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