This essay asks why Chinese and North Vietnamese agricultural scientists in the 1950s and 1960s willingly adopted the Soviet agricultural sciences represented not only by agronomists Ivan Michurin and Trofim Lysenko but soil scientist Vasili Williams. The answer, I argue, is that they were fascinated by the promise of Soviet agrobiology that I conceptualize as a combination of dialectical materialism and voluntarist productivism: if one masters the interconnectivity between plants, microbes, organic and inorganic materials, and soil, one can overcome the (...) given biological and environmental limits, manipulate and optimize the material flow, and ceaselessly maximize agricultural production. Engaging the historiographical debate about Lysenkoism—which has mostly paid attention to the Euro-American cases, genetic controversies, and geopolitical specificities of each locale—as a global phenomenon, I shed fresh light on the understudied Chinese and North Vietnamese cases, the intersection between Lysenko’s theories and Williamsian soil science, and epistemic commonality across national differences. (shrink)

Thanks largely to the work of Robert Adams and Philip Quinn, the second half of the twentieth century witnessed a resurgence of interest in divine command theory as a viable position in normative theory and meta-ethics. More recently, however, there has been some dissatisfaction with divine command theory even among those philosophers who claim that normative properties are grounded in God, and as a result alternative views have begun to emerge, most notably divine intention theory (Murphy, Quinn) and divine motivation (...) theory (Zagzebski). My goal here is to outline a distinct theory, divine desire theory, and suggest that, even if it is not clearly superior to these extant views, it is at least worthy of serious consideration.1 As far as this paper is concerned, the discussion will be limited just to the deontic status of actions (obligatory, permissible, forbidden), and so no attempt will be made to also account for axiological properties such as goodness or evil. In order to get oriented to the range of deontological views in this area, consider the following three rough characterizations. (shrink)

This chapter surveys work in meta-ethics in the past fifty years which explicitly deals with issues associated with evil. It discusses two examples from secular discussions: the argument developed by Gilbert Harman on the explanatory role of moral facts, and the argument developed by Gilbert Harman and John Doris on the empirical inadequacy of the virtues. The chapter then turns to two topics related to theistic meta-ethics: the problem of evil and moral realism, and theological voluntarism and evil.

Anastasia Philippa Scrutton renders helpful service to philosophers and mental health clinicians by highlighting strongly voluntarist approaches to depression within some present-day Christian writers and communities, particularly Pentecostal and Evangelical Christian communities in the United States and the United Kingdom. Drawing on a number of evangelical Christian books and online resources, she argues that these resources are "voluntaristic because they emphasize the role of libertarian free will and choice in the attitudes and behaviors of people with depression, such that depression (...) is seen to be a sin, or the result of sin, because depression sufferers are able to do otherwise." She counters these... (shrink)

This paper is part of a six paper exchange with Michael Shermer. Section one explains how “God” is meant to be understood. Section two then introduces the position that morality depends in some way upon God. Section three turns to some of the leading arguments for this view. Finally, we will conclude with the most powerful challenge to this approach, namely what has come to be called the Euthyphro Dilemma.

This paper is part of a six paper exchange with Michael Shermer. This is my critical commentary on Michael Shermer's paper “Morality is real, objective, and natural.” Shermer and I agree that morality is both real and objective. Here I raise serious reservations about both Shermer's account of where morality comes from and his account of what morality tells us to do. His approach to the foundations of morality would allow some very disturbing behaviors to count as moral, and his (...) approach to what morality says does not provide the action guidance we need from a moral theory. (shrink)

In her article, "Is Depression Sin? A Philosophical Examination of Christian Voluntarism," Anastasia Phillippa Scrutton has offered a thoughtful contribution to the philosophical literature regarding depression and freedom of the will. Her analysis provides a careful and well-organized review of the position, prevalent in some Christian literature, that depression is within the individual's control and is thus a sin. She describes various components of this view, which she labels Christian voluntarism, and distinguishes it from more moderate versions of (...) free will, in its assumptions that nearly all persons in all situations possess total freedom, and thus the inherent ability to prevent or to overcome depression.... (shrink)

The article analyzes the varied meanings historically associated with concepts of voluntarism in relation to social relief as they were articulated by changing moral elites in Denmark from the late nineteenth century until the present. Concepts of voluntarism have historically constituted “normative counterconcepts” that link voluntary practices to desired futures in opposition to alternative modes of organizing. The “proximity” of voluntarism vis-à-vis the “distance” of the state has always been a core meaning, but the concept has drifted (...) across the political spectrum from its first articulation by nineteenth-century conservative Christians to its rediscovery by leftist social researchers in the late twentieth century. Paradoxically, the welfare state helped “proximity” become a core meaning, in contrast to its original social-conservative meaning emphasizing proximity and distance. (shrink)

Christian interpretations of what psychiatry terms "depression" vary widely. Although liberal forms of Christianity regard depression as both a form of mental illness and a catalyst for moral and spiritual transformation, some Catholic theology regards some forms depression not as pathological but as a Dark Night of the Soul. Nonliberal Protestant forms of Christianity tend to view depression more as a sign of spiritual illness than spiritual health: an indication of demonic possession in some Charismatic and syncretistic/indigenous forms of Christianity, (...) and a sin or a result of sin, primarily in conservative Evangelical thought.This paper is about the... (shrink)

This book considers different forms of voluntarism developed from the 13th to 18th centuries. By crossing the conventional dividing line between the medieval and early modern periods, the volume draws important new insights on the historical development of voluntarism. Voluntarism places a special emphasis on the will when it comes to the analysis and explanation of fundamental philosophical questions and problems. Since the Middle Ages, voluntarist considerations and views played an important role in the development of different (...) theories of action, ethics, metaethics, and metaphysics. The chapters in this volume are grouped according to three distinct kinds of voluntarism: psychological, ethical, and theological voluntarism. They address topics such as the threat of irrationality as the standard objection to voluntarism, incontinent actions and their explanation, the nature of the will as rational appetite, the relationship between intellect and will, the implications of conceptions of the will for political freedom, and the relations between divine freedom and the modal status of eternal truths. The chapters not only consider towering figures of the Middle Ages--Thomas Aquinas, Henry of Gent, William of Ockham, Francisco de Vitoria--and early modern period--René Descartes, Thomas Hobbes, Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz, Samuel Pufendorf--but also engage with less well-known figures such as Peter John Olivi, John of Pouilly, Catharine Trotter Cockburn, and Christian August Crusius. Varieties of Voluntarism in Medieval and Early Modern Philosophy will appeal to scholars and advanced students working in medieval philosophy, early modern philosophy, the history of ethics, and philosophy of religion. (shrink)

