Divine Reason Research Articles

Starość – szansa czy zagrożenie dla rozwoju moralnego człowieka w ocenie stoików

The old age in the ancient culture of Greece and Rome, in contrast to popular opinion, appears not to be held in high esteem by everyone. This observation can be illustrated by a lot of sources in the Greek and Roman literature. The old age has been considered as dif­ficult and troublesome both for persons, whose were afflicted by this age, and for their fam­ily, friends and all attendants. This period of human life has been exposed to illness and the other afflictions – weakness of body and mind, less intense clarity and precision of thought. Consequently, the old people would take active part in the social and political life only in this case, when they were in good health, in good physical and mental condition. Because of this in Greek and Roman literature can be found a lot of lamentations and complaints of the old age. Only Plato and representatives of new stoic school – Seneca, Epictetus and Marcus Aurelius formulated opposite theories about the old age. According to Stoics’ perceiving of the world and the time and cyclical changes of them, the man’s nature and condition from his birth directs inevitably to his death. The whole world is ruled by God and nothing in it happens without his will. So the good and wise man will accept everything, as well the old age, and all its disadvantages. This acceptance off all that happens will bring man peace of mind and protection against whatever he may suffer. The old age – for a lover of wisdom is an occasion to develop and grow up his moral virtues and to improve his character. This intellectual and ethical process issues from human reason, which is a part of divine reason, pervasive all things in the world and all men. The Stoics warn against a danger of a moral decline and in the old age. This corrup­tion would be caused by direction of man’s attention to the shortness of life instead of the improving his character. The number of years of human life appears not to be important for Stoics. They condemn an aim for long life, if it not connected with an aspiration for wisdom.

Public and private, divine and temporal in Justus Lipsius' De Constantia and Politica

The Flemish humanist Justus Lipsius’ (1547–1606) two works, the Constantia and the Politica are analysed here as examples of the redefinition of the boundaries between public and private brought about in the late sixteenth century. This was the result of many factors, among which the wars of religion was perhaps the most prominent. Lipsius’ experience of the wars, his work, his associated flights and confessional switches make him an ideal commentator on the disjunction between public and private. In the two works under consideration, prudence and constancy are ascribed to the two domains while the different traits of the two virtues reflect on the different moral framework of public and private. The moral superiority of the private realm is associated with the divine through man's personal relationship with God following the Stoic notion of the kinship between human and divine reason. Prudence, an entirely human and temporal virtue, equips man in his conduct through the instability and depravity of temporal/human affairs. Man can still be constant, however, and maintain his morality and religious integrity in private. Thus, in the context of the continuous religious tension and political instability the moral implications of the distinction between the two realms render the discourse of the relationship between public‐private and divine‐temporal into an issue regarding the limits of ecclesiastical and political jurisdiction.

The Theological Origins of Modernity (review)

Reviewed by: The Theological Origins of Modernity Michael Lackey Michael Allen Gillespie. The Theological Origins of Modernity. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 2008. xiii + 386 pp. Dauntingly ambitious and consistently insightful, The Theological Origins of Modernity is to date the most informed study to convincingly demonstrate that secularization is an overstated fiction, which has significantly distorted our understanding of intellectual and political history. In stark contrast to Steve Bruce’s God is Dead: Secularization in the West (2002), Charles Taylor’s A Secular Age (2007), and Theodore Ziolkowski’s Modes of Faith: Secular Surrogates for Lost Religious Belief (2007), which claim that secularization is either well underway or an established fact in the contemporary West, Gillespie’s book is in the tradition of Vincent P. Pecora’s Secularization and Cultural Criticism: Religion, Nation, & Modernity (2006), Tracy Fessenden’s Culture and Redemption: Religion, the Secular, and American Literature (2007), and Pericles Lewis’s Religious Experience in the Modernist Novel: God’s Afterlife (forthcoming, 2010), which demonstrate that what we witness in the West is not so much “the erasure or disappearance of God but the transference of his attributes, essential powers, and capacities to other entities or realms of being” (274). What makes Gillespie’s book relevant and groundbreaking is not so much his major claim as it is the nuanced and complicated journey he takes to arrive at his conclusion. Gillespie begins the journey by tracing the theological origins of modernity back to a medieval crisis in Christianity between scholasticism, which reifies universals as the incarnation of divine reason, and nominalism, which provisionalizes the universal as it prioritizes the particular. According to Gillespie, it was ultimately [End Page 463] nominalism that shaped European thought by calling being into question and thereby producing “a new ontology, a new logic, and a new conception of man, God, and nature” (16). This triad of man, God, and nature turns out to be decisive, for Gillespie defines humanism, the Reformation, and modernity in relation to each one. Humanism prioritizes man and thus interprets God and nature on the basis of man, while the Reformation prioritizes God and thus interprets man and nature on the basis of God. Given their radically different approaches, humanists and reformers waged intense battles. Gillespie reads these battles in relation to Pelagianism, a “heretical” doctrine that holds that humans have not been irreparably damaged by original sin. Hence, humans can behave as moral agents without divine assistance, so they are primarily responsible for their own salvation and Jesus’s sacrifice on the Cross is not the basis for redemption. Pelagianism had a polarizing effect. In the tradition of Pelagius, many Christian humanists developed philosophies that limited divine power and underscored human freedom and moral responsibility as the way to the divine. In opposition to Pelagius, many Christian reformers developed theologies that extended divine power and underscored human servitude as the road to the divine. Modernity sought to sidestep the conflicts between humanists and reformers by prioritizing nature. However, and this is where Gillespie is at his scholarly best, modernity neither overcame nor resolved the earlier conflicts about God and man but merely concealed them within its metaphysics. To clarify and justify his approach, Gillespie reads Kant’s third antinomy, which foregrounds the contradiction between the mechanical laws of natural necessity and the insistent claim to human freedom, as one of the most unresolved dilemmas haunting western philosophy. Kant prioritizes the mechanistic view of nature “as a self-evident truth of reason” (276). As an offshoot of this nature-first approach, Kant believed transcendental idealism solved the conflict between mechanical necessity and human freedom “by differentiating the phenomenal realm of nature and necessity from the noumenal realm of freedom and morality” (277). However, if modernity has understood “the world not as a product of a Promethean freedom or of a radically omnipotent divine will but of the mechanical motion of matter” (262), this certainly did not eliminate the crucial questions about the contradiction between mechanical necessity and human freedom that are central to Kant’s third antinomy. What Kant did was merely to conceal or ignore rather than resolve the conflicts between humanists and reformists by prioritizing nature as the axiomatic...

