This chapter contains sections titled: New Atheist Definitions of God The Supremely Good God of Traditional Theism Non‐Substantive Definitions of “God” The Ethico‐Religious Hope God: The Ethico‐Religious Hope Fulfilled Continuity from the Ancients: Plutarch and Zoroaster Concluding Remarks.

If one were to arrange the history of the ideas of violence and aggression in periods, the first would be that in which such evils were accepted as an integral part of cosmic history. I refer to what we know of Zoroastrianism. According to this complex of ideas there is a constant battle going on between the forces of evil and those of good, a battle whose ground extended to the limits of the universe. Little if anything is known (...) of the sources of this cosmology but judging from appearances it looks as if they were the frank acceptance of the empirical observation that evil is an active force, autonomous and normally present in all human affairs. History would seem to be the result of an ever-living struggle between evil and the good. That the two sets of contradictory forces are given divine names, Ahura-Mazda and Ahriman, is of no importance here. What is of importance is the acceptance of the evil powers as something inevitable and the relegation of the triumph of goodness to the infinitely remote future. (shrink)

The author of The Marketing of Evil and managing editor of WorldNetDaily.com explains the destructive forces at work in the U.S.

Roger Kennedy has written a masterful investigation into the concept of evil. He begins with a general view of the subject before moving into more detailed analysis. First is a review of the science of evil, including evidence from neuroscience and social psychology. This is followed by psychoanalytical studies of the individual and groups before presenting an overview of the philosophy of evil. Also included are historical and social studies which inform an understanding of evil in (...) action. Kennedy goes on to examine the nature of genocide using a main focus on the Holocaust and of slavery. Both of these "journeys to evil" remain relevant for understanding contemporary society and issues. The Nazi past continues to disturb and resonate decades on. The politics and social fabric of Western society was reliant on slavery as a foundation of economic wealth and is haunted by its inability to process the harsh reality of slavery and its continuing after-effects. Kennedy moves from there to a discussion on the genius of Shakespeare and his encapsulation of the essential features of how evil can develop and take over a person's inner world. The book concludes with a summary of the main themes and a look at those who have resisted evil and what we can learn from them if we are to build a society that can resist the forces of evil. The book is informed by a psychoanalytic approach, with its emphasis on the power and influence of unconscious processes underlying human actions, and on the role of inner conflicting and elemental fears and anxieties often driving individual and group behaviours. It brings fresh insight to an eternal discourse. (shrink)

Zurvanism was an ancient variant of Zoroastrianism. According to Zurvanism, the great powers of good and evil, Ahura Mazda and Angra Mainyu, were the sons of a greater god Zurvan, associated with time. According to Eudemus of Rhodes, some Persian thinkers, presumably Zurvanists, took there to be three great principles underlying the world: light, darkness, and greatest of all time (or perhaps, according to Eudemus, space). This paper explores what metaphysics might underlie these doctrines, and what contemporary (...) options we have for making sense of a metaphysics where time is the ultimate principle. Among the options explored is the option that despite appearance many of the entities of the concrete world are identical to stretches of time, or are somehow aspects of stretches of time; that they include times as parts, or are included in times as parts; that they are somehow properties of time; or hylomorphic compounds of which time is the matter; that the world is somehow a mixture of time, light, and dark; or that somehow the ends or teloi of everyday objects and processes are to be found among good, evil, and time. (shrink)

The concept of time is an integral part of any religious and philosophical system. It creates a universal cognitive strategy: seeing the world in its change and development, finding temporary relationships and order in everything. In Iranian mythology, where the cult of time was highly developed, time was personified by the higher deity Zurvan, who initially was imagined as an endless time, eternity, existing at the beginning of the universe, and then, in the latter part of the "Avesta" takes an (...) image of the final, natural, world time, who forecasts not only its beginning, but the end, death. Zurvan Akarana in Zoroastrianism - is unlimited Time or Eternity; one of the two primary forces that are mentioned in "Avesta" and "Yasna". Zurvan - is the Сreator who did not make a creation. He is only the foundation, the idea that gives impulse, like an explosion. It is similar to the concept of "dharma" in the Indian tradition, the "Logos" of Heraclites, the law by which the universe exists. Helps to the time, the main essence of space is the duration, the matter has the opportunity to come into effect. Late Avesta makes a distinction between endless time and time, which has a long duration, but finite. Later theologians interpreted endless time as eternity of being, and a long time was regarded as the duration of the world, which was created and will have an end. These ideas can be correlated with ideas that later we can find in Christianity, that person has a freedom of choice, and even later - in Islam, that person's fate is determined in advance. But Zoroastrianism is talking about the same thing, the fate of this material world in which evil is present is determined in advance, but in the world of Ahura Mazda person has the right to choose and there will get whatever deserves. The unconditional departure from mythological beliefs is also the idea of the linearity of time that we meet in Zoroastrianism and which later gets its continuation in Christianity. But in Zoroastrianism time is endless, and therefore is reversible and linear, and therefore simultaneously is irreversible. (shrink)

The most common argument against negative utilitarianism is the world destruction argument, according to which negative utilitarianism implies that if someone could kill everyone or destroy the world, it would be her duty to do so. Those making the argument often endorse some other form of consequentialism, usually traditional utilitarianism. It has been assumed that negative utilitarianism is less plausible than such other theories partly because of the world destruction argument. So, it is thought, someone who finds theories (...) in the spirit of utilitarianism attractive should not go for negative utilitarianism, but should instead pick traditional utilitarianism or some other similar theory such as prioritarianism. I argue that this is a mistake. The world destruction argument is not a reason to reject negative utilitarianism in favour of these other forms of consequentialism, because there are similar arguments against such theories that are at least as persuasive as the world destruction argument is against negative utilitarianism. (shrink)

In The Man Problem, Ross Honeywill posits that the potential for evil in all men is the social, political, and economic problem of our age. Drawing on the work of social critics and theorists including Zygmunt Bauman, Karl Marx, Hannah Arendt, Simone de Beauvoir, Jean Baudrillard, Slavoj Žižek, and others, the book traces destructive masculinity through cultural texts, social systems, and everyday life practices. Using the lens of social theory, social philosophy, feminist cultural studies, and sociology, The Man Problem (...) explores the legacy of the Enlightenment as a context for a social world constructed by men (in modernity), deconstructed (in postmodernity) and reconstructed (in the liquid present). This book investigates the outlines of the patriarchy and why the men who legitimate it behave the way they do. Despite the troubled and troubling legacy of masculinity, Honeywill reveals an alternative path forward. (shrink)

Philosophers have not resisted temptation to transgress against the logic of their own conceptual structures. Self-undermining position-taking is an occupational hazard. Philosophy stands in need of conceptual therapy. The author describes three conceptions of philosophy: the narcissistic, disputatious, and therapeutic. (i) Narcissistic philosophy is hermetic, believing itself to contain all evidence that can possibly be relevant to it. Philosophy undertaken in this spirit has led to defensive, monadically isolated positions. (ii) Disputatious philosophies are fundamentally question-begging, animated by assumptions that (...) philosophical adversaries reject. (iii) The intention of therapeutic philosophy is to study philosophical positions from the standpoint of their internal consistency, or lack of it. In particular, its interest is in positions that either compel assent, because they cannot be rejected without self-referential inconsistency, or self-destruct because self-referential inconsistency cannot be avoided. The article's focus is on the latter. Several examples of self-undermining positions are drawn from the history of philosophy, exemplifying two main varieties of self-referential inconsistency: pragmatical and projective. (shrink)

The problem of the destruction of nature and the natural environment is one of the most serious problems that confronts humanity at the end of the twentieth century. This destruction has its basis in the dualistic way of thinking that has dominated the Modern age: Humanity has been accustomed to think of the world dualistically as a confrontation between subject and object, soul and body, and spirit and nature. Both Modern natural sciences and scientific technology in general (...) are grounded in such a dualistic way of thinking. But this way of thinking itself, in other words, the Modern dualistic paradigm, is now one of the most serious problems of present-day philosophy. It has become clear that a new relation between humanity and nature must be established. In this paper, I will re-examine the relationship between “nature” and “spirit” in the context of Husserl’s phenomenology in which, in my opinion, a new concept of nature can be found. In the course of this investigation, I shall try to elucidate the present-day situation of human spirit in a phenomenological way. (shrink)

This essay will address the question for what good or purpose is evil. First, an examination of the use-mention distinction between evil and “evil” produces two distinct questions: what good is the presence of evil in the world, and what good is the concept of evil as part of our ethical vocabulary describing human interaction. By severing all logically necessary connections between evil and greater goods, we discover that the answer to the first question—what (...) good is evil in the world—is none whatsoever. Evil deeds leave an enduring and destructive impact on people’s lives. Attempts to justify this ruination belittle the torment that sufferers of evil sustain. Because there is no normative vindication of evil’s existence, recognizing it as an indelible fact of human interaction proves to be crucial to understanding elemental features of the moral community and one’s role within it. Hence, the answer to the second question—what good is the concept of evil—is that it is of the utmost importance. Insofar as evil is a perpetual element of human interaction, being aware of this very fact—that is, understanding the concept of evil—is central to comprehending one’s moral agency, to appropriately reacting to others in the moral community, and to possibly inhibiting future incidents of evil. (shrink)

Pamphilus’ introductory letter opens contradictory ways of reading Hume’s Dialogues. The first, suggested by Pamphilus' claim to be “mere auditor” to the dialogues, which were “deeply imprinted in [his] memory,” is the empiricist reading. This traditional reading could, and has, gone several ways, including to such conclusions as Philo forces upon Cleanthes, shocking Demea; e.g., that the design of the mosquito and other “curious artifices of nature,” which inflict pain and suffering on all, bespeaks an utterly careless and insensate, if (...) not malign creator. Pamphilus' preface also opens a more philosophical reading implied in his consideration of the ancient literary form of dialogue. This second interpretive path suspects more design in writing, and more revealed in it, than the simple empiricist reading(s) allow. Dialogically elucidating the Dialogues confronts us with the limits of empiricism in moral and religious philosophy. Hume's last work, if read philosophically, exhibits the vacancy of empiricism. (shrink)

