عنوان

Minding the modern :

0268038406

0268038449

9780268038403

9780268038441

dltt

Minding the modern :

[Book]

human agency, intellectual traditions, and responsible knowledge /

Thomas Pfau.

ix, 673 pages ;

27 cm

Includes bibliographical references (pages 619-649) and index.

Exordium: Modernity's gaze -- Part I. Prolegomena. Frameworks or tools? : on the status of concepts in humanistic inquiry -- Forgetting by remembering : historicism and the limits of modern knowledge -- "A large mental field" : intellectual traditions and responsible knowledge after Newman -- Part II. Rational appetite : an emergent conceptual tradition. Beginnings : desire, judgment, and action in Aristotle and the Stoics -- Consolidation : St. Augustine on choice, sin, and the divided will -- Rational appetite and good sense : will and intellect in Aquinas -- Rational claims, irrational consequences : Ockham disaggregates will and reason -- Part III. Progressive amnesia : will and the crisis of reason. Impoverished modernity : will, action, and person in Hobbes's Leviathian -- The path toward non-cognitivism : Locke's Desire and Shaftesbury's Sentiment -- From naturalism to reductionism : Mandeville's Passion and Hutcheson's Moral sense -- Mindless desires and contentless minds : Hume's enigma of reason -- Virtue without agency : sentiment, behavior, and habituation in A. Smith -- After sentimentalism : liberalism and the discontents of modern autonomy -- Part IV. Retrieving the human : Coleridge on will, person, and conscience. Godd or commodity? : modern knowledge and the loss of Eudaimonia -- The persistence of gnosis : freedom and "error" in philosophical modernity -- Beyond voluntarism and deontology : Coleridge's notion of the responsible will -- Existence as reality and act : person, relationality, and incommunicability -- "Consciousness has the appearance of another" : on relationality as love -- "Faith is fidelity ... to the conscience" : Coleridge's ontology.

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In this brilliant study, Thomas Pfau argues that the loss of foundational concepts in classical and medieval Aristotelian philosophy caused a fateful separation between reason and will in European thought. Pfau traces the evolution and eventual deterioration of key concepts of human agency -- will, person, judgment, action -- from antiquity through Scholasticism and on to eighteenth-century moral theory and its critical revision in the works of Samuel Taylor Coleridge. Featuring extended critical discussions of Aristotle, Gnosticism, Augustine, Aquinas, Ockham, Hobbes, Shaftesbury, Mandeville, Hutcheson, Hume, Adam Smith, and Coleridge, this study contends that humanistic concepts they seek to elucidate acquire meaning and significance only inasmuch as we are prepared positively to engage (rather than historicize) their previous usages. Beginning with the rise of theological (and, eventually, secular) voluntarism, modern thought appears increasingly reluctant and, in time unable to engage the deep history of its own underlying conceptions, thus leaving our understanding of the nature and function of humanistic inquiry increasingly frayed and incoherent. One consequence of this shift is to leave the moral self-expression of intellectual elites and ordinary citizens alike stunted, which in turn has fueled the widespread notion that moral and ethical concerns are but a special branch of inquiry largely determined by opinion rather than dialogical reasoning, judgment, and practice. A clear sign of this regression is the present crisis in the study of the humanities, whose role is overwhelmingly conceived (and negatively appraised) in terms of scientific theories, methods, and objectives. The ultimate casualty of this reductionism has been the very idea of personhood and the disappearance of an adequate ethical language. Minding the Modern is not merely a chapter in the history of ideas; it is a thorough phenomenological and metaphysical study of the roots of today's predicaments.

Agent (Philosophy)

Free will and determinism.

Humanism.

Humanities.

Philosophical anthropology.

Pfau, Thomas,1960-

20160624111740.0

rda

[Book]

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