Ralph Cudworth Biography

(born 1617, Aler, Somerset, Eng.—died June 26, 1688, Cambridge) English theologian and philosopher. Reared as a Puritan, he eventually adopted Nonconformist views such as the notion that church government and religious practice should be individual rather than authoritarian. He became a leader of the Cambridge Platonists. In ethics, his outstanding work is A Treatise Concerning Eternal and Immutable Morality (1731), which was directed against Puritan Calvinism, the theology of René Descartes, and the attempt by Thomas Hobbes to reduce morality to obedience to civil authority. He stressed the natural good or evil inherent in an event or act, in contrast to the Calvinist-Cartesian notion of divine law. “Things are what they are,” he wrote, “not by Will but by Nature.” intuitionism; voluntarism.

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