24 research outputs found
Bodies, Morals, and Religion: Utopia and the Erasmian Idea of Human Progress
Although Thomas More’s description of the Utopians’ ‘Epicurean’ position in
philosophy nominally coincides with Erasmus’s defence of the Philosophia
Christi, More shows no concern for the arguments Erasmus gave in support of
this view. Taking its starting point from Erasmus’s depreciations of the body
and More’s intellectual as well as physical preoccupations with the bodily
sphere, this article presents the theme of the human body and its moral and
religious significance as a test case for comparing Erasmus and More. The
treatises both men wrote on Christ’s suffering in the Garden of Gethsemane
confirm that both authors dealt with the notion of the body in contrasting
ways: Erasmus shows a tendency to address the moral-psychological question
of mentally conquering the worldly self, whilst More highlights the way in
which ordinary facts and physical things may carry spiritual and religious
meaning. Paradoxically, Erasmus consistently applied his spiritualized ideal of
man to this-worldly moral and social concerns, whereas More focused on the
physical domain out of a religious interest in transcendent truths. In line with
Giulia Sissa’s thesis, our hypothesis is that More ostensibly appropriated an
Erasmian type of idealism in Utopia, but, contrary to Erasmus himself, focused
on the exterior form of a virtuous society, rather than on its moral and spiritual
preconditions. While Erasmus advocated a mental transformation towards
reason, More’s Utopia envisioned what might come of this
Method vs. Metaphysics
This article discusses Descartes’s preferred focus on morally and theologically neutral
subjects and points out the impact of this focus on the scientific status of theology.
It does so by linking Descartes’s method to his transformation of the notion of substance.
Descartes’s _Meditations_ centred around epistemological questions rather than
non-human intelligences or the life of the mind beyond this world. Likewise, in his early
works, Descartes consistently avoided referring to causal operators. Finally, having first
redefined the notion of substance in the _Principia,_ Descartes would completely abandon
making use of this notion in his later years. Indeed, in contrast to many authors
before and after him, Descartes never showed any interest in the long-established
metaphysical interpretation of substances as being causal factors of natural change.
With God, nature, and mind commonly serving as instances of substantial causality,
Descartes’s philosophy had a huge impact on the place of God in science and discreet