Jonathan Edwards’s Philosophy of Nature: The Re-Enchantment of the World in the Age of Scientific Reasoning

Jonathan Edwards's Philosophy of Nature: The Re-Enchantment of the World in the Age of Scientific Reasoning analyses the works of Jonathan Edwards (1703-1758) on natural philosophy in a series of contexts within which they may best be explored and understood. Its aim is to place Edwards's writings on natural philosophy in the broad historical, theological and scientific context of a wide variety of religious responses to the rise of modern science in the early modern period - John Donne's reaction to the new astronomical philosophy of Copernicus, Kepler and Galileo, as well as to Francis Bacon's new natural philosophy; Blaise Pascal's response to Descartes' mechanical philosophy; the reactions to Newtonian science and finally Jonathan Edwards's response to the scientific culture and imagination of his time.

Avihu Zakai is Professor of early modern history and early American history at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. His fields of interest are Protestant religious history in both Europe and America in the early modern period, from the Protestant Reformation to the Great Awakening in America. In the past he published several books with, among others, Cambridge University Press and Princeton University Press.