The Collected Works of William Warburton (Hardcover)

Warburton's major work "The Divine Legation of Moses" aimed at being a definitive reply to the arguments of freethinkers such as William Collins and John Toland, which cast doubt on the intellectual validity of religious metaphors. His work thus played a central role in that late eighteenth-century reappraisal of the value of metaphor which paved the way for Romanticism, influencing continental linguistic theorists such as Rousseau, Condillac, Michaelis, Lichtenberg and Hamann, as well as British thinkers such as Robert Lowth and Thomas Reid. In connection with his thinking about language, Warburton plays an important role in Jacques Derrida's seminal work of philosophy/critical theory Of Grammatology, since his ideas about the nature of hieroglyphics represent an alternative to Rousseau's phonocentrism. Warburton's "The Divine Legation of Moses" and his earlier "The Alliance between Church and State" represented the major intellectual justification of the Anglican church establishment, and as such Warburton's thinking is currently being re-evaluated by historians influenced by the work of J.C.D. Clark. Warburton's studies of the development of early religious ideas were a major in