Psychoanalysis has traditionally had difficulty in accounting for the existence of evil. Freud saw it as a direct expression of unconscious forces, whereas more recent theorists have examined the links between early traumatic experiences and later ‘evil’ behaviour. _Humanizing Evil: Psychoanalytic, Philosophical and Clinical Perspectives _explores the controversies surrounding definitions of evil, and examines its various forms, from the destructive forces contained within the normal mind to the most horrific expressions observed in contemporary life. Ronald Naso (...) and _Jon Mills_ bring together an international group of experts to explore how more subtle factors can play a part, such as conformity pressures, or the morally destabilizing effects of anonymity, and show how analysts can understand and work with such factors in clinical practice._ _Each chapter is unified by the view that evil is intrinsically linked to human freedom, regardless of the gap experienced by perpetrators between their intentions and consequences. While some forms of evil follow seamlessly from psychopathology, others call this relationship into question. Rape, murder, serial killing, and psychopathy show very clear links to psychopathology and character whereas the horrors of war, religious fundamentalism, and political extremism resist such reductionism. Humanizing _Evil_ is unique in the diversity of perspectives it brings to bear on the problem of evil. It will be essential reading for psychoanalysts, psychotherapists, philosophers, and Jungians. Because it is an integrative depth-psychological effort, it will interest general readers as well as scholars from a variety of disciplines including the humanities, philosophy, religion, mental health, criminal justice, political science, sociology, and interdisciplinary studies. Ronald Naso, Ph.D., ABPP is psychoanalyst and clinical psychologist in independent practice in Stamford, CT. The author of numerous papers on psychoanalytic topics, he is an associate editor of _Contemporary Psychoanalytic Studies_, and contributing editor of _Division/Review _and _Journal of Psychology and Clinical Psychiatry_. His book, _Hypocrisy Unmasked: Dissociation, Shame, and the Ethics of Inauthenticity_, was published by Aronson in 2010. Jon Mills, Psy.D., Ph.D., ABPP is a philosopher, psychoanalyst, and clinical psychologist. He is Professor of Psychology & Psychoanalysis at Adler Graduate Professional School, Toronto. A 2006, 2011, and 2013 Gradiva Award winner, he is Editor of two book series in psychoanalysis, on the Editorial Board for _Psychoanalytic Psychology_, and is the author and/or editor of thirteen books including his most recent works, _Underworlds: Philosophies of the Unconscious from Psychoanalysis to Metaphysics_, and _Conundrums: A Critique of Contemporary Psychoanalysis_, which won the Goethe Award for best book in 2013. (shrink)

There is an objection to divine timelessness which claims that timelessness shouldn’t be adopted since on this view evil is never “destroyed,” “vanquished,” “eradicated” or defeated. By contrast, some divine temporalists think that presentism is the key that allows evil to be destroyed/vanquished/eradicated/defeated. However, since presentism is often considered to be inconsistent with timelessness, it is thought that the presentist solution is not available for defenders of timelessness. In this paper I first show how divine timelessness is consistent (...) with a presentist view of time and then how defenders of Presentist-Timelessness can adopt the presentist solution to the removal of evil. After this, I conclude the paper by showing that it’s far from clear that the presentist solution is successful and that unless one weakens what is meant by the destruction/vanquishing/eradication/defeat of evil, one can only make the presentist solution work by adopting a number of additional assumptions that many will find unattractive. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:Resisting Structural Evil: Love as Ecological-Economic Vocation by Cynthia Moe-LobedaKiara A. JorgensonReview of Resisting Structural Evil: Love as Ecological-Economic Vocation CYNTHIA MOE-LOBEDA Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2013. 309 pp. $22.00The factors that have contributed to today’s perilous global economy and ecology originate in structures that predate recent implosions of international banks or measurements of rising climates. These structures—systemic and social while also personal—are the focus of Moe-Lobeda’s (...) work, Resisting Structural Evil: Love as Ecological-Economic Vocation. Convinced that sin and violence is “uncreating” the beauty of God’s interdependent community and can only be countered and alleviated by a moral vision structured around “justice-seeking love,” Moe-Lobeda provides a compelling theological critique and reconstruction of the Christian concept of love by way of a fresh retrieval of the classical Christian doctrine of vocation.The book’s argument consists of a tapestry of sobering statistics, theological analysis, and narrative prose. Early on Moe-Lobeda takes great care to explain how the moral crises of today relate to the embedded social structures of yesterday. Here her attention to the globalization of economies and subsequent ecological injustice is particularly helpful since few contemporary texts make explicit this critical connection. In a chapter titled “Countering Moral Oblivion” she also devotes attention to why seemingly good people, particularly good Christians, passively and ignorantly participate in systems of oppressive power. This portion of her book, coupled with her discussion of how Christian theology can be a resource of hope, is empowering and particularly attentive to the role of biblical theology in the ecological conversation. Unlike many other theoretical books on the topic, Moe-Lobeda’s book can be appropriated as a tool for lifestyle appraisal useful to the academician, pastor, and lay reader alike. Indeed, Moe-Lobeda can evoke discomfort with her compelling vision and challenging call for a change in our current practices.Pivoting her argument on the promise of hope, the second half of Resisting Structural Evil discusses what can and must be realized. And it is here that Moe-Lobeda’s voice makes a contribution not only to Christian ecological ethics but also to Christian social ethics at large. Vocation, she argues, encompasses more than what traditional renderings of vocare have sought to connote. The human call to life is a call to love in compassion and justice both the neighbor [End Page 208] and the self, and must be made manifest in the public sphere. What is more, one must fulfill one’s vocation not only for the sake of the human other but also for the benefit of the oikos (household) present within all economic and ecological communities. To this end, Moe-Lobeda’s attention to love as vocation uniquely characterizes her approach to ecological ethics, thereby transcending traditional deontolological or teleological classifications. Unique within Protestant work on ecological ethics, Resisting Structural Evil provides a fresh depiction of character ethics wherein the pursuit of moral aptitude is fundamentally rooted in biotic community.This very strength may also foster some critique since Moe-Lobeda’s schema is so thoroughly corporate in scope that it affords little time and attention to what some virtue and character ethicists would call the inward journey. Yet Moe-Lobeda, aligned with the liberal and feminist traditions from which she hails, views love and power as inseparable. “What is needed,” she argues, “is a realization that power without love is reckless and abusive and that love without power is sentimental and anemic” (169). Hence, on a very fundamental level Resisting Structural Evil is a book arguing for a radically new paradigm, one where the enormity of today’s crises is met with an equally comprehensive dose of transformative loving power.Kiara A. JorgensonLuther SeminaryCopyright © 2015 Society of Christian Ethics... (shrink)

In this witty, accessible study, the prominent Marxist thinker Terry Eagleton launches a surprising defense of the reality of evil, drawing on literary, theological, and psychoanalytic sources to suggest that evil, no mere medieval artifact, is a real phenomenon with palpable force in our contemporary world. In a book that ranges from St. Augustine to alcoholism, Thomas Aquinas to Thomas Mann, Shakespeare to the Holocaust, Eagleton investigates the frightful plight of those doomed souls who apparently destroy for no (...) reason. In the process, he poses a set of intriguing questions. Is evil really a kind of nothingness? Why should it appear so glamorous and seductive? Why does goodness seem so boring? Is it really possible for human beings to delight in destruction for no reason at all? (shrink)

This article considers the ethical dimension of technological science (technoscience), namely, the problem of the applicability of the categories of ‘good’ and ‘evil’ to the functioning of new technologies. Aspects of evil brought about by the introduction of new technologies (i.e. lack/scarcity of resources, devaluation of human labour, ignorance of/inability to use technical tools, violations of the measure and harmony of life, etc.) are highlighted. Particular attention is paid to a new form of evil, namely artificial/technological (...) class='Hi'>evil. The article argues that the emergence of such evils is associated with the growing scale of human intervention in the natural course of things and with recent advances in technology. Dangers related to the uncontrolled development of technological science along many axes of human existence are analysed. The authors conclude that overcoming artificial evil is possible via a transition from a man-made to an anthropogenic (intellectual and humanistic) form of civilisation in which the achievements of technoscience serve not the self-destruction of mankind but the discovery of essential human forces. (shrink)

In two essays, first published in book form in 1940, Louis Lavelle delves into Evil and Suffering, tracing their relationships with Good and Happiness, the Body and the Spirit, Matter and Spirit. Evil and Suffering is considered a work of moral philosophy. In it, Lavelle leads us to reflect on suffering and how it is inserted in the inner and outer world of the being. From this experience of living suffering, according to the author, the (...) class='Hi'>spirit arises. The marks that pain causes in us allows us to transcend what we are to the external world, after understanding ourselves with suffering in the inner world. If suffering is an inherent condition of human life, it remains for him to do his best, face it and overcome it. According to Lavelle, it is suffering itself that gives meaning to life; but this is only possible if there is awareness that one suffers, because it is this awareness that awakens the spirit. The author also, through antitheses, tells us that it is in the absence that we find the presence, in the darkness we see the light, in loneliness we find community, in an inner deepening, where we perceive reality. Therefore, suffering connects beings. Pain shapes us, awakens us and makes us better beings if we know how to face it. Reading this book, of incredible spiritual richness, generates in us a dialogue about suffering, in order to transcend it. (shrink)

In Plato's Meno , there is a famous discussion of desire and evil. This paper is not a contribution to Platonic scholarship, but a direct taking up of the issue whether someone can desire evil. One stock interpretation of the putative impossibility of desiring what is evil or bad is the interpretation which emphasizes an internal or conceptual tie between desire and good. This interpretation compares pairs of terms such as ‘fear—danger’, ‘belief—truth’ and ‘desire—good’. To fear something (...) is to regard it as, or believe that it is, dangerous ; to believe something is to regard it as, or believe it to be, true ; to desire something is to regard it as, to believe it to be, good. Since it is obvious that people believe things which are false, it is maintained that it is equally obvious that people may desire what is bad and fear what is harmless or of no danger. Let us call this interpretation of the doctrine that it is impossible to desire evil the weak thesis. The weak thesis allows what seems a plain fact of human reality, that people believe falsehoods, fear things that cannot harm them and desire things which are not good. Equally obviously, it allows that people fail to believe truths, fail to desire goods, and fail to fear things that are dangerous. On this weak interpretation, the manner in which wickedness to others and self-destructiveness are due to ignorance is that people are ignorant about the nature of things and ways of acting, ignorant about what it would be like to possess something or ignorant about what it would be like to do something or other. (shrink)

A guide to evil from a Christian point of view. In this wide-ranging and concise study, philosopher Charles Taliaferro explores: •the idea that evil is the destruction or privation of what is good •sin •divine commands •redemption from evil •hell and heaven •the problem of evil •and the multiple ways Christians seek to overcome evil with good.