According to standard late medieval Christian thought, humans in heaven are unable to sin, having been “confirmed” in their goodness; and, nevertheless, are more free than humans are in the present life. The rise of voluntarist conceptions of the will in the late thirteenth century made it increasingly difficult to hold onto both claims. Peter Olivi suggested that the impeccability of the blessed was dependent upon a special activity of God upon their wills and argued that this external constraint upon (...) their wills did not eliminate their freedom. Later voluntarists largely agreed with Olivi in attributing the confirmation of the blessed to be dependent upon God’s activity in some way, but disputed the means by which and the extent to which the wills of those in heaven could be said to retain their freedom. This paper will examine various attempts made to either harmonize these two claims or else to soften the blow of rejecting one of them; among the authors surveyed will be Peter John Olivi, John Duns Scotus, Henry of Harclay, William of Ockham, Walter Chatton, and Margurite Porete. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Isaac Barrow on the Mathematization of Nature: Theological Voluntarism and the Rise of Geometrical OpticsAntoni MaletIntroductionIsaac Newton’s Mathematical Principles of Natural Philosophy embodies a strong program of mathematization that departs both from the mechanical philosophy of Cartesian inspiration and from Boyle’s experimental philosophy. The roots of Newton’s mathematization of nature, this paper aims to demonstrate, are to be found in Isaac Barrow’s (1630–77) philosophy of the mathematical sciences.Barrow’s (...) attitude towards natural philosophy evolved from his earnest interest in medicine of around 1650, when a young Cambridge graduate, to natural philosophy (apparently under Henry More’s influence); from his thesis on the insufficiency of the Cartesian hypothesis to geometrical optics and the strong program of mathematization of natural philosophy of the middle 1660s; from Lucasian professor of Mathematics to Chaplain of his Majesty and eminent Restoration divine. Contemporary accounts of Barrow’s life suggest that he grew ever more skeptical about the worth of natural philosophy and mathematics. 1 In his last years he became a prolific [End Page 265] author of sermons and theological works. Published shortly after his death by John Tillotson (1630–94), later archbishop of Canterbury, they occupy over two thousand folio pages. Overloaded with involved philosophical arguments, Barrow’s sermons were apparently not very popular, but they were highly regarded by scholars and the Anglican hierarchy. 2 It is on certain of his sermons, as well as on the philosophical discussions contained in the Mathematical Lectures that our account of Barrow’s philosophy of the mathematical sciences will rest. 3 Barrow’s understanding of the mathematical sciences will allow us to discuss together three issues often analyzed independently: the theological background to English natural philosophy, the changing notion of mixed mathematical sciences during the seventeenth century, and finally the philosophical foundations of modern geometrical optics.It has long been recognized that significant relationships exist between theological voluntarism or intellectualism and views on natural philosophy. In particular Robert Boyle’s theological voluntarism is seen as grounding his experimentalist approach to natural philosophy. It is not quite so clear, however, how well theological voluntarism may relate to a strong program of mathematization such as the one embodied in Newton’s Principia Mathematica. In fact it has been suggested that the relationship is a negative one. This is derived from the necessary character of mathematical laws, which would put unwanted restrictions on God’s absolute dominion over nature, and also from the notion that theological intellectualism is conducive to a deductive, a priori science—the paradigm of which is of course geometry. However, Barrow’s theological voluntarism lead him to heighten the role of mathematics within natural philosophy.During the seventeenth century the so-called mixed or subalternate mathematical sciences changed profoundly. In the Enlightenment mixed mathematics—meaning above all rational mechanics—became one of the most prestigious and influential disciplines. The mixed mathematics of the Enlightenment, however, was markedly different from the Aristotelian [End Page 266] mixed mathematical sciences. The differences are noticeable both in the subject matter and in the substitution of mathematical infinitesimal analysis for geometrical synthesis, but also in the way of grounding mathematical theory on empirical evidence. Barrow’s Mathematical Lectures (delivered at Cambridge from 1664 to 1666) offer a fresh insight into the metamorphosis of these sciences just when Newton’s “mathematical principles” were in the making. Not the least interesting feature of Barrow’s discussion is that God’s omnipotence allows an evaluation of the truth of mathematical theories that do not apply to this world. Therefore, Barrow is led to introduce the distinction between the internal consistency, or mathematical truth, of a mathematical theory and its physical truth. This, in turn, leads him to the notion that theories need testing.Barrow on Matter and GodRecent literature has established significant correlations between theological voluntarism and empiricism, as well as between theological intellectualism and rationalism. As E. B. Davis writes, “the Christian doctrine of creation is a dialogue between God’s unconstrained will, which utterly transcends the bounds of human comprehension, and God’s orderly intellect, which serves as the model for the human mind.” Intellectualist theology considers God’s omniscience His... (shrink)

This chapter begins by considering the relationship between Christian ethics and moral philosophy. The analysis then turns to the period between the Reformation and the death of St Alphonsus Liguori. It discusses arguments for and against voluntarism; fundamental morality as genuine morality; pagan virtue; what Christian morality adds to morality; moral and positive obligations; and divine love and divine justice.

In an attempt to think through the Islamic alongside the Christian, this article draws upon the political theology of Carl Schmitt to reflect on the salience of sovereignty. But in doing so, the article re-reads Schmitt’s political theology for its Protestant voluntarism, and adopts a more robust theological voluntarism as a vehicle for reflecting on political thought across both Christian and Islamic history. Moreover, this approach to political theology makes possible reflections on how political theology, whether in Christian (...) or Islamic thought, may offer a critical lens by which to gain new analytic insights into the operation of sovereignty in presumably secularised regimes of thought, such as international law. (shrink)

Christian Wolff's 1721 Discourse on the Practical Philosophy of the Chinese is generally read as championing the autonomy of ethics from religion. This is too simple: Wolff's ethics was an antivoluntarist religious ethics. The example of the Chinese confirmed for Wolff that revelation is not necessary for knowledge or practice of genuine virtue, though he held that the Chinese achieve only the first of three “degrees of virtue.” (Most Christians, including the Pietists who drove Wolff from Halle shortly after he (...) delivered the Discourse, did not, in his judgment, achieve even that.) China's being perceived as outside of Western (and sacred) history made it a congenial example for the ethics and moral anthropology that, in Wolff's time, were struggling against the voluntarism of a Christian ethics premised on original sin. (shrink)

I tease out two early Christian puzzles about agency: (a) agential control: how can agents self-constitute if their primary experience of themselves is not one of control, as in Greek antiquity, but of relative powerlessness? And (b) ethical expertise: how can agents constitute themselves as ethical agents if they cannot trust themselves to recognize, and act in the light of, the good? I argue, first, that Foucault saw the importance of these puzzles and focused on extreme obedience as affording a (...) possible resolution; second, that he failed to resolve the puzzles because of his reliance on an overly voluntarist and reflective understanding of obedience as an exercise of will; and finally, that turning to Cassian’s own thoughts on the relation between extreme obedience and humility as kenosis affords us a way out of the puzzles. (shrink)

Ehrenamt - Facetten eines komplexen Phänomens -- Moralische Dignität und Ehrenamt - eine theologisch-ethische Analyse -- Zusammenschau von Theorie und Praxis -- Konklusion. Aspekte einer zukunftsfähigen und nachhaltigen Gestalt des Ehrenamtes.

Traditionalist and radical orthodox critiques of the Enlightenment assert that the modern discourse on moral self-government constitutes a radical break with the theocentric model of morality which preceded it. Against this view, this paper argues that the conceptions of autonomy emerged from the effort to reconcile commitments within the Christian tradition. Through an analysis of the moral thought of the Cambridge Platonist Ralph Cudworth, this paper contends that distinctively Christian theological concerns concerning moral accountability to God and the character of (...) divine-human moral relationships produced a theory of moral autonomy which anticipates that of Kant. This paper highlights the role of anti-voluntarism in the creation of this moral standpoint, and argues that the resultant moral view is an “internalization” of the voluntarist model of sovereignty. (shrink)

In the history of philosophy, voluntarists—that is, philosophers committed to some version of the freedom of indifference—have worried about its metaphysical credentials, but only a few, at least to my knowledge, have attempted to argue for more than its mere existence. Freedom of indifference is the option to choose between opposites in a given situation. In this paper, I present the ambitious attempt of the German pre-Kantian philosopher Christian August Crusius (1715–1775) to argue for the claim that we have freedom (...) of indifference as a matter of hypothetical necessity. The point is that, in his view, there can be no actual world without freedom of indifference. This is not a logical but a metaphysical truth. I argue that a possible (motivational) reason for Crusius’s choice to tread this slippery path is that he attempts to bestow some metaphysical dignity on the freedom of indifference. As a consequence, this metaphysical value of freedom of indifference shapes the relation between the divine and free, rational agents in a way that is completely different from a rationalist’s conception such as Leibniz’s. In this paper, I give a plausible interpretation of a metaphysical argument that has been neglected in the relevant literature. (shrink)

Medieval theology had an important influence on later philosophy which is visible in the empiricisms of Russell, Carnap, and Quine. Other thinkers, including McDowell, Kripke, and Dennett, show how we can overcome the distorting effects of that theological ecosystem on our accounts of the nature of reality and our relationship to it. In a different philosophical tradition, Hegel uses a secularized version of Christianity to argue for a kind of human knowledge that overcomes the influences of late-medieval voluntarism, and (...) some twentieth-century thinkers, including Benjamin and Derrida, instead defend a Jewish-influenced notion of the religious sublime. Frank B. Farrell analyzes and connects philosophers of different eras and traditions to show that modern philosophy has developed its practices on a terrain marked out by earlier theological and religious ideas, and considers how different philosophers have both embraced, and tried to escape from, those deep-seated patterns of thought. (shrink)

