Early modern Protestant scholars closely engaged with Islamic thought in more ways than is usually recognized. Among Protestants, Lutheran scholars distinguished themselves as the most invested in the study of Islam and Muslim culture. Mehmet Karabela brings the neglected voices of post-Reformation theologians, primarily German Lutherans, into focus and reveals their rigorous engagement with Islamic thought. Inspired by a global history approach to religious thought, Islamic Thought Through Protestant Eyes offers new sources to broaden the (...) conventional interpretation of the Reformation beyond a solely European Christian phenomenon. -/- Based on previously unstudied dissertations, disputations, and academic works written in Latin in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, Karabela analyzes three themes: Islam as theology and religion; Islamic philosophy and liberal arts; and Muslim sects (Sunni and Shi‘a). This book provides analyses and translations of the Latin texts as well as brief biographies of the authors. -/- These texts offer insight into the Protestant perception of Islamic thought for scholars of religious studies and Islamic studies as well as for general readers. Examining the influence of Islamic thought on the construction of the Protestant identity after the Reformation helps us to understand the role of Islam in the evolution of Christianity. (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)

Ex interiore ipso exeas. Preface. This book reconstructs the history of a still open dialectics between several ethoi, that is, shared codes of unwritten rules, moral traditions, or self-aware attempts at reforming such codes, and ethical theories discussing the nature and justification of such codes and doctrines. Its main claim is that this history neither amounts to a triumphal march of reason dispelling the mist of myth and bigotry nor to some other one-way process heading to some pre-established goal, but (...) instead to a chain of controversies where the partners’ will to win unintentionally yields a wealth of insights on human existence that has still something to teach us. -/- 1. The Hellenic moral tradition. -/- 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. -/- 2. Plato and the Good. -/- Plato’s own reformulation of Socrates rejoinder 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. -/- 3. Aristotle and 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 inconsistency in such opinions, finally trying to correct mistakes and make the overall practical science more consistent. The relationship of individual ethics, or ‘monastics’, with the art and the science of the pater families, or ‘economics’, and the science of the ruler and citizen, or politics, is illustrated. The nature of virtues, or better, excellences of character, is discussed, highlighting the basic role of hexes, or ‘dispositions’. Prudence, or better, practical wisdom, is the focus of the chapter. Its relationship with boùleusis or deliberation is discussed, and its autonomous status vis-à-vis theoretical knowledge is stressed. -/- 4. Cynics and Stoics: ethics as therapy. -/- 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. The various phases of Stoicism are described, and the shifting place that was 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. The peculiar character of the Epicurean school is described, a combination of the science of well-being aiming, more than pleasure understood as in the popular view, the reduction of useless suffering, of unnecessary needs, and at a balanced selection of pleasures of the best and most durable kind. -/- 5. Roman and Imperial Moralists. -/- The chapter is dedicated to the reconstruction of a particular kind of literature, whose specific features have long been under-stressed, namely the Roman and Imperial moral literature. Cicero is treated at some length, 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 given pride of place, stressing the novelty of his approach to ethics as cognitive therapy, in this case just following an already existing new wave of interest after nineteenth-century oblivion justified by alleged lack of authentic ‘philosophical’ character. -/- 6. The Hebrew moral tradition. -/- 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 Torah (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 Levitic is stressed as the turning point when the stress on mercy, typical of the Prophetic tradition, starts being combined with legal tradition yielding the change in the sensibility of the Second Temple time. -/- 7. Second Temple Judaism. -/- This chapter describes the Long March leading from the post-exile Zadokite restoration to the first-century aevi vulgaris. The first topic reconstructed is the Zadokite theology of the double retribution. The second is the alternative Enochic tradition consistently rejecting the central role of the Temple, the Priesthood and worship as atonement for sins and offering as an alternative God’s unlimited mercy and preaching mercy, not sacrifice as the way of behaving requested by God. Wisdom literature, the third subject discusses, is a kind of third way, on the one hand increasingly critical towards the double retribution and ruling theology’s optimism facing the world as it is and on the other mocking at the Enochic current as a band of dreamers and visionaries. The third way consists in disenchantment facing the word as it is combined with a refusal of vain and childish hope of prizes for the righteous, suggesting instead the leading idea of right deeds for righteousness’s sake. Rabbi Hillel, Rabbi Yeshua and Philo of Alexandria are described as the three leading figures at the culminating point of such process of emergence of a 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 starting point consists precisely in the precept of one’s neighbour’s love or of the golden rule, whose meaning is, arguably, more consistent than a long-lasting Christian tradition deriving from John and Augustine made us believe. And Christian morality, vis-à-vis allegedly legalist ‘Ancient Testament’ teachings, is less of a novelty than most early Christian writers announced. -/- 8. Talmudic moral doctrines and proto-Christian paraenesis. -/- The first three sections examine the moral doctrines of so-called 'ethical Treaties' from the Talmud, a group of treaties, among which the best known is Pirke 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 Deot, 'opinions', i.e., mental dispositions, that is, the translation of the Greek term hexes 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 last two sections examine first the various Christian currents and then Gnostic para-Christian or non-Christian currents as well as Manicheism. 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, purest Judaism. The last section describes briefly the galaxy of Gnostic currents and Manicheism, 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. -/- 9. Christianity as “philosophy”. -/- The chapter reconstructs the stormy story 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 several rhetorical topics from the Stoic and Cynical popular philosophy in a few books from the New Testament itself. This, far from proving that Rabbi Yeshua himself had been influenced by cynical preachers, is a proof of the necessity to translate the original Christian message in 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 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. -/- 10. Ethics in the Arabic-Islamic Philosophy. -/- 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 the 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. 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 the 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. -/- 11. Ethics in the Jewish philosophy. -/- The encounter between the Talmudic tradition and Hellenic philosophy had taken place for the 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 too a few 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 Tora 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 Pirke Avot could be translated. -/- 12. The practical philosophy revival in Latin Europe. -/- A reconstruction is carried out of a fresh start of philosophical ethics in Latin Europe at the turn of the Millennium rescuing a Platonic and Augustinian legacy, with Anselm and Peter Abelard. 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 a full legitimization of natural morality, i.e. ethics without Revelation. -/- 13. Scholastic practical philosophy: Thomas Aquinas. -/- Aquinas’s ethics is theological ethics out of which it would be vain to try to extract self-contained philosophical ethics. His treatment of topics in philosophical ethics, yet, does not boil down to the 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, 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 ambitious, 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 Prima Secundae 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 was able to solve the tension proving that it is just an apparent tension, in so far as the right reason and bliss derived from the knowledge of God tend to coincide, but this is just a conjecture. Thomas’s ethics is a virtue ethics, 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 the death penalty and persecution of heretics is simply disgusting, and yet we should blame Thomas the man, not the Thomist ethical theory. Finally, Thomas’s ethics is no way an ethical ‘absolutism’, as both the traditionalist Catholic theologians and secularists tend to believe, but rather an ethic of prudential judgment on the individual case. Exceptions to this approach – or better the result of logical fallacies – are provided by the thesis of the absolute character of negative precepts and of the existence of so-called intrinsically evil acts, a thesis that would simply cease to make sense in the light of Thomas’s own distinction between human act and natural act, carrying consequences that Thomas did not live long enough to draw. -/- 14. Scholastic practical philosophy: John Duns Scotus and William of Ockham. A reconstruction is carried out of the ethical doctrines by both most authoritative Franciscan doctors. Their continuity with Aquinas is vindicated against prejudice carried by centuries of polemics within the Catholic Church and tendentious disparaging of both as forerunners of execrable Reformation. Besides aspects of continuity, also the important novelties are illustrated, first John’s abandonment of Aquinas’s and Augustine’s eudemonism, asserting righteousness for righteousness’s sake, and then William’s explicit defence of the philosopher’s virtues, that is, natural morality, and his solution to the dilemma of God’s omnipotence and the universal validity of natural law extending to God himself. -/- 15. Aristotelianism interpreted by the Magistri Artium. -/- A reconstruction of the until recently forgotten ethical doctrines by the Parisian Magistri Artium, falsely depicted as ‘Averroists’ and either deprecated as heretics or mistaken for predecessors of modern secularism. In fact, they illustrate a view of ‘natural’ virtue as may be understood by human reason without the assistance by Revelation. -/- Etiamsi daremus Deum non esse. Intermediate considerations. Three considerations may be suggested by the story told in the book. The first one is that intellectual histories have been mounted in the past with the same state of mind as one may mount a war chariot. Such constructions are not very helpful as tools for understanding the past. Wars waged in the past have left the field obstructed by ruins not easy to remove even by those historians who have animated by an impartial academic motivation. They have been influenced too by consequences of past emphasis on some authors and damnatio capitis suffered by others, by stratifications left on sources by secondary literature and translations, by allotment of originally close sources to different literary genres, by the monopolization of religious texts by churches with full cooperation by secular scholars who still fear contamination. The second one is that aware or unaware ethnocentrism has carried various calamities to our comprehension of the past. Their last vestiges have surfaced again in the semi-scholarly discussion on the idea of Europe occasioned by the debate on a project of a European Constitution. Mention of Europe’s Christian roots has been the clumsiest move. Proclamations of such roots were so obvious in what they affirmed as they were totally off-path concerning what they omitted, namely that he modern European moral tradition included legacies from Middle-Eastern wisdom, Hellenic philosophy, Roman Imperial legal literature, and, besides, a Jewish legacy in turn incorporating other more ancient Middle-Eastern legacies and which has been partly conveyed by Christianity. And the Islamic-Arabic philosophy too, in so far it made the Nicomachean Ethics available to Latin Christian scholars, is one more of Europe’s roots. The third is that religious traditionalists and secularist fundamentalists have gone hand in hand for a couple of centuries in either extolling or deprecating the allegedly Modern idea of Ethics without God, first formulated by Hugo Grotius with the claim that natural law would still be valid ‘etiamsi daremus – quod sine summo scelere dari potest – Deum non esse’. The facts are, firstly, that this is not an irreligious claim and Grotius was just a pious and meek Christian and, secondly, that it is not a ‘modern’ claim but rather one more formulation of the claim that there is a natural morality, independent of divine revelation, a claim shared by Moshe ben Maimon, Aquinas and William of Ockham. -/- . (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:The Medieval Heritage in Early Modern Metaphysics and Modal Theory, 1400–1700Jean-Pascal AnfrayRussell L. Friedman and Lauge O. Nielsen, editors. The Medieval Heritage in Early Modern Metaphysics and Modal Theory, 1400–1700. Dordrecht: Kluwer, 2003. Pp. vi + 346. Cloth, $149.00.This volume contains contributions that aim to show the continuity between late medieval thought and early modern philosophy, or, as the editors say, to investigate "the way (...) that medieval thought served as a fertile basis for developments in the early modern period" (3). As the title indicates, most papers treat topics more or less connected to modalities, either from a logical or from an ontological point of view. The nature of modalities is indeed at the core of metaphysics and philosophical theology. Ludger Honnefelder, Joël Biard, and Fabrizio Mondori all show the influence of Duns Scotus on the setting of modern metaphysics. The importance of theological matters in the development of philosophical thought has been acknowledged for a long time. Thus Chris Schabel ("Divine Foreknowledge and Human Freedom: Auriol, Pomponazzi, and Luther on 'Scholastic Subtleties'") sketches the story of the controversy over God's foreknowledge and future contingents from its setting in the early fourteenth century to Lutheran Reformation. He stresses the underestimated influence of Peter Auriol in this continuing debate. Still, revealed theology too exercised influence on the philosophy of logic. Trinity constitutes an until now little studied case, which is the subject matter of Simo Knuuttila's contribution ("The Question of the Validity of Logic in Late Medieval Thought"). He partly rehearses some of his well-known theses about the source of logical truths and modalities and analyses the constructivist aspects of Descartes's position, in so far as the laws of logic are said to depend on God's will. But the most original part of the study bears on the effects of Trinitarian constraints within the field of logic, especially in syllogistics. Medieval thinkers had to cope with syllogisms like: "The divine essence is the father; the divine essence is the Son; therefore the Son is the Father." In order to avoid the absurdity of the conclusion, many answers were elaborated: Robert Holcot removed the Trinity from the domain of validity of syllogistics, thereby relativizing it. Luther's claim that the principles of theology contradict those of logic looks like a radical version of this position. Adam Wodeham maintained contrariwise the universality of syllogistics: he held that the premisses are not syllogistic if they are interpreted as true (130). His account is based on the identity theory of predication and on the distinction between intensional and extensional identity, which both date back to Abelard.In the period covered by the volume, early modern scholastic, chiefly the Jesuit scholastic, holds a central place. Two articles insist on its originality and intrinsic value. Jeffrey Coombs ("The Ontological Source of Logical Possibility in Catholic Second Scholasticism") [End Page 208] analyzes the various metaphysics of modalities. He claims that three theories of the source of logical modalities were entertained during the early seventeenth century, which he labels respectively "transcendentalism," "modal voluntarism," and "divine conceptualism." All of these positions can be traced back to medieval theories; however, they received an extensive treatment in late scholastic thought. Coombs is especially illuminating when he emphasizes the importance of the grounding metaphysical structure: essences and their systematic relations through "Porphyrian trees." This generated two different accounts of the ontological status of essences: according to essentialist theories, complete Porphyrian trees are the basis of necessity and possibility, while according to a "string theories," only the logical connections between the components of the essential structure are available eternally (196).Yet the most striking novelty of the time lies in the systematization of a statistical interpretation of modalities through the "moral modalities," originating in post-Tridentine Catholic theology. In contrast to Hacking's thesis (see The Taming of Chance [Cambridge, 1990]), Sven Knebel ("The Renaissance of Statistical Modalities in Early Modern Scholasticism") contends that the concept of aleatory probability was first developed within this context. That an event-type Q is morally necessary means that Q is always the case, and that not-Q actually is never the case (236... (shrink)

In his disputatio, Johann Peter von Ludewig provides a history of rational philosophy among the Arabs and sets out to contextualize the Turks’ attitude to it. Like many Lutheran scholars of the time, Ludewig believed that Islam, as a religion, impeded the development of rational philosophy in the Arab world. However, unlike those philosophers, he examines external influences that may have fed the interest of Arab Muslims in rational philosophy, especially dialectic. Unlike Orthodox Lutherans, such as Pfeiffer and Kromayer, (...) in his conclusion, Ludewig prays that Muslim philosophers cultivate reason to overcome the "deceit of Muhammadanists" toward rational worship. The use of the contentious and seemingly oxymoronic phrase “rational worship” (logikē latreia: λογική λατρεία, from Rom. 12:1), combining “rationality” and “worship” together refects, to a certain extent, the Enlightenment belief that reason could be used to understand the nature of God against any type of irrational religiosity. The idea of worshipping God rationally and equating God with reason shows the intellectual engagement of Protestant scholars with Enlightenment rationalism. (shrink)

The recent wave of rebellions in the Middle East, commonly referred to as the “Arab Spring,” has stirred up a revival of scholarly interest in the phenomenon of political reform in the Arab world and Muslim-majority states in general. Speculation on the causes of revolution, the provenance and function of political authority, and the means for reshaping or refashioning the existing political or social order had a rich legacy in medieval and early modern Arabic political thought. Islamic (...) history itself provides examples of reforms and revolts that can be seen as antecedents to events associated with the Arab Spring as well as with religious conflicts in Northern Nigeria and Sudan. Thus, a study of the past can.. (shrink)

The Prologue offers an overview of the Reformation of method from Augustine of Hippo through to the Ramist movement, providing an orientation to the rest of the book. It highlights and explains an important nexus of Realism, exemplarism and illumination fundamental to Ramism. Beginning with Augustine it shows how these themes coalesced into a distinctive Christian philosophy taken up and refined by Franciscans such as Bonaventure of Bagnoregio and John Duns Scotus, as well as by Ramon Lull, the Franciscan-inspired encyclopaedist. (...) It traces the continuation of this methodological impulse into the Platonism and Christian humanism of the Renaissance, highlighting especially the topical and Realist (Scotistic) reform of logic pioneered by Lorenzo Valla and Rudolph Agricola. It concludes by showing the reception of this topical and biblical reform in Philipp Melanchthon and the movement of Reformed scholasticism, revealing Reformed Scotism and Christian philosophy as important preconditions for Ramism. (shrink)

Johannes Steuchius’ disputatio uses Arabic logic to present an historical account of the development of philosophical thought in Arabia before and after the emergence of Islam. Steuchius first proposes that philosophy drew its origins from the East. His evidence for this claim is that many of the Greek philosophers, considered the forefathers of European philosophy, began cultivating their philosophical thinking as a result of exposure to ancient Eastern philosophy. After the introduction of Greek philosophy, it is agreed that dialectic (...) was among the first of the arts the Arabs practiced. (shrink)

Johannes Steuchius was a prominent Swedish Lutheran theologian and academic, a descendant of celebrated Lutheran bishops and academics. Born in 1676 in Härnösand in northern Sweden, Steuchius moved with his family to Lund in 1694 when his father, Matthias Steuchius, the renowned academic and theologian, was appointed Bishop of Lund. After completing his studies in logic and metaphysics at Uppsala University, Steuchius was given the opportunity to attend some of Europe’s foremost Protestant academic institutions, a luxury afforded to (...) few. Steuchius’ disputatio uses Arabic logic to present an historical account of the development of philosophical thought in Arabia before and after the emergence of Islam. He first proposes that philosophy drew its origins from the East. His evidence for this claim is that many of the Greek philosophers, considered the forefathers of European philosophy, began cultivating their philosophical thinking as a result of exposure to ancient Eastern philosophy. After the introduction of Greek philosophy, it is agreed that dialectic was among the first of the arts the Arabs practiced. (shrink)

This chapter contains section titled: I Aristotle and Early Modern Philosophy II Medieval Thought in Early Modern Scholasticism III The Philosophical Textbook IV Conclusions.

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Journal of the History of Philosophy 40.1 (2002) 121-122 [Access article in PDF] Book Review Humanism and Early Modern Philosophy Jill Kraye and M. W. F. Stone, editors. Humanism and Early Modern Philosophy. New York: Routledge, 2000. Pp. xii + 270. Cloth, $75.00 Early-modern philosophy begins in the seventeenth century. This book, based on a colloquium at the Warburg Institute, London in 1997, strives at extending (...) the limits of this period into the sixteenth and fifteenth centuries. Thus "the long-standing exclusion of the Renaissance from the standard philosophical curriculum" (xii) should come to an end by acknowledging its being an integral part of early modern philosophy and its relevance for an understanding of modern thought. The distinctive element of the Renaissance was, according to the editors, humanism, understood as the revival of ancient sources from the fourteenth century on, and its impact on the shaping of modern thought by these sources.One can identify the following types of argument offered in the twelve contributions to this book: (1) Renaissance humanists mediated classical sources into the seventeenth and following centuries either by translating Greek texts into Latin (Lohr on Aristotle commentaries) or by offering new interpretations that were to become standard (Hankins on Ficino and Galileo, and Mercer on the German Platonists). (2) Ancient modes of thought, mediated through the Renaissance, shaped modern philosophy (Stone on Aristotelian and Reformed ethics, Levi on Stoicism in Justus Lipsius, Kraye on Marcus Aurelius editions, and Osler on Gassendi and Aristotle). (3) Humanist literary forms and mentalities survived in modern thought (Bianchi on dialogue, Vickers on rhetoric in Bacon, and James on 'grandeur' and scientific argument).Two papers do not fit into this scheme: in "The Theology of Lorenzo Valla," the only paper dealing directly with a Renaissance humanist, Monfasani wants to prove that "Valla was no theologian." Monfasani does this on the basis of a very narrow concept of dogmatic correctness, blaming Valla continuously for being banal, to the effect that the paper does not contribute to the topic of the book. One could well connect Valla's theological issues (free will, summum bonum, trinity, etc.) with his provocative stirring up of philosophy in general and show his influence on Protestant theology and on modern ethics.The other paper is by J. R. Milton, which is enlightening because it summarizes the prejudices against humanism in modern philosophy ("'Delicate learning,' erudition and the enterprise of philosophy"). He endorses "one of the most familiar narratives in European philosophy" (161), namely that Descartes's breakthrough was due to his total rupture [End Page 121] with the philosophical tradition, especially with contemporary humanist and scholastic thought. Thus Descartes's triumph was that of the myth of the irrelevance of history to philosophy as evident in Galileo, Locke, and even Hume. If antecedents are acknowledged, e.g., in Berkeley, then accepting that they "provide us either with an irreplaceable source of wisdom or with equally irreplaceable models for imitation, or indeed both" (167), still fails to recognize that the history of a philosophical problem is a part of that problem rather than just some general "wisdom" or a model for imitation. Of course, Milton repeats the myth of Bacon's anti-humanism, masterly refuted in this very book by Brian Vickers, and Milton believes that Valla "enthroned" "custom and example" and therefore for him "it would be difficult if not impossible to state Hempel's Raven Paradox" (169). One might wonder whether the conclusion: "All ravens are black --all non-black things are non-ravens," is the paramount of modern philosophy. But a thorough reader of Valla's logic might discover similarities to pragmatism, which are fostered by his deep criticism of language with the tools of Renaissance humanism. However, Descartes's indebtedness to Renaissance method and rhetoric is handbook knowledge today.The audience for this collection of samples are specialists either in seventeenth- or eighteenth-century philosophy, or in Renaissance thought, or even philosophers in the narrow sense of the disciplines. The latter are difficult to convince of the usefulness of historic studies or "erudite activity" (Milton... (shrink)

Scholasticism, appropriation, and censure -- Humanists' invectives and Aristotle's impiety -- Renaissance Aristotle, Renaissance Averroes -- Italian Aristotelianism after Pomponazzi -- Religious reform and the reassessment of Aristotelianism -- Learned anti-Aristoteliansim -- History, erudition, and Aristotle's past -- Pious novelty.

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:Happiness in Premodern Judaism: Virtue, Knowledge, and Well-BeingDaniel H. FrankHava Tirosh-Samuelson. Happiness in Premodern Judaism: Virtue, Knowledge, and Well-Being. Cincinnati: Hebrew Union College Press, 2003. Pp. xi + 596. Cloth, $50.00.Franz Rosenzweig tried hard to convince the neoKantian Hermann Cohen of the merits of Zionism and the normalization it would bring to Jews and Jewish life. His attempt met with this response from Cohen: "Oho! So the gang (...) now wants to be happy, does it?" For those ignorant of the history of Jewish philosophy, one might imagine that Jewish philosophers, no less than their non-philosophical kinsmen, were so weighed down by the burdens of history and persecution that happiness could play no role in their theorizing. But happiness plays a key role in the history of Jewish moral and political philosophy, especially in the premodern period. Even Spinoza, the last of the medievals and the first of the moderns, the great critic of the rabbinic tradition and of Maimonides in particular, is concerned in his Ethics with identifying those activities that together constitute human well-being and the good life. Only lately, since the Enlightenment and Kant, has non-eudaimonism been a live option for Jewish thinkers. Only with the rise of (modern) Orthodoxy, and its predilection for construing goodness as rectitude and rule-following, has eudaimonism fallen out of favor. But with Tirosh-Samuelson's weighty volume on happiness in premodern Judaism, there can be no excuse in the future to imagine that all Jews are, or must be, closet Kantians, strict deontologists. To think otherwise seems to come close to taking on the classical (anti-Semitic) dichotomy of legalistic Judaism vs. spiritual Christianity. In it own way, Happiness in Premodern Judaism is a critique of such a one-sided, monochromatic view of Judaism, whether from the Christian or even from the Jewish side.Tirosh-Samuelson writes explicitly as an intellectual historian, rather than as a philosopher. She understands herself and her project as one that presents just the facts, without evaluating them. While one may cavil at a lost opportunity, in the present case this would be churlish, given the enormous erudition on display. After an introductory chapter outlining the foundational moral theories of Plato, Aristotle, and the Hellenistic philosophers, the text presents the (Greek-inspired) areteic wisdom literature of the Second Temple period, the teleological theocentrism of the rabbis, the Greco-Arabic Islamicate culture that nurtured Jewish philosophers from Saadia in the tenth century to Maimonides in the twelfth, the rabbinic and kabbalistic critiques of the philosophical ideal of happiness commencing [End Page 338] with the translation (into Hebrew) of Maimonides' Guide of the Perplexed at the beginning of the thirteenth century, and finally, very important and the focus of much recent scholarly work, the transformation of Jewish eudaimonism through direct contact with Christian Scholasticism and later with the humanist Renaissance. All in all, a millennium and a half of Jewish intellectual history is presented in a sober and scholarly way.Not surprisingly Maimonides plays a pivotal role in the story that Tirosh-Samuelson relates. A Janus-like figure, he represents the culmination and height of accommodation with Greek and Greco-Arabic philosophical culture. However, with the gradual worsening of the socio-economic condition of European Jewry in the thirteenth century, his accommodationism seemed traitorous, and as a result generations of thinkers, mystics and philosophers alike, strove to critically distance themselves from Maimonidean Aristotelianism. Tirosh-Samuelson is admirably clear in pointing out that such anti-Maimonidean tendencies are ill-characterized as anti-philosophical. Hasdai Crescas in the late-fourteenth and early-fifteenth centuries launched a massive critique of Maimonides' physics, metaphysics, and moral philosophy, but did so in as rigorous a manner as any philosopher would. The picture that enfolds over the course of the text is one of vigorous dialectic between partisans of 'alien' (Greek) wisdom and those who viewed such wisdom with considerable suspicion. Such a dialectic parallels, not surprisingly, developments in Christian philosophy.The trajectory of the story of premodern Jewish musings on happiness is from the centrality of reason and intellect, and the contemplative activity that is reason's preeminent actuality, to the primacy... (shrink)

The premodern history of the European university can be divided into two triads of three centuries: the medieval university and the ‘medieval’ university of the sixteenth, seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. During these last three centuries Europe’s Christian university was a ‘confessional’ university: the catholic, Lutheran, reformed and Anglican university and the dissenter university of New England. The reformed university of these centuries offered a distinctive way of systematic thought. A specific doctrine of God was connected with a distinct ontology (...) and this combination constituted the theoretical framework of its philosophy and theology. What are the main distinctive features of this scholastic way of thought and can a specific traditionhistorical background be identified ? I– The key concept of this systematic way of thought is God’s free knowledge . This free knowledgeis here understood to be God’s knowledge of future states of affairs – see section 7 for the main lines of Turrettini’s doctrine of God. This free knowledge of future states of affairs is also called definite , because future states of affairs are definite on the basis of God’s certain will. Thus God’s free knowledge is partly based on divine will, but the other pillar of God’s free knowledge is that divine knowledge which is structurally prior to an act of divine will: God’s ‘natural’ knowledge . This natural or necessary knowledge of God encompasses all possible states of affairs. This structure turning around the notion of scientia libera is vital for understanding Western thought, because Aristotelianism and latin Averroism, Thomism and nominalism do not dispose of this notion of scientia libera. Such a free knowledge doctrine of God is married to a specific type of ontology, namely a contingency ontology– see section 8. This type of ontology centres on the notion of fundamental possibility. All possible states of affairs enjoy the status of possibility . This status of possibility is constituted by logical possibility. Turrettini joins Duns Scotus in defining the logicum possibile: If a state of affairs is possible, then it is not inconsistent that it obtains. Therefore, the twin concept of fundamental possibility is logical IMpossibility: What is logically impossible, is inconsistent and self-contradictory, because it includes contradictory predicates. This approach leads to the central ontological notion of synchronic contingency. Turrettini’s key term is even almost the same as this modern invention to name this crucial device: simultas potentiae. When is an event contingent in this sense? An event e is synchronically contingent at time t, if e is the case at time t – therefore eis possible – while it is possible too that e is not the case at the same time t. Because of the simultaneity of the possibility of the opposite, reality is not necessary. It is open. Thus, the tool of implicative necessity is essential to Turrettini’s methodology. It does not only govern his doctrine of God, but also his theory of true freedom of the human will. II – In contrast to traditional descriptions of reformed scholasticism, Turrettini’s theology is a theology of will and radical contingency in general and a theology of freedom and grace in particular. I have already indicated that Turrettini followed Scotism in vital respects and Duns Scotus stood on the shoulders of Henry of Ghent and of Bonaventure . The ontological infrastructure was delivered by Duns Scotus’ way of thinking structured by synchronic contingency, but the basics of this type of doctrine of God’s knowledge are already conspicuous in the so-called Summa fratris Aleandri . Thomas Aquinas substantially borrowing from Aristotle consciously deviates from this tradition built on the legacy of Augustine and Anselm, the Victorines and Alexander of Hales by ignoring the new theory of divine knowledge put forward by John of La Rochelle. This new approach develops a new relationship between God’s notitia simplex and notitia visionis on the one hand and his potentia absoluta and potentia ordinata on the other hand. (shrink)

The present essay contends that progressive readings of Smith ignore the influence of theological concepts and religious ideas on his work, notably three distinct strands: first, seventeenth- and eighteenth-century natural theology; second, Jansenist Augustinianism; third, Stoic arguments of theodicy. Taken together, these theological elements help explain why Smith’s moral philosophy and political economy intensifies the secular early modern and Enlightenment idea that the Fall brought about ‘radical evil’ and a ‘fatherless world’ in need of permanent divine intervention. As such, (...) Smith views the market as divine regulation of human sinfulness and an instrument to serve God’s providential plan. Indeed, the ‘invisible hand of the market’ represents a nominalist realm where human cooperation intersects with divine providence, blending private self-interest with the public commonweal. I will also argue that Smith’s conception of a morally neutral market is ultimately incompatible with creedal Christianity, in particular orthodox catholic Christian ideas of the common good in which all can share and the practice of charity for those most in need who have been abandoned by state bureaucracy and the marketplace. The main reason is that Smith, not unlike Calvin, tends to divorce human contract from divine gift by dividing the theo-logic of gratuitous reciprocal giving from the economic logic of contract – a dualism that bears an uncanny resemblance with Suárez’s Baroque scholasticism of which Smith’s friend David Hume was rightly critical. In particular, the Reformation and Counter-Reformation theology of Calvin, Luther and Suárez sunders ‘pure nature’ from the supernatural and develops a ‘two ends’ account of human nature, according to which human beings have a natural end separate from their supernatural finality. So instead of participating in the divine oikonomia of asymmetrical gift-exchange, human society and the economy operate autonomously and are ordered towards a purely natural end. Smith conceptualises the market mechanism as both a fundamental precondition for interpersonal relationality and at the same time separate from the sociality it engenders. Smith’s anthropology hovers half-way between Machiavelli and Mandeville’s homo œconomicus in search for maximal profit, on the one hand, and the diametrically opposed conception of man as a gift-exchanging animal striving for mutual social recognition, on the other hand. By viewing market exchange as separate from the private virtues of benevolence, justice and prudence, he introduces a split between the exercise of moral virtues and the operation of commercial society. Such a divide is wholly foreign to the project of an overarching civil compact in the writings of Smith’s contemporary Antonio Genovesi and other members of the Italian schools of civic humanism and civil economy. In consequence, Smith’s œuvre marks a decisive shift from civil to political economy. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Journal of the History of Philosophy 41.3 (2003) 414-415 [Access article in PDF] Gregorio Piaia, editor. La presenza dell'aristotelismo padovano nella filosofia della prima modernità: Atti del Colloquio internazionale in memoria di Charles B. Schmitt (Padova, 4-6 settembre 2000). Rome and Padua: Antenore, 2002. Pp. 488. Paper, € 38.00.Dedicated to the impact of Paduan Aristotelianism on early modern philosophy, this volume, edited by Gregorio Piaia, presents the (...) proceedings of a much-anticipated conference held in memory of Charles B. Schmitt at the University of Padua on September 4-6, 2000, jointly co-sponsored by Padua's Department of Philosophy, the Centro per la Storia dell'Università di Padova, the Seminar für Philosophie und Geistesgeschichte der Renaissance of the University of Munich, the Center for Medieval and Renaissance Natural Philosophy of the Catholic University of Nijmegen, and the Foundation for Intellectual History of London. It was indeed Schmitt's merit (one thinks first and foremost of The Cambridge History of Renaissance Philosophy he edited in 1988) to have revised in the most critical and convincing way the image historians of philosophy had of Renaissance Aristotelianism as a backward-looking movement unable to express any vitality, to say nothing about its influence on later philosophers. Obviously, the Paduan Aristotelians did not achieve the same impact as Descartes and they did not produce the sharp reactions the libertins provoked. Yet, their impact was substantial, as many contributors show, with a concentration in the north of central Europe, i.e., in Germany and in Scandinavia.The volume opens with a paper by Stefano Perfetti on the physician, statesman, and philosopher Giulio Cesare Scaligero, who belongs among the Paduan Aristotelians because he received his education at Padua. The works of the "pure Aristotelian" (following the definition of this movement provided by Wilhelm Risse) Giacomo Zabarella, surely the most celebrated of the group, is the subject of papers by Francesco Bottin, Ian McLean, Sachicko Kusukawa, Daniel A. Di Liscia, Heikki Mikkeli, Merio Scattola, David A. Lines, Antonino Poppi, Paul Richard Blum, Giovanna Varani, Gregorio Piaia, and Giuseppe Micheli. They have looked into the impact of Zabarella's philosophy, logic, and theory of demonstration (the celebrated regressus) in contexts such as Lutheran Germany and Scandinavia, Reformed Germany and Holland, and Catholic Italy and France during the impressive span from the publication of Melanchthon's Dialectic in 1520 to that of Kant's Critique of Judgment in 1790. Less known today, but quite influential until 1648, was the "eclectic Aristotelian" (to use Schmitt's phrase) and colleague (and antagonist) of Zabarella, Francesco Piccolomini, whom Jill Kraye, Heikki Mikkeli, Merio Scattola, and David A. Lines consider in their papers. Piccolomini became famous for his mediation between Aristotelianism and Platonism. He revived "the soul of Aristotle and the spirit of Plato," as a contemporary said. Pierre Bayle and Jakob Brucker highlighted Piccolomini's efforts to combine Aristotelian and Platonic philosophy; and modern scholars have identified many [End Page 414] Platonizing elements in his Aristotelianism. In the hope of producing a more accurate and complete picture of eclectic Aristotelianism within the context of Renaissance moral philosophy, Jill Kraye's paper explores a neglected side of Piccolomini's ethical thought, namely his careful account of Stoicism. Finally, a group of papers with a more general scope needs to be mentioned, namely Heinrich C. Kuhn's survey of works of Paduan Aristotelians in German libraries, Charles H. Lohr's paper on the sources of Calvinist theories of science, and Ekhard Kessler's paper on the relation of logic to hermeneutics. As a last remark, of the seventeen contributions to this important volume, which no research library should be without, eight are in Italian, six in English, and three in German. Riccardo Pozzo Università di Verona... (shrink)

TWENTIETH-CENTURY ETHICS. AFTER NIETZSCHE -/- Preface This book tells the story of twentieth-century ethics or, in more detail, it reconstructs the history of a discussion on the foundations of ethics which had a start with Nietzsche and Sidgwick, the leading proponents of late-nineteenth-century moral scepticism. During the first half of the century, the prevailing trends tended to exclude the possibility of normative ethics. On the Continent, the trend was to transform ethics into a philosophy of existence whose self-appointed task was (...) that of describing the human condition as consisting of choices, as unavoidable as arbitrary, without any attempt at providing criteria for making such choices. In the Anglo-Saxon countries, the heir of ethics was a philosophy of morality, that is, an analysis of the language of morality that intended to clarify valuations without trying to justify them. 1958 was the year of the normative turn that led to the Rehabilitation of practical philosophy, a turn followed by decades of controversies between distinct kinds of normative ethics: utilitarian, Kantian, virtue ethics. While the controversy was raging, a quiet revolution took place, that of applied ethics which surprisingly dissolved the controversy's very subject matter by providing methods for making convergence possible on intermediate principles even when no agreement was available about first principles. The normative turn and the revolution of applied ethics have led us, at the turn of the century, to a goal that was quite far from the starting point. Instead of scepticism and relativism that was the fashion at the beginning of the century, at the beginning of the third millennium impartial and universal moral arguments seem to hold the spot being supported, if not by a final rational foundation, at least by reasonableness, the most precious legacy of the Enlightenment. -/- ● TABLE OF CONTENTS -/- ● I Anglo-Saxon philosophy: naturalism 1. Dewey beyond evolutionism and utilitarianism 2. Dewey and anti-essentialist moral epistemology 3. Dewey and naturalist moral ontology 4. Dewey and normative ethics of conduct and function 5. Perry and semantic naturalism -/- ● II Anglo-Saxon philosophy: ideal utilitarianism and neo-intuitionism 1. Moore's critique of utilitarian empiricism 2. Moore on the naturalistic fallacy 3. Moore on the nature of intrinsic value 4. Moore on ideal utilitarianism 5. Prichard on the priority of the right over the good 6. Ross's coherentist moral epistemology 7. Ross's moral ontology: realism, pluralism, and non-naturalism 8. Ross's normative ethics of prima facie duties -/- The chapter 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. It stresses the role of religious concerns, as well as that of the Idealist legacy. It argues that PE is more a patchwork of somewhat diverging contributions than a unitary work, not to say the paradigm of a new school in Ethics. -/- ●III Anglo-Saxon philosophy: non-cognitivism 1. The Scandinavian School, the Vienna circle and proto-emotivism 2. Wittgenstein and the ineffability of ethics 3. Russell's and Ayer's radical emotivism 4. Stevenson and moderate emotivism 5. Stevenson and the pragmatics of moral language 6. Stevenson and the methods for solving ethical disagreement 7. Hare and prescriptivism 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 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. A section reconstructs the discussion from the Forties about Hume's law, mentioning Karl Popper's argument and Richard Hare's early non-cognitivist but non-emotivist doctrine named prescriptivism. -/- ●IV Anglo-Saxon philosophy: critics of non-cognitivism 1. Neo-naturalism and its objections to the naturalistic fallacy argument 2. Objections to Hume's law 3. Clarence Lewis and the pragmatic contradiction 4. Toulmin and the good reasons approach 5. Baier and moral reasons 5. Baier, social moralities and the absolute morality 6. Baier and the moral point of view 7. Baier and the contents of absolute ethics -/- ● V Continental philosophy: the philosophy of values 1. Max Weber and the polytheism of values 2. Phenomenology against psychologism and rationalism 3. Reinach and the theory of social acts 4. Scheler and the material ethics of values 5. Hartmann and the ontology of values 6. Plessner, Gehlen and the Philosophische Anthropologie -/- 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 apriori 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 conducted 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 sketches the ideas 'discovered' later by Clarence I. Lewis, John Searle, Karl-Otto Apel and Jürgen Habermas. A final section discusses 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 be Husserl's legitimate heirs. -/- ● VI Continental philosophy: the critics of the philosophy of values 1. Freud, the Superego and Civilization 2. Heidegger on original ethos against ethics 3. Sartre and de Beauvoir on authenticity and ambiguity 4. Adorno and Horkheimer on emancipation and immoralism -/- ●VII Post-liberal theologians and religious thinkers 1. Barth on the autonomy of faith from ethics 2. Developments of Reformed moral theology after Barth 3. Bonhoeffer on the concrete divine command and ethics of penultimate realities 4. Developments of Reformed and Catholic moral theology after world war II 5. Baeck and the transformation of liberal Judaism 6. Rosenzweig against liberal Judaism 7. Buber and religion as the vital lymph of morality 8. Heschel and Judaism as a science of actions -/- The chapter examines the main protagonists of Christian theology and Jewish religious thinking in the twentieth century. It stresses how the main dilemmas of contemporary philosophical ethics lie at the root of the various path of inquiry taken by these thinkers. -/- ● VIII Normative ethics: neo-Utilitarianism 1. The discussion on act and rule utilitarianism 2. Hare on two-tiered preference utilitarianism 3. Harsanyi, Gauthier and rational choice ethics 4. Parfit, utilitarianism and the idea of a person 5. Brandt and indirect conscience 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 refuted. Two examples give the reader a glimpse at this uproarious process. 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 transformation 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 the eventual rational justification of moral judgments and rule-utilitarianism that of an action-guiding practical device. -/- ● IX Normative ethics: neo-Aristotelianism and virtue ethics 1. Hannah Arendt, action and judgement 2. Hans-Georg Gadamer and phronesis 3. Alasdair MacIntyre on practices, virtues, and traditions 5. Stuart Hampshire on deliberation 6. Bernard Williams and moral complexity 7. Feminist ethics -/- Sect 1 reconstructs 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. Heidegger's most brilliant disciples were the promoters of this Rehabilitation. Hans-Georg Gadamer is 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 significant role of the notion of phronesis. Sect 3 discusses the three theses defended by Anscombe in 'Modern Moral Philosophy'. It argues 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. The chapter gives a short look at further developments in the neo-naturalist current 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 inevitable failure of the Enlightenment project of an autonomous ethic. -/- ● X Normative ethics: Kantian and rights-based ethics 1. Dialogical constructivism 2. Apel, Habermas and discourse ethics 3. Gewirth and rights-based ethics 4. Nagel on agent-relative reasons 5. Donagan and persons as ends in themselves Parallel to the neo-Aristotelian trend, there was in the Rehabilitation of practical philosophy a Kantian current. This current started 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. The chapter offers an examination of his argument in some detail, followed by a more cursory reconstruction of Jürgen Habermas's elaboration on Apel's theory. -/- ● XI The applied ethics renaissance 1. Elisabeth Anscombe on the atom bomb 2. From medical ethics to bioethics 3. Rawls and public ethics 3. Nozick, Dworkin and further developments of public ethics 5. Sen and the revival of economic 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. The chapter argues that Rawls's distinction between a "political" and a "metaphysical" approach to the theory of justice, one central part of ethical theory, is a formulation of the same basic idea at the root of both the principles approach and the new casuistry, both discussed in the following chapter. The idea is 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 essential criteria for judgment. -/- ● XII Fin-de-siècle metaethics 1. Deontic logics 2. Anti-realism 3. External realism 4. Internal realism 5. Kantian constructivism -/- The chapter illustrates the fresh start of meta-ethical discussion in the Eighties and Nineties and the resulting new alignments: metaphysical naturalism, internal realism, anti-realism, and constructivism. (shrink)

Nazariyat, Journal for the History of Islamic Philosophy and Sciences, issued twice a year in English and Turkish (Nazariyat İslam Felsefe ve Bilim Tarihi Araştırmaları Dergisi), is a refereed international journal. It publishes original studies, critical editions of classical texts and book reviews on Islamic philosophy, kalām, theoretical aspects of Sufism and the history of sciences. The goal of Nazariyat is to contribute to the discovery, examination and reinterpretation of the theoretical traditions in the history of Islamic (...) thought, by giving special attention to the post-classical period of it. **ISSN: 2148-8088 E-ISBN: 2547-9415**. (shrink)

Logical reflection in early modern philosophy (EMP) is marked by the instability of the period, although it is more lasting (the Port-Royal Logic was nevertheless used as a handbook in philosophy courses until the end of the nineteenth century). It started in the sixteenth century and ended in the nineteenth century, a period of 300 years during which there were deep transformations in the conceptions of authority and scientific method. For the history of twentieth-century philosophy, it was the period (...) of “classical logic,” which lasted from the Renaissance to the linguistic turn conducted by Gottlob Frege. The period was used to be thought of as centuries of little or no original contribution to logic, in which conceptions of logic were tainted by rhetoric, epistemology, and psychologism in the worst sense (Kneale and Kneale 1962; Michael 1997). From the last decades of the twentieth century, however, scholars began to regard this period more accurately with respect to reflection and changes in logic and semantics. It has recently become a promising field for historical and conceptual research; today we can say that the legacy of early modern logical reformism has a philosophical, logical, and semantic value in itself. (shrink)

Reform is a call for renewal and modernity, therefore. Much study and refutation were attributed to it, in comparison with others, it always needs to be set and defined, that’s not for its difficulty but it’s connected to its concept with the ideologies of its advocates and their projection of its connotations and meanings on the contents of their projects and visions. For this reason, reform advocates had a dilemma in defining this concept accurately. This dilemma has dimensions that made (...) it more obvious, by shedding light on the Ideology of reform and historical criticism. The research focused on two great thinkers with different ideologies. Ahmad Amin began his journey through research and exploration of the historical, religious, and intellectual life of the Arabs and produced several historical writings that reflect his ideology in the field of reform and historical criticism. But Sayyid Qutb had a classical fundamentalist tendency that was later translated into Qutbist thought, which was adopted by some Islamic groups, and from whose texts they took ideas for building their structure. The different vision between secular, "rational" Islam and fundamentalist, "extremist" Islam lies in the reformist and critical visions of each of the two trends. It can be said that historical reform and criticism of Ahmad Amin had a character that relied on reason before transmission and sifting through historical and classical texts. As for reform in Sayyid Qutb, it was a longing for the era of early Islam and a view of society as ignorant and far from monotheism, and that it must be reformed by reviving faith in it once again. Qutb showed this clearly in his writings and followed this approach in the process of historical criticism. (shrink)

While the transmission of Greek philosophy and science via the Muslim world to western Europe in the Middle Ages has been closely scrutinized, the fate of the Arabic philosophical and scientific legacy in later centuries has received less attention, a fault this volume aims to correct. The authors in this collection discuss in particular the radical ideas associated with Averroism that are attributed to the Aristotle commentator Ibn Rushd (1126-1198) and challenge key doctrines of the Abrahamic religions. This volume (...) examines what happened to Averroes's philosophy during the sixteenth, seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Did early modern thinkers really no longer pay any attention to the Commentator? Were there undercurrents of Averroism after the sixteenth century? How did Western authors in this period contextualise Averroes and Arabic philosophy within their own cultural heritage? How different was the Averroes they created as a philosopher in a European tradition from Ibn Rushd, the theologian, jurist and philosopher of the Islamic tradition? (shrink)

Disc 1. Philosophy and the modern age ; Scholasticism and the scientific revolution -- Disc 2. The rationalism and dualism of Descartes ; Locke's empiricism, Berkeley's idealism -- Disc 3. Neo-Aristotelians : Spinoza and Leibniz ; The Enlightenment and Rousseau -- Disc 4. The radical skepticism of Hume ; Kant's Copernican revolution -- Disc 5. Kant and the religion of reason ; The French Revolution and German idealism -- Disc 6. Hegel, the last great system ; Hegel and the English (...) century -- Disc 7. The economic revolution and its critic, Marx ; Kierkegaard's Critique of reason -- Disc 8. Nietzsche's Critique of morality and truth ; Freud, Weber, and the mind of modernity -- Disc 9. Rise of 20th-century philosophy, pragmatism ; analysis -- Disc 10. Rise of 20th-century philosophy, phenomenology ; Physics, positivism and early Wittgenstein -- Disc 11. Emergence and Whitehead ; Dewey's American naturalism -- Disc 12. Heidegger's Being and time ; Existentialism and the Frankfurt School -- Disc 13. Heidegger's turn against humanism ; Culture, hermeneutics, and structuralism -- Disc 14. Wittgenstein's turn to ordinary language ; Quine and the end of positivism -- Disc 15. New philosophies of science ; Derrida's deconstruction of philosophy -- Disc 16. The challenge of postmodernism ; Rorty and the end of philosophy -- Disc 17. Rediscovering the premodern ; Pragmatic realism, reforming the modern -- Disc 18. The reemergence of emergence ; Philosophy's death greatly exaggerated. (shrink)

Studies on Early Modern Aristotelianism is a collection of seventeen essays by Paul Richard Blum, previously published over the last three decades in German and Italian, French and English, as well as Hungarian. Two concluding chapters serve as appendices, with the remaining fifteen divided into three sections: Philosophy at Early Modern Schools, Science from the Renaissance through the Enlightenment, and Metaphysics and Theology. While Blum’s Studies is not a monograph, it is neither simply a collection of works (...) which are incidentally related by either their topical or historical scope. Rather, there are threads running throughout these essays which are emphasized in different ways, and we hope here to draw attention to a few of these. (shrink)

Contemporary Greeks and Arabs are heirs of a common empire which ruled the lives of their ancestors for long centuries before it ended at the beginning of the twentieth century. These heirs imagined, constructed and experienced their post-Ottoman nations in connection with the existential crises of the empire. Their national selves emerged from political and military struggles, and were fashioned by ideas about enlightenment, modernization, selfhood and emancipation. Their journeys to national statehood were shaped by the different positions they (...) held in the empire; they were marked by different givens and different circumstances. Their post-independence eras witnessed numerous challenges and faced dramatic crises. They were often internally disenchanting and externally checked by geo-political pressures. But they were experienced in total isolation from each other’s situations. Today these journeys are critically reflected upon by the intellectuals of these nation-states but almost never in conjunction with the other’s experiences, despite their geographical contiguity, significant common historical past, and many shared social mores. This study looks at how these two estranged neighbors fared after they parted ways on their independence journeys in their definitions of cultural identity and practices of cultural critique, and compares these journeys, by establishing links that were rarely, if ever, made hitherto. It focuses on the respective contemporary debates on enlightenment and emancipation that look at the early ideas of independence and progress and assess their fate in the post-independence era to our present day. The study aims at revealing the commonalities and specificities of the struggles of these nation-states for enlightenment, emancipation, progress and modernization. It helps us raise a number of questions about the meaning of enlightenment in these post-Ottoman contexts. (shrink)

Although Islamic philosophy represents one of the leading philosophical traditions in the world, it has only recently begun to receive the attention it deserves in the non-Islamic world. This important text provides a concise and accessible introduction to the major movements, thinkers and concepts within that tradition, from the foundation of Islam to the present day. Ever since the growth of Islam as a religious and political movement, Muslim thinkers have sought to understand the theoretical aspects of their (...) faith by using philosophical concepts. Leaman outlines this history and demonstrates that, although the development of Islamic philosophy is closely linked with Islam itself, its form is not essentially connected to any particular religion, and its leading ideas and arguments are of general philosophical significance. The author illustrates the importance of Islamic thought within philosophy through the use of many modern examples. He describes and contrasts the three main movements in Islamic philosophy – Peripatetic, Sufi and Illuminationist – and examines the Persian as well as the Arabic traditions. Wide coverage is given to key aspects of Islamic philosophy, including epistemology, ontology, politics, ethics and philosophy of language, providing readers with a balanced view of the discipline. The second edition has been thoroughly revised and updated throughout, including the addition of two new chapters on recent debates surrounding Islam’s need for an enlightenment, and on the future of Islamic philosophy. The new edition of Islamic Philosophy will continue to be essential reading for students and scholars of the subject, as well as anyone wanting to learn more about one of the most significant and influential philosophical traditions in the world today. (shrink)

The Cambridge Companion to Early Modern Philosophy is a comprehensive introduction to the central topics and changing shape of philosophical inquiry in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. It explores one of the most innovative periods in the history of Western philosophy, extending from Montaigne, Bacon and Descartes through Hume and Kant. During this period, philosophers initiated and responded to major intellectual developments in natural science, religion, and politics, transforming in the process concepts and doctrines inherited from ancient and medieval (...) philosophy. In this Companion, leading specialists examine early modern treatments of the methodological and conceptual foundations of natural science, metaphysics, philosophy of mind, logic and language, moral and political philosophy, and theology. A final chapter looks forward to the philosophy of the Enlightenment. This will be an invaluable guide for all who are interested in the philosophical thought of the early modern period. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:The Emergence of Scientific Culture: Science and the Shaping of Modernity, 1210–1685Helen HattabStephen Gaukroger. The Emergence of Scientific Culture: Science and the Shaping of Modernity, 1210–1685. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2007. Pp. ix + 563. Cloth, $65.00.The sheer variety of both cognitive and non-cognitive contributions to the emergence of a scientific culture in the West and the complex relations to pre-modern developments that scholars have brought to light over (...) the past decades have put into question both the Enlightenment and Kuhnian accounts of the scientific revolution. Gaukroger’s work performs the ambitious but indispensable task of beginning to formulate an alternative way of understanding this momentous transition, one based on recent scholarship. Gaukroger treats science as both “a particular kind of cognitive product, and as a particular kind of cultural product” (3). His overarching goal is to show that examining the interrelations between the two can teach us something about modernity that focusing on one, to the exclusion of the other, cannot. He argues that the enduring success of Western science was not due to its advances (there were previous advances in other cultures), but due to its ability to consolidate. Successful consolidation promotes the cognitive claims of science and builds a scientific culture to legitimate them. Hence, throughout this book, Gaukroger explores how particular advances (e.g., in astronomy and natural philosophy) were legitimated by their ability to reinforce revelation, unify different disciplines, and exemplify the scientific persona. Since these means of consolidation, unlike methods of scientific discovery, rely on both cultural forces and intellectual advances, Gaukroger makes good on his promise to teach us something that intellectual and cultural histories taken separately cannot.Gaukroger characterizes Western modernity in terms of the eventual assimilation of all cognitive values to scientific ones. He targets the Enlightenment view which, as a result of this assimilation, reinterprets the success of scientific practices over others in ahistorical terms. On this view, the longstanding success of science results solely from cognitive advances, such as the commitment to objectivity (science was assumed to have dissociated itself from religion), the employment of adversarial, non-dogmatic arguments, and the development of quantitative and empirical methods. Gaukroger shows instead that: (1) early modern Epicurean and mechanist natural philosophies forged a closer connection to religious doctrine in response to the ultimate failure to maintain the Thomist reconciliation of theology with Aristotelian natural philosophy; (2) the threat posed by the naturalism of Renaissance philosophers like Pomponazzi led to a privileging of systematization over innovation in late Scholasticism, as well as a renewed interest in natural history, which later spawned the enterprise of physico-theology; (3) the adversarial character of ancient means of cultivating wisdom was rejected in favor of gentlemanly cooperation. This went hand-in-hand with a gradual reassignment of the aims of enquiry from the attainment of a transcendent truth to a productive truth, and the corresponding construction, by Bacon and others, of the scientific persona, which embodied the cognitive virtue of objectivity rather than the ethical virtue of ancient and medieval wisdom. Finally, (4) Beeckman and Descartes failed to achieve the quantification of natural philosophy they aimed for, in large part due to their conflicting commitment to corpuscularian matter theory. The successful replacement of Aristotelian causal explanations in natural philosophy by mechanistic explanations lay in mechanism’s ability to unify all causal explanation, rather than its ability to offer quantitative [End Page 640] explanations of various natural phenomena. Similarly, the experimental methods of Gilbert and Boyle were at first hotly contested, the eventual success of non-foundationalist, empirical approaches owing more to the unifying role played by the experiments of Gilbert, Boyle, and Newton. Although Boyle’s experimental philosophy included a mechanistic matter theory, unlike strict mechanists, experimentalists used experiments to focus and unify heterogeneous phenomena rather than grounding explanations in matter theory.Gaukroger presents the relevant cultural developments and theoretical advances with an impressive degree of detail and accuracy. Readers will gain insights about everything from the differences between early medieval Augustinianism and late medieval Aristotelianism, to Spinozism versus its late seventeenth-century alternatives. Scholars with expertise in specific areas will no doubt take issue with individual claims... (shrink)

L'idée de réforme en islam – ce qu'il est convenu d'appeler en français, depuis les années 1930, le « réformisme musulman » – reste couramment associée aux discours, systèmes de pensée et idéologies qui se développèrent dans les pays musulmans, en gros du milieu du xixe siècle au milieu du xxe siècle, à la fois en réaction à la domination économique, culturelle, militaire et coloniale européenne et grâce au développement des échanges et à la circulation plus rapide des personnes et (...) de l'information. Ce réformisme était constitutif de ce qui était alors perçu comme une renaissance de la pensée et de la production écrite, en arabe nahḍa. Combiné au nationalisme, l'idéal de renaissance plongeait les siècles antérieurs à la rencontre avec l'Europe dans l'obscurité et faisait de l’époque ottomane un temps de déclin. Ceci se traduisit longtemps, sur le plan scientifique, par une grande méconnaissance des xve, xvie, xviie et xviiie siècles. Au prétendu retard pris par le monde musulman à l’époque moderne répondit ainsi un retard historiographique, fort heureusement en voie de comblement depuis près de cinquante ans. (shrink)

In recent decades, the trope that classical Muslim thinkers anticipated or influenced modern European thought has provided an easy endorsement of their contemporary relevance. This article studies how Arab editors and intellectuals, from 1882 to 1947, understood the twelfth-century Andalusian philosopher Ibn Ṭufayl, and Arabo-Islamic philosophy generally. This modern generation of Arab scholars also attached significance to classical Arabic texts as precursors to modern European thought. They invited readers to retrospectively identify with Ibn Ṭufayl and his treatise, Ḥayy (...) ibn Yaqẓān. Comparisons of Ibn Ṭufayl to European thinkers, and re-presentations of Ḥayy ibn Yaqẓān as the precedent or genesis of European thought, facilitated these editors’ global imaginaries, anti-colonial projects and political fantasies. This article tracks these projects and fantasies through the afterlife of Ḥayy ibn Yaqẓān from early printings and generalist surveys to later editions and studies, as Ibn Ṭufayl’s significance became sutured into his imagined importance for Europe, and for going beyond Europe. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Whose Aristotle? Which Aristotelianism? A Historical Prolegomenon to Thomas Farrell’s Norms of Rhetorical CultureCarol PosterThe description of various works of logical and rhetorical theory as “Aristotelian,” although far from unusual, is not particularly informative, because it assumes, incorrectly, that there is some ultimate singular Aristotle being imitated by all authors who consider themselves, or who are labeled by others, Aristotelian. In fact, there never has been an interpretation (...) of Aristotle that satisfies the canon of St. Vincent of Lerins, “quod ubique, quod semper, quod ab omnibus creditum est”; instead, there have been almost as many Aristotles as there have been interpreters of Aristotle. Thomas Farrell’s Norms of Rhetorical Culture (1993), therefore, is not so much situated against the background of some single, unique, undisputed Aristotle but, rather, as he himself mentions, within an evolving tradition of Aristotelianism.The historical transformations of Aristotle include two distinct traditions, one oriented toward scientific-technical philosophy andthe other toward rhetorical-poetic and ethical humanism.1 The technical-philosophccical tradition, in which Aristotle was conceived primarily [End Page 375] as metaphysician and natural philosopher, emphasized the logical treatises of the organon, the speculative systems of the Physics and Metaphysics, and the scientific works of the biological treatises. This tradition originated in the Greco-Roman middle and Neoplatonic schools and has had a continuous history stretching through the Middle Ages, Counterreformation, neo-Thomism, and certain contemporary European postmodernisms. The rhetoricalhumanistic tradition, on the other hand, emphasizing the Rhetoric, Poetics, Politics, and ethical treatises, views Aristotle as a practical philosopher, concerned with the productive arts and those matters about which knowledge is probable rather than certain. This rhetorical-humanistic tradition was a relatively negligible aspect of Aristotle’s ancient reception, had a slight presence in the Islamic and Latin traditions, developed in certain strands of Renaissance humanism, and came to fruition in the late eighteenth century, primarily, though not exclusively, within a Protestant tradition. In eighteenth-and early nineteenth-century Britain, the rhetorical-humanistic Aristotle found expression directly in neoclassical poetics and, in a more complicated fashion, in a group of authors (including the Scottish moderates and the slightly later Oxford Noetics) who enlisted Aristotle in a battle against skepticism and materialism. It is the latter of the two strands of the rhetorical-humanistic Aristotle that resurfaces (albeit in an indirect and mediated fashion) in the work of Alastair MacIntyre, Richard McKeon (and other members of the Chicago school), and Thomas Farrell, who used Aristotle’s model of probable deliberation and habituated virtue to construct an alternative to twentieth-century skepticism and materialism.Significant Strata of Aristotelian ReceptionThe history of Aristotelian reception is not monolithic. There has been tremendous variation across periods and national traditions of what works were considered authentically Aristotelian, which of those works were considered important, and how they were interpreted. The phases of Aristotelian reception immediately relevant to Farrell’s work include Greco-Roman Platonism, Islamic commentary, medieval Latin Christianity, Renaissance humanistic textual recovery, neoclassical “Aristotelianism,” early modern Aristotelianism and anti-Aristotelianism, and the nineteenthcentury rehabilitation of Aristotle. This article will summarize briefly pre eighteenth-century interpretations of Aristotle as prolegomena to a close analysis of the works of two eighteenth-century Scotsmen, James Moor [End Page 376] and John Gillies, whose reconfiguration of Aristotle’s Rhetoric, Poetics, and Organon as tools for practical wisdom in modern society anticipated (and, albeit indirectly, influenced) Farrell.2AntiquityTwo distinct strands of Aristotelian reception, the rhetorical-humanistic and technical-philosophical, originated in antiquity. Of these, the rhetorical-humanistic strand was substantially less important. Neither the Poetics nor the Rhetoric was well known in antiquity. The Rhetoric was not the subject of a Greek commentary until the Byzantine period and, although occasionally cited by Greco-Roman rhetoricians including Cicero, Quintilian, and Dionysus of Halicarnassus, was not widely or carefully read.3 The Poetics was also virtually unknown and was never the subject of an ancient commentary.4The Greek commentaries on Aristotle, which are predominantly technical-philosophical in character, include some fifteen thousand pages of extant text. Despite the existence of a distinct ancient Peripatetic school, the majority of commentaries were produced in the Platonic schools, where the works of Aristotle... (shrink)

