Preface, by F. L. Windolph.--A modern concept of God, by A. H. Compton.--The immortality of man, by J. Maritain.--The idea of God in the mind of man, by M. Royden.--Psychical research and the life beyond death, by H. Hart.--Religion and modern knowledge, by R. Niebuhr.--Immortality in the light of science and philosophy, by W. E. Hocking.--"To whom shall ye liken God?" By C. E. Park.--Man's destiny in eternity, by W. L. Sperry.--The idea of God as affected by modern knowledge, (...) by F. S. C. Northrop. (shrink)

THE IMMORTAL FLY: ETERNAL WHISPERS. WHO IS SHE? Author: Rituparna Ray Chaudhuri. Hello, Recently my book named, ‘The Immortal Fly: Eternal Whispers : Based On True Events of a Family' been published from Partridge (USA) In Association with Penguin Random House (UK) and achieved a separate Google identity. -/- As being # the author of the book, I thought to define self in the book what is definition of 'Depression'. I wanted to explain self in many ways, but (...) the best quotation appeared to me : “My life will end someday, but it will end at my convenience.’’ -/- ***** I am missing "her". By now, years passed without 'her' . Even though, unlike before, everything is becoming to be more scattered, gloomy and desolate. She is no-where whom I share my feelings. Even now, when I do close my eyes, I can visualize the same that I had left years since on 7th February, 2019 at 8.20 A.M. in the hospital struggling a continuous period of fifty days : on the fifty one day, my father said, ”The End of our Fifty Years relationship has been completed with the Fifty Days”….’Whoever’ she was to others , but she is our legend…To me, she is ‘My Ma’. -/- The story could begin, 'I failed preciously on success of my life.' Simplicity, Innocence, Belief, Faith and Personality met unknowingly with filthy waves skillfully immersed in Betray, Sorcery, Jealousy, Greediness, Revenge, Lie... ‘’ ******* The Daughter writes, “I had asked Ma many times, but her ‘impenetrable personality’ and dynamic words to everyone with a tinge of smile as reflected on her face, she was reluctant to continue her conversation with me. I had thought, hence, I must not be indefinite on my spoken words. Who shall I blame!” Based on true story of a family came from South Calcutta (India) to a suburb, on staying at home of the Daughter’s maternal grandmother’s house, this book reveals in facts and true events how Destiny had unknowingly ‘further’ played an abominable role to Fate of The Daughter, when eventually one day on 7th February, 2019 everything was finished within 8.20A.M. The Daughter is, therefore, left alone on terrestrial with immortal words as written in her Diary, ‘Eternal Whispers’: “My words to self that I am to fulfill my Ma’s - wish. ’’ ‘’ -/- • Keywords: 1. Diary and True Events 2. The Chaotic Society 3. Fatality 4. Of A-Family 5. Science , Philosophy and Literature 6. Severe Depression 7. Medical Journey. -/- The Alternative Title of the Book: The Greatest Mistake or Fortune:: The book is mainly carrying with intense words of a journey of the relationship between a Mother with her Daughter has left readers in an abrupt situation where ,perhaps, I can define "Man is the innocent creature with 'his' personality under circumstances..." -/- . (shrink)

-/- This paper offers a preliminary interpretation of Nietzsche’s doctrine of Eternal Recurrence, according to which the doctrine constitutes a parable that, speaking of what is permanent in life, praises and justifies all that is impermanent. What is permanent, what always recurs, is the will to power or to self-overcoming that is the fundamental engine of all life. The operating mechanism of such a will consists in prompting the living to undergo transformations or transitory deaths, after which this fundamental (...) engine resurrects again and is once more activated. The individual human being, in his capacity as creator, is only a conscious and finite surrogate of this fundamental will. In confronting his abysmal thought of Eternal Recurrence, Zarathustra comes to the realization that the individual human being will never cease to be a mere transit that, while remaining in existence, will have to always return to the moment of his own self-overcoming. This means that the small man in each of us, the man that can be overcome, will always recur, and that even the greatest man we could become will still be too small and human all too human. Although this thought generates disgust with existence, it can also become a source of life-affirmation, when we learn to love our tragic destiny: that of never being able to realize the ideal of superhumanity that is recommended by the book, and, yet, that of eternally striving to realize it. (shrink)

According to some theists, God will never completely destroy moral evil or banish it from his creation entirely; instead, he will eventually confine moral evil to a specific region of his creation, a region known as hell, and those condemned to hell, having no hope of escape from it, will live out eternity in a state of estrangement from God as well as from each other. Let us call that the traditional doctrine of hell. Elsewhere I have argued that any (...) form of theism which includes such a doctrine, even one that tries to preserve consistency by denying the universal love of God, is in fact logically inconsistent. But moderately conservative theists, as I have called them, have an argument for the traditional doctrine that some have found convincing, one that emphasizes libertarian free will. The argument is this. Because God is perfectly loving, he wills the good for every created person and wills the redemption of all who have fallen into evil; but because he has also given his loved ones the gift of freedom and some of them in fact exercise their freedom to reject him forever, it is simply not within his power, even as an omnipotent being, to redeem all of those who fall into evil. According to moderately conservative theists, therefore, the following hypothesis, which I shall call the Rejection Hypothesis , is at least possibly true: Some persons will, despite God's best efforts to save them, freely and irrevocably reject God and thus separate themselves from God forever. (shrink)

wledge, including philosophy, theology and literature. The concept of time has deep roots in human history and is related to many complex questions, such as the nature of time, its relation to eternity and human existence. In this context, comparing the concepts of time of different authors can help to understand the diversity of views on this phenomenon and its significance in culture and history.This article examines the concepts of time and eternity in the works of two outstanding authors - (...) Origen and Dante. Both of these authors have a significant impact on the culture and spiritual heritage of the world, and their views on time and eternity attract the attention of researchers from various fields. The purpose of the article is an attempt to compare and analyze the concepts of time and eternity in the works of Origen and Dante in order to better understand their views and their influence on culture and spiritual tradition.Through the analysis and comparison of the two authors’ theological-philosophical concept of eternity, we also identify the way of participation in eternity through which man opens the way to his eternal permanence.The study of time and eternity is of constant relevance because it addresses fundamental questions about the nature of existence, the meaning of life, and the ultimate destiny of humanity. By studying the thoughts of Origen, an early Christian theologian, and Dante Alighieri, a medieval poet, we gain a deeper understanding of the evolution of these concepts and their significance in different intellectual and cultural contexts. This comparative analysis sheds light on timeless and universal aspects of time and eternity that transcend historical and cultural boundaries. (shrink)

This essay considers Medjugorje, a small mountain village in Bosma-Hercegovina, as an icon or a bridge between God and man. The contemporary quest for national roots in the Balkans has led to cultural policies in the Yugoslav successor states which deny all common bonds among the South Slavs, resulting in a Kafkaesque civil war. Drawing on the crisis of liberal democracy and community in the West, the essay explores the prospects for peace in the former Yugoslavia, as reflected in Our (...) Lady of Medjugorje's call for moral and spiritual renewal. It concludes that the quintessential, universal. Christian, and ecumenical Medjugorje message of peace represents a bridge to eternity, just as the historic Old Bridge in Mostar and the Višegrad Bridge over the Drina River are symbolic of a common South Slav history and destiny. (shrink)

