| dc.description.abstract | Recent scholarship on the eighteenth-century polymath Joseph Priestley (1733-1804) has
focused on his work as a pioneering scientist, a controversial Unitarian polemicist, and a
radical political theorist. This thesis provides an extensive analysis of his comparatively
neglected philosophical writings. It situates Priestley’s philosophy in the theological
context of eighteenth-century rational dissent, and argues that his ideas on ethics,
materialism, and determinism came to provide a philosophical foundation for the
Socinian theology which came to prominence among Presbyterian congregations in the
last decades of the century.
Throughout the thesis I stress the importance of rational debate to the development of
Priestley’s ideas. The chapters are thus structured around a series of Priestley’s
engagements with contemporary figures: chapter 1 traces his intellectual development in
the context of the debates over moral philosophy and the freedom of the will at the
Daventry and Warrington dissenting academies; chapter 2 examines his response to the
Scottish ‘common sense’ philosophers, Thomas Reid, James Beattie, and James Oswald;
chapter 3 examines his writings on materialism and philosophical necessity and his
debates with Richard Price, John Palmer, Benjamin Dawson, and Joseph Berington;
chapter 4 focuses on his attempt to develop a rational defence of Christianity in
opposition to the ideas of David Hume; chapter 5 traces the diffusion of his ideas through
the syllabuses at the liberal dissenting academies at Warrington, Daventry, and New
College, Hackney. The thesis illustrates the process by which Priestley’s theology and
philosophy defeated a number of rival traditions to become the predominant intellectual
position within rational dissent in the late eighteenth century. In the course of doing so, it
illuminates some of the complex interconnections between philosophical and theological
discourses in the period. | en_US |