‘“Star-Defeated Sighs”: Classical Cosmology and Astronomy in the Poetry of A. E. Housman’

A. E. Housman is renowned as the scholar–poet who in his lifetime published two slim volumes of verse – A Shropshire Lad (1896) 1 and Last Poems (1922) 2 – a much larger volume of classical papers, and an edition of Manilius‘ Astronomica that remains the definitive Latin text to this day. Although Housman had little sympathy with Manilius‘s stoical beliefs about the operation of divine reason in the universe, both the poems and the Astronomica share the sense of human beings playing out their lives in a cosmos where stronger impersonal forces are at work. Since Astronomica is an extended astrological text, this is, of course, to be expected; in the poems, the cosmological and astronomical references are more subtly exploited and are derived from other classical authors, such as Lucretius, and Housman‘s own extensive knowledge of astronomy. Nevertheless, an awareness of such sources and references remains crucial for a fuller understanding of Housman‘s poetic achievement. The purpose of this article then is twofold. Firstly, and by way of setting a context for the second part, I seek to show briefly how Housman‘s poetry can be read as part of a more general struggle (shared by writers such as Tennyson, Browning, Hardy, Swinburne and Meredith) that took place in Housman‘s lifetime to confront the implications of advances in evolutionary theory, cosmology, and astrophysics, and to formulate a wider synthesis that integrated the objective facts of science with the subjective reality of human experience. Secondly, and primarily, I aim to show how an understanding of specific traditions in classical philosophy, and Housman‘s own expertise in spherical astronomy (itself a necessary adjunct to his classical scholarship), considered in the context of Housman‘s own worldview and his personal life, illuminates the reading of Housman‘s verse. The reconsideration of man‘s place in nature was a process that acquired a particular urgency in the second half of the nineteenth century. As Pamela Gossin observes in her similarly-intentioned treatment of the work of Thomas Hardy: Victorian Culture was uniquely situated to integrate its knowledge of astronomical and cosmological history – ancient to near modern – with its own emergent and every more urgent attempts to understand and explain humanity‘s place in the cosmos. (58)

Escapism, religious luck, and divine reasons for action

AbstractIn our paper, ‘Escaping hell: divine motivation and the problem of hell’, we defended a theory of hell that we called ‘escapism’. We argued that, given God's just and loving character, it would be most rational for Him to maintain an open-door policy to those who are in hell, allowing them an unlimited number of chances to be reconciled with God and enjoy communion with Him. In this paper we reply to two recent objections to our original paper. The first is an argument from religious luck offered by Russell Jones. The second is an argument from Kyle Swan that alleges that our commitments about the nature of reasons for action still leaves escapism vulnerable to an objection we labelled the ‘Job objection’ in our original paper. In this paper we argue that escapism has the resources built into it needed to withstand the objections from Jones and Swan.

Hell and divine reasons for action

AbstractEscapism, a theory of hell proposed by Andrei Buckareff and Allen Plug, explicitly relies on claims about divine reasons for action. However, they say surprisingly little about the general account of reasons for action that would justify the inferences in the argument for escapism. I provide a couple of plausible interpretations of such an account and argue that they help revive the ‘Job objection’ to escapism that Buckareff and Plug had dismissed.

