Platonism at the Origins of Modernity: Studies on Platonism and Early Modern Philosophy (International Archives of the History of Ideas Archives ... internationales d'histoire des idées)

293 Pages·2008·1.39 MB·English

by  Douglas Hedley

PLATONISM AT THE ORIGINS OF MODERNITY
ARCHIVES INTERNATIONALES D’HISTOIRE DES IDÉES
INTERNATIONAL ARCHIVES OF THE HISTORY OF IDEAS
196
PLATONISM AT THE ORIGINS
OF MODERNITY
Studies on Platonism and Early Modern Philosophy
Edited by
Douglas Hedley • Sarah Hutton
Board of Directors:
Founding Editors:
Paul Dibon† and Richard H. Popkin†
Director:
Sarah Hutton (University of Wales, Aberystwyth)
Associate Directors:
J.E. Force (University of Kentucky, Lexington, USA);
C. Laursen (University of California, Riverside, USA)
Editorial Board:
M. Allen (Los Angeles); J.-R. Armogathe (Paris); J. Henry (Edinburgh);
J.D. North (Oxford); M. Mulsow (New Brunswick); J. Popkin (Lexington);
G.A.J. Rogers (Keele); Th. Verbeek (Utrecht)
Platonism at the Origins
of Modernity
Studies on Platonism and Early
Modern Philosophy
Edited by
Douglas Hedley
and
Sarah Hutton
A C.I.P. Catalogue record for this book is available from the Library of Congress.
ISBN 978-1-4020-6406-7 (HB)
ISBN 978-1-4020-6407-4 (e-book)
Published by Springer,
P.O. Box 17, 3300 AA Dordrecht, The Netherlands.
www.springer.com
Printed on acid-free paper
All Rights Reserved
© 2008 Springer
No part of this work may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted
in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, microfilming, recording
or otherwise, without written permission from the Publisher, with the exception
of any material supplied specifically for the purpose of being entered
and executed on a computer system, for exclusive use by the purchaser of the work.
Contents
List of Contributors .....................................................................................vii
1. Introduction ......................................................................................... 1
Sarah Hutton
2. Nicholas of Cusa (1401–1464): Platonism
at the Dawn of Modernity .................................................................... 9
Dermot Moran
3. At Variance: Marsilio Ficino, Platonism and Heresy .......................... 31
Michael J.B. Allen
4. Going Naked into the Shrine: Herbert, Plotinus
and the Constructive Metaphor .......................................................... 45
Stephen R.L.Clark
5. Comenius, Light Metaphysics and Educational Reform
(Translated by Alexandra Wörn and David Leech) ............................. 63
Jan Rohls
6. Robert Fludd’s Kabbalistic Cosmos
(Translated by Geoff Dumbreck and Douglas Hedley) ...................... 75
Wilhelm Schmidt-Biggemann
7. Reconciling Theory and Fact: The Problem of ‘Other Faiths’
in Lord Herbert and the Cambridge Platonists ................................... 93
David Pailin
v
vi Contents
8. Trinity, Community and Love: Cudworth’s
Platonism and the Idea of God ........................................................ 113
Leslie Armour
9. Chaos and Order in Cudworth’s Thought ......................................... 131
Jean-Louis Breteau
10. Cudworth, Prior and Passmore on the
Autonomy of Ethics ......................................................................... 147
Robin Attfi eld
11. Substituting Aristotle: Platonic Themes in Dutch
Cartesianism ..................................................................................... 159
Han van Ruler
12. Soul, Body and World: Plato’s Timaeus and Descartes’
Meditations ....................................................................................... 177
Catherine Wilson
13. Locke, Plato and Platonism .............................................................. 193
G.A.J. Rogers
14. Refl ections on Locke’s Platonism ...................................................... 207
Victor Nuovo
15. The Platonism at the Core of Leibniz’s Philosophy .......................... 225
Christia Mercer
16. Leibniz and Berkeley: Platonic Metaphysics
and ‘The Mechanical Philosophy’ ..................................................... 239
Stuart Brown
17. Which Platonism for Which Modernity? A Note
on Shaftesbury’s Socratic Sea-Cards ................................................. 255
Laurent Jaffro
18. Platonism, Aesthetics and the Sublime
at the Origins of Modernity .............................................................. 269
Douglas Hedley
Index of Names ........................................................................................ 283
List of Contributors
Michael J.B. Allen is a distinguished professor of English and Renaissance
Studies at UCLA and currently the President of the Renaissance Society of
America. He is an authority on the work of Marsilio Ficino.
Leslie Armour is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada and Research
Professor of Philosophy at the Dominican University College, Ottawa and
Professor Emeritus of Philosophy at the University of Ottawa. He is the author
of books on metaphysics, epistemology, logic and the history of philosophy. He
also works on problems in the philosophy of history and the social sciences
and is editor of the International Journal of Social Economics.
Robin Attfield is a Professor of Philosophy at Cardiff University. Besides works
on environmental philosophy, including The Ethics of Environmental Concern
(1983 and 1992) and Environmental Ethics (2003), he has published on ethics
