Summum Bonum Research Articles

The Appeal to Nature in Cicero's De finibus

When Cicero examines the varied versions of cradle arguments that appear in De finibus, he finds much to criticize. Though he rejects these attempts to discern our proper ethical ends from the earliest inclinations of newborn animals, he nevertheless accepts that human beings should adopt ends for themselves that are consistent with, and perfections of, human nature. I argue that Cicero uses two connected argumentative strategies to create an appeal to nature that overcomes some basic problems he has with the cradle arguments used in Epicureanism, Stoicism, and the Old Academy. The first strategy criticizes the different cradle arguments directly, by which Cicero establishes two negative criteria for any appeal to nature. These criteria indicate what to avoid in arguing for a highest moral end or summum bonum. These criteria eliminate the Epicurean and Stoic cradle arguments, and more subtly criticizes the Antiochian one. As a result, it may seem plausible that Cicero either adopts the Antiochian position himself or that he at least considers it to be a strong position that is worthy of further consideration, particularly in contrast with his categorical rejection of the other schools. Cicero’s second strategy, however, leads us away from accepting any established cradle argument, including the Antiochian one. This strategy develops a rich theme of education over the course of the text and emphasizes an appeal to the telic sense of “nature” that ultimately meets the two criteria set out by his first strategy. He does not seek ethical direction in some biological origin and given nature as cradle arguments do. Cicero appeals instead to human nature and its summum bonum as it appears during philosophical education. Though he finds cradle arguments rely too much on given nature and too little on telic nature, Cicero’s own own emphasis on education and telic nature amounts to a new appeal to “nature” that, in avoiding the “cradle”, is more sound than those of his philosophical rivals.

Этика Аристотеля

In ethics and politics, Aristotle is a classic representative of eudaimonism. The summum bonum for human being is happiness (eudaimonía), which consists in the activity of the soul to realize its virtue (areté). Virtues carried out in rational activity are divided into ethical and dianoetic (sc. intellectual). The highest moral ideal, according to Aristotle, is to live a contemplative life (bíos theōrētikós; vita contemplativa), because happiness is a kind of contemplation. The blessed life consists of enjoying contemplation, i.e. in the study of philosophy. Philosophy, the subject of which is the highest principles of existence, is the most speculative of the sciences. Therefore, a life devoted to philosophy is the most perfect.

Exploration of the Self in a Religious-Ethical Context from Late Antiquity through the Early Renaissance: St. Augustine, Boethius, and Petrarch - Past Ideas for our Future

There are many efforts to defend the Humanities against countless attacks by university administrators, the public, and, implicitly, even by students. In light of those problems, this article returns to three of the most important intellectuals in the history of western culture, St. Augustine, Boethius, and Francesco Petrarch, examining their respective fundamental dialogic narratives in which they probed their own self and discovered answers to the most critical questions in life. This paper suggests that we can profoundly promote the Humanities by returning to the bedrock of our discipline established by these three authors whose concepts about the self and its relationship with the transcendental being (the divine, Summum bonum, etc.) continue to offer central perspective also for the twenty-first century.

Spinoza: Desire and Supreme Good, from Philosophizing to Wise

Spinoza: Desire and Supreme Good, from Philosophizing to Wise

THE MORAL VALUES IN GAMBIRANOM DANCE

Based on Immanuel Kant’s perspective about morality, this study aims to identify the moral values in Gambiranom dance that are worthy of being used as a guideline in reviving the disappearing moral values. The researcher used a discourse analysis method and a qualitative approach to understand the symbolic meaning of discourse. The discourse in this study was the Gambiranom dance. In collecting the data, the researcher conducted interviews, observations, literary reviews, and documentation studies. The researcher also used the Miles and Huberman model of analysis technique to analyze the data. This study resulted in two primary data, the Gambiranom dance Hasta Sawanda and the form of presentation. The data resulted in an interpretation of Hasta Sawanda in Gambiranom dance as good will and the presentation form of Gambiranom dance as act rightly, both from the perspective of moral values by Immanuel Kant. The two data produced praiseworthy values, bringing forth the highest or ultimate good (Summum Bonum). A dancer can achieve the highest good if they implement act rightly and good will by the rules of Surakarta’s style of classical Javanese dance. It is a condition where the dancer succeeds in wholly merging themselves into the character of Irawan, where the spectators or audience no longer see the dancer as a dancer but as the character of Raden Irawan, the Prabu Gambiranom.

