The Platonic Enlightenment and the Modern Vitalists

Abstract

The historiographic category by L. Toledo “Platonic Enlightenment” notices the theoretical continuity of the platonic philosophy in the Middle Ages and Renaissance through three axes: metaphysic unity, ontological hierarchy and selfness epistemology. This article proposes to broaden the application of this category considering that the vitalist philosophers of Early Modern Philosophy Henry More, Ralph Cudworth, Joseph Glanvill and Anne Conway are representatives of Platonic Enlightenment, as well they strengthen it by the resignification of this metaphysics and epistemological categories to face the challenges of the models of experimental explanation, grounds and scope of the truth in science and the indissoluble relationship between moral virtue and epistemological virtue in Seventeenth-Century.