BIBLIOGRAPHY
The historian of the idea of the Chain of Being is Arthur
O. Lovejoy.
The present article is predicated upon his
exemplary study, The Great Chain of Being. A Study of the
History of
an Idea (Cambridge, Mass., 1936; 1961).
We cannot here provide a bibliography for all the authors
touched on and
for all the different themes involved in one
way or another with the
idea of the Chain of Being. How-
ever, the
following are certain studies to which (although
they may not deal
specifically with the subject in question)
the present article is
indebted for clarification and useful
suggestions.
For the influence of the Timaeus and the continuity
of
Platonic thought to the Renaissance: H. Lyttkens, The
Analogy between God and the World (Uppsala, 1953;
1955);
T. Gregory, Anima mundi (Florence, 1955);
E. Garin Studi
sul platonismo medievale
(Florence, 1958); R. Klibansky
“The School of
Chartres,” Twelfth-Century Europe and the
Foundation of Modern Society (Madison, 1961).
For the connection between the Scale of Nature and the
classification of
the sciences from the Middle Ages to the
Renaissance: T. Carreras y
Artau and J. Carreras y Artau,
Historia de la filosofía
española (Madrid, 1939), I, 233-640;
J. Carreras y
Artau, De Ramón Lull a los modernos
ensayos
de formación de una lengua universal
(Barcelona, 1946); P.
Rossi, Clavis
universalis (Milan and Naples, 1960).
Fundamental for knowing the background of the devel-
opments of the Chain of Being in scientific thought
from
the late Renaissance to the late eighteenth century are: J.
Roger, Les sciences de la vie dans la pensée
française du
XVIIIe siècle (Paris,
1963), esp. Part III (“La science des
philosophes,” pp. 457-761); The Forerunners of
Darwin, ed.
B. Glass (Baltimore, 1959; 1968), containing among other
things an essay of Lovejoy on Buffon (“Buffon and the
Problem of Species,” pp. 84-113). There is something on
the
Chain of Being in S. Toulmin and J. Goodfield, The
Discovery of Time (London, 1965). See also: Roots
of Scien-
tific Thought, ed.
Philip P. Wiener and Aaron Noland (New
York, 1957), Pt. 4; C. Greene,
The Death of Adam: Evolution
and its Impact on
Western Thought (Ames, Iowa, 1959); and
Leibniz Selections, Philip P. Wiener, 2nd ed. revised
(New
York, 1966).
LIA FORMIGARI
[See also Conservatism; Continuity;
Creativity; Evil;
Evo-
lutionism; God;
Hierarchy; Macrocosm; Neo-Platonism;
Perfectibility; Romanticism in Post-Kantian Philosophy;
Theodicy.]