Medieval Christian philosophy was founded on the work of Bishop Augustine of Hippo and theologian Thomas Aquinas, who understood evil in terms of Biblical infallibility and Biblical inerrancy, as well as the influences of Plato and Aristotle, in their appreciation of the concept of the Summum bonum. Silent contemplation was the route to appreciation of the Idea of the Good.[8

Medieval Christian philosophy was founded on the work of Bishop Augustine of Hippo and theologian Thomas Aquinas, who understood evil in terms of Biblical infallibility and Biblical inerrancy, as well as the influences of Plato and Aristotle, in their appreciation of the concept of the Summum bonum. Silent contemplation was the route to appreciation of the Idea of the Good.[8

Роль эвдемонизма в моральной философии Бенедикта Спинозы

In recent decades, historians of moral philosophy started to pay more attention to Baruch Spinoza, studying the often-neglected ethical dimension of his philosophy. Nevertheless, despite this growing interest, Spinoza is rarely placed in the canon of moral philosophy, and therefore his relation to various traditions of normative ethics remains unclear. In this article, I attempt to show that Spinoza’s moral theory relies heavily on a certain tradition in normative ethics, usually called eudaimonism or eudaimonist virtue ethics. This assertion is justified through close examination of two conceptual features that unite Spinoza’s moral theory with virtue-ethical eudaimonism. The first feature is its moral naturalism: this theory is explicitly derived from Spinoza’s metaphysical views on nature sive substance and human nature in particular. The second feature is Spinoza’s active reliance on a developed normative concept of the highest good (summum bonum), also called “happiness” (felicitas) or “blessedness” (beatitudo) – the concept that is directly manifested in the moral ideal of a “free man” (homo liber), put forward in Part IV of the “Ethics”.

Analytical Study of Fazlur Rahman's "Revival and Reform in Islam: A Study of Islamic Fundamentalism"

In Islam, there is freedom of every thought and along with that, respect for every thought. In the present era, freedom of thought is considered the summum bonum. It is generally believed that this freedom is the result of the scientific revolution in the West. The immediate and proximate cause of this revolution is indeed the modern scientific revolution, but this scientific revolution itself was the result of the unified revolution of Islam. What is meant by the modern reconstruction of Islamic Thought? What this means is that the new intellectual and practical problems that have arisen in the present age should be addressed in such a way that it comprises the complete concession of the spirit and temperament of Islam on the one hand, and on the other hand, it fully embraces the modern requirements. A lot has been said and written about how modern Islamic thought developed in the current period. Probably the first person to write and draw attention to this subject was Syed Jamaluddin Afghani. Similarly, the names of Sheikh Muhammad Abdah, Sir Syed Ahmad Khan, Mohammad Iqbal, Syed Amir Ali, Namik Kamal, etc. can be taken in this regard. All these people tried to redefine Islam. It had two purposes. One is to make modern ideas compatible with Islamic principles, and at the same time to reassure Muslims that Islam is still important and relevant for their guidance. the current review paper is an endeavor to meticulously present the outline of the revivalist and reformist approach of Fazlur Rahman presented by him in his book "Revival and Reform in Islam: A Study of Islamic Fundamentalism".