This review essay assesses the significance of J. B. Schneewind's "The Invention of Autonomy" for the history of moral thought in general and for religious ethics in particular. The essay offers an overview of Schneewind's complex argument before critically discussing his four central themes: the primacy of Immanuel Kant, the fundamentality of conflict, the insufficiency of virtue, and community with God. Whereas Schneewind argues that an impasse between modern natural law and perfectionist ethics revealed irresolvable tensions within Christian ethics and (...) thus encouraged the emergence of secular moral thought, this author suggests that these tensions were specific to a voluntarist strand of Christian moral thought from which even antivoluntarists of the modern period were unable to break free. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:Virtues of the Will: The Transformation of Ethics in the Late Thirteenth Century by Bonnie KentTimothy B. NooneBonnie Kent. Virtues of the Will: The Transformation of Ethics in the Late Thirteenth Century. Washington, D.C.: The Catholic University of America Press, 1995. Pp. viii + 270. Cloth, $44.95.In this admirably written study, Bonnie Kent presents researchers on medieval philosophy with a survey of moral psychology during the crucial period (...) between the death of Thomas Aquinas and the summit of Duns Scotus’s career in the first decade of the fourteenth century. Although there have been many studies of particular issues in particular thinkers during this period and a generous presentation of texts with commentary by the great Dom Lottin (Psychologie et morale aux XIIe et XIIIe siècles, 7 vols. Louvain, 1942–1954), there has not been any lengthy study to date devoted to the period of the late thirteenth century that focused on moral psychology and the will. Simply in drawing attention to this period in the history of moral psychology, Professor Kent has made a tremendous contribution to the study of medieval philosophy, since she has rendered accessible authors that are more often than not neglected and overlooked. Kent, in fact, attempts something more: she places her study in the framework of the general historiography of Scholastic thought and the more recent interest in medieval ethics prompted by those championing virtue ethics.In order to highlight the distinguishing features of recent studies on medieval ethical thought, Kent reviews the established interpretation of philosophy in the thirteenth century. In the opening chapter, entitled “Heroes and Histories,” she points out the features common to the scholarly approaches of Gilson, Van Steenberghen, and even Copleston: (1) a prominent role is assigned to schools and movements, especially Aristotelianism and Augustinianism; (2) metaphysics and epistemology are the primary objects of study along with the relation between philosophy and theology; and (3) the Thomistic point of view is the organizing principle for telling the drama of the period. The last feature means that the history of the period is fundamentally told as streams of influence leading to Aquinas, followed by the golden age of Aquinas and his contemporaries and succeeded by a gradual decline after Aquinas, leading to the demise of Scholastic thought. In the context of the established historiography, accordingly, the approach of Alasdair MacIntyre represents a restatement of the common view, but one more radical in form. Instead of being merely different schools or movements, Augustinianism and Aristotelianism are different worldviews with their own paradigmatic conceptions of rationality, each of which is subsumed into the higher synthesis of Thomism. According to MacIntyre, the passage to modernity is begun by Scotus whose innovative theses in moral psychology and ethics are considered revolutionary.Kent’s stated aim is to challenge the “standard story” found in Gilson and others as well as its revised version in MacIntyre’s writings by providing a detailed study of the [End Page 462] period just prior to Scotus and establishing precisely how revolutionary Scotus’s teachings were when compared to his immediate predecessors. She accomplishes this aim masterfully in a series of chapters dedicated to the sources of medieval thought and elements of moral psychology. Beginning with late thirteenth-century thinkers’ attitude toward Aristotle in her second chapter, she shows in considerable detail that there is little evidence for any serious anti-Aristotelianism in the vast majority of late thirteenth-century authors. Indeed, the posture of these thinkers was to separate Aristotle from radical Aristotelianism and Thomism in order to claim that ancient wisdom was on the side of Christian ethics and psychology. The only exception that Kent finds to this widespread attitude is in the writings of Peter John Olivi whose hostility to pagan philosophy is clearly evident.The focus in the next chapter is on ethical voluntarism, a position characterized by the endorsement of the superiority of will over reason, the claim that human freedom resides primarily in the faculty of the will, that the will can act contrary to reason’s judgment, and that the will, not the intellect, commands the lower powers of the soul. In detailing the advent of... (shrink)

Despite the way we think of saints as belonging to a certain historical period and confronting specific historical obstacles, we tend to see their acts as being universally meaningful, and therefore, that these acts are practices which should be imitated in some manner. However this understanding carries with it a significant difficulty: namely, there is a risk of interpreting the lives and actions of saints as providing rules of conduct to be followed, as if their enactment was an end in-itself. (...) In other words, a simplistic notion of imitation can lead to the problem of voluntarism, where the intention to imitate an action is viewed to be sufficient or equal to actualizing goodness or piety. But there is a further, perhaps more significant problem with this understanding, and this involves how we tend to conflate the performance (or doing) of actions with their meaning. Does an action, especially that of a saint, have a meaning that is identical to its effect? Or, does the action itself produce a sense of meaning that outruns its effect? If the answer to this last question is affirmative, then the actions of a saint can be said to predicate an emergent meaning, that is, a meaning that has not yet been articulated, let alone realized. A saint would therefore be less a figure of convention and more a figure of innovation. In this chapter, I employ Paul Ricoeur’s theory of symbol to show how, beyond the historical specificity of the lives of saints, their actions can be understood to offer new ways of understanding the possibility for being, which I will unapologetically link to the Christian notion of “the New Being.” My discussion will first include a summary of Ricoeur’s theory of symbol, turning next to an application of this theory to saints and the contrasting context of the Prophet in the Hebrew Bible. The chapter will conclude with an elaboration of a symbolic understanding of action in relation to the New Being. (shrink)

Emotions are the focus of intense debate both in contemporary philosophy and psychology, and increasingly also in the history of ideas. Simo Knuuttila presents a comprehensive survey of philosophical theories of emotion from Plato to Renaissance times, combining rigorous philosophical analysis with careful historical reconstruction. The first part of the book covers the conceptions of Plato and Aristotle and later ancient views from Stoicism to Neoplatonism and, in addition, their reception and transformation by early Christian thinkers from Clement and Origen (...) to Augustine and Cassian. Knuuttila then proceeds to a discussion of ancient themes in medieval thought, and of new medieval conceptions, codified in the so-called faculty psychology from Avicenna to Aquinas, in thirteenth century taxonomies, and in the voluntarist approach of Duns Scotus, William Ockham, and their followers. Philosophers, classicists, historians of philosophy, historians of psychology, and anyone interested in emotion will find much to stimulate them in this fascinating book. (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)

1Preface: Malthus the Utilitarian vs. Malthus the Christian moral thinker. The chapter aims at reconstructing the deadlocks of Malthus scholarship concerning his relationship to utilitarianism. It argues that Bonar created out of nothing the myth of Malthus’s ‘Utilitarianism’, which carried, in turn, a pseudo-problem concerning Malthus’s lack of consistency with his own alleged Utilitarianism; besides it argues that such misinterpretation was hard to die and still persists in Hollander’s reading of Malthus’s work. ● -/- 2 Eighteenth-century Anglican ethics. 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 worked out a kind of a rational-choice account of the origins of natural laws, where a law-giver God chooses among a number of possible sets of laws on the basis of a maximizing criterion, happiness for his creatures. ● -/- 3 Malthus’s meta-ethics. The chapter reconstructs the two ethical chapters of the second Essay. It argues that Malthus’s ethics is not dependent on Paley’s, but is derived from Cumberland, Butler, Gay, Brown. Besides, it argues that theodicy takes a new place in the 1803 Essays and ethics becomes a key to theodicy. The new solution is that, once it has been proved that passions can be mastered and that a world where passions are under control would be a comparatively happy place, a society where moral restraint prevailed would make the middling ranks more numerous, reduce dependence, and preserve liberty. ● -/- 4 Malthus’s early normative ethics: a morality of freedom. The chapter reconstructs young Malthus’s views on the foundations of ethics, proving his adhesion to voluntarist consequentialism. Then it reconstructs his treatment of political issues, whence a clear stance emerges in favour of traditional Whig concerns, such as political freedom, personal independence and dignity. Finally, it gives a fresh look at the theological argument in the two well-known final chapters, locating it in the context of consequentialism, voluntarism, and quasi-Leibnizian theodicy. ● -/- 5 Malthus’s intermediate normative ethics: a morality of prudence. Malthus’s normative ethics focuses on two main ‘natural’ virtues, benevolence and chastity, and three artificial virtues. These include love for equality and love for liberty. A special place is granted to another virtue, prudence, which is the link between natural and artificial virtues. This special virtue also provides an invisible link between the private and the public domains, in that it contributes to combine self-love with general happiness. This is granted by the unintended results mechanism, or “the happiness of the whole is to be the result of the happiness of individuals, and to begin first with them. No cooperation is required”. ● -/- 6 Malthus’s mature normative ethics: a morality of humanity. The chapter describes reactions by Evangelicals, such as Gisborne, Sumner, and Chalmers, to Malthus’s theory and Malthus’s transformation of his own system in order to pave objections. This amounts to incorporating The Evangelicals’ ideas into his own system. The friendly controversy with his Evangelical fellow-travellers yielded several important changes in 1806, 1817, and 1826 editions of the second Essay in the formulation of Malthusian ethics, in the adoption of moral improvement instead of happiness as the variable to be maximised, in the adoption of generalized education as the main weapon in the war on poverty. ● -/- 7 Malthus’s applied ethics. The chapter reconstructs Malthus’s treatment of a few issues in ‘applied ethics’, sexual morality, public morality, poverty, and besides, war and slavery. On the first issue, he argues the duty to marry only at a time when one is ready to carry the burden of six children as a moral duty imposed by prudence and rejects birth control because of its alleged effect of encouraging ‘indolence’. On the second issue, he defends a peculiar kind of Whiggism as anti-Machiavellian politics centred on rights, equality, and dignity. On the third issue, his final approach is a kind of Institutional approach to poverty, making room for generalized basic education, free markets for labour and allowing for a subsidiary role for private beneficence. The goal to be aimed at is bringing about circumstances which tend to elevate the character of the lower classes of society and offer them a chance of being respectable, virtuous and happy. ● -/- 8 Conclusions: strengthening the theological foundation. Malthus’s criteria for policy appraisal were not utilitarian ones. His normative ethics and his politics were sharply different from Bentham’s. Utility is just one element in Malthus’s ethics, going with laws of nature and rights, and ironically, far from being a Benthamite insertion, is the most markedly theological element in Malthus’s system of ideas. ● -/- . (shrink)