When does benefiting from others’ wrongdoing effectively make one a moral accomplice in their evil deeds? If stem cell research lives up to its therapeutic promise, this question (which has previously cropped up in debates over fetal tissue research or the use of Nazi research data) is likely to become a central one for opponents of embryo destruction. I argue that benefiting from wrongdoing is prima facie morally wrong under any of three conditions: (1) when the wrongdoer is (...) one’s agent; (2) when acceptance of benefit directly encourages the repetition of the wrongful deed (even though no agency relationship is involved); and (3) when acceptance of a benefit legitimates a wrongful practice. I conclude by showing that, because of the ways in which most embryonic stem cell lines come into being, people who oppose embryo destruction may use human embryonic stem cells without incurring moral blame. (shrink)

The Enlightenment marked a shift inmoral debates away from notions of sin and eviltoward the more secular concept of virtue basedin reason. Perhaps the most notable example ofsuch liberal thought can be found in JohnDewey's 1934 A Common Faith, where he arguesthat people should set aside bickering overreligious differences and work in a utilitarianspirit to achieve public good through science.Hitler's Germany, Stalin's Soviet Union, theChinese cultural revolution, and the Cold War'sthreat of mutually assured destruction haveinspired philosophers and theologians to (...) revivethe concept of evil to explain atrocities tooextreme to be incorporated into conventionalunderstandings of virtue and reason. In theirstruggle to explain the enormity of humancapacities for destruction, they have replacedtraditional religious definitions of evil witha more secular one: the construction anddefense of a systemic contempt for life.Assuming that bad consequences are simply theunintended result of good intentions, socialscientists have resisted employing such aconception of evil. Persisting in thisassumption may prevent us from seeing theperversity of the liberal economicjustification for promoting and perpetuatingdestructive tendencies in the industrialagricultural system. This paper seeks tooperationalize a conception of evil and toapply it to policy debates surrounding the 1985Food Security Act in the hope of evaluating oursociety's inability to resolve social andenvironmental consequences generated byindustrial agriculture. (shrink)

_Messiahs and Machiavellians_ is an innovative exploration of “modern evil” in works of early- and late-modern theatre, raising issues about ethics, politics, religion, and aesthetics that speak to our present condition. Paul Corey examines how theatre—which expressed a key political dynamic both in the Renaissance and the twentieth century—lays open the impulses that instigated modernity and, ultimately, unparalleled levels of violence and destruction. Starting with Albert Camus’ _Caligula_ and Samuel Beckett’s _Waiting for Godot_, then turning to Machiavelli’s _Mandragola_ (...) and Shakespeare’s _Measure for Measure_, Corey traces the emergence of two dominant, intertwining features of modern evil: an unrestrained pursuit of power and the utopian desire for perfection. Corey’s imaginative and convincing readings of these plays, based on detailed textual analysis, move beyond the accounts usually offered by literary critics. Drawing on political, theological, and philosophical sources—a combination as fertile as it is unusual—Corey’s methodology allows him to make keen and subtle arguments about the eschatological nature of modern politics. “Corey’s lucid, compelling treatise argues for a radical reconsideration of the role of tragedy in dealing with the shifting metaphysical and metatheatrical sands of the contemporary era. While the study begins with an examination of mid-20th Century French existentialism—and the dramatic work of Beckett and Camus in particular—the book soon takes the reader on a fascinating voyage back into the ‘problem’ comedies of the Italian and English Renaissance theatre, and beyond that, into Greek tragedy to understand the evolving concept of ‘evil’ in the Western philosophical, theological, and dramatic tradition. Ending with a reflection on the new ‘theatre’ of terrorism entering the 21st Century, Corey poses the intriguing suggestion, that far from being irrelevant to the post-modern era, a ‘new tragic sensibility’ may become key to our gaining a ‘lucid awareness of our current situation […] the limits of politics, the indelible nature of violence, our inescapable mortality, and a need for prudence’ ” —_Moira Day, University of Saskatchewan_ “A sensitive examination of the problem of evil in Renaissance and 20th century drama. Corey provides fascinating analyses of individual plays, and makes a compelling argument for restoring a tragic vision of good and evil in the face of modern expediency and utopianism.” —_Mary P. Nichols, Baylor University_ _ _ “In _Messiahs and Machiavellians_, Paul Corey delivers insights both numerous and profound. His work is a serious and important contribution to contemporary political science while also offering analyses of interest to scholars in literature, religious studies, theology, and ethics.” —_Barry Cooper, University of Calgary_. (shrink)

Is there really a hell? Should we be good simply to avoid punishment in the life hereafter? Just asking these questions theoretically doesn't get us far, George F. Dole suggests, but examining the works of someone who has been there may help. Dole refers to Emanuel Swedenborg, the eighteenth-century Swedish scientist and statesman who over the last twenty-seven years of his life had the privileged status of an observer of non-physical worlds, including hell. Swedenborg wrote that we are unconscious residents (...) of the spiritual world as well as the material world, and the hells he encountered have mirrors in our everyday lives. Within this framework, Dole examines questions about evil and hell that have plagued thinkers for centuries: Do we have freedom of choice? Do our spirits exist after death? Does an all-loving God condemn us to hell? If not, can we ourselves become irredeemably evil? What distinguishes Dole's approach to these questions is his open-mindedness and his hopefulness. Freedom and Evil brings us face to face with a God of mercy, and it is easy to believe, with Dole, that the gates of hell are not to keep people in but to keep people out. (shrink)

Mass casualty attacks in recent years have demonstrated the need to include “evil intent” as a design consideration. Three recent actual or potential weapons of mass destruction (WMD) attacks did not involve nuclear bombs or other devices designed as weapons, but rather benign objects used with evil intent. Just as unplanned events such as hurricanes, earthquakes, fires, and user misuse have been codified into design requirements based on the likelihood and potential impact of the event, “evil (...) intent” has to become part of the design process for buildings, vehicles, equipment, and other items. The endstate should be reasonable additions to existing codes and standards such that it is clear what is and is not designed for. In the absence of specific design guidance, professionals with appropriate expertise can assess potential for “evil intent” and provide recommendations to design out or warn against this potential harm to public safety, particularly when codified requirements are not present. (shrink)

Our past century was exemplary in a number of ways. The advances it made in science and medicine were unparalleled. Also without precedent was the destructiveness of its wars. In part, this was due to an increasing technological sophistication. The time lag between a scientific advance and its technological application was, in the urgency of the century, constantly diminished. Modern weaponry combined with mass production, communication and mobilization to produce what came to be known as “total war.” This was a (...) war without any of the limits that characterized the conflicts of the previous centuries. It was this lack of restraint that, perhaps more than anything else, led to the terrible excesses of this century: its war time terror bombings, deportations, and genocidal slaughters. It also led to the chief problem this century presents to ethics: that of the grasp and comprehension of collective evil. This problem is not just theoretical. An inability of those involved in its collective processes to take thought--to actually apprehend the evil they were engaged in--characterized the disasters of our century. At least in part, the participants’ lack of restraint was based on a lack of recognition. (shrink)

Holmes Rolston, III’s analysis of disvalue in nature is the sole explicit and sustained discussion of the negative side of nature by an environmental philosopher. Given Rolston’s theological background, perhaps it is not surprising that his analysis has strong analogues with traditional theodicies, which attempt to account for evil in a world created by a good God. In this paper, I explore those analogues and use them to help evaluate Rolston’s account. Ultimately, I find it more satisfactory than traditional (...) theodicy in its own context, but I also raise two problems: a weighting and a counseling problem. First, once Rolston acknowledges the reality and role of disvalue in nature, he discounts its significance too greatly. Second, his account is less useful in helping those who have been harmed by the destructive activity of nature. I claim that we can usefully regard Rolston’s analysis as a deconstruction of the anthropocentric, non-ecological view of nature. Finally, I argue that the two problems and a related issue, the objectivity/subjectivity of values, point in the direction of a pragmatist account of value in nature. (shrink)

The author considers the problem of evil in the transgressive concept often identified with destructive transgressions. He describes possible approaches to the problem of evil asking, at the same time, about its source. He also carries out a discussion with reference to Kozielecki’s concept in comparison with other researchers of this issue in the area of anthropology (Immanuel Kant, Gottfried W. Leibniz, Leszek Kolakowski, Konrad Lorenz, Hannah Arendt, Herbert A. Simon and Philip Zimbardo). Evil is treated by (...) Kozielecki as destructive transgressions, that are always present in man, and are the source of the crisis and the regression of humanity. (shrink)

Abstract: Kant and Arendt on Barbaric and Totalitarian Evil -/- This paper starts by sketching Kant’s four ideal legal and political conditions—'anarchy,’ ‘despotism,’ ‘republic,’ and ‘barbarism’—before showing their usefulness for analyzing different political forces that may operate in any given society. Contrary to the common tendency in political philosophy to view our societies as either in the so-called ‘state of nature’ (‘anarchy’) or in ‘civil society’ (‘republic’), I propose that we might find ourselves in societies where aspects or ‘pockets’ (...) of our lives are subject to any one of these (anarchic, despotic, republican, and barbaric) political forces. I then combine Kant’s ideas on barbaric evil with Arendt’s ideas on totalitarian evil, which gives us a four-fold conception of political evil. This fourfold distinction is then used to identify some types and patterns of destructive political forces as they occur in actual, historical societies, such as racist, sexist, or heterosexist violence and oppression. (shrink)

