Substance, essence and attribute in Spinoza, Ethics I

Both Descartes before Spinoza and Leibniz after him continued the medieval Aristotelian tradition of 'supernaturalizing' Aristotle's conception of God as first substance, and of treating God as the creator of natural substances. Because Spinoza adopts the terminology of that tradition, while identifying Nature with God, he is widely taken to supernaturalize Nature. This presupposes that he conceives his metaphysical axioms as the medievals did theirs, as true of all logically possible worlds, and per se nota to the human intellect. Unlike them, however, he holds that the "mechanical principles of nature," while per se nota, are true only of the actual world. This suggests that his conception of what is per se no tum in metaphysics is holistic, and presumes experience of the actual world. Assuming this, it is shown that his theory of substance in Ethics I must be elucidated on naturalist lines. The objection raised by de Vries to ElplOs, that really distinct attributes cannot, as Spinoza maintains, constitute one and the same substance (or essence of a substance), is shown to be valid on the 'supernaturalizing' interpretation of Spinoza's theory, and Spinoza's replies to it in Ep9 and ElplOs are shown to be question-begging. However, on the naturalist interpretation of it, Spinoza's doctrine in ElplOs is shown to be defensible. Pollock's explanation of why his arguments in ElplOs and Eplld are incompatible with the naturalist interpretation is adopted

Morality, Property and Slavery

This is the text of The Lindley Lecture for 1981, given by Alan Donagan (1925-1991)

Hermeneutics and Nature

This paper contributes to the on-going research into the ways in which the humanities transformed the natural sciences in the late Eighteenth and early Nineteenth Centuries. By investigating the relationship between hermeneutics -- as developed by Herder -- and natural history, it shows how the methods used for the study of literary and artistic works played a crucial role in the emergence of key natural-scientific fields, including geography and ecology

Constitutivism

A brief explanation and overview of constitutivism

What is conscience and why is respect for it so important?

The literature on conscience in medicine has paid little attention to what is meant by the word 'conscience.' This article distinguishes between retrospective and prospective conscience, distinguishes synderesis from conscience, and argues against intuitionist views of conscience. Conscience is defined as having two interrelated parts: (1) a commitment to morality itself; to acting and choosing morally according to the best of one's ability, and (2) the activity of judging that an act one has done or about which one is deliberating would violate that commitment. Tolerance is defined as mutual respect for conscience. A set of boundary conditions for justifiable respect for conscientious objection in medicine is proposed

Ideology and moral values in rhetorical framing:How wine was saved from the 19th Century Phylloxera Epidemic

Extant organizational research into crises has focused on the efforts of different actors to defend and legitimate their ideologies towards particular actions. Although insightful, such research has offered little knowledge about the moral reasoning underlying such action. In this paper, we explore how moral reasoning from different ideological viewpoints can lead to polarized debates and stalemate within the context of ecological crises. We apply our conceptual framework in an analysis of the 19th century French phylloxera epidemic. Drawing upon this analysis, we argue that, by adapting their moral reasoning, opposing stakeholder groups could maintain their underlying ideology, while at the same time pragmatically changing their actions towards the crisis. We discuss the theoretical implications of our analysis for historical research in organizational studies and research on organizations and the natural environment

The twilight of the Liberal Social Contract? On the Reception of Rawlsian Political Liberalism

This chapter discusses the Rawlsian project of public reason, or public justification-based 'political' liberalism, and its reception. After a brief philosophical rather than philological reconstruction of the project, the chapter revolves around a distinction between idealist and realist responses to it. Focusing on political liberalism’s critical reception illuminates an overarching question: was Rawls’s revival of a contractualist approach to liberal legitimacy a fruitful move for liberalism and/or the social contract tradition? The last section contains a largely negative answer to that question. Nonetheless the chapter's conclusion shows that the research programme of political liberalism provided and continues to provide illuminating insights into the limitations of liberal contractualism, especially under conditions of persistent and radical diversity. The programme is, however, less receptive to challenges to do with the relative decline of the power of modern states

Monsters, Laws of Nature, and Teleology in Late Scholastic Textbooks

In the period of emergence of early modern science, ‘monsters’ or individuals with physical congenital anomalies were considered as rare events which required special explanations entailing assumptions about the laws of nature. This concern with monsters was shared by representatives of the new science and Late Scholastic authors of university textbooks. This paper will reconstruct the main theses of the treatment of monsters in Late Scholastic textbooks, by focusing on the question as to how their accounts conceived nature’s regularity and teleology. It shows that they developed a naturalistic teratology in which, in contrast to the naturalistic explanations usually offered by the new science, finality was at central stage. This general point does not impede our noticing that some authors were closer to the views emerging in the Scientific Revolution insofar as they conceived nature as relatively autonomous from God and gave a relevant place to efficient secondary causation. In this connection, this paper suggests that the concept of the laws of nature developed by the new science –as exception-less regularities—transferred to nature’s regularity the ‘strong’ character that Late Scholasticism attributed to finality and that the decline of the Late Scholastic view of finality played as an important concomitant factor permitting the transformation of the concept of laws of nature