Free and Rational: Suárez on the Will

2013 ◽  
Vol 95 (1) ◽  
pp. 1-35 ◽  
Author(s):  
Sydney Penner
Keyword(s):  
Modern Philosophy ◽  
Early Modern ◽  
Early Modern Philosophy ◽  
Freedom Of The Will ◽  
The Will ◽  
Libertarian Freedom ◽  
Recent Attention

Abstract: Despite the importance of Suárez’s defense of the freedom of the will at the threshold of early modern philosophy, his account has received scant recent attention. This paper aims partially to redress that neglect. Suárez’s position can be understood as a balancing act between desiring to attribute libertarian freedom to agents and desiring to maintain the will’s status as a rational appetite. Hence, he rejects an intellectualism that says that choices are necessitated by the intellect’s judgements (since he does not think that the judgements themselves can be directly free), but affirms that only what is judged good can be chosen.

Grace and Freedom

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Richard A. Muller
Keyword(s):  
Early Modern ◽  
Church Of England ◽  
Roman Catholic ◽  
Reformed Theology ◽  
Divine Grace ◽  
Freedom Of The Will ◽  
Ultimate Cause ◽  
The Will ◽  
Libertarian Freedom ◽  
The Church

Grace and Freedom addresses the issue of divine grace in relation to the freedom of the will in Reformed or “Calvinist” theology in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth century with a focus on the work of the English Reformed theologian William Perkins, and his role as an apologist of the Church of England, defending its theology against Roman Catholic polemic, and specifically against the charge that Reformed theology denies human free choice. Perkins and his contemporaries affirmed that salvation occurs by grace alone and that God is the ultimate cause of all things, but they also insisted on the freedom of the human will and specifically the freedom of choice in a way that does not conform to modern notions of libertarian freedom or compatibilism. In developing this position, Perkins drew on the thought of various Reformers such as Peter Martyr Vermigli and Zacharias Ursinus, on the nuanced positions of medieval scholastics, and on several contemporary Roman Catholic representatives of the so-called second scholasticism. His work was a major contribution to early modern Reformed thought both in England and on the continent. His influence in England extended both to the Reformed heritage of the Church of England and to English Puritanism. On the Continent, his work contributed to the main lines of Reformed orthodoxy and to the piety of the Dutch Second Reformation.

Descartes and the Seven Senses of Indifference in Early Modern Philosophy

Dialogue ◽  
2011 ◽  
Vol 50 (3) ◽  
pp. 577-602 ◽  
Author(s):  
Thomas M. Lennon
Keyword(s):  
Modern Philosophy ◽  
Early Modern ◽  
Early Modern Period ◽  
Early Modern Philosophy ◽  
Modern Period ◽  
The Will

ABSTRACT: Indifference is a term often used to describe the sort of freedom had by the will according to the libertarian, or Molinist account. It is thought to be a univocal term. In fact, however, it is used in at least seven different ways, in a variety of domains during the early modern period. All of them have plausible roots in Descartes, but he himself uses the term in only one sense, and failure to notice this consistent use by him has bedeviled interpretations of his account of the will.

Judgment and belief, in early modern philosophy

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jennifer Marušić
Keyword(s):  
Modern Philosophy ◽  
Early Modern ◽  
Traditional Approach ◽  
Early Modern Period ◽  
Propositional Content ◽  
Early Modern Philosophy ◽  
Causal Influence ◽  
Modern Period ◽  
The Will ◽  
The Difference

What is the difference between simply thinking about something and judging or believing that something is the case? One finds a remarkable range of answers to this question in the early modern period. A traditional approach to judgment has its origins in Aristotle and treats judgment as closely related to predication. Judging, on this view, is a matter of affirming or denying something of something else. Affirming and denying, in turn, are different forms of predication: affirming whiteness of snow results in the judgment that snow is white; denying whiteness of snow results in the judgment that snow is not white. Descartes rejects this approach and instead treats judgment as an act of will. He holds that the intellect or understanding presents us with a complete content for judgment, and then the will, in a separate act, assents or dissents to this content. Spinoza rejects both the Aristotelian and Cartesian views by holding, against the Aristotelian view, that every idea has propositional content and also, against the Cartesian view, that every idea is an affirmation. Spinoza claims that judgment or affirmation just consists in the causal influence that an idea has on us, and he holds that all ideas have some influence. Thus, Spinoza holds the radical view that all ideas are judgments. Finally, Hume also rejects both the Aristotelian and Cartesian views. Against the Aristotelians, he denies that what is judged or believed must always be a proposition with a subject–predicate structure. Against the Cartesians, he denies that belief is in any way subject to the will. Finally, against Spinoza he insists that there are some ideas that are merely conceived and not believed or judged. Hume holds that beliefs differ from ideas that are not believed in a way that makes beliefs more like perceptual experiences.

Introduction

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Marjorie Levinson
Keyword(s):  
Modern Philosophy ◽  
Early Modern ◽  
Martin Heidegger ◽  
Conceptual Structure ◽  
Field Theories ◽  
Self Organization ◽  
Physical Sciences ◽  
Early Modern Philosophy

The Introduction explains the combination of a narrative arc and conceptual structure in the organization of the book. The former, primarily diachronic, discussion is concerned with the development of the field of Romanticism since the 1980s, presented through both a review of scholarship and exemplary readings of well-known lyric poems. The latter, predominantly synchronic, presentation entails an argument for the analytical value of field theories of form—that is, frameworks drawn from early modern philosophy (Spinoza) and postclassical life- and physical sciences, especially models of self-organization. As an alternative to the external, retrospective perspective provided by, for example, Rita Felski in The Limits of Critique, it draws on the work of Martin Heidegger, Pierre Macherey, and the poet-critic J. H. Prynne to offer a conjunctural approach.

The Baroque and Philosophy

2018 ◽  
pp. 601-622
Author(s):  
Michael Moriarty
Keyword(s):  
Modern Philosophy ◽  
Early Modern ◽  
Visual Arts ◽  
Common Sense ◽  
The Self ◽  
Early Modern Philosophy ◽  
The World ◽  
Baroque Art ◽  
Art And Architecture

Although the concept “baroque” is less obviously applicable to philosophy than to the visual arts and music, early modern philosophy can be shown to have connections with baroque culture. Baroque style and rhetoric are employed or denounced in philosophical controversies, to license or discredit a certain style of philosophizing. Philosophers engage with themes current in baroque literature (the mad world, the world as a stage, the quest for the self) and occasionally transform these into philosophical problems, especially of an epistemological kind (are the senses reliable? how far is our access to reality limited by our perspective?) Finally, the philosophies of Malebranche and Berkeley, with their radical challenges to so-called common sense, and their explanation of conventional understandings of the world as based on illusion, have something of the disturbing quality of baroque art and architecture.

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