Cambridge Platonism

Draft. Berkeley denied the existence of abstract ideas and any faculty of abstraction. At the same time, however, he embraced innate ideas and a faculty of pure intellect. This paper attempts to reconcile the tension between these commitments by offering an interpretation of Berkeley's Platonism.

The word 'reason' as used today is used ambiguous in its meaning. It may denote either of two mental faculties: a lower reason associated with discursive, linear thinking, and a higher reason associated with direct apprehension of first principles of mathematics and logic, and possibly also of moral and religious truths. These two faculties may be provisionally named Reason (higher reason) and rationality (lower reason). Common language and personal experience supply evidence of these being distinct faculties. So does classical philosophical (...) literature, the locus classicus being Plato's Divided Line analogy. -/- The effect of currently using a single word to denote both faculties not only produces confusion, but has had the effect of decreasing personal and cultural awareness of the higher faculty, Reason. Loss of a sense of Reason has arguably contributed to various psychological, social, moral, and spiritual problems of the modern age. This issue was also a central concern of 19th century Transcendentalists, who reacted to the radical empiricism of Locke. It would be advantageous to adopt consistent terms that make explicit a distinction between higher and lower reason. One possibility is to re-introduce the Greek philosophical terms nous and dianoia for the higher and lower reason, respectively. This discussion has certain parallels with the recent theories of McGilchrist (2009) concerning the increasingly left-brain hemisphere orientation of human culture. (shrink)

We look at some interesting and important episodes in the life of early modern Epicureanism, focusing on natural philosophy. We begin with two early moderns who had a great deal to say about ancient Epicureanism: Pierre Gassendi and Ralph Cudworth. Looking at how Gassendi and Cudworth conceived of Epicureanism gives us a sense of what the early moderns considered important in the ancient tradition. It also points us towards three main themes of early modern Epicureanism in natural philosophy, which we (...) then discuss at greater length: atomism, materialism about the mind or soul, and the denial of providence, which was often accompanied by deflationary explanations of religious belief. (shrink)

More, Henry (1614-1687), an English philosopher, theologian and poet. The most important member of the Cambridge Platonists, a group of seventeenth century thinkers associated with the University of Cambridge. Accepting of the developments of Galilean science, Cartesianism and atomism, they sought an alternative to the faltering philosophical foundation of Aristotelianism by looking to the Platonic tradition, viewed through the framework of Renaissance perennial philosophy. More’s Christian apologetics argued for the existence of God, the immortality of the soul, and the veracity (...) of Christian ethics in light of the atheistic, mechanistic, and fatalistic conclusions drawn from the thought of Spinoza and Hobbes. (shrink)

This examination makes the case that the tradition of Christian Platonism can constitute a valuable resource for addressing the long-running and increasingly-acute environmental crisis that threatens the global ecosystem and all who inhabit it. More than a scientific, technological or political challenge, the crisis requires a fundamental shift in the way humans understand nature and their place within it. Key to implementing this shift is the need to address the problematic anthropocentric conceptualisation of nature characteristic of the contemporary social imaginary (...) that determines a wide range of present day economic, religious and scientific perspectives. The case made here is that Christian Platonism, and in particular its participatory ontology, can offer a radically non-anthropocentric alternative to the present-day understanding of nature, reconceptualising the way we understand the meaning, value, and way we know nature. (shrink)

This is the first volume to offer a systematic consideration and comprehensive overview of Christianity’s long engagement with the Platonic philosophical tradition. The book offers a detailed consideration of the most fertile sources and concepts in Christian Platonism, a historical contextualization of its development, and a series of constructive engagements with central questions. Bringing together a range of leading scholars, the volume guides readers through each of these dimensions, uniquely investigating and explicating one of the most important, controversial, and often (...) misunderstood elements of Christian intellectual history. (shrink)

Ralph Cudworth’s The True Intellectual System of the Universe (1678) is credited with the first instance of the English word “consciousness” used in a distinctively philosophical sense. While Cudworth says little in the System about the nature of consciousness, he has more to say in his (largely unpublished) freewill manuscripts. I argue that, in these manuscripts, Cudworth distinguishes two kinds of consciousness, which I call “bare consciousness” and “reflective consciousness”. What both have in common is that each is a kind (...) of reflection or reflexive perception that therefore involves a “duplication” of the soul as both subject and object. While it is less clear how Cudworth takes these two kinds of consciousness to differ, I argue that the central difference for Cudworth is that, whereas bare consciousness is always directed towards individual cogitations, reflective consciousness is the kind of consciousness that the soul achieves through reflection upon itself as a whole. As a result, reflective consciousness introduces a unity into our experience that is not present at the level of bare consciousness. (shrink)

