Cambridge Platonism

“Plutarch in ‘The True Intellectual System of the Universe’”. In The True Intellectual System of the Universe Ralph Cudworth uses a great deal of sources in order to reconstruct past doctrines. In this paper, I propose that we pay attention to the way he uses Plutarch of Chaeronea’s work. The hypothesis that guides this article sustains that Cudworth uses this work as a source of ancient thought despite not totally agreeing with his interpretation of Plato. This means that Plutarch’s work (...) has two levels of reading: on the one hand, its exposition as a source of other authors; and, on the other hand, the interpretation that Plutarch himself makes of his sources, especially, of Plato. This will allow me to draw some conclusions concerning Cudworth’s work as a historian of philosophy and his relationship with Platonic philosophy. (shrink)

Little is known about the shaping and development of Anne Conway’s thought in relation to her early modern contemporaries. In one part of her only surviving treatise, The Principles, Conway criticises “those doctors” who uphold a dualist theory of soul and body, a mechanist conception of body (as dead and inert), and the view that the soul is “intimate present” in the body. In this paper, I argue that here she targets Walter Charleton, a well-known defender of Epicurean atomism in (...) mid-seventeenth-century England. My intention is to highlight the sophistication of Conway’s theory of soul-body relations vis-a-vis that of Charleton. (shrink)

John Norris’s novel and compelling theory on the soul’s immortality is both a central element of his overall philosophical vision and a vital engagement with his contemporaries on the topic. Even so, it has been mostly neglected in the secondary literature. This article aims to fill this lacuna by providing a detailed analysis of how Norris arrives at two seemingly inconsistent theses: the soul is naturally immortal in the sense of being incorruptible but naturally mortal in the sense of being (...) perishable. I focus particularly on how Norris articulates this position in dialogue with a number of Scholastic philosophers whose views he rejects. I conclude by suggesting that Norris’s arguments against these thinkers are less than fully successful. (shrink)

It is well known that at the heart of Kant’s Critical philosophy is the claim that the mind possesses an essentially spontaneous power or capacity. It is also sometimes maintained that Kant’s appeals to this spontaneous power are intimately tied to his recognition of there being a fundamental and irreducible normative dimension to judgement. However, I attempt to complicate this picture by way of appeal to some less appreciated influences upon the development of Kant’s epistemology. A different conception of the (...) role of spontaneity in judgement has clear precedents, I claim, in the works of Cudworth and Rousseau. There the imagined role for the active power of the mind is not to identify criteria that might serve as norms for epistemically responsible judgement. Rather the spontaneous power of the mind is cited as the source of representational contents that secure the truth conditions of our everyday claims to empirical knowledge. (shrink)

The concept of self has preeminently been asserted (in its many versions) as a core component of anti-reductionist, antinaturalistic philosophical positions, from Descartes to Husserl and beyond, with the exception of some hybrid or intermediate positions which declare rather glibly that, since we are biological entities which fully belong to the natural world, and we are conscious of ourselves as 'selves', therefore the self belongs to the natural world (this is characteristic e.g. of embodied phenomenology and enactivism). Nevertheless, from Cudworth (...) and More’s attacks on materialism all the way through twentieth-century argument against naturalism, the gulf between selfhood and the world of Nature appears unbridgeable. In contrast, my goal in this paper is to show that early modern materialism could yield a theory of the self according to which (1) the self belongs to the world of external relations (Spinoza), such that no one fact, including supposedly private facts, is only accessible to a single person; (2) the self can be reconstructed as a sense of “organic unity” which could be a condition for biological individuality (a central text here is Diderot’s 1769 Rêve de D’Alembert); yet this should not lead us to espouse a Romantic concept of organism as foundational or even ineffable subjectivity (a dimension present in Leibniz and made explicit in German idealism); (3) what we call 'self' might simply be a dynamic process of interpretive activity undertaken by the brain. This materialist theory of the self should not neglect the nature of experience, but it should also not have to take at face value the recurring invocations of a better, deeper “first-person perspective” or “first-person science.”. (shrink)

