The Cambridge Platonists were an influential group of Platonist philosophers and Christian theologians at the University of Cambridge that existed during the 17th century. [1] The leading figures were Ralph Cudworth and Henry More. [2]
The Cambridge Platonists were an influential group of Platonist philosophers and Christian theologians at the University of Cambridge that existed during the 17th century. [1] The leading figures were Ralph Cudworth and Henry More. [2]
Mark Goldie, writing in the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography , notes that the term "Cambridge Platonists" was given in the 19th century and can be misleading. There is no clear distinction between the group and latitudinarians in general.
The categorization and interpretation of the Cambridge Platonists has changed over time. Frances Yates interpreted them as scholars who engaged with the Christian Kabbalah but rejected Hermeticism following Isaac Casaubon's redating of the Hermetic corpus. [3] She argues that Cudworth and More perpetuate certain Renaissance Neoplatonic ideas, including a broad syncretism of early forms of Hermeticism, in a new scholarly context. [3]
Dmitri Levitin has challenged any categorization of the Cambridge Platonists as a cohesive philosophical group. While he admits that the group "existed as a loose set of acquaintances linked by tutorial relationships," he argues that they were not exclusive in their interest in Platonism, nor did most of them believe in any syncretism or a prisca theologia/philosophia perennis. [4] Levitin notes that of the Cambridge Platonists, only More saw himself as a philosopher rather than a philologist or theologian and he faced criticism from others, including Cudworth, for his lack of attention to historical detail. [5] Moreover, philosophers not traditionally deemed "Cambridge Platonists" took an historical and philosophical interest in Platonism and ideas of ancient science. [6] Based on these conclusions Levitin rejects any categorization of the Cambridge Platonists as a cohesive group in terms of philosophical views as historically unfounded.
More recently, David Leech has argued that while Levitin makes some important points "it would be a mistake to assume that the category of Cambridge Platonism is a retroprojection of nineteenth century historiography. This is because earlier practices of referring to a group of primarily Cambridge-based 'Platonists', invariably including Ralph Cudworth (1617–1688) and Henry More (1614–1687), usually Benjamin Whichcote (1609–1683), and (more variably) a number of other key figures, can be traced back at least to the 1730s in continental Europe, and still earlier in English texts." [7]
The Cambridge Platonists used the framework of the philosophia perennis of Agostino Steuco, and from it argued for moderation. [8] They believed that reason is the proper judge of disagreements, and so they advocated dialogue between the Puritan and Laudian traditions. The orthodox English Calvinists of the time found in their views an insidious attack, by-passing as it did the basic theological issues of atonement and justification by faith. Given the circle's Cambridge background in Puritan colleges such as Sidney Sussex College, Cambridge and Emmanuel College, Cambridge, the undermining was intellectually all the more effective. John Bunyan complained in those terms about Edward Fowler, a close latitudinarian follower. [9] [ need quotation to verify ]
Their understanding of reason was as "the candle of the Lord", an echo of the divine within the human soul and an imprint of God within man. They believed that reason could judge the private revelations of Puritan narrative, and investigate contested rituals and liturgy of the Church of England. For this approach they were called "latitudinarian".
The dogmatism of the Puritan divines, with their anti-rationalist demands, was, they felt, incorrect. They also felt that the Calvinist insistence on individual revelation left God uninvolved with the majority of mankind. At the same time, they were reacting against the reductive materialist writings of Thomas Hobbes. They felt that the latter, while rationalist, were denying the idealistic[ clarification needed ] part of the universe.
To the Cambridge Platonists, religion and reason were in harmony, and reality was known not by physical sensation alone, but by intuition of the intelligible forms that exist behind the material world of everyday perception. Universal, ideal forms inform matter, and the physical senses are unreliable guides to their reality. In response to the mechanical philosophy, More proposed a "Hylarchic Principle", and Cudworth a concept of "Plastic Nature". [8] [ need quotation to verify ]
Though coming later and not generally considered a Cambridge Platonist himself, Anthony Ashley Cooper, 3rd Earl of Shaftesbury (1671–1713) was much influenced by the movement.
