Samuel Clarke (1675-1729) was one of the leading figures of 18th-century Britain, considered in his day to be of comparable stature to John Locke. In traditional terms, if Locke is the chief Empiricist of British philosophy, Clarke is the main representative of its Rationalist wing. After an education at Cambridge, where be became a friend and disciple of Isaac Newton, Clarke took holy orders and quickly established a great reputation as a preacher. In his sermons he sought to reconstruct religion and ethics on the basis of Newtonian science and the power of human reason. Clarke was chosen to deliver two series of Boyle Lectures from the pulpit of St. Paul's Cathedral in 1704 and 1705. Later, while serving as a chaplain to Queen Anne, he engaged in a very extensive and important correspondence with Leibniz. Clarke spent the last 20 years of his life as Rector of the fashionable St. James's Church in Picadilly, from where he made highly influential contributions to various key theological debates of the time. Hoadly's 1738 edition remains the only complete edition of Samuel Clarke's major works. It includes both sets of Boyle Lectures, in which Clarke presents what is considered the most powerful version of the Cosmological Argument for the existence of God ever mounted. The edition also contains the famous correspondence with Leibniz; here - in a dispute that foreshadows those among 20th-century physicists - Clarke defends the Newtonian view of space and time as absolute entities rather than mere relations between objects and events. Included too are Clarke's many writings on moral philosophy. In these he argues that moral principles can be known by reason alone to be as certain as the propositions of mathematics. These four volumes are central to the history of ideas in Europe, and no major library should be without them.
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