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Newton and the Cambridge Platonists

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Encyclopedia of Early Modern Philosophy and the Sciences

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Introduction

The Cambridge Platonists were a loose-knit group of philosophers and theologians in the seventeenth century, chiefly associated with Emmanuel and Christ’s Colleges in Cambridge, the two leading philosophers among them being Henry More (1614–1687) and Ralph Cudworth (1617–1688).

Newton’s library catalogue lists Cudworth’s A Discourse Concerning the True Notion of the Lord’s Supper, and we know that he studied Cudworth’s more celebrated True Intellectual System of the Universe closely, because extensive extracts from that exist among his manuscripts (see the catalogue and manuscript collection at the Newton Project, www.newtonproject.ox.ac.uk). The catalogue also lists no fewer than ten titles by More. Indeed, More is the second best represented author in Newton’s library (after only Robert Boyle), and none of the other leading figures in the Royal Society possessed more of More’s works than Newton did (Hall 1990: 277–8).

And they all moved in the same circles. When Boyle...

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. King’s College London, London, UK

    Jasper Reid

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  1. Jasper Reid
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Correspondence to Jasper Reid .

Editor information

Editors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Theoretical Philosophy, University of Bucharest, Bucharest, Romania

    Dana Jalobeanu

  2. ICUB-Humanities, University of Bucharest, Bucharest, Romania

    Dana Jalobeanu

  3. Department of Philosophy, Université de Toulouse Jean-Jaurès, Toulouse, France

    Charles T. Wolfe

Section Editor information

  1. Philosophy, University of Cincinnati, Cincinnati, OH, USA

    Zvi Biener

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Reid, J. (2022). Newton and the Cambridge Platonists. In: Jalobeanu, D., Wolfe, C.T. (eds) Encyclopedia of Early Modern Philosophy and the Sciences. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-31069-5_114

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