The Cambridge Platonists were an influential group of 17th century philosophers and clergy whose teachings on philosophy and theology later influenced Leibniz, Locke, the Scottish common sense philosopher Thomas Reid, and Kant. They thrived at Cambridge largely between 1633 and 1678, though their younger disciples carried their thinking into the early 18th century. They identified themselves neither with the Puritans nor the High Anglicans, and they encouraged toleration within the church. The Cambridge Platonists drew on the dualistic philosophies of mind and matter of Plato (427–347 BCE) and Plotinus (205–270 CE), contending that mind is prior to matter and that reason is superior to knowledge derived from the senses. They developed the ideas that reason and morality reside in the human mind and that reason is indeed the indwelling of God in the mind that allows individuals to judge both natural and divine revelation. This group of thinkers, who were among the first to write philosophy primarily in the English language (rather than in Latin or French), believed that the rational and the spiritual could go hand-in-hand. These philosophers taught that human nature possessed an innate tendency toward goodness and that human nature was perfectible. Humans possess free will, and they learn rationally the wisdom of practicing Christ's universal love. Thus, while the Cambridge Platonists devoted their energies to metaphysical questions regarding the immortality of the soul and the existence of God, they also attended closely to morality and the principles of daily living.
Ralph Cudworth was an English Anglican clergyman, Christian Hebraist, classicist, theologian and philosopher, and a leading figure among the Cambridge Platonists who became 11th Regius Professor of Hebrew (1645–88), 26th Master of Clare Hall (1645–54), and 14th Master of Christ's College (1654–88). A leading opponent of Hobbes's political and philosophical views, his magnum opus was his The True Intellectual System of the Universe (1678).
Plotinus was a Greek Platonist philosopher, born and raised in Roman Egypt. Plotinus is regarded by modern scholarship as the founder of Neoplatonism. His teacher was the self-taught philosopher Ammonius Saccas, who belonged to the Platonic tradition. Historians of the 19th century invented the term "neoplatonism" and applied it to refer to Plotinus and his philosophy, which was vastly influential during late antiquity, the Middle Ages, and the Renaissance. Much of the biographical information about Plotinus comes from Porphyry's preface to his edition of Plotinus' most notable literary work, The Enneads. In his metaphysical writings, Plotinus described three fundamental principles: the One, the Intellect, and the Soul. His works have inspired centuries of pagan, Jewish, Christian, Gnostic, and early Islamic metaphysicians and mystics, including developing precepts that influence mainstream theological concepts within religions, such as his work on duality of the One in two metaphysical states.
Joseph Glanvill was an English writer, philosopher, and clergyman. Not himself a scientist, he has been called "the most skillful apologist of the virtuosi", or in other words the leading propagandist for the approach of the English natural philosophers of the later 17th century. In 1661 he predicted "To converse at the distance of the Indes by means of sympathetic conveyances may be as natural to future times as to us is a literary correspondence."
Hermeticism or Hermetism is a philosophical and religious system based on the purported teachings of Hermes Trismegistus. These teachings are contained in the various writings attributed to Hermes, which were produced over a period spanning many centuries and may be very different in content and scope.
Henry More was an English philosopher of the Cambridge Platonist school.
Latitudinarians, or latitude men, were initially a group of 17th-century English theologians – clerics and academics – from the University of Cambridge who were moderate Anglicans. In particular, they believed that adhering to very specific doctrines, liturgical practices, and church organizational forms, as did the Puritans, was not necessary and could be harmful: "The sense that one had special instructions from God made individuals less amenable to moderation and compromise, or to reason itself." Thus, the latitudinarians supported a broad-based Protestantism. They were later referred to as broad church.
Benjamin Whichcote was an English Establishment and Puritan divine, Provost of King's College, Cambridge and leader of the Cambridge Platonists. He held that man is the "child of reason" and so not completely depraved by nature, as Puritans held. He also argued for religious toleration.
Damaris Cudworth, Lady Masham was an English writer, philosopher, theologian, and advocate for women's education who is often characterized as a proto-feminist. She overcame some weakness of eyesight and lack of access to formal higher education to win high regard among eminent thinkers of her time. With an extensive correspondence, she published two works, A Discourse Concerning the Love of God (1696) and Thoughts in reference to a Vertuous or Christian Life (1705). She is particularly noted for her long, mutually-influential friendship with the philosopher John Locke.
Middle Platonism is the modern name given to a stage in the development of Platonic philosophy, lasting from about 90 BC – when Antiochus of Ascalon rejected the scepticism of the new Academy – until the development of neoplatonism under Plotinus in the 3rd century. Middle Platonism absorbed many doctrines from the rival Peripatetic and Stoic schools. The pre-eminent philosopher in this period, Plutarch, defended the freedom of the will and the immortality of the soul. He sought to show that God, in creating the world, had transformed matter, as the receptacle of evil, into the divine soul of the world, where it continued to operate as the source of all evil. God is a transcendent being, who operates through divine intermediaries, which are the gods and daemons of popular religion. Numenius of Apamea combined Platonism with neopythagoreanism and other eastern philosophies, in a move which would prefigure the development of neoplatonism.
