Radicalism and Mysticism in the Later Seventeenth Century: John Pordage’s Angels
In 1667, when Paradise Lost was published, John Milton’s nephew, pupil and biographer, Edward Phillips, was working as tutor for Philip Herbert, 5th Earl of Pembroke. At the same time, the Earl’s steward was the little-known author of a visionary and prophetic epic poem about angels, Samuel Pordage. Were there discussions of their parallel projects? Unfortunately, we do not know whether Milton and Pordage heard news of each other, or even met. Their shared interests included not only poetry and angels, but radical religion: Samuel’s father, John, was a visionary who had conversed with angels, rejected the moral law and founded a church. The circumstantial associations deepen with another visitor to the Earl’s house in that same year, 1667. This was Richard Bovet, author of Pandaemonium (1684), an antiSadducist compendium of tales of witches and spirits, but also a dissenter’s attack on Catholicism and on Restoration politics. Bovet was later involved in plotting against the regime. Not only was there an element of political sympathy between them, but Bovet’s title Pandaemonium derives from Milton’s epic (which Bovet commends in the text). Perhaps all three writers intersected in person as well as in spirit in 1667.1
Milton and the Idea of the Fall
Introduction Part I. Fallen Culture: 1. The fall 2. Augustinianism 3. The quarrel over original sin 1649-60 4. The heterodox fall 5. The fall in practice Part II. Milton: 6. Towards Paradise Lost 7. Paradise Lost I: the causality of primal wickedness 8. Paradise Lost II: God, Eden, and man 9. Paradise Lost III: creation and education 10. Paradise Lost IV: fall and expulsion Conclusion.
Rethinking Health: Healthy or Healthier than?
Theorists of health have, to this point, focused exclusively on trying to define a state—health—that an organism might be in. I argue that they have overlooked the possibility of a comparativist theory of health, which would begin by defining a relation—healthier than—that holds between two organisms or two possible states of the same organism. I show that a comparativist approach to health has a number of attractive features, and has important implications for philosophers of medicine, bioethicists, health economists, and policy makers. 1 Introduction 2 Comparative and Non-comparative Concepts 3 Traditional Theories of Health 4 An Argument for Comparativism: Intergenerational Assessments of Health 5 Another Reason to be a Comparativist: Functionalist Theories of Health 6 A Non-comparative Alternative? 7 An Objection to Comparativism? 8 Why this Matters: The Consequences of Comparativism 1 Introduction 2 Comparative and Non-comparative Concepts 3 Traditional Theories of Health 4 An Argument for Comparativism: Intergenerational Assessments of Health 5 Another Reason to be a Comparativist: Functionalist Theories of Health 6 A Non-comparative Alternative? 7 An Objection to Comparativism? 8 Why this Matters: The Consequences of Comparativism