Cudworth, Ralph, 1617–88, English theologian and philosopher. He was a noted representative of the 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.
..... Click the link for more information. . Cudworth's most ambitious work, The True Intellectual System of the Universe, was never completed. The first part, a critique of atheistic materialism, appeared in 1678, and two parts were published posthumously as A Treatise concerning Eternal and Immutable Morality (1731) and A Treatise on Freewill (1838). In his works Cudworth attacked the materialistic philosophy of Hobbes and maintained the belief that moral ideas are innate in man.

Bibliography

See study by J. A. Passmore (1951).

Cudworth, Ralph

(born 1617, Aler, Somerset, Eng.—died June 26, 1688, Cambridge) English theologian and philosopher. Reared as a Puritan, he eventually adopted Nonconformist views such as the notion that church government and religious practice should be individual rather than authoritarian. He became a leader of the Cambridge Platonists. In ethics, his outstanding work is A Treatise Concerning Eternal and Immutable Morality (1731), which was directed against Puritan Calvinism, the theology of René Descartes, and the attempt by Thomas Hobbes to reduce morality to obedience to civil authority. He stressed the natural good or evil inherent in an event or act, in contrast to the Calvinist-Cartesian notion of divine law. “Things are what they are,” he wrote, “not by Will but by Nature.” See also intuitionism; voluntarism.