A groundbreaking, revisionist account of the importance of the history of philosophy to intellectual change - scientific, philosophical and religious - in seventeenth-century England.

Dmitri Levitin is a Fellow of All Souls College, Oxford. Previously, he was a Fellow of Trinity College, Cambridge, and of the Centre for Research in Arts, Social Sciences and Humanities, also in Cambridge. He has also held positions at the Folger Library and at the University of Edinburgh. His research is on the intellectual, religious and cultural history of early modern Europe. Within these fields, he has published work on the history of science, philosophy, scholarship, medicine, theology, church-state relations, and political and legal thought.

1. Introduction: histories of philosophy between 'Renaissance' and 'Enlightenment'; 2. Ancient wisdom I: the wisdom of the East: Zoroaster, astronomy and the Chaldaeans, from Thomas Stanley to Thomas Hyde; 3. Ancient wisdom II: Moses the Egyptian?; 4. Histories of natural philosophy I. Histories of method; 5. Histories of natural philosophy II. Histories of doctrine: matter theory and animating principles; 6. Philosophy in the early church; 7. Conclusion.