Results for 'Cudworth'

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  1. Cudworth as a Critic of Spinoza.Stewart Duncan - manuscript
    In the _True Intellectual System_, Cudworth attacks types of atheist position—atomic atheism, hylozoic atheism, etc. He generally uses ancient examples to illustrate those types, but also criticizes some of his contemporaries. We can identify direct criticisms of contemporaries by finding quotations, paraphrases, and accounts of their views in the text. My primary question in this paper is, 'how much of the _True Intellectual System_ is directly about or aimed at Spinoza?' My ultimate answer, contrary to some prominent voices in (...)
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  2. Cudworth as a Critic of Hobbes.Stewart Duncan - 2021 - In Marcus P. Adams (ed.), A Companion to Hobbes. Hoboken, NJ: Wiley-Blackwell. pp. 398-412.
    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 (...)
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  3. Cudworth, Ralph.Andrea Strazzoni - 2022 - Encyclopedia of Renaissance Philosophy.
    Ralph Cudworth was an expounder of “Cambridge Platonism.” His main tenet is that natural phenomena cannot be explained only by the principles of mechanism; therefore, the existence of a “plastic nature,” which orders the world in accordance with divine decrees, has to be postulated. The order of creation, in turn, does not depend only on divine will but also on the essences present in God’s intellect. These essences can be known through the notions innate to human soul, which recollects (...)
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  4. Cudworth and Normative Explanations.Mark Schroeder - 2005 - Journal of Ethics and Social Philosophy 1 (3):1-28.
    Moral theories usually aspire to be explanatory – to tell us why something is wrong, why it is good, or why you ought to do it. So it is worth knowing how moral explanations differ, if they do, from explanations of other things. This paper uncovers a common unarticulated theory about how normative explanations must work – that they must follow what I call the Standard Model. Though the Standard Model Theory has many implications, in this paper I focus primarily (...)
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  5. Ralph Cudworth, A Treatise Concerning Eternal and Immutable Morality, With a Treatise of Freewill Reviewed by.Jennifer Nagel - 1998 - Philosophy in Review 18 (1):19-21.
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  6. Ralph Cudworth e le origini della “filosofia della religione” in epoca moderna.Mario Micheletti - 2014 - In Stefano Caroti & Alberto Siclari (eds.), _Filosofia e religione. Studi in onore di Fabio Rossi_. Raccolti da Stefano Caroti e Alberto Siclari. Firenze-Parma, Torino: E-theca OnLineOpenAccess Edizioni, Università degli Studi di Torino. pp. 111-155.
    The first occurrence of the expression ‘Philosophy of Religion’ is in Ralph Cudworth’s book The True Intellectual System of the Universe, published in London in 1678. In my essay I relate this fact to the recent interpretations of the origins of modern philosophy of religion, arguing that there are valid reasons to attribute to Cudworth and the Cambridge Platonists a significant role in the formation of the philosophy of religion in modern thought.
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  7. (1 other version)An English Source of German Romanticism: Herder's Cudworth Inspired Revision of Spinoza from ‘Plastik’ to ‘Kraft’.Alexander J. B. Hampton - 2016 - Heythrop Journal 57 (6).
    This examination considers the influence of the seventeenth century Cambridge Platonist Cudworth upon the thought of the late eighteenth century German thinker Herder. It focuses upon Herder's use of Cudworth's philosophy to create a revised version of Spinoza's metaphysics. Both Cudworth and Herder were concerned with the problem of determinism. Cudworth outlined a number of difficulties relating to this problem in the thought of Spinoza and proposed amendments, particularly the introduction of the middle principle of plastik, (...)
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  8. Über den Zusammenhang zwischen plastic natures, spirit of nature und dem Naturgesetzbegriff bei Cudworth und More.Andreas Hüttemann - 2001 - In Kausalität und Naturgesetz in der frühen Neuzeit. Steiner. pp. 139-154.
    The paper discusses Cudworth's plastice natures and More's spirit of nature in the context of different 17th century conceptions of laws of nature.
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  9. Cudworthian Consciousness.Matthew A. Leisinger - 2022 - Oxford Studies in Early Modern Philosophy 11:163–196.
