David Leech

In Cudworth’s view, it is God’s love which makes morality possible, and true righteousness is not attainable by free will alone but only with the assistance of divine grace. However, he has little to say about grace in his published works. By contrast, he discusses grace at some length in a large collection of manuscript writings on the topic of free will, most of which remain unpublished (British Library Additional MSS 4978-4982). In my examination of what Cudworth has to say about divine grace in these manuscripts, I argue that despite the fact that he seeks to justify the necessary role of grace at some length in these writings, Cudworth nevertheless struggles to give a satisfactory account of why humans’ freewilled effort is only a necessary but not also a sufficient condition of the achievement of true righteousness. On this picture, it begins to look like special grace, understood as a power breaking into humans’ lives from without to assist them towards moral goodness, has become superfluous. Verbally Cudworth can claim that he preserves a necessary, and the larger, role for grace, but this is at the cost of collapsing special grace into the ‘natural’ graces (including human freewill) which God has created by his general providence.

Henry More was probably the most important English philosopher between Hobbes and Locke. Described as the 'hammer' of the Cartesians, More attacked Descartes' conception of spirit as undermining its very intelligibility. This work, which analyses an episode in the evolution of the concept of spiritual substance in early modernity, looks at More's rational theology within the context of the great seventeenth century Cartesian controversies over spirit, soul-body interaction, and divine omnipresence. This work argues that More's new, univocal spirit conception, highly influential upon Newton and Clarke, contributed unwittingly to a slow secularisation process internal to theistic culture. It thus fills a lacuna in scholarship by examining how conceptual changes in early modern metaphysics, as opposed to better researched transformations in moral philosophy, were an additional ingredient in the origins of modern speculative atheism. It also suggests that these controversies are by no means merely of historical interest but represent a resource for contemporary philosophical reflection.

This volume contains essays that examine the work and legacy of the Cambridge Platonists. The essays reappraise the ideas of this key group of English thinkers who served as a key link between the Renaissance and the modern era. The contributors examine the sources of the Cambridge Platonists and discuss their take-up in the eighteenth-century. Readers will learn about the intellectual formation of this philosophical group as well as the reception their ideas received. Coverage also details how their work links to earlier Platonic traditions. This interdisciplinary collection explores a broad range of themes and an appropriately wide range of knowledge. It brings together an international team of scholars. They offer a broad combination of expertise from across the following disciplines: philosophy, Neoplatonic studies, religious studies, intellectual history, seventeenth-century literature, women’s writing, and dissenting studies.The essays were originally presented at a series of workshops in Cambridge on the Cambridge Platonists funded by the AHRC.

Recent decades have seen the emergence of various cognitive and biological explanations of religious belief that claim to be better scientifically supported than predecessor explanations. This article provides an overview of such explanations and some of the philosophical discussions they have evoked. Contemporary naturalistic explanations of religious belief come in three types: cognitive explanations, evolutionary explanations and co‐evolutionary explanations. Some writers have claimed that scientifically plausible biological and psychological accounts of religious belief make religious belief itself irrational because they reveal the naturalness and unreliability of the mechanisms that produce religious belief. Conversely, others have argued that the possible naturalness of religious belief is not enough to make it irrational or unwarranted. They maintain that naturalistic explanations of religious belief cannot debunk religious belief wholesale, but instead their religious relevance depends on the ways in which religious people justify their beliefs. Philosophical debates are currently in their early stages, as are the naturalistic theories, and the chief philosophical stakes themselves have not yet come entirely into focus

The Cambridge Platonists mark an important juncture in Western intellectual history. Benjamin Whichcote, Ralph Cudworth, Henry More and John Smith helped shape the modern idea of selfhood and the contemporary culture of autonomy, toleration, and rights. Not only do they represent one of the great phases of the Platonic tradition, but also this group of Cambridge thinkers arguably represent a ‘Copernican revolution’ in Western moral philosophy. Attention has also been drawn to their impact on women thinkers such as Anne Conway, Damaris Masham, Catharine Macaulay, and Mary Wollstonecraft. The key aesthetic notion of ‘disinterested pleasure’ can be traced back to Cambridge Platonist influence on Shaftesbury, and their concept of Plastic Nature shaped the modern concepts of artistic creativity and genius. There is, however, a striking neglect of Cambridge Platonism in contemporary research, and there is also disagreement about the application and even the legitimacy of the category ‘Cambridge Platonism’ itself. We maintain however that ‘Cambridge Platonism’ is nevertheless a helpful category for exploring the intellectual milieu or constellation of these thinkers. This is not to say that all of the figures included in this volume belong to a tightly defined group of ‘Platonists’, but a distinctive early modern transformation of Platonism is at work among these writers, and a better understanding of the networks, intellectual and personal, of these figures is the aim of the volume.

Abstract. Although the Cognitive Science of Religion (CSR), a current approach to the scientific study of religion, has exerted an influence in the study of religion for almost twenty years, the question of its compatibility or incompatibility with theism has not been the subject of serious discussion until recently. Some critics of religion have taken a lively interest in the CSR because they see it as useful in explaining why religious believers consistently make costly commitments to false beliefs. Conversely, some theists have argued for the compatibility of religious belief with basic CSR results. In this article, we contribute to the incipient discussion about the worldview relevance of the CSR by arguing that while a theistic reading of the field only represents one interpretative option at most, antitheistic claims about the incompatibility of the CSR with theism look like they may be harder to maintain than first appearances might suggest

Cet article examine l’interprétation athée de la doctrine de l’esprit de Descartes que More propose dans ses écrits tardifs, en particulier dans l’ Enchiridion Metaphysicum de 1671 et dans des remarques éparses dans ses scholies de 1679. More n’a pas toujours pensé que la philosophie de Descartes conduisait à l’athéisme. Cependant, je suggère qu’à l’époque où il rédigeait l’ Enchiridion, il était convaincu que le cartésianisme impliquait l’athéisme au sens fort où il impliquait l’impossibilité de Dieu. Je présente les principales raisons de More à l’appui de sa lecture athée et me tourne dans une seconde partie vers son principal problème à l’égard de la doctrine de l’esprit de Descartes – ce qu’il nomme « nullibisme ». La critique du nullibisme par More est implicite dès la correspondance avec Descartes (1648-1649), mais c’est seulement dans les œuvres ultérieures et en particulier dans l’ Enchiridion qu’elle est principalement développée. J’essaie de montrer que le problème avec le nullibisme se réduit au problème avec l’autre doctrine de l’esprit inacceptable aux yeux de More – le « holenmérisme » scolastique – et que sa reductio ad atheismum de la philosophie de Descartes repose au fond sur sa façon de comprendre le holenmérisme. Or je suggère que celle-ci n’est pas charitable. À l’inverse, la doctrine de l’esprit qu’il défend – l’étendue spirituelle – échoue à surmonter les difficultés que le nullibisme et le holenmérisme cherchent, chacune de leur manière, à résoudre.

Stephen Darwall notes that for Cudworth the fundamental ethical motive is love, but that the Cambridge Platonist tells us little about love’s character, aim and object. In this article I examine Cudworth’s doctrine of ‘superintellectual instinct’ as a natural love for or inclination to the good as it takes shape in two of his unpublished freewill manuscripts. I show that in these manuscripts he assumes a threefold model of how this higher love as a natural or ‘created’ grace fits into the overall moral life of a person, together with human free will and special grace. I argue that although Cudworth adopts an Origenist synergistic position on the question of the relationship between grace and free will, stating that special grace is a necessary condition of salvation conjointly with free will and creation grace, in reality he struggles to show the strict necessity of special grace.