Radical constructivists appeal to self-legislation in arguing that rational agents are the ultimate sources of normative authority over themselves. I chart the roots of radical constructivism and argue that its two leading Kantian proponents are unable to defend an account of self-legislation as the fundamental source of practical normativity without this legislation collapsing into a fatal arbitrariness. Christine Korsgaard cannot adequately justify the critical resources which agents use to navigate their practical identities. This leaves her account riven between rigorism and (...) voluntarism, such that it will not escape a paradox that arises when self-legislation is unable to appeal to external normative standards. Onora O'Neill anchors self-legislation more firmly to the self-disciplining structures of reason itself. However, she ultimately fails to defend sufficiently unconditional practical norms which could guide legislation. These endemic problems with radical constructivist models of self-legislation prompt a reconstruction of a neglected realist self-legislative tradition which is exemplified by Christian Wolff. In outlining a rationalist and realist account of self-legislation, I argue that it can also make sense of our ability to overcome anomie and deference in practical action. Thus, I claim that we need not make laws but can make them our own. (shrink)

This book tells the story of modern ethics, namely the story of a discourse that, after the Renaissance, went through a methodological revolution giving birth to Grotius’s and Pufendorf’s new science of natural law, leaving room for two centuries of explorations of the possible developments and implications of this new paradigm, up to the crisis of the Eighties of the eighteenth century, a crisis that carried a kind of mitosis, the act of birth of both basic paradigms of the two (...) following centuries: Kantian ethics and utilitarianism. The new science of natural law carried a fresh start for ethics, resulting from a mixture of the Old and the New. It was, as suggested by Schneewind, an attempt at rescuing the content of Scholastic and Stoic doctrines on a new methodological basis. The former was the claim of existence of objective and universal moral laws; the latter was the self-aware attempt at justifying a minimal kernel of such laws facing skeptical doubt. What Bentham and Kant did was precisely carrying this strategy further on, even if restructuring it each of them around one out of two alternative basic claims. The nineteenth- and twentieth-century critics of the Enlightenment attacked both not on their alleged failure in carrying out their own projects, but precisely on having adopted Grotius’s and Pufendorf’s project. What counter-enlightenment has been unable to spell out is which alternative project could be carried out facing the modern condition of pluralism, while on the contrary, if we takes a closer look at developments in twentieth-century ethics or at on-going discussions on practical issues, we might feel inclined to believe that Grotius’s and Pufendorf’s project is as up-to-date as ever. -/- Table of Contents -/- Preface I. Fathers of the Reformation and Schoolmen 1.1. Luther: passive justice and the good deeds; 1.2. Calvin: voluntarism and predestination; 1.3. Baroque Scholasticism; 1.4. Casuistry and Institutiones morales -/- II Neo-Platonists, neo-Stoics, neo-Sceptics 2.1. Aristotelian, neo-Platonic, neo-Epicurean and neo-Cynic Humanists; 2.2. Oeconomica and the art of living; 2.3. Neo-Stoics; 2.4. Neo-Sceptics; 2.5. Moralistic literature -/- III Neo-Augustinians 3.l. The Jansenists on natura lapsa, sufficient grace, pure love; 3.2. Nicole on the impossibility of self-knowledge; 3.3. Nicole on self-love and charity; 3.4. Nicole against civic virtue, for Christian civility; 3.5. Malebranche on general laws and necessary evil; 3.6. Malebranche on Neo-Augustinianism and Platonism. -/- IV Grotius, Pufendorf and the new moral science 4.1. Grotius against Aristotle and the sceptics; 4.2. Mersenne and Gassendi; 4.3. Descartes on ethics as the last branch of philosophy’s tree; 4.4. Hobbes on scepticism and the new moral science; 4.5. Spinoza on the new moral science as a descriptive science;4.6. Locke on voluntarism and probabilism; 4.7. Pufendorf on natural law as an exact science; 4.8. Pufendorf on physical and moral entities; 10. Pufendorf on self-preservation -/- V The empiricist version of the new moral science: from Cumberland to Paley 5.1. Cumberland against Hobbesian voluntarism; 5.2. Cumberland and theological consequentialism; 5.3. Cumberland on universal benevolence and self-love; 5.4. Shaftesbury on the moral sense; 5.5. Hutcheson on natural law and moral faculties; 5.6. Gay, Brown, Paley and theological consequentialism. -/- VI The rationalist version of the new moral science: from Cudworth to Price 6.1. The Cambridge Platonists; 6.2. Shaftesbury on the moral sense; 6.3. Butler and a third way between voluntarism and scepticism; 6.4. Price and the rational character of moral truths; -/- VII Leibniz’s compromise between the new moral science and Aristotelianism 1.Leibniz against voluntarism; 2.Leibniz against the division between the physical and the moral good; 3.Leibniz on la place d’autrui and theological consequentialism; 4.Thomasius, Wolff, Crusius -/- VIII French eighteenth-century philosophers without the new moral science 8.1. The genealogy of our ideas of virtue and vice; 8.2. Maupertuis and moral arithmetic 8.3. The philosophes and the harmony of interests; 8.4. Rousseau on corruption, self-love, and virtue; 8.5. Sade on the merits of vice -/- IX Experimental moral science: Hume and Adam Smith 9.1. Mandeville’s paradox; 9.2. Hutcheson on the law of nature and moral faculties; 9.3. Hume on experimental moral philosophy and the intermediate principles; 9.4. Hume’s Law; 9.5. Hume on the fellow-feeling; 9.6. Hume on natural and artificial virtues and disinterested pleasure for utility; 9.7. Adam Smith’s anti-realist metaethics; 9.8. Adam Smith on self-deception and the paradox of happiness; 9.9. Adam Smith on sympathy and the impartial spectator; 9.10. Adam Smith on the twofold criterion for moral judgement and its paradox; 9.11. Reid on the refutation of scepticism and the self-evidence of duty -/- X Kantian ethics 10.1. Kantian metaethics: moral epistemology; 10.2. Kantian metaethics: moral ontology; 10.3. Kantian metaethics: moral psychology; 10.4. Kantian normative ethics; 10.5. Kant on the impracticability of applied ethics; 10.6. Kantian moral anthropology; 10.7. Civilisation and moralisation; 10.8. Theology on a moral basis and the origins of evil; 10.9. Fichte and the transformation of theoretical philosophy into practical philosophy XI Bentham and utilitarianism 11.1. Bentham’s linguistic theory; 11.2. Bentham’s moral ontology, psychology, and theory of action; 11.3. The principle of greatest happiness; 11.4. The critique of religious ethics; 11.5. The new morality; 11.6. Interest and duty; 11.7. Virtues; 11.8. Private ethics and legislation -/- XII Followers of the Enlightenment: liberal Judaism and Liberal Theology 12.1. Mendelssohn; 12.2. Salomon Maimon; 12.3. Haskalā and liberal Judaism; 12.4. Liberal Theology. -/- XIII Counter-Enlighteners 13.1.Romanticism and the fulfilment of individuality as the Summum Bonum; 13.2. Hegel on history as the making of liberty; 13.3. Hegel on the unhappy consciousness and the beautiful soul; 13.4. Hegel on Morality and Sittlichkeit; 13.5. Marx on ideology, alienation, and praxis; 13.6. Schopenhauer on compassion; 13.7. Kierkegaard on faith beyond ethics. -/- XIV Followers of the Enlightenment: intuitionists and utilitarian 14.1 Whewell‘s criticism of utilitarianism; 14.2 Whewell on morality and the philosophy of morality; 14.3 Whewell on the Supreme Norm; 14.4 Whewell on the conflict between duties; 14.5 Mill and the proof of the principle of utility; 14.6 Mill’s eudemonistic utilitarianism; 14.7 Mill on rules -/- XV Followers of the Enlightenment: neo-Kantians and positivists 15.1. French spiritualism; 15.2. Neo-Kantians: the Marburg school; 15.3. Neo-Kantians: the Marburg school; 15.4. Comte’s positivism and the invention of altruism; 15.5. Social Darwinism; 15.6. Wundt and an ethic of humankind -/- XVI Post-enlighteners: Sidgwick 16.1. Criticism of intuitionism; 16.2. On ethical egoism; 16.3. Criticism of utilitarianism -/- XVII Post-enlighteners: Durkheim 17.1. Sociology as physics of customs; 17.2. Morality as physics of customs and as practical science; 17.3. On Kantian ethics and utilitarianism; 17.4. The variability of moralities;17.5. Social solidarity as end and justification of morality; 17.6. Secular morality as “sociodicy”; XVIII Post-enlighteners: Nietzsche 18.1. On the Dionysian; 18.2. On the deconstruction of the