Life and the living (on Aristotelian biohorror) -- Supernatural horror as the paradigm for life -- Aristotle's De anima and the problem of life -- The ontology of life -- The entelechy of the weird -- Superlative life -- Life with or without limits -- Life as time in Plotinus -- On the superlative -- Superlative life I: Pseudo-Dionysius -- Negative vs. affirmative theology -- Superlative negation -- Negation and preexistent life -- Excess, evil, and non-being -- Superlative life (...) II: Eriugena -- Negation in the periphyseon -- The quaestio de nihilo: on nothing -- The quaestio de nihilo: superlative nothing -- Dark intelligible abyss -- Apophasis -- The apophatic logic -- Negation in Frege and Ayer -- Negation vs. subtraction in Badiou -- Negation and contradiction in Priest -- The dialetheic vitalism of negative theology -- Ellipses: Suhraward and the luminous void -- Univocal creatures -- On spiritual creatures -- Life as form in Aristotle -- The concept of the creature -- Univocity I: Duns Scotus vs. Aquinas -- Univocity in Aquinas' Summa theologica -- Univocity in Duns Scotus' Opus oxoniense -- The common nature of the creature -- Univocity II: Duns Scotus vs. Henry of Ghent -- Univocity in Henry of Ghent -- Negative vs. privative indetermination -- Absolute indetermination -- Univocity III: Deleuze's scholasticism three variations -- Spinoza et le problème de l'expression -- Différence et répétition -- Cours de Vincennes -- Univocal creatures -- Ellipses: Dgen and uncreated univocity -- Dark pantheism -- Everything and nothing -- Life as spirit in Aquinas -- The concept of the divine nature -- Immanence I: Eriugena's periphyseon -- Natura and the unthought -- Universal life -- Four statements on pantheism -- Immanence II: Duns Scotus' reportatio Ia -- Univocal immanence -- Actual infinity -- The pathology of the triple primacy -- Immanence III: Nicholas of Cusa's De docta ignorantia -- The coincidence of opposites -- The folds of life -- Absolute vs. contracted pantheism -- Speculative pantheism (Deleuze's interlocutors) -- Pantheism and pure immanence -- The insubordination of immanence in Deleuze -- Scholia I: the isomorphism of univocity and immanence -- Scholia II: the vitalist logic of common notions -- Scholia III: the life of substance -- Dark pantheism -- Ellipses: Wang Yangming and idealist naturalism -- Logic and life (on Kantian teratology) -- The wandering line from Aristotle to Kant -- Critique of life -- Spectral life and speculative realism -- Ontotheology in Kant, atheology in Bataille -- The night land. (shrink)

