Is God a mindless vegetable? Cudworth on stoic theolog

Sellars, John (2011) Is God a mindless vegetable? Cudworth on stoic theolog. Intellectual History Review 21 (2), pp. 121-133. ISSN 1749-6977.

Abstract

In the late sixteenth century a number of influential writers claimed Stoicism to be compatible with Christianity but by the mid eighteenth century, Stoicism had come to be associated with atheism. What happened during the course of the reception of Stoicism in the intervening period? While it remains unclear who was the first person to call the Stoics atheists, there is no doubt that the most philosophically sustained analysis of Stoic theology during this period is to be found in Ralph Cudworth's True Intellectual System of the Universe, published in 1678. Cudworth's aim in this work is to catalogue and then attack all existing forms of atheism and one of the four principal forms of atheism he identifies he calls ‘Stoical’. However, in Cudworth's complex taxonomy of different forms of theism and atheism, Stoicism appears twice, first as a form of atheism but also as a form of imperfect theism. The aim of this study is to examine Cudworth's claims about Stoic theology, assessing their fairness, but also placing them within the wider context of the early modern reception of Stoicism.

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• Is God a mindless vegetable? Cudworth on stoic theology. (deposited 26 Oct 2012 08:25)
  • Is God a mindless vegetable? Cudworth on stoic theolog. (deposited 16 Sep 2013 08:32) [Currently Displayed]

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