An Overview of Charles Peirce on Ethics, Esthetics and the Normative Sciences

In Charles Peirce on Ethics, Esthetics and the Normative Sciences, I argue that Peirce was motivated to develop a normative science of ethics because of his growing concern with the corruption of science in the Gilded Age, and the recognition that the pragmatic maxim entailed an amoral instrumentalism. Rather than taking a Kantian approach to resolve the latter issue, he adopts an Aristotelian one, engaging in a search for an ultimate end that could order all other ends. What is right is what would be conducive to that end. As such he sees the necessity of a science of esthetics which would study such an end. However, rather than eudaimonia as the highest end, Peirce sees reasonableness as the summum bonum. Although barely sketched by Peirce, I argue that its principal sense is that of an ongoing process of self-correction away from error. In regard to this end, what is most important is the design of practices and the establishment of habits of conduct and sentiment most conducive to self-correction. For this reason, a proper community of inquiry with these features ought to be established, armed with the general methodology of science to assess the norms that guide the experiments of living together. Assurance that communities of inquiries are moving away from error and toward improvement is based on a convergence theory of truth.

Remarks on James Liszka’s Charles Peirce on Ethics, Esthetics and the Normative Sciences

Peirce held a convergence theory of moral truth, as James Liszka persuasively argues in Charles Peirce on Ethics, Esthetics, and the Normative Sciences (2021). Here I emphasize: (1) that Peirce's convergence theory follows from the application of the maxim of pragmatism to the concept of moral goodness or rightness; (2) that in connection with Peirce's account of the ethical summum bonum, morally right action can be understood as action that conforms or contributes to the growth of concrete reasonableness; and (3) that, for Peirce, the growth of concrete reasonableness seems to be a movement or development toward "God". While I broadly agree with Liszka's approach, I highlight some disagreements. As do many readers of Peirce, Liszka seems to regard the convergence of beliefs and habits as necessarily a convergance among the "indefinite community" of distinct persons or inquirers; however, there is sufficient evidence that Peirce came to think that, if any given person were to live long enough, they would come to the same conclusions or rest in the same habits on their own. With respect to morality, even the most evil person would eventually come around to the moral truth.

A Female Neighbour in Whose Country? The Untold Story of Afia Begum and the Sari Squad

This paper is one of the first attempts to reconstruct the story of Afia Begum, wife —and later widow— of Abdul Hamid (a Bangladeshi immigrant in Thatcherite London), whose entry was cleared by the British Home Office in 1982, months before her husband died tragically in a fire in East London. Upon her arrival in the United Kingdom, Afia was told that her grant to stay in the country was no longer valid owing to the death of her husband; that she was now an illegal immigrant in Britain. In the process of the reconstruction, I also revisit the untold story of the Sari Squad, a group of Asian women who fought valiantly, though peacefully, to stop Afia’s deportation. Although Afia was deported on May 8, 1984, her case was heard in the European Court of Human Rights and debated in the European Parliament; in both forums, the highhandedness of the British Home Office was fiercely critiqued. By way of conclusion, I lay out a hermeneutic in which to read Afia’s story, in a literary sense, offering a skeptical stance to reading it in binary terms of success-defeat/victimization-survival of a female foreigner battling a racist state. In doing so, I draw upon Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak’s “connection between nationalism and reproductive heteronormativity”, to argue that the case of Afia’s deportation suggests that her nationality can only be —tragically— established by determining the citizenship of her husband; this ends up doubly othering and transcendentalizing her nationality, reducing her to her sociobiological reproductive heteronormativity, impregnated with the cryptic trace of her husband’s ghost which practically became the summum bonum of her deprived statehood.

Police Ethics in Rural Contexts: A Left Realist Consequentialist View

This article presents crime survey data from the state of West Virginia in the United States showing that, controlling for structural conditions, community atmosphere is significantly related to crime, violence and many other social problems in rural places. These results help identify measurable and achievable progressive desired ends in rural policing, replacing law enforcement outputs (for example, arrests, gun and drug seizures) with safe, strong community outcomes as the summum bonum (i.e, ultimate outcome) of policing. Findings show that interdependent communities where police are partners with residents are the safest, while conflict communities where the police are viewed as adversaries are least safe. These results suggest a left realist consequentialist approach to police ethics to dismantle the hegemony of draconian policies and practices.

