Jonathan Edwards and the “American Difference”: Pragmatic Reflections on the “Sense of the Heart”

1987 ◽  
Vol 21 (3) ◽  
pp. 377-385 ◽  
Author(s):  
David Jacobson
Keyword(s):  
Theological Method ◽  
Jonathan Edwards ◽  
Logical Necessity ◽  
Freedom Of The Will ◽  
The Will ◽  
The Subject ◽  
The Way

Early in Freedom of the Will Jonathan Edwards formulates a description of logical necessity that has important implications for the way we understand both his philosophical and theological method. He describes the principal forms of necessary meaning, delineating three modes of necessity: philosophical, moral and natural. Of these, the first is most important, for it indicates that, at the highest level, meaning is determined according to the structure of a proposition. Edwards states that “philosophical necessity is nothing different from certainty,” and the form of certainty, he tells us, “[is] nothing else than the full and fixed connection between the things signified by the subject and predicate of a proposition.”

Jonathan Edwards on the Sense of the Heart

1948 ◽  
Vol 41 (2) ◽  
pp. 123-145 ◽  
Author(s):  
Perry Miller
Keyword(s):  
Ad Hoc ◽  
Jonathan Edwards ◽  
Great Awakening ◽  
American Mind ◽  
Freedom Of The Will ◽  
The World ◽  
Real Work ◽  
The Will ◽  
The Mind

The reputation of Jonathan Edwards, impressive though it is, rests upon only a fragmentary representation of the range or profundity of his thinking. Harassed by events and controversies, he was forced repeatedly to put aside his real work and to expend his energies in turning out sermons, defenses of the Great Awakening, or theological polemics. Only two of his published books (and those the shortest), The Nature of True Virtue and The End for which God Created the World, were not ad hoc productions. Even The Freedom of the Will is primarily a dispute, aimed at silencing the enemy rather than expounding a philosophy. He died with his Summa still a mass of notes in a bundle of home-made folios, the handwriting barely legible. The conventional estimate that Edwards was America's greatest metaphysical genius is a tribute to his youthful Notes on the Mind — which were a crude forecast of the system at which he labored for the rest of his days — and to a few incidental flashes that illumine his forensic argumentations. The American mind is immeasurably the poorer that he was not permitted to bring into order his accumulated meditations.

scholarly journals Edwards on the Incompatibility of Divine Foreknowledge and Human Free Will

Sententiae ◽  
2020 ◽  
Vol 39 (2) ◽  
pp. 29-45
Author(s):  
Oleh Bondar ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Free Will ◽  
20Th Century ◽  
Jonathan Edwards ◽  
Divine Foreknowledge ◽  
The Past ◽  
Freedom Of The Will ◽  
The Will ◽  
Theological Fatalism ◽  
Nelson Pike ◽  
Necessity Of The Past

In the book “Freedom of the Will”, Jonathan Edwards (1703-1758) put forward a strong ar-gument for theological fatalism. This argument, I suppose, can be considered as the universal basis for discussion between Fatalists and Anti-Fatalists in the 20th century, especially in the context of the most powerful argument for fatalism, introduced by Nelson Pike. The argument of Edwards rests upon the following principles: (a) if something has been the case in the past, it has been the case necessarily (Necessity of the past); (b) if God knows something (say A), it is not the case that ~A is possible (Infallibility of God`s knowledge). Hence, Edwards infers that if God had foreknowledge that A, then A is necessary, and it is not the case that someone could voluntarily choose ~A. The article argues that (i) the Edwards` inference Kgp → □p rests upon the modal fallacy; (ii) the inference „God had a knowledge that p will happen, therefore „God had a knowledge that p will happen” is the proposition about the past, and hence, the necessarily true proposition“ is ambiguous; thus, it is not the case that this proposition necessarily entails the impossibility of ~p; (iii) it is not the case that p, being known by God, turns out to be necessary. Thus, we can avoid the inference of Edwards that if Kgp is a fact of the past, then we cannot freely choose ~p. It has also been shown that the main provisions of the argument of Edwards remain significant in the context of contemporary debates about free will and foreknowledge (Theories of soft facts, Anti-Ockhamism, theories of temporal modal asymmetry, „Timeless solution”). Additionally, I introduce a new challenge for fatalism – argument from Brouwerian axiom.

