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Il lato eterodosso di ogni questione: Joseph Priestley e la «Ecclesiastical History»

Ferdinando Abbri    Università degli Studi di Siena, Italia    

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abstract

Joseph Priestley (1733-1804) is the most outstanding  natural philosopher of British Enlightenment, celebrated for his discoveries in the fields of electricity and chemistry of airs. However, Priestley was mainly a theologian, a pastor, an historian, an  untiring polemist who wanted to affirm a true Christianity based on a Unitarian vision of God. He was the most famous British Socinian of the eighteenth century. His mammoth collection of philosophical and theological works includes sermons, discourses, pamphlets, historical works and multivolume treatises.  This paper focuses on  Priestley’s General History of the Christian Church, published in six volumes from 1790 to 1803, and aims at demonstrating that Priestley  was a heterodox and  radical thinker, but also an apologist of the Christian Revelation, very critical of Edward Gibbon and of the anti-Christian philosophers.

Presentato
14 Dicembre 2016
Lingua
IT
ISBN (PRINT)
978-88-6969-133-1
ISBN (EBOOK)
978-88-6969-132-4

Keywords: GibbonHistory of the Christian ChurchPriestleyBritish EnlightenmentUnitarianism

Copyright: © 2017 Ferdinando Abbri. This is an open-access work distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY). The use, distribution or reproduction is permitted, provided that the original author(s) and the copyright owner(s) are credited and that the original publication is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. The license allows for commercial use. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms.