In this book Douglas Langston traces its intellectual history to account for its neglect while arguing for its still vital importance, if correctly understood.

God’s Willing Knowledge argued that Scotus should be seen as offering a non-libertarian view of freedom. Some critics of this interpretation point to Scotus’s texts that offer a synchronic view of possibility, which is seen as necessarily implying a libertarian view. Other critics point to the debt that Scotus owes to his libertarian predecessors and argue that Scotus follows their view. In order to address these critics, in the first section of the paper, some of the thinkers Scotus draws upon (...) or reacts to in forming his views about freedom are examined. It turns out that Scotus’s non-libertarian view of freedom as it relates to divine omniscience is rather typical of medieval views. In the subsequent sections of the paper, Scotus’s texts are examined to show his non-libertarian views. Moreover, various criticisms offered against the argument of God’s Willing Knowledge are answered. (shrink)

This chapter contains sections titled: Notes.

Douglas C. Langston - Moral Philosophy on the Threshold of Modernity - Journal of the History of Philosophy 44:3 Journal of the History of Philosophy 44.3 475-476 Jill Kraye and Risto Saarinen, editors. Moral Philosophy on the Threshold of Modernity. New Synthese Historical Library, 57. Dordrecht: Springer, 2005. Pp. vi + 340. Cloth, e139.10. This is a collection of fifteen essays from a 2001 workshop, "Late Medieval and Early Modern Ethics and Politics," funded by the European Science Foundation as part (...) of a network of meetings on Early Modern Thought. The editors intend the volume to reflect current historical and philosophical scholarship about the moral thought of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. It is arranged into three sections, reflecting three different themes: 1... (shrink)

The intellectualistic analysis of conscience Aquinas provides appears to regard conscience as mechanistic and undynamic. Such understanding fails to place Aquinas’s remarks on conscience in the context of the virtue ethics he offers in the Summa and his Commentary on the Nicomachean Ethics. In fact, there is an intricate connection between the virtues and conscience in Aquinas’s thought, and this connection relates directly to his remarks on weakness of will. His connecting conscience to issues in Aristotelian virtue ethics affects subsequent (...) discussions of conscience in significant ways. (shrink)

The problem of evil has traditionally been formulated as a claim about the incompatibility of the statements ‘God exists’ and ‘There occur instances of suffering’. Hume, for example, in his Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion , part x, claims that the statements ‘God exists’ and ‘There occur instances of suffering’ are incompatible. In his esssy ‘Hume on Evil’, Nelson Pike argues that it has not been shown that the statements ‘God exists’ and ‘There occur instances of suffering’ are incompatible because it (...) has not been shown that God could not have a morally sufficient reason for permitting suffering he could prevent. 1 Moreover, according to Pike, the theist who is convinced that God must have a morally sufficient reason for permitting suffering he can prevent will claim that the statements ‘God exists’ and ‘There occur instances of suffering’ are not incompatible. He will claim this even though he cannot specify the morally sufficient reason why God permits suffering he can prevent. The theist will thus maintain that God exists even given the occurrence of suffering in the world. 2 Robert Richman, in his essay ‘The Argument from Evil’, argues that Pike is too generous to the theist. According to Richman, only if the theist can specify the morally sufficient reason why God permits suffering he can prevent will the theist be rationally justified in maintaining that God exists in the face of suffering in the world. Richman supports his position by reformulating the argument from evil in terms of what he calls ‘the logic of our moral judgmentsr’. 3 Richman thinks that his formulation of the argument from evil is successful against the theist who cannot specify the morally sufficient reason why God permits evil he can prevent. In this paper, I shall argue that Richman's argument is not successful against the typical theist, i.e. the person who accepts the existence of God on the basis of faith or a priori arguments. 4. (shrink)