Joseph Glanvill 1636 – 1680

Joseph Glanvill was an English clergyman, philosopher, and an early Fellow of the Royal Society. After studies at Oxford he served as a country parson in Somerset and as chaplain to Charles II, while producing a long series of philosophical and apologetic works in defense of the new natural philosophy of Boyle and his circle. His Vanity of Dogmatizing developed a moderate skepticism intended to humble the pretensions of scholastic learning and to make room for cautious experimental inquiry, while his Saducismus Triumphatus, posthumously expanded by Henry More, defended belief in witches and spirits as continuous with the new philosophy of nature.

Joseph Glanvill was born at Plymouth in 1636 of a Puritan merchant family. He took his bachelor's at Exeter College Oxford in 1655 and his master's at Lincoln College in 1658, conformed to the Restoration church, served as vicar of Frome Selwood, then as rector of the Abbey Church at Bath from 1666, and in 1678 was named a prebendary of Worcester and chaplain in ordinary to Charles II. He was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society in 1664.

His main works are The Vanity of Dogmatizing (1661, containing the tale of the Oxford 'scholar gypsy' that Matthew Arnold later borrowed), the philosophical refinement Scepsis Scientifica (1665), Plus Ultra (1668) in defence of the new experimental philosophy and the Royal Society, the Essay concerning Preaching (1678), and the posthumous Saducismus Triumphatus (1681), edited by Henry More, on the reality of witches and apparitions.

Glanvill combined a mitigated Cartesian scepticism with the Cambridge Platonism of More and Whichcote and was one of the most articulate clerical defenders of Bacon and the Royal Society against scholastic and sectarian attacks. His campaign for the legal and theological credibility of witchcraft, far from being a relic of medieval credulity, was meant as empirical refutation of the materialism he associated with Hobbes. He died at Bath in November 1680.