Damaris Cudworth Masham

Damaris Cudworth Masham
Born	18 January 1659 Cambridge, England
Died	20 April 1708(1708-04-20) (aged 49) London, England
Nationality	English
Era	17th-/18th-century philosophy
Region	Western Philosophy
Main interests	metaphysics, logic, theodicy, universal language
Influences Holy Scripture, Plato, Aristotle, Plotinus, Augustine of Hippo, Scholasticism, Thomas Aquinas, Nicholas of Cusa, Suárez, Giordano Bruno, Descartes, Hobbes, Pico della Mirandola, Jakob Thomasius, Gassendi, Malebranche, Spinoza, Bossuet, Pascal, Huygens, J. Bernoulli, Weigel, Thomasius, G. Wagner, Steno, Llull,Confucius
Influenced John Locke, C. Wolff, Tetens, Maupertuis, Vico, Platner, Boscovich, Bonnet, Diderot, Hume, Husserl, Kant, G. Wagner, Bonald, Russell, Howison, Varisco, Chaitin, Gödel, Heidegger, LaRouche, du Châtelet, F. G. Frobenius, Nietzsche, Ravaisson, Bergson, Rescher, Deleuze, Tarde, Adorno

Damaris Cudworth, Lady Masham (18 January 1659 – 20 April 1708) was an English theological writer and advocate for women's education who is characterized as a proto-feminist. She overcame some weakness of eyesight and lack of access to formal higher education to win high regard among eminent thinkers of her time. With an extensive correspondence, she published two works, A Discourse Concerning the Love of God (1696) and Thoughts in reference to a Vertuous or Christian Life (1705). She is particularly noted for her long, mutually-influential friendship with the philosopher John Locke.

Damaris Cudworth was born on 18 January 1659, daughter of Damaris and Ralph Cudworth junr., D.D., five years after her father had become Master of Christ's College in the University of Cambridge, a position he occupied for the rest of his life. Distinguished classicist and Professor of Hebrew, Dr. Cudworth was educated during the 1630s in the non-conforming environment of Emmanuel College. Both his father (died 1624) and his stepfather, the clergyman John Stoughton (died 1639), had previously studied and held Fellowships there, and had successively held the college living or Rectory of Aller (Somerset), where Ralph was born. He became a leading figure of the Cambridge Platonist School, and poured immense erudition and originality into his great work, The True Intellectual System of the Universe, only the first very substantial part of which came to readiness by 1671 and publication in 1678. Overtly a refutation of atheistic determinism, his work evolved in critique of aspects of Calvinist theology, in the light of his near-contemporary René Descartes, and in opposition to Thomas Hobbes.

Lady Masham had full brothers John (undergraduate and later Fellow at Christ's College between 1672 and 1684), Charles and Thomas. Her mother Damaris, daughter of Damaris and Mathew Cradock of London (d. 1641), was first married to London merchant citizen Thomas Andrewes (d. 1653) (son of the Commonwealth Lord Mayor of London Sir Thomas Andrewes), by whom there were several half-brothers and sisters. Her mother's stepmother Rebeccah, relict of Mathew Cradock, secondly married the Emmanuel College Platonist Benjamin Whichcote, whose niece married her father's friend John Worthington in 1657.