The book reconstructs the history of Western ethics. The approach chosen focuses the endless dialectic of moral codes, or different kinds of ethos, moral doctrines that are preached in order to bring about a reform of existing ethos, and ethical theories that have taken shape in the context of controversies about the ethos and moral doctrines as means of justifying or reforming moral doctrines. Such dialectic is what is meant here by the phrase ‘moral traditions’, taken as a name for (...) threads of moral discourse, made in turn of other interwoven threads, including transmission of shared codes, appeals to reform of prevailing custom, rational argument about the justification of some precept on the basis of some shared general teaching or principle, and rational argument about the ultimate basis for principles and justification of authoritative teaching. That is, the approach adopted to the reading of ethical texts depends on a firm belief in the fact that philosophers hardly created any ethical doctrine out of nothing. The main point this book tries to highlight is how different philosophical theories emerged and followed each other as a result of attempts at accounting for what was going on in the world of moral traditions. Changes were propelled by controversies between different schools, and highly abstract arguments were the unintended effects of moves made by controversialists forced to transform (and occasionally to turn upside down) their own doctrines in order to face the challenge posed by other arguments. This is the reason why the book examines not only texts that already enjoy pride of place in the history of philosophy (Aristotle, Kant, Hegel), but also other texts usually treated in the histories of religions (the Bible, the Talmud, the Quran), and others considered to be much less philosophical (Plutarchus, Pufendorf). -/- 1. Plato and a response to ethical scepticism. Two different traditions of morality in VI-V century Greece are described. The birth of philosophical questioning of traditional morality and temporal and spatial variation of custom is described within the context of the v century crisis, the demise of traditional aristocratic and tyrannical rule and the birth of democracy. Two conflicting answers to the challenge are reconstructed, namely conventionalist or immoralist theories formulated by the Sophists and the eudemonist and intellectualist Socratic theory. Plato’s own reformulation of Socrates answer to the Sophists is reconstructed. His psychological views, his classification of the four cardinal virtues and his political theory are described as parts of a unitary system, culminating in an extremely realist moral ontology identifying the idea of the good with the essence of the (moral and extra-moral) world itself. -/- 2. Aristotle and the invention of practical philosophy. Aristotle’s invention of practical philosophy as a field separated from first philosophy is shown to be an implication of his break with Plato moral ultra-realism. Aristotle’s agenda in his moral works is arguably dependent on a polemical intention, namely dismantling Socratic intellectualism. The semi-inductive or virtuously circular method of practical philosophy is illustrated, starting with the received opinions of the better and wiser individuals and trying dialectically to sift what is left of mistake and inconsistence in such opinions, finally trying to correct mistakes and make the overall practical science more consistent. The chapter illustrates then the relationship of individual ethics, or ‘monastics’, with the art and the science of the pater familias, or ‘economics’, and the science of the ruler and citizen, or politics. The nature of virtues, or better, excellences of character, is discussed, highlighting the basic role of hexis, or ‘disposition’. Prudence, or better practical wisdom, is the focus of the chapter. Its relationship with bouleusis or deliberation is examined, and its autonomous status vis-à-vis theoretical knowledge is stressed. -/- 3. Diogenes and philosophy as a way of life. The chapter provides an overview of Hellenistic ethics, which almost amounts to Hellenistic schools of philosophy, in so far as ‘philosophy’ became in these centuries primarily the name for a way of life. The typical character of the Cynical movement is highlighted, that of a school of life, not a school aimed at providing any kind of intellectual training was to be provided. -/- 4. Epicurus and ethics as self-care. The peculiar character of the Epicurean school is described, a combination of a science of well-being aiming, more than at pleasure as in the popular view, at reduction of useless suffering, of unnecessary needs, and at a balanced selection of pleasures of the best and most durable kind. -/- 5. Epictetus and ethics as therapy of the passions. The various phases of Stoicism are described, and the shifting place given to ethics in the Stoic system of idea, culminating in the paradoxical view of ethics, its impossibility in principle notwithstanding, as the only truly significant and necessary part of philosophy. Cicero is treated, showing how his own synthesis of various Hellenistic trends is as a truly philosophical enterprise, deserving serious consideration after one or two centuries when he was confined to the role of literate. Epictetus is chosen as the best example of what the Stoic tradition could yield, an art of living based on sophisticated introspection, in turn aimed at making a kind of cognitive therapy possible, dismantling obnoxious passions at their root by systematically correcting false representations. -/- 6. Philo and the reconciliation of Torah and Platonism. A reconstruction of basic ideas from a few books of the Hebrew Bible is provided, starting with the Prophetic tradition and the focus on God’s mercy as the source of motivation and standard for human behaviour. Then a comparative analysis is undertaken of a parallel tradition, namely the three codifications of the Torā (Law or, better, Instruction), highlighting how a core of moral ideas may be recognized as a basis and preamble of codification of civil law, cultural practice, and regulation of ritual purity. The importance of Leviticus is stressed as the turning point when emphasis mercy, typical of the Prophetic tradition, is combined with the legal tradition, yielding the change in sensibility of the Second Temple time. Philo of Alexandria is described as one of the three leading figures – together with Rabbi Hillel and Rabbi Yeshua – at the apex the emergence of the mentioned new sensibility, gradually including mercy as an essential part of justice and establishing the starting point of both the Rabbinic and the Christian tradition. This consists precisely in the precept of one’s neighbour’s love or of the golden rule, two eventually identical precepts whose meaning is arguably more sober and sensible than the long-lasting Christian tradition deriving from John and Augustine has made us believe and no novelty vis-à-vis so-called Ancient-Testament teachings. -/- 7. Augustine and Christianity as Neo-Platonism. The first section examines the moral doctrines of so-called 'ethical Treaties' from the Talmud, a group of treaties, among which the best known is Pirqé Avot, that were left out of the six "orders" of the canon as they did not fit in any of the six groups of issues ritual or legal on which the division was based. According to Maimonides, their peculiar theme is provided by the Deòt, 'opinions', i.e., mental dispositions, that is, the translation of the Greek term hexeis and Arab akhlak (in turn providing in this language the name for ethics as such). The three topics I reconstruct are: i) the notion of Torah: The Torah is understood as the world order itself, or as the ‘Wisdom’ that existed even before creation and was ‘the tool by which the world was built’; however, the Torah is an earthly and human entity, as it was "received" by humans, and from that very moment belongs to them; ii) the relationship between love of God and love of neighbour; the treaties require us to study and practice the Torah ‘for its own sake’, that is, require us to act out of love, not out of fear or hope of reward; iii) the idea of sanctification of daily life: having disappeared with the destruction of the Temple the possibility of any conflict between liturgical service and everyday life, the latter is assumed to be in itself divine service: to give food to the poor has the same value as sacrifices in the Temple, and as an implication, the insistence become recurrent on the goodness of created things in themselves along with a polemic against ascetic currents. The conclusions drawn are: i) the moral teachings of the Talmud and those of Yeshua are, rather than similar, virtually identical; one may safely say that the precept of love and the golden rule are central ones for all Talmudic rabbis, that mercy plays an indispensable role alongside with justice, and the latter is not a different thing from one’s neighbour’s love; ii) a peculiarity of Talmud rabbis facing Yeshua is the idea of study as worship, and knowledge as a source of justice; but this is an idea of Judaism after the Temple's destruction that cannot be attributed to the Pharisees of Yeshua’s time; iii) the relation of study and practice in the Talmud parallels that between faith and deeds in Paul's epistles, that is, respectively faith or learning are a necessary and sufficient condition to be recognized as righteous , but deeds are the inevitable effect of either faith or learning. The sayings ascribed to Yeshua are examined first, yielding the conclusion that a close equivalent may be found for every saying in Talmudic literature and yet the whole is ascribed to one rabbi, with rather consistent stress on God’s mercy and unconditional forgiving as the mark of true imitation of God. Thus, Yeshua’s teaching is pure Judaism. The third section describes briefly the galaxy of Gnostic currents and Manichaeism, trying to sketch the profile of moral teachings resulting from an encounter of Asian spiritual traditions, Hellenistic lore and sparks of teachings from apocalyptic Jewish currents. The last section summarizes the turbulent history of several encounters between Christian currents and Hellenistic philosophical schools. The first one was with late Cynicism. Recent, rather controversial, literature discovered the jargon and a few topics from the Stoic-Cynical popular philosophy in a few books from the New Testament itself. This, far from proving that Rabbi Yeshua had been influenced by cynic preachers, is a proof of the necessity felt by Christian preachers to translate the original ‘Christian’ teaching into a Greek lexicon deeply impregnated with cynic terminology. The second was with Platonism, yielding the mild and temperate moral teaching of Clemens of Alexandria, teaching the sanctity of nature and the human body, the joy of moderate fruition of ‘natural’ kinds of pleasures, and the beauty of the marital life – in short, the opposite of the standard picture of Medieval Christianity. Ambrose of Milan brings about a different kind of synthesis, namely with Middle Platonism, where Stoic themes prevail. The most shocking case is Augustine, where an early Manichean education is overcome in a former phase by a synthesis of Plotinian Neo-Platonism and Christian preaching, yielding a sustained polemic with the Manicheans and rather optimistic views on life and Creation, the body and sexuality, and Hebrew-Judaic tradition not far from Clemens of Alexandria. In a later phase, occasioned by controversy on the opposite front, with such Christian currents as the Pelagians and Donatists, Augustine comes back to heavily anti-Judaic and world-denying ascetic attitudes where is earlier Manichean upbringing seems to emerge again. The tragedy of medieval Christianity will be the later Augustine’s overwhelming influence. A final section is dedicated to the monastic tradition where a curious mixture of world-denying asceticism with an astonishingly penetrating ‘science’ of introspection emerges. -/- 8. Al Farabi and the reconciliation of Islam and Platonism. The Qurān and the qadit, that is, collections of sayings ascribed to the prophet Muhammad contain a wealth of precepts and catalogues of virtues mirroring moral contents from the Jewish and the Christian traditions, among them the basic notion of imitation of the Deity, where mercy is assumed to be its basic trait. An important tradition within Islam, namely Sufism, stressed to the utmost degree the role of mercy, turning Islam into a mystic doctrine centred on retreat from the world, abandonment to God’s will, and a peaceful and fraternal attitude to our fellow-beings. A secular literary tradition originating in the Sassanid Empire, the literature of advice to the Prince had for a time a widespread influence in the newly constituted Arabic-Islamic commonwealth. In a later phase, the legacy of Hellenic philosophy made its way into the intellectual elite of the Islamic world. The first important legacy was Platonic, and the Republic became the main text for Islamic Platonism. Al-Farabi wrote an enjoyable remake of the Platonic Republic, arguing that the citizen’s virtues were the basis on which the political building needs to rest. The secular lawgiver is enlightened by the light of reason in his everyday practice of governance, but room is made for the Prophet as the voice of revealed truth that confirms and completes the rational truth that philosophy may afford. In a second phase also Aristotelian and Stoic influence were assimilated. Miskawayh’s treatise was the masterwork at the time Arabic philosophy reached its Zenith. It is a treatment of the soul’s diseases and their remedies, combining the Aristotelian doctrine of the golden mean with the Stoic doctrine of the passions and elements of Galenic medicine. Towards the eleventh-twelve centuries a war raged among theologians and philosophers, finally won by the former with disappearance of philosophy as such. The newly established mainstream, yet, was no kind of intolerant fanaticism. It drew from the work of mystic theologian Al-Ghazālī, the best heir of Sufism, teaching a tolerant and peaceful attitude to our fellow-beings and a passive attitude to destiny as an expression of the Divine will. -/- 9. Moshe ben Maimon and the reconciliation of Torah and Aristotelian ethics. The encounter between the Talmudic tradition and Hellenic philosophy had taken place a first time in Alexandria at the time of Philo but the two traditions had parted way again. In fact, the kind of Platonic Judaism founded by Philo survived only within Christianity, in the fourth Gospel and then in writings by Clemens of Alexandria. The Talmudic literature had absorbed just less striking traits from the Hellenic Philosophy, namely an idea of ethics as care of the self and a role for the education of character as propaedeutic to theoretical knowledge. In the Arabic-Islamic world, a second round started when Jewish authors writing in Arabic undertook the task to prove the full compatibility of the tradition deriving from Torah and Platonic philosophy. The culmination of this attempt is provided by Moshe ben Maimon who tried to use Aristotelian ethics as a language into which the teaching from the Pirké Avot could be translated. -/- 10. Thomas Aquinas and the reconciliation of Christian morality and Aristotelian ethics. In the first section the fresh start is described of philosophical ethics in Latin Europe at the turn of the Millennium. In a first phase, Anselm and Peter Abelard built on a Platonic and Augustinian legacy. In this phase. remarkable innovations are introduced, including Abelard’s claim of the obliging character of erring consciousness. In a second phase, the rediscovery of Nicomachean Ethics thanks to Latin translation of Arabic versions gives birth to a new wave of ethical studies, recovering the very idea of Aristotelian practical philosophy, with the potential implication of full legitimization of natural morality, i.e. ethics without Revelation. Aquinas’s ethics is a theological ethics out of which it would be vain to try to extract a self-contained philosophical ethics. His treatment of topics in philosophical ethics, yet, does not boil down to repetition of Aristotelian arguments but is rather a creative reshaping of such arguments. For example, he introduces also in the practical philosophy a first principle parallel to the principle of non-contradiction; and he also carries out a synthesis of Aristotelianism, Stoicism, and neo-Platonism. Even though it is essentially moral theology, Aquinas’s doctrine - unlike Augustine – grants full citizenship to "natural" morality, firstly by rejecting the claim that the corruption of human nature due to the original sin is so radical as to leave "pure nature" incapable of moral goodness. The doctrine is presented in a more sophisticated formulation in a few of the Quaestiones, such as De Malo and De Veritate, in the Summa contra Gentes and in the commentaries to Aristotle than in the famous Summa Theologica, but the latter work includes the only or the largest exposition of some decisive part of the theory. Thus, the Summa Theologica should be read for what it is more than criticized for not being what it was not meant to be. It was not meant to be the brilliant synthesis of all that Reason he had been able to produce with what Revelation had added about which the Neo-Thomists used to dream, but rather a manual for the training of preachers and confessors, where theoretical claims are not too demanding and a few serious tensions are left. Besides a jump between the Prima Secundae and the Secunda Secundae, being the former an essay in virtue theory and the latter a handbook for confessors, the most serious tension is perhaps the one between the ethics of right reason presented in most of Ia-IIae and the eudemonistic ethics developed in quaestiones 1-5 of the same part; the alternative ethical theory which also may be found in Augustine, the Stoic view of a cosmic reason eventually coincident with the moral law, was believed by Anselm (followed by John Duns Scotus and William of Ockham) to be incompatible with eudemonism. It is questionable whether Thomas could reduce the tension proving that it is just an apparent tension, in so far as the right reason and bliss derived from knowledge of God tend to coincide, but this is just a conjecture. Thomas’s ethics is a virtue ethic, not a law-based one, and moral judgment focuses on the virtues, particularly charity, not on the commandments and even less on absolute prohibitions; Thomas, however, would not have considered a drastic alternative between law and the virtues such as the one which has been advanced in late twentieth-century philosophy to be justified. Nonetheless, when it discusses ‘special’ virtues, it ceases to be an ethics of virtue and becomes a disappointing and often contradictory discussion of legal and illegal acts. Such a discussion takes most of the time ‘reasonable’ middle positions on controversial issues but not the alternative approach that Aristotelianism would have made possible; even when some occasional Aristotelian claim shows up, such as money’s barrenness as a reason against usury, this seems to be made by an author who apparently ignores the Aristotelian Thomas of the Prima Secundae. It is an ethic of human autonomy which recognizes the binding character of the individual conscience and, potentially, even a duty to disobey unjust laws. It is true that what Thomas writes in his discussion of death penalty and persecution of heretics is simply disgusting, and yet we should blame Thomas the man, not Thomist ethical theory. Finally, Thomas’s ethics is not ethical ‘absolutism’, as both traditionalist Catholic theologians and secularist enemies of dogmatic morality tend to believe. It is instead an ethic of prudential judgment. Exceptions to this approach – or better results of logical fallacies – are such claims as the absolute character of negative precepts and of the existence of "intrinsically evil acts", claims that simply cease to make sense in the light of Thomas’s own distinction between human act and natural act, carrying consequences Thomas did not live long enough to draw or was not consistent enough to dare to draw. -/- 11. Francisco de Vitoria and casuistry. The first topic illustrated is the discussion about the notion of pura natura, namely the human condition after the original sin and before divine revelation. The core notion was already there in Aquinas but was later developed by Caietanus (Thomas de Vio) with a number of interesting implications: firstly a view of human nature as such much more positive than Augustine’s and his followers’ view, including both Calvinists and Jansenists; secondly, the implication that the philosopher’s morality, as opposed to the Christian’s morality, is a quite respectable kind of morality; thirdly, that theocracy and