Preliminaries to a concept of constitutional secularism

Constitutional arrangements, today, are facing the challenge of new forms of strong religion that have the apparent goal of reconquering the public space. These movements’ strategies typically involve Trojan horses designed to smuggle religion into constitutional law by arguing that a democratically achieved religious takeover of legislation, for the purposes of imposing divine command, is not constitutionally suspicious per se. Constitutionalism looks vulnerable to certain claims of strong religion when presented in terms of the free exercise of religion and pluralism. As a fi rst step toward a more robust theory of constitutional secularism, this paper reviews some inherent diffi culties of the concept. Constitutionalism relies on the use of the human faculty of reason and on popular sovereignty. The fi rst consideration translates into the duty of public reason giving in law and denies the acceptability of divine reasons; the second precludes any source of law but the secular. A robust notion of secularism, animated by these considerations, is capable of patrolling the borders of the public square. … the French people recognizes the existence of God — French national convention, 1794 Strong religion is back in the public square. 1 Constitutional arrangements are now facing new forms of religiousness due to mass emigration and, also, because the religion of both migrants and locals is changing to stronger versions that aspire to control or reclaim the public space. Strong religion is a social fact. Religious movements organize themselves politically and, in so doing, they challenge secular arrangements directly. In this regard, their chances of success vary considerably, but they are certainly capable of undermining the legal arrangements that claim to be neutral and generally applicable to all people living in the national community. This is a fundamental challenge to secularist processes including constitutionalism.

The Industrial Ecology of Emerging Technologies

Summary The modern world increasingly reflects human activities, to the point that many scientists are referring to this era as the “Anthropocene,” the Age of Humans. A major domain of human activity involves sociotechnical systems, which can be characterized as occurring in constellations of coevolving technological, cultural, institutional, economic, and psychological systems lasting over many decades. The current constellation, still in its early stages of development, brings together five powerful technology systems—nanotechnology, biotechnology, robotics, information and communication technology, and cognitive science—that are even more complex than historical precedents because they enable not just far more powerful capabilities to design domains external to humans but also the potential to design individual humans themselves. Understanding the implications of this sociotechnical landscape for industrial ecology suggests profound theoretical challenges as well as important new areas of research.

Natural Law, Laws of Nature, and Natural Rights. Continuity and Discontinuiy in the History of Ideas (review)

Reviewed by: Natural Law, Laws of Nature, and Natural Rights. Continuity and Discontinuiy in the History of Ideas Brian Tierney Natural Law, Laws of Nature, and Natural Rights. Continuity and Discontinuiy in the History of Ideas. By Francis Oakley. (New York: Continuum Press. 2005. Pp. 143. $29.95.) This excellent book provides a sophisticated but accessible introduction to some fundamental problems in the history of natural law thinking, and the writing throughout is elegant, lucid, and persuasive. Oakley's central argument is that a major shift occurred in the fourteenth century and that it influenced both the scientific and the moral philosophies of the succeeding age. A byproduct of the argument is a reminder that the traditional periodization of Western history into ancient, medieval, and modern is "more of a hindrance than a help" in the study of intellectual history (p. 81), an observation that will be applauded by many medievalists. [End Page 111] Historians typically treat the physical laws of nature as conceptually distinct from the natural law that directs our moral behavior. But Oakley challenges this sharp distinction. He is not concerned to refute Hume's is-ought argument, that we cannot derive moral propositions from factual ones. His argument is rather that the same underlying set of ideas informs both kinds of thinking and that the physical laws of nature can provide a sort of "intellectual template" to which the natural moral law conforms (p. 70). Underlying Oakley's whole argument is his concern with a persistent tension between the Greek and Hebrew sources of Christian thought. On the one hand we have the Greek idea of a divine reason immanent in an eternal cosmos, a reason reflected also in the workings of human reason. On the other hand stands the God of Abraham and Isaac and Jacob, an all-powerful, willful God of untrammeled freedom who made the universe from nothing and out of his own good pleasure. Oakley shows how the church fathers, especially Augustine, and then the scholastic theologians, especially Aquinas, sought to reconcile the two ideas. Aquinas envisaged an eternal law, a manifestation of divine reason directing all created beings to their due ends, a ground of both the physical laws of the universe and the natural moral law known to man. As Oakley notes, in Aquinas the fit between the templates of moral and physical natural law is very close. But a later generation of theologians, prominent among them William of Ockham, saw in this way of thinking an unacceptable restraint on God's absolute freedom and omnipotent will. Ockham argued that the characteristics of the existing universe did not flow by any kind of necessity from the reason of God; God could have made a different universe with different laws of motion and different rules of morality. And this teaching, Oakley argues, helped to shape the new scientific thought of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. In a contingent universe one could not explain the way things behaved by pure reason, by hypothesizing about natural ends and occult essences. The only way to understand the material world was by observation and experiment and mathematical formulations of the resulting data. The problem is more complicated when we consider the moral natural law. Ockham's teaching that moral norms depended entirely on the will of God was reflected in some natural law theories of the early modern period. But alongside this doctrine Ockham also presented a "non-positive moral science" based on reason and experience, and this too had echoes in later thought. In Ockham's own later political writings, where he discussed explicitly the varieties of natural law, he appealed persistently to right reason as a guide to human behavior. Oakley explains the dichotomy by pointing to the common medieval distinction between the absolute and ordained powers of God. However, Oakley's argument here leaves open a much-disputed question that he raises but does not finally answer, the question whether Ockham's voluntarist theology did in fact exercise any significant influence on the content of his later political thought and his teachings there on natural law. [End Page 112] In a last chapter the author considers the emergence of a doctrine of...

