Jasper Reid 
The Metaphysics of Henry More 

The book surveys the key metaphysical contributions of the Cambridge Platonist, Henry More (1614–1687). It deals with such interwoven topics as: the natures of body and spirit, and the question of whether or not there is a sharp ontological division between them; the nature of spatial extension in relation to each; the composition and governance of the physical world, including More’s theories of Hyle, atoms, vacuum, and the Spirit of Nature; and the life of the human soul, including its pre-existence. It approaches these topics and the systematic connections between them both historically and analytically, and seeks to do justice to the ways in which More’s system developed and changed—sometimes quite dramatically—over the course of his long career. It also explores More’s intellectual relations with both his own inspirations (Plotinus, Origen, Ficino, Descartes, etc.) and with those who responded, whether positively or negatively, to his work (Leibniz, Locke, Boyle, Newton, etc.).

Table of Content

1. Introduction.- 1.1. The Place of Henry More in Seventeenth-Century Thought.- 1.2. More’s Goals, Targets and Influences.- 1.3. Epistemology and Rhetoric.- 2. Atoms and Void.- 2.1. Background.- 2.2. Henry More on Atoms.- 2.3. The Void.- 2.4. The Extension of the Universe, and Extramundane Void.- 2.5. Impenetrability.- 2.6. Atomic Shape. 3. Hyle, Atoms and Space.- 3.1. Background.- 3.2. Hyle, Atoms and Space in More’s Philosophical Poems.- 3.3. More’s Equivocation on the Nature of Hyle, 1653–1662.- 3.4. More’s Mature Conception of Hyle.- 4. Real Space.- 4.1. Background.- 4.2. The Immobility of the Parts of Space I: More’s Cylinder.- 4.3. The Immobility of the Parts of Space II: The Reciprocity of Motion.- 4.4. What Space Could Not Be.- 4.5. The Reception of More’s Theories of Space.- 5. Spiritual Presence.- 5.1. Background: Holenmerianism and Nullibism.- 5.2. More’s Refutation of Nullibism.- 5.3. More and Holenmerianism.- 5.4. Time and Eternity.- 6. Spiritual Extension.- 6.1. Introduction.- 6.2. Indiscerpibility.- 6.3. Penetrability.- 6.4. Self-penetration, Essential Spissitude, and Hylopathia.- 6.5. Divine Real Space.- 6.6. Divine Space before and after Henry More.- 7. Living Matter.- 7.1. Life and Soul.- 7.2. Gradual Monism in More’s Philosophical Poems.- 7.3. Life and Causation in the More-Descartes Correspondence.- 7.4. More’s Subsequent Reversal: the Case of Francis Glisson.- 7.5. Anne Conway and Francis Mercury van Helmont.- 7.6. The Eagle-Boy-Bee.- 7.7. More–Conway–van Helmont–Leibniz.- 8. Mechanism and its Limits.- 8.1. Introduction.- 8.2. Mechanism in More’s Early Works.- 8.3. The Limits of Mechanism: Some Case Studies.- 8.4. ‘Mixed Mechanics’.- 8.5. The Fate of the Mechanical Philosophy: Boyle, Newton and beyond.- 9. The Spirit of Nature.- 9.1. Background.- 9.2. Psyche, Physis, the Mundane Spright, and the Spirit of the World.- 9.3. The Spirit of Nature, and Particular Spirits.- 9.4. Occasionalism and Bungles.- 9.5. The Fate of the Spirit of Nature.- 10. The Life of the Soul.- 10.1. The Pre-Existence of the Soul.- 10.2. The Immortality of the Soul, and Aerial and Aethereal Vehicles.- 10.3. The Animal and Divine Lives.- 10.4. The Fall and Rise of the Soul.- Editions Cited.

About the author

Jasper Reid studied philosophy at Cambridge and Princeton, and is now a lecturer in philosophy at King’s College London. His main area of research is in the history of philosophy of the early modern period, particularly on the metaphysical and epistemological side. He has written on a number of figures from that period, including Henry More, Descartes, Malebranche, Berkeley and Jonathan Edwards; and on a number of themes, including space, immaterialism, and early modern philosophy of mathematics.