Historians now face the challenge of digitalisation. Technological advances in the recent
years have enabled unprecedented access to historical documents. The advent of Early
English Books Online (EEBO), in particular key stroked texts, has made it possible to access
and search early modern texts to a greater degree then ever before. My work will aim to
look at how language was shaped by and helped to mould the multitude of new ideas that
developed in philosophy in the seventeenth century by applying corpus linguistics and
discourse analysis to the corpus of EEBO. Through understanding the discourses and the
way in which they changed to incorporate the emerging new concepts in philosophy and
science, it is hoped that we can learn more about the way in which language was used in
intellectual and conceptual battles and how new ideas gain acceptance. The lack of a
standardised English in the seventeenth-century brought scepticism of the role words could
play in conveying ideas, and a contest of what the definition of the word should be. It is
hoped then that my work will form part of the answer as to how language was modified and
developed in order to combat this scepticism. Recently Phil Withington in Society in Early
Modern England has attempted to map the appearance of key words as they appear in titles
to books, however his methodology is unconvincing and is limited to only titles of books,
however it does demonstrate that this method can produce results. In contrast I intend to
look at the larger corpus of searchable texts and alternate method to see how language was
deployed in the intellectual battles. A study into this will be insightful as this was a period in
which Scholastic natural philosophy was declining and numerous rival philosophies were
competing to replace it. This provides an interesting dynamic whereby thinkers are uniting
against scholasticism whilst trying to distinguish themselves from other anti-scholastics at
the same time. My work will draw chiefly upon the work of Quentin Skinner, Wittgenstein,
Reinhart Kosseleck and Mikhail Bakhtin. It will attempt to apply the methodology that
Skinner has applied to the history of political philosophy to natural philosophy. It will hope
to move beyond their work by drawing upon the work on the sociology of knowledge by
Steven Shapin and the literary theories of intertextuality by Kristena, Barthes and Deridda
and speech-act theory of J. L. Austin. It will be interdisciplinary with aim of integrating these
approaches and applying corpus linguistics to conceptual history to provide a more nuanced
account of intellectual history made possible through recent technological developments. It
will first seek to reconstruct the normative language structures of the time and the sociopolitical connotations that the lexicon of the dominant vocabulary had at the time. These
connotations will be found through looking at the relationship between author, institute and
popular views of the ideas, that feature in philosophical discussions of the period. I shall
then look at the way in which new texts attempted to alter the language of the discourse
and contested the dominant meanings and drew upon other powerful metaphors and words
to render controversial philosophical ideas normative; providing insight into the way in
which these structures were modified and altered. An example of this is the shift in the role
of the phrase ‘new philosophy’ in the times of John Donne it was seen as a suspicious
derogatory term to imply a heretical or dangerous philosophy that was to be avoided.
However by the time of Thomas Sprat and the History of the Royal Society it was something
desirable with people proclaiming themselves as ‘new philosophers.’ In the intermittent
period the phrase has shifted its connotations by This will build upon the work that I have
conducted for both my Masters and Undergraduate Dissertations investigating the role of
language in the acceptance of philosophical ideas. It is hoped that this research will provide
a conceptual and philosophical framework that will allow future research into the discourses
of the scientific and Copernican revolutions. It is ideally suited to Warwick due to the
research done by Professor Knights in Warwick on the history of words and concepts in early
modern England, and the research of Professor Bernard Capp on radical seventeenth
century movements.