prosecution of the unfaithful lacked justification, with more far-fetching consequences than Aquinas himself had dared to draw. The second topic is casuistry, a new name for a comparatively older way of thinking, which was already there in late Stoicism and Cicero as well as in the Talmudic literature. This is an approach aimed at yielding probable enough solutions for doubtful cases even in absence of completely safe staring points. The genre developed from medieval reference books for confessors and became by the sixteenth-century a sophisticated tool-box for dealing with various fields of applied ethics. Francisco Vitoria, the main authority of Baroque Scholasticism, was a controversial figure, among the proponents of the new discipline of casuistry and a consistent proponent of more separation between the religious and the civil authority, stricter limits to the legitimacy of war, innate rights of non-Christian nations in the New World based on the notion of pura natura, providing a standard of ‘natural’ goodness, previous to revelation, on which the Indian nations were judged to live in a naturally good condition, provided with the institutions of family, justice, and religion had accordingly a right to full respect by Christian sovereigns. Bartolomé de Las Casas, arguing along similar lines, was the leader of a historical battle in defence of the rights of the Indios. -/- 12. Michel de Montaigne and the art of living. A short description of one of the Renaissance Phyrronism, one of the classical philosophies revived in the fifteenth and sixteenth century. Montaigne combines the sceptical epistemology with an understanding of ethics – indeed of philosophy as a whole – in terms of an art of living inspired by two basic ideas, sagesse, that is, practical wisdom as the only kind of rationality available after theology, science, and tradition have declared bankrupt, and an aesthetic ideal of self-transformation through the art of writing and introspection. -/- 13. Pierre Nicole and neo-Augustinianism. The chapter illustrates first the vicissitudes of Augustinianism newly born after the late medieval triumph of Thomist Aristotelianism in the alternative Protestant and Catholic versions processed by the Calvinists and the Jansenists. Then it illustrates the doctrines of Pierre Nicole, Blaise Pascal’s best disciple, on the impossibility of introspection, on the ubiquity of self-deception, on the incurably evil character of the passion of love, and on the two moralities, the one of the man of the world, the morality of honesty which is indispensable for granting peace and order but devoid of any true value for eternal salvation, since the same external behaviour may be prompted by opposite motivations, and the morality of charity, the only true one but also useless to society. The third topic is Pierre Malebranche’s view of self-deception as a ubiquitous phenomenon accounting for human action and responsibility and his reformulated theory of self-love, no less ubiquitous than for Nicole and yet not as incurably evil, given the distinction between morally indifferent and even necessary amour de soi and vicious amour proper, a distinction on which the whole of Rousseau’s moral and political theory rests. -/- 14. Samuel von Pufendorf and the new science of morality. The chapter is dedicated to the discovery of the idea of a ‘new moral science’. Hugo Grotius is discussed first highlighting the real character of his project, much closer to the Thomist idea of a natural law accessible to non-corrupted human reason when human beings are living in a state of pura natura. Then Hobbes’s combination of scepticism, voluntarism, and conventionalism is described and both the continuity with Grotius’s new science, in the search for non-revealed rational morality, and the break with him, in the adoption of voluntarism and refusal of an intellectualist view of natural law, are illustrated. Pufendorf’s work is illustrated as a synthesis of the two previous attempts and the – up to Schneewind underestimated – paradigmatic example of the new science of morality. -/- 15. Richard Cumberland and consequentialist voluntarism. The chapter gives an overview of eighteenth-century Anglican ethics, noticing how the Cambridge tradition gave special weight to natural theology as opposed to positive or revealed theology – and how two Cambridge fellows, John Gay and Thomas Brown, elaborated on Cumberland’s (and Malebranche’s, as well as Leibniz’s) strategy for finding a third way between intellectualist view and voluntarist view of the laws of nature. The result of their elaboration was a kind of a rational-choice account of the origins of natural laws, where a law-giver God chooses among a number possible sets of laws on a maximizing criterion, and God’s maximandum is happiness for his creatures. The chapter notices also how such a solution aimed at solving at once the problem of evil and that of the foundation of moral obligation by proving how God’s choice was justified as far as it was the one minimising the amount of suffering in the world. 16. Richard Price and intuitionism. The chapter describes first the doctrines of the Cambridge Platonists, an example of hyper-rationalist reaction to Calvinism. Secondly it describes the sophisticated and universally ignored – from Sidgwick to Anscombe –version of what was later labelled ‘ethical intuitionism’ – showing how it escapes familiar objections and misrepresentations of intuitionism – from Mill to Rawls – in grounding its argument on transcendental arguments while carefully avoiding recourse to introspection and psychological evidence, which has been taken as a too easy target by critics of intuitionism. Thirdly, the chapter discusses Whewell’s ‘philosophy of morality’, as opposed to ‘systematic morality’, not unlike Kant’s distinction between a pure and an empirical moral philosophy. Whewell worked out a systematization of traditional normative ethics as a first step before its rational justification; he believed that the point in the philosophy of morality is justifying a few rational truths about the structure of morality such as to rule hedonism, eudemonism, and consequentialism; yet a system of positive morality cannot be derived solely from such rational truths but requires consideration of the ongoing dialectics between idea and fact in historically given moralities. Whewell’s intuitionism turns out closer to Kantian ethics than commentators have made us believe until now, and quite different from what Sidgwick meant by intuitionism. -/- 17. Adam Smith and the morality of role-switch. The chapter describes first, Hutcheson’s attempt at basing the ‘new science’ of natural law on different bedrock than Pufendorf and the English Platonists, namely a moral sense, a faculty whose existence is assumed to be proved on an empirical basis. The second step is a reconstruction of Hume’s rejoinder in terms of a new science of man including morality on an ‘experimental’ basis, that is, a ‘Newtonian’ hypothetical-deductive approach, distinguished from Hutcheson’s allegedly uncritical descriptive approach to human nature. The third step is a reconstruction of Adam Smith theory of morality understood as emerging from a spontaneous interplay of exchanges of situations (the most basic meaning of the word ‘sympathy’ as construed by this author). -/- 18. Jeremy Bentham and utilitarianism. The bulk of the chapter is dedicated to the doctrines of Jeremy Bentham. The Enlightenment spirit that suggested the idea of a new morality, free from religion, is illustrated. The notion of utility is illustrated as well as the subsequent formulations of the principle of utility. The idea of felicific calculus is discussed, showing how its inner difficulties prompted several reformulations of the principle of utility in order to avoid undesirable implications of proposed formulations. The role of the thesis of spontaneous convergence between interest and duty is discussed, showing how it left numberless questions open, and the distinction between the virtues of prudence, justice and beneficence is described as a way out of the deadlocks of classical utilitarianism. After Bentham, Mill’s reformed utilitarianism is reconstructed, showing how it is a kind of mixed system – as closer to common sense as it gives up Bentham’s claims to consistency and simplicity – resulting as unintended consequences from the controversies in which Mill was too keen to engage. The hidden agenda of the controversy between Utilitarianism and Intuitionism, going beyond the image of the battle between Prejudice and Reason, is described, showing how both competing philosophical outlooks turn out to be more research programs than self-contained doctrinal bodies, and such programs appear to be implemented, and indeed radically transformed while in progress thanks to their enemies no less than to their supporters. -/- 19. Immanuel Kant, practical reason and judgment. The chapter argues that Kant took from Moses Mendelssohn the idea of a distinction between geometry of morals and a practical ethic. He was drastically misunderstood by his followers precisely on this point. He had learned from the sceptics and the Jansenists the lesson that men are prompted to act by deceptive ends, and he was aware that human actions are also empirical phenomena, where laws like the laws of Nature may be detected. His practical ethics made room for judgment as a holistic procedure for assessing the saliency of relevant moral qualities in one given situation; this procedure yields the same results as the geometry of morals does for abstract cases but does so immediately and without balancing conflicting duties with each other, since what makes for the salient quality of a situation is perceived from the very beginning. Kant's practical philosophy is richer than the received image, making room for an ‘empirical moral philosophy’ or moral anthropology including treatment of commerce, needs, value and price, happiness and well-being; the overall social theory and philosophy of history is less different from Adam Smith's than the received image makes believe; the paradox of happiness is central to Kant's philosophy; a distinction between happiness and well-being is clearly drawn; the distinction plays a basic role in establishing a link between the economic and the moral life. -/- 20. Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel and the critique of abstract universalism. The chapter describes first the Romantic movement and the implications some of its concerns, rescuing passions, community, tradition, the individual as the bearer of a unique destiny, and the longing for organic unity between the individual, mankind and nature. Hegel’s contribution is discussed then, highlighting how, on the one hand, he shared a number of these concerns and on the other he had more rationalist leanings. The notion of morality is the pivotal point of the reconstruction, highlighting how Hegel construes this notion as a key to his own diagnosis of the malaise of modernity – the separation of individual and Gemeinschaft – and how his attack on Kant turns around this very idea. -/- 21. Friedrich Nietzsche against Christianity and the Enlightenment. The chapter illustrates first the idea of deconstruction of the back-world of values. Nietzsche claims to be legitimate heir of the French moralists, Leibniz, Kant and Hegel, in so far as he allegedly carries out to its deepest implications their discovery of what lies behind traditional naïve belief in the existence of an objective realm of values just waiting for description by the philosopher. The two exemplars form which genealogy draws inspiration are the classical philologist’s historical reconstructions of lost meanings and the chemist’s decomposition of elements. Then the genealogy of the notions of good and evil carried out in the first dissertation of Genealogy of morals is illustrated with its paradoxical conclusion that will to power is in fact the only ‘genuine’ kind of goodness. The third point illustrated is the dialectic of ascetism and self-realization with its ambiguous outcome. The suggested interpretation of such outcome is that Nietzsche’s normative ethics is a kind of virtue ethics taking an aesthetic ideal as a normative standard -/- 22. George Edward Moore and ideal utilitarianism. The chapter discusses the ideas of common sense and common-sense morality in Sidgwick. I argue that, far from aiming at overcoming common-sense morality, Sidgwick aimed purposely at grounding a consist code of morality by methods allegedly taken from the natural sciences to reach, also in ethics, the same kind of “mature” knowledge as in the natural sciences. His whole polemics with intuitionism was vitiated by the a priori assumption that the widespread ethos of the educated part of humankind, not the theories of the intuitionist philosophers, was what was worth considering as the expression of intuitionist ethics. In spite of a naïve positivist starting-point, Sidgwick was encouraged by his own approach in exploring the fruitfulness of coherentist methods for normative ethics. Thus, Sidgwick left an ambivalent legacy to twentieth-century ethics: the dogmatic idea of a “new” morality of a consequentialist kind, and the fruitful idea that we can argue rationally in normative ethics albeit without shared foundations. Then it reconstructs the background of ideas, concerns and intentions out of which Moore’s early essays, the preliminary version, and then the final version of Principia Ethica originated. I stress the role of religious concerns, as well as that of the Idealist legacy. I argue that PE is more a patchwork of rather diverging contributions than a unitary work, not to say the paradigm of a new school in Ethics. I add a comparison with Rashdall’s almost contemporary ethical work, suggesting that the latter defends the same general claims in a different way, one that manages to pave decisive objections in a more plausible way. I end by suggesting that the emergence of Analytic Ethics was a more ambiguous phenomenon than the received view would make us believe, and that the wheat (or some other gluten-free grain) of this tradition, that is, what logic can do for philosophy, should be separated from the chaff, that is, the confused and mutually incompatible legacies of Utilitarianism and Idealism. -/- 23. Edmund Husserl and the a-priori of action. The chapter illustrates first the idea of phenomenology and the Husserl’s project of a phenomenological ethic as illustrated in his 1908-1914 lectures. The key idea is dismissing psychology and trying to ground a new science of the a priori of action, within which a more restricted field of inquiry will be the science of right actions. Then the chapter illustrates the criticism of modern moral philosophy carried out in the 1920 lectures, where the main target is naturalism, understood in the Kantian meaning of primacy of common sense. The third point illustrate is Adolph Reinach’s theory of social acts as a key the grounding of norms, a view that basically sketches the very ideas ‘discovered’ later by Clarence I. Lewis, John Searle, Karl-Otto Apel and Jürgen Habermas. A final section is dedicated to Nicolai Hartman, who always refused to define himself a phenomenologist and yet developed a more articulated and detailed theory of ‘values’ – with surprising affinities with George E. Moore - than philosophers such as Max Scheler who claimed to Husserl’s legitimate heirs. -/- 24. Bertrand Russell and non-cognitivism. The chapter reconstructs first the discussion after Moore. The naturalistic-fallacy argument was widely accepted but twisted to prove instead that the intuitive character of the definition of ‘good’, its non-cognitive meaning, in a first phase identified with ‘emotive’ meaning. Alfred Julius Ayer is indicated as a typical proponent of such non-cognitivist meta-ethics. More detailed discussion is dedicated to Bertrand Russell’s ethics, a more nuanced and sophisticated doctrine, arguing that non-cognitivism does not condemn morality to arbitrariness and that the project of a rational normative ethics is still possible, heading finally to the justification of a kind of non-hedonist utilitarianism. Stevenson’s theory, another moderate version of emotivism is discussed at some length, showing how the author comes close to the discovery of the role of a pragmatic dimension of language as a basis for ethical argument. Last of all, the discussion from the Forties about Hume’s law is described, mentioning Karl Popper’s argument and Richard Hare’s early non-cognitivist but non-emotivist doctrine named prescriptivism. -/- 25. Elizabeth Anscombe and the revival of virtue ethics. The chapter discusses the three theses defended by Anscombe in 'Modern Moral Philosophy'. I argue that: a) her answer to the question "why should I be moral?" requires a solution of the problem of theodicy, and ignores any attempts to save the moral point of view without recourse to divine retribution; b) her notion of divine law is an odd one more neo-Augustinian than Biblical or Scholastic; c) her image of Kantian ethics and intuitionism is the impoverished image manufactured by consequentialist opponents for polemical purposes and that she seems strangely accept it; d) the difficulty of identifying the "relevant descriptions" of acts is not an argument in favour of an ethics of virtue and against consequentialism or Kantian ethics, and indeed the role of judgment in the latter is a response to the difficulties raised by the case of judgment concerning future action. A short look at further developments in the neo-naturalist current is given trough a reconstruction of Philippa Foot’s and Peter Geach’s critiques to the naturalist-fallacy argument and Alasdair MacIntyre’s grand reconstruction of the origins and allegedly unavoidable failure of the Enlightenment project of an autonomous ethic. -/- 26. Richard Hare and neo-Utilitarianism. The chapter addresses the issue of the complex process of self-transformation Utilitarianism underwent after Sidgwick’s and Moore’s fatal criticism and the unexpected Phoenix-like process of rebirth of a doctrine definitely refuted. A glimpse at this uproarious process is given through two examples. The first is Roy Harrod Wittgensteinian transformation of Utilitarianism in pure normative ethics depurated from hedonism as well as from whatsoever theory of the good. This results in preference utilitarianism combined with a ‘Kantian’ version of rule utilitarianism. The second is Richard Hare’s two-level preference utilitarianism where act utilitarianism plays the function of eventual rational justification of moral judgments and rule-utilitarianism that of action-guiding practical device. -/- 27. Hans-Georg Gadamer and rehabilitation of practical philosophy. The post-war rediscovery of ethics by many German thinkers and its culmination in the Sixties in the movement named ‘Rehabilitation of practical philosophy’ is described. Among the actors of such rehabilitation there were a few of Heidegger’s most brilliant disciples, and Hans-Georg Gadamer is chosen as a paradigmatic example. His reading of Aristotle’s lesson I reconstructed, starting with Heidegger’s lesson but then subtly subverting its outcome thanks to the recovery of the central role of the notion of phronesis. -/- 28. Karl-Otto Apel and the revival of Kantian ethics. Parallel to the neo-Aristotelian trend, there was in the Rehabilitation of practical philosophy a Kantian current. This started, instead than the rehabilitation of prudence, with the discovery of the pragmatic dimension of language carried out by Charles Peirce and the Oxford linguistic philosophy. On this basis, Karl-Otto Apel singled out as the decisive proponent of the linguistic and Kantian turn in German-speaking ethics, worked out the performative-contradiction argument while claiming that this was able to provide a new rational and universal basis for normative ethics. An examination of his argument is some detail is offered, followed by a more cursory reconstruction of Jürgen Habermas’s elaboration on Apel’s theory. -/- 29. John Rawls and public ethics as applied ethics. Rawls’s distinction between a “political” and a “metaphysical” approach to one central part of ethical theory, namely the theory of justice, is interpreted as a formulation of the same basic idea at the root of both the principles approach and neo-casuistry, both discussed in the following chapter, namely that it is possible to reach an agreement concerning positive moral judgments even though the discussion is still open – and in Rawls’ view never will be close – on the basic criteria for judgment. -/- 30. Beauchamp and Childress and bioethics as applied ethics. The chapter presents the revolution of applied ethics while stressing its methodological novelty, exemplified primarily by Beauchamp and Childress principles approach and then by Jonsen and Toulmin’s new casuistry. -/- . (shrink)

