Jeffrey Edwards

This work treats comprehensively seventeenth century Cambridge Platonism, but gives pride of place to the movement’s practical philosophy. The editors organize the collection of essays, composed in English and French, in such a way that the moral-theological and political theories put forward by thinkers in the Cambridge group are fully emphasized. The approach to these thinkers from the moral and political perspective allows us to see important connections between modern Platonic physics, metaphysics, and theories of knowledge that otherwise would remain obscure. In particular, that approach enables us to recognize the great extent to which both the natural and moral philosophies of the Cambridge Platonists were determined by a common concern to respond to voluntarism in its various forms.

This article takes its cue from an intriguing passage in Hume's September 1739 letter to Hutcheson. After appealing to what Cicero proves ‘against the Stoics’ in book four of De finibus, Hume indicates that he and Hutcheson are in some respect opposed to one another as far as their views on virtue and moral motivation are concerned. While this may seem surprising, given the similarities between their approaches to the foundations of morals, careful analysis of Cicero's criticism of Stoic ethics shows why Hume and Hutcheson should indeed be fundamentally at odds with one another in precisely the respect indicated by Hume.

How are we to understand Thomas Reid in relation to Bernard de Mandeville? I answer this question by considering two components of the assessment of Hume's theory of morals that Reid provides in his Essays on the Active Powers of Man: first, Reid's claim that Hume's system of morals cannot accommodate the Stoic conception of moral worth ; second, Reid's charge that Hume's account of morally meritorious action leads to an inflated and incoherent version of Epicurean virtue theory. I thus determine the character of Reid's relation to Mandeville by examining the Stoic and anti-Epicurean assumptions involved in Reid's criticism of Hume's ethics.