{"id":571,"date":"2018-03-09T11:21:34","date_gmt":"2018-03-09T09:21:34","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/cprg.hypotheses.org\/?p=571"},"modified":"2018-06-21T22:44:04","modified_gmt":"2018-06-21T20:44:04","slug":"571","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/cprg.hypotheses.org\/571","title":{"rendered":"Some earlier reflections on Cudworth’s Platonic credentials"},"content":{"rendered":"

(By David Leech)<\/strong><\/p>\n

As I noted in my last blog, the term \u2018Cambridge Platonism\u2019 is a British mid-nineteenth century coinage, but our research is indicating that the category preexists it, since there is a tradition of picking out at least Cudworth, More and Whichcote as Platonists-from-Cambridge since the 1730s (and perhaps further back). How did authors in this tradition characterize the Platonism of these figures they picked out as \u2018Platonists\u2019?<\/p>\n

In the case of Cudworth, Johann Jakob Brucker characterises him as a Platonist in his Kurtze Fragen aus der Philosophischen Historie<\/em> of 1735 (as had Johann Lorenz Mosheim shortly before). In a chapter entitled \u2018Were there also admirers of the Platonic philosophy in the seventeenth century?\u2019, he distinguishes explicitly between those who took a merely historical interest in the \u2018system\u2019 of Platonism – he deals with these authors in a separate chapter – and those who actually embraced Platonic principles (\u2018die Platonische principia hochgehalten haben\u2019 (656)). Brucker includes in this class\u00a0<\/strong>Jan Marek Marci\u00a0(1595-1667), but also notes that the \u2018Platonic theology\u2019 especially found patrons in Cambridge, mentioning in particular (Theophilus) Gale, Cudworth, and More. Of Cudworth, he notes that in natural philosophy he embraced atomism, but in metaphysics and theology he followed Plato and the later Platonists, especially Plotinus, noting a Platonic influence on his doctrines of the Trinity and plastic nature (662-663).<\/p>\n

But Brucker\u2019s characterisation of Cudworth as a Platonist is a mere sketch. By contrast, in a later engagement with Cudworth in Johann Gottlieb Buhle\u2019s Geschichte der neuern Philosophie seit der Epoche der Wiederherstellung der Wissenschaften<\/em> (1801) the author goes to greater efforts to characterize the nature of his Platonism. In a chapter entitled \u2018The history of Platonism in England in the seventeenth century\u2019, Buhle, whose principal sources are Brucker and Mosheim, provides a fairly lengthy summary of Cudworth\u2019s\u00a0distinctive philosophical positions, noting his Platonic credentials in\u00a0particular, namely: that his plastic nature is identical with the Platonic world soul (666); that the essences of things are eternal and these are the Ideas, therefore a thinking substance\u00a0containing these Ideas must have eternally existed (669); that his defence against Hobbes of the existence of innate ideas came out of the\u00a0\u2018Platonic school\u2019 in which he had been formed (670-671)); and his theory\u00a0about the origin and nature of knowledge was also Platonic (672). In fact Buhle says that Cudworth\u2019s entire\u00a0philosophy is, in its essentials, Platonism (‘in der Hauptsache, barer Platonismus\u2019 (672)).<\/p>\n

Buhle, seeking to\u00a0distinguish Cudworth\u2019s position from the Kantian one, argues that the\u00a0identity of Cudworth\u2019s\u00a0philosophical system with the Platonic (\u2018die Identitaet des Cudworthischen und Platonischen Systems\u2019) can be seen in the fact that the Platonists also suppose a world of Ideas\u00a0which exists in the divine intellect, and the\u00a0sensible\u00a0world is created on their model, as well as that the ideas in humans minds have their origin from them (672). He also notes the\u00a0\u2018unmistakable\u2019 influence of the Platonic\u00a0philosophy on Cudworth\u2019s moral philosophy, namely, that he derives the eternal and immutable moral system from the mind of God, which is superior to and determines God\u2019s wisdom, which in turn determines his will (673); and that human goodness participates in the divine goodness (674).<\/p>\n

