Cambridge Platonists

Cambridge Platonists, group of English philosophers, centered at Cambridge Univ. in the latter half of the 17th cent. In reaction to the mechanical philosophy of Thomas Hobbes this school revived certain Platonic and Neoplatonic ideas. Chief among these was a mystical conception of the soul's relation to God and the belief that moral ideas are innate in man. Although tending toward mysticism, the school also stressed the importance of reason, maintaining that faith and reason differ only in degree. The assertion of the founder of the school, Benjamin Whichcote, that "the spirit in man is the cradle of the Lord" became the motto for the entire movement. Other leading members were Ralph Cudworth, Henry More, and John Smith.

Bibliography

See G. R. Cragg, ed., The Cambridge Platonists (1968); E. Cassirer, The Platonic Renaissance in England (tr. 1953, repr. 1970).

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Cambridge Platonists

Group of 17th-century British philosophic and religious thinkers. Led by Benjamin Whichcote (1609–1683), it included Ralph Cudworth and Henry More (1614–1687) at Cambridge and Joseph Glanvill (1636–1680) at Oxford. Educated as Puritans, they reacted against the Calvinist emphasis on the arbitrariness of divine sovereignty. In their eyes, Thomas Hobbes and the Calvinists erred in making the voluntarist assumption (see voluntarism) that morality consists in obeying the will of a sovereign. Morality, they asserted, is essentially rational, and the good person's virtue is grounded in an understanding of the eternal and immutable nature of goodness, which not even God can alter through sovereign power.

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Cambridge Platonists 

a group of English religious philosophers of the second half of the 17th century who tried through Neoplatonic ideas to place Christianity on a rationalist foundation.

The leading exponents were the Cambridge professors R. Cudworth and H. More and J. Glanvill at Oxford. The Cambridge Platonists opposed the empirical and sensationalist tendency in English philosophy and struggled against it— particularly against the materialist teaching of T. Hobbes. Although they rejected the ancient Neoplatonic doctrine of emanation, substituting for it the creation of the world by god, they adhered to the Neoplatonic idea of world reason, which they regarded as the intermediary between god and the world, as unconscious “plastic nature” carrying out the will of the creator. They accepted the Cartesian critique of empiricism but rejected Descartes’s mechanistic conception of the physical world and affirmed a teleological view of nature.

REFERENCES

Istoriia filosofii, vol. 2. [Moscow] 1941. Pages 212–13.
Smirnov, A. Istoriia angliiskoi etiki, vol. 1. Kazan, 1880.
Campagnac, E. T. Cambridge Platonists. Oxford, 1901.
Cassirer, E. Die Platonische Renaissance in England und die Schule von Cambridge. Leipzig-Berlin, 1932.
Passmore, J. A. R. Cudworth. Cambridge, 1951.