Contingency, Necessity, Teleology, and Progress: Reply to Mazlish

30 Historically Speaking May/June 2006 Contingency, Necessity, Teleology, and Progress: Reply to Mazlish Aviezer Tucker Bruce Mazlish notes correctly that there is enormous conceptual confusion over contingency, necessity, teleology, and progress in history. I hope to clarify some of these confusions. The related concepts of contingency and necessity are independent of teleology, and teleology and progress are independent of each other as well. Teleology and Contingency Mazlish seems to assume that historical teleology is inconsistent with historical contingency . Since historical teleology implies that history or some historical processes have an end or a purpose, historical contingency , the possibility that things could have turned out otherwise, precludes a predestined end. Historical necessity seems to be a necessary condition for a predestined telos, but it ain't necessarily so. In book two of his Physics Aristotle distinguished four types ofcauses: material, formal, moving, and teleological. The moving cause is the primary source of change or coming to rest, as the sculpture is to a statue. The teleological cause is the end for the sake ofwhich an event happens, such as the finished statue for its making. In his Timaeus and Philebus Plato suggested that necessity, the moving cause (ananke in Greek or causa efficiens in Latin), may be in conflict with telos, the final cause that permeates the universe. Plato considered the moving cause to be a blind, brute, necessary force that the etiologic "Mind"— "Divine Mind," "Divine Intelligence," "Reason," "Wisdom," or plain "Zeus"—needs to "get the better of or to "persuade" to move in the correct meaningful direction, "perfection ." With the exception of the Atomists, Greek philosophers felt that the necessary, moving cause was insufficient for explaining the order of the universe and the place of humanity in it. Plato and Aristotle added teleology for this purpose. Teleology is distinct from necessity, and the two may affect events in contradictory directions. Plato's idea that teleology can use necessity as a tool was developed later in the theistic philosophies of history of Vico and Hegel, where cunning divine reason uses human motivations in the service of a historical plan designed to lead to the end of history. It also appears in less metaphysically presumptuous philosophies that uphold the heterogenesis of ends—the "private vices, public virtues" social theories that Malebranche and Vico shared with Adam Smith. Likewise, Marx One may write about the history of chess or electrical engineering and notice steady progress . ... Yet that does not imply that there is a telos of chessplaying or engineering. combined necessity with teleology in arguing that inevitable economic processes would lead to a classless society, thereby eliminating the class antagonisms he saw as the necessary engine of world history. Individual voluntary action can "lengthen the birth pangs" of the end ofhistory but not prevent it. Conversely, historical contingency can be consistent with historical teleology. If we interpret contingency probabilistically, we may suggest that at given junctures in history (social or natural) there was a certain distribution of probabilities across several options. The fact that one of these low-probability, contingent potentials actualized whereas the others did not may be consistent with either a teleological or purposeless interpretations of history. For example, in a fair lottery, there is an equal distribution ofvery low probabilities for each ticket to be the winning ticket. It is necessary that some ticket should win, but it is contingent that this ticket will. When one ticket —say, yours—wins, it is consistent with a teleological interpretation that you were meant or destined to win. Since both historical contingency and necessity are equally consistent with both a teleological and non-teleological interpretation of history, the concepts of teleology and contingency/necessity are independent ofeach other. Teleology and Progress Obviously, not all teleological interpretations ofhistory are progressive, since the end ofhistory may be a return to barbarism or even the annihilation of the human race in universal entropy. Progressive interpretations of history may be a subset of teleological interpretations. However, progressive interpretations are not necessarily teleological. It may be argued that, from our value-laden perspective, history progressed for a while toward a greater fulfillment of our values, without assuming that there is any grander final cause or design...