This paper examines Fichte's proof of evil in §16 of the System of Ethics. According to the majority of commentators, Fichte was mistaken to consider his proof Kantian in spirit (Piché 1999; Kosch 2006, 2011; Dews 2008; and Breazeale 2014). For rather than locate our propensity to evil in an act of free choice, Fichte locates it in a natural force of inertia. However, the distance between Kant and Fichte begins to close if we read his concept (...) of inertia, not as a material force, but as a tendency to resist the work of agency and autonomy. There are, I argue, both textual and conceptual reasons in support of a figurative interpretation. In the course of presenting these reasons, I also uncover an important insight guiding Fichte's analysis of evil in the System of Ethics: namely, his claim that we can never fully step back from ourselves in reflection. In the concluding sections of the paper, I argue that Fichte's insight may solve a particular skeptical threat facing recent Kantian accounts of normativity. (shrink)

Beyond Good and Evil was one of the last books German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche wrote, and has fast become one of the best-known works on moral and ethical philosophy. A collection of aphorisms and commentary largely make up one of his most celebrated works on his mature philosophy of the free spirit, and continues to be one of the most widely read and studied works of philosophy today. To be published as part of the first batch. Along with (...) Thus Spake Zaruthustra, this is Nietzsche's most popular work, in which he dismisses the a slave morality of Western civilization in favour of the a will to power. There are many editions, but they tend to be cheap paperback versions, or academic-style editions. This will be a nice looking collectable hard-back edition. (shrink)

This provocative book questions whether contemporary humanity can face death in any of the traditional ways, since the events of our century have created a new selfhood and a new death. Wyschogrod describes the “death event” and the “death world”; these refer to the Holocaust but also to the destructive bombings in World War II, and most importantly to the death-in-life of the Nazi and Stalinist concentration and labor camps. Her thesis is.

The destructive tension between human needs and environmental conservation arises from flaws in our political and economic structures. Oppression of people and devastation of nature go hand in hand, and the root of both these evils is the denial of otherness. The ecology movement is basically a movement of liberation, and is in league, de jure and de facto, with other liberation movements, since it seeks to promote the rights ofthe nonhuman world. In this context, subjugation of the Other is (...) immoral in all forms and ultimately suicidal. Recognition of the value of nonhuman nature doesn’t preclude a rational use of it, but requires something analogous to the primitive custom of apologizing to the spirits of prey, i.e., a mixture of religious respect and common sense. Awareness of the beauty and power of nature, like awareness ofthe injured rights of our fellow humans, creates a revolutionary moral imperative to change the life of our society. (shrink)

Men and women “possessed by unclean spirits” throng the pages of the Acta sanctorum, just as they had for centuries thronged the shrines of miracle-working saints. Around the turn of the thirteenth century, however, the literature of edification shows a sudden upsurge of interest in demoniacs. They begin to proliferate not only in saints' lives but also in the new genre of the exemplum, associated with the friars and the rise of vernacular preaching. At the same time that these sources (...) are directing heightened attention toward the possessed, the symptoms of possession itself conspicuously alter. Unlike the violent and self-destructive persons who had always qualified for saintly exorcism, the energumens of the new exemplum literature are lucid and articulate, inspiring responses more of curiosity and respect than of pity or horror. Speaking in persona diaboli, they were viewed as sources of supernatural authority, treated with circumspect awe by priests, and sometimes even allowed to preach. In their diabolically inspired, charismatic role, such demoniacs bear a startling, if superficial, resemblance to prophetic female saints, who gained their religious authority by speaking in persona Dei. (shrink)

