Ралф Кадуърт и неговата роля в историята на моралната философия през ранната модерна епоха

Abstract

Sarah Hutton, renowned scholar of Ralph Cudworth’s philosophy in the present day, notes that Cudworth himself has constructed a conception of the human mind that lies at the root of most fully developed philosophical psychology that a representative of Seventeenth-Century Cambridge Platonists has ever endowed in the terms of his own intellectual heritage. Cudworth had turned his attention to the philosophical tradition of Platonism, especially to the Plotinus’ Enneads, to have developed the same philosophical psychology distinguished by its notion of the soul like self-determining entity having many faculties: intellectual, vital, and moral. On account of this state of affairs Hutton presumes that it is rightfully to think Cudworth undoubtedly to have carried out real theory of mind that has yielded explanations about discernible experience in relation to the human mental states. Hutton rightly thinks on account of that statement that the definitions of the essence of the soul Plotinus has presented in his Enneads, IV, are substantial part of Cudworth’s philosophical psychology that places emphasis on the notion of the soul like self-determining and ruling entity in the realm of mental processes in human vital experience. That soul according to Cudworth can in the same time sympathize with the phenomena of this experience. Here I propose discussion on these issues. I posit that Cudworth had relied on his notion of the soul when he had developed his own epistemology in relation to the conception of morality and freewill that he had been working out. Accordingly I maintain that the moral philosophy of Cudworth within this frame of reference has had its influence on the further development of the moral philosophy in Britain.