    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 (...)
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  10. Materialism and the Activity of Matter in Seventeenth‐Century European Philosophy.Stewart Duncan - 2016 - Philosophy Compass 11 (11):671-680.
    Early modern debates about the nature of matter interacted with debates about whether matter could think. In particular, some philosophers (e.g., Cudworth and Leibniz) objected to materialism about the human mind on the grounds that matter is passive, thinking things are active, and one cannot make an active thing out of passive material. This paper begins by looking at two seventeenth-century materialist views (Hobbes’s, and one suggested but not endorsed by Locke) before considering that objection (which I call here (...)
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  11. Locke, God, and Materialism.Stewart Duncan - 2021 - Oxford Studies in Early Modern Philosophy 10:101-31.
    This paper investigates Locke’s views about materialism, by looking at the discussion in Essay IV.x. There Locke---after giving a cosmological argument for the existence of God---argues that God could not be material, and that matter alone could never produce thought. In discussing the chapter, I pay particular attention to some comparisons between Locke’s position and those of two other seventeenth-century philosophers, René Descartes and Ralph Cudworth. -/- Making use of those comparisons, I argue for two main claims. The first (...)
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  12. A Woman's Influence? John Locke and Damaris Masham on Moral Accountability.Jacqueline Broad - 2006 - Journal of the History of Ideas 67 (3):489-510.
    Some scholars suggest that John Locke’s revisions to the chapter “Of Power” for the 1694 second edition of his Essay concerning Human Understanding may be indebted to the Cambridge Platonist, Ralph Cudworth. Their claims rest on evidence that Locke may have had access to Cudworth’s unpublished manuscript treatises on free will. In this paper, I examine an alternative suggestion – the claim that Cudworth’s daughter, Damaris Cudworth Masham, and not Cudworth himself, may have exerted an (...)
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  13. Early Modern Accounts of Epicureanism.Stewart Duncan & Antonia LoLordo - 2025 - In Jacob Klein & Nathan Powers (eds.), The Oxford Handbook of Hellenistic Philosophy. New York, NY: Oxford University Press.
    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, (...)
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  14. L'etica moderna. Dalla Riforma a Nietzsche.Sergio Cremaschi - 2007 - Roma RM, Italia: Carocci.
    This book tells the story of modern ethics, namely the story of a discourse that, after the Renaissance, went through a methodological revolution giving birth to Grotius’s and Pufendorf’s new science of natural law, leaving room for two centuries of explorations of the possible developments and implications of this new paradigm, up to the crisis of the Eighties of the eighteenth century, a crisis that carried a kind of mitosis, the act of birth of both basic paradigms of the two (...)
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  15. The Legacy of a ‘Living Library’: On the Reception of John Smith.Derek A. Michaud - 2019 - In Douglas Hedley & David Leech (eds.), Revisioning Cambridge Platonism: Sources and Legacy. Springer Verlag. pp. 241-257.
    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 (...)
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  16. Adversaries or allies? Occasional thoughts on the Masham-Astell exchange.Jacqueline Broad - 2003 - Eighteenth-Century Thought 1:123-49.
    Against the backdrop of the English reception of Locke’s Essay, stands a little-known philosophical dispute between two seventeenth-century women writers: Mary Astell (1666-1731) and Damaris Cudworth Masham (1659-1708). On the basis of their brief but heated exchange, Astell and Masham are typically regarded as philosophical adversaries: Astell a disciple of the occasionalist John Norris, and Masham a devout Lockean. In this paper, I argue that although there are many respects in which Astell and Masham are radically opposed, the two (...)
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  17. DIDEROT AND MATERIALIST THEORIES OF THE SELF.Charles T. Wolfe - 2015 - Journal of Society and Politics 9 (1):37-52.
    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 (...) 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)
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  18. (1 other version)Vital materialism and the problem of ethics in the Radical Enlightenment.Charles T. Wolfe - 2013 - Philosophica 88 (1):31-70.
