This new edition of Dr. Alexander Jacob's translation of Henry More’s refutation of Spinoza’s Ethics restores to view a significant episode in the history of early modern philosophy: the Cambridge Platonist response to the materialist bases of Spinoza’s system. Dr. Jacob's edition reviews More’s philosophical development from his early poetic Platonism to his mature metaphysical writings and situates More's critique of Spinoza within the broader intellectual context of his Neoplatonic spiritualism, his engagement with Descartes, and his defense of the reality of spiritual substance against mechanistic accounts of nature. The new edition also provides an appendix of passages from More’s Enchiridion Metaphysicum that clarify More's conception of spiritual substance.This volume thus provides historians of philosophy with a detailed framework for assessing Henry More’s significance in the early modern debates on materialism, mechanism, and the nature of spirit.

Alexander Jacob is a scholar of the history of ideas whose work spans early modern philosophy, political thought, and the history of religion. Born in Madras, India, he studied English Literature at the University of Leeds and earned his Ph.D. in the History of Ideas from Pennsylvania State University. He subsequently conducted research at the University of Toronto as a Visiting Fellow. Jacob has published widely on Cambridge Platonism and related traditions and is the editor of Henry More's The Immortality of the Soul (1987), Henry More's Manual of Metaphysics (1995) and A Platonick Song of the Soul (1998).