Andrey Bely's autobiographical novel Kotik Letaev and Terrence Malick's film The Tree of Life do not share a common subtext. Nevertheless, they have strikingly similar themes. They each deal with an adult's confrontation of his past through memory, a memory that extends back before birth. Coming to terms with the past prepares the adult protagonist of each work for his destiny. The essay discusses Malick's use of William Blake's mysticism and Bely's dependence on the religious-philosophical ideas of Rudolf Steiner. (...) Memory plays an important role in both works as it touches on the recapitulation of cosmic origins in the development of the individual human being. What the quester discovers through memory enables him to find the way back to Eternity from which he has descended. Both artists invoke the World Tree uniting heaven and earth and its association with the Cross of Christ. In both the novel and the film the world is seen first through a child's eyes, then through growing understanding of the adult. Malick illustrates with cinematography what Bely describes in words. Malick uses music in a way that fleshes out what Bely attempted to create through using musical tropes in language. (shrink)

Andrey Bely's autobiographical novel Kotik Letaev and Terrence Malick's film The Tree of Life do not share a common subtext. Nevertheless, they have strikingly similar themes. They each deal with an adult's confrontation of his past through memory, a memory that extends back before birth. Coming to terms with the past prepares the adult protagonist of each work for his destiny. The essay discusses Malick's use of William Blake's mysticism and Bely's dependence on the religious-philosophical ideas of Rudolf Steiner. (...) Memory plays an important role in both works as it touches on the recapitulation of cosmic origins in the development of the individual human being. What the quester discovers through memory enables him to find the way back to Eternity from which he has descended. Both artists invoke the World Tree uniting heaven and earth and its association with the Cross of Christ. In both the novel and the film the world is seen first through a child's eyes, then through growing understanding of the adult. Malick illustrates with cinematography what Bely describes in words. Malick uses music in a way that fleshes out what Bely attempted to create through using musical tropes in language. (shrink)

The story of the show, The Good Place, begins with a common picture of what happens to us after we die. One of the key philosophical issues in the story involves how to assess correctly the moral goodness or badness of a person's life on Earth, since this is the basis of the judgment concerning their eternal destiny. Thomas Nagel claims that there are four kinds of “moral luck”: luck in the circumstances in which we find ourselves, luck (...) with respect to our constitution or character, luck with respect to the results of our actions, and luck with respect to having free choices at all. Perhaps one moral of the story of The Good Place is that life is really complicated, morally speaking—people are not simply good or evil, and cannot be judged easily. (shrink)

We all started out as evil. Immanuel Kant describes and attempts to solve three specific difficulties that arise out of the fact that we are all inevitably corrupted by evil. This chapter presents Kant's treatment of these difficulties as corresponding to three traditional problems in Christian theology: sanctification, eternal security, and justification. That the first difficulty relates to the doctrine of sanctification (how a Christian, following conversion, can become holy) is evident when Kant describes this difficulty in terms of (...) the contrast between human imperfection and God's holiness. Kant provides an overview of how rational religion can come to terms with a practical need: we must be able to access divine grace in some form in order to have a reasonable hope of being sanctified, assured of an eternal destiny with God, and justified in spite of our past evil. (shrink)

One of the major arguments for theological voluntarism offered by the Ash’arites involves the claim that that some of the factors upon which our salvation or condemnation depend are beyond our control. We will call this “the problem of salvific luck.” According to the Ash’arites, the fact that God does save and condemn human beings on the basis of factors beyond their control casts doubt on any non-voluntarist conception of divine justice. A common way to respond to this Ash’arite argument (...) for voluntarism is to eliminate the role of luck in God’s judgments. But this is not the Mu’tazilite way of resisting the argument. The Mu’tazilite, who oppose theological voluntarism, choose a more daunting solution to the problem of salvific luck. They reject the claim that God’s Judgment concerning the eternal destiny of some persons would be unjust if it depended upon factors beyond their control. The paper discusses this solution to the problem of salvific luck. (shrink)

Ted Sider’s paper “Hell and Vagueness” challenges a certain conception of Hell by arguing that it is inconsistent with God’s justice. Sider’s inconsistencyargument works only when supplemented by additional premises. Key to Sider’s case is a premise that the properties upon which eternal destinies superveneare “a smear,” i.e., they are distributed continuously among individuals in the world. We question this premise and provide reasons to doubt it. The doubts come from two sources. The first is based on evidential considerations (...) borrowed from skeptical theism. A related but separate consideration is that supposing it would be an insurmountable problem for God to make just (and therefore non-arbitrary) distinctions in morally smeared world, God thereby has sufficient motivation not to actualize such worlds. Yet God also clearly has motivation only to actualize some member of the subset of non-smeared worlds which don’t appear non-smeared. For if it was obvious who was morally fit for Heaven and who wasn’t, a new arena of great injustice is opened up. The result is that if there is a God, then he has the motivation and the ability to actualize from just that set of worlds which are not smeared but which are indiscernible from smeared worlds. (shrink)

I argue that the idea of a freely embraced eternal destiny in hell is deeply incoherent and implies, quite apart from its incoherence, that we are free both to sin with impunity and to defeat God's justice forever.

The aim of this paper is to show the difference between Aristotle's conception of friendship and the Christian charity. While the pagan charity only search for happiness in this life, the Christian charity moreover point out the eternal destiny in all the men and magnify the friendship in this life.

