Swedenborg, Emanuel - Scott McLemee (essay date May-June 1998)
Scott McLemee (essay date May-June 1998)
SOURCE: McLemee, Scott. “Under the Influence: The Long Shadow of Emanuel Swedenborg.” Lingua Franca: The Review of Academic Life 8, no. 4 (May-June 1998): 58-61.
[In the following essay, McLemee discusses the work of Gregory Johnson, who claims that Swedenborg was a seminal influence on the German philosopher Immanuel Kant and that Swedenborg's ideas actually informed Kant's thinking, even though the German thinker once lampooned the Swede in his pamphlet Dreams of the Spirit Seer and called him a “deliberate fraud.”]
Right up until the dramatic events of his mid-fifties, Emanuel Swedenborg—nicknamed “the Swedish Aristotle”—led the busy life of a one-man think tank. In 1716, while still in his twenties, he launched his country's first scientific journal. Expert knowledge of mineralogy and economics made him a valuable consultant to the Swedish government. His notebooks...
[The entire page is 2501 words long]
Join eNotes
Over 3,500 study guides, question and answer forums, literature criticism, reference content, and much more!
Navigate
Related Topics
