This chapter provides a basic introduction to Cambridge Platonism and its four central figures: Benjamin Whichcote (1609–83), Ralph Cudworth (1617–88), John Smith (c. 1618–52) and Henry More (c. 1614–87). Beginning with brief biographies of the Cambridge Platonists and an outline of the Civil War background to their intellectual development, the chapter then moves to a consideration of the contested nature of Cambridge Platonism in contemporary scholarship. Were Whichcote, More, Cudworth and Smith aligned enough biographically and intellectually to warrant grouping them together as architects of a shared philosophical school of thought? After reviewing several recent arguments to the contrary, the main argument of the book is laid out: Anthony Tuckney’s 1651 correspondence with Whichcote contains important evidence that Whichcote, Cudworth, Smith and More were known to their Cambridge contemporaries as proponents of a distinctive set of philosophical positions clearly inspired by Platonism.

This chapter considers whether and in what way Whichcote, More, Cudworth and Smith can be called ‘Platonists’. Was Platonism a part of the story they told about themselves, or that their contemporaries told about them, or is it simply an anachronistic label invented by modern scholarship? I argue that ‘Platonism’ was a live intellectual category in the Cambridge Platonists’ seventeenth-century philosophical and theological context and denoted a particular set of doctrinal positions which were associated with ancient Platonism, such as the primacy of God’s goodness over his will. The chapter also investigates evidence of a surge of interest in ancient and Renaissance Platonism at Cambridge in the latter half of the 1630s, centred at Emmanuel College, which included John Sadler, Peter Sterry and Laurence Sarson and also coincides with Henry More’s discovery of Platonism, and Cudworth’s early Platonic letters to John Stoughton. It is argued that these developments provide important context for the origins of Cambridge Platonism, and illuminate the ways in which Whichcote, More, Cudworth and Smith’s intellectual development was shaped by engagement with Platonic texts and ideas.

This chapter provides important background for the 1651 correspondence between Anthony Tuckney and Benjamin Whichcote via an examination of a local Cambridge controversy sparked by the radical anti-Calvinist preacher John Goodwin, drawing especially on a little-known satirical account of Ralph Cudworth’s 1651 Commencement Disputation. When the disruptions of the civil war propelled the anti-Calvinists Whichcote, Cudworth, Smith and Worthington to new positions of authority in the university alongside their Calvinist teachers such as Anthony Tuckney, Thomas Hill and John Arrowsmith, a theological fault line emerged that split the university leadership down the middle. Primary sources around the Goodwin controversy at Cambridge indicate that Cudworth, Smith and Whichcote were widely known in the university community as close theological allies of Whichcote, who shared his anti-Calvinist convictions. These sources demonstrate that the Cambridge Platonists were part of a broader anti-Calvinist network at Cambridge, providing essential context for the distinctive Platonic anti-Calvinism which this book argues they developed in tandem.