Cambridge Platonists

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A small group of mid17th century thinkers centred on Cambridge, whose members included Ralph Cudworth, Henry More, and Benjamin Whichcote. The problems they addressed included the rise of low-church ‘enthusiasm’, the increasing influence of the Godless system of Hobbes, and the decreasing prestige of Aristotelian logic and science. The solution was an increased reliance on themes from Plato, including a general sympathy with mysticism and especially a belief that ethics rests upon absolute standards of right and wrong, discernible by human reason and independent of divine revelation.

The Cambridge Platonists are so called because they were all educated at the University of Cambridge and were all indebted to Platonist philosophy. The senior member of the group was Benjamin Whichcote (1609–1683), and its most important philosophers were Henry More (1614–1687) and Ralph Cudworth (1617–1688). The group also included Peter Sterry (1613–1672), John Smith (1618–1652), Nathaniel Culverwel (1619–1651), and John Worthington (1618–1671). Their younger followers included George Rust (d. 1670), Anne Conway (1631–1679), and John Norris (1675–1711).

Cambridge Platonism may be defined not so much by a strict set of doctrines as by a loose framework of values and philosophical preferences. This Platonism was of the syncretic model familiar since the Renaissance, which was open to other strands of thought, including, in this case, new developments in science and philosophy, in particular Cartesianism and the experimentalism of the Royal Society. While the Cambridge Platonists' individual writings exhibit marked differences of emphasis and style, the major premise of their thinking is the compatibility of reason and faith and the view that the human mind is equipped with the principles of knowledge and morality. Their tolerant Protestantism, underpinned by a liberal theology of grace, is matched by an optimistic view of human nature, according to which human beings are capable of self-improvement through the exercise of reason and free will. These views set them in opposition to the dogmatic Calvinism of their day, as well as to the philosophical determinism of Thomas Hobbes and Baruch Spinoza. The main themes of their writings were the defense of the existence of God and of the immortality of the soul and the formulation of a practical ethics for Christian conduct. They propounded a philosophy of spirit, according to which mind or soul is antecedent to matter, the truths of the mind are superior to sense-knowledge, and spirit is the main principle of causal agency. The most distinctive accounts of the latter are More's hypothesis of the spirit of nature and Cudworth's analogous hypothesis of plastic nature. The fullest and most systematic exposition of their philosophy of spirit is set out in More's Of the Immortality of the Soul (1659) and Enchiridion Metaphysicum (1671; Manual of metaphysics). Cudworth never completed his main work, The True Intellectual System of the Universe (1678). Nonetheless this substantial volume is a compendious philosophy of religion, which surveys ancient philosophy as a philosophia perennis ('perennial philosophy'). It broaches a number of themes more fully treated in Cudworth's unpublished writings "On Liberty and Necessity" and his posthumously published Treatise concerning Eternal and Immutable Morality (1731). The Treatise is the most comprehensive statement of innate-idea epistemology by any seventeenth-century philosopher. The most accessible summary of the ethos and assumptions of Cambridge Platonism is John Smith's posthumously published Select Discourses (1660). More also took care to communicate his philosophy in more popular works like his Philosophical Poems (1647) and Divine Dialogues (1668). Nathaniel Ingelo's romance Bentivolio and Urania (1660) contains an outline of their views for popular consumption.

Despite difficulties occasioned by the upheaval of contemporary political events, the legacy of the Cambridge Platonists was far-reaching. On the religious front, they inspired the Latitudinarians who adopted a nonrestrictive approach to matters of doctrine within the Church of England. In philosophy, More and Cudworth were read by Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz, while their British adherents included Lord Shaftesbury, Richard Price, and Thomas Reid. The works of More, Cudworth, and Whichcote continued to be printed well into the eighteenth century.

Bibliography

Primary Sources

Conway, Anne. The Principles of the Most Ancient and Modern Philosophy. Translated by Taylor Corse and Allison P. Coudert. Cambridge, U.K., 1996.

Cragg, Gerald R., ed. The Cambridge Platonists. New York, 1968.

Cudworth, Ralph. A Treatise concerning Eternal and Immutable Morality. Edited by Sarah Hutton. Cambridge, U.K., 1996.

——. The True Intellectual System of the Universe. London, 1678.

Culverwel, Nathaniel. An Elegant and Learned Discourse of the Light of Nature. Edited by Robert A. Greene and Hugh Mac Callum. Toronto, 1971.

Ingelo, Nathaniel. Bentivolio and Urania. London, 1660.

More, Henry. A Collection of Several Philosophical Writings. London, 1662.