The Influence and Enlightenment of Lao Tzu's Philosophical System on Modern Enterprise Management

A full exploration of the essence of management science in traditional culture is an important path for modern enterprises’ innovation in management thought. Taoist culture is an important branch of traditional Chinese culture. Lao Tzu's philosophical system contains not only rich philosophical, ecological, and military thought, but also rich management thought, playing a quite conductive role in constructing a management theory that tailors to local reality in China. Lao Tzu's management philosophy, such as " Dao follows what it is", "non-contention ", "the Supreme Good is like water", have been widely considered as excellent management philosophy and used in business management by many entrepreneurs. For modern Chinese enterprises, an in-depth study of Lao Tzu's philosophy will help achieve the best management state. In this context, this paper gives a systematic analysis of the influence and enlightenment of Lao Tzu's philosophical system on modern enterprises’ management.

Ecotheological Community and the Question of Non-Human Animals Understood as Persons

Ecotheological Community and the Question of Non-Human Animals Understood as Persons

MARK MORAL IN DANCE GAMBIRANOM (STUDY MORALITY IMMANUEL KANT)

Leave from perspective Immanuel Kant about morality, study this aim for identify the moral values in the Gambiranom dance that deserve to be guided to bring life to life return values moral which has faded. Discourse analysis methodology with approach Qualitative research in this study is used to understand the symbolic messages contained in the text something discourse. Discourse which meant in study this is dance Gambiranom. Collection data done through Interview, observation, studies References, and studies documentation. The data analysis technique used the data analysis technique of the Miles and Huberman model. This research produce two data main research, namely Hasta Sawanda dance Gambiranom and shape Gambiranom dance presentation. These data produce an interpretation of Hasta Sawanda in the Gambiranom dance as good will according to the perspective of Immanuel Kant's moral values, and the form of presenting the Gambiranom dance as an act rightly according to the perspective of Immanuel's moral values Kant. From the two data, it produces a good value (praiseworthy) which is then gives birth to the highest good (summum bonum). The highest good is obtained by a dancer if has carry out the action which correct (act rightly) and intention which good (good will) according to the rules of classical Javanese dance style Surakarta is a condition where dancers are successful merged himself into the full character of Irawan's character. So that connoisseurs/viewers don't again see dancer as personal dancer but character Raden Irawan or King Gambiranom.

