Where Mechanism Ends: Thomas Reid on the Moral and the Animal Oeconomy
Theories of life have consequences for how the social order is conceptualized. I pursue this theme in the work of the Aberdeen philosopher of mind Thomas Reid (1710–96), or more accurately, in his reactions to others’ views. Reid typically developed his own ideas into a coherent view in juxtaposition to ideas to which he took exception. This means entering into a number of apparently discrete contexts before the unifying threads can be made plain. Let me introduce my theme with a not untypical example of Reid’s way of clarifying by accentuating difference. In 1794, just two years before he died, Reid gave two lectures to the Glasgow Literary Society. The subjects were apparently unconnected. In the first lecture Reid extensively criticized and commented on Joseph Priestley’s materialist philosophy. The central point of dispute was the inertness of matter and its consequences for physiology and religion: “By what force [the muscular fibers] are contracted and relaxed, either in voluntary or involuntary Motion, Philosophy has never discovered. . . . It is here that Mechanism ends, at least human wisdom has never been able to carry it farther; and some cause must operate that has the power of beginning motion” (Wood 1995, 202).
Hutcheson's Moral Sense Theory Reconsidered
There is no more central feature of Francis Hutcheson's moral philosophy than his theory of the moral sense. In the past this sense or faculty was widely understood to be a distinctive and independent sense devoted to the apprehension of moral qualities, but William Frankena has in recent years challenged this traditional view of Hutcheson's theory, and offered in its place an emotivist interpretation. Without question Frankena's study was of the first importance, in that it seems to have overturned the much too simplistic traditional view of the moral sense. Unfortunately, however, Frankena's own interpretation of the moral sense is as inadequate and misleading as the view he overturns, for he concludes that the moral sense is not at all a cognitive faculty, that it does not, that is, apprehend moral qualities, but, rather, is a faculty that enables and motivates us to feel, express, and evoke moral emotions. The moral sense, he argues, is “the source of the feelings involved” in moral approbation or disapprobation, and this approbation is “wholly non-cognitive, very much as it is on Ayer's more recent [emotivist] view … This, I shall show, is much too narrow a view; Hutcheson did not limit the moral sense to a single function, nor did he — lacking as he did twentieth-century perspectives — find it either necessary or desirable to assume that the domains of the cognitive and the emotive (or affective) were mutually exclusive.
Iustitia Dei: A History of the Christian Doctrine of Justification
Preface Acknowledgements 1. Prolegomena 2. The fountainhead: Augustine of Hippo 3. The development of the doctrine in the medieval period 4. The medieval schools of thought on justification 5. The transition from the medieval to the modern period 6. The development of the doctrine in the Reformation period 7. The Tridentine decree of justification 8. The legacy of the English Reformation 9. The modern period Appendix: a glossary of medieval soteriological terms Abbreviations Notes Bibliography Index.