Platonism is the philosophy of Plato and philosophical systems closely derived from it, though contemporary Platonists do not necessarily accept all doctrines of Plato. Platonism had a profound effect on Western thought. In its most basic fundamentals, Platonism affirms the existence of abstract objects, which are asserted to exist in a third realm distinct from both the sensible external world and from the internal world of consciousness, and is the opposite of nominalism. This can apply to properties, types, propositions, meanings, numbers, sets, truth values, and so on. Philosophers who affirm the existence of abstract objects are sometimes called Platonists; those who deny their existence are sometimes called nominalists. The terms "Platonism" and "nominalism" also have established senses in the history of philosophy. They denote positions that have little to do with the modern notion of an abstract object.
Samuel Parker was an English churchman, of strong Erastian views and a fierce opponent of Dissenters. His political position is often compared with that of Thomas Hobbes, but there are also clear differences; he was also called in his time a Latitudinarian, but this is not something on which modern scholars are agreed. During the reign of King James II he served as Bishop of Oxford, and was considered by James to be a moderate in his attitude to Catholics.
Discourse is a use of written or spoken communication.
The University of Cambridge was the birthplace of the 'Analytic' School of Philosophy in the early 20th century. The department is located in the Raised Faculty Building on the Sidgwick Site and is part of the Cambridge School of Arts and Humanities. The Faculty achieved the best possible results from The Times 2004 and the QAA Subject Review 2001 (24/24). In the UK as of 2020, it is ranked second by the Guardian, second by the Philosophical Gourmet Report, and fifth by the QS World University Rankings.
John Worthington (1618–1671) was an English academic. He was closely associated with the Cambridge Platonists. He did not in fact publish in the field of philosophy, and is now known mainly as a well-connected diarist.
Neoplatonism was a major influence on Christian theology throughout Late Antiquity and the Middle Ages in the East, and sometimes in the West as well. In the East, major Greek Fathers like Basil, Gregory of Nyssa and Gregory of Nazianzus were influenced by Platonism and Neoplatonism, but also Stoicism often leading towards asceticism and harsh treatment of the body, for example stylite asceticism. In the West, St. Augustine of Hippo was influenced by the early Neoplatonists Plotinus and Porphyry. Later on, in the East, the works of the Christian writer Pseudo-Dionysius the Areopagite, who was influenced by later Neoplatonists such as Proclus and Damascius, became a critical work on which Greek church fathers based their theology, like Maximus believing it was an original work of Dionysius the Areopagite.
Neoplatonism is a version of Platonic philosophy that emerged in the 3rd century AD against the background of Hellenistic philosophy and religion. The term does not encapsulate a set of ideas as much as a series of thinkers. Among the common ideas it maintains is monism, the doctrine that all of reality can be derived from a single principle, "the One".
Matthew Cradock was a London merchant, politician, and the first governor of the Massachusetts Bay Company. Founded in 1628, it was an organization of Puritan businessmen that organized and established the Massachusetts Bay Colony. Although he never visited the colony, Cradock owned property and businesses there, and he acted on its behalf in London. His business and trading empire encompassed at least 18 ships, and extended from the West Indies and North America to Europe and the Near East. He was a dominant figure in the tobacco trade.
Many interpreters of Plato held that his writings contain passages with double meanings, called allegories, symbols, or myths, that give the dialogues layers of figurative meaning in addition to their usual literal meaning. These allegorical interpretations of Plato were dominant for more than fifteen hundred years, from about the 1st century CE through the Renaissance and into the 18th century, and were advocated by major Platonist philosophers such as Plotinus, Porphyry, Syrianus, Proclus, and Marsilio Ficino. Beginning with Philo of Alexandria, these views influenced the Jewish, Christian, and Islamic interpretation of these religions' respective sacred scriptures. They spread widely during the Renaissance and contributed to the fashion for allegory among poets such as Dante Alighieri, Edmund Spenser, and William Shakespeare.
Elizabeth Foxcroft was an English theosophist. She was Anne Conway's companion and they were both interested in the views of the German philosopher Jakob Böhme. Her son, Ezekial, was a follower of the Cambridge Platonists.