The work of women philosophers in the early modern period has traditionally been overlooked, yet their writing on topics such as reality, time, mind and matter holds valuable lessons for our understanding of metaphysics and its history. This volume of new essays explores the work of nine key female figures: Bathsua Makin, Anna Maria van Schurman, Elisabeth of Bohemia, Margaret Cavendish, Anne Conway, Damaris Cudworth Masham, Mary Astell, Catharine Trotter Cockburn, and Émilie Du Châtelet. Investigating issues from eternity to free (...) will and from body to natural laws, the essays uncover long-neglected perspectives and demonstrate their importance for philosophical debates, both then and now. Combining careful philosophical analysis with discussion of the intellectual and historical context of each thinker, they will set the agenda for future enquiry and will appeal to scholars and students of the history of metaphysics, science, religion and feminism. (shrink)

This essay examines Henry More’s engagement with Jacob Böhme and compares the sympathetic critique of Böhme with More’s much more negative evaluation of Spinoza. More directs his criticism of Böhme at the similarities between Spinoza and Böhme: their materialism and confusion of God and world. The present essay suggests, however, that the perception of shared Platonism informs More’s more favourable approach to the Silesian. The problem of what “Platonism” means in this context is thus also addressed. Böhme’s writings were valued (...) by More because of a shared metaphysics that rejected both radical dualism and pantheism, and the Platonic theology of the goodness of God and the freedom of man, together with the rejection of predestination. Spinoza, on the other hand, is rejected because of his radical determinism, his denial of any substantial distinction between good and evil, and the transcendent being of the divine. (shrink)

Overviews -- Hildegard of Bingen -- Anne Conway -- Mary Astell -- Mary Wollstonecraft -- Harriet Taylor Mill -- Edith Stein -- Simone Weil -- Simone de Beauvoir -- Conclusions.

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)

Plato and Platonism held a significant place in British intellectual inquiry in the eighteenth century. Louise Hickman enters this largely unexplored territory with a valuable study of select elements in the theological and political arguments of certain British divines. She is particularly concerned to expose the limitations of familiar and narrowly-rational arguments that in the eighteenth century supported natural religion and theology, and to bring to the fore a countervailing rational theology that discovers in and for the human mind the (...) eternal and immutable truth that is divine.The principal figure in Hickman’s study is Richard Price, rational dissenting minister, friend of liberty and America, and author of... (shrink)

En el presente trabajo se estudia el lugar que ocupa Ralph Cudworth en la historia de la filosofía. El objetivo es mostrar que este autor no es parte del canon de la filosofía del siglo XVII y que, sin embargo, es un representante del período moderno en las primeras historias de la filosofía. Para ello, primero se introduce al autor y luego se expone la presentación que se realiza del inglés en las obras de Jacob Brucker, Wilhelm Tennemann, Taddä Rixner (...) y Joseph Marie Degérando, para terminar en las Lecciones sobre historia de la filosofía de Georg Hegel. En un segundo momento se exponen algunas reflexiones en torno a Cudworth, que se originan a partir de la lectura de la bibliografía actualizada sobre dicho autor. Las conclusiones muestran la importancia de estudiar este tipo de pensadores, que no forman parte del canon de la filosofía pero son parte de la conformación del mismo. (shrink)

Isaac Newton is best known as a mathematician and physicist. He invented the calculus, discovered universal gravitation and made significant advances in theoretical and experimental optics. His master-work on gravitation, the Principia, is often hailed as the crowning achievement of the scientific revolution. His significance for philosophers, however, extends beyond the philosophical implications of his scientific discoveries. Newton was an able and subtle philosopher, working at a time when science was not yet recognized as an activity distinct from philosophy. He (...) engaged with the work of Rene Descartes and G.W. Leibniz, and showed sensitivity to the work of John Locke, Francis Bacon, Pierre Gassendi and Henry More, to name just a few. In his time, Newton was not perceived as a scientific outsider, but as an active and knowledgeable participant in philosophical debates.... (shrink)