This paper wishes to make a contribution to the study of how seventeenth-century scholasticism adapted to the new intellectual challenges presented by the Reformation. I focus in particular on the theory of accidents, which Reformed scholastic philosophers explored in search of a philosophical understanding of the rejection of the Catholic and Lutheran interpretations of the Eucharist. I argue that the Calvinist scholastics chose the view that actual inherence is part of the essence of accidents because it was coherent with (...) their theology. In this paper, I bring to attention the Reformed scholastic philosophy which was taught in the Scottish universities in the first half of the seventeenth century, an area so far neglected by scholars. In so doing, I compare Scottish scholasticism with coeval Calvinist sources, and highlight the differences from authoritative Catholic and Lutheran philosophers. The conclusion is that Calvinist scholasticism, both Scottish and Continental, brought about fundamental changes in seventeenth-century metaphysics, which are coherent with a humanist interpretation of Aristotle, and anticipate some themes of early modern philosophy. (shrink)

The Philosophy and logic in Islamic thought, unlike Christian culture, developed uncensored and as a result of great demand. After the biggest translation movement in history, important components of Ancient Greek, Syriac, Persian, Jewish and Hindu cultures were transferred to Arabic. Kalam, which developed earlier in Islamic culture, has also been effective in understanding and accepting the philosophical content. In the beginning, translations were made in fields such as medicine, chemistry, astronomy and mathematics. Philosophy literature was also (...) translated into Arabic due to its close relationship with other sciences and the need to fill the "gaps" in Islamic culture. The philosophy of logic was also transferred to Arab culture in its Aristotelian form. Especially the great influence of Aristotle helped strengthen the thought of logic among Arab philosophers and some theologians. As with other translation content, the logic has been translated into Arabic without any censorship. Contrary to the thinkers of Christian culture, Islamic philosophers learned all the subtleties of logic in a free intellectual environment, and as a result, this fact created a way for them to make a unique contribution to the discipline of logic. Logic, as it has been transformed into Arabic elements in Islamic culture, has been influential in basic areas such as theology, language, fiqh and kalam. In this process, logic, which was handled intertwined with traditional philosophy, has progressed to become a refined thought, especially with the influence of the first great philosopher Fârâbî. Fârâbî is not only a great philosopher but also a great Islamic scholar, and these qualities enabled him to adapt logic to Arab culture and Islamic sciences from his Aristotelian roots. Fârâbî, just like Aristotle, wanted to use logic as a criterion of truth for philosophical fields. Fârâbî, who designed logic under two main headings such as concepts and judgments, adapted logic to Arab culture for Muslims in the reasoning process. This solid construction of logic not only strengthened philosophical thought, but also contributed to the later establishment of a solid structure in Islamic sciences. In this context, the understanding of Islamic philosophy and its transformation with the effect of logic require a close examination of Fârâbî's thought. In our article, we will briefly discuss the pre-Islamic origins of philosophy and logic, and on this plane, we will examine Fârâbî's contribution to philosophy of some basic issues such as God, the classification of sciences, and the philosophical dimension of logic and try to reveal his effects on Islamic culture from a general point of view. (shrink)

The graduation theses of the Scottish universities in the first half of the seventeenth century are at the crossroads of philosophical and historical events of fundamental importance: Renaissance and Humanist philosophy, Scholastic and modern philosophy, Reformation and Counterreformation, the rise of modern science. The struggle among these tendencies shaped the culture of the seventeenth century. Graduation theses are a product of the Scholasticism of the modern age, which survived the Reformation in Scotland and decisively influenced Scottish philosophy in the seventeenth (...) century, including the reception of early modern philosophy. We can therefore speak of a ‘Scottish Scholasticism’, characterised by an original reception and interpretation of the long traditions of Scholastic philosophy and Aristotelianism. The aim of the thesis is the analysis of the general physics of the graduation theses: the two central theories are prime matter and movement. Natural philosophy is a particularly interesting case, and the main features of the graduation theses are the reception of Scholasticism alongside innovation within Scholasticism. Graduation theses adhere to the Scholastic tradition, especially Scotism, while being innovative in their opposition to Catholic forms of Scholasticism. Scottish Scholasticism can be then further qualified as an example of ‘Reformed Scholasticism’. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:Classical Islamic Philosophy: A Thematic Introduction by Luis Xavier López-FarjeatThérèse-Anne DruartLuis Xavier López-Farjeat. Classical Islamic Philosophy: A Thematic Introduction. New York: Routledge, 2022. Pp. 368. Paperback, $34.36.Interest in classical Islamic philosophy has grown and recently given rise to several presentations of the field: The Routledge Companion to Islamic Philosophy, edited by Richard C. Taylor and Luis Xavier López-Farjeat (New York: Routledge, 2016); Islamische Philosophie (...) im Mittelalter. Ein Handbuch, edited by Heidrun Eichner, Matthias Perkams, and Christian Schäfer (Darmstadt: WBG, 2017); and The Oxford Handbook of Islamic Philosophy, edited by Khaled El-Rouayheb and Sabine Schmidtke (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017). One may, therefore, wonder whether López-Farjeat should have provided another one. My answer is a resounding "yes." The Oxford Handbook presents specific texts, The Routledge [End Page 320] Companion gives brief overviews of specific themes, and Islamische Philosophie provides a sketch of the development of Arabic-Islamic philosophy as well as an introduction to some of the major philosophers' most significant themes or works. By contrast, López-Farjeat offers a detailed picture of lively philosophical debates between philosophers, theologians, and other intellectuals, showing how philosophy pervaded thinking in the Islamic lands and was itself enriched by serious thinking in theology and other fields.After presenting the Islamic context and the translation movement from Greek into Arabic, López-Farjeat focuses on six main themes: (1) Theologians and Philosophers on Islamic Revelation; (2) The Classification of the Sciences, Logic, and Language; (3) Philosophy and the Natural Science; (4) Metaphysics in the Islamic Philosophical Context; (5) Psychology and Theories of Cognition; and (6) Ethics and Political Philosophy. In each case, he focuses on various much-debated philosophical issues, reconstructing their evolution. He begins by highlighting the Greek background, then moves to show chronologically how and why those debates evolved. When needed, he indicates in which other section of the book the context for a particular philosopher's or theologian's specific position on a debated issue can be found. Finally, after each chapter, he gives an excellent list of further readings (mostly in English) for the reader who wishes to delve more deeply into the topic.López-Farjeat's approach highlights the liveliness and the nuances of the debates between intellectuals of various religious persuasions in a way rarely done before. Such a detailed attention to specific contexts also means that his book does not allow for a quick, easy read. It provides all the information that even someone unfamiliar with Islamic studies or ancient philosophy may need to appreciate the richness and depth of Islamic-Arabic thinking, but this amount of information requires close and slow reading. López-Farjeat's frequent references to scholarly disagreement about specific issues could make this book at times challenging for nonspecialists. This means, however, that even seasoned scholars might find something to learn from López-Farjeat's treatments of the aspects of Islamic thought they might be less familiar with. And while beginners will need some time to absorb the vast amount of information López-Farjeat provides, they will be grateful for the clear way he has organized it.Too often and for too long have historians of Islamic philosophy focused on thinkers who saw themselves as mainly Aristotelians and neglected what philosophers learned from other disciplines, in particular from theology, be it Islamic or Christian. This book shows how Christians in the Islamic world had already integrated some Greek philosophy into their thinking from an early time, when they first entered into dialogue with Islamic theologians. In turn, Islamic theologians integrated philosophical elements in their works. López-Farjeat's knowledge of Islamic theology and Eastern Christian theology allows him to show that this process of integration was not a one-way street. The Islamic milieu and its theological developments raised new questions and issues that philosophers under Greek influences had to take into account. One does not philosophize in a vacuum: new questions raised in a different cultural and linguistic environment led to a refinement and enrichment in the understanding of philosophical issues.As an example, let us consider chapter... (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Journal of the History of Philosophy 42.1 (2004) 101-103 [Access article in PDF] Cees Leijenhorst. The Mechanization of Aristotelianism: The Late Aristotelian Setting of Thomas Hobbes' Natural Philosophy. Leiden: Brill, 2002. Pp. xv + 242. Cloth, $97.00. Cees Leijenhorst, the young Dutch scholar and student of the late Karl Schuhmann, has written the most important book on Thomas Hobbes's natural science since Frithiof Brandt's Thomas Hobbes's Mechanical Conception (...) of Nature of 1928. This is true despite the undoubted brilliance and success of Leviathan and the Air Pump, published in 1985 by Simon Schaffer and Steven Shapin. Why this is so, it will be the burden of this review to clarify.Writing in the modern historiographical tradition known as contextualism, long associated with John Pocock, Quentin Skinner and Richard Tuck, Leijenhorst seeks to locate Hobbes within the horizon of that current of natural thought that began with Aristotle, led through antiquity and then flourished and came to predominate with the West's recovery of the Stagirite in the late Middle Ages. The course of so long a filiation of ideas cannot be the subject of a book whose length is under 250 pages, though a companion collection of essays on Aristotle and his long progeny, edited by Leijenhorst and others, has also appeared [End Page 101] (to be reviewed in the Journal). Instead, Leijenhorst focuses on the last, self-avowed inheritors and developers of that tradition, known as late Aristotelianism, though precisely how to define that tradition is itself problematized.Classically trained, Hobbes was well equipped to study Aristotle directly in Greek, without intermediaries; he early on published a translation of Thucydides. Still, Leijenhorst's concern is less to draw Hobbes closer to Aristotle than to relate him both to his immediate intellectual predecessors and to his own contemporaries, though, in each case, for different reasons. In the former, Leijenhorst convincingly argues that, as Gilson showed for Descartes, Hobbes assumed, drew upon, adopted and modified prevailing Aristotelian doctrines, even as he famously condemned their ancient author. And, Hobbes's sources, as they themselves interpreted, rejected and modified the views of their forebear, were rather various, including such writers of manuals as Bartholomaeus Anglicus and John Case, as well as others whose interests and directions were more varied and less conservative, including Scaliger, Rudolph Goclenius and Otto Casmann.A common source for both these strains of late Aristotelianism was the great stream of commentaries produced largely by members of the Jesuit Order from the middle of the sixteenth century onward, including Franciscus Toletus, Antonio Rubio, Petrus Fonseca, as well as Franciscus Suarez and members of other orders.This stream of thought also fed into the confessional strife of post-Reformation Europe, so that both Lutherans and Calvinists developed their own Aristotelianisms. One of the most striking conclusions of Leijenhorst's work is that, in characterizing both Aristotle's and his own metaphysics (or philosophia prima) as a universal science rather than as a particular theological science, Hobbes is an heir of this "Protestant ontology."Finally, Hobbes looked to the great names of natural-scientific thinking in sixteenth-century Italy, Zabarella, Pomponazzi, Fracastoro, Telesio and Campanella. Like Hobbes, these latter authors, "though vehemently anti-Aristotelian," nonetheless "exploited kinematic, empiricist and materialist tendencies found within the Aristotelian tradition itself, particularly in the School of Padua" (11).Such investigations into sources and lines of argument illuminate relations with predecessors and contemporaries in ways that social-constructivist accounts, like those of Schaeffer and Shapin and of the Edinburgh sociologist of knowledge David Bloor, may not accomplish. The author gives one instance of direct conflict between the results of that school and his own contextualism which illustrates this larger point.In his fight with Boyle, Hobbes is at pains to deny the existence of the void. Though he came to reject it rather late in his scientific thinking, the void, Schaffer and Shapin suggest, served to give space to the "incorporeal substances," similar to the scholastics' "abstract essences," upon which the latter erected the "kingdom of darkness" that... (shrink)