    From Hegel to Engels, Sartre and Ruyer (Ruyer, 1933), to name only a few, materialism is viewed as a necropolis, or the metaphysics befitting such an abode; many speak of matter’s crudeness, bruteness, coldness or stupidity. Science or scientism, on this view, reduces the living world to ‘dead matter’, ‘brutish’, ‘mechanical, lifeless matter’, thereby also stripping it of its freedom (Crocker, 1959). Materialism is often wrongly presented as ‘mechanistic materialism’ – with ‘Death of Nature’ echoes of de-humanization and hostility to (...)
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  19. A Minimalist Account of Love.Getty L. Lustila - 2021 - In Rachel Fedock, Michael Kühler & T. Raja Rosenhagen (eds.), Love, Justice, and Autonomy: Philosophical Perspectives. Routledge. pp. 61-78.
    There is a prima facie conflict between the values of love and autonomy. How can we bind ourselves to a person and still enjoy the fruits of self-determination? This chapter argues that the solution to this conflict lies in recognizing that love is the basis of autonomy: one must love a person in order to truly appreciate their autonomy. To make this case, this chapter defends a minimalist account of love, according to which love is an agreeable sensation that is (...)
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  20. Emily Thomas (red.): Early Modern Women on Metaphysics.Oda K. S. Davanger - 2018 - Norsk Filosofisk Tidsskrift 53 (2-3):171-175.
    På mange måter er dette en bok som blir utgitt alt for sent. Det er den første antologien av sitt slag, og retter fokus på kvinnelige metafysikere som virket i den tidlige moderne perioden (16. og tidlig 17. århundre). Redaktør Emily Thomas skriver i introduksjonen at til tross for at flere antologier om moderne metafysikk allerede finnes, er kvinnelige filosofer fortsatt underrepresentert og den filosofiske kanon mannsdominert. De ni filosofene som blir omtalt i totalt 13 kapitler var alle originale og (...)
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  21. The ontological argument from Descartes to Hegel (review). [REVIEW]Graham Oppy - 2010 - Journal of the History of Philosophy 48 (2):pp. 243-245.
    Kevin Harrelson's book commences with the following words: This book provides a philosophical analysis of the several debates concerning the "ontological argument" from the middle of the seventeenth to the beginning of the nineteenth century. My aim in writing it was twofold. First, I wished to provide a detailed and comprehensive account of the history of these debates, which I perceived to be lacking in the scholarly literature. Second, I wanted also to pursue a more philosophically interesting question concerning the (...)
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  22. Axiarchism and Selectors.John Russell Roberts - 2014 - Faith and Philosophy 31 (4):412-421.
    This essay offers a defense of Axiarchism's answer to the question, "Why does the world exit?" against prominent objections leveled against it by Derek Parfit. Parfit rejects the Axiarchist answer while abstracting from it his own Selector strategy. I argue that the abstraction fails, and that even if we were to regard Axiarchism as an instance of a Selector hypothesis, we should regard it as the only viable one. I also argue that Parfit's abstraction leads him to mistake the nature (...)
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  23. (1 other version)Whichcote and the Cambridge Platonists on Human Nature: An Interpretation and Defense.John Russell Roberts - 2012 - Oxford Studies in Early Modern Philosophy VI.
    Draft version of essay. ABSTRACT: Benjamin Whichcote developed a distinctive account of human nature centered on our moral psychology. He believed that this view of human nature, which forms the foundation of “Cambridge Platonism,” showed that the demands of reason and faith are not merely compatible but dynamically supportive of one another. I develop an interpretation of this oft-neglected and widely misunderstood account of human nature and defend its viability against a key objection.
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  24. Materialism from Hobbes to Locke: by Stewart Duncan, New York, Oxford University Press, 2022, pp. 240, £ 56.00 (hb), ISBN 9780197613009. [REVIEW]Ruth Boeker - 2024 - British Journal for the History of Philosophy 32 (1):231-237.
    Stewart Duncan’s excellent book Materialism from Hobbes to Locke offers an insightful study of the debates concerning materialism during the seventeenth century. When we hear the expression ‘materialism’, we often associate with it the question of whether the human mind is an entirely material entity. Although the question of whether the human mind is material plays an important role throughout the seventeenth-century debates examined in this book, Duncan offers a broader understanding of materialism that is not restricted to the human (...)
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