Suchergebnisse

This book presents in translation writings by six medieval philosophers which bear on the subject of conscience. Conscience, which can be considered both as a topic in the philosophy of mind and a topic in ethics, has been unduly neglected in modern philosophy, where a prevailing belief in the autonomy of ethics leaves it no natural place. It was, however, a standard subject for a treatise in medieval philosophy. Three introductory translations here, from Jerome, Augustine and Peter Lombard, present the loci classici on which subsequent discussions drew; there follows the first complete treatise on conscience, by Philip the Chancellor, while the two remaining translations, from Bonaventure and Aquinas, have been chosen as outstanding examples of the two main approaches which crystallised during the thirteenth century

The history of political philosophy exhibits two fundamentally opposed responses to economic scarcity. The classical view, exemplified by Aristotle's Politics, accepts scarcity as an inevitable feature of human existence, but endeavors to direct at least some individuals toward a life of virtue that transcends the concern with economic acquisition. Aristotle rhetorically exaggerates nature's beneficence to humans in order to facilitate this goal. A concomitant of his approach is the acceptance of slavery, despite its acknowledged injustice, as the precondition of the leisure essential to the practice of virtue by the city's governing class. In contrast, the modern doctrine, as expounded in Montaigne's Essays, emphasizes the natural neediness of humans and their consequent need to ameliorate their condition by the technological mastery of nature. The modern view aims to liberate human acquisitiveness from the moral and political restraints that both classical and medieval thinkers had endeavored to impose on it. Part of the reason for Montaigne's advocacy of acquisitiveness and self-indulgence had been the desire to divert people's minds from the religious, moral, and political concerns that generated civil strife and religious persecution. The materialism and privatism that characterize modern liberal society render it vulnerable to the attacks of the radical left, however, and subject also to the more profound criticism of Solzhenitsyn.

A conspicuous feature of current demands for a more equitable economic order is the idea of "just prices" or more broadly a just relationship of prices. Although the conception of a just price goes back to medieval philosophy, it has not acquired a generally accepted meaning in either economic or juridical thought and it certainly cannot be regarded as a technical term of art in international economic relations. Yet there is no doubt that the concept of the just price (as well as the closely related notion of a just relationship of prices) expresses political demands that are of considerable importance in the development of new international legal and institutional arrangements. It is particularly interesting to note that the concept which has long played a leading role in the grievances of the poor countries has recently received emphasis in the statements of spokesmen for the industrialized countries faced with the soaring prices of oil and minerals. The idea of linking justice to prices may seem to some to be a vain effort to mingle ethical and economic factors (possibly with overtones of medieval metaphysics) but the political realities cannot be wished away and the demands for fairness and equity in international pricing will have to be faced.

Karl Marx's celebration of capitalism is discussed. The subject is divided into 6 sections: (1) a concept of dialectic; (2) an aspect of freedom; (3) labor being alienated under capitalism & the results of this alienation (4) varieties of the DofL; (5) homage to capitalism; (6) discussion of the fate of labor under socialism. Marx's dialectic of labor is seen to draw upon Hegel's dialectic of consciousness & nature. Hegel's theory of knowledge comprises 3 stages: sensuous consciousness, understanding, & reason. Turning to Marxism, the development from primitive communism, through the divisions of classes in society, to modern communism is cited. This sequence is more prominent in Soviet & kindred doctrine than in Marx's thought which contains a different triad: precapitalist society-capitalism-communism of the future, thus corresponding to the Hegelian division of Ethical Life. Freedom of detachment is discussed as one of the stages of transition, this stage involving freedom from engulfment & the sensing of constraint as coming from a force without, not from within. For Marx labor is both abstract & concrete; abstract under capitalism, for the labor performed is not in itself important, at least not in its concreteness. Marx contrasted medieval & modern labor. Medieval work is viewed as being concrete but not universal, whereas modern work is universal but abstract. Marx holds that capital "steals & shrinks" man's laboring power, but promotes a great increase in the power of mankind, he also holds that capitalism develops a cosmopolitan civilization of production & that it alone must & can do so. S. Cummings.