——. A Collection of Several Philosophical Writings of Dr. Henry More. Cambridge, U.K., 1662. Reprinted 1978.

——. H. Mori Cantabrigiensis Opera Omnia. London, 1675–1679. Latin translation of all More's theological and philosophical works.

Patrides, C. A., ed. The Cambridge Platonists. London, 1969.

Smith, John. Select Discourses. New York, 1978.

Secondary Sources

Darwall, Stephen L. The British Moralists and the Internal Ought, 1640–1740. Cambridge, U.K., and New York, 1992.

Hutton, Sarah. "Lord Herbert and the Cambridge Platonists." In British Philosophy and the Age of Enlightenment, edited by Stuart Brown. Vol. 5 of Routledge History of Philosophy. London and New York, 1995.

Hutton, Sarah, ed. Henry More (1614–1687): Tercentenary Studies. Dordrecht, Netherlands, 1990.

Passmore, John Arthur. Ralph Cudworth. Cambridge, U.K., 1951.

Rogers, G. A. J., J.-M. Vienne, and Y.-C. Zarka, eds. The Cambridge Platonists in Philosophical Context: Politics, Metaphysics, and Religion. Dordrecht, Netherlands, 1997.

Scott, Dominic. Recollection and Experience: Plato's Theory of Learning and Its Successors. Cambridge, U.K., 1990.

—SARAH HUTTON

Anglicanism portal

Henry More was an English philosopher of the Cambridge Platonist school.

The Cambridge Platonists were a group of philosophers at Cambridge University in the middle of the 17th century (between 1633 and 1688).

Contents 1 Programme 2 Representatives 3 Works of the Cambridge Platonists 4 External links

Programme

The Cambridge Platonists were reacting to two pressures. On the one hand, the dogmatism of the Puritan divines, with their anti-rationalist demands, were, they felt, immoral and incorrect. They also felt that the Puritan/Calvinist insistence upon individual revelation left God uninvolved with the majority of mankind. At the same time, they were reacting against the materialist writings of Thomas Hobbes. They felt that the latter, while properly rationalist, were denying the idealistic nature of the universe. To the Cambridge Platonists, religion and reason were in harmony, and reality was comprised not of sensation, but of "intelligible forms" that exist behind perception. Universal, ideal forms (a la Plato) inform matter, and the senses are unreliable guides to reality.

As divines and in matters of polity, the Cambridge Platonists argued for moderation. They believed that reason is the proper judge of all disagreements, and so they advocated dialogue between the Puritans and the High Churchmen. They had a mystical understanding of reason, believing that reason is not merely the sense-making facility of the mind, but, instead, "the candle of the Lord" - an echo of the divine within the human soul and an imprint of God within man. Thus, they believed that reason could lead beyond the sensory, because it is semi-divine. Reason was, for them, of God, and thus capable of nearing God. Therefore, they believed that reason could allow for judging the private revelations of Puritan theology and the proper investigation of the rituals and liturgy of the Established Church. For this reason, they were called latitudinarians.

Representatives

• Ralph Cudworth (1617–1688)
• Nathaniel Culverwel (1619–1651)
• Henry More (1614–1687)
• John Smith (1618–1652)
• Peter Sterry (1613–1672)
• Benjamin Whichcote (1609–1683)

Works of the Cambridge Platonists

• Cudworth's chief philosophical work was The True Intellectual System of the Universe (1678) and the Treatise concerning Eternal and Immutable Morality, which appeared posthumously in 1731.
• Culverwel's chief work was Light of Nature (1652). Culverwel died young (probably at the age of 32). He had intended to write a multi-part work reconciling the Gospel with philosophical reason.
• Henry More (1614–1687) wrote many works. As a Platonist, his important works were Manual of Ethics (1666), the Divine Dialogues (1668), and the Manual of Metaphysics (1671). While all of More's works enjoyed popularity, the Divine Dialogues were perhaps most influential.
• John Smith, a student of Benjamin Whichcote, is remembered for the elegance of his style and the depth of his learning in the posthumously published Select Discourses (1660).
• Benjamin Whichcote (1609–1683) was one of the leaders of the movement, but he was also an active pastor and academic who did not publish in his lifetime. His sermons were notable and caused controversies, and Whichcote wrote a great deal without publishing. In 1685, Some Select Notions of B. Whichcote was published due to demand. After that was Select Sermons (1689) (with a preface by Shaftesbury) and Several Discourses (1701). Finally, a collection of his sayings appeared as Moral and Religious Aphorisms in 1703.

External links

• "The Cambridge Platonists" article by Sarah Hutton in the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy

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