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

ISBN-13: 9780792345305 / Angielski / Twarda / 1997 / 258 str.

G. a. Rogers; J. -M Vienne; Y. C. Zarka

Opis

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.

Recenzje

`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)

Spis treści

Abbreviations. Introduction. I. The Other-Worldly Philosophers and the Real World: The Cambridge Platonists, Theology and Politics; G.A.J. Rogers. II. Liberté et vérité: Politique et morale dans la correspondance hollandaise de More et de Cudworth; L. Simonutti. III. Critique de Hobbes et fondement de la morale chez Cudworth; Y.-C. Zarka. IV. The Heritage of Patristic Platonism in Seventeenth-Century English Philosophical Theology; D. Dockrill. V. John Smith et le portique; J. Lagrée. VI. Cudworth, Boethius and the Scale of Nature; S. Hutton. VII. Ralph Cudworth, un platonisme paradoxal: La nature dans la Digression Concerning the Plastick Life of Nature; A. Petit. VIII. Schesis et relation: Du platonisme à l'empirisme; J.-M. Vienne. IX. The Role of Illuminism in the Thought of Henry More; R. Crocker. X. `La nature est un art'. Le vitalisme de Cudworth et de More; J.-L. Breteau. XI. Force, Motion and Causality: More's Critique of Descartes; J. Cottingham. XII. Cudworth versus Descartes: Platonisme et sens commun dans la critique des Méditations; M. Baldi. XIII. Les différentes lectures du System de Cudworth par G.W. Leibniz; A. Robinet. XIV. Platonic Idealism in Modern Philosophy from Malebranche to Berkeley; S. Brown. Appendix: Additional Manuscript No. 4981 (On the Nature of Liberum Arbitrium) introduced by J.L. Breteau; R. Cudworth. Bibliography. Index. List of Contributors.