world of values 18.3 On the twofold genealogy of moralities; 18.4. On ascetics and nihilism; 18.5. Normative ethics of self-fulfilment -/- Bibliography / Index of names / Index of concepts -/- . (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:The Concept of Will in EarlyLatin Philosophy NEAL W. GILBERT AN HISTORICALDISCUSSIONOf the concept of will is best begun with an analysis of the use of voluntas in Latin philosophy, from its earliest occurrences in Lucretius and Cicero on down to Augustine and medieval times. This development can be traced without much controversy because the line of transmission and development is more or less unbroken. But the correlating of (...) Latin psychological terms with their Greek originals presents problems. Greek philosophy was indeed the source from which Latin philosophical psychology developed: Lucretius reflects Epicurean doctrine, while Cicero and Seneca were strongly influenced by Stoic philosophy when they discussed moral action. However, many modern scholars are convinced that the Greeks had no word that corresponds to our "will" at all, and so we seem to be left with no choice but to regard the will as an original creation of Latin philosophy. But this would be to overlook the fact that ancient Latin writers sometimes specifically equated voluntas with certain Greek terms, and such evidence ought not to go unexamined. Voluntas was well established in Latin usage before Roman writers began to concern themselves with philosophical problems, but it did not have a technical sense. It meant simply "good will," or "favor," or concretely, a "will, or testament. ''I Clustered around it were other derivatives of "volo," such as "benevolentia" and "malevolentia," "well-wishing" and "ill-wishing." When Roman writers began to deal with philosophical problems, there were a number of different contexts in which voluntas could play a leading role. Chief among them, naturally, was the "freedom of the will" which, then as now, intrigued the ordinary man or the moralist. However, discussions revolving around the determinist-libertarian issue often fail to clarify the concept of the will itself. Major philosophers (Chrysippus, Augustine, or Hume, for example) offer fine distinctions within moral action when considering the determinist-libertarian dispute, but lesser figures are apt to "C'est seulement lots de la creation du vocabulairephilosophiqueque voluntas a pris le sens abstrait et technique de 'volont6'." Ernout, A., and A. Meillet,Dictionnaire Etymologique de la langue latine, 4th ed. (Paris, 1959),sub "volo." [17] 18 HISTORY OF PHILOSOPHY neglect the detailed analysis of moral action in favor of sweeping metaphysical pronouncements. When a Latin writer wished to say that a person did something of his own accord, the locution most natural to him was "sua sponte," an ablative absolute derived from the same root as our word "spontaneous." The nominative case of "sponte" ("spons") was almost never used, so that dictionaries are perhaps somewhat misleading in suggesting that the word "spons" means "free will": it would be more correct to say that the phrase "sua sponte" means "of his own free will." Latin writers also indicate that someone did something willingly by saying that he did it "non invitus" ("not unwillingly "). Finally, they could apply the adjective "voluntarius" to such an action, or say that it was done "ex voluntate." When the latter term begins to be used as a designation for a separate faculty of the soul distinct from reason or intelligence, it begins to resemble the modern concept of will. Augustine is usually given credit for introducing the concept of will into philosophy, but even the earliest Latin treatment of the free-will problem framed the issue in terms of voluntas. Nevertheless, I think that the received view is substantially correct, although it would be more proper to say that what Augustine introduced into philosophy was not the concept of will in general but the concept of the evil will. What Augustine called the "good" will ("bona voluntas") was closely related to the "reasonable desire" of the Stoic sage, rendered into Latin by Cicero as voluntas, without any adjective. The addition of the evil will altered the outlines of moral analysis considerably, involving among other things the major shift from a Socratic or Platonic psychology and ethics (usually labeled "intellectualistic") to a Christian psychology and ethics (usually labeled "voluntaristic"). Such a characterization is likely to be drawn too sharply, and to overlook anticipations of voluntarism in Greek thought or reminiscences of Greek intellectualism in Christian thought. Hence it may be useful... (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Journal of the History of Ideas 64.4 (2003) 619-637 [Access article in PDF] Overcoming Gnosticism:Hans Jonas, Hans Blumenberg, and the Legitimacy of the Natural World Benjamin Lazier University of Chicago In 1984, about a decade before his own murder, the Romanian scholar of religion Ioan Culianu complained of a more widespread, if decidedly less grisly form of assault. 1 The gnostics, he declared in a moment of high jocularity, (...) had "taken hold of the whole world, and we were not aware of it. It is a mixed feeling of anxiety and admiration, since I cannot refrain myself from thinking that these alien body-snatchers have done a remarkable job indeed." 2Though offered in jest, Culianu's designation "alien body-snatchers" quite accurately sums up what has remained since 1934 the leading view of gnosticism as a delimited, identifiable phenomenon. In that year appeared the first monumental volume of Gnosis und spätantiker Geist (Gnosis and the Spirit of Late Antiquity) composed by the young Jewish philosopher Hans Jonas as a dissertation under Martin Heidegger and the theologian Rudolf Bultmann. Over the next sixty years Jonas returned again and again to the movement as he defined it. Above all, gnosticism had as its guiding principle the notion of das Fremde. The term includes in its linguistic domain not only "the alien," by which it is most usually translated, but its cognates as well: the strange, the foreign, the other, the unknown, the uncanny, and the like. This sense of alienation is wildly overdetermined in gnostic theology: man is alienated from himself, from a fully transcendent God, and most powerfully from the material, [End Page 619] sensuous universe in which he lives, created as it was by an evil, malicious demiurge. Such anti-cosmism could license both ascetic retreat from the world as well as an antinomian descent into the worldly abyss, with the intent to defeat it from within. The locution "body-snatcher" now acquires relevance, for gnostic theology made impossible any positive appraisal of the physical body, or of the physical world at all for that matter. As the political philosopher Leo Strauss put it in a letter to Jonas, gnosticism may well have been the most radical rebellion in Western history against the Greek notion of physis.In stylized terms Jonas's philosophical career represents what I would like to call gnosticism's "third overcoming." Such terms signal an allegiance to the work of the German philosopher Hans Blumenberg. But they signal a departure as well. In Legitimität der Neuzeit (Legitimacy of the Modern Age, 1966), Blumenberg undertook what must count among the most ambitious revisions of Western intellectual history ever ventured. Against a rash of attacks on the modern age as an ill-concealed, secularized derivative of an earlier Christian era, he stepped up in its defense. He linked the emergence of the modern age—defined preeminently by man's need for self-assertion, to act in the world—to a "second overcoming" of gnosticism at the end of the Middle Ages. The gnostic spirit he found revived by the nominalism and theological voluntarism of late-medieval scholastic theology, a loose confluence of thought centripetally bound by the black hole of the deus absconditus or hidden god. Whereas gnosticism's first overcoming was Augustine's work and but a partial success, its second, and for Blumenberg "final" overcoming was the work of an ethos of human self-assertion best instantiated by the scientific program of Francis Bacon.To argue for its third overcoming in the late 1920s and '30s is therefore to take leave of Blumenberg's account, if also to extend it. The condition for the possibility of this argument, of course, is that gnosticism had in fact returned. Gnosticism, or at the very least a host of phenomena going by the name and generally understood as such, did indeed return, and with a vengeance—on the occult scene, in philosophy, in theology of all persuasions, even in natural-scientific discourse. This period also witnessed the return of the... (shrink)

