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The Arian writers made much of the blunt admission by Jesus that he was ignorant of the Day of Judgment. This chapter examines orthodox responses to the charge that this was proof of the inferiority of the Incarnate Word's nature.

This chapter examines the charge of circularity or question-begging that has been leveled against John Locke's notion of personal identity. It first considers Locke's assumption, in raising the question of personal identity, that there exists a diachronically continuous subject of experience that qualifies as a person by virtue of possessing the capacities characteristic of personhood. It then discusses the concept of a person (Person), described as something that has a certain personality or moral-characteral coherence in addition to being a cognitively sophisticated “sensible creature.” It also suggests that Locke never endorsed the radical theory of personal identity and concludes by interpreting the claim that “consciousness makes personal identity” as simply the claim that “the actions that you'll be responsible for on the Day of Judgment, as a human subject of experience, will be all.”

The essay examines Kant's thesis that “All natural predispositions of a creature are determined sometime to develop themselves completely and purposively” which is the initial proposition of “The Idea for a Universal History with a Cosmopolitan Aim.” It explores the connection between this teleological principle, which Kant applies in the remaining propositions of his essay to the history of humankind, and the central ideas of the Critique of the Teleological Power of Judgment; and, in light of this connection, it argues for the controversial thesis that Kant's philosophy of history is fully “critical.” Special attention is given to what has been called the “cunning of nature,” which refers to the way in which humankind is seen as directed against its collective will to the political ends specified in Toward Perpetual Peace. It further notes, however, that Kant alludes in his essay to a trans‐political goal of history, namely, the collective realization of the highest good.

The decline of moral constraints in a society suffering from intra-state conflict and experiences of violence on an everyday basis is explored in this chapter. Here the author focuses on the moral development of Catholic and Protestant youth in Northern Ireland. The scope of the chapter is to assess whether partisan solutions that violate moral social standards associated with in-group loyalty are employed by Northern Irish youths. The findings show that the major factor that impacts on moral reasoning is not the conflict between Irish Catholics and British Protestants, but the conflict between those who show strong group loyalty and those who seek a culture of coexistence. The findings of the cross-national comparison between Northern Irish and British students indicate a comparatively normal moral development of the former group. This is probably due to the developing peace process that seems to have reduced the general stress level on moral reasoning.

This chapter examines another reason why the idea of a person's overall moral identity or nature may be useful in a Lockean framework. It first considers the difficulty that arises when materialists or mortalists address the troublesome question of what guarantees personal identity between death and resurrection before discussing John Locke's reply to the same question in terms of consciousness. It then explores Locke's position regarding the idea that God may give each of us a brand-new body on the Day of Judgment, which won't matter so long as our personality and memory information and mental capacities and consciousness are somehow preserved. It argues that this kind of preservation of personal identity is no worse than its preservation through sleep or change of material particles. The chapter also analyzes the link between consciousness and concernment and concludes by commenting on punishment and reward.

Relying on Kantian notions of judgement, Sjöholm explores its relevance and applications in Arendt’s aesthetics. Arendt argues that taste alone cannot be the requisite of judgement. Historically, racism and xenophobia can corrupt taste a pure category, such as the corrupt ideology of the Third Reich. Arendt critiques Kant by arguing that, both, aesthetics operates at the level of appearances and appearances can be corrupted by totalitarian regimes and thought. Perception – which is offered as sedimentation of appearances - informs aesthetics. Narratives solidify a sense of the real community and can similarly pervert perception through ideology. As always, Arendt is historically considering The Third Reich in the background of all theorizing, and Sjöholm is directly engaging with Arendt’s political commitment. Arendt locates the ‘sensus communis’ away from the transcendental logic of Kant, and towards the plurality of the public sphere. Arendt’s ‘sensus communis’ is the solidification of a collective, plural and political body towards a new reality; the integration of plurality of senses through the production of a community

The chapter examines the role of apocalyptic in Islam. It begins with the mutation in Muslim apocalyptic literature at the approach of the year 2000, then goes back to Islamic origins as an apocalyptic movement in which Muhammad announced the imminent Last Judgment, and developed military jihad AU: MW and CMS both say lower case, and since you use lc elsewhere, I'm going to standardize to that. as a response to the humiliating disappointment of its non-arrival. After outlining the basic components of Islamic apocalyptic thinking, the chapter traces how Western modernity and, especially, Israel, revived apocalyptic Islam, in the form of global jihad, from 1979 (ah 1400) to the year 2000, from the Iranian (Shiite) revolution to Bin Laden, Hizbullah, and Hamas. Global jihad, in the terms of this book, represents an active, cataclysmic apocalyptic movement aiming at an imperial millennium—the most destructive force in human history.