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:Simone Weil for the Twenty-First Century by Eric O. SpringstedLissa McCulloughSPRINGSTED, Eric O. Simone Weil for the Twenty-First Century. Notre Dame, Ind.: University of Notre Dame Press, 2021. xxi + 264 pp. Cloth, $100.00; paper, $35.00This book proposes taking French philosopher Simone Weil as a polestar to inspire and orient thought in the twenty-first century. It collects revised versions of eleven articles and essays published between 1994 and (...) the present, now organized into a whole with three new framing chapters (1, 3, and 14). Not intended as an introduction to Weil's life and work, nor as a study primarily directed to Weil scholars, the book seeks a broader readership that need not be well versed in her thought. Weil is recommended as a model for leading a thoughtful life of action exemplifying integrity, discipline, and the exercise of attention: "[W]ith Weil it is important to understand not only what she thought but how she thought," as in her own intellectual transformations she "moved from a strict disciplining of the mind to a regime of attentiveness." [End Page 160]A condensed three-page biography is provided for orientation to Weil's life before the reader is launched into the book's two parts, the first focused on philosophical and theological themes, the second on social and societal concerns. Springsted notes that these themes profoundly converge in Weil's later work, describing her political thought as a "retheologization of the space in which we dwell... an attempt to think about the natural life of humankind in supernatural terms while keeping in mind that this relation is often mediated and veiled." Theology concerns itself with "the sense that God communicates Himself and His Holiness," and the appropriate response is an opening up of oneself in order to listen further: "This is what mystery is about; it is not something to be solved, it is not a set of facts, but something that keeps giving itself.... This is not only the biblical worldview; ancient Greeks such as Plato had it too." Even as Weil's thinking on good, beauty, and truth is profoundly inspired by Plato's, dating back more than two millennia, her bold originality and gift for synthesis manages to pull this thinking into our late modern, post-Christian, and indeed anti-Platonic world of novel perplexities, demonstrating how powerfully this handful of essential words (God, truth, justice, love, good) can speak in our day. This is the key value that Weil offers: "Unless human thought finds some way of connecting itself to something bigger than itself, something that gives a sense of value (and this is what the world's beauty does), human thought will lose depth and dimensionality."Speaking in his own voice, the author affirms that "how we look at our problems can be very different if we understand that we have eternal obligations and that humans have an eternal destiny." This quest for ultimate value and sacramental order puts Springsted on the path of "searching for a new Saint Benedict," the formation of moral communities that bring thoughtful attention and practical work together in a communal life oriented to the good—though he admits that such value-community formation is difficult in increasingly pluralistic and divided societies. Partly because Weil tended to accent individualism, there is no easy or short route to apply Weil's insights on a communal level, even as she clearly sought to do so in her final book-length essay, The Need for Roots, written in 1943 just before her death at age thirty-four.To read Weil's final essay is to be struck by her prescience concerning the dominant intellectual-spiritual conundrums we face today, almost a century later, which are keenly analyzed by her far-seeing attention: the quandaries of post-colonial oppression and uprootedness, us-versus-them nationalisms, money-value as erosive force, mendacity and propaganda in politics, cultural vacuity and soullessness even in the nominally religious domain. To take Weil as one's polestar is indeed to be guided by a sharply critical, rarely lucid thinker whose rigorous criticism of social, political, and religious domains challenge the spectrum... (shrink)

For anyone teaching undergraduates material related to Peter Singer’s (1972) ‘Famine, Affluence, and Morality’, this chapter is for you. I carefully explain the core of the Affluence Argument, balancing accessibility with rigor. I systematically entertain and undermine the following objections: I can’t save everyone, I reject the conclusion, other people aren’t sacrificing their luxuries, it’s MY money and I don’t work hard so that I have to give it to others, I can’t solve the problem by throwing money at it, (...) (flaming) liberals like Peter Singer propose arguments like this, what’s really important is the eternal destiny of people, luxuries are not themselves immoral, Jesus said, “The poor you will have with you always”, riches to rags, proximity, urgency, certainty, corruption, better than others, communism, motivation, economic collapse, population explosion. (shrink)

The aim of this paper is to show the difference between Aristotle’s conception of friendship and the Christian charity. While the pagan charity only search for happiness in this life, the Christian charity moreover point out the eternal destiny in all the men and magnify the friendship in this life.

“Orthodox theism” is “the cognitive core” of mainstream religious belief in the Abrahamic tradition, according to which God is the omnipotent, omniscient, and perfectly good designer, creator, and sustainer of the world, who made us so that we might develop into morally mature agents capable of choosing freely to love God, on the basis of which we will be judged and our eternal destinies determined. O’Connor aims to pose a problem for this view, namely, that given the “standard assumption” (...) governing discussion of God and evil since Hume, a certain fact about natural evil that results solely from natural processes constitutes good reason to think that OT is false. The standard assumption is that we can compare by way of thought experiment how things are with how they would be if there were a God and with how they would be if there were no God, and thereby, we can, in principle, ground a justified verdict about whether God exists. The fact in question is that it seems that, necessarily, NERNP is gratuitous. Since God and gratuitous evil are incompatible, it follows that we have fairly strong prima facie reason to think that there is NERNP that is incompatible with God, and consequently that OT is false. (shrink)

The story of the show, The Good Place, begins with a common picture of what happens to us after we die. One of the key philosophical issues in the story involves how to assess correctly the moral goodness or badness of a person's life on Earth, since this is the basis of the judgment concerning their eternal destiny. Thomas Nagel claims that there are four kinds of “moral luck”: luck in the circumstances in which we find ourselves, luck (...) with respect to our constitution or character, luck with respect to the results of our actions, and luck with respect to having free choices at all. Perhaps one moral of the story of The Good Place is that life is really complicated, morally speaking—people are not simply good or evil, and cannot be judged easily. (shrink)

“Orthodox theism” is “the cognitive core” of mainstream religious belief in the Abrahamic tradition, according to which God is the omnipotent, omniscient, and perfectly good designer, creator, and sustainer of the world, who made us so that we might develop into morally mature agents capable of choosing freely to love God, on the basis of which we will be judged and our eternal destinies determined. O’Connor aims to pose a problem for this view, namely, that given the “standard assumption” (...) governing discussion of God and evil since Hume, a certain fact about natural evil that results solely from natural processes constitutes good reason to think that OT is false. The standard assumption is that we can compare by way of thought experiment how things are with how they would be if there were a God and with how they would be if there were no God, and thereby, we can, in principle, ground a justified verdict about whether God exists. The fact in question is that it seems that, necessarily, NERNP is gratuitous. Since God and gratuitous evil are incompatible, it follows that we have fairly strong prima facie reason to think that there is NERNP that is incompatible with God, and consequently that OT is false. (shrink)

The relevance of the research. The various approaches are analyzed on the essence of nostalgia, ranging from psychological understanding of this phenomenon as emigrant`s neurosis and mental illness to a more profound comprehension of it as a cultural and philosophical “universalia” that concerns complicated mechanisms of historical memory, identity, time and eternity. Analysis of research and publications. Among contemporary researchers investigating the ethical, religious and cultural-historical dimensions of nostalgia, there should be mentioned S. Boim, F. Davis, S. Merzlyakov, V. Nurkov, (...) Y. Davydov, E. Loftus, O. Fedkov, M. Rewakowicz, M. Shkandrij, M. Boichenko, O. Yakovleva, V. Liakh, E. Novikov and many others researchers. The purpose of the paper is to examine the ethical and religious dimensions of nostalgia, to figure out the connection of nostalgia with the problems of memory, time and eternity. Presentation of the main research material. The article deals with the cultural phenomenon of nostalgia, its religious, ethical and general philosophical aspects. It is shown that nostalgia is based on memory value selectivity, due to which a moral tradition, social and individual identity, and the continuity of generations are established. Modern man rebels against the actual state of being as untrue and non-authentic. He feels nostalgia for the past as something right and proper. A person not only mythologizes, but also seeks to resurrect the past in a symbolic way. In this almost religious faith in the resurrection of what is gone there is an existential certainty for the final cancellation of time and triumph of eternity, within which everything is preserved and nothing is forgotten. Nostalgic lust for the past is inherent to humanity throughout its history and is especially actualized in the culture of postmodernism. Conclusion. Nostalgia is a kind of personal and social myth creation, the construction of the historical identity. It reconstructs the past, which appears not only valuable and significant for the present, but also proper. Nostalgia is a moral phenomenon based on a morally healthy memory, capable of forgiveness, reconciliation and love for one's own destiny. The attention is stressed on metaphysical, political and aesthetic forms of nostalgia that oppose destructive force of nihilism. (shrink)