Are human beings purely material creatures, or is there something else to them, an immaterial part that does some of the thinking, and might even be able to outlive the death of the body? This book is about how a series of seventeenth-century philosophers tried to answer that question. It begins by looking at the views of Thomas Hobbes, who developed a thoroughly materialist account of the human mind, and later of God as well. This is in obvious contrast to (...) the approach of his contemporary René Descartes. After examining Hobbes's materialism, Stewart Duncan considers the views of three of his English critics: Henry More, Ralph Cudworth, and Margaret Cavendish. Both More and Cudworth thought Hobbes's materialism radically inadequate to explain the workings of the world, while Cavendish developed a distinctive, anti-Hobbesian materialism of her own. The second half of the book focuses on the discussion of materialism in John Locke's Essay concerning Human Understanding, arguing that we can better understand Locke's discussion if we see how and where he is responding to this earlier debate. At crucial points Locke draws on More and Cudworth to argue against Hobbes and other materialists. Nevertheless, Locke did a good deal to reveal how materialism was a genuinely possible view, by showing how one could develop a detailed account of the human mind without presuming it was an immaterial substance. This work probes the thought and debates that originated in the seventeenth-century yet extended far beyond it. And it offers a distinctive, new understanding of Locke's discussion of the human mind. (shrink)

Anne Conway produced only one short treatise – The Principles of the Most Ancient and Modern Philosophy – but addressed key problems in the philosophy of religion which are still much discussed today. The most significant of these are the problem of religious diversity and the problem of evil. Although the sources of her ideas may be found in the Kabbalah of Isaac Luria and the work of the Cambridge Platonists and the Quaker George Keith, among others, she offers her (...) own unorthodox solutions to these problems. The idea of Christ as an indwelling mediator of the divine who assists us in our moral endeavours is designed to appeal to those of all religions and none, while her claim that God created creatures knowing that they would eventually be redeemed, and that suffering promotes moral development which leads to redemption offers a novel response to the problem of evil. Conway's work is also important for its influence on the work of Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz, and some have argued that it prefigures, at least in outline, the field theory of modern physics. (shrink)

This chapter considers Ralph Cudworth as a philosophical critic of Hobbes. Cudworth saw Hobbes as a representative of the three views he was attacking: atheism, determinism, and the denial that morality is eternal and immutable. Moreover, he did not just criticize Hobbes by assuming that a general critique of those views applied to Hobbes’s particular case. Rather, he singled out Hobbes, often by quoting him, and argued against the distinctively Hobbesian positions he had identified. In this chapter I look at (...) Cudworth as a critic of Hobbes in two of the three central areas, atheism and ethics, focusing on passages where we see him explicitly picking out Hobbes. (shrink)

In his unpublished freewill manuscripts, Ralph Cudworth seeks to complete the project that he begins in The True Intellectual System of the Universe (1678) by arguing for an account of human liberty that avoids the opposing poles of necessitarianism and indifferency. I argue that Cudworth’s account rests upon a crucial distinction between the will and the power of freewill. Whereas we necessarily will the greater apparent good, freewill is a more fundamental power by which we endeavour to discern the greater (...) good before willing to pursue it. Cudworth thus opposes necessitarianism by arguing for a libertarian account of freewill while nonetheless rejecting the indifferentist claim that we can will contrary to the greater apparent good. (shrink)

‘PHILOSOPHY, or the doctrine and discipline of ideas’, as S. T. Coleridge understood it, is the theme of this book. It considers the most vital and mature vein of Coleridge’s thought to be ‘the contemplation of ideas objectively, as existing powers’. A theory of ideas emerges in critical engagement with thinkers including Plato, Plotinus, Böhme, Kant, and Schelling. A commitment to the transcendence of reason, central to what he calls ‘the spiritual platonic old England’, distinguishes him from his German contemporaries. (...) The book also engages with Coleridge’s poetry, especially in a culminating chapter dedicated to the ‘Limbo’ sequence. This book pursues a theory of contemplation that draws from discussions of imagination and the ‘Ideas of Reason’ in Coleridge’s published texts and extensively from his unpublished works, fragments, letters, and notebooks. He posited a hierarchy of cognition from basic sense intuition to the apprehension of scientific, ethical, and theological ideas. The structure of the book follows this thesis, beginning with sense data, moving upwards into aesthetic experience, imagination, and reason, with final chapters on formal logic and poetry that constellate the contemplation of ideas. Coleridge’s Contemplative Philosophy is not just a work of intellectual history, it addresses a figure whose thinking is of continuing interest, arguing that contemplation of ideas and values has consequences for everyday morality and aesthetics, as well as metaphysics. The volume will be of interest to philosophers, intellectual historians, scholars of religion, and of literature. (shrink)

