Joseph Butler

2019 ◽  
pp. 445-452
Author(s):  
Eugene Marshall ◽  
Susanne Sreedhar
Keyword(s):  
Joseph Butler

Theology in the Church of England

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
B. W. Young
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Church Of England ◽  
Ecclesiastical History ◽  
International Reputation ◽  
History Of ◽  
Joseph Butler ◽  
Anglican Theology ◽  
The Many ◽  
The Church

The dismissive characterization of Anglican divinity between 1688 and 1800 as defensive and rationalistic, made by Mark Pattison and Leslie Stephen, has proved more enduring than most other aspects of a Victorian critique of the eighteenth-century Church of England. By directly addressing the analytical narratives offered by Pattison and Stephen, this chapter offers a comprehensive re-evaluation of this neglected period in the history of English theology. The chapter explores the many contributions to patristic study, ecclesiastical history, and doctrinal controversy made by theologians with a once deservedly international reputation: William Cave, Richard Bentley, William Law, William Warburton, Joseph Butler, George Berkeley, and William Paley were vitalizing influences on Anglican theology, all of whom were systematically depreciated by their agnostic Victorian successors. This chapter offers a revisionist account of the many achievements in eighteenth-century Anglican divinity.

Newton’s Modal Metaphysics and Polemics with Spinozism in the “General Scholium”

2021 ◽  
pp. 198-220
Author(s):  
Eric Schliesser
Keyword(s):  
Metaphysical Necessity ◽  
Modal Metaphysics ◽  
Suggestive Evidence ◽  
Joseph Butler ◽  
Formal Causation ◽  
The Way

This chapter is devoted to explaining the nature and use of metaphysical necessity in Newton’s “General Scholium.” In particular, it focuses on Newton’s metaphysical commitments about (i) the nature of modality; (ii) the nature of formal causation; and (iii) God’s existence. In order to explain these, the chapter draws on Clarke and Clarke’s subsequent correspondence with Joseph Butler. In order to clarify some philosophical distinctions, I treat Toland’s Spinozism, in particular, as the target of some of Newton’s arguments. Along the way, I’ll provide suggestive evidence that Newton was in a decent position to distinguish the thought of Descartes from Spinozism

Special Concern and Personal Identity

2021 ◽  
pp. 15-38
Author(s):  
David O. Brink
Keyword(s):  
Personal Identity ◽  
David Hume ◽  
John Locke ◽  
Compensation Principle ◽  
Self Interest ◽  
Henry Sidgwick ◽  
Explanatory Priority ◽  
Special Concern ◽  
Joseph Butler ◽  
Equal Concern

As discussed by John Locke, Joseph Butler, and Thomas Reid, prudence involves a special concern for the agent’s own personal good that she does not have for others. This should be a concern for the agent’s overall good that is temporally neutral and involves an equal concern for all parts of her life. In this way, prudence involves a combination of agent relativity and temporal neutrality. This asymmetrical treatment of matters of interpersonal and intertemporal distribution might seem arbitrary. Henry Sidgwick raised this worry, and Thomas Nagel and Derek Parfit have endorsed it as reflecting the instability of prudence and related doctrines such as egoism and the self-interest theory. However, Sidgwick thought that the worry was unanswerable only for skeptics about personal identity, such as David Hume. Sidgwick thought that one could defend prudence by appeal to realism about personal identity and a compensation principle. This is one way in which special concern and prudence presuppose personal identity. However, as Jennifer Whiting has argued, special concern displayed in positive affective regard for one’s future and personal planning and investment is arguably partly constitutive of personal identity, at least on a plausible psychological reductionist conception of personal identity. After explaining both conceptions of the relation between special concern and personal identity, the chapter concludes by exploring what might seem to be the paradoxical character of conjoining them, suggesting that there may be no explanatory priority between the concepts of special concern and personal identity.

Hume's Philosophy of Religion

1986 ◽  
Vol 20 ◽  
pp. 129-146
Author(s):  
Antony Flew
Keyword(s):  
Human Nature ◽  
Philosophy Of Religion ◽  
Treatise Of Human Nature ◽  
Section Viii ◽  
Joseph Butler

I shall be dealing with not only Sections X and XI but also Part II of Section VIII and Part III of Section XII. Of all this material we have, anywhere in the originally anonymous and later emphatically disowned Treatise of Human Nature, Hume's first book, nothing more than at most hints. But in a surviving letter, written while he was still working on the manuscript of that Treatise, Hume wrote: ‘I am at present castrating my work, that is, cutting off its nobler parts; that is, endeavouring it shall give as little offence as possible, before which I would not pretend to put it in the Doctor's hands’. Enclosed with this letter were some ‘Reasonings concerning Miracles’, which must have anticipated what became Section X of our Enquiry. Presumably there were other excised anticipations also. The ‘Doctor’ mentioned was a Doctor of Theology, Joseph Butler, soon to be appointed Bishop of Durham; an office open in that period only to believing Christians.

scholarly journals GLADSTONE, DEVELOPMENT, AND THE DISCIPLINE OF HISTORY, 1840–1896

2020 ◽  
Vol 63 (4) ◽  
pp. 911-934
Author(s):  
JONATHAN CONLIN
Keyword(s):  
Natural Theology ◽  
Human Reason ◽  
Political Issues ◽  
Thomas Henry Huxley ◽  
Scientific Status ◽  
Book Of Genesis ◽  
Joseph Butler ◽  
Historical Truth ◽  
Natural Historian ◽  
Professional Scientist

AbstractBetween 1885 and 1891, the Liberal statesman William Ewart Gladstone debated the scientific status of the Book of Genesis with the natural historian Thomas Henry Huxley in a series of articles published in the Nineteenth Century. Viewed in isolation, this episode has been seen as a case of a professional scientist dismissing an amateur interloper. This article repositions this familiar dispute as one chapter in Gladstone's lifelong engagement with the concept of historical ‘development’, the unfolding or evolution of Providence to human reason over time, a concept which came to prominence in the 1840s, in both Tractarian theology and in natural history. Gladstone consistently advocated an accommodation between transmutation and natural theology based on a probabilist ontology derived from the eighteenth-century Anglican churchman Joseph Butler (1692–1752). That understanding of historical truth to which Gladstone credited his ability to discern when political issues became ripe for agitation demanded a humble, Christian moral temper that embraced doubt and salutary suffering, rather than certainty and whiggish celebration of progress.

scholarly journals Comment on P.A Moritz's Essay on Joseph Butler

1981 ◽  
Vol 4 (3) ◽  
pp. 248-253
Author(s):  
Alan R Lacey
Keyword(s):  
Joseph Butler

Introduction

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Galen Strawson
Keyword(s):  
Personal Identity ◽  
Central Point ◽  
Thomas Reid ◽  
Joseph Butler

This book defends John Locke's account of personal identity, first published in 1694, against claims that it is blatantly circular and inconsistent. Joseph Butler and Thomas Reid were the main representatives of the circularity and inconsistency objections, and their influence has been such that few since then have had a chance to read what Locke wrote without prejudice. The extent of the misreading of Locke is remarkable, which is difficult to comprehend considering that he makes his central point extremely plain over and over again. The book argues that Locke's notions of person, consciousness, and concernment are partly responsible for the misunderstanding.

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