How Germany Left the Republic of Letters

How Germany Left the Republic of Letters Kasper Risbjerg Eskildsen A common culture of scholarship existed across Europe from the Middle Ages to the Enlightenment. This culture possessed its own institutions, traditions, and rituals that connected its members across borders and religious divides. A professor from Lisbon, a librarian from Hanover, and a schoolmaster from Turku would all speak nearly the same language and wear nearly the same clothing. They would share many of the same dreams, celebrate many of the same heroes, and have similar memories from their youth and adult life. They were convinced that they belonged to the same cultural group and were normally willing to make personal and economic sacrifices when called upon by members of this group. Long before the emergence of European nation-states, the community of scholars formed what Benedict Anderson has called an imagined community, united by the forces of language, culture, and writing.1 From around 1500, the community of scholars went by the name respublica litteraria—the Republic of Letters. Italian humanists already used the metaphor in the early fifteenth century, and with Erasmus of Rotterdam's Antibar-barorum liber, it became commonplace within Europe.2 To Erasmus and his [End Page 421] circle the Republic of Letters signified the natural community between all students of creation, divine reason, and Greek and Roman antiquity. It gathered scholars across space and time and set them apart from the hordes of ignorant barbarians. To most early modern scholars, however, respublica litteraria signified much more than a community of reason and knowledge. They used the metaphor to describe every aspect of the culture of scholarship that connected its members and demarcated them from surrounding society. Universities, academies, and secret societies were talked about as parts of the Republic of Letters. Scholarly letters and conversations tête-à-tête, books, lectures and seminars, rituals and traditions were all included. The metaphor demarcated invisible borders between learned and lay, tacitly known to insiders but rarely strictly defined.3 The Republic Challenged During the last decades of the seventeenth century the metaphor of the Republic of Letters lost much of its force and elasticity. Scholars used and debated the metaphor more than ever before, but these heated and emotional discussions were not necessarily—as is assumed in much of the work on the eighteenth century4 —a sign that the metaphor and the culture it represented had gained ground. The discussions were, much rather, a symptom of crisis. The end of the great religious wars and the emergence of modern centralized states forced scholars to rethink their role in society and their relationship to the new military and administrative elites. Philosophical skepticism and philological criticism threatened established academic teachings and methods.5 Debates about the Republic of Letters reveal the scholars' efforts to answer these political and intellectual challenges. In her studies of learned Huguenots who, after 1685, were spread across Europe, Anne Goldgar has described how the alienated community of scholars at the turn of the eighteenth century came increasingly under pressure.6 The Huguenots felt marginalized in their adopted [End Page 422] homes, lost income and patronage, and suffered a decline in social prestige. According to Goldgar, these external pressures resulted in stronger internal bonds, as exiled scholars rallied around the ideal of the borderless Republic of Letters. But already before Louis XIV's revocation of the Edict of Nantes, Huguenot scholars defined a French version of the republic—La République des Lettres—in strong opposition to the forces suppressing the Protestant minority. In 1684 Pierre Bayle defiantly declared from his Dutch refuge, It is not a matter of religion, but of science: therefore one should put an end to all boundaries that divide men into different camps, and consider only that which unites them, namely their rank as noblemen in the Republic of Letters. In this sense all scholars should regard themselves as brothers, and consequently one another as family. They should say: We are all equal We are all relatives } as children of Apollo.7 Protestant Northern Europe did not witness the same religious and political conflicts that France did.8 Scholars there were also ridden by crisis at the turn...

The Wycliffite Heresy: Authority and the Interpretation of Texts (review)

180 Reviews Parergon 21.1 (2004) troths, secrets and lies’ (p. 169) to its interest in the circumstances of its own production – its own transformation into genre. The final essay, Edwin D. Craun’s ‘Fama and Pastoral Constraints on Rebuking Sinners: ‘The Book of Margery Kempe’ examines the bourgeois wife’s correcting of her superiors. How does her autobiography going about assuring her ‘fraternal corrections’ the status of charity rather than slander? Besides a substantial contribution to the body of knowledge surrounding the fascinating cultural phenomenon of fama, this volume represents a model of what interdisciplinary studies can be.The essays form a coherent whole, and the methods they elaborate reciprocally illuminate the contents presented across the collection. Tracy Adams School of European Languages and Literatures University of Auckland Ghosh, Kantik, The Wycliffite Heresy: Authority and the Interpretation of Texts (Cambridge Studies in Medieval Literature), Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2002; hardback; pp. 312; £45; ISBN 0521807204. The Wycliffite Heresy is a valuable contribution to the study of the intellectual climate of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. Drawing on many unpublished sources, Ghosh examines not only the hermeneutic principles underlying Wyclif’s writings, but also those of his critics. Importantly, he underlines the academic nature of Lollardy and its ‘imbeddedness in traditions of self-conscious intellectual endeavour’ (15). He believes that ‘Lollardy was as much a symptom as a cause of larger changes taking place in late-medieval scholasticism’ (214) and that it ‘brought about a reassessment and reconfiguration – in terms both of values and methodologies – of late-medieval intellectuality…hermeneutic and historical positivism, as well as its interest in textual criticism, in patristics, in ecclesiastical history and the psychology of faith’ (216). Ghosh nowhere claims to be definitive, but his masterful study provokes much thought and should assist scholars to deepen their research into the world of Oxford at this crucial time, as well as in medieval religion, literature, psychology and philosophy. Wyclif believed that the whole of sacred scripture is one word of God, and in his attempt to translate the Bible into a text accessible to opyn reson by all, he recasts the distinction between the literal and the spiritual into two aspects of the literal. He read figurative language not as metaphorical but as sharing in a Reviews 181 Parergon 21.1 (2004) common universal, and so his philosophical realism underpins his exegesis. Wyclif sought for the literal sense, even in allegory, but his ways of knowing, mediate and inmediate, are not easily resolvable. His ‘universalising attempt at limiting the cognitive role of the individual – thereby discounting the inevitability of hermeneutic variation – seeks instead to stress the fixity, stability and determinateness of biblical meaning’ (24). A fixed meaning is, however, problematic for Lollards whose emphasis on textual analysis made them aware of the text as a product of historical and individual context. To bridge the gap between scientia (human reason) and sapientia (divine reason) Wyclif had to rely on the knowledge of the intention of God. This understanding can lead ‘from a system of textual interpretation to a direct apprehension of God’s mind’ (43). To explain how this occurred, Wyclif sought to redefine divine ‘logic’as a means of textual analysis, or scientia and so helped shift scholastic debate from rhetoric to logic. However, Ghosh’s claim that ‘reason and scripture are two not necessarily harmonious sources of authority’ (54) relies, perhaps, on a view of logic as purely human. An older, traditional understanding of ‘reason’ as ratio or logos found meaning sited in the apprehension by the human seminal logos of the divine logos. The openness and diversity of the intellectual world are most clearly seen in the various responses to Lollardy, presented chronologically by Ghosh. The hardening of attitudes towards this ‘heresy’ is illustrated through the almost disinterested debate of Ullerston with Wyclif, to the later polemical works of Butler and Palmer. William Woodford opposed the notion of a fixed meaning and was aware of the vagaries of time and of the differing historical contexts which produced the text. There is much of interest here for scholars to ponder how differing medieval thinkers responded to reason and faith, foreign languages, the nature of the...