Grown up as versatile people, Ottoman intellectuals had holistic views towards science, art and literature, and wrote in a variety of disciplines. It was not uncommon for a mathematician to write in philosophy, for a ḥadīth (report of the words and deeds of the Prophet) scholar to write history books, for a statesman to be busy with calligraphy or for a Shaykh al-Islām (the highest ranking Islamic legal authority) to have a “Dīwān” (a collection of poems). However, possibly (...) due to specialization-based scientific understanding of modern researchers, one side of these people generally came to the fore and some capabilities of them remained unknown. Grown up in Istanbul, capital town of Ottoman Empire, in late 16th and early 17th centuries, Okchuzāde Mehmed Shāhī was also one of these personalities called “hezār-fan” (polymath). Mehmed Shāhī served in top level offices of the State, was busy with art and literature, and became known for inshāʾ (composition) kind of works written with elaborate prose. Mehmed Shāhī earned a deserved fame with these capabilities and he was also a poet. Indeed, due to poems he wrote in his early ages, he was noticed by some biography writers about poets and his poems were mentioned in some anthologies. In addition to poetry anthologies, he had some classical works, and some couplets, quatrains and verses included in his prose works. In the present study, a collection and evaluation of poems by Mehmed Shāhī were presented.Summary: Ottoman statesman Okchuzāde Mehmed Shāhī was born in 1562 AD (970 AH) in Istanbul. He was son of Okchuzāde Mehmed Pasha (d. 995 AH/1587 AD) and served as Kātib (scribe), Defterdār (treasurer), Reīs-ul-kuttāb (chief of the scribes), Governor General of Cyprus and Aleppo. His real name was Mehmed, but he was mentioned in different sources by names such as Mehmed Bey, Mehmed Shāh, Mehmed Shāhī, Mir Mehmed Shāhī and Okchuzāde Mehmed Shāhī. Starting at a young age, he was well educated in madrasah (college). With his vibrant character and superior genius, he came to the forefront among his peers. He was educated under the supervision of Māʿlūlzāde Nakīb Efendi (d. 993 AH/1585 AD) and graduated in 988 AH/1580 AD at the age of 18. When Nakīb Efendi became Shaykh al-Islām in the same year, he started his official duty as Dīwān-ı Humāyūn (imperial council) secretary. With the duty of Executive Assistant, he became the secretary of Damad İbrahim Pasha who started to his office in 1004 AH/1596 AD. He worked under the patronage of the Pasha until Pasha’s death in 1010 AH/1601 AD. Mehmed Shāhī succeeded Musa Chelebi as Reīs-ul-kuttāb and Basdefterdar (chief treasurer) in 1005 AH/1596 AD, and was appointed as title deed and cadastre director in 1006 AH/1597 AD. However, he was dismissed from this duty and was included among the officials to join military campaign. He was prosecuted and tried for imprisonment for the accusation of coming to Istanbul without permission. He succeeded Hamza Pasha as Nishanci (high-ranking bureaucrat) in 1007 AH/1599 AD and was assigned to military campaign. Mehmed Shāhī was dismissed from his duty in 1008 AH/1600 AD. Although he was reappointed to his duty in the same year, he was dismissed again in 1010 AH/1601 AD. While Hamza Pasha was reappointed to his office, Mehmed Shāhī was not assigned to any duty. He succeeded Murad Efendi as the Defterdar of Egypt in 1013 AH/1605 AD. After this duty, one of the vassal Sanjak (administrative district) Beyliks (principalities) in Egypt was given to him. When vassal Sanjak Beyliks were abolished by Kara Mehmed Pasha, Beylerbeyi (governor) of Egypt, in 1016 AH/1608 AD, he returned to Istanbul. He was not appointed to an office for a long time. In 1029 AH/1620 AD, he was appointed as title deed and cadastre director in 1029 AH/1620 AD, and became Nishanci again in 1030 AH/1621 AD. He served in military campaign to Poland, but was dismissed from this duty during the campaign. He was appointed as Nishanci for the fifth time during the second reign of Sultan Mustafa (1622-1623). He was dismissed in 1033 AH/1624 AD and retired. In early 1039 AH/1630 AD, he died at the age of 69 in Istanbul. His tomb is near Ekmekchioghlu tomb in the vicinity of Sunbul Efendi.What is known about his family is limited to his son named Vakʿi Ahmed Efendi (d. 1060 AH/1650 AD). Ahmet Efendi learned Naskh, Thuluth and tevkīʿi types of calligraphy styles from his father. He served as anthology writer for Shaykh al-Islām Bahāī Efendi. He died in 1060 AH/1650 AD when he was serving as teacher in Sulaymaniyah Madrasah. His tomb is around Shaykh Vefa tomb.In addition to his administrative duties, Mehmed Shāhī was also interested in poetry, prose, calligraphy, mysticism, ḥadīth and tafsīr (exegesis). Possibly also due to his dismissal of duties many times in his life, he produced many works. Among them are Aḥsan al-ḥadīth, an-Naẓm al-mubīn fī āyāt al-erbaʿīn, al-Maqām al-Maḥmūd, Tarjuma-i Tuḥfa as-ṣalavāt, Jāmiʿ al-ghāyāt, Mukhtār al-akhyār, Qānūn-i Jadīd-i Arāḍi, Munsheat ve Dīwān. Famed for his prose works, the author was also a poet. With his couplets which he wrote under pseudonym of Zaynī, he managed to get on the anthology of Kınalızāde at his twenties. He was celebrated with the expression of “Arrow of word from his bow of soul has reached the target of approval from masters; he is at a young age (at his twenties)”. Subsequently adopting pseudonym of Shāhī, the poet had some poems published within the works of Beyānī, Nevʿizāde and Mustaqimzāde as well as within his own prose works. Mustaqimzāde even mentioned that Mehmed Shāhī had a dīwān. Nevertheless, this work of him has not been found yet. A total of 30 poetry works of Mehmed Shāhī were found in various sources, except for his translations of 40 ḥadīth and 40 Qur’ān verses written in poetry. Of his 30 poetry works, 26 were written in Turkish and 4 in Persian. Various sections of ʿarūḍ (meter) were used in these works written as couplets, quatrains and verses. It could be stated that his poems rich in Persian and Arabic words had a rich rhyme frame. In his poetry works in which religious, literary, historical, legendary and mysticism themes were worked, concepts and figures such as Allah, the Lord, Messiah, Messenger, Risālet (messengership), intercession, Kāfūr al-Ikhshīdī (966-968), Mustaʿsim (d. 656 AH/1258 AD), Ibn Alkamī (d. 656 AH/1258 AD), Naṣīr-i Tūsī (d. 672 AH/1274 AD), Jamshīd, Keyumars, Uftade, Hudāyī, Majūsī, Kizilbash, Bayramī and muftī (jurist capable of giving a formal legal opinion). His poems were about intercession demand from the Messenger (PBUH), sin of serving to Persian, importance of an invention, praise of Uftade Sultan (d. 988 AH/1580 AD), effect of prayer, fate of administrator favoring his relatives, futility of envying the rich, importance of fighting with Zoroastrian, benefits of exhibition of sorrow, value of skillful people, resembling of the world to a bride with a thousand grooms, beauty of eloquence, ignominy of leaving chastity for lust, asking for forgiveness for sins, talent of understanding the words, not giving quarter to enemies, praise of Hz.ʿUmar, humbleness, value of lack of worldly things, sufferance due to the beauty of the beautiful, needing not to wonder why the beloved one is far away, evil of protecting the snot, richness of Arabic language, deeds of Anatolian fāḍils (virtuous), importance of endeavor in succeeding the closeness to God and respectability of ʿAzīz Maḥmūd Hudāyī (d. 1038 AH/1628 AD). Okchuzāde Mehmed Shāhī was an Ottoman statesman who also earned a well-deserved fame for his works written in inshāʾ (composition) genre of elaborate prose. In addition, he also had poetry works. Praised for the poems which he wrote in his early ages by anthology writers who included his poems in their anthologies, the poet also had some couplets and quatrains scattered among his own prose works. His poems in the form of couplets and quatrains within abovementioned works mostly were about religious, literary, legendary, historical and mysticism themes.Mehmed Shāhī was knowledgeable in tafsīr, ḥadīth, mysticism and calligraphy, and had good levels of Arabic and Persian. Writing poems in Persian, Mehmed Shāhī was decorated his prose works with Arabic expressions such as Qur’ān verses, ḥadīths and proverbs. It could be stated that such decorations made the language of his poems more difficult. Nevertheless, his poems are plainer and easier compared to his prose works. The poet who also had lyrical poems generally preferred ḥikamī (sapiential) style and wrote genres such as munacaat (prayer to God), shafaatnāme (intercession epistles), historical quatrain, medhiye (panegyric) and hicviye (epigram). His poems in anthologies were lyrical, those in Aḥsan al-ḥadīth and an-Naẓm al-mubīn were didactical and those in Munsheat were epic. Based on an evaluation of these poems, it could be stated that he was a poet with a style, though not a poet of first class. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Journal of the History of Philosophy 41.2 (2003) 273-274 [Access article in PDF] Christoph Lüthy, John E. Murdoch, and William R. Newman, editors. Late Medieval and Early Modern Corpuscular Matter Theories. Leiden: Brill, 2001. Pp. viii + 610. Cloth, $186.00. The nineteen papers of this weighty (handsomely produced, but expensive) volume are mostly devoted to the views of one thinker or group of persons on "corpuscularism" (see 17ff.), (...) in either physics or mathematics, with few synthetic or diachronic studies. Only a quarter of the volume is devoted to the medieval period: Danielle Jacquart on minima in the Salerno school of medicine (twelfth century); the late George Molland on Roger Bacon's and Grosseteste's "corpuscular tendencies"; Charles Lohr on Ramon Lull; John Murdoch on minima naturalia in the medieval and Renaissance periods; and the greater part of William Newman's study of corpuscularian conceptions in "Aristotelian alchemy" from Geber to Sennert. The early-modern part includes studies on mostly expected figures: Francesco Patrici, Giordano Bruno, the Northumberland circle, Francis Bacon, David Gorlaeus (a little-known Dutch theology student; 1591-1612, sic), Daniel Sennert, Honoré Fabri, Galileo, Gassendi, Charleton, Boyle, Locke, and Homberg. Alan Gabbey more generally distinguishes different patterns of explanations in mechanical philosophy.As far as I can judge, the authors are knowledgeable and competent, and the studies make important contributions. But just because this is a high-quality volume produced with the ambition of making a step toward rewriting the history of a major chapter in the history of science, its two significant and principled deficiencies must be pointed out.The volume follows the intention of "show[ing] the debt of early-modern matter theory to previous traditions and thereby [explaining] its bewildering heterogeneity" (back cover). Now, the study of the corpuscular traditions in the pre-modern period is certainly an important desideratum (although this volume again attends chiefly to the early modern corpuscularians). But the motivation and perspective here announced—the medieval period [End Page 273] is to be studied because early modern science is indebted to it—are astoundingly Whiggish. Worse: the study of the entire Arabic-Islamic tradition is dismissed, on the grounds that "Islamic atomism does not seem to have been of any influence upon Christian fourteenth-century atomism" (8): this is not only Whiggism, but also frank and explicit euro- and Christian-centrism, which in the beginning of the twenty-first century is simply stunning. The method amusingly consists in affirming the consequent: presupposing that "Islamic atomism" did not influence the West and early-modern science, no scholar was asked to examine whether or not this was indeed the case, with the congenial result that the volume seemingly confirms the initial presupposition. Q.E.D. Similarly and no less regrettably, the fact that (ps.-) Geber's Summa Perfectionis is not, as Lasswitz had thought, the translation of an Arabic work is here used as grounds on which to dismiss altogether his claim concerning the importance of the Arabic input (13, but see also 293). This way, incomprehension between civilizations is reinforced instead of being reduced, and I believe we did not need September 11 to know this.The thusly dismissed Mu'tazilite school of Islamic theology had important repercussions in Judaism, so that referring to it as "Islamic atomism" is misleading (see notably Hagai Ben-Shammai, "Studies in Karaite Atomism," Jerusalem Studies in Arabic and Islam 6 [1985]: 243-93). The volume's forty-page cumulative bibliography, for which the editors are to be congratulated, reflects the volume's parochial viewpoint: H. A. Wolfson's important The Philosophy of the Kalam (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1976), with some 150 pages on atomism, is not included; nor is the (English version of the) landmark study by the late S. Pines, Studies in Islamic Atomism (Jerusalem: The Magnes Press, 1997; the original 1936 German version is mentioned). Wolfson's study, incidentally, shows that the editors' presupposition (8) that the Kalâm tradition could have influenced the West only via the Latin translation of Maimonides' Guide of the Perplexed is unwarranted, for Isaac... (shrink)

