawn to Dee by particular aspects of his work, and participating in the colloquium was to c- front other narratives about Dee’s career: an experience which was both bewildering and instructive. Perhaps more than any other intellectual figure of the English Renaissance Dee has been fragmented and dispersed across numerous disciplines, and the various attempts to re-integrate his multiplied image by reference to a particular world-view or philosophical outlook have failed to bring him into focus. This volume records the diversity of scholarly approaches to John Dee which have emerged since the synthetic accounts of I. R. F. Calder, Frances Yates and Peter French. If these approaches have not succeeded in resolving the problematic multiplicity of Dee’s activities, they will at least deepen our understanding of specific and local areas of his intellectual life, and render them more historiographically legible.

Newton's theology, his study of alchemy, the early reception of Newtonianism, & the history of Newtonian scholarship are topics included in the eleven essays that comprise this volume.