A Robert Spaemann Reader: Philosophical Essays on Nature, God, and the Human Person

Abstract

Robert Spaemann's long and distinguished career has gone largely unnoticed by Anglophone philosophers. True, there has been the odd endorsement from Elizabeth Anscombe, or review by Alasdair MacIntyre; T&T Clark released his seminal Happiness and Benevolence in 2000, and two short works have appeared more recently with American publishers. But only in 2006 did OUP give us Persons: The Difference between Something and Someone, and now this handsome collection of essays, covering the period from 1953 to 2008. Spaemann tends, admittedly, to write in a more exploratory, historicizing and dialectical way than is the norm in Anglophone philosophy. But this style masks, I believe, a highly integrated and rigorous vision—a vision well conveyed by this engrossing, erudite and long-overdue volume. At the heart of Spaemann's project is the resurrection of a teleological view of nature, including human nature, along with a wide-ranging critique of various rival views. According to Spaemann, to understand nature as teleological is to understand it as embodying a plurality of forms (p. 55), each with its own entelechy or end-directedness. In this way, each substantial form possesses a constitutive direction (p. 24), which establishes normative criteria of assessment (this geranium/cheetah/female adolescent is doing well, because it/he/she is en route to realizing their proper telos). On this view, ethics is inseparable from (because grounded in) ontology (p. 85), and life is the paradigm of being (p. 91)—non-living or inanimate beings are ontologically de-privileged, and within the category of the animate, conscious beings are the most perfect or complete. In this sense, natural teleology is ‘anthropomorphic’ (ch. 6; 108, 197), because it takes human nature and its end-directedness as the pattern to which other forms of life approximate.