However, he also notes his disagreement with his colleague Christoph Meiner who denied that Cudworth\u2019s moral philosophy is identical with the Platonic one, and identified it\u00a0instead with Kant\u2019s practical philosophy. But contra<\/em> Meiner, Buhle – slightly\u00a0repetitively by this point – argues that Plato supposes that the objective Ideas of\u00a0sensible objects exist in the divine intellect; that the divine will is\u00a0determined by these; and they are also that by\u00a0which the human will should be\u00a0determined, insofar as human minds participate in the divine Ideas and therefore contain the ideas of the good, the right etc. But (he argues) this is also\u00a0exactly what Cudworth teaches, and also, if any concept is distinctive of a Platonic position it is participationism, but Cudworth is fully participationist (675). He observes that Cudworth accepted certain (unnamed) \u2018modifications\u2019 which Neoplatonists (\u2018Neuplatoniker\u2019) made to Platonism, and differs from Platonism only in the obvious respect that he harmonised\u00a0it with Christianity (677).<\/p>\n

Buhle\u00a0further observes that it is precisely due to these Platonic commitments that he\u00a0differs from Kant. This is true, he thinks, in the following respects: his moral philosophy is not<\/em> purely formal (\u2018bloss formal\u2019); that like Plato but unlike Kant, he is relatively obscure about the content of the\u00a0moral good, comparing the highest good in God with the kabbalistic notion of the\u00a0\u2018crown\u2019 (keter) of divinity (677); that he lacks a doctrine of the categorical imperative;\u00a0that the Cudworthian reason is not an autonomous law-setter independent of God; and that unlike Kant he has a theory of ideas and which does a lot of philosophical work for him (the list goes on).<\/p>\n

This early tradition of calling Cudworth a Platonist does not settle the more general question of whether it is appropriate to use the category of Cambridge Platonism, but it does show at a minimum that the category predates the British mid-nineteenth century. A similar account can be given of More\u2019s Platonism, but I will pick this up in a separate blog devoted to him.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

(By David Leech) As I noted in my last blog, the term \u2018Cambridge Platonism\u2019 is a British mid-nineteenth century coinage, but our research is indicating that the category preexists it, since there is a tradition of picking out at least Cudworth, More and Whichcote as Platonists-from-Cambridge since the 1730s (and perhaps further back). How did … Continue reading Some earlier reflections on Cudworth’s Platonic credentials<\/span> →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":19837,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_license":"","publish_to_discourse":"","publish_post_category":"","wpdc_auto_publish_overridden":"","wpdc_topic_tags":"","wpdc_pin_topic":"","wpdc_pin_until":"","discourse_post_id":"","discourse_permalink":"","wpdc_publishing_response":"","wpdc_publishing_error":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[69461],"tags":[],"ppma_author":[2460576],"class_list":["post-571","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-billets"],"authors":[{"term_id":2460576,"user_id":19837,"is_guest":0,"slug":"cprg","display_name":"David Leech","avatar_url":"https:\/\/secure.gravatar.com\/avatar\/2d93d39b4cd4070fd47c7fbc1ff8bd73991a91866e634b708a9d8898b05d66e6?s=96&d=blank&r=g","1":"","2":"","3":"","4":"","5":"","6":"","7":"","8":""}],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/cprg.hypotheses.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/571","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/cprg.hypotheses.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/cprg.hypotheses.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cprg.hypotheses.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/19837"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cprg.hypotheses.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=571"}],"version-history":[{"count":6,"href":"https:\/\/cprg.hypotheses.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/571\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":583,"href":"https:\/\/cprg.hypotheses.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/571\/revisions\/583"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/cprg.hypotheses.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=571"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cprg.hypotheses.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=571"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cprg.hypotheses.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=571"},{"taxonomy":"author","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cprg.hypotheses.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/ppma_author?post=571"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}