Abstract
Thomas White was an English priest. As leader of the Blackloist faction in English Catholicism, he aimed to make Catholicism more acceptable to Protestant authorities. In his natural philosophical works, White combined Aristotelian philosophy with the findings of the new science. In his political work, he argued that rulers owe their authority to the people rather than to God and that states that fail to serve their subjects’ best interest lose their legitimacy.
References
Primary Literature
Coke, Roger. 1660. Justice indicated against the late writings of Thomas White, Thomas Hobbes and Hugo Grotius. London: Thomas Newcomb.
White, Thomas. 1655. The grounds of obedience and government. London: J. Flesher.
Secondary Literature
Sgarbi, Marco. 2013. Thomas White, an Aristotelian response to scepticism. Archive of the History of Philosophy and Social Thought 58: 83–96.
Southgate, Beverley. 1993. Covetous of truth. The life and works of Thomas White 1593–1676. Dordrecht: Kluwer.
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Adriaenssen, H.T. (2017). White, Thomas. In: Sgarbi, M. (eds) Encyclopedia of Renaissance Philosophy. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-02848-4_543-1
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-02848-4_543-1
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