The Cambridge Platonists in Philosophical Context: Politics, Metaphysics and Religion

by G.A. Rogers (Editor), J.-M. Vienne (Editor), Y.C. Zarka (Editor)

Overview

The Cambridge Platonists were defenders of tolerance in the political as well as the moral sphere ; they held that practical j u d g e m e n t came down in the last instance to individual conscience ; and they laid the foundations of our modern conceptions of conscience and liberty. But at the same time they ma intained the existence of eternal truths , and of a Good-in-itself , identical with Truth and Being, refusing to admit that freedom of conscience i m p li e d moral relativism. They were critics of dogmatism, and of the sectarian notion of "enthusiasm" as a source of illumination , on the grounds that both were disruptive of social harmony; they pleaded the cause of reason , in the hope that it could become the foundation of all human knowledge . Yet , for all that , they ma intained that a certain sort of mystical illumination lay at the heart of all true thought , and that human reason had validity only in virtue of i t s divine origin . They debated with Des cartes and took a keen interest in his mech- ism and his dualism ; they brought the atomistic theories of Democritus back into repute; and they sought to provide a detailed account of the causality link ing all phenomena.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9789048148448
Publisher:	Springer Netherlands
Publication date:	12/07/2010
Series:	International Archives of the History of Ideas Archives internationales d'histoire des idées , #150
Edition description:	Softcover reprint of hardcover 1st ed. 1997
Pages:	258
Product dimensions:	6.30(w) x 9.45(h) x 0.02(d)

Table of Contents

I The Other-Worldly Philosophers and the Real World: The Cambridge Platonists, Theology and Politics.- II Liberté et Vérité: Politique et morale dans la correspondance hollandaise de More et de Cudworth.- III Critique de Hobbes et fondement de la morale chez Cudworth.- IV The Heritage of Patristic Platonism in Seventeenth century English Philosophical Theology.- V John Smith et le Portique.- VI Cudworth, Boethius and the Scale of Nature.- VII Ralph Cudworth, un platonisme paradoxal: La Nature dans la Digression concerning the Plastick Life of Nature.- VIII—????? et Relation: Du platonisme à l’empirisme.- IX The Role of Illuminism in the Thought of Henry More.- X “La Nature est un art”. Le vitalisme de Cudworth et de More.- XI Force, Motion and Causality: More’s Critique of Descartes.- XII Cudworth versus Descartes: platonisme et sens commun dans la critique des Méditations.- XIII Les différentes lectures du System de Cudworth par G. W. Leibniz.- XIV Platonic Idealism in Modern Philosophy from Malebranche to Berkeley.

Editorial Reviews

‘This collection will be of interest to historians and researches in theology as wel as philosophers.'
‘The scholarship represented by all of the essays in this collection is of uniformly high quality. The volume is a most worthy addition to Kluwer's excellent International Archives of the History of Ideas.
The Review of Metaphysics. (March, 2000)

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