To the ancient Greeks, providence was the inherent purpose and
rational structure of the world. In Christian thought, it became a
benign will "providing" for human well-being. And in our own ever
more secular times--is providence lost? Perhaps, but as Genevieve
Lloyd makes clear in this illuminating work, providence still
exerts a powerful influence on our thought and in our lives; and
understanding how can help us clarify the functioning--or,
increasingly, disfunctioning--of concepts of freedom and autonomy
that define our modernity. Such an understanding is precisely the
goal of this book, which traces a succession of transformations in
the concept of providence through the history of Western
philosophy.
Beginning with early versions of providence in ancient Greek
thought, Lloyd follows the concept through its convergence with
Christian ideas, to its role in seventeenth-century philosophical
accommodations of freedom and necessity. Finally, she shows how
providence was subsumed into the eighteenth-century ideas of
progress that eventually rendered it philosophically superfluous.
Incorporating rich discussions of thinkers from Euripides to
Augustine, Descartes and Spinoza to Kant and Hegel, her lucid and
elegantly written work clearly and forcefully brings the history of
ideas to bear on our present confusion over notions of autonomy,
risk, and responsibility. Exploring the interplay among philosophy,
religion, and literature, and among intellect, imagination, and
emotion in philosophical thought, this book allows intellectual
historians and general readers alike to grasp what it actually
means that providence can be lost but not escaped.
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