David Leech

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.

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.