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).