As noted earlier, the essays in Part II explore instances of theistic proofs from the mediaeval period with particular attention to the ‘forms of life’ within which such proofs were embedded, and to the literary genres and rhetorical structures within which they functioned. Those essays also provide treatments of theistic proofs in pre-modern contexts to be used as points of orientation in a consideration of the degree and character of difference between the work of rationality within which the proofs participated in pre-modern and modern contexts. In Part III of this volume, Clayton provides three histories of the transitions from pre-modern to modern philosophical and theological uses of reason. Here he investigates uses of theistic proofs in a variety of discursive and institutional contexts, developing a regionally and temporally comparative account focused on France and the Netherlands in Chapter 8, Germany in Chapter 9 and Britain in Chapter 10.

In these essays, Clayton attends closely to intellectual debates within which theistic proofs figured, from the late seventeenth century into the nineteenth. He provides histories of ‘natural theology’ and of ‘atheism’ in relation to the early-modern lives of theistic proofs. In doing so, Clayton offers focused studies of particular thinkers and moments of debate. These are examined in connection with generational and regional trends in the relationships that obtained between philosophy, theology and natural science. Our own distinction between ‘philosophy’, ‘theology’ and ‘natural science’ in the last sentence is, as Clayton's work in Part III suggests, in some ways anachronistic.