Michael Banner
- Published in print:
- 2014
- Published Online:
- December 2014
- ISBN:
- 9780198722069
- eISBN:
- 9780191788994
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780198722069.003.0002
- Subject:
- Religion, Theology, Religion and Society
This book outlines an everyday Christian ethics: an ethics which Christianly imagines the fundamental moments of the human life course and in dialogue with alternative imaginations of human being. ...
More
This book outlines an everyday Christian ethics: an ethics which Christianly imagines the fundamental moments of the human life course and in dialogue with alternative imaginations of human being. This chapter argues that the challenge of providing such an ethics is the greater because of deficient and dominant self‐understandings in moral theology and moral philosophy, and consequent misrelations between these disciplines and social anthropology. It suggests that moral theology is misconceived as essentially an ethics of hard cases, that moral philosophy generally fails to reckon with moral practice, and so itself contributes to moral theology's misdirection, and that social anthropology provides a more promising partner for a more adequate Christian ethics. The chapter closes with a treatment of the Mérode Altarpiece as inviting the viewer, as this book invites the reader, to imagine human life in the light of the life of Christ.Less
This book outlines an everyday Christian ethics: an ethics which Christianly imagines the fundamental moments of the human life course and in dialogue with alternative imaginations of human being. This chapter argues that the challenge of providing such an ethics is the greater because of deficient and dominant self‐understandings in moral theology and moral philosophy, and consequent misrelations between these disciplines and social anthropology. It suggests that moral theology is misconceived as essentially an ethics of hard cases, that moral philosophy generally fails to reckon with moral practice, and so itself contributes to moral theology's misdirection, and that social anthropology provides a more promising partner for a more adequate Christian ethics. The chapter closes with a treatment of the Mérode Altarpiece as inviting the viewer, as this book invites the reader, to imagine human life in the light of the life of Christ.
Aaron Garrett
- Published in print:
- 2017
- Published Online:
- February 2017
- ISBN:
- 9780190226411
- eISBN:
- 9780190226442
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780190226411.003.0011
- Subject:
- Philosophy, History of Philosophy, Ancient Philosophy
This chapter outlines what I refer to as the self-knowledge tradition: that we can attain self-knowledge via our natural reason, that the attainment of self-knowledge is a key goal of philosophy, and ...
More
This chapter outlines what I refer to as the self-knowledge tradition: that we can attain self-knowledge via our natural reason, that the attainment of self-knowledge is a key goal of philosophy, and that it is desirable and important. Then I focus on an attack on this tradition beginning with Jean Calvin and Conrad Jansenius that questioned the attainment of self-knowledge via natural reason due to the corruptness or inefficacy of our natural reason. This corruption was a consequence of our natural predilection for self-deceit. The chapter considers self-deceit as undermining of self-knowledge in the French Moralists, Thomas Hobbes, and Bernard Mandeville. I conclude with a brief discussion of the consequences of the seventeenth-century and early eighteenth century attack on self-knowledge in a few of the most important philosophers of the eighteenth century: Joseph Butler, David Hume, Adam Smith, and Jean-Jacques Rousseau.Less
This chapter outlines what I refer to as the self-knowledge tradition: that we can attain self-knowledge via our natural reason, that the attainment of self-knowledge is a key goal of philosophy, and that it is desirable and important. Then I focus on an attack on this tradition beginning with Jean Calvin and Conrad Jansenius that questioned the attainment of self-knowledge via natural reason due to the corruptness or inefficacy of our natural reason. This corruption was a consequence of our natural predilection for self-deceit. The chapter considers self-deceit as undermining of self-knowledge in the French Moralists, Thomas Hobbes, and Bernard Mandeville. I conclude with a brief discussion of the consequences of the seventeenth-century and early eighteenth century attack on self-knowledge in a few of the most important philosophers of the eighteenth century: Joseph Butler, David Hume, Adam Smith, and Jean-Jacques Rousseau.
