Cudworth, Bayle and Hume: on Stratonic atheism
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.11606/issn.1517-0128.v1i38p11-24Keywords:
Atheism, Stratonism, Cudworth, Bayle, HumeAbstract
One of the most interesting debates about the reasonableness of atheistic materialism occurred between the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries after the Anglican Ralph Cudworth recovered, to confute it, an old version attributed to the peripatetic Strato of Lampsaco. This version, and Cudworth's ideas about it, reached the Continent through Jean Le Clerc, where they quickly fell under the criticism of Pierre Bayle. Bayle, in effect, shows that Cudworth's position was less solid than had been supposed and that, therefore, the Stratonic hypothesis had not been confuted at all. David Hume, for his part, took note of this debate and reused it as an important part of his Dialogues concerning Natural Religion, from where it was widely disseminated.
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