The eternal recurrence of the same. Simmel's critique ; Awareness ; Evidence ; Significance ; Coherence -- Demon or god? Deathbed revelation ; Daimonic prophecy ; Dionysian doctrine ; Diagnostic test -- The dwarf and the gateway. The gateway to Hades ; The dwarf's interpretation ; Zarathustra's cross-examination ; The inescapable cycle ; Crossing the gateway ; No time until rebirth ; The ancient memory ; Midnight swan song -- The great noon. Two conclusions ; Tragic end and analeptic (...) satyr play ; Zarathustra's hour ; Noon crucifixion ; Seventh-day convalescence ; Last temptation ; Third-day resurrection -- The laughing lions. Revaluation of values ; Dawn reunion ; Morning consecration ; Call to arms ; Final farewell and last will ; Zarathustra's great destiny -- The shepherd and the serpent. The eternally recurring human ; The future human ; Zarathustra the dragon-slayer ; The decapitation ; The heavy hammer ; No longer shepherd -- Circulus vitiosus deus. Impotence and revenge ; Backward-willing ; Self-redemption ; The third transformation ; The child spirit ; No longer human ; Zarathustra's dying gift -- Post-Zarathustra. Nietzsche and Zarathustra ; Reversing the bad conscience ; Atheism and the death of God ; Countering the ascetic ideal. (shrink)

Ontology is a part of metaphysics; it concerns what there is. Is it possible to consider being and reality not in a traditional metaphysical way—that is, not as a ground, an origin, a cause, but as a movement, a flux, a dynamogenic principle? I will set out from a seminal aphorism by Nietzsche, occurring in Human, all too Human (§2): “A lack of the historical sense is the hereditary fault of all philosophers. But everything has evolved; there are no (...) class='Hi'>eternal facts, as there are likewise no absolute truths. Therefore, historical philosophising is henceforth necessary, and with it the virtue of diffidence”. I will then move on to explore Peirce’s late thought, starting from a passage in a letter to W. James, where the author supports a “futurist” interpretation of reality—as he had in the juvenile writings—and speaks of “the reality of the public world of the indefinite future as against our past opinions of what it was to be.” This can be defined as a process of “mellonization,” that operation of logic by which what “is conceived as having been is conceived as extended indefinitely into what always will be”. Similarly, in the Preface to Human, all too Human Nietzsche writes: “Our destiny rules over us, even when we are not yet aware of it; it is the future that makes laws for our today”. I will try to read some Peirce’s statements in a Nietzschean perspective within the context of the plan to develop a dynamic and historical ontology; and I will try to read the “enigma” of Nietzsche’s Eternal recurrence from a Peircean perspective. (shrink)

Jewish destiny works itself out in the nexus between two poles: between temporal, finite human experience and the eternity of divine governance and orientation. At times the two poles seem close; an intimacy with God seems accessible and worthy of human aspiration. At other times, however, the poles diverge, and God seems remote, human affairs seem a vale of tears, the domain of human responsibility alone. Like human existence, Judaism is embedded in history and yet cleaves to transcendence, and (...) no one has understood the depths of this polarity for human existence in general and for Judaism in particular better than Franz Rosenzweig. (shrink)

There are some verses in the Qur'an that can be understood at first glance to mean that Allah Almighty knew certain things afterwards. Based on such verses, it has been claimed that Allah Almighty knew the voluntary acts of the slaves afterwards. This view, whose historical origin goes back to Cehmiyya, is defended by Abdülaziz Bayındır today. Adopting an approach that understands and explains the verses he refers to as the main reference on the subject, Abdülaziz Bayındır argues that the (...) thirty-first verse of the chapter of Muhammad and other verses with a similar notion indicate that Allah does not know beforehand the optional actions of His servants. In this study, the rational and narrative evidences that Bayındır presented as a justification for his views were examined within the framework of the basic procedural principles of the science of tafsir. In our study, the method of analysis and criticism has been adopted. While interpreting the verses that Bayındır examined as a basis for his thesis, the method he put forward was verified through different verses, and it was seen that this method did not offer an accurate and authentic methodology of understanding and interpretation. It has been seen that the verses that Bayındır put forward as a basis for his thesis do not indicate that Allah knows the voluntary actions of the servants afterwards, but that he reveals what he knows in his pre-eternal knowledge. (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)

Many contemporaries criticized him for smashing the Age of Reason. Goethe, however, remarked that reading a page of Immanuel Kant was like entering a bright and well-lighted room: The great eighteenth-century philosopher illuminated everything he ever pondered. The twelve essays in this volume reveal Kant's towering importance as an ethical and social thinker as well as his enduring influence on the shape of philosophy. Included are excerpts from Dreams of a Visionary, Prolegomena to Every Future Metaphysics, Metaphysical Foundations of Morals, (...) Critique of Judgement , and Eternal Peace . As Professor Friedrich writes in his introduction to this volume: "The problem of freedom, the freedom of the human personality to unfold and fulfill its higher destiny, is the central issue of all of Kant's philosophizing.". (shrink)

Continuing Keith Ward's series on comparative religion, this book deals with religious views of human nature and destiny. The beliefs of six major traditions are presented: the view of Advaita Vedanta that there is one Supreme Self, unfolding into the illusion of individual existence; the Vaishnava belief that there is an infinite number of souls, whose destiny is to be released from material embodiment; the Buddhist view that there is no eternal Self; the Abrahamic belief that persons (...) are essentially embodied souls; and the materialistic position that persons are complex material organisms. Indian ideas of rebirth, karma, and liberation from samsara are critically analysed and compared with semitic belief in the intermediate state of Sheol, Purgatory or Paradise, the Final Judgement and the resurrection of the body. The impact of scientific theories of cosmic and biological evolution on religious beliefs is assessed, and a form of 'soft emergent materialism' is defended, with regard to the soul. In this context, a Christian doctrine of original sin and atonement is presented, stressing the idea of soterial, as opposed to forensic, justice. Finally, a Christian view of personal immortality and the 'end of all things' is developed in conversation with Jewish and Muslim beliefs about judgement and resurrection. (shrink)

Ancient philosophers -- The history of philosophy -- Philosophy within quotation marks? -- Anglophone attitudes -- Brentano's Aristotle -- Heidegger in the cave -- 'There was an old person from Tyre' -- The Presocratics in context -- Argument in ancient philosophy -- Philosophy and dialectic -- Aristotle and the methods of ethics -- Metacommentary -- An introduction to Aspasius -- Parmenides and the Eleatic One -- Reason and necessity in Leucippus -- Plato's cyclical argument -- Death and the philosopher -- (...) Aristotelian arithmetic -- The principle of plenitude -- 'Aristotle's opinion concerning destiny and what is up to us' -- 'Belief is up to us' -- The same again : the Stoics and eternal recurrence -- Bits and pieces -- Partial wholes -- 'Drei Sonnen sah ich ...' : Syrianus and astronomy -- Immaterial causes. (shrink)