Conceptions of "the self" have received significant recent attention in philosophy, anthropology, and cultural history. Scholars argue that the introspective self of the modern West is a distinctive phenomenon that cannot be projected back onto the cultures of antiquity. While acknowledging such difference is vital, it can lead to an inaccurate flattening of the ancient self. In this study, Carol A. Newsom explores the assumptions that govern ancient Israelite views of the self and its moral agency before the fall of (...) Judah, as well as striking developments during the Second Temple period. She demonstrates how the collective trauma of the destruction of the Temple catalyzed changes in the experience of the self in Israelite literature, including first-person-singular prayers, notions of self-alienation, and emerging understandings of a defective heart and will. Examining novel forms of spirituality as well as sectarian texts, Newsom chronicles the evolving inward gaze in ancient Israelite literature, unveiling how introspection in Second Temple Judaism both parallels and differs from forms of introspective selfhood in Greco-Roman cultures. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:BOOK REVIEWS 327 Tragic Vision and Divine Compassion: A Contemporary Theodicy. By WENDY FARLEY. Louisville, Kentucky: Westminster/John Knox Press, 1990. 150 pp. Wendy Farley sets herself an ambitious task in her book. She is dissatisfied with past theodicies, which account for evil and suffering as punishment for sin, as counterpoints in a larger aesthetic cosmic harmony, as means of purification and formation of character, or something that will (...) be as compensated for by other-worldly vindication and reward. These four theories may explain some forms of evil and suffering, but in the face of " radical suffering " they are " unable to exorcise the demons that whisper that life is futile, suffering is meaningless, and the cosmos an empty and evil void " (p. 22). By " radical suffering " Farley means that kind of suffering which debases and destroys the human dignity of the sufferer: " Radical suffering pinches the spirit of the sufferer, numbing it and diminishing its range. The distinctiveness of radical suffering does not lie in its intensity or its injustice but its power over the sufferer" (p. 54). Radical suffering drives the person to self-loathing and despair and therefore destroys her or his capacity to resist it. Despite its massive destructive power radical suffering is not rare; it occurs in familial, cultural, poli· tical, and economic relations under the forms of, e.g., child abuse, sexism, racism, violation of human rights, poverty, and starvation. To account for radical suffering, Farley proposes that (a) one place suffering rather than sin at the center of the problem of evil; (b) one replace the notion of a primordial fall with that of tragedy; (c) one repudiate the idea of divine omnipotence in favor of that of divine compassion (pp. 12-13). The second and third proposals are captured in the title of the book, " Tragic Vision and Divine Compassion." Farley's first proposal leads one to expect that she would do away with the notion of sin altogether, hut this is not the case. Strangely, she devotes a good deal of attention to sin, describing it as " catastrophic because it introduces chaos and disharmony into history " (p. 43). She sees sin as (self)-deception, callousness, bondage, and guilt (pp. 4451 ). Whereas traditional theology perceives a causal link between sin and suffering, the logic of Farley's alternative proposal entails her locating the origin of suffering elsewhere, namely, the tragic character of human existence: "... tragic vision locates the possihilirty of suffering in the conditions of existence and in the fragility of human freedom " (p. 29). A tragic vision of life does not, Farley claims, rationalize (radical) 3~8 BOOK REVIEWS suffering, nor is it atheistic. It recognizes, honestly and bluntly, that " the conditions of finite existence include conflict and fragility " (p. 31). Multiplicity ·and' variety enrich creation hut they inevitably lead to division and.separation; relationships warm the heart hut they must include some and exclude others; values sometimes conflict, such as mercy and justice; embodiment allows us to enjoy the pleasures of life but it leads to decay and death. Even human freedom, Farley points out, is infected with fragility caused by anxiety and desire: "Freedom is the tragic flaw of human existence, at once the stamp of its greatness and its destruction " ·(p. 37). What should one do in face of inevitable suffering? One must have compassion. Farley takes compassion to mean an enduring disposition horn of sympathetic knowledge of another person's suffering leading to love (which is a liberation from egocentrism that enables one to care for others) and working for justice (especially removing social in· justice). In contrast to dominating power, compassion empowers the sufferers to speak and act in their own defenses. It rejects the tempta· tion of passivity before evil and the use of violence to overthrow it. Rather, it empowers sufferers to resist evil. For Farley, God's power must he understood as compassion or love. As a noncoercive form of power, divine love (a) creates a tragic world in which radical suffering is inevitable and (b) because of suffering redeems it. Hence, divine compassion is both creative and redemptive. But why does God go through this seemingly redundant exercise? Why doesn't God create... (shrink)

Can an omnipotent and omnibenevolent God create humans with free will without the capacity to commit evil? Scholars have taken opposite positions on the contentious problem. Using scripture and the rules of logic, we argue that God cannot create impeccable creatures because of his ‘simplicity’. God cannot create gods, because God is uncreated. Peccable humans freely choose to disobey their creator and thus cannot blame him for the horrendous evils in this world. Concerning the belief of sinless humans (...) with free will in heaven, we suggest that such an impartation of God’s impeccability can be accomplished, not through creation, but by the marriage of Christ and the Church, for the two shall become one. Believers will become children of God and partakers of the divine nature.Contribution: Theologians and philosophers have argued whether God could create humans with free will who never commit evil, and if he could, why did he not do so? The primary contribution of this article is the argument that God could not create impeccable humans with free will for God could not create gods. (shrink)

The paper reads Kant’s notion of radical evil as anticipating and clarifying problematic aspects of what Arendt called ‘the banality of evil’. By reconstructing Arendt’s varied analyses of this notion throughout her later writings, I show that the main theoretical challenge posed by it concerns the adjudication of responsibility for evil deeds that seem to lack recognisable evil intentions. In order to clarify this issue, I turn to a canonical text in which the relationship between (...) class='Hi'>evil and responsibility plays a central role: Kant’s Religion within the Boundaries of Mere Reason. Relying on an interpretation of this writing by Arendt’s mentor Karl Jaspers published in 1935, in evident connection to National Socialism, I challenge Arendt’s own interpretation of Kant’s notion of radical evil, which, I argue, represents an antecedent, rather than a contrast, to ‘the banality of evil’. For Kant, radical evil consists in the destruction of the person’s sense of responsibility, thus producing a self-exculpatory... (shrink)

The main conclusion of Herman Philipse’s God in the Age of Science? is that we should all be atheists. Remarkably, however, the book contains no argument whatsoever for atheism. Philipse defends the argument from evil and the argument from divine hiddenness, but those arguments count only against an omnibenevolent and omnipotent God, not against just any god. He also defends the claim that there cannot be any bodiless spirits, but, of course, not all religions take their gods to be (...) bodiless. However, because his main tar- get of criticism is monotheism and adherents of monotheism usually claim that God is a bodiless spirit, this paper discusses Philipse’s arguments against the existence of a bodiless spirit. I argue that his three main claims about religious belief in a bodiless spirit are false. First, contrary to what he says, there is good reason to think that the expression “bodiless spirit” is meaningful. Among other things, the Wittgensteinian semantic theory of psychological attribute ascription on which his argument relies turns out to be untenable. Second, Philipse’s thesis that the existence of a bodiless spirit is impossible is also problematic. We can properly use the word person for bodiless spirits. Also, an attribute such as presence or omnipresence can be understood metaphorically without the definition of “God “thereby losing too much meaning. And we do not need any criterion for diachronic personal identity of bodiless spirits; such identity may very well be a primitive fact. Third and finally, there is no reason to think that the existence of a bodiless spirit is improbable. The fact that science has discovered a dependence relation between mental states and brain states and the fact that science has never been able to detect bodiless spirits provide no reason to think otherwise. (shrink)

For Kierkegaard, the problem of evil is the existential challenge of our entanglement in evil, suffering, and sin. Sin is not a “negation” but a “position,” not a moral wrongdoing or lack of virtue, but a distinctive condition in which humans live. Nor is evil simply a lack or absence of good, but the weakening, obstruction, and destruction of good. This paper traces Kierkegaard’s account of evil and sin in his major writings in terms of (...) despair, boredom, and fear. Sin and evil do not question God’s love, but rather become the occasion for God to create good out of evil, life out of death, being out of nothing. (shrink)

:Our theoretical claim is that racism was consciously devised, and later evolved, to serve two conflicting purposes. First, racism served a legal-economic purpose, legitimating ownership and savage treatment of slaves by southern whites, preserving the value of property rights in labor. Second, racism allowed slave owners to justify, to themselves and to outsiders, how a morally "good" person could own slaves. Racism portrayed African slaves as being less than human, or else as being other than human. The interest of the (...) historical narrative presented here is the emergence of racial chattel slavery as a coherent and fiercely defended ideal, rather than the "necessary evil" that had been the perspective of the Founders. The reason that this is important is that the ideology of racism persisted far beyond the destruction of the institution of slavery, through Reconstruction, Jim Crow, and in some ways persisting even today. This work is an example of the problems of assuming that there is a "feedback" mechanism by which moral intuitions are updated and perfected; to the contrary, as suggested by Douglass North, even socially inferior ideologies can prove extremely persistent. (shrink)

Both the sociological as well as biblical-theological concepts of secularism may make use of the phenomenological discussions of implicit horizonal knowledge as informing explicit forms of knowing. If secularism may mean the erosion of faith by way of appropriation of fundamental beliefs about oneself or the world, the deep secularism may mean an appropriation of beliefs which make faith itself appear reprehensible. But perhaps the deepest form of secularism is the existence of scientific, reductionist naturalism; this may take the forms (...) eliminativism or of identity theory. This ‘secularism’ is such that it makes knowing itself impossible. Its basic move is to reduce the transcendental conditions of the manifestation, description, or display of the world to physical causes. Its most startling thesis is that first-person experience itself is an illusion and this illusion is the source of the major lies and beliefs that are most harmful for the culture, e.g. religious faith and belief in immortality. Unfortunately for deep secularism, as scientistic reductionistic materialist naturalism, it self-destructs. (shrink)

Could Greek philosophers-Plato, Aristotle, Plotinus, Proclus-be considered as guardians and schoolmasters that brought humanity to Christ in a way similar to the Law of the Old Testament according to Saint Paul (Gal. 3,24)??he philosophical project of Platonism had five fundamental tenets, namely monism, transcendence, participation, ethics of purification, and the relevant notion of evil as non-being. Dr. Dionysios Skliris is both theologian and philosopher, and he sees that all of these philosophical demands were realized in the theology of the (...) Fathers in the most radical way, yet "in another form" (Mark 16,12). After Christ, transcendence means that God is uncreated and creates a contingent world out of free love. Monism coexists with a Trinity of Persons since God is love in His own transcendent being and not only in relation to the world. On every page, Skliris shows us the true implications of purification: it leads to transformation and evil is non-being not as a "fading away" of light, but as a historical closedness to God that cannot survive in the eschaton. (shrink)

New from the bestselling author of Transformers and Becoming Naturally Therapeutic comes a passionate call to all spiritual seekers to awaken their senses, explore their "shadows", and unite the powerful forces of body and soul to find true spiritual fulfillment.