This is the first Italian translation of Bentham’s “Deontology”. The translation goes with a rather extended apparatus meant to provide the reader with some information on Bentham’s ethical theory's own context. Some room is made for so-called forerunners of Utilitarianism, from the consequentialist-voluntarist theology of Leibniz, Malebranche, John Gay, Thomas Brown and William Paley to Locke and Hartley's incompatible associationist theories. After the theoretical context, also the real-world context is documented, from Bentham’s campaigns against the oppression of women and cruelty (...) to animals to his projects of political reform. Another section illustrates the ideas of Bentham's followers as well as the objections raised by nineteenth- and twentieth-century critics of utilitarianism. -/- Table of contents I. BEFORE THE TEXT 1. Bentham’s legacy 2. Bentham the Reformer 3. Bentham and the enlightenment project of a reformed morality 4. The principle of utility 5. Deontology or private morality 6. Utilitarianism as «eudemonologism» -/- II. TEXT Deontology I. Deontology: theoretical II. Deontology: practical III. -/- III. CO-TEXT 1. Biography 2. The reform of legislation 3. The Philosophic Radicals between the French revolution and the Industrial revolution -/- IV. CONTEXT 1. Forerunners of Utilitarianism 2. Psychological associationism 3. The oppression of women 4. Cruelty against animals 5. Parsimony and industry in Hogarth’s prints 6. Followers 6.1. John Stuart Mill 6.2. Henry Sidgwick 7. Critics 7.1. Romantic, conservative, and Christian critics 7.2. Socialist critics 8. Consequences: neo-utilitarianism 9. Consequences: critics of utilitarianism 9.1. Deontological critics 9.2. Perfectionists critics 9.3. Sceptical critics 10. Bentham’s legacy for contemporary ethics, by Bikhu Parekh Bibliography Lexicon Index of names and concepts -/- READER'S GUIDE . (shrink)

Hugo Grotius und Thomas Hobbes stehen beide in unterschiedlicher Weise für einen Neubeginn in der Politischen Philosophie bzw. in der Rehtsphlosophie. Während bei Grotius die Anknüpfung an die vorangehende Tradition des Christlichen Naturrechts gleichwohl unübersehbar ist, ist Hobbes' Beziehung zum Naturrecht kontrovers. In der Konfrontation beider Autoren mit dem in der scholastischen Diskussion herausgearbeiteten Naturgesetzbegriff zeigt sich, wie die Auseinandersetzung zwischen den voluntaristischen und rationalistischen Positionen letztlich einer Rechts- und Moralphilosophie Bahn bricht, die sich von den theologischen Voraussetzungen des Christlichen (...) Naturrechts befreien kann, ohne dabei mit diesem in unmittelbaren Widerspruch zu geraten oder auch nur dessen Begriffsrahmen zu sprengen. Durch eine strikte Trennung von Evaluationsproblem und Obligationsproblem eröffnet Grotius' De iure belli ac pacis das Feld einer säkularen Moralwissenschaft, welche Hobbes im Leviathan dann auf ein neues methodisches Fundament stellt und zudem durch eine säkulare Verpflichtungstheorie ergänzt. In different respects, Hugo Grotius and Thomas Hobbes represent a new beginning in political and legal philosophy. Although Grotius' connection with the previous tradition of Christian natural law is obvious, Hobbes' relation to natural law is controversial. Both of them, however, confront the concept of natural law as developed in the scholastic discussion. The ensuing debate between voluntarism and rationalism finally paves the way for a new philosophy of law and morals. This new philosophy can extricate itself from the theological presumptions of Christian natural law without running into contradiction with it, or even dissolving its conceptual framework. Through its strict division between evaluation and obligation, Grotius' De iure belli ac pacis opens the door for a secular moral science, which Hobbes in Leviathan places on a new methodological foundation and also expands upon through a secular theory of obligation. (shrink)

In the predominant pedagogical frameworks of our days, rationalist, voluntarist or sentimentalist reductionisms are seen, from which it is about educating people regardless of their Origin and the singular and unrepeatable originality with which they have been given to existence. Faced with this anthropocentric confinement, Sensitive Education arises so that every person, regardless of their culture and creed, remains sensitive to their Origin and captures their own originality, which in the end is what they must accept and try to manifest (...) with education. When educational systems are not sensitive to the original, they develop falsehood. With the aim of consolidating the validity of the pedagogical-anthropological foundation of Sensitive Education, this study seeks to show how Edith Stein’s argument explains Sensitive Education, although Stein, after her conversion, uses explicitly Christian terminology. Stein’s direct terms serve to describe Education Sensitive to the Holy Spirit, but for those who do not start from a Christian worldview, Education Sensitive to Origin can be a more non-denominational way of approaching the Original. To achieve this objective, an analytical-synthetic methodology has been followed in which essential features of Sensitive Education are proposed and in a hermeneutic manner, arguments are extracted from the writings of Edith Stein that offer support for these essential features. In conclusion, it is sufficiently shown that Edith Stein’s thought provides a pedagogical foundation to Sensitive Education. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:The Coherence of a Mind: John Locke and the Law of Nature*Alex Tucknessit is almost thirty years since John Dunn’s book, The Political Thought of John Locke, argued that a more coherent understanding of Locke was possible if his religious beliefs were taken to play a crucial role in his political theory.1 Since that time many scholars have expanded our historical knowledge of the role of religion in Locke’s (...) political thought.2 This article will not use a historical methodology, but will rather take the claim that religion is crucial to Locke’s thought as a starting point. When one combines this assumption with a careful reading of the Two Treatises of Government (Two Treatises), The Reasonableness of Christianity as Delivered in Scripture (The Reasonableness), and the Essay Concerning Human Understanding (Essay), significant progress in resolving many of the long-standing difficulties in Locke’s theory of natural law is possible.The difficulties are indeed serious. Prior to Locke there was a long standing theological debate about whether the laws of nature were binding because they were the command of God (voluntarism) or binding because of their intrinsic compatibility with reason (“rationalism” or “intellectualism”). There has been much dispute about whether Locke was consistently a voluntarist or not.3 Second, Locke argues in the Essay that the principles of morality are [End Page 73] capable of proof just like principles of geometry, yet Locke never produced a proof of the law of nature. In the Second Treatise the laws of nature are more asserted than defended, as if they were self-evident, yet in The Reasonableness Locke says that it is exceedingly difficult to discover the moral law through reason alone and says that no one has ever discovered the complete law of nature through unaided reason. It appears that Locke “… went on believing the arguments of the Second Treatise were plainly true even after he knew he could not properly ground them in natural law….”4Third, Straussians have been quick to point out that Locke adopted a hedonistic theory of human motivation and of good and evil, a position which seems to sit poorly with a Christian theory of natural law. Locke claimed that men5 were motivated to obey the law of nature by their perception of future pleasure or pain and that divine sanctions in the next life were necessary for the law of nature to be a proper law, yet later in life Locke admitted his inability to prove the existence of an afterlife.6 Fourth, the account of moral knowledge in the Essay seems to sit poorly with Locke’s account of natural law in the Two Treatises; his commitment in the latter to empiricism is questionable and the law of nature is presented with little argument as if it were obvious. Laslett has argued that the difficulties are so severe that Locke the philosopher of knowledge and Locke the political thinker should be kept very separate.7 This article will respond to each of these difficulties in order to show that Locke’s theory of natural law is more coherent than his critics have allowed.1. the ground of natural law: rationalism and voluntarismThe early Essays on the Law of Nature of Locke link morality to conformity with the rule of a superior; it is the will of God which provides the essential binding force of the law of nature. (ELN 183–185)8 In the Essay Concerning Human [End Page 74] Understanding, this theme continues. “I grant the existence of God, is so many ways manifest, and the Obedience we owe him, so congruous to the Light of Reason, that a great part of Mankind give Testimony to the Law of Nature”: But nonetheless many affirm these principles not “admitting the true ground of Morality; which can only be the Will and Law of a God, who sees Men in the dark, has in his Hand Rewards and Punishments, and Power enough to call to account the Proudest Offender” (Essay 1.3.6).There are, however, passages which seem to point to a more rationalist account of morality. When Locke writes in the Two Treatises that... (shrink)

