Ralph Cudworth

Ralph Cudworth (1618 to 1688) was an English philosopher at the University of Cambridge, usually counted among the Cambridge Platonists although he would not have recognised the label. Born in Somerset and educated at Emmanuel College, he rose through Cambridge during the English Civil War to become Master of Clare College and later Regius Professor of Hebrew, and he kept both posts after the Restoration. His thought joins Platonist ethics and metaphysics to an atomist account of nature. He is remembered for epistemological nativism, for an ethical idealism, for a theory of conscious and unconscious mental life, for a view of free will as a power of self-determination, and for the hypothesis of a plastic power of nature. His one work published in his lifetime was The True Intellectual System of the Universe, and much of his writing appeared only after his death.