Heinrich Damerow (1798-1866). Comments on the title page

Heinrich Philipp August Damerow was one of the most important German psychiatrists of the nineteenth century. His most notable achievements were in the field of institutional psychiatry. With the construction of a clinic for the mentally ill in Halle-Nietleben, Germany, he realized the concept of a "relatively integrated Mental Hospital and Asylum." As an editor of the Allgemeine Zeitschrift für Psychiatrie und psychischgerichtlichen Medicin (Journal of Psychiatry and Psychic-Legal Medicine), he exerted considerable influence. Ideologically, Damerow was a representative until about the mid-nineteenth century of the holistic approach of medicine during the Romantic period, and he was largely influenced by the ideas of Hegel. He found justification for his service to the then ruling Prussian state in the concept of the state as manifestation of divine reason. He supported a holistic approach to treating the mentally ill in which the patient is viewed as a union of body, soul, and mind. This viewpoint was evident in his critical stance toward Esquirol's concept of monomania.

Providence, Predestination and Progress: or, did the Enlightenment Fail?

Early in 2002, the earth experienced a near-miss: an asteroid passed within a whisker (in astronomical terms) of the planet. Had it struck, it would have done so with a force six hundred times greater than the bomb dropped on Hiroshima. No observer saw it coming, and it was tracked only after it had passed; yet this event produced little surprise. We already knew that the secure foundations of modernism had moved beneath our feet: the idea of continental drift; then pollution; then global climate change; then epidemic disease, AIDS; now the realization that life on this planet is regularly challenged, and at longer periods catastrophically transformed, by the impact of extraterrestrial objects. Asteroids are rational in the sense that they obey mechanical laws well understood since Newton; yet their intrusion into our world says nothing of human or divine reason, and seems to re-assert the old doctrine: chance rules all.

AHMAD S. MOUSSALLI, Moderate and Radical Islamic Fundamentalism: The Quest for Modernity, Legitimacy, and the Islamic State (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 1999). Pp. 249. $49.95/cloth.

This is the slyest, and therefore smartest, assessment of Islamic fundamentalism currently available. The author, a prolific Lebanese political theorist, has offered in this, his fourth monograph on the subject, a well-argued, highly original thesis. Moussalli asks one basic question: does Islamic fundamentalism have a philosophical basis? “Yes, it does,” he replies, “but it is not the same basis for all Islamic fundamentalists.” He then proceeds to demonstrate how particular Islamic fundamentalist theorists have addressed issues such as ideology and knowledge, society and politics, from their own philosophical perspective. The argument is markedly tilted toward politics, as each of the six chapters examines either a facet of political philosophy or the discourse of a particular theorist on the Islamic state. The first three chapters are framed as general overviews, first of the fundamentalism–modernism dyad, then of the epistemological divide between divine revelation and human reason, and finally of the discursive dichotomy between the Islamic state and democratic pluralism. The next three chapters shift to dominant theorists, the three “heroes” of Islamist ideology. Chapter 4 examines Hasan al-Banna on the Islamic state; Chapter 5, Sayyid Qutb. Chapter 6 takes up the most prominent current Islamist: Hasan al-Turabi. Not since Hamid Enayat's Modern Islamic Political Thought (Texas, 1982) has any scholar made such a comprehensive effort to trace the patterns of similarity—and the evidence of conflict and disagreement—among the major ideologues of Islamic fundamentalism.