Freedom and Personality

Philosophy ◽  
1939 ◽  
Vol 14 (55) ◽  
pp. 259-280
Author(s):  
A. E. Taylor
Keyword(s):  
Human Freedom ◽  
Practical Situation ◽  
Freedom Of The Will ◽  
The Will ◽  
The Subject ◽  
Speculative Hypothesis

Is it possible to say anything on the well-worn theme of human freedom or unfreedom which has not been ahready better said by someone else before us? It may be doubted; yet it is always worth while to see whether we cannot at least set what is perhaps already familiar to us in a fresh light and so come to a clearer comprehension of our own meaning. This, at any rate, is all that will be attempted in these pages; I have spoken in an earlier essay of the “practical situation” in which we find ourselves whenever we have to make a decision as involving indetermination, and my purpose is simply to make it plainer to myself, and so incidentally perhaps to a reader, what I mean by such an expression. I shall start, then, by adopting what we may perhaps agree to call a phenomenological attitude to the subject; that is, I will try to describe the facts in a way which anyone who recalls occasions when he has been driven to take a decision will recognize as faithful to his experience, without imparting into the description any element of explanatory speculative hypothesis. The description is meant to be one which will be admitted to be true to the “appearances,” independently of any theory about the “freedom of the will”—to describe correctly that which it is the object of all such theories to explain.

scholarly journals “In Harmony with Reason”: John Duns Scotus’s Theo-aesth/ethics

Open Theology ◽  
2014 ◽  
Vol 1 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Oleg Bychkov
Keyword(s):  
Natural Law ◽  
Point Of View ◽  
Divine Command ◽  
Moral Norms ◽  
God's Will ◽  
Accurate Model ◽  
The Past ◽  
Freedom Of The Will ◽  
The Will ◽  
The Way

AbstractOver the past two decades, the debate has intensified over the nature of John Duns Scotus’s (meta) ethics: is it a purely voluntarist “divine command” ethics or is it still based on rational principles? The former side is exemplified by Thomas Williams and the latter by Allan Wolter. Scotus claims that even the divine commandments that are not based on natural law are still somehow “in harmony with reason.” But what does this mean? Richard Cross in a recent study claims that God’s reasons for establishing certain moral norms are “aesthetic.” However, he fails to show clearly what is “aesthetic” about these reasons or why God’s will would follow “aesthetic” principles in legislating moral norms. This article clarifies both points, first, by painting an up-to-date picture of what constitutes “aesthetic” principles, and second, by providing a more accurate model of the way the human volitional faculty operates and addressing the problem of the “freedom of the will” from a present-day point of view.

Augustine on will, freedom, and foreknowledge: De libero arbitrio, III, 1–3

2015 ◽  
Vol 52 (3) ◽  
pp. 315-332
Author(s):  
CHRISTOPHER HUGHES
Keyword(s):  
Human Freedom ◽  
Divine Foreknowledge ◽  
The Third ◽  
Freedom Of The Will ◽  
The Will ◽  
The Way

AbstractTowards the beginning of the third book of De libero arbitrio, Augustine defends the compatibility of human freedom and divine foreknowledge. His defence appears to involve the idea that the will is essentially free. I discuss and evaluate Augustine's reasons for thinking that the will is essentially free, and the way that Augustine moves from the essential freedom of the will to the compatibility of human freedom and divine foreknowledge.

Horses, Pigeons, and the Therapy of Conversion: A Psychological Reading of Jonathan Edwards's Theology

1981 ◽  
Vol 74 (4) ◽  
pp. 337-352
Author(s):  
David R. Williams
Keyword(s):  
Jonathan Edwards ◽  
Freedom Of Will ◽  
Freedom Of The Will ◽  
The Will

Jonathan Edwards expected his inquiry on the Freedom of the Will to be the definitive work on that subject, establishing for all time the truth of predestination on the twin pillars of reason and revelation. He answered every objection of the Arminians with irrefutable scriptural texts, biting satire, and devastating logic. He brought the revolutionary insights of Locke and Newton to the defense of Reformed doctrine, restructuring ancient truths on the foundations of the latest science.The effort was immediately successful. For sixteen years no one dared to publish a rebuttal. Then, in 1770, with Edwards safely dead, James Dana of Wallingford, Connecticut, published An Examination of the Late President Edwards's Enquiry on Freedom of Will.

Horkheimer and Adorno

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Vincenzo Ferrone
Keyword(s):  
Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel ◽  
Science And Technology ◽  
Will To Power ◽  
The Enlightenment ◽  
Theodor Adorno ◽  
The Will ◽  
The Subject ◽  
New Form ◽  
Subjective Reason ◽  
The Way

This chapter examines the claim by Max Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno, articulated in their work Dialektik der Aufklärung that the Enlightenment underwent a dialectical reversal that paradoxically transformed it into a new form of myth, a totalitarian religion devoted solely to an instrumental rationalism whose final aim was to creatie a dehumanized society dominated by science and technology. Dialektik der Aufklärung began with the adventures of Odysseus (the first Dialektik der Aufklärungrer) and traveled on all the way to Adolf Hitler's totalitarianism and the American mass consumerism in their own day. Horkheimer and Adorno indicted what they saw as the historical failure of the Enlightenment's emancipation project. They took issue with the philosophy of the subject as described in Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, appropriating both Karl Marx's critique of ideologies and Friedrich Nietzsche's unmasking of subjective reason as a smokescreen for the will to power.

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