Ralph Cudworth

from Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Ralph Cudworth. Engraving by George Vertue after David Loggan, 1684

Ralph Cudworth (* 1617 in Aller, Somerset , † June 26, 1688 in Cambridge ) was an English philosopher and theologian. He belonged to the group of the Cambridge Platonists .

Life

Ralph Cudworth's father, also called Ralph, was a Fellow at Emmanuel College at Cambridge University and later became a pastor in Aller, a small town in Somerset. After his father's death (1624), the young Cudworth was taken over by his stepfather, Rev. Dr. John Stoughton, educated. Stoughton was strictly Calvinistic . In May 1632, Cudworth was admitted to Emmanuel College and began his university studies. In 1635 he became a Bachelor of Arts . In 1639 he obtained the degree of Master of Arts , after which he was elected a Fellow of Emmanuel College in November 1639. He was popular as a tutor ; he had 28 students, a high number for the time. Among his students was Sir William Temple , who later played an important role as a diplomat. During these years, Cudworth turned away from Calvinism. In 1645 he was appointed Master of Clare Hall (now Clare College ) by the English Parliament after his predecessor had been deposed. In October 1645, the House of Commons gave him the chair of Regius Professor of Hebrew by unanimous vote , on which he remained until his death.

Emmanuel College was then a center of a particular branch of Platonism , the representatives of which are known as the Cambridge Platonists . They included Benjamin Whichcote , John Smith , Nathaniel Culverwell, and John Worthington . Worthington was particularly close to Cudworth. On March 31, 1647, Cudworth preached a sermon in front of the House of Commons, in which he opposed what the Platonists considered excessive dogmatism of the Puritans . In 1651 he obtained the degree of doctor of theology. In 1654 he was elected a master’s degree from Christ’s College in Cambridge .

Under the reign of Lord Protector Oliver Cromwell , when England was a republic, Cudworth was a confidante of Cromwell's Secretary of State and Secretary of State John Thurloe , to whom he recommended candidates for public service positions. After the Stuart Restoration (restoration of the monarchy) in 1660, he was able to keep his position despite difficulties that arose from his activities on the inferior republican side. Because of his liberal attitude to conflicts over theological dogmas, he was counted among the "latitude men" ("Latitudinarians"), the "advocates of the broad", who advocated allowing a broad spectrum of opinion. Therefore, he was exposed to some hostility.

Cudworth died June 26, 1688; he was buried in the chapel of Christ's College. He was married and had several sons who did not survive, and a daughter Damaris († 1708), who married Sir Francis Masham and became known for her friendship with the famous philosopher John Locke .

Works

In 1642 Cudworth wrote Discourse concerning the True Notion of the Lord's Supper . In it he justified his view that the Lord's Supper should not be viewed as a sacrifice. In 1678 he published his main work, The True Intellectual System of the Universe , in which he opposed atheism and determinism . The first edition was distorted by numerous printing errors. When examining the question of God's existence and providence , he also presented in detail the philosophical and religious history background. He dealt in detail with the relevant arguments of ancient philosophers, but did not appreciate the originality of the considerations of more recent thinkers such as Thomas Hobbes and Francis Bacon and Baruch Spinoza , whom he did not name by name, but only mentioned circumscribing them. He saw the ideas of Hobbes and Spinoza as a mere renewal of ancient errors. Readers like Dryden and Shaftesbury noticed the convincing formulation of the arguments of the atheist opposing side, which Shaftesbury attributed to Cudworth's fairness. Cudworth also wrote poems and sermons. It was not until long after his death, in 1731, that his treatise A Treatise concerning Eternal and Immutable Morality appeared , in which he explains his assumption that the intellect is independent from sensory perception. Among other things, he starts from considerations of Plato in his dialogue Theaetetos . A number of other works by Cudworth also remained unprinted during his lifetime; his handwritten estate is now in the British Library . These include in particular writings on ethics and the question of free will . One of them, the treatise A Treatise of Freewill , was first published in 1838.