In this article, Kierkegaard's depiction of the teleological suspension of the ethical is contrasted with Levinas's articulation of the emergence of the ethical in the Akedah narrative drawing on Jewish, Christian, and Chinese philosophical and religious perspectives. The narrative of Abraham's binding of Isaac illustrates both the distance and nearness between Kierkegaard and Levinas. Both realize that the encounter with God is a traumatic one that cannot be defined, categorized, or sublimated through ordinary ethical reflection or the everyday social-moral life (...) of a community. For Kierkegaard, the self is forced back upon itself, exposed to the otherness of its singular unfathomable source; in Levinas a traumatic exposure and delivery over to the Other occurs. It leads to an inescapable ethical responsibility more fundamental than either religious faith or theoretical cognitive knowledge. The rupture and aporia of Abraham's sacrifice appears to destroy the categories of the ethical. Yet it might suggest something other than the nihilistic or voluntaristic destruction of ethics. It indicates instead a different modality of the ethical; an aporetic and paradoxical ethics that resonates in part with classical Chinese Daoist sources such as the Daodejing and the Zhuangzi. (shrink)

Scholastic debates about the activity of our final end—happiness—become famously heated in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, with intellectualists claiming that the primary activity through which we are joined to God is intellective ‘vision’ and voluntarists claiming that it is love (an act of will). These conversations represent only one set of medieval views on the subject, however. If we look to contemplative sources in the same period—even just those of the Rome-based Christian tradition—we find a range of views on (...) our final end that runs the gamut from ‘self-less union with an unknowable God’ to ‘embodied fulfilment of human nature.’ In this article, I argue that these differing conceptions push their holders to develop a correspondingly wide range of attitudes toward the human faculty of reason, particularly with respect to its value (or lack thereof) in helping us achieve our ultimate end. Medieval thinking on this topic is thus much more complex—and offers more points of connection with contemporary philosophical theology—than is typically recognized. (shrink)

This paper, studies the way how St. Bonaventure deepens to the “Christian Socratism” . St. Bonaventure through the philosophical, theological and Franciscans sources understands that the soul is united with the Good. The anthropology is not only philosophical, and the Good is not only a concept of the philosophy. San Buenaventura adds to the schemes of Plato and Aristotle, the Biblical scheme who understand that the soul is “image of God”. In Itinerarium mentis in Deum an alternative motto to the (...) self knowledge sets out to us. It is invited to us to watch the soul that is loved itself, which supposes one of the sources of voluntarism.El artículo estudia el modo cómo san Buenaventura profundiza el “socratismo cristiano” . San Buenaventura a través de las fuentes filosóficas, teológicas y franciscanas entiende que el alma se une con el Bien. Pero ni la antropología es sólo filosófica, ni el Bien es sólo un concepto de la filosofía. San Buenaventura añade a los esquemas de Platón y Aristóteles, el bíblico que muestra que el alma es “imagen de Dios”. En el Itinerarium mentis in Deum se nos propone un lema alternativo al autoconocimiento. Se nos invita a mirar el alma que se ama a sí misma, lo que supone una de las fuentes del voluntarismo. (shrink)

This excellent book provides a novel analysis of medieval theories of faith, using as its conceptual basis the notion of doxastic voluntarism: the thought that belief is in some sense in our power to choose. This notion fits very neatly with medieval accounts, since, other than in cases in which the intellect's assent is compelled, the medieval philosophers all maintained that assent to a given proposition—paradigmatically the supernatural claims of Catholic Christianity, the principal interest of the earliest thinkers in (...) Nicolas Faucher's account—was in some sense voluntary. Indeed, one thing that the book illustrates very nicely is the way in which problems that begin in the... (shrink)

Many scholars view political contractarianism as a distinctly modern account of the foundations of political order. Ideas such as popular sovereignty, the right of revolution, the necessity of the consent of the governed for rightful political authority, natural equality, and a pre-civil state of nature embody the modern rupture with classical political philosophy and traditional Christian theology. At the headwaters of this modern revolution stands Thomas Hobbes. Since the American founders subscribed to the social contract theory, they are often said (...) to reject classical political philosophy and traditional Christian political theology as well. In America on Trial, Robert Reilly rejects the usual argument. He maintains that the building blocks of the American founding originate in medieval Christian political theology. In this essay, I argue that a morally and metaphysically realist contractarian tradition—one that affirms natural equality, the authority of the society over government, the necessity of consent for legitimate government, the right to resist tyrannical rulers, and the idea of a pre-civil state of nature—predates Hobbes and also that the voluntarist contractarian tradition inaugurated by Hobbes is self-referentially incoherent. A coherent political contractarianism logicially depends on the sort of metaphysics and moral ontology Hobbes rejects. (shrink)

This book is a transcription from tapes of a course given by Tillich in the spring quarter of 1963 at the University of Chicago Divinity School. The title is somewhat misleading as Tillich spends a very limited amount of time on the period after Nietzsche--no doubt because of lack of time in the course schedule--and also devotes an entire third of the book to developing the seventeenth- and eighteenth-century philosophical, theological, and cultural background for nineteenth-century Protestant theology. He is especially (...) good on the Enlightenment and the way in which Hume, Rousseau, and Kant, though undeniably enlightened, prepared the way for the Romantic reaction to the superficial rationalism that had culminated in Deism and the bourgeois ideal of reasonable religion. Romanticism itself is viewed as the attempt to resolve the problem of the relation between the finite and the infinite; and Schleiermacher and Hegel are treated in detail as the ones who picked up the romantic problematic and carried it through to systematic theological and cultural synthesis. Tillich then explores the breakdown of the synthesis as it passed through the historical problem of Christianity, the anthropological problem, the proto-existential criticism of Schelling and Kierkegaard, the sociopolitical criticism of Marx, and the voluntaristic and Lebensphilosophie criticism of Schopenhauer and Nietzsche. From here on Tillich appears to be racing with the school calendar. He gives a rapid review of the neo-Kantian-Ritschlian, Erlangen, and Harnackian schools of liberal theology, and concludes by touching briefly upon Bultmann, Troeltsch, Barth, and his own thought. The course was meant to be a survey, but Tillich's presentation of the material is so deft and unerring, and so gently guided in its historical and conceptual unfolding by his own favored theological and religious categories, that the overall impression is of a theological meditation on homo religiosus.--E. A. R. (shrink)

In this study, Daniel Westberg offers readers an account of Aquinas’s ethics and the action theory that underlies it. Both friends and enemies of Aquinas have covered this subject matter before, but early commentators misunderstood central parts of Aquinas’s ethical theory, and they handed down their misinterpretations in traditions that continue into the present. Against the traditional view that Aquinas’s medieval Christian inheritance, with its focus on the will, and on grace and love, required an action theory fundamentally different from (...) Aristotle’s, Westberg shows that the core of Aquinas’s action theory is authentically Aristotelian. Aquinas is neither a natural law theorist nor a voluntarist, as he is commonly thought to be. Instead, he holds a complex yet plausible account of human action that gives a greater role to practical reason and prudence than commentators generally recognize. This central contention is important, for it counters centuries of misinterpretation, and Westberg argues effectively for it. For this reason, anyone with a serious interest in medieval ethics should read Westberg’s study. (shrink)

This article shows that Held's central philosophical concern is with the manner in which the withdrawal of world is apparent in kairological moments disclosed in fundamental moods. The phenomenology of world is for him a way of overcoming voluntarist nominalism. World is of its nature a limit to will and is experienced in the passivity of being acted upon. It is shown how Held emphasizes the common origins of philosophy and politics in the fundamental moods of wonder and awe. In (...) the final section it is argued - with reference to his more recent encounter with theological and scriptural themes - that Held's understanding of kairos and doxa is one-sided. By failing to account for the biblical transformation of both terms, especially St Paul's conception of the kairos as a suspension of world and by equating the Judaeo-Christian God with its voluntaristic conception, Held fails to give sufficient weight to the singularity of the kairos in the kenotic humbling of will implicit in the Christian notions of creation and incarnation. (shrink)

Despite its many strengths, Engelhardt’s After God displays two surprising features: an affinity for voluntaristic ethics and a tendency to oppose Eastern Orthodoxy to philosophy. Neither of these is in keeping with the mainstream of Eastern Orthodox tradition. Here, I offer a modest corrective. I begin with the figure of Socrates as presented in the Apology and Phaedo, highlighting the role that faith plays for Socrates and the reasons why he was widely admired by the early Church. I then describe (...) more broadly the attitude of the Greek Church Fathers to philosophy, showing that, although they were cautious of its potential errors, they nonetheless embraced the ideal of philosophy as a way of life dedicated to the pursuit of wisdom. For many, in fact, Christianity is itself simply the true philosophy, an attitude that led many of the most eminent patristic and Byzantine theologians to draw extensively on philosophical sources. Finally, I discuss the Euthyphro dilemma, contrasting the voluntaristic approach favored by Engelhardt with the Platonic approach adopted by the mainstream of Orthodox tradition. (shrink)

