Temporary Title 19991103

This is the first major work devoted to the life and work of Thomas White, an important and wide ranging seventeenth-century thinker long overdue for historical rehabilitation. Renowned in his own day as an eminent philosopher, White's reputation suffered not least as a result of his theological heresies and his pro-Cromwellian political sympathies. But he is here shown as the leader of an influential faction of English Catholics, known after his alias as 'Blackloists' as a dogged opponent of the then newly-fashionable scepticism; and as a would-be synthesiser of scholastic thought with the 'new philosophy'. In his Janus-faced intellectual stance White exemplifies the position of many mid-seventeenth-century thinkers; and he is presented here as representing a philosophical standpoint that is crucial for our understanding of a fascinating period in intellectual history.