(Awarded the International Society for Intellectual History’s Charles Schmitt Prize) Mīrzā Fatḥ 'Alī Ākhūndzāda’s Letters from Prince Kamāl al-Dawla to the Prince Jalāl al-Dawla (1865) is often read as a Persian attempt to introduce European Enlightenment political thought to modern Iranian society. This essay frames Ākhūndzāda’s text within a broader intellectual tradition. I read Ākhūndzāda as a radical reformer whose intellectual ambition were shaped by prior Persian and Arabic endeavors to map the diversity of religious belief and to critically (...) assess the limits of religion. That Ākhūndzāda’s critique of religion reached further than that of his predecessors is due in part to the influence of the European Enlightenment, but Ākhūndzāda’s form of critical reasoning was also substantially shaped by prior early modern intellectual genealogies. -/- . (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:The Absolute and Ordained Power of God and King in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries: Philosophy, Science, Politics, and LawFrancis OakleyThe quintessentially scholastic distinction between God’s power understood as absolute and ordained (potentia dei absoluta et ordinata) has been described “as a ‘yes and no’ answer to the question whether God is able to do or arrange things other than he did in creating the orders of nature and (...) grace.” 1 The importance of that distinction the historical scholarship of the past forty years has served increasingly to indicate. 2 The idea that it expressed had emerged already in the twelfth century, and in the standard form familiar to us from later years we now know it to have surfaced among the theologians of Paris in the opening years of the thirteenth. We also know that long before the end of the thirteenth century it had come to be understood in the two distinct ways that were to persist on through the late medieval and early modern centuries and to be acknowledged in the neo-scholastic manuals of the late nineteenth century.According to the first of these understandings, embedded in the classical formulations given to the distinction by Albertus Magnus, Thomas Aquinas, William of Ockham, and many other later thinkers, the term potentia absoluta was used simply to denote God’s power in itself, taken in abstracto and without reference to the orders of nature and grace he has actually willed de potentia ordinata to establish. There was no question, that is, of the absolute power’s [End Page 669] being understood as a presently-active power by means of which God intervenes in the world to act apart from or set aside the order established by the ordained power. It refers instead to God’s ability to do many things he does not choose to do. Or put in the temporal terms that William Courtenay favors, it refers to “the total possibilities initially open to God, some of which were realized by creating the established order,” the “unrealized possibilities” being “now only hypothetically possible.” 3Side by side with this “classical” usage, however, there had emerged already in the thirteenth century what has been called a “juristic” or “opera-tionalized” understanding of the potentia dei absoluta as a presently-active power of potential interposition in the established order. Thus Duns Scotus, who gave a most influential expression to this alternative understanding, drawing an analogy not only with kings but with any free agent within whose power the law falls, distinguished between the ordained power by which God acts de jure in accordance with the rightful law he has established and the absolute power whereby de facto he can act apart from or against the law. In such a formulation the absolute power clearly exceeds the ordained. Rather than referring simply to the realm of logical possibility prior to God’s ordination of things, that absolute power is now construed as a presently-active and extraordinary power capable of acting apart from the order established de potentia ordinata and prevailing in the ordinary course of things. This “juristic” understanding of the distinction was clearly affiliated closely with the cognate distinction that medieval canonists invoked as early as the thirteenth century in an attempt to elucidate what the pope, in the absoluteness of his plenitudo potestatis, or absolute power, could do that was not open for him to do when acting in accordance with his merely ordained or “ordinary” power.Philosophy and ScienceIn an earlier and complementary article, I traced the career of the power distinction, as well as the persistence of the two distinct ways of understanding it, across the fifteenth century and on into the thinking of sixteenth- and seventeenth-century theologians, Lutheran and Reformed as well as Catholic. 4 It remains now to go on to demonstrate that the currency of the distinction in these later centuries was no more confined to strictly theological circles or settings than it had been during the Middle Ages. The Coimbran commentators and Suárez certainly deployed it for more generally philosophical purposes, 5 [End Page 670] and in the seventeenth century they were by no means... (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:Chinese and Indian Ways of Thinking in Early Modern European Philosophy: The Reception and the Exclusion by Selusi AmbrogioCatherine König-Pralong (bio)Chinese and Indian Ways of Thinking in Early Modern European Philosophy: The Reception and the Exclusion. By Selusi Ambrogio. London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2020. How Modern Historians of Philosophy Drew Their World MapsIn his latest book, Chinese and Indian Ways of Thinking in Early Modern European (...) Philosophy: The Reception and the Exclusion, Selusi Ambrogio presents an extensive survey of how Indian and Chinese traditions were conceived of and staged in modern European historiography. This study, which surpasses in detail and scope other works devoted to the same topic,1 reconstructs 150 years of philosophical historiography. Otto van Heurn's Barbaricae philosophiae antiquitatum libri duo (published in 1600) included for the first time contemporary and ancient Indian thinkers in the philosophical doxography; at the other end of the time span considered, Jacob Brucker's Historia critica philosophiae (1744) sanctioned the exclusion of Chinese and Indian thinkers by means of a detailed criticism of their pseudo-philosophies. Moreover, Ambrogio makes the choice to focus on the history of philosophy, unlike Étiemble, for example,2 who was interested in philosophy in a broad sense—academic and non-academic—as well as in travel accounts, the writings of the Jesuits, and those of their opponents, among other sources. According to Ambrogio, the histories of philosophy were more representative of "the common European understanding of these civilizations," since they "were not openly written for controversialist aims" (p. 2). Even though one may wonder whether defining philosophy ("what philosophy is and its role"—ibid.) and legitimizing its scholarly practice is a less political or less polemical undertaking than pamphlets, letters, and philosophical essays,3 it is probably true that philosophical historiography produced an effect of objectification or an appearance of neutrality.The author's main thesis is that the exclusion of all non-Greeks or non-Europeans from the history of philosophy does not date from the nineteenth century and Hegel, as is generally thought, but precisely from the moment when Indian and Chinese "civilizations" were considered by historians of philosophy and included in the philosophical historiography: from the beginning of the seventeenth century onwards (p. 3). Applying a segregationist model, modern historians of philosophy developed a dialectic of [End Page 203] identification—the author speaks of "reception"—and exclusion. They defined the European philosophical mind by demarcating it from other ways of thinking, which they situated in place and time on a civilizational world map. Encompassing the world from Europe produced in return processes of definition and situation. Philosophy was established in a territory and identified with a "culture" or "mind" that began to think itself in relation to the rest of the world under the name of Europe.4I will discuss Ambrogio's remarkable work in three moments. First, I will develop some particularly interesting conclusions drawn from the study; namely, they address periodization, the production of cultural categories, and the valorization of theory. I will then discuss the main thesis as well as some problematic issues, before concluding on the subject of a world absent from Ambrogio's book, the Near and Middle East.I. Logic of Time and Cultural TerritorializationAmbrogio's book is composed of three parts that address three successive historiographical models. First, the "perennialist universalism" (p. 57)—represented by, among others, Otto van Heurn, Thomas Burnet, Isaac Vossius, François Bernier, Georg Horn, and François de la Mothe le Vayer—included ancient India and then China in the "prisca theologia"; on the other hand, it described contemporary Indian and Chinese thinkers as "barbarian" philosophers. In this constellation, Buddhism began to function as the negative part of Oriental thought. According to the Jesuits, it had polluted and corrupted the original Chinese wisdom, often identified with Confucianism.The second model constructed an "Atheistic Asia," which was used either as a positive anthropological image (for example in Pierre Bayle), or as a negative foil for Lutheran philosophy and theology (for example in Johann Franz Buddeus). In the pages he dedicates to these endeavors, Ambrogio often moves away from philosophical doxography, represented by André-Fran... (shrink)

This book offers the first comprehensive introduction to one of the most significant Arab thinkers of the late 20th century and the early 21st century: the Moroccan philosopher and social theorist Mohammed Abed al-Jabri. With his intellectual and political engagement, al-Jabri has influenced the development of a modern reading of the Islamic tradition in the broad Arab-Islamic world and has been, in recent years, subject to an increasing interest among Muslims and non-Muslim scholars, social activists and lay (...) men. The contributors to this volume read al-Jabri with reference to prominent past Arab-Muslim scholars, such as Ibn Rushd, al-Ghazali, al-Shatibi, and Ibn Khaldun, as well as contemporary Arab philosophers, like Hassan Hanafi, Abdellah Laroui, George Tarabishi, Taha Abderrahmane; they engage with various aspects of his intellectual project, and trace his influence in non-Arab-Islamic lands, like Indonesia, as well. His analysis of Arab thought since the 1970s as a harbinger analysis of the ongoing “Arab Spring uprising” remains relevant for today's political challenges in the region. (shrink)

[Holbrook's] is one of the keenest and deepest critical minds in the field of Islamic literature. She provides for the reader (scholar and lay persona alike) fascinating insights into the genre, poetic functions, mystical allegory, narrative technique, audience response, etc. Many of her analyses are scintillating.... The Holbrook volume is a landmark in Ottoman literary scholarship. --MESA Bulletin... a major contribution to Ottoman and Turkish literary study--I frankly am at a loss to describe how major.... Dr. Holbrook's (...) book will make its own category and subsequent publication in the field will be judged in relation to it. --Walter G. Andrews, professor of Near Eastern Languages and Civilization, University of Washington When the Ottoman Turkish Empire was divided into modern states after World War I, in Turkey a change of alphabet and radical linguistic reform aimed to free modern Turkish literature from intellectual ties to the East. Holbrook recuperates Ottoman debates on the existential status of language and social value of art with a poetics of Beauty and Love, the philosophical fairy tale in verse by Seyh Galib. Where does language come from? How does a poet conceive imagery? What rights to interpretive authority does Muslim law accord the individual when God's word is law? Holbrook's lively analysis ranges an intertext of genres in Arabic and Persian as well as Turkish. The romance of separated lovers is a paradigm of journeys that lead beyond discourse. A poet's quest for originality reveals an archaeology of modernism. Holbrook traces the revolutionary polemic and Orientalist philology that de-aestheticized Ottoman poetry, bringing the critique of Orientalismto bear upon the Ottoman center Orientalism suppressed. (shrink)

The article covers main features of Early Modern Sufi Philosophy in Crimea. Based on the new discoveries of Arabic manuscripts in Turkey (libraries in Istanbul and Corum) and Germany (Berlin library), the study provides analysis of the Sufi approach towards human onthology, developed by Crimean thinkers Ibrahim al-Qirimi, Abu Bakr al-Kafawi and finally Hussam al-Din al-Qirimi. Apart from the classical Sufi rethinking of a human being as the body-soul entity making spiritual journey towards final Perfect Man (al-insan al-kamal) (...) and approaching ultimate revival, Crimean thinkers also paid great attention to the issue of human freedom, naming it by special term (Arabic al-istiqlal, literary meaning “independence”). In contrast to rather conservative background of Islamic discursive theology (kalam) and other schools of Islamic philosophical thought of the Post-Classical period, special attention to this concept can be regarded as evidence of some "humanistic" tendencies among thinkers of the Crimean Khanate. The article also notes that this concept of freedom was considered by Crimean thinkers as one of the important conditions for the manifestation of Divine Attributes in human existence; that is, the anthropologic measurement of the pantheistic idea of "unity of being", widely poplular among Sufis of those times. Taking into account the fact that the modern notion of "freedom" in the Arabic philosophical thought is based predominantly on Western concepts, the new reading of Sufi Post-Classical manuscripts reveals autochthonous cultural potential of this tradition. (shrink)

The article is devoted to the analysis of representations of the state which were part of the philosophical concept of the famous Ukrainian church leader, educator, philologist Yepyfanii Slavynetskyi. It was found that the historical and cultural context in which these views were formed, included deep familiarity with European philosophy, the theory of the state developed by the Orthodox intellectuals of Kyiv-Mohyla Collegium, the political struggle for the incipience of early modern Ukrainian nation in the second half of the (...) XVII century. Noted significant influence of the philosophy of E. Slavynetskyi on the religious, cultural and educational processes in Muscovy in era of Patriarch Nikon's reforms. The presence of the Patriarch own notions of state authority actively influence on the formation of the E. Slavinetsky's concept too. It is noted that E. Slavynetskyi's statesmanship theory was based on the developed by the Ukrainian Orthodox intellectuals of the end of XVI - first half XVII theory of the ideal state, which in the second half of the XVII century actively evolved due to the political union of the The Cossack Hetmanate and Moscow. Accordingly, E. Slavynetskyi recognized people's right to political activity and state power, the church was considered as a leader of social progress, obligement of the lord to care for the public good. It was found that the concept of E. Slavynetskyi's state have many elements of European theories of enlightened absolutism. Yes, he acknowledges that the foundation of the state is public good and providing the best way for implementation this good - monarchy, insisted on the absolute power of the monarch. The relationship between the church and secular authorities philosopher solves unambiguously in favor of a secular, acknowledging the king's right to decide all important issues of church life. It is noted that the main reason for the evolution of such ideas was given the fact of The Cossack Hetmanate's political union with Russia as the civilizational mission to improve the capacity of the Orthodox culture and building a just state. This theory has become its logical conclusion later in the XVIII century in F. Prokopovich's philosophical views and political activities. (shrink)

PREFACE WORD The Tanzimat period, which was the starting point of reform movements in many areas such as social, political, economic, military, etc., in which steps were taken towards Westernization, is considered to be an important milestone in drawing the fate of the Ottoman Empire. In this longest century of the empire, when many things were rushed, education partially received its share of change and reform. However, since the field of education was under the control of religious institutions such (...) as the Şeyhülislâmlık and the Nezâresi Evkâf-ı Hümâyun, the changes and reforms in this field remained limited. Regarding philosophy, which is the subject of our study, we can say in advance that philosophical movements in the West, the ideas of philosophers and philosophical education in the Western sense began to enter our country in the post-Tanzimat period. It is noteworthy that during this period when the Ottoman Empire became acquainted with Western philosophy, philosophy in the West experienced a period of crisis. In the period preceding this acquaintance, philosophy education in our country was carried out in a style loyal to the tradition of Islamic philosophy, and the break in this tradition occurred with the Tanzimat. One of the most widely debated issues from the Tanzimat to the present day has been whether or not a philosophical tradition unique to us can be established. Issues such as whether a philosophy built on our own culture and values can provide us with the opportunity to raise philosophers who are considered philosophers in the Western sense, and the level of competence and proficiency of Turkish in terms of creating a philosophical language on the way to realizing this opportunity, and efforts to establish a deep-rooted tradition continue to stand before us. In this study, from a holistic perspective, the changes in philosophical paradigms in certain periods from Tanzimat to the present day have been tried to be determined chronologically and problematically. The fact that the movements that emerged with Tanzimat were broken in certain periods, such as 1915, 1933 and 1960, and left their place to different movements, and the changes in our country in parallel with the change in the perception of philosophy in the world have been tried to be revealed in this study, and as a result of the study, results that have not been expressed so far have been reached. Again, whether the perception of philosophy has changed in society along with the change in philosophy in higher education is among the topics investigated in this study. For example, the fact that professors such as Mehmet İzzet, Niyazi Berkes and Necati Öner, who studied philosophy, regretfully admitted that it was embarrassing to say "I am studying philosophy", and instead took refuge in evasive answers such as "I am studying at the Faculty of Literature, I am studying at the Faculty of Language and History", clearly shows how the difficulty of doing philosophy in Turkey is at a high level with these prejudices. From the times when philosophy was identified with irreligion and atheism, and philosophers were seen as useless people who only criticized and did not produce solutions, to the present situation, the paths taken and the obstacles overcome make us hopeful for the bright future of philosophy in Turkey. In the Dârülfünun, which was de facto established in 1863 and opened and closed many times, philosophy courses were able to find a wide place in the curriculum after 1900 and especially after 1916. However, the contribution of philosophy courses and departments, which have been a significant part of the academy since 1916 both as a field of research and education, to the establishment and development of the longed-for original philosophical thought is currently the subject of a separate discussion. Indeed, philosophy departments have never escaped the criticism that they teach Western thought, transfer Western intellectual currents, ignore social values, and provide an exclusively Western and unproductive education. Our study, which deals with the processes of change and transition in philosophy education in Turkey and the debates on these processes, consists of three chapters and three appendices. In the first part, the studies in the field of philosophy from Tanzimat to the Republic are discussed theoretically and a general framework is tried to be drawn about the establishment of philosophy in Turkey. The topics covered in this section are mainly philosophy education until the establishment of the first university in 1863 under the name Dârülfünun and its closure and reopening in 1900 under the name Dârülfünun-ı Şâhâne. As is known, after a long period of trial and error, Dârülfünun was reformed under the name "Dârülfünun-ı Osmânî" in 1908 during the Second Constitutional Monarchy. Reforms in the field of education continued unabated, and with the university reforms in 1915 and 1933, philosophy departments also underwent significant change and transformation. Especially German faculty members, who were influential in these reforms, played an active role in the restructuring of the philosophy department. Apart from universities, philosophical activities were also carried out in non-governmental organizations, newspapers and journals. In particular, the philosophers who tried to become an association under the name of the Turkish Philosophical Society are today actively working under the name of the Philosophical Society of Turkey and the Turkish Philosophical Association. In this part of our study, in addition to these issues, the philosophers of the Republican period, which we have identified as four generations, and their philosophical attitudes and behaviors are evaluated together with the aspects reflected and not reflected in their works, and the interaction between the similarities and differences between the general characteristics of the generations and the philosophical atmosphere in the country is tried to be analyzed. The similarities and differences between the generations are analyzed since they are the main factors that determine and govern the course of philosophy in Turkey. The second chapter is devoted to "Philosophical Disciplines in Purgatory in the Republican Era". In this section, the disciplines of history of science, logic, Islamic philosophy and philosophy of religion, which we characterize as disciplines in limbo because their place in philosophy departments has always been controversial, are analyzed. In the third and final chapter, under the title "Philosophical Problems and Movements in the Republican Era", the problem of establishing the practical implications of the philosophical issues discussed in the first two chapters on the theoretical level, the question of whether Turkish can be the language of philosophy, Western philosophical movements in Turkey and their representatives are discussed. This chapter concludes with the main purpose of the study, which is to discuss the problems of philosophy in Turkey, suggestions for solutions and future perspectives. We have tried to enrich our research with three appendices that are considered to be complementary to these three chapters. The first appendix contains interviews with twelve senior professors who retired after teaching philosophy in Turkey for many years. These senior professors were asked questions about the changes in the view of philosophy in Turkey, philosophy education in higher education, their perceptions of philosophy, etc., and an important historical note was made with their answers based on their experiences. In this respect, we believe that these interviews will serve as an important source and reference for future generations and the social sciences community. Although the speeches of these professors contain many important discourses, messages and references, we have chosen one motto phrase to carry in the title. On this occasion, we would like to express our gratitude to our esteemed professors for sharing their vast knowledge and experience in the field of philosophy with us. In the second appendix, the short life stories and works of about a hundred professors in the field of philosophy in the Republican period are included. Although this information is sometimes easily obtained through the internet, biographical books or the works of the professors themselves, sometimes, after a very long and laborious work, original information has been reached, which is expressed for the first time in this study. Sometimes the capture of a very small detail required great efforts. In the third and final appendix, the names and periods of the senior philosophers of the Republican period are listed chronologically. (shrink)

