Joseph Glanvill

Joseph Glanvill (1636 – 4 November 1680) was an English writer, philosopher, and clergyman. Not himself a scientist, he has been called "the most skillful apologist of the virtuosi", or in other words the leading propagandist for the approach of the English natural philosophers of the later 17th century. In 1661 he predicted "To converse at the distance of the Indes by means of sympathetic conveyances may be as natural to future times as to us is a literary correspondence."

Life

He was raised in a strict Puritan household, and educated at Oxford University, where he graduated B.A. from Exeter College in 1655, M.A. from Lincoln College in 1658.''Concise Dictionary of National Biography''

Glanvill was made vicar of Frome in 1662, and was a Fellow of the Royal Society in 1664. He was rector of the Abbey Church at Bath from 1666 to 1680, and prebendary of Worcester in 1678.

Works and views

He was a Latitudinarian thinker. Latitudinarians generally respected the Cambridge Platonists, and Glanvill was friendly with and much influenced by Henry More, a leader in that group where Glanvill was a follower. It was Glanvill's style to seek out a "middle way" on contemporary philosophical issues. His writings display a variety of beliefs that may appear contradictory. There is discussion of Glanvill's thought and method in Basil Willey's ''Seventeenth Century Background'' (1934).

Rationality and plain talking

He was the author of '' The Vanity of Dogmatizing'' (editions from 1661), which attacked scholasticism and religious persecution. It was a plea for religious toleration, the scientific method, and freedom of thought. It also contained a tale that became the material for Matthew Arnold's Victorian poem '' The Scholar Gipsy''.

Glanvill was at first a Cartesian, but shifted his ground a little, engaging with scepticism and proposing a modification in ''Scepsis Scientifica'' (1665), a revision and expansion of ''The Vanity of Dogmatizing''. It started with an explicit "Address to the Royal Society"; the Society responded by electing him as Fellow. He continued in a role of spokesman for his type of limited sceptical approach, and the Society's production of useful knowledge. As part of his programme, he argued for a plain use of language, undistorted as to definitions and reliance on metaphor. He also advocated with ''Essay Concerning Preaching'' (1678) simple speech, rather than bluntness, in preaching, as Robert South did, with hits at nonconformist sermons; he was quite aware that the term "plain" takes a great deal of unpacking.

In ''Essays on Several Important Subjects in Philosophy and Religion'' (1676) he wrote a significant essay ''The Agreement of Reason and Religion'', aimed at least in part at nonconformism. Reason, in Glanvill's view, was incompatible with being a dissenter. In ''Antifanatickal Religion and Free Philosophy'', another essay from the volume, he attacked the whole tradition of imaginative illumination in religion, going back to William Perkins, as founded on the denigration of reason. This essay has the subtitle ''Continuation of the New Atlantis'', and so connects with Francis Bacon's utopia. In an allegory, Glanvill placed the "Young Academicians", standing for the Cambridge Platonists, in the midst of intellectual troubles matching the religious upheavals seen in Britain. They coped by combining modern with ancient thought. Glanvill thought, however, that the world cannot be deduced from reason alone. Even the supernatural cannot be solved from first principles and must be investigated empirically. As a result, Glanvill attempted to investigate supposed supernatural incidents through interviews and examination of the scene of the events.

The supernatural

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