Subjective Accounts of Reasons for Action

Next article No AccessArticlesSubjective Accounts of Reasons for Action*David Sobel David Sobel Search for more articles by this author PDFPDF PLUS Add to favoritesDownload CitationTrack CitationsPermissionsReprints Share onFacebookTwitterLinkedInRedditEmail SectionsMoreDetailsFiguresReferencesCited by Ethics Volume 111, Number 3April 2001 Article DOIhttps://doi.org/10.1086/233523 Views: 69Total views on this site Citations: 21Citations are reported from Crossref © 2001 by The University of Chicago. All rights reserved.PDF download Crossref reports the following articles citing this article:Nathaniel Sharadin Ecumenical epistemic instrumentalism, Synthese 198, no.33 (May 2019): 2613–2639.https://doi.org/10.1007/s11229-019-02232-7Yonatan Shemmer Subjectivism about Future Reasons or The Guise of Caring *, Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 101, no.33 (Jul 2019): 630–648.https://doi.org/10.1111/phpr.12614Samuel Asarnow Internal Reasons and the Boy Who Cried Wolf, Ethics 130, no.11 (Sep 2019): 32–58.https://doi.org/10.1086/704342Arash Abizadeh Hobbes and the Two Faces of Ethics, 88 (Oct 2018).https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108277310Rob Compaijen Transformative Choice, Practical Reasons and Trust, International Journal of Philosophical Studies 26, no.22 (Mar 2018): 275–292.https://doi.org/10.1080/09672559.2018.1450084Rob Compaijen , ( 2018): 37.https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-74552-7_3Samuel Asarnow The Reasoning View and Defeasible Practical Reasoning, Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 95, no.33 (Sep 2017): 614–636.https://doi.org/10.1111/phpr.12446Joshua Gert Reasons, (Feb 2013).https://doi.org/10.1002/9781444367072.wbiee063Steven Arkonovich Reasons, Internal and External, (Feb 2013).https://doi.org/10.1002/9781444367072.wbiee251Steven Arkonovich Advisors and Deliberation, The Journal of Ethics 15, no.44 (Apr 2011): 405–424.https://doi.org/10.1007/s10892-011-9101-7Attila Tanyi Sobel on Pleasure, Reason, and Desire, Ethical Theory and Moral Practice 14, no.11 (Jan 2010): 101–115.https://doi.org/10.1007/s10677-009-9220-4Attila Tanyi Desires as additional reasons? The case of tie-breaking, Philosophical Studies 152, no.22 (Nov 2009): 209–227.https://doi.org/10.1007/s11098-009-9475-6KYLE SWAN Hell and divine reasons for action, Religious Studies 45, no.11 (Feb 2009): 51–61.https://doi.org/10.1017/S0034412508009785Christian Miller Gert on Subjective Practical Rationality, Ethical Theory and Moral Practice 11, no.55 (Aug 2008): 551–561.https://doi.org/10.1007/s10677-008-9121-yChristian Basil Miller Motivational internalism, Philosophical Studies 139, no.22 (Jun 2007): 233–255.https://doi.org/10.1007/s11098-007-9115-yDavid Sobel Subjectivism and Blame, Canadian Journal of Philosophy Supplementary Volume 33 (Jan 2020): 149–170.https://doi.org/10.1353/cjp.0.0070Joshua Gert Brute Rationality, (Sep 2009).https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9780511487088Michael Byron Satisficing and Maximizing, 93 (Dec 2009).https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9780511617058David Sobel Reply to Robertson, Philosophical Papers 32, no.22 (Jul 2003): 185–191.https://doi.org/10.1080/05568640309485122TALBOT BREWER The Real Problem With Internalism About Reasons, Canadian Journal of Philosophy 32, no.44 (Jul 2013): 443–473.https://doi.org/10.1080/00455091.2002.10716526David Sobel Explanation, Internalism, and Reasons for Action, Social Philosophy and Policy 18, no.22 (Jan 2009): 218–235.https://doi.org/10.1017/S026505250000296X

Coleridge's Philosophy: The Logos as Unifying Principle

Part 1 Logos the word: logos - communicative intelligence the archetypal symbol Jehovah-word, name of God. Part 2 Logos - light and life of nature: the redemptive scheme of nature polarity light, life and love. Part 3 Logos - divine reason: reason and understanding logos - unifying principle and law will in a form of reason. Part 4 Logos - the human principle: the idea of humanity personeity in person theanthropology becoming human conclusion - logosophia. Appendices: Coleridge, Humboldt and the word the cosmic Christ logocentricity in Hegel and Coleridge.