Teaching

Ralph Cudworth was one of the main exponents of Cambridge Platonism. He shared with the other Platonists the aversion to the theological dogmatism of the then still influential, strictly Calvinist movement among the Puritans . The Platonists advocated freedom of conscience ; they felt that a Christian way of life was more important than the correctness of the particulars of the doctrine of the faith emphasized by the Puritans. Therefore, in his homily in the House of Commons, Cudworth warned against legislation on religious matters restricting freedom of conscience. In doing so he theologically distanced himself from the Puritans, but politically he was close to them through his association with Cromwell's supporters.

Metaphysics and natural philosophy

A major goal of Cudworth was the fight against the different varieties of determinism . He turned against the mechanistic worldview of atheistic materialists , who assume that all events are determined by natural laws, and also against the theological determinism of the Calvinist doctrine of the “double predestination ” (divine predestination of man to heaven or hell). In particular, Cudworth argued against an atomistic interpretation of the world, according to which the interactions of atoms can explain all known phenomena sufficiently, so that the assumption of incorporeal substances such as a soul or God is superfluous. Although Cudworth was an atomist himself, he viewed matter as essentially passive and inert. From this arose for him the necessity of the existence of immaterial substance, which should explain the origin, the movement and the structure of material things. In his opinion, this necessity was seen in civilizations of all times and regions of the world and only contested by individual atheists, who thereby refused to accept the consensus of humanity. He interpreted polytheism as the personification of the individual attributes of the one God.

Cudworth thus shared the basic dualistic conviction of the Cartesians (followers of the teaching of René Descartes ), who distinguished between a material and an immaterial part of reality. In contrast to Descartes, however, he did not consider spatial expansion, but rather passivity as the decisive characteristic of matter and activity, not self-awareness as the characteristic of the incorporeal soul. Because of the fundamental difference between the material and the immaterial, assumed in dualism, the question arose for Cudworth as well as for Descartes, how an interaction between these two areas of total reality is possible at all. Something was needed to mediate between them. As a mediating authority between spirit soul and matter, Cudworth assumed lower immaterial forces in the soul. His system also required mediation between God and the world. His general solution to the problem of mediation consisted in assigning the mediating function to an immaterial power that did not have its own consciousness. He called this power the “plastic” (formative) nature, which orders the world in the sense of the divine intentions and aligns it with their goals. However, the question of how plastic nature can affect matter despite its immateriality remained unanswered.

The plastic nature in Cudworth's system guarantees a continuous (not, as in Descartes, only an initial) influence of God on creation. This influence is indirect, so that God does not have to arrange every detail himself. Furthermore, this model offers an explanation for empirically ascertainable imperfections in creation, because plastic nature is not omnipotent. The limits of their abilities are shown, for example, in the slowness of natural processes. This concept of a plastic nature or plastic forces corresponds to a similar idea in Henry More , the most prominent Cambridge Platonist. However, in contrast to More, Cudworth did not ascribe spatial extension to incorporeal substance and did not consider space to be infinite.

Cudworth believed that the soul cannot exist in body, but always needs a body, though not necessarily a material one. He assumed that souls that are not in a physical body have a spiritual one.

Epistemology

In his epistemology, Cudworth opposes the view of the empiricists and Aristotelians , according to which knowledge arises only as a reflection or reproduction of a reality conveyed by the sense organs and the human mind limits itself to processing the impressions flowing into it from the sense objects. Cudworth opposes this interpretation of mental activity with a Platonic model. He believes that all sensory perception relates to individual objects as such, but that knowledge can only be obtained by means of general terms (the universals or Platonic ideas ). The universals are in no way derived from the sensory perceptions, since these in themselves contain nothing that could give rise to such an abstraction if the general concept were not already known to the perceiver.