The subject of human acts has been one of the controversial topics of kalām since the first centuries of Islam. A lot of concerning human acts –from divine attributes to divine decree and destiny, from the issue of good and evil (ḥusn and Qubḥ) to the boundaries of the reasoning, from the accountability with impossible things to the rational accountability, from the topics of substance and accident to causality- has been said and written in the history of Islamic tought. (...) In this study, the subject was discussed especially within the scope of man’s on his own action in connection with the divine knowledge, will, and power. On this issue, the Muʻtazila argues that human beings are independent in doing their good and evil acts with the power that God has given to them because of His will and wisdom, and that the evil actions that they have done cannot be associated with the divine attributes in any way. Sunnī theologians assert that God creates human actions through man’s orginated power. They also arguethat evil acts are not independent of the Divine Creation although human beings are the reason of evil in terms of thier acquisition (kasb) and will (irāda). Nevertheless, the representetives of the Sunnī kalām (Asharites and Māturīdis) differ on their account of acquisition, which expresses man’s agency in his acts. In contrary to the Mātūrīdiya, the Ashʻariya holds that acquisition is a created act of God. On the other hand, the Mashshai (peripatetic) philosophers, who are opposed by teologians on some issues such as divine attributes and the working of activity/acts in nature, consider human’s actions part of the eternal chain of cause-effect that emanate (al fayḍ) from the First Principle. However, according to them, every link of this chain is formed by the divine providence (al-ināyah). They also attribute morally evil acts not to the First Principle which is complete (tām) and full good (hayr), but to agents in the cause-effect chain. In summary, according to both teologians and philosophers, the ultimate source of human acts is the divine will and power. The acts that are morally or religiously evil, are not independent of man’s will. Thus, human beings are accountable for their actions. Philosophers and teologians, who agree on these issues, have explained their views and build their opinions on different concepts and principles. They have shown a very different attitude in their discourse and secondary principles, while all of them basically try to express the same idea. This difference has revealed within the frame of the following questions: Is man’s accountability for his actions because of his created power or will? Can evil actions, which are willed by human beings and therefore created by God, attributed to Him? Does the fact that the world emanates from God, the First Principle, due to His knowledge and essence, necessitate Him to be a willless and ineffective agent, and therefore to be a cause cause that has no effect on man's actions?Although teologians and philosophers have put forward different views in the context of the answers to these questions, they agree on the issues we have mentioned above. As this study shows, there is actually a common purpose in this subject, man’s actions, which causes deep divisions between theologians and philosophers in Islamic history. Primary sources of the study are the basic texts of the schools mentioned above. Additionally, the study were limited to the subject the effect of human on acts. It consists of two parts: the main part and the conclusion part. In the main section, the approaches of schools were examined from two aspects, in in terms of divine attribute and human effectiveness, and in the conclusion section, the common purposes behind the discussions were determined. (shrink)

The article dealt with the question of the ratio of Yuri Mamleev’s I-utrism to Tradition. The problem is in the contradiction between two positions, which Mamleev notes in different places of “The Destiny of Being” – a view of the I-utrism as a new approach within the framework of Tradition, and as going beyond it with the introduction of extraneous elements. Based on the connection between the I-utrism and the “Last Doctrine”, which clearly lies outside the Tradition, the author (...) of the article concludes that the I-utrism should not be considered as a new approach within the framework of the Tradition, but as an autonomous construction to it. According to the author, the I-utrism due to its own radicalism contains two key problems that lead not only to a break with Tradition but also to a violation of the inner integrity of Mamleev’s philosophy itself. These two problems are defined as the radicalization of the Vedanta formula “Atman = Brahman” and the absence of the figure of the Other. I-utrism forms unified I, which the author of the article proposes to call “I-total”, because it displaces everything but itself, including the classical concept of the Absolute. Hence the lack of a topos for Mamleev’s concepts such as “Abyss” and “Eternal Russia”. It is compounded by the prevention of the metaphysical event of the Other, which is especially important for the idea of a metaphysical and mysterious Russia that requires intersubjectivity. In the process of analyzing these problems and issues, the article compares the philosophical positions of Stirner and Mamleev, as well as addresses the topic of demonic I-utrism. After all, the author concludes that the I-utrism needs to be revised and softened. This would allow it to exist organically in the overall picture of Mamleev’s worldview and not lose touch with Tradition despite the inevitable exit from it. (shrink)

A new paradigm in theology, termed evolutionary theology, supports the understanding of ecology as the proper ordering of the relations between living organisms and their environment. It is argued that evolutionary theology yields a unique conceptual framework in which the human species share a common history with the entire Universe and respecting nature’s integrity means securing a common destiny to everything that exists. This is a powerful motivation for adopting a balanced ecological attitude aimed at respecting nature’s inherent integrity. (...) Furthermore, proposing theological arguments to substantiate ecological claims will help neutralize the objections that religion as such promotes anti-ecological attitudes. Such objections become more pressing when religion focuses exclusively on the afterlife in the immaterial and eternal world to come, and neglects the well-being of the material and temporal Universe. -------------- Received: 30/08/2020. Reviewed: 07/10/2020. Accepted: 12/11/2020. (shrink)

The report examines philosophic and anthropological aspects of the modern mankind vital activity on the basis of revised understanding of ideological and methodological content of the Russian XIX-XX century organicists’ and cosmists’ ideas. The author substantiates the position, in accordance to which the place of a human in the world, the nature of their relations with the world, being an eternal philosophical subject, determines the ideological content and significance of modern human problems. The efficiency of mastering the current situation (...) of a human in the world depends to a great deal on continuing introspection between different generations of professional philosophers. The author proposes to realize global ideological reorientation, which took place in the world history as a result of the late XVIII - early XIX century industrial revolution, by comparing meditative and behavioral types of ideology. The main contradiction of the behavioral type of ideology is shown as methodology of comparing the subjective and objective factors of history, which fundamentals were laid by the Russian XIXXXcentury organicism and cosmism. This methodology allows studying boundaries of freedom and the amount of responsibility of modern mankind for its destiny and the destiny of its world. (shrink)

