Michael Ayers (ed.)
- Published in print:
- 2007
- Published Online:
- January 2012
- ISBN:
- 9780197264201
- eISBN:
- 9780191734670
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- British Academy
- DOI:
- 10.5871/bacad/9780197264201.001.0001
- Subject:
- Philosophy, History of Philosophy
This book comprises three main chapters on Descartes, Spinoza and Leibniz, with extensive responses. It explores the common ground of the great early-modern rationalist theories, and provides an ...
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This book comprises three main chapters on Descartes, Spinoza and Leibniz, with extensive responses. It explores the common ground of the great early-modern rationalist theories, and provides an examination of the ways in which the mainstream Platonic tradition permeates these theories. One chapter identifies characteristically Platonic themes in Descartes’s cosmology and metaphysics, finding them associated with two distinct, even opposed attitudes to nature and the human condition, one ancient and ‘contemplative’, the other modern and ‘controlling’. It finds the same tension in Descartes’s moral theory, and believes that it remains unresolved in present-day ethics. Was Spinoza a Neoplatonist theist, critical Cartesian, or naturalistic materialist? The second chapter argues that he was all of these. Analysis of his system reveals how Spinoza employed Neoplatonist monism against Descartes’s Platonist pluralism. Yet the terminology — like the physics — is Cartesian. And within this Platonic-Cartesian shell Spinoza developed a rigorously naturalistic metaphysics and even, Ayers claims, an effectually empiricist epistemology. The final chapter focuses on the Rationalists’ arguments for the Platonist, anti-Empiricist principle of ‘the priority of the perfect’, i.e. the principle that finite attributes are to be understood through corresponding perfections of God, rather than the reverse. It finds the given arguments unsatisfactory but stimulating, and offers a development of one of Leibniz’s for consideration. These chapters receive informed and constructive criticism and development at the hands of, respectively, Douglas Hedley, Sarah Hutton and Maria Rosa Antognazza.Less
This book comprises three main chapters on Descartes, Spinoza and Leibniz, with extensive responses. It explores the common ground of the great early-modern rationalist theories, and provides an examination of the ways in which the mainstream Platonic tradition permeates these theories. One chapter identifies characteristically Platonic themes in Descartes’s cosmology and metaphysics, finding them associated with two distinct, even opposed attitudes to nature and the human condition, one ancient and ‘contemplative’, the other modern and ‘controlling’. It finds the same tension in Descartes’s moral theory, and believes that it remains unresolved in present-day ethics. Was Spinoza a Neoplatonist theist, critical Cartesian, or naturalistic materialist? The second chapter argues that he was all of these. Analysis of his system reveals how Spinoza employed Neoplatonist monism against Descartes’s Platonist pluralism. Yet the terminology — like the physics — is Cartesian. And within this Platonic-Cartesian shell Spinoza developed a rigorously naturalistic metaphysics and even, Ayers claims, an effectually empiricist epistemology. The final chapter focuses on the Rationalists’ arguments for the Platonist, anti-Empiricist principle of ‘the priority of the perfect’, i.e. the principle that finite attributes are to be understood through corresponding perfections of God, rather than the reverse. It finds the given arguments unsatisfactory but stimulating, and offers a development of one of Leibniz’s for consideration. These chapters receive informed and constructive criticism and development at the hands of, respectively, Douglas Hedley, Sarah Hutton and Maria Rosa Antognazza.
Johannes Quack
- Published in print:
- 2012
- Published Online:
- January 2012
- ISBN:
- 9780199812608
- eISBN:
- 9780199919406
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199812608.003.0013
- Subject:
- Religion, Hinduism
This chapter analyses the way in which epistemological and moral arguments co-constitute the official ANiS agenda. The rationalists’ agenda features what Charles Taylor called “exclusive humanism” ...
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This chapter analyses the way in which epistemological and moral arguments co-constitute the official ANiS agenda. The rationalists’ agenda features what Charles Taylor called “exclusive humanism” and “naturalistic materialism” and the rationalists criticises religion(s) on this basis. It is argued, however, that the organisation's position with respect to religion(s) is unspecific and not uniform: officially ANiS claims to only object to harmful and exploitive aspects of religion but often avoids specifying what actually constitutes such practices. It's agenda can further be described as modernistic in it's attempt to accelerate the evolutionary process away from superstition and religion, towards rationalism and science the world over. On the basis of an assumed natural rationality within all human beings, the equality of all humans is stressed against the position of those who differentiate and rank humans along the lines of caste, creed or culture.Less
This chapter analyses the way in which epistemological and moral arguments co-constitute the official ANiS agenda. The rationalists’ agenda features what Charles Taylor called “exclusive humanism” and “naturalistic materialism” and the rationalists criticises religion(s) on this basis. It is argued, however, that the organisation's position with respect to religion(s) is unspecific and not uniform: officially ANiS claims to only object to harmful and exploitive aspects of religion but often avoids specifying what actually constitutes such practices. It's agenda can further be described as modernistic in it's attempt to accelerate the evolutionary process away from superstition and religion, towards rationalism and science the world over. On the basis of an assumed natural rationality within all human beings, the equality of all humans is stressed against the position of those who differentiate and rank humans along the lines of caste, creed or culture.