Anne Conway rejects the view that creatures are essentially members of any natural kind more specific than the kind 'creature'. That is, she rejects essentialism about species membership. This chapter provides an analysis of one of Anne Conway's arguments against such essentialism, which (as I argue) is drawn from metaethical rather than metaphysical premises. In her view, if a creature's species or kind were inscribed in its essence, that essence would constitute a limit on the creature's potential to participate in (...) the divine good. It is this consideration that ultimately leads her to reject essentialism about species membership. The chapter concludes with an examination of some of the metaethical consequences of Conway's view as well as a lesson it can teach us about ideal adviser accounts of the good. (shrink)

Henry More est le plus connu des Platoniciens de Cambridge et l’Enchiridion Metaphysicum, son dernier ouvrage, représente l’accomplissement de sa pensée. Il s’agit d’une enquête métaphysique dont le principal objectif est d’établir l’existence d’une substance immatérielle, d’une âme du monde, sorte d’intermédiaire entre Dieu et le monde par laquelle les choses agissent. More nous invite ainsi à découvrir la vraie métaphysique qui consiste en la découverte de la nature véritable de l’étendue des êtres spirituels comme Dieu, les anges et les (...) démons, l’espace, les âmes individuelles des hommes ou des bêtes. Ce manuel de métaphysique prend appui sur le mécanisme cartésien pour mieux le contredire et démontre que l’extension spirituelle est la principale qualité des esprits. Cette doctrine conduira More à re-diviniser l’espace pour l’instituer à l’instar des kabbalistes de l’école de Safed, comme lieu de la possibilité de l’existence du monde. More montre ainsi les limites des mécanismes d’Hobbes et de Descartes tout en essayant de composer avec d’autres savants mécanistes tels que Robert Boyle et Robert Hooke. Quelques années plus tard, à Cambridge, Newton, sur les pas d’Henry More, pensera la nature de son espace physique comme un espace de nature divine, comme un Sensorium Dei. ---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- ------------- Biographie de l'auteur: Françoise Monnoyeur est Docent en philosophie (Associate Professor). Elle enseigne la philosophie et l’histoire des sciences en France, aux États-Unis et en Suède. Elle est chercheur associée au centre Jean Pépin, Paris, France. Ses principaux ouvrages portent sur Descartes, l’infini, la matière, la vie. (shrink)

For early modern metaphysician Anne Conway, the world comprises creatures. In some sense, Conway is a monist about creatures: all creatures are one. Yet, as Jessica Gordon-Roth has astutely pointed out, that monism can be understood in very different ways. One might read Conway as an ‘existence pluralist’: creatures are all composed of the same type of substance, but many substances exist. Alternatively, one might read Conway as an ‘existence monist’: there is only one created substance. Gordon-Roth has done the (...) scholarship a great favor by illuminating these issues in Conway. However, this article takes issue with Gordon-Roth's further view that Conway ‘oscillates’ between the extremes of existence pluralism and monism. In its place, I argue we should read Conway as a priority monist: the whole of creation is ontologically prior to its parts. (shrink)

This chapter evokes two major French Platonists of the last two centuries, Joseph de Maistre and Simone Weil, in order to show that Cudworth was the initiator of a combative Platonism, un platonisme de combat. Of course it is only a simple sketch to identify convergences, rather than to detect influences – an exercise which is always post hoc and can as such result in questionable reconstructions.