The academic community in the West tends to be suspicious of Russian philosophy, often relegating it to another category, such as “ideology” or “social thought.” But what is philosophy? There is no simple universal definition, and many thinkers consider it impossible to formulate one. The most credible attempt is nominalistic: philosophy is the practice in which Plato and Aristotle were involved. As Alfred North Whitehead wrote, “The safest general characterization of the European philosophical tradition is that it consists of a (...) series of footnotes to Plato.”If so, then Russian thought needs to be understood as an important part of the Western philosophical heritage, given that it offers perhaps the most elaborate set of footnotes to Plato's most mature and comprehensive dialogues: the Republic and the Laws. The status of ideas in Russian philosophy mirrors Plato's vision of them as ontological and political entities, “laws,” or ideal principles—as distinct from mere epistemic units or tools of cognition. The Platonic tendency to integrate and implement religious, philosophical, and political teachings culminated in twentieth-century Russia. In the Soviet state, perhaps more than anywhere else in history, philosophy became a supreme legal and political institution, acquiring the power of a suprapersonal, universal reason. Hence thought itself, in the moment of its triumph, became a prisoner in the social structures that Soviet ideocracy erected on a philosophical foundation. In discussing Russian philosophy, we inevitably consider the practical application of Platonic conceptions by the Soviet ideocracy to a state in which philosophy was called upon to rule.According to Sergei Averintsev, the emphasis on Platonism in the Russian intellectual tradition is nothing to be proud of; it should rather be lamented and repented. Despite the obvious Platonic preferences of Russian thinkers (from Ivan Kireyevsky to Aleksei Losev), Averintsev asks whether even now we might be able to reorient the tradition toward Aristotle instead—toward a more secular, tolerant, and analytic philosophy of human nature. “If Plato is the first utopian,” Averintsev writes, “Aristotle is the first thinker to look the spirit of utopia right in the eye and overcome it.... Aristotle's technique of thought is more neutral toward religion than is Plato's ecstasy.” Characteristically, the name index to the Palgrave Handbook of Russian Thought contains almost twice as many mentions of Plato as of Aristotle.Each national tradition has its own “strange attractor,” as they say now in complexity theory. English empiricism, French rationalism, German Idealism, American pragmatism... However stereotypical these generalizations are, they help to clarify the nations’ distinctive contributions to philosophy. Where does Russia stand in this row? I think that Caryl Emerson is correct to pinpoint, among the most distinctive features of the Russian intellectual tradition, the striving for “wholeness” (tselostnost’). Many Russian thinkers seem to evade definitive and particular “isms,” preferring to find ways of complementing (and thus diluting) those that are on offer. Faced with the claims for rationalism, for example, the Russian response tends to be that true rationality is or should be coupled with fullness of feeling. The characteristic Russian “ism” is at best “holism,” at worst “totalitarianism,” and is usually directed against Western thought. Kireyevsky declares: There [in the West] is a bifurcation [razdvoenie] of the spirit, a bifurcation of thoughts, a bifurcation of the sciences, a bifurcation of the state, a bifurcation of estates, a bifurcation of society, a bifurcation of family rights and duties, a bifurcation of morality and the heart.... In Russia, on the contrary, there is a predominant tendency toward the wholeness of the inner and the outer, of public and moral being.Vladimir Solovyov held that the goal of all knowledge was to comprehend “total unity” and to overcome all kinds of unilateralism, which he referred to as “abstract elements” (otvlechennye nachala). These one-sided elements included Realism, rationalism, empiricism, and positivism, all of which had been advanced by Western philosophical movements.Reading the Handbook, I was struck by how steadily, from one thinker to another, the concept of “unity” is reiterated in various synonyms and contexts: “all-unity,” “wholeness,” “totality,” “integrity,” “edinstvo,” “tsel'nost,’” “tselostnost,” “sobornost,” and so forth. Russian thinkers endeavor not to create something original and special but to unify everything that has already been done and known. Consider opponents, like the Slavophiles and Westernizers; take Petr Chaadaev and Vissarion Belinsky, Kireyevsky and Alexander Herzen, Dostoevsky and Solovyov—all are united by this “super-idea,” proclaiming its embodiment to be the all-embracing vocation of the Russian people. At the same time, they sharply reject all “private principles” and “trashy certainty” (Belinsky's driannaia opredelennost’)—anything that restricts and divides individuals or nations. All these forms of privacy and particularity must be overcome on the way to a universal whole that is even greater in scale than Western Catholicism. According to this logic of totality, we would be better off left with nothing than to be content with the particular and the limited. The first original Russian thinker, Chaadaev (1794–1856), makes the salto mortale of declaring Russia a country that has given nothing to the world, then proclaiming that Russia's destiny is to rise above the rest of the world and resolve all its contradictions. From nothing to everything: such are the philosophical foundations for the totalitarian aspiration of Russian thought, which eventually expressed itself in the revolutionary movements and communist experiments of the twentieth century.As is well known, Russian literature is considered in the West a far more powerful and original expression of philosophical ideas than Russian philosophy as such. Characteristically, then, almost half of the Handbook, its entire second part, is devoted to the dialogue of Russian philosophy with literature and art. As M. N. Forster remarks in the Handbook's concluding essay: “It is natural to wonder why this striking asymmetry between relatively modest achievements in pure philosophy and spectacularly high achievements in literature came about.” To the literary focus of Russian philosophy, we can add a political focus. At least a third of part one of the Handbook is devoted to Russian political and revolutionary philosophy, to Lenin and other Marxists, to Ivan Ilyin, and so on. In this context, both literature and politics assumed philosophical dimensions, often overshadowing philosophy itself.Bertrand Russell lamented that the system of philosophical categories in the West featured mostly nouns (being, consciousness, idea, matter, substance, and so forth), omitting adjectives, verbs, prefixes, and other parts of speech. This criticism should be applied to the category philosophy itself. Why the noun philosophy rather than the adjective philosophical, which can be applied to many areas of activity and creativity, including literature and politics?In Russian intellectual history, the philosophical, rather than philosophy, is the predominant category. The state, ideology, economics, politics and geopolitics, literature, art, warfare, space exploration—all these spheres in Russia and the USSR have been and remain abundantly philosophical, subordinated to certain philosophical tasks, though philosophy as such has never been as developed and sophisticated as in the West. As a discipline, Western philosophy “outsourced” itself to Russian disciples, leaving it