The Cambridge Platonists
1 total work
The Cambridge Platonists occupy a particular place in 17th-century European intellectual history for they were active precisely at that moment when the modern world view was being created and to which they were important contributors. Their concern was to foster new knowledge, as exemplified by the natural sciences, from within a religious and more specifically a Christian neoplatonic framework. Their enemy was the materialism of Thomas Hobbes and the slide towards materialism which they also came to detect in Descartes and other contemporaries. Through their writings they encouraged an atmosphere in which both the natural sciences and religious belief could flourish as the two most potent exemplifications of the power of the rational intellect. The two most important members of the school philosophically were Ralph Cudworth and Henry More. Together they set out to defeat both materialism and atheism by showing that the explanations of the atomistic philosophers required also a spiritual element, which was itself supported by both reason and observation.
Their works remain classic texts of liberal protestant Christian philosophy, and are useful for a full understanding of the relationship between the natural sciences, religion and philosophy in the period from Galile to Newton. Probably one of the most influential of the Cambridge Platonists, this is a collection of Henry More's most important writings and also his biography. The contents include "An Antidote Against Atheism, or An Appeal to the Natural Faculties of the Minde of Man, Whether There Be Not a God" (1655).
Their works remain classic texts of liberal protestant Christian philosophy, and are useful for a full understanding of the relationship between the natural sciences, religion and philosophy in the period from Galile to Newton. Probably one of the most influential of the Cambridge Platonists, this is a collection of Henry More's most important writings and also his biography. The contents include "An Antidote Against Atheism, or An Appeal to the Natural Faculties of the Minde of Man, Whether There Be Not a God" (1655).