La filosofía de Anne Finch, Viscondesa de Conway ha sido estudiada desde la perspectiva del papel crítico de su monismo vitalista frente a la filosofía de sus contemporáneos, así como en la valoración de su papel en la historia de la filosofía. No obstante, la atención que han recibido sus tesis epistemológicas ha sido escasa en razón del carácter fragmentario de sus Principios de la más antigua y moderna filosofía. El presente artículo parte de la idea de que es posible (...) sistematizar la filosofía de esta autora moderna, lo cual, implica la reconstrucción de sus tesis epistemológicas a través de los conceptos de percepción sensible e imaginación. Lo anterior, nos permitirá no sólo comprender estas tesis bajo la lógica de su correlación con la ontología y la filosofía moral de Conway, también permite acceder a una propuesta original alterna a los modelos mecanicistas imperantes en la época. (shrink)

This introductory article outlines the themes and aims of this special issue, which offers new perspectives on early modern debates about agency in two ways: First, it recovers writings on agency and liberty that have been widely neglected or that have received insufficient attention, including writings by Anne Conway, Henry More, Ralph Cudworth, William King, Gabrielle Suchon, Elizabeth Berkeley Burnet, Mary Astell, and Anthony Ashley Cooper, the Third Earl of Shaftesbury. Second, it reveals the richness of early modern debates about (...) agency and liberty. (shrink)

In this paper, I examine Anne Conway’s ‘argument from love’ in her Principles of the Most Ancient and Modern Philosophy. This argument, supported by a further argument, the ‘argument from pain’, undermines the dualist dichotomy between mind and matter by appealing to a vitalist similarity principle. My goal is two-fold: first, to contribute to a close systematic reconstruction and analysis of Conway’s arguments, which so far is largely lacking in the literature; second, to show that these arguments are richer and (...) more compelling than commentators have thought. (shrink)

Name der Zeitschrift: Neue Zeitschrift für Systematische Theologie und Religionsphilosophie Jahrgang: 61 Heft: 1 Seiten: 84-106.

The philosophy of Henry More was deeply indebted to the philosophical tradition of late antiquity. His metaphysics, clearly inspired by the magnificent synthesis of Plato, Plotinus and the later Platonists operated in the fifteenth century by Marsilio Ficino, relied on the continuity of being between Spirit and Matter, which also justified the presence of daemons and disembodied souls within the natural world. However, More fiercely criticised all forms of religious worship in which dii medioxumi were regarded as a mean to (...) rejoin with God, including theurgy, or philosophical magic. Theurgy, which was aimed at purifying the soul and reuniting it with the divine, had a central place in the works of the Platonists who followed Plotinus. Intriguingly, More accepted the theoretical premises of theurgy, i.e., the ontological continuity between the natural and the divine worlds, but condemned its practice, which involved the deification of daemons and minor gods. This criticism can be fully understood only if looked at within the context of More’s iconoclastic polemic against the Roman Catholics. (shrink)

Wordsworth’s thought was first defined by its relation to Anglicanism, typified in Coleridge’s remark that Wordsworth was a ‘semi-atheist’. A subsequent commonplace associates his poetic decline with his gradual return to Christian orthodoxy. Even if true, his orthodoxy has many missing elements, and Wordsworth implicitly authorized a search for some philosophical or theological coherence in his work when he declared that an attentive reader of The Excursion would have no difficulty in extracting ‘the system’. Careful study has yielded few convincing (...) results. That he has been taken as an Anglican, a Methodist, a pantheist, a Platonist, a Lockean, a Berkelean and even a Kantian indicates how difficult it is to establish Wordsworth’s intellectual antecedents precisely. Nonetheless, Plato’s was the only ‘system’ that he acknowledged, and a brief review of Wordsworth’s Platonism begins this paper. An examination of The Prelude in the light of Cambridge Platonist thought follows, and reveals a surprising degree of affinity across a range of ideas: the primacy of Reason, the unity of the laws of mind and nature, the idea of a plastic nature, as well as Reason delivering moral absolutes, the senses rejected as a form of knowledge, geometry as ‘a leader of the human mind’, the knowability of God, and the notion of an ‘immaterial centre of Immortality within’. (shrink)

Reseña del libro: Martin Heidegger y Karl Löwith, Briefwechsel. 1919–1973 -/- .