As a system of belief, medieval Christianity was assertively soteriological and eschatological in its teaching. The Catholic Church was much concerned with the science of personal and collective salvation and soteriology. Less coherent were its teachings about eschatology, the collapse of human history and of the Church Militant at the end of time, to be consummated in the Last Judgment. In the Middle Ages, this surrealistic work was usually ascribed to the pen of St. John the Apostle in his old age. The books of the Bible running from the Hebrew prophets in the Old Testament to the Gospels and Epistles in the New, to say nothing of the Book of Revelation as such, are well stocked with speculative eschatological passages. They have provoked an enormous literature from the time of the church fathers onward, some of it determined to establish the exact nature and, even worse, the exact date of the end of human history.

Humanity has a long record of reacting strongly to heavenly spectacles. Celestial events can be regarded as omens for many reasons. Eclipses and meteor showers impress any observer with the awesome nature of the spectacle itself. Astrological theory can attach importance to certain specific planetary configurations. Tradition associates both comets and meteors with death. The Christian Bible and the Islamic Koran associate solar and lunar eclipses with Judgment Day. Judgment Day is fundamental to Christian theology, and there are some biblical grounds for anticipating its imminent arrival. It is natural to think that such a momentous event will be heralded in the skies. For a variety of reasons, medieval Europeans were expecting Judgment Day to arrive around the end of the first Christian millennium. Hence, any study of the apocalyptic year 1000 should include a survey of the astronomical situation during that period.

This book discusses a wide variety of documents from the 10th and 11th centuries that indicate a concern and expectation during that time about the end of the world, the Last Judgment, the coming of the Antichrist, and either the beginning or the end of the Millennium, depending upon what one believed about the thousand-year reign of Christ. It also lists many documents indicating that in fact there was an expectation of the end of the world from the mid-10th to the mid-11th century, according to the various theories of how the Millennium should be calculated. One of these documents, the commentary on Two Thessalonians by Thietland, second abbot of Einsiedeln, provides an additional, and previously unnoticed, witness to the apocalyptic expectations of the mid-10th century. This commentary, like the rest of Thietland's expositions on the letters of St. Paul, is little known and virtually unstudied.

Around the year 1000, one encounters in the iconography of divine visions, something new: something that betrays at the least some new preoccupations and even a change in attitude with regard to representations of the present or future glory of God. Although the extant documents are rare, dispersed, and often riddled with lacunae, it seems that a reexamination of the Last Judgment and the illustrated Apocalypse cycles from these several decades might shed some new light on the matter. In this regard, the sixty-four verses that remark upon the lost decor of Saint-Pierre de Fleury constitute an exceptional testimony in that they reveal a close connection between a depiction of the Last Judgment and some narrative descriptions of the Apocalypse. Concurrently, the contemporary cycle preserved in the baptistery of Novara suggests a different approach. Essentially, this cycle was conceived so as to eschew this book's representation of the end of time and the Last Judgment.

This chapter relates John Locke's use of the word “consciousness” to the notion that a subject of experience's field of consciousness is identical with its “field of from-the-inside givenness,” where this includes all its present experience, as well as all memories accessible from-the-inside, and also everything somatosensorily available. The chapter suggests that a subject of experience's field of consciousness is identical with its field of morally-affectively-concerned from-the-inside experience, and that Lockean consciousness is always accompanied by concernment. Finally, it considers the fundamental and forensic aspect of Locke's view of personal identity, the commonsense point that “human beings won't on the Day of Judgment be responsible for all the things they have done in their lives, but only for those that they're still Conscious of and so still Concerned in.”

This chapter examines the notion that personal identity or sameness of subject of experience across time doesn't require sameness of substance or substantial composition across time, any more than the diachronic continuity of an individual animal life requires sameness of substance or substantial composition. It begins with a discussion of materialism, one of John Locke's principal ideas in his discussion of personal identity, and especially the idea that one's whole psychological being—one's character, personality, memory, and so on—is wholly located in one's brain. It then considers Locke's claim that materialists can—must—allow full transmission of personal identity across complete change of substance, along with his attempt to block an argument from the taken-for-granted or nonnegotiable fact of personal responsibility on the Day of Judgment to the immateriality of thinking substance.

This chapter examines John Locke's position regarding concernment and repentance. It first considers various possibilities for past events to become part of present consciousness before discussing guilt as a form of concernment in relation to consciousness, personhood, accountability, and punishability. It then explores the idea that one's overall forensic condition, or fundamental moral standing, at any time, either now or on the Day of Judgment, lies in his overall moral character or moral being at that time. It also analyzes the possibility that repentance—metanoia—can cancel out or detach one from a past wrongdoing in such a way that he won't be punished for it on the Day of Judgment, or indeed on some earlier, sublunary occasion, even though he remembers perfectly well what he did.