Leibniz was writing his "Discourse on the Natural Theology of the Chinese" as the Leibniz-Clarke Controversy developed. Both were terminated by his death. These two fronts show interesting doctrinal correlations. The first is Leibniz' concern for the "decadence of natural religion." The dispute with Clarke began with it, and the Discourse is a defense of Chinese natural religion in order to show its agreement with Christian natural religion. The Controversy can be summed up as "clockmaker God versus idle God." Leibniz (...) wants to escape from the perverse consequences that all criticism of divine voluntarism seems to cause. Thus, his elaboration is directed at a distinct concept of a God that rules without interposing, a supramundane intelligence. And the Leibnizian interpretation of the natural theology of the Chinese can be viewed the same way: it emphasizes a First Principle, Li, which rules without interposing. (shrink)

: Leibniz was writing his Discourse on the Natural Theology of the Chinese as the Leibniz-Clarke Controversy developed. Both were terminated by his death. These two fronts show interesting doctrinal correlations. The first is Leibniz' concern for the ''decadence of natural religion.'' The dispute with Clarke began with it, and the Discourse is a defense of Chinese natural religion in order to show its agreement with Christian natural religion. The Controversy can be summed up as ''clockmaker God versus idle God.'' (...) Leibniz wants to escape from the perverse consequences that all criticism of divine voluntarism seems to cause. Thus, his elaboration is directed at a distinct concept of a God that rules without interposing, a supramundane intelligence. And the Leibnizian interpretation of the natural theology of the Chinese can be viewed the same way: it emphasizes a First Principle, Li, which rules without interposing. (shrink)

Contemporary discussions of self-knowledge usually start from the assumption that self-knowledge is a distinct form of knowledge to which a subject has privileged access. This paper focuses on our access to our own desires by discussing the voluntarist position of Christian August Crusius (1715–1775), a still undeservedly neglected pre-Kantian philosopher. The general aim is to show that it follows from Crusius’s account of access to one’s own desires as the most relevant kind of mental act, this access in fact lacks (...) the marks of privileged access, namely, transparency and infallibility. The paper argues that Crusius presents access to one’s desires as one of the requirements for moral action, the account of which is one of the main goals of his philosophical system. The paper thus aims to show that it is plausible that, because moral action should depend on our free, rational efforts, access to and knowledge of our own desires is not privileged. (shrink)

My aim is to explain the relation of ‘right reason’ to Ockham's voluntarism by analysing what Ockham takes individual liberty to mean and how men come to know of it. The Christian law of liberty reveals what individuals come to know by other means — from their own experiences and reason, about certain rights which can never be alienated either to Church or ‘state’. It is argued that his distinctive and later political positions can be supported by positions maintained (...) in his earlier logical, psychological and philosophical writings from his Oxford period. He explains the three sources of our knowledge as experience, natural reason and infallible scriptural authority. Based on his explanation of how Scripture is to be interpreted and linking this to his epistemology which starts with intuitive cognition, it is argued that Ockham's understanding of the separate roles of ‘state’ and Church can be defended. From his earlier positions can also be derived his understanding of corporation theory, his defence of individual members of the community's consent to the constitution of government and the limits on absolute government, no matter what its constitutional form. Because right reason always operates in social contexts with their respective, prevalent knowledge, Ockham has some startling things to say about men's access to the truth. (shrink)

Sometimes people posit "beliefs" to explain mundane instrumental actions (e.g., Neil believes the switch is connected to the light, so he flipped the switch to illuminate the room). Sometimes people posit "beliefs" to explain group affiliation or identity (e.g., in order to belong to the Christian Reformed Church Neil must believe that God is triune). If we set aside the commonality of the word "belief," we can pose a crucial question: Is the cognitive attitude typically involved in the first "light (...) switch" sort of case the same as the cognitive attitude typically involved in the second "Trinity" sort of case? Or: Is mundanely believing the same cognitive relation as groupishly believing? In this essay, I argue that the answer is no. Mundane Beliefs play their instrumental roles well if they are true, and their manner of processing is accordingly sensitive to evidence. Groupish Beliefs play their identity-constituting roles well if they are distinctive, and their manners of processing accordingly allow for and often support distortions of evidence and truth. The manners of processing are thus so different that--despite the common word "belief"--philosophy of mind and epistemology would do well to recognize distinct cognitive attitudes. (shrink)

Why celebrate Thomas Aquinas? Three eras that celebrated Aquinas in unique ways—the Fourteenth century that canonized him, the Sixteenth century that declared him a doctor of the Church, and the nineteenth century that made him patron of the schools—all struggled with the corrosive effects of nominalism and voluntarism on Western culture. With the help of G. K. Chesterton and C. S. Lewis, this essay suggests that these eras were drawn to Aquinas because his theology offers an antidote against these (...) twin diseases. Specifically, Thomas Aquinas's theology can help us confront the ills of nominalism and voluntarism by encouraging us to celebrate nature, grace, and Christian apprenticeship in virtue as the perennial gifts of God's love. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Journal of the History of Philosophy 41.1 (2003) 128-129 [Access article in PDF] Robert Crocker, editor. Religion, Reason and Nature in Early Modern Europe. Dordrecht: Kluwer, 2001. Pp. xix + 228. Cloth, $77.00. By describing the early modern period as such, we thereby avow a continuity with it that ill squares with the following, insufficiently appreciated fact. The early modern counterparts of the largely atheistic American Philosophical Association, let's (...) say, were to an even greater degree theistic, and, moreover, theism affected their description and explanation of the world in a profound way—certainly more so than it does their few theistic descendents. This is true even of authors, like Hobbes and Spinoza, who might be read as leading to later atheism. The fact of early modern theism and its centrality in early modern philosophy and science are amply demonstrated in one after another of the eleven essays of this book.An emblematic figure is Robert Boyle, who figures as a main player in three of the essays, and is at least mentioned in five of the others. Lotte Mulligan, for example, investigates the role of "right reason" in Boyle's argument that religion is illuminated and made [End Page 128] plausible by metaphorically expressed analogies with natural philosophy, and conversely. The upshot is that only the "Christian Virtuoso," endowed with right reason whereby he is inspired to notice and express these analogies, was in a position to interpret the codes expressed both in the book of revelation and in the book of nature, one being incomplete without the other.Luisa Simonutti treats Boyle's engagement with the theological and scientific work of Spinoza through Spinoza's correspondence with Oldenburg. And G. A. J. Rogers deploys the work of Boyle, as well as of Locke, Newton, and the Cambridge Platonists, against the once-standard view (vide Butterfield) that "a major feature of the seventeenth-century was a secularization of knowledge." (Given just the other papers in this volume, this may seem like shooting fish in a barrel. Even so, perhaps one or two of the shots appear to miss. Newton seems proleptically to answer Hume's skepticism about induction by invoking, not divine simplicity, but an argument to the best explanation.)These papers overlap with two others, forming the core of the book. Sarah Hutton and Robert Crocker take on Cambridge Platonism. The former deals with Ralph Cudworth's rejection of Cartesian voluntarism in favor of an intellectualism of goodness and wisdom that grounds both the providential governance of the world and its intelligibility to human inquiry. The latter deals with Henry More's doctrine of the soul's pre-existence, a prima facie unlikely doctrine, but one that is less problematic, according to More, than the orthodox alternatives (creationism and traducianism).Three other papers fall outside this core, but their topics are no less relevant. Perhaps the most undeniable connection between the natural and the supernatural is to be found in Grotius, here studied by Jacqueline Lagree. Likely the most unexpected player will be the eccentric esprit fort, Cyrano de Bergerac. His work of nearly pure fantasy, in the Rabelaisian tradition, might well have made later, more serious heterodoxies possible. James E. Force provides a nice case study in Newton's reliance on what he took to be providentially guided comets as sources for the replenishment of otherwise declining celestial motion and matter (a line which, ironically, was picked up by Hume as a premise of an argument designed to undo the argument from design). Richard H. Popkin outlines three views of Judaism in the period. There is little connection with nature, but an important one with reason via a problem that exercised Cudworth and Newton: most peoples are polytheistic despite the clear monotheism of revelation. One theory had it that Judaism was the original, pure religion, which degenerated into various forms of paganism. But this degeneracy was soon read by the English deists such that originally there was a natural religion, of which Judaism and all others were a degeneration. Transmitted to the Enlightenment by Spinoza... (shrink)