The extensive influence of Plotinus, the third-century founder of 'Neoplatonism', on intellectual thought from the Renaissance to the modern era has never been systematically explored. This collection of new essays fills the gap in the scholarship, thereby casting a spotlight on a current of intellectual history that is inherently significant. The essays take the form of a series of case-studies on major figures in the history of Neoplatonism, ranging from Marsilio Ficino to Henri-Louis Bergson and moving through Italian, French, English, (...) and German philosophical traditions. They bring clarity to the terms 'Platonism' and 'Neoplatonism', which are frequently invoked by historians but often only partially understood, and provide fresh perspectives on well-known issues including the rise of 'mechanical philosophy' in the sixteenth century and the relation between philosophy and Romanticism in the nineteenth century. The volume will be important for readers interested in the history of thought in the early-modern and modern ages. (shrink)

In the collection of poems entitled Psychodia Platonica, and in particular in the poem entitled Psychozoia, Henry More laid the groundwork for his life-long inquiry into the nature of the human self. He provided a poetic commentary of Plotinus’s Enneads in which three ontological dimensions – the life of nature, animal perception and the intellect – created an allegorical background against which one could articulate a systematic analysis of the individual human self in its relationships with God and created reality. (...) Psychozoia ended with a conversion, in which the soul of a Platonic pilgrim was released from its condition of ‘autaesthesia’ so that it was finally able to reach a state of ‘anautoaesthesia’. Significantly, More characterized this crucial shift from self-perception to the annihilation of the individual self as a motion towards ‘self-senslessnesse’ and ‘self-deadnesse’. Regardless of its aesthetic merits, More’s poem dramatizes key philosophical notions, while bringing to the fore the prodigious effervescence of his linguistic skills. In this sense, Psychozoia remains an important document to understand the evolution of More’s thought. (shrink)

Locke’s political philosophy brings forth theologically-rich aims, while seeking to counter or disarm threats such as atheism, hyper-Calvinism, and religious enthusiasm. Locke’s theological views are born out of a context, and his theological perspective is heavily shaped by strands of influence from these perspectives. There is a generous orthodoxy that lay beneath Locke’s political project which parallels closely the explicit teachings of a moderating influence in seventeenth-century England with whom Locke is intimately associated—the Oxford Tew Circle, the London Latitudinarians, and (...) the Cambridge Platonists. Locating Locke within his seventeenth-century religious context provides a fitting framework for placing Locke’s political project within the sphere of a moderating political theology. Locke scholars and biographers have already established these links broadly; but how did this background provide not only a general influence, but an impetus to provide something akin to a political theology after the teaching of Whichcote, Cudworth, and the like? The answer is that many of Locke’s political aims are already present in his theological context. This backdrop shows how Locke was able to establish the crucial link between his political ends and his Christian theological commitment. (shrink)

ABSTRACTThis paper seeks to shed light on the often-overlooked account of divine and human freedom presented by Anne Conway in her Principles of the Most Ancient Modern Philosophy, partly through a...

The Cambridge Platonists mark an important juncture in Western intellectual history. Benjamin Whichcote, Ralph Cudworth, Henry More and John Smith helped shape the modern idea of selfhood and the contemporary culture of autonomy, toleration, and rights. Not only do they represent one of the great phases of the Platonic tradition, but also this group of Cambridge thinkers arguably represent a ‘Copernican revolution’ in Western moral philosophy. Attention has also been drawn to their impact on women thinkers such as Anne Conway, (...) Damaris Masham, Catharine Macaulay, and Mary Wollstonecraft. The key aesthetic notion of ‘disinterested pleasure’ can be traced back to Cambridge Platonist influence on Shaftesbury, and their concept of Plastic Nature shaped the modern concepts of artistic creativity and genius. There is, however, a striking neglect of Cambridge Platonism in contemporary research, and there is also disagreement about the application and even the legitimacy of the category ‘Cambridge Platonism’ itself. We maintain however that ‘Cambridge Platonism’ is nevertheless a helpful category for exploring the intellectual milieu or constellation of these thinkers. This is not to say that all of the figures included in this volume belong to a tightly defined group of ‘Platonists’, but a distinctive early modern transformation of Platonism is at work among these writers, and a better understanding of the networks, intellectual and personal, of these figures is the aim of the volume. (shrink)

This volume contains essays that examine the work and legacy of the Cambridge Platonists. The essays reappraise the ideas of this key group of English thinkers who served as a key link between the Renaissance and the modern era. The contributors examine the sources of the Cambridge Platonists and discuss their take-up in the eighteenth-century. Readers will learn about the intellectual formation of this philosophical group as well as the reception their ideas received. Coverage also details how their work links (...) to earlier Platonic traditions. This interdisciplinary collection explores a broad range of themes and an appropriately wide range of knowledge. It brings together an international team of scholars. They offer a broad combination of expertise from across the following disciplines: philosophy, Neoplatonic studies, religious studies, intellectual history, seventeenth-century literature, women’s writing, and dissenting studies.The essays were originally presented at a series of workshops in Cambridge on the Cambridge Platonists funded by the AHRC. (shrink)