to Dostoevsky and Tolstoy, Lenin and Trotsky, to test in literary and political practices a host of Western philosophical ideas, from those of Plato, Rousseau, and Hegel to those of Feuerbach, Marx, and Nietzsche.Likewise, the verb to philosophize is used in ways unusual and awkward in the West. “It is characteristic of the Russian people to philosophize [filosofstvovat'],” as Nikolai Berdyaev observed: “An illiterate Russian peasant likes to pose questions of a philosophical nature—about the meaning of life, about God, about eternal life, about evil and untruth, about how to realize the Kingdom of God.” The philosophical and philosophizing, as attributes and actions of the state and society, overpowered philosophy as a noun—as an academic discipline, if you will. Russian philosophy has had a very modest impact on the West, but the impact of the philosophical has been immense. Nineteenth-century Russian literature influenced Western culture with its philosophical interrogations and existential dilemmas, just as, in the twentieth century, the USSR influenced the West with the philosophical ideas (Marxism, materialism, dialectics, collectivism, socialism, communism) that determined Soviet ideology, politics, and economics.In the USSR of the 1920 and 1930s, for instance, philosophy as an independent academic subject was in a subdued position, as a servant of party ideology. But, meanwhile, the sphere of the philosophical spread to such distant domains as theater (Stanislavsky), physiology (Pavlov), and agriculture (Michurin), with all such activities glorified and sponsored by the state as “philosophically correct”—as faithful to “materialism” and “Realism.” Paradoxically, in the quintessentially philosophical state that was the USSR, the state of philosophy, with the repression of all independent thought and thinkers, was miserable. The fateful and often disastrous originality of Russian philosophy consisted precisely in its dissemination to other areas, in an act of kenosis or self-transcendence that can be viewed both as an aggressive philosophical appropriation of politics, economics, ideology, and literature—and as philosophy's sacrificial devotion to the world beyond its professional boundaries.So there are three features that make Russian thought relevant and dangerous: its Platonic utopian aspiration; its spirit of totality; and its tendency to transcend the boundaries of academic philosophy and to philosophize society, politics, and life in general. Russian philosophy has not been as good at explaining the world as at changing it, sometimes ethically and poetically, sometimes violently and aggressively. Teachers and students of Russian culture should be deeply motivated to draw more attention to the philosophical in Russia and to raise its status in the Western academy. In my view, we would do better service to Russian philosophy if we are frank enough to qualify it as dangerous, sometimes very toxic and addictive, fraught with totalistic tendencies. This philosophy is the voice of the “underground,” both in the Dostoevskian and Leninist senses.At the same time, however, the antidotes concocted in the Russian metaphysical laboratory are of enormous value: the Russian versions of personalism, existentialism, secular and religious liberalism, neorationalism, culturology, conceptualism, and postmodernism. These movements, which counteract totalization, need to be studied precisely because they were cooked up and tested under the same extreme conditions in which the most dangerous intellectual poisons have been produced. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Philosophy and Rhetoric 35.4 (2002) 267-296 [Access article in PDF] Allegory and Democratic Public Culture in the Postmodern Era Robert Hariman The man lies on the hotel bed, clad only in his underwear, as he watches the TV screen just beyond his feet. His right hand holds the remote control, which he uses to scan through the cable channels. To his left sits Abraham Lincoln, clothed in long-sleeved white (...) shirt and black pants and reading a book. Lincoln's long, angular frame is just a bit stooped, and his brow is slightly furrowed, as if long accustomed to thinking on the edge of melancholy. Lincoln is mulling over a statement by Walter Benjamin: "Allegories are, in the realm of thoughts, what ruins are in the realm of things" (Benjamin 1977, 178). 1Seated to the man's right is a woman wearing the terry cloth bathrobe provided by the hotel. She leans slightly forward, legs crossed, as she reads the New York Times Magazine cover story about President Clinton. "Listen to this," she says with a bemused smile. "In the clutter around his desk in the Oval Office stands not a single bust of a favorite predecessor, but five: Lincoln, Teddy Roosevelt, Truman and two of F.D.R., plus a statuette of Will Rogers for good measure. If governing is choosing, this collection is a metaphor for this President's trouble with choices, and he himself allows, 'That's the story of my Presidency, that desk'" (Purdum 1996, 36).The man says nothing as he continues to watch the succession of images on the screen: a lizard flicks its tongue in the desert heat; a child in a stroller laughs as she holds a strawberry ice cream cone; a congressman in blue suit, white shirt, and red tie jabs his finger into the air as he talks earnestly; cars plastered with automotive product logos curl around a race track; Fred and Ginger swirl around the dance floor; soldiers wade ashore at Omaha Beach; the Space Shuttle lifts off; Groucho lifts his eyebrows; Regis smiles; mushrooms and peppers simmer in a pan.The succession of images could go on indefinitely. The tableau remains static. The composition is an allegory: a figural presentation that organizes multiple interpretations regarding collective experience. It also contains and comments on other forms of itself: Clinton's desk is an example [End Page 267] of the figural anecdote that has been a staple of American public address. The manifold of televisual images exemplifies the allegorical encoding that operates within postmodern art forms, including fragmentary appropriation, paratactic association, encyclopedic range, and non-linear temporality. The statement by Benjamin illuminates the nature of allegory in a specific genre and historical period, and as it is a general mode of representation, and perhaps as it is a model for all textual interpretation.The composition also evokes a set of dialectical tensions that are characteristic of both allegory in general and fundamental anxieties in the contemporary period. Past and present sit side by side, but incongruously, as if by artifice alone. So it is also with the print and visual media, which are held together by mutual competencies but otherwise in figural isolation that perhaps represents different destinies. Likewise, one might wonder about the peculiar relationship between public affairs and private life: the succession of images on the screen adhere to no hierarchy of values, no principle of loyalty or sacrifice, no basis for discerning obligations or maintaining rights, yet they are replete with the paraphernalia of these concerns, and the arrangement of figures in the room likewise is at once suggestive yet inconclusive. If this tableau contains familiar features of the mass-mediated experience that now saturates American politics, one might wonder: Is the democratic tradition in ruins?Allegories give us dynamic juxtapositions in a static frame. This principle of composition seems particularly suited to periods of cultural change. To the extent that the genre of allegory has a history, it is one of eternal recurrence at periods of loss and fragmentation produced by the expansion of a new, somewhat... (shrink)

