Aristotle does not explain why ordinary citizens who lack the virtue of justice nevertheless praise justice and the law. Indignation, defined as pain at the undeserved gains of others, is a promising candidate in the list of means regarding virtues and passions in Book 2 of the Nicomachean Ethics. However, as many scholars have noted, Aristotle’s description of indignation as a mean is flawed. Moreover, indignation is the only characteristic in the list that disappears from the inquiry thereafter. I argue (...) that Aristotle obliquely criticizes indignation for aligning envy, a base passion, with conventional justice. Aristotle’s subtle critique reveals that envy motivates ‘the many’ to support justice, an unsavory conclusion which he does not highlight. (shrink)

Scholarly debate about Kierkegaard’s fideism focuses upon whether his voluntarism—the doctrine that religious faith can be simply willed—is practicable or credible. This paper proposes that a close reading of Philosophical Fragments and The Concept of Anxiety reveals that there is a role for both the will and the intellect in Kierkegaard’s concept of faith. Kierkegaard arrives at a compatibilism that emphasizes the roles of both the intellect and the will. The intellect perceives a “moment” that paradoxically intersects time and eternity (...) and assents to a skeptical argument that one cannot understand how things and events come into existence. And beyond simply recognizing that belief is not unreasonable, the intellect perceives an internal logic to faith in a theological aesthetic—Johannes Climacus’s “poem” in Philosophical Fragments. Against the standard view of Kierkegaard’s voluntarism, this argument for compatibilism shows how the intellect combined with the will forms the “eyes of faith.”. (shrink)

I. A Defense of Adorno's Reading of Kierkegaard On February 27, 1933, Theodor W. Adorno published his first work, Kierkegaard: Construction of the Aesthetic, which was a revision of the Habilitationsschrift that Adorno wrote under Paul Tillich and Max Horkheimer between 1929 and 1931. The Reichstag fire raged that evening, the climax of the Nazi Machtergreifung, and in a matter of days Adorno's most important interlocutors—Walter Benjamin and Siegried Kracauer—would flee Germany. The political context of the Nazi takeover is the (...) obvious background to Adorno's Kierkegaardbuch , the monograph that became the…. (shrink)