Cudworth also emphasizes the importance of the relation . In it he sees a constitutive principle of things which, however, cannot be perceived by the senses and transmitted to the intellect. Rather, the intellect produces its own concepts of the various relations only through its own activity, in that it evaluates the information supplied by the sense organs. He does not receive knowledge, but creates it deductively thanks to his corresponding disposition. It is not sensory perception that enables him to do this, but his own divine nature, which through participation has access to the divine nature that organizes the cosmos and thus also to the relationships existing there.

ethics

Among the clearly recognizable Platonic ideas, Cudworth counted the principles of ethics. In doing so, he turned against ethical relativism , of which the most prominent representative at the time was Thomas Hobbes, the main philosophical opponent of the Platonists. Hobbes viewed ideas of morally right and wrong as mere conventions. Cudworth also fought against the ethical conception of nominalist late medieval thinkers such as Wilhelm von Ockham and Pierre d'Ailly . These nominalists believed that something should be considered good or bad solely because God had decreed it so. In this sense, Descartes also argued that the determination of morally good or bad must go back to a contingent act of will of God, since otherwise ethics would have an existence independent of God. Cudworth countered such teachings, following Plato's dialogue Euthyphron, with his view that the ethical good or bad is absolutely certain as such. That is not the case because God has determined it to be so, rather God wants what is good because it is good. Since God acts according to his own nature, there is no restriction of his freedom by an external fact.

As with the other Platonists, Cudworth's defense of the concept of human free will plays a central role. He thinks that through its self-observation the soul is in a position to judge the opposing affects , the demands of conscience and the conclusions of reason. Therefore she can make decisions and act as a unified self. Thus human action is not determined by external compelling causes. Freedom does not consist in the possibility of making and implementing an arbitrary decision without external pressure, but in the ability to recognize what is objectively correct as such and to choose it. Hence, for Cudworth, sin is not the result of a conscious free will in favor of something known to be poorly known, but - in the sense of Platonic tradition - the result of failure in trying to choose the best. Accordingly, he regards vices as expressions of self-love only.

reception

From an ancient scholarly point of view, the classical philologist Richard Bentley criticized considerable deficiencies in Cudworth's handling of the ancient sources in his Epistola ad Millium ("Letter to Mill") in 1691 .

The theologian and naturalist John Ray joined the natural philosophical convictions of Cudworth and Henry More in his treatise The Wisdom of God in the Works of Creation, printed in 1691 . At the beginning of the 18th century there was a lively controversy over Cudworth's main work, in which the French philosopher Pierre Bayle claimed that The True Intellectual System of the Universe did not weaken the position of atheists, but strengthened it, because the plastic forces were there took the place of the divine world ruler. Jean Le Clerc and Cudworth's daughter took the opposite position.

The church historian Johann Lorenz von Mosheim translated Cudworth's main work into Latin. This Latin version, which appeared in Jena in 1733, contributed significantly to the European familiarity of the views of the Cambridge Platonist among scholars. In 1743 Thomas Birch published a biography of Cudworth, which was printed along with a two-volume new edition of The True Intellectual System of the Universe .

The philosopher Richard Price (1723–1791) was strongly influenced by Cudworth.

The Australian philosopher John Passmore (1914-2004) published in 1951 a study of Cudworth's teaching.

Text output

  • Bernhard Fabian (Ed.): Collected Works of Ralph Cudworth . Olms, Hildesheim 1977-1979
    • Vol. 1: The True Intellectual System of the Universe (1678) , 1977, ISBN 3-487-06009-4 (reprint of the London 1678 edition)
    • Vol. 2: A Treatise concerning Eternal and Immutable Morality (1731). A Treatise of Freewill (1838) , 1979, ISBN 3-487-06010-8 (reprint of the London editions 1731 and 1838; two Latin poems by Cudworth at the end)
  • Sarah Hutton (Ed.): Ralph Cudworth: A Treatise Concerning Eternal and Immutable Morality, with A Treatise of Freewill . Cambridge University Press, Cambridge 1996, ISBN 0-521-47362-4 (critical edition of the two tracts)
  • Ralph Cudworth: Sermon Preached Before the Honorable House of Commons at Westminster, March 31, 1647 . In: Gerald R. Cragg (Ed.): The Cambridge Platonists , University Press of America, Lanham (MD) 1968, ISBN 0-8191-4347-2 , pp. 369-407
  • Jean-Louis Breteau (Ed.): Ralph Cudworth: Additional Manuscript n ° 4981 (On the Nature of Liberum Arbitrium), Summary pp. 1-12 . In: Graham A. John Rogers et al. (Ed.): The Cambridge Platonists in Philosophical Context. Politics, Metaphysics and Religion . Kluwer, Dordrecht 1997, ISBN 0-7923-4530-4 , pp. 217-231 (first edition of a text from Cudworth's handwritten estate)