Descartes and some predecessors on the divine conservation of motion

Here I reexamine Duhem's question of the continuity between medieval dynamics and early modern conservation theories. I concentrate on the heavens. For Aristotle, the motions of the heavens are eternally constant (and thus mathematizable) because an eternally constant divine Reason is their mover. Duhem thought that impetus and conservation theories, by extending sublunar mechanics to the heavens, made a divine renewer of motion redundant. By contrast, I show how Descartes derives his law of conservation by extending Aristotelian celestial dynamics to the earth. Descartes argues that motion is intrinsically linear, not circular. But he agrees that motion is mathematically intelligible only where divine Reason moves bodies in a constant and eternal motion. Descartes strips bodies of active powers, leaving God as the only natural mover; thus both celestial and sublunar motions are constant, and uniformly mathematizable. The law of conservation of the total quantity of motion is an attempt to harmonize the constancy derived a priori with the phenomenal inconstancy of sublunar motions.

"Vestigia philosophorum," Il medioevo e la storiografia filosofica (review)

~66 JOURNAL OF THE HISTORY OF PHILOSOPHY moral theory, especially in the three doctrines of natural law, conscience, and synderesis . The Stoic ideal was to live in harmony with nature, which impels the individual to act in conformity with the norms of virtue and to rise above the impulses of passion. By nature the Stoics meant divine reason immanent in the individual, inclining him to act rightly. Thus the natural law is unwritten, inborn law, belonging to the natural structure of each individual (46). Verbeke shows that natural law was variously interpreted in the Middle Ages, as it is in modern times. His statement that Ockham's teaching on natural law reveals the same orientation as that of Duns Scotus is questionable (65). For Scotus, the natural law is inscribed in the human nature God has freely chosen to create, and in which individuals participate. Ockham denied the existence of such a nature and made the natural law dependent on the divine will. This book fills a lacuna in the literature on medieval philosophy. Much has been written about the influence of Platonism and Aristotelianism in the Middle Ages. Less well known is the part Stoicism played in shaping medieval thought. Verbeke has given us a wealth of information on this subject. His book will be welcomed by everyone interested in the history of philosophical ideas. ARMAND MAURER Pontifical Institute of Mediaeval Studies G. Piaia. "Vestigia philosophorum, ll medioevo e la storiografia filosofica. Studi di filosofia e di storia della filosofia, vol. 6. Rimini, Italy: Maggioli Editore, 1983, pp. 246. Paper, L. x5,ooo. The present work is devoted to philosophical historiography in the Middle Ages and about the Middle Ages. Indeed, its first part ("La storia dei filosofi nelruniverso culturale del Medioevo," 13-159) studies how mediaeval thinkers represented and interpreted the philosophers' histories, while the second part ("I1 costituirsi del pensiero medievale come oggetto storiografico," 163-232) deals with the Middle Ages as an object of historiographic investigation. The author's purpose in the first part is to show that mediaeval historiography is richer and more complex than usually believed, a view which contrasts with a general trend among historians of philosophic historiography, who often pay little attention to it, or neglect its specific features. They consider the mediaeval approach to ancient philosophers merely as an appendix to the survivals of ancient thought, or considered it in the light of the subsequent humanistic and renaissance historiography. Based upon a choice of particularly significant texts, the author first traces the path followed in the Middle Ages by the historic and philosophic themes of antiquity which became the very kernel of the mediaeval approaches to the histories of philosophy; indeed, he indicates by whom they were usedwand variously manipulated--and how they were interpreted, by relating them to the appropriate historical, doctrinal, or biographical context. Next, he strikes a first balance and advances an interpretation; finally, he compares some aspects of mediaeval and modern historiography. BOOK REWvWS 267 Augustine and Isidore are the first authors examined, for both transmitted topics in the history of philosophy which mediaeval thinkers considered for a long time as exemplary. Whereas the first-mentioned writer has, by and large, a tolerant attitude towards heathen culture, the second one, whose writings carry strong traces of the antiheretical polemics, generally opposes it. Both make use of the current doxographies (Isidore relies in part on Augustine as well). Augustine's could be defined as a 'speculative doxography'; his main concern is the evaluation of the ancient philosophies in light of his notion of Christian philosophy. Thus Platonism, the nearest philosophical system to Christianity, becomes the gauge of all remaining philosophies . They are regarded as introductory to Platonism, and evaluated according to their respective closeness to it. On the other hand, Isidore does not worry about such questions; he limits himself to outlining a philosopher's history based on the distinction in sects and 'placita', referring in a scantily and often unreliable fashion to the classification moduli of late antiquity. Topics in philosophers' histories appear in historical works, for instance in the Chronicon of Otto of Freising (twelfth century) and in the Speculum historialeof Vincent of Beauvais (thirteenth century...

MONEY, PRODUCTIVITY AND UNCERTAINTY IN CAPITALISM AND SOCIALISM

« Hegel's idea, according to which the negation of what has been negated must ipso facto prevail, is probably in itself good old superstition: belief in divine reason—that is, affirmation of the positive. Why should something “prevail” and not simply be forgotten? This presupposes truth, in which is just what cannot be presupposed in philosophy: it is positive theology». (Max Horkheimer [1957], Notizen [Notes] 1950‐1969, Frankfurt am Main, 1974, p. 66.)