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The chain begins with God and descends through angels, humans, animals and plants to minerals. [1] [2] [3] The great chain of being (from Latin scala naturae 'ladder of being') is a concept derived from Plato, Aristotle (in his Historia Animalium), Plotinus and Proclus. [4]
Arthur Oncken Lovejoy (October 10, 1873 – December 30, 1962) was an American philosopher and intellectual historian, who founded the discipline known as the history of ideas with his book The Great Chain of Being (1936), on the topic of that name, which is regarded as 'probably the single most influential work in the history of ideas in the United States during the last half century'. [1]
Arthur Lovejoy, The Great Chain of Being. Harvard University Press, 1936: ISBN 0-674-36153-9. Chapter IV "The Principle of Plenitude and the New Cosmography", p. 99–143. Chapter V "Plenitude and Sufficient Reason in Leibniz and Spinoza", p. 144–182.
Rousseau also critiqued the work, questioning "Pope's uncritical assumption that there must be an unbroken chain of being all the way from inanimate matter up to God". [8] The essay, written in heroic couplets, comprises four epistles. Pope began work on it in 1729, and had finished the first three by 1731.
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The mediaeval great chain of being as a staircase, implying the possibility of progress: [1] Ramon Lull's Ladder of Ascent and Descent of the Mind, 1305. Alternatives to Darwinian evolution have been proposed by scholars investigating biology to explain signs of evolution and the relatedness of different groups of living things.
The Anglo-American position recalls (and is presumably inspired by) 18th century concepts regarding the temporalization of The Great Chain of Being. Spiritual evolution, rather than being a physical (or physico-spiritual) process is based on the idea of realms or stages through which the soul or spirit passes in a non-temporal, qualitative way.
Category of being, the metaphysical classification of all beings; Ego (religion), spiritual or religious "beingness" Great chain of being, the rationalist classification of all beings; Human being; Human beings in Buddhism; Reference failure, a concept of Bertrand Russell involving fictional beings; Sentient beings (Buddhism), a type of being