This chapter argues that Ralph Cudworth should be recognised as formative for Richard Price’s political philosophy. Cudworth’s ethics of eternal and immutable morality, dualistic account of human intellect, idea of deiform reason—and his consequent theology of conscience—together with his participatory account of commonwealth, gives significant shape to Price’s conception of political will, equality and democracy. A consideration of the impact of Cudworth’s philosophy on Price’s political thought results in a difficulty for the attempt to dichotomise the enlightenment into sharply distinct (...) radical and moderate movements. A commitment to eternal and immutable reality is shared with the more moderate Burke while Price’s own anti-materialist, dualistic and theologically motivated radicalism marks a significant departure from some of his most important Dissenting contemporaries, including Joseph Priestley. (shrink)

Ralph Cudworth’s goal in his manuscript writings on freewill is to argue that our actions are in our own power in a robust sense that entails the ability to do otherwise. Cudworth’s unorthodox views about the nature of desire threaten to undermine this project, however. Cudworth maintains that only desire is able to distinguish good and evil and, consequently, that desire alone motivates our actions. Therefore, since Cudworth holds that desire itself is not in our own power, he appears committed (...) to the conclusion that our actions are not in our own power either. Cudworth’s solution, I argue, is to emphasize our inward responses to desire, which Cudworth does take to be in our own power. I focus in particular on attention: by directing attention differently in response to desire, Cudworth holds that we are able actively to influence the way in which desire motivates our actions. Our actions are in our own power, therefore, only because such inward responses to desire are in our own power. (shrink)

Benjamin Whichcote, the reputed father of Cambridge Platonism, and Henry Hallywell, a younger member of the group, each preached a sermon series on Philippians 4:8 in which they stressed the necessity of moral virtue as a means to deiformity and participation in God. It is argued here that both drew on the Platonic and Origenian epistemological doctrine that there must be conformity between the knower and the thing known, and the Christian soteriological and ethical implications of this doctrine are explored. (...) The dependence of Hallywell on Whichcote and the impossibility of his having read Whichcote in a printed source also suggest his close association with a group of rational divines gathered around Whichcote at St Lawrence Jewry in London. The present study introduces that group and calls for further prosopographical research on London Latitudinarianism, especially in relation to Cambridge Platonism. (shrink)

John Smith was among the first of the Cambridge Platonists. He was therefore in a position to influence not only his contemporaries but all those who followed after him well into the twentieth century and beyond. Well established lines of influence both to and from Whichcote, Cudworth, and More are explored first before moving on to less well-known connections to Bishop Simon Patrick and mathematician Isaac Barrow. Smith’s continued significance for eighteenth century theology is demonstrated through discussion of his inspiration (...) of the doctrines of spiritual sensation developed by Jonathan Edwards and John Wesley. Special notice is also given to Smith’s authority as an interpreter of Biblical prophecy through the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. The chapter concludes with looks at Smith’s influence on Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Ralph Waldo Emerson, William Ralph Inge, Rufus Jones, Pierre Hadot, and others. This chapter, offers a broad, but highly selective, overview of the reception and influence of Smith’s life and work. It is intended, however, as a call for future research more than as an authoritative presentation of Smith’s legacy. For, if the Cambridge Platonists have been underappreciated until recently, none of them have been unjustly ignored as consistently as Smith. (shrink)

The present study compares Cudworth’s method of interpretation of ancient texts with that of the Late Antique Neoplatonists, like Iamblichus, Proclus and Simplicius. Not only does Cudworth, like his Neoplatonic predecessors, attach himself to a long lasting tradition of early wisdom that, at least for the Christian Platonists, went back to Moses himself, but he also uses the same exegetical methods and Platonic and Aristotelian texts. Furthermore, the treatment of these texts as sacred implies that their importance is not based (...) on their historical date, but on the authenticity of their doctrine. In a second part, we look briefly to the implications of this singular hermeneutics on Cudworth’s epistemology. (shrink)