literature

Overview representations

Investigations

  • Lutz Bergemann: Ralph Cudworth - System of Transformation. On the natural philosophy of the Cambridge Platonists and their method. De Gruyter, Berlin 2012, ISBN 978-3-11-028634-2
  • Lydia Gysi: Platonism and Cartesianism in the Philosophy of Ralph Cudworth. Herbert Lang, Bern 1962
  • John A. Passmore: Ralph Cudworth. In terms of interpretation. Thoemmes, Bristol 1990 (reprinted Cambridge 1951 edition), ISBN 1-85506-019-1

Web links

Remarks

  1. ↑ For the content of the sermon see Stefan Weyer: Die Cambridge Platonists. Religion and Freedom in England in the 17th Century , Frankfurt a. M. 1993, pp. 113-118; Graham A. John Rogers: The Other-Worldly Philosophers and the Real World: The Cambridge Platonists, Theology and Politics . In: Graham A. John Rogers et al. (Ed.): The Cambridge Platonists in Philosophical Context. Politics, Metaphysics and Religion , Dordrecht 1997, pp. 3–15, here: 7 f.
  2. ^ Stefan Weyer: The Cambridge Platonists. Religion and Freedom in England in the 17th Century , Frankfurt a. M. 1993, pp. 140-143; Graham A. John Rogers: The Other-Worldly Philosophers and the Real World: The Cambridge Platonists, Theology and Politics . In: Graham A. John Rogers et al. (Ed.): The Cambridge Platonists in Philosophical Context. Politics, Metaphysics and Religion , Dordrecht 1997, pp. 3–15, here: 9.
  3. ^ British Library, Department of Manuscripts, Addit. MSS. 4978-87. See also John A. Passmore: Ralph Cudworth. An Interpretation , Cambridge 1951 (reprinted Bristol 1990), pp. 107-113.
  4. ↑ See Alain Petit: Ralph Cudworth: un platonisme paradoxal. La nature in la Digression concerning the Plastic Life of Nature . In: Graham A. John Rogers et al. (Ed.): The Cambridge Platonists in Philosophical Context. Politics, Metaphysics and Religion , Dordrecht 1997, pp. 101–110; Lydia Gysi: Platonism and Cartesianism in the Philosophy of Ralph Cudworth , Bern 1962, pp. 17-24.
  5. ^ Jean-Michel Vienne: Σχέσις et relation: Du platonisme à l'empirisme . In: Graham A. John Rogers et al. (Ed.): The Cambridge Platonists in Philosophical Context. Politics, Metaphysics and Religion , Dordrecht 1997, pp. 111–126, here: 114–121.
  6. ^ Anthony Grafton : Defenders of the Text. The Traditions of Scholarship in an Age of Science, 1450-1800 , Cambridge (Massachusetts) 1991, pp. 17-20.
  7. ↑ See also John A. Passmore: Ralph Cudworth. An Interpretation , Cambridge 1951 (reprinted Bristol 1990), pp. 103-105.
personal data
SURNAME Cudworth, Ralph
BRIEF DESCRIPTION English philosopher
DATE OF BIRTH 1617
PLACE OF BIRTH Aller (Somerset)
DATE OF DEATH June 26, 1688
Place of death Cambridge