John Worthington (1618–1671) was an English academic. He was closely associated with the Cambridge Platonists.[1][2] He did not in fact publish in the field of philosophy, and is now known mainly as a well-connected diarist.
Worthington was an active correspondent of Samuel Hartlib, the "intelligencer", in the period 1655 to 1662.[5] At Worthington's request, Hartlib's close collaborator John Dury searched in the Netherlands for the lost papers of Henry Ainsworth.[14] He shared with Hartlib and Dury (and both Henry More and John Covel) an interest in the Karaites.[15] He was also involved in the connections between Hartlib and Dury with Adam Boreel in Amsterdam, including the Boreel project to translate the Hebrew Mishnah into Latin and Spanish.[16]
After Hartlib's death, Worthington took on the task of organising his archive of correspondence, which had been bought by William Brereton, 2nd Baron Brereton.[17] After a period of nearly 300 years, the bundles into which he sorted it were rediscovered, and his system for the archive persists.[18]
Works
The Christian's Pattern: a translation of the De Imitatione of Thomas à Kempis (1654)
John Smith, Selected Discourses (London, 1660) editor
Life of Joseph Mede with third edition of Mede's Works (1672)
The Great Duty of Self-Resignation to the Divine Will (1675)
The Diary and Correspondence of Dr. John Worthington, 2 vols. (1847–86, Chetham Society), editor James Crossley
Notes
^Hutton, Sarah (1 August 2013). "The Cambridge Platonists". In Zalta, Edward N. (ed.). The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. Metaphysics Research Lab, Stanford University – via Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy.
^Matt Goldish, Judaism in the Theology of Sir Isaac Newton: International Archives of the History of Ideas (1998), p. 23.
^see Popkin, Richard H., “Hartlib, Dury and the Jews,” in M. Greengrass, M. Leslie, and T. Raylor, eds., Samuel Hartlib and Universal Reformation: Studies in Intellectual Communication, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1994, pp. 118-136; cf. pp. 122-123.
^Michael Hunter, Archives of the Scientific Revolution: The Formation and Exchange of Ideas in Seventeenth-century Europe (1998), p. 40.