伊曼纽尔·斯威登堡

作品

• 1734自然事物的原理（Principia）

  他的《哲学与矿物学著作》第一卷：一种笛卡尔式的机械论宇宙论，从一个被推动的点推导出物质，并让行星从太阳的物质中形成。

• 1749天国的奥秘（Arcana Coelestia）

  1749—1756年在伦敦匿名出版的八卷本《创世记》和《出埃及记》注释：它通过对应展开《圣经》内在的灵性意义，其间穿插着他自称在灵界所见所闻的记述。

立场

Swedenborg is on the map for two reasons that belong together in the history of philosophy. As a natural philosopher he worked in the tradition of Descartes and Leibniz: the Principia (1734) derives matter from mathematical points set in motion and lets the planets form from the matter of the sun, and his anatomical works looked for the seat of the soul in the brain. After 1745 he turned to theology. He taught that the visible world corresponds, item by item, to a spiritual world that flows into it, that Scripture has an inner sense speaking of the regeneration of the soul, and that heaven and hell are not places assigned from outside but states that human beings form through what they love. In “De commercio animae et corporis” (1769) he rejected both pre-established harmony and physical influx in favour of a spiritual influx. Kant read the Arcana Coelestia and answered with “Dreams of a Spirit-Seer” (1766), which uses the spirit-seer to question the claims of speculative metaphysics itself; Emerson portrayed him in “Representative Men” (1850) as the type of the mystic. After his death his followers founded the New Church. Whether his visions should be read as religious experience, as a continuation of his natural philosophy or in psychological terms has long been debated; the map records his reception, not a judgement on these claims. His place in the school of rationalism refers to his early natural philosophy. His theological works also contain passages on Jews and on Africans that are set out under “Context & critique”.

生平与背景

Emanuel Swedenborg was born in Stockholm on 29 January 1688 (Old Style; 8 February in the Gregorian calendar), the son of Jesper Swedberg, later bishop of Skara; the family was ennobled in 1719 and took the name Swedenborg. He studied at Uppsala and from 1710 to 1715 travelled in England, the Netherlands, France and Germany, studying mathematics, mechanics and astronomy. From 1716 he served on the Swedish Board of Mines for three decades, and he sat in the House of Nobles of the Swedish Diet. He published works on mineralogy and metallurgy, on cosmology (Opera philosophica et mineralia, 1734) and on the anatomy of the brain and the seat of the soul (Oeconomia regni animalis, 1740–41). In 1744–45 he went through a religious crisis, recorded in his dream diary, after which he said he had been called to reveal the inner meaning of Scripture. He resigned from the Board in 1747 and published his theological works, at first anonymously, mostly in London and Amsterdam. He died in London on 29 March 1772.

其他主要作品

• Oeconomia regni animalis (1740–41)
• De Caelo et ejus Mirabilibus et de Inferno (Heaven and Hell, 1758)
• De commercio animae et corporis (1769)
• Vera Christiana Religio (1771)