The philosopher Jacob Böhme was known among his contemporaries for his creative use of the German language that led to inventing new words, or to attributing new meanings to existing ones. Böhme claimed that, properly speaking, his mother-tongue was not German but the ‘language of nature’, the language spoken by Adam before the Fall, and in which essences and words were still in perfect correspondence. This essay investigates how early English readers of Böhme assessed the transposition of Böhme’s works from (...) German into English: what interpretative challenges were entailed in translating Böhme’s language, and in interpreting Böhme through translations, rather than the originals? The essay is divided into three sections. First, I examine the role of Abraham von Franckenberg’s famous biography of Böhme, and consider how its English translation acted as a filter for approaching Böhme in England. Second, I discuss the strategies of readers and translators of Böhme active in seventeenth-century Cambridge. Third, I compare the approaches of two main readers, Henry More and Charles Hotham, demonstrating that they were aware of the gap that had opened between the ‘German Böhme’, and the new, successful creation of seventeenth-century England: the English ‘Jacob Behmen’. (shrink)

Scholarly treatments of Peter Sterry and the Cambridge Platonists often view their reception of Platonism as radically different from their Puritan or Calvinist contemporaries. This essay focuses on three individuals, John Sherman, Girolamo Zanchi, and Peter Sterry, in order to clarify the variety of opinions regarding the value of Platonism for Christian theology among Protestant theologians in the Early Modern period. An example of this comes from John Sherman’s use of the Reformed scholastic, Girolamo Zanchi in a treatise that he (...) delivered in the Trinity College chapel in 1641. In this treatise entitled A Greek in the Temple, Sherman argues for a pious reception of pagan wisdom based on the concept of perennial philosophy, ideas which led the early twentieth century historian J.B. Mullinger to conclude that Sherman was the original influence behind Cambridge Platonism. Yet, Sherman claims to receive many of these ideas from Zanchi, an Aristotelian who recommends Ficino and Steuco’s works in his writings and refers to Plotinus as “homo Christianus.” Peter Sterry was likely familiar with Zanchi, though Sterry takes greater liberty in the ideas that he borrows from the Platonists and he rejects the Aristotelian method in favor of the method of coincidence similar to that used by Nicholas Cusanus. (shrink)

In chapter IX of the Principles, Anne Conway claims that her metaphysics is diametrically opposed to those of Descartes and Spinoza. Scholars have analyzed her rejection of Cartesianism, but not her critique of Spinoza. This paper proposes that two central points of Conway’s metaphysics can be understood as direct responses to Spinoza: (1) the relation between God, Christ, and the creatures in the tripartite division of being, and (2) the individuation of beings in the lowest species. I will argue that (...) Conway, in criticizing Spinoza’s identification between God and nature, defends a paradoxical monism, and that her concept of individuation is a reductio ad absurdum of Spinoza’s criterion of identity in the individuation of finite modes. (shrink)

A survey of theories on the passions and action in seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Britain and western Europe reveals that few, if any, of the major writers held the view that reason in any of its functions executes action without a passion. Even rationalists, like Cambridge Platonist Ralph Cudworth and English clergyman Samuel Clarke, recognized the necessity of passion to action. On the other hand, many of these intellectuals also agreed with French philosophers Jean-François Senault, René Descartes, and Nicolas Malebranche that, (...) for passions to be useful or to become virtues, they must be governed by reason. Without the moderation of reason, passions will be unruly, distort our notions of good, and disrupt our rational volitions. In response to these popular early modern perspectives, Enlightenment thinker David Hume offered a now-famous argument that reason without passion cannot motivate, drawing the further conclusion that reason cannot govern the passions, either. Given that no one in Hume’s era seemed to defend the claim that reason alone can motivate action, what was Hume’s intention? (shrink)

In his “True Intellectual System of the Universe”, published in 1678, Cudworth defends the doctrine of the Trinity against the Socinian critique. In contrast to its defenders in the Presbyterian or Congregationalist camp he is less interested in showing that the doctrine is contained in Scripture than in showing that it is in accordance with philosophical reason. He was convinced that it was already present in pagan philosophy, especially in Platonism, there being no fundamental difference between the Platonic and the (...) Nicean Trinity. For this reason Cudworth strictly distinguishes between a genuine Platonic Trinity and what he calls the Pseudo-Platonic Trinity of pagan Neoplatonism. (shrink)

This essay examines recent attempts to defend holenmerism, or the ‘whole in every part’ doctrine, as the preferred view of God’s relationship to the material world in the work of Descartes. By focusing on the interrelationship between space, matter, and immaterial entities in Cartesian philosophy, I will demonstrate that the textual evidence not only fails to provide support for the holenmerist revival, but that holenmerism also runs counter to many of Descartes’s concepts regarding space and bodily extension.