Article ID: CBB000850278

In Search of the “Sea-Something”: Reason and Transcendence in the Frend/De Morgan Family (2007)

unapi

Richards, Joan L. (Author)


Science in Context
Volume: 20
Pages: 509--536


Publication Date: 2007
Edition Details: Part of the special issue “Believing Nature, Knowing God”
Language: English

This paper traces the changing fortunes of natural theology in two generations of an English family. The group is represented in the first generation by the Unitarian radical, William Frend, and in the second by the spiritualist Sophia Frend De Morgan and her husband, the mathematician Augustus De Morgan. The Frend/DeMorgans were distinguished from the naturalistic Darwins by their commitment to reason; they were a quintessentially urban group whose impulses to natural theology flowed from a God they encountered through their minds. For William Frend, natural theology was rooted in a tightly disciplined, linguistic view of reason that linked theological and mathematical understandings; in the De Morgan's generation, however, understandings of mathematics and of language changed in ways that undercut the power of Frend's reasoned approach. In its rise and fall this family story of reasoned theology is co-temporal with the natural theology that was wrecked on the rocks of Darwinian evolutionary theory.

...More

Description On natural theology in two generations of an English family---the Unitarian radical, William Frend, the spiritualist Sophia Frend De Morgan, and the mathematician Augustus De Morgan---charting the changing understandings of mathematics and of language.


Included in

Article Vidal, Fernando; Kleeberg, Bernhard (2007) Introduction: Knowledge, Belief, and the Impulse to Natural Theology. Science in Context (p. 381). unapi

Citation URI
https://data.isiscb.org/isis/citation/CBB000850278/

Similar Citations

Article Phillips, Christopher; (2005)
Augustus De Morgan and the Propagation of Moral Mathematics (/isis/citation/CBB000501556/)

Chapter Cohen, Daniel J.; (2005)
Reason and Belief in Victorian Mathematics (/isis/citation/CBB000740675/)

Book Montaigne, Michel de; (2003)
Apology for Raymond Sebond (/isis/citation/CBB000471210/)

Article Ludovica Marinucci; (2021)
Christiaan Huygens’s Natural Theology in His Cosmotheoros and Other Late Writings (/isis/citation/CBB927642672/)

Chapter Bekkum, Wout J. van; (2005)
Medieval Jewish Approaches to Natural Law. The Rationalism of Saadya Gaon (/isis/citation/CBB001020092/)

Article John Lidwell-Durnin; (2020)
William Benjamin Carpenter and the Emerging Science of Heredity (/isis/citation/CBB587683100/)

Chapter Paul White; (2017)
Religion (/isis/citation/CBB078021312/)

Article Donal Murphy; (2016)
George Boole and Walsh's Delusions (/isis/citation/CBB926782871/)

Book Vinci, Thomas C.; (2015)
Space, Geometry, and Kant's Transcendental Deduction of the Categories (/isis/citation/CBB001500573/)

Article Wang, Xiaoqin; (2004)
A Strange Mathematical File Which Will Never Be Out of Date (/isis/citation/CBB000401218/)

Article Verburgt, Lukas M.; (2015)
The Objective and the Subjective in Mid-Nineteenth-Century British Probability Theory (/isis/citation/CBB001553591/)

Article Rohrbasser, Jean-Marc; (2008)
Süssmilch lecteur de Petty. Arithmétique politique et théologie naturelle (/isis/citation/CBB001021398/)

Article Richards, Joan L.; (2006)
Introduction: Fragmented Lives (/isis/citation/CBB000670196/)

Authors & Contributors
Richards, Joan L.
Donal Murphy
Marinucci, Ludovica
Lidwell-Durnin, John
Delorme, Shannon
White, Paul S.
Concepts
Science and religion
Mathematics
Unitarianism
Rationalism
Natural theology
Transcendentalism
Time Periods
19th century
18th century
9th century
17th century
16th century
Places
Great Britain
Germany
United States
Institutions
Society for the Diffusion of Useful Knowledge
Oxford University
Cambridge University
Comments

Be the first to comment!

{{ comment.created_by.username }} on {{ comment.created_on | date:'medium' }}

Log in or register to comment