Twelve years after his Origin of Species, Charles Darwin published his Descent of Man. If the first book brought the gases of philosophi cal controversy to fever heat, the second exploded them in fiery roars. The issue was the nature, the condition, and the destiny of genus humanum. According to the prevailing Genteel Tradition mankind was a congregation of embodied immortal souls, each with its fixed identity, rights and duties, living together with its immortal neigh bors under conditions imposed (...) by "the laws of nature and of nature's God." Obedience or disobedience of these laws destined all to eternal bliss or eternal damnation. What had come to be called "evolution" was assimilated to the Tradition in diverse interpretations such as John Fiske's, Henry Drummond's and Charles Pierce's. Their common ten dency was to establish "evolution" as somehow the method whereby divine providence ordains the conditions under which man accom plishes his destiny. The most productive competitor of the Genteel Tradition went by various names, with positivism, materialism and naturalism the most telling. Its success as competitor was not due to its theological or metaphysical import. Its success flowed from its mode of observing how effects or results, those undesired as well as those desired, got produced. Unified and generalized, these observations were taken for notations of causal sequences always and everywhere the same, thus for laws of "nature" to whose workings "the providence of God" added nothing productive and could be and was dispensed with. (shrink)

This study is an attempt partially to describe the sociological foundations of modern science. When the question is put, under what social circumstances did the idea of science develop, one sees that there is here an inadequately explored sociological area. Perhaps a definition and a contrast will make this clearer. By the idea of science is meant simply the proposition that the valid source of human knowledge is to be found in the analysis of experience. But knowledge in this sense (...) was not a problem in the medieval period. In the first place, it was then taken for granted that the universe was intelligible to man on the basis of divinely revealed principles. Secondly, man constituted the center of the universe, which in its entirety was thought to be subordinate to man's destiny. Thirdly, not only was the universe which existed for man then known by him, but it was endowed with human qualities. The categories of interpretation were substance, essence, form, matter, quality, and purpose. The reason why rain fell upon the earth was to grow crops; the purpose of the moon and the stars was to light the earth at night, and to act as guideposts for him on his travels. Bodies tended to their proper places, light ones upward, heavy ones earthward. Quantitative differences were inferred from these qualitative ones. It is well-known, for example, how tenaciously was the knowledge held, that heavier objects fall more quickly than lighter ones. And finally, the universe was religious. If the world existed for the benefit of man, man existed for the glory of God. Human sojourn upon the earth was merely preparation for permanent residence in eternity. (shrink)

Gianni Vattimo refers his weak interpretation of metaphysics to its Christian provenance. He argues that his nihilist secularization theory divulges the full and ultimate meaning of Christianity. This model understands Christianity as God who ‘returns,’ not as an eternal substance but as one who in his return reveals himself as becoming the current nihilist hermeneutic flux that is reality. Vattimo takes kenosis as the model of the destiny of ontology. God takes a distance from the eternal origin (...) and lets go of his transcendent divinity. From this, Vattimo learns that truth becomes a purely ‘wordly’ matter without any external, c.q. metaphysical or sacred reference. The Good message is: there are only messages, no facts. God’s return has to be understood epistmo-theologically. Revelation is now completely accomplished in a nihilist, endless way: Christianity means keeping thought away from petrifying into truth, fact, and reality. This is pure Christian caritas in that it does away with the violence of metaphysics and the sacred and thereby discourages all human attempts toward violence. Redeeming though this may sound, perhaps Vattimo is too naïve and too theologically shallow. (shrink)

Teilhard has never given up on permanence behind change, whereas Blondel, although interested by permanence, presents a very keen consciousness of irreversibility. Blondel attempts to construct an ontology that integrates this fact of change or becoming. Would this have satisfied Teilhard? Blondel develops a "logic of moral life" insisting on the initial option right to the end of our destiny. Teilhard develops a consciousness of time with a direct hold on a world apprehended first by the senses, whereas Blondel (...) is suspicious of the sometimes misleading testimony of the senses. We thus see a Blondelian attempt to see where the will reach its limits from this only standpoint, while Teilhard admits the influence of a mystical vision. We thus find in both thinkers a primacy of eternal light and truths, strongly affirmed by Blondel, although present in Teilhard; a specificity of evolution, and the necessity of a complement to prevent thought to close itself off. Both thinkers agree on the idea that "Everything holds from above." They recognize that our humanity represents only a sketch, that it is infra-substantial. (shrink)

After having pointed to the different religious concepts of the origin of evil, the author focuses on the discussion of Hinduism as a typical paradigm of monism. Since the Indian deities are actually manifestations of the eternal arch principle, they contain within themselves the unity of opposites, i.e. they have both light and dark side. Evil which affects an individual is interpreted as sinning against the universal cosmic and moral order. The doctrine that man's destiny is determined by (...) one's deeds in the previous incarnations is almost widely accepted in India. The idea of karma at the same time provides the cosmic justice and releases God from the responsibility for evil in the world. The impersonal law of karma also has the educational purpose. The whole world derived from the brahman and under the process of evolution. Through the numerous lives and the different experiences, suffering from the consequences of one's own behavior, an individual learn from the spiritual lessons. In the times of the cosmic crises, when evil prevails in the world, Vishnu incarnates in the figure of avatar to win over evil and to restore the blocked evolution. Although evil is defeated, it still cannot be entirely uprooted from the physical world. The salvation for man is possible only after dissolving personal ego and having enlightened oneself, transcends to the sphere of dualism. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Journal of the History of Ideas 62.2 (2001) 335-358 [Access article in PDF] Between East and West: Hegel and the Origins of the Russian Dilemma Ana Siljak Nikolai Berdiaev, the eminent twentieth-century Russian philosopher, wrote that the "problem of East and West" was an "eternal" one for Russia. 1 Attempting to make sense of the violent upheavals that shook Russia in 1917, Berdiaev believed that the source of (...) Russian troubles lay in the "inconsistency of the Russian spirit" due to the "conflict of the Eastern and Western elements in her." 2 Russia, he argued, always contained within its wide territory an invisible and shifting border between two continents, and thus Russian society was forever torn between two cultures. Berdiaev insisted that Russia could not discover its true calling or its place in the world until it resolved its internal conflict between East and West. 3Berdiaev was contemplating the course of the nineteenth century, when Russia's geographical destiny had deeply troubled Russian intellectuals. In the late 1830s Russian thinkers began their minute analyses of cultural and historical sources, hoping to determine the essential character of their nation and believing that their research would enable them to predict Russia's future. Often, diverse questions of progress and stagnation, tradition and innovation, and the individual and society were all framed within this overarching problem of East versus West.It is tempting to see this Russian dilemma as longstanding and natural, given Russia's position between two continents. Indeed, many recent scholars have argued that Russian encounters with Asia, taking place within the framework of Russia's territorial expansion eastward, forced Russians to examine their relationships [End Page 335] with the Eastern, Asian world. 4 It is true that European geographers and historians have debated the location of the border between Asia and Europe since the Middle Ages. But before the nineteenth century this ambiguity hardly troubled Russian minds. The Muscovite state of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, for example, was well acquainted with cultures and lands to its East, engaging in trade and diplomatic relations with Muslim Tatars and others. Yet there is little evidence to suggest that Muscovy was concerned about its position between Eastern and Western countries. 5 Even Peter the Great, whom historians have credited for bringing European customs into Russia, was little concerned with the European/Asian divide in Russian culture. For him the most important geographical question was Russia's place among the northern states, and he was particularly obsessed with Sweden as Russia's primary military rival. 6After Peter's reign, educated Russians, as they became increasingly acquainted with Western European culture, experienced their first pangs of envy and self-doubt in the face of perceived European superiority. Nonetheless, throughout the eighteenth century few cultured Russians had trouble embracing a diverse historical legacy and national character--German, Slavic, Asian. After all, Europeans themselves were proud of their barbarian past. Peter the Great's chief historian, V. N. Tatishchev, wrote with full confidence and little concern that the Russian empire was located "in both Europe and Asia," noting that though more Russian people lived in Europe, Russia had more territory in Asia. In passing he mentioned that "where the border between these two large and most important cultures is located, no one has as yet determined for certain." 7 According to him, the Slavic people as a whole could be divided into Asian and European branches, thus both cultures were of importance in Russian history. 8The first of the great nineteenth-century Russian historians, Nikolai Karamzin, was proud of Russia's diverse heritage. Russia, he wrote, [End Page 336] raising its head between the Asiatic and European kingdoms, represented within its civic life the characteristics of these two parts of the world: a mixture of old Eastern customs, brought by the Slavs into Europe and renewed, so to speak, by our long connection with the Mongols; Byzantine customs borrowed by the Russians along with the Christian religion, and some German customs imparted by the Varangians.... 9This cultural "mixture... (shrink)