Tag Archives: Christianity

Calvin and Servetus

By chris | Published: 9 November 2009
Paul helm has been running a old and erudite series on Calvin at The Guardian. This week he looks at Calvin’s part in the Geneva authorities’ execution of Michael Servetus, concluding with an ambivalent defence that doesn’t seem quite right to me. The plain fact is that the civil authorities in Geneva, with the support of [...]
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King Lear

By chris | Published: 30 October 2009
This post is part of an essay on Mansfield Park, being posted in instalments. Mansfield Park Preface Introduction Method Critiques The Moral Law Within Fanny and Edmund The Crawfords Sir Thomas and Lady Bertram Mrs Norris The Quiet Thing Enlightenment Kantian Deontology King Lear Romanticism The Satirical Inheritance Conclusion Epilogue: Diminutive Greatness & Fanny Price 4.2. King Lear Seneca also wrote nine tragedies on Greek mythological subjects, more designed to be recited or read than [...]
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Kantian Deontology

By chris | Published: 29 October 2009
This post is part of an essay on Mansfield Park, being posted in instalments. Mansfield Park Preface Introduction Method Critiques The Moral Law Within Fanny and Edmund The Crawfords Sir Thomas and Lady Bertram Mrs Norris The Quiet Thing Enlightenment Kantian Deontology King Lear Romanticism The Satirical Inheritance Conclusion Epilogue: Diminutive Greatness & Fanny Price 4.1. Kantian Deontology deontology. The ethical theory taking duty as the basis of morality; the view that some acts are [...]
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Preface to Mansfield Park

By chris | Published: 28 October 2009
This post is the first part of an essay on Mansfield Park, being posted in instalments. Mansfield Park Preface Introduction Method Critiques The Moral Law Within Fanny and Edmund The Crawfords Sir Thomas and Lady Bertram Mrs Norris The Quiet Thing Enlightenment Kantian Deontology King Lear Romanticism The Satirical Inheritance Conclusion Epilogue: Diminutive Greatness & Fanny Price Preface Philosophy is hard. In the Buddhist tradition meditation practitioners are warned that they must engage in study [...]
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Enlightenment

By chris | Published: 21 October 2009
This post is part of an essay on Mansfield Park, being posted in instalments. Mansfield Park Preface Introduction Method Critiques The Moral Law Within Fanny and Edmund The Crawfords Sir Thomas and Lady Bertram Mrs Norris The Quiet Thing Enlightenment Kantian Deontology King Lear Romanticism The Satirical Inheritance Conclusion Epilogue: Diminutive Greatness & Fanny Price 4. Enlightenment In Sense and Sensibility Austen showed that the Hume’s declaration in the Treatise that ‘reason is, and ought [...]
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Free Will, Super Freakocide and Mansfield Park

By chris | Published: 18 October 2009
(See below for updates.) Horgan on Free Will On his blog at the Centre for Science Writing ,John Horgan has been looking at Free Will, ethics and science, his latest post skewering an Einstein quote using a quintessential classical physics analogy (lunar orbits) to suggest that Free Will is an illusion. I agree with John’s broad thesis, about [...]
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Calvin and the Fall

By chris | Published: 12 October 2009
Paul Helm has an interesting series on John Calvin over at the Guardian CiF belief (part 1, part 2). I was first alerted to the subtlety of Calvin’s thought by Marilynne Robinson’s Death of Adam essays and this series of articles is consistent with what I remember from Robinson. John Calvin of course was supposed [...]
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The Post-rational Discourse

By chris | Published: 9 October 2009
Henry over at Crooked Timber has posted Centrism as Tribalism on how centrists can be just as strident and aggressive as the partisans.  This is indeed an excellent point! I am especially fond of it because it highlights something I have been saying, that the breakdown in rationality is systemic to our ethics. Henry [...]
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Losing Our Minds

By chris | Published: 8 October 2009
Reading Antti Kauppinen’s ideas on moral philosophy (long version & encapsulation) and Marilyn Butler’s conclusion for Mansfield Park in Jane Austen and the War of Ideas (1975), I am reminded of a crucial mistake repeatedly made in moral philosophy that I can scarcely believe could be made by anyone with a religious training and commitment [...]
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Bankers, Economists, All, Repent

By chris | Published: 18 September 2009
Archbishop Rowan Williams’ recent call on Newsnight for bankers and economists to repent has provoked a bit of debate in the UK, while across the pond Paul Krugman’s earlier call in the NYT Magazine for fresh water economists to repent has provoked a sharp response from its targets (h/t John Quiggin, who has a nice [...]
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The Invention of Autonomy

By chris | Published: 2 September 2009
In my quest to define what I mean by moral philosophy I will, again, contrast it with something that it is not: The Invention of Autonomy, J.B. Schneewind’s great historical account of modern moral philosophy culminating in the moral philosophy of Kant.  I will do this by way of commenting on some key passages from [...]
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Why religion is valuable

By chris | Published: 23 August 2009
In my previous post, The problem with the Enlightenment, I set out my conviction that the Enlightenment had established a false view of the self, that I labelled Romantic, and that this false view had insinuated itself into modern religion as well as its discontents. (See The romantic Austen (IV) for a taster of [...]
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