History of Philosophy Commons^™

John Toland’S Pivotal Version Of Secularism At The Turn Of The Eighteenth Century, Edward Jayne

English Faculty Publications

John Toland’s Pivotal Version of Secularism at the Turn of the Eighteenth Century

John Toland (1669-1728) sustained a life-long confrontation with Christianity as well as with religion and orthodox belief in general. His unprecedented advance from Irish Catholicism to secularism and finally outright atheism played a central role in European philosophy despite its having been all but forgotten in later times. He left Ireland to attend Edinburgh University in Scotland followed by Leyden University in the Netherlands and finally a faculty position at Oxford University preceding his career as an independent author. By his early death he had published as …