Trinitarian Grace in Martin Luther's The Bondage of the Will by Miikka Ruokanen

Reviewed by: Trinitarian Grace in Martin Luther's The Bondage of the Will by Miikka Ruokanen Mark Mattes Trinitarian Grace in Martin Luther's The Bondage of the Will. By Miikka Ruokanen. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2021. xiii + 222 pp. One might think that commentators have picked over the Bondage of the Will so many times that there would be nothing further to discover. In this reworking of a Cambridge University dissertation, Finnish missionary and scholar Miikka Ruokanen proves this supposition wrong. He discerns pneumatological and trinitarian dimensions [End Page 208] within the Bondage of the Will and shows their bearing on Luther's theology. Additionally, he sees Erasmus and Luther debating less over the power of the human will and more over the nature of God. Drawing from late medieval Nominalist views of grace configured by means of a pactum theology, where God promises to give his grace to those who do their very best, Erasmus saw God as fair, not arbitrary, even if that relaxes divine omnipotence or at least makes it less threatening to humans. In contrast, Luther emphasized not a "juridical-like relationship" between God and humanity, but an "intimate relationship with transcendence" of humanity with either God, who is wholly good, or Satan (11–13). This of course leads to the question of whether or not Luther's view of justification is forensic, but Ruokanen deals with that matter only to reassert the new Finnish perspective in which justification is based on union with Christ and not the verdict of "not guilty" for Jesus' sake. Ruokanen eschews an existentialist theology of the Word since what is important about the Word is not how it alters a human's core but instead how through it the Spirit unites believers to Christ. So, for Luther, salvation involves the agency of the entire triune life to bring the Spirit's indwelling within believers. This work is triune since (1) Christ obtains remission of sins for sinners through his work upon the cross, (2) the Spirit offers forgiveness to believers in the mission of the church, and (3) the Father is the source of this mercy obtained by Christ and proffered by the Spirit (105). Many readers of Lutheran Quarterly will disagree with Ruokanen's contention that "union with Christ" is not a consequence of forensic justification but the essence of justification, that is, justification is constituted not only by God's favor given in Christ but also the donum, the "real presence" of Christ in the believer (29). That said, Ruokanen is no slavish disciple of Tuomo Mannermaa. He freely criticizes Mannermaa for underemphasizing the work of Christ in his focus on the person of Christ (170). Likewise, he acknowledges Gerhard Forde as a pioneer who lifted up the pneumatological dimension embedded in the Bondage of the Will. Ruokanen notes that the categories of the rational, the judicial, and the moral, which Erasmus applied to heavenly matters, Luther limited to earthly matters. That is, what for Erasmus is soteriological [End Page 209] is for Luther merely ethical (43). For Luther, renovation, the new birth, is no prudential calculation but instead wholly a work of the Holy Spirit. With respect to humans' eternal destiny, humans have "no neutrality"; they are ridden either by God or the devil (55). Ruokanen handles Luther's response to scholastic categories deftly. Luther notes that necessity is not externally imposed on humans (73). God compels no one to do evil; instead, humans choose evil deeds freely. God's foreknowledge of Judas' betrayal led to no coercion of Judas. Judas' evil will is such that he cannot change it. That said, the devil and evil persons can serve as instruments of God in the world (79). For Ruokanen, Luther allows God to be God (123), a Being not on a continuum with his creatures. God is, after all, the summum bonum (81) and all entities exist only because they share in his life through his creation of them. With respect to his creation, God is completely free. Indeed, he exercises his will as his law for creation (126). Towards the end, Ruokanen raises the question of rapprochement between Erasmus and Luther: "Looking from a distance...

More's Life of Pico: a Christian Epicureanism?

This essay examines More's engagement with Epicurean philosophy in his Life of Pico. In the Life, More enters the humanist debate on the possibility of a synthesis between Christianity and Epicureanism using Pico as a model. More's method imitates the eudaimonism of his classical sources insofar as it employs human happiness as a standard for examining the best way of life. In his evaluations of Pico, More uses the concept of the summum bonum and a hierarchy of human goods in order to show that Epicureanism mistakes the nature of the greatest good: in positing that the best life entails withdrawal from political community and social duties in order to enjoy the pleasures of philosophy, Epicureanism undermines the equanimity that it aims to achieve. As an alternative, More upholds the life of piety and Christian service as the source of “solid” happiness.

Paul on Humility

Paul on Humility

Cousin Marvin's Secret

Cousin Marvin's Secret

Peirce’s open community in light of sentimentalism and normative sciences

Peirce’s idea of an unlimited community has been usually analyzed from its role in science and the normative ideal of truth. However, it is essential to understand the role of the community of inquiry in light of the other normative sciences, aesthetics and ethics, since according to Peirce, any endeavor to know that is not guided by the esthetical ideal of admirable per se should not be considered as proper science, but as a power tool to benefit some elite. This article aims to analyze Peirce’s idea of community of inquiry in light of sentimentalism and the normative sciences in order to evidence that such community is not elitist, but open, insofar as it is also lured by the summum bonum and the admirable per se. Finally, we provide a more organic reading of Peirce’s work, opening the way to consider possible consequences of this position from an ethical and political perspective.