Cudworth, Ralph 1617-88
English philosopher and theologian

Born in Aller, Somerset, he was the leading member of the Cambridge Platonists. He became student, then Fellow, at Emmanuel College, Cambridge; Master of Clare Hall and Regius Professor of Hebrew (1645); rector of North Cadbury, Somerset (1650); and Master of Christ's College, Cambridge (1654), where he lived until his death. His monumental work, The True Intellectual System of the Universe (1678), was a systematic but unwieldy and uncompleted treatise which aimed to refute determinism and materialism and to establish the reality of a supreme divine Intelligence. An important work on ethics, directed against Thomas Hobbes, was published posthumously in 1731 as Treatise Concerning Eternal and Immutable Morality.

Bibliography: John Passmore, Ralph Cudworth (1951)