Dâwûd al-Qarisî (Dâvûd al-Karsî) was a versatile and prolific 18th century Ottoman scholar who studied in İstanbul and Egypt and then taught for long years in various centers of learning like Egypt, Cyprus, Karaman, and İstanbul. He held high esteem for Mehmed Efendi of Birgi (Imâm Birgivî/Birgili, d.1573), out of respect for whom, towards the end of his life, Karsî, like Birgivî, occupied himself with teaching in the town of Birgi, where he died in 1756 and was buried next (...) to Birgivî. Better known for his following works on Arabic language and rhetoric and on the prophetic traditions (hadith): Sharḥu uṣûli’l-ḥadîth li’l-Birgivî; Sharḥu’l-Ḳaṣîdati’n-nûniyya (two commentaries, in Arabic and Turkish); Şarḥu’l-Emsileti’l-mukhtalifa fi’ṣ-ṣarf (two commentaries, in Arabic and Turkish); Sharḥu’l-Binâʾ; Sharḥu’l-ʿAvâmil; and Sharḥu İzhâri’l-asrâr, Karsî has actually composed textbooks in quite different fields. Hence the hundreds of manuscript copies of his works in world libraries. Many of his works were also recurrently printed in the Ottoman period. One of the neglected aspects of Karsî is his identity as a logician. Although he authored ambitious and potent works in the field of logic, this aspect of him has not been subject to modern studies. Even his bibliography has not been established so far (with scattered manuscript copies of his works and incomplete catalogue entries). This article primarily and in a long research based on manuscript copies and bibliographic sources, identifies twelve works on logic that Karsî has authored. We have clarified the works that are frequently mistaken for each other, and, especially, have definitively established his authorship of a voluminous commentary on al-Kâtibî’s al-Shamsiyya, of which commentary a second manuscript copy has been identified and described together with the other copy. Next is handled his most famous work of logic, the Sharhu Îsâghûcî, which constitutes an important and assertive ring in the tradition of commentaries on Îsâghûcî. We describe in detail the nine manuscript copies of this work that have been identified in various libraries. The critical text of Karsî’s Sharhu Îsâghûcî, whose composition was finished on 5 March 1745, has been prepared based on the following four manuscripts: (1) MS Kayseri Raşid Efendi Kütüphanesi, No. 857, ff.1v-3v, dated 1746, that is, only one year after the composition of the work; (2) MS Bursa İnebey Yazma Eser Kütüphanesi, Genel, No.794B, ff.96v-114v, dated 1755; (3) MS Millet Kütüphanesi, Ali Emiri Efendi Arapça, No. 1752, ff.48v-58r, dated 1760; (4) MS Beyazıt Yazma Eser Kütüphanesi, Beyazıt, No. 3129, ff.41v-55v, dated 8 March 1772. While preparing the critical text, we have applied the Center for Islamic Studies (İslam Araştırmaları Merkezi, İSAM)’s method of optional text choice. The critical text is preceded by a content analysis. Karsî is well aware of the preceding tradition of commentary on Îsâghûcî, and has composed his own commentary as a ‘simile’ or alternative to the commentary by Mollâ Fanârî which was famous and current in his own day. Karsî’s statement “the commentary in one day and one night” is a reference to Mollâ Fanârî who had stated that he started writing his commentary in the morning and finished it by the evening. Karsî, who spent long years in the Egyptian scholarly and cultural basin, adopted the religious-sciences-centered ‘instrumentalist’ understanding of logic that was dominant in the Egypt-Maghrib region. Therefore, no matter how famous they were, he criticized those theoretical, long, and detailed works of logic which mingled with philosophy; and defended and favored authoring functional and cogent logic texts that were beneficial, in terms of religious sciences, to the seekers of knowledge and the scholars. Therefore, in a manner not frequently encountered in other texts of its kind, he refers to the writings and views of Muhammad b. Yûsuf al-Sanûsî (d.1490), the great representative of this logical school in the Egyptian-Maghrib region. Where there is divergence between the views of the ‘earlier scholars’ (mutaqaddimûn) like Ibn Sînâ and his followers and the ‘later scholars’ (muta’akhkhirûn), i.e., post-Fakhr al-dîn al-Râzî logicians, Karsî is careful to distance himself from partisanship, preferring sometimes the views of the earliers, other times those of the laters. For instance, on the eight conditions proposed for the realization of contradiction, he finds truth to be with al-Fârâbî, who proposed “unity in the predicative attribution” as the single condition for the realization of contradiction. Similarly, on the subject matter of Logic, he tried to reconcile the mutaqaddimûn’s notion of ‘second intelligibles’ with the muta’akhkhirûn’s notion of ‘apprehensional and declarational knowledge,’ suggesting that not much difference exists between the two, on the grounds that both notions are limited to the aspect of ‘known things that lead to the knowledge of unknown things.’ Karsî asserts that established and commonly used metaphors have, according to the verifying scholars, signification by correspondence (dalâlat al-mutâbaqah), adding also that it should not be ignored that such metaphors may change from society to society and from time to time. Karsî also endorses the earlier scholars’ position concerning the impossibility of quiddity (mâhiyya) being composed of two co-extensive parts, and emphasizes that credit should not be given to later scholars’ position who see it possible. According to the verifying scholars (muhaqqîqûn), it is possible to make definition (hadd) by mentioning only difference (fasl), in which case it becomes an imperfect definition (hadd nâqis). He is of the opinion that the definition of the proposition (qadiyya) in al-Taftâzânî’s Tahdhîb is clearer and more complete: “a proposition is an expression that bears the possibility of being true or false”. He states that in the division of proposition according to quantity what is taken into consideration is the subject (mawdû‘) in categorical propositions, and the temporal aspect of the antecedent (muqaddam) in hypothetical propositions. As for the unquantified, indefinite proposition (qadiyya muhmalah), Karsî assumes that if it is not about the problems of the sciences, then it is virtually/potentially a particular proposition (qadiyya juz’iyyah); but if it is about the problems of the sciences, then it is virtually/potentially a universal proposition (qadiyya kulliyyah). This being the general rule about the ambiguous (muhmal) propositions, he nevertheless contends that, because its subject (mawdû‘) is negated, it is preferable to consider a negative ambiguous (sâliba muhmalah) proposition like “human (insân) is not standing” to be a virtually/potentially universal negative (sâliba kulliyyâh) proposition. He states that a disjunctive hypothetical proposition (shartiyya al-munfasila) that is composed of more than two parts/units is only seemingly so, and that in reality it cannot be composed of more than two units. Syllogism (qiyâs), according to Karsî, is the ultimate purpose (al-maqsad al-aqsâ) and the most valuable subject-matter of the science of Logic. For him, the entire range of topics that are handled before this one are only prolegomena to it. This approach of Karsî clearly reveals how much the ‘demonstration (burhân)-centered’ approach of the founding figures of the Muslim tradition of logic like al-Fârâbî and Ibn Sînâ has changed. al-Abharî, in his Îsâghûjî makes no mention of ‘conversion by contradiction’ (‘aks al-naqîd). Therefore, Karsî, too, in his commentary, does not touch upon the issue. However, in his Îsâghûjî al-jadîd Karsî does handle the conversion by contradiction and its rules. Following the method of Îsâghûjî, in his commentary Karsî shortly touches on the four figures (shakl) of conjuctive syllogism (qiyâs iqtirânî) and their conditions, after which he passes to the first figure (shakl), which is considered ‘the balance of the sciences’ (mi‘yâr al-‘ulûm), explaining the four moods (darb) of it. In his Îsâghûjî al-jadîd, however, Karsî handles all the four figures (shakl) with all their related moods (darb), where he speaks of fife moods (darb) of the fourth figure (shakl). The topic of ‘modal propositions’ (al-muwajjahât) and of ‘modal syllogism’ (al-mukhtalitât), both of which do not take place in the Îsâghûjî, are not mentioned by Karsî as well, either in his commentary on Îsâghûjî or in his Îsâghûjî al-jadîd. Karsî proposes that the certainties (yaqîniyyât), of which demonstration (burhân) is made, have seven, not six, divisions. After mentioning (1) axioms/first principles (awwaliyyât), (2) observata/sensuals (mushâhadât), (3) experta/empiricals (mujarrabât), (4) acumenalia (hadthiyyât), (5) testata (mutawâtirât), and (6) instictives (fitriyyât), that is, all the ‘propositions accompanied by their demonstrations,’ Karsî states that these six divisions, which do not need research and reflection (nazar), are called badîhiyyât (self-evidents), and constitute the foundations (usûl) of certainties (yaqîniyyât). As the seventh division he mentions (7) the nazariyyât (theoreticals), which are known via the badîhiyyât, end up in them, and therefore convey certainty (yaqîn). For Karsî, the nazariyyât/theoreticals, which constitute the seventh division of yaqîniyyât/certainties, are too numerous, and constitute the branches (far‘) of yaqîniyyât. Every time the concept of ‘Mughâlata’ (sophistry) comes forth in the traditional sections on the five arts usually appended to logic works, Karsî often gives examples from what he sees as extreme sûfî sayings, lamenting that these expressions are so widespread and held in esteem. He sometimes criticizes these expressions. However, it is observed that he does not reject tasawwuf in toto, but excludes from his criticism the mystical views and approaches of the truth-abiding (ahl al-haqq), shârî‘â-observant (mutasharri‘) leading sufis who have reached to the highest level of karâmah. (shrink)

This book offers a historical explanation of important philosophical problems in logic and mathematics, which have been neglected by the official history of modern logic. It offers extensive information on Gottlob Frege’s logic, discussing which aspects of his logic can be considered truly innovative in its revolution against the Aristotelian logic. It presents the work of Hilbert and his associates and followers with the aim of understanding the revolutionary change in the axiomatic method. Moreover, it offers useful tools to understand (...) Tarski’s and Gödel’s work, explaining why the problems they discussed are still unsolved. Finally, the book reports on some of the most influential positions in contemporary philosophy of mathematics, i.e., Maddy’s mathematical naturalism and Shapiro’s mathematical structuralism. Last but not least, the book introduces Biancani’s Aristotelian philosophy of mathematics as this is considered important to understand current philosophical issue in the applications of mathematics. One of the main purposes of the book is to stimulate readers to reconsider the Aristotelian position, which disappeared almost completely from the scene in logic and mathematics in the early twentieth century. (shrink)

PREFACE WORD -/- Hilmi Ziya Ülken was born and educated in Istanbul during the last period of the Ottoman Empire and worked in many fields of the intellectual life of the newly established Republic. Although he was interested in many fields of social sciences, he gained fame in the fields of Turkish thought and Islamic philosophy, and undertook important tasks in revealing and introducing medieval Islamic thinkers and post-Tanzimat Turkish thought. Again, due to his deep knowledge of (...) Eastern and Western philosophies, he was a thinker who made comparative studies and revealed the similarities and differences in both cultures. Apart from philosophy, which is his main field of interest, he also wrote works in the fields of sociology, anthropology, logic, history, novels, poetry, painting, miniature painting and even calligraphy. Ülken served as a bridge to the disconnect in our culture due to the Alphabet Revolution through the works he wrote and the students he trained. He made great contributions to Turkish-Islamic thought with his maturity period works, especially when he was a faculty member in the field of systematic philosophy at Ankara University Faculty of Theology. The philosophy of being, which constitutes the main axis of our study, is intertwined with metaphysics and ontology. Metaphysics, which deals with the question of "what being is", and ontology, which seeks to answer the question of "what kind of the same things exist in essence", are closely related; in fact, it is almost impossible to separate these two fields. Metaphysics, or the philosophy of being, is the most important and yet the most problematic field of philosophy. This is because throughout the history of philosophy there are many philosophers who do not see metaphysics as a field of philosophy. Especially in the Enlightenment period, metaphysics was seen as unobservable and incapable of meaningful discourse because it included topics such as God, the soul and universals. Some positivist thinkers even saw metaphysics as a continuation of animist discourse, the biggest obstacle to progress and Enlightenment, and criticized it severely. As a continuation of this understanding, metaphysics has been viewed negatively in our country since the early years of the Republic, and some philosophers have ignored an important field of philosophy by saying, "Metaphysics is not philosophy; philosophy is not metaphysics." In fact, in contemporary Western philosophy, Heidegger, Heidegger, Heidegger, Heidegger, Heidegger, Heidegger, Heidegger, Heidegger, Heidegger, Heidegger, Heidegger. In fact, in contemporary Western philosophy, philosophers such as Heidegger (1889-1976), Sartre (1905-1980) and Merleau-Ponty (1908-1961) attempted to demolish metaphysics in order to solve the problem of existence, but in doing so they themselves had to do metaphysics. When we ignore metaphysics, we ignore an important field of philosophy and an important function of the philosopher. Because in the pithy words of Ibn Rushd (1126-1198), "Man is a being who does metaphysics." Again, according to the Andalusian philosopher Ibn Bâjce (1077-1139), a virtuous society is one that emphasizes the metaphysical dimension of human beings. Although Ülken grew up in a period when metaphysics was viewed negatively, he wrote many works in this field and attached great importance to metaphysics. In fact, one of his first works was Metaphysics (1928), which is important in this respect. In addition, one of his mature works, Being and Becoming (1968), which is a summary of his philosophy, also shows the importance he attached to metaphysics. Ülken attached great importance to the philosophy of being (ontology) in his philosophical studies. He even wrote on this subject in his Felsefe Dersleri: Bilgi ve Vücûd Nazariyeleri (Metafizik) (Philosophy Lectures: Knowledge and Body Theory -Metaphysics) (1928), Aşk Ahlâkı (Love Ethics) (1931), İnsanî Vatanperverlik (Humanitarian Patriotism) (1933), and Varlık ve Oluş (Being and Becoming) (1968). These works on ontology are among the first publications in his field in Turkish. According to him, the basic subject of philosophy is existence. Other fields should be built on this philosophy. During our study, the most important problem was the change in Ülken's thought between his works. We also encountered difficulties such as the scattered nature of his works, the lack of a systematic system, the lack of methodological sensitivity in footnotes and citations, and the use of some terms in their original form instead of their Turkish equivalents. (shrink)