Denker der Frühen Neuzeit bis zu den Cambridge Platonists

This chapter provides an overview of early modern readings of Plotinus after Ficino’s translation and up to the ‘Cambridge Platonists’. Ficino’s Latin translation and commentary (1492) deeply shape the reception of Plotinus in the sixteenth century, to the point that philosophers come to regard as Plotinian doctrines which are actually characteristic of Ficino (for example, the view that a corporeal spiritus acts as the vehicle of the world soul). Early modern naturalist philosophers such as Giordano Bruno and Tommaso Campanella are representative of this approach. The situation changes with the so-called Cambridge Platonists (particularly Henry More and Ralph Cudworth), who are familiar with Perna’s edition of the Greek text (1580) and whose reception of Plotinus is shaped by debates concerning Descartes’ dualism and by their characteristic polemics against mechanism. This is particularly evident in Cudworth’s account of plastic nature (see his True Intellectual System of the Universe, 1678).