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10 - Liberty, Violence and Practical Reason:

Moral Obligation and the Law of Love

from Part III - The Religious Epistemology of the Cambridge Platonists

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  09 May 2024

Samuel M. Kaldas
Affiliation:
The University of Sydney and The University of Notre Dame Australia
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Summary

The Cambridge Platonists’ philosophy of religion might be summed up as a tension between their commitment to the fixed nature of reason and goodness on the one hand and a commitment to freedom and distaste for all forms of tyranny and imposition on the other. This last chapter contends that the Cambridge Platonists not only acknowledge this tension, but embrace it, revelling in the paradoxical way that absolute fixedness and absolute freedom come together at the highest levels of being. This is made possible by what Stephen Darwall (writing specifically of Cudworth) has identified as an early theory of ‘practical reason’. This Platonic theory of practical reason draws together all the elements of the Cambridge Platonists’ outlook considered in earlier chapters – moral realism, divine communicative intent, and participatory epistemology, illustrating the extent to which this Platonic outlook binds together not only the thought of Whichcote, More, Cudworth and Smith but also runs through each of their views on different philosophical topics such as obligation, freedom and pedagogy.

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The Cambridge Platonists and Early Modern Philosophy
Inventing the Philosophy of Religion
, pp. 269 - 285
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2024

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