caa a22 4500 386387516 CHVBK 20180307112103.0 cr unu---uuuuu 161130e198912 xx s 000 0 eng 10.1017/S0034412500020047 doi S0034412500020047 pii (NATIONALLICENCE)cambridge-10.1017/S0034412500020047 Webb Mark O. Syracuse University, New York, U.S.A. Natural Theology and the Concept of Perfection in Descartes, Spinoza and Leibniz [Elektronische Daten] [Mark O. Webb] One of the hallmarks of the early modern rationalists was their confidence that a great deal of metaphysics could be done by purely a priori reasoning. They thought so at least partly because they inherited via Descartes Anselm's confidence that the existence of God could be established by purely a priori reasoning in an ontological argument. They also inherited a Thomistic and scholastic confidence that the concept of God as supremely perfect being, if subjected to serious and deep analysis, would yield sound doctrine. Descartes, Spinoza, and Leibniz all three took it that they had in their stock of ideas an idea of God sufficiently clear and detailed that a little analytic work could produce real metaphysical results, not only about God himself, but also about the universe in which they found themselves (for Spinoza, these turned out to be the same thing). Though they start with what purport to be ideas of the same God, they get radically different results in their analyses. Copyright © Cambridge University Press 1989 Religious Studies Cambridge University Press 25/4(1989-12), 459-475 0034-4125 25:4<459 1989 25 RES https://doi.org/10.1017/S0034412500020047 text/html Onlinezugriff via DOI 1 research-article jats NATIONALLICENCE 856 40 https://doi.org/10.1017/S0034412500020047 text/html Onlinezugriff via DOI NATIONALLICENCE 100 1- Webb Mark O. Syracuse University, New York, U.S.A NATIONALLICENCE 773 0- Religious Studies Cambridge University Press 25/4(1989-12), 459-475 0034-4125 25:4<459 1989 25 RES CC0 http://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/zero/1.0 nationallicence BK010053 XK010053 XK010000 NATIONALLICENCE NATIONALLICENCE NL-cambridge