and the philosophy of religion. His writings on history of philosophy include
God and The Secular (1978 and 1993) and articles on Bacon, Baxter, Bekker,
Berkeley, Clarke, Collins, Hume, Leibniz and Rousseau.
Jean-Louis Breteau is Professor of English Literature at the University of
Toulouse. He has published extensively on the Cambridge Platonists, especially
on Cudworth of whose Treatise concerning Eternal and Immutable Morality
andTreatise of Freewill he made the first French translation (1995). He edited
Millénarisme et utopie dans les pays anglo-saxons (1998) and Protestantism and
Authority (2005).
Stuart Brown was formerly Professor of Philosophy and is now Emeritus Prof essor at
the Open University. He has written extensively on early modern philosophy,
particularly on Leibniz.
vii
viii List of Contributors
Stephen R.L. Clark is Professor of Philosophy at the University of Liverpool.
His most recent book is G.K.Chesterton: Thinking Backward, Looking Forward
(2006), and he is at present working on the spiritual exercises, and ethical
theory, of Plotinus.
Douglas Hedley is Fellow and Tutor of Clare College, Cambridge and University
Senior Lecturer in the Philosophy of Religion in the Faculty of Divinity, Cambridge
University. His publications include, Coleridge, Philosophy and Religion: Aids
to Reflection and the Mirror of the Spirit (2000) and Living Forms of the
Imagination (2007).
Sarah Hutton holds a chair at the University of Wales, Aberystwyth. Her
publications include, Anne Conway. A Woman Philosopher (2004) and Newton
and Newtoniansm, co-edited with James E. Force (2004). She has edited Ralph
Cudworth’s Treatise Concerning Eternal and Immutable Morality (1996). She is
Director of the series International Archives of the History of Ideas.
Laurent Jaffro is Professor of philosophy at Blaise Pascal University in
Clermont-Ferrand, France. His publications include Ethique de la communication et
artd’écrire.Shaftesbury et les lumières anglaises (1998), Le sens moral.Une histoire
de laphilosophie morale de Locke à Kant (2000), John Toland: La Constitution
primitive de l’église chrétienne.The Primitive Constitution of the ChristianChurch
(2003).
Christia Mercer is the Gustave M. Berne Professor of the Philosophy Department,
Columbia University, the North American Editor of the Archiv für Geschichte der
Philosophie, author of Leibniz’s Metaphysics: its Origins and Development (2001),
and series editor of Oxford Historical Concepts (Oxford University Press).
Dermot Moran holds the Chair of Philosophy at University College Dublin and
is a Member of the Royal Irish Academy. His books include The Philosophy of
John Scottus Eriugena (1989), Introduction to Phenomenology (2000), andEdmund
Husserl. Founder of Phenomenology (2005). He has edited The Phenomenology
Reader, co-edited with Tim Mooney (2002), Phenomenology. Critical Concepts
in Philosophy, co-edited with Lester E. Embree (2004), and The Routledge
Companion to Twentieth-Century Philosophy (2007).
Victor Nuovo is Charles A. Dana Professor of Philosophy Emeritus at
Middlebury College, Vermont, and Senior Research Fellow at Harris Manchester
College, Oxford. He is an editor of the Clarendon Locke. His critical edition
of Locke’s Vindications of the Reasonableness of Christianity, a volume in that
series, will shortly appear.
John Rogers is the founder editor of The British Journal for the History of
Philosophy and, after Nottingham and Oxford has spent his academic career
at the University of Keele. His Locke’s Enlightenment was published in 1998.
With the late Peter Nidditch he edited for the Clarendon Edition of John Locke,
List of Contributors ix
Drafts ofthe ‘Essay Concerning Human Understanding’, and, with the late Karl
Schuhmann, he edited Hobbes’s Leviathan (2003).
Jan Rohls is Professor of Systematic and Philosophical Theology at the Ludwig
Maximilians Universität, Munich. He has written extensively on the history of
philosophy and theology. His publications include Theologie und Metaphysik
(1987) and Geschichte der Ethik (1999).
Han (J.A.) van Ruler heads the NWO project ‘From Erasmus to Spinoza’ at
Erasmus University Rotterdam. He is general editor of Texts and Sources in
Intellectual History. His publications include The Crisis of Causality: Voetius
and Descartes on God, Nature and Change (1995); The Dictionary of Seventeenth
and Eighteenth Century Dutch Philosophers, co-edited with Wiep van Bunge
(2003), and Arnold Geulincx, Ethics, with Samuel Beckett’s Notes, co-edited
with Martin Wilson (2006).
Wilhelm Schmidt Biggemann is Professor of Geschichte der Philosophie
und der Geisteswissenschaften at the Freie Universität Berlin. He directs
the Interdisciplinary Centre ‘Mittelalter, Renaissance, Frühe Neuzeit and the
Research Group (DFG) ‘Topik und Tradition’. His interests include the His-
tory of Scholarship, Philosophy of History, Philosophy of Religion, History
of Christian Kabbala. His publications include Topica universalis (1983),
Philosophia perennis (1998, English 2004), Philosophie der Gegenaufklärung
(2004),Apokalypse und Philologie (2007).
Catherine Wilson is Distinguished Professor of Philosophy and Andrew Heiskell
Research Scholar at City University New York. Her main publications include
Leibniz’s Metaphysics (l989), The Invisible World: Early Modern Philosophy and
the Invention of the Microscope (1995), Descartes’s Meditations: an Introduction.
(2003),Moral Animals: Ideals and Constraints in MoralTheory (2004).