News and events

Philosophy Meets Theology: a Day Symposium and Debate

Re-Thinking the Ethics of State Punishment: Philosophy, Theology and Penal Theory

The 3rd Annual McDonald Symposium in Theological Ethics at Cambridge. See the programme for the symposium.

The Cambridge Platonists arguably constitute the single most important group of Christian Neoplatonic thinkers between the fifteenth century Florentine Renaissance and the Romantic period.

Douglas Hedley has been awarded an AHRC grant for funding three international workshops held at Clare College, Cambridge in order to explore the intellectual constellation of these decisive thinkers who stand at the threshold of the modern age.

These thinkers, who were the first self-consciously Platonic philosophers to confront modern science, exerted a decisive influence upon what is now seen as Cambridge theology in the nineteenth century through figures like S. T. Coleridge, F.D. Maurice, Westcott and Hort, and Charles Raven and W.R. Inge in the twentieth.

They also had a lesser known seminal influence on women thinkers such as Conway, Masham, Macauley, and Wollstonecraft, and their momentous impact via the British Dissenting tradition on the development of the discourse of
women's rights has just started to be appreciated.

The key aesthetic notion of 'disinterested pleasure' can be traced back to
Cambridge Platonist influence, and from them we have derived basic terms in the philosophy of religion such as 'materialism',
'monotheism', 'philosophy of religion', and 'Cartesianism'. Distinguished speakers at the first two workshops have included John Marenbon, Stephen Gersh, Charles Taliaferro, Martine Pécharman, Stephen Clark, and Dan Garber.

"Constructive Idioms for a Post-Secular Spirituality."
A series of discussions, lectures and events responding to the challenge of privatised spirituality in a post-secular age, organised by Graduates within the Faculty. For more information, visit their website.