Sergio Cremaschi
Sergio Volodia Marcello Cremaschi (Bergamo February 17 1949) was educated at the Humanistic Gymnasium ‘Paolo Sarpi’, Bergamo, and at Milan Catholic University, where he received the degree of 'Dottore in Filosofia' in 1971. From 1970 to 1972, he worked as a preparatory school teacher in Mogadishu, Somalia, and from 1972 to 1981, he was a research fellow at Milan Catholic University and Venice University. From 1981 he was a senior lecturer at the Catholic University, 1992, University Professor of Philosophy of Religion at Ferrara University, 1993 of Moral Philosophy at Turin University and 1997-2014 at the Amedeo Avogadro University. Besides, he had visiting positions at the New School for Social Research, New York; Nuffield College, Oxford; the Faculty of Education, Aarhus University, Danemark; the Institute for Advanced Studies at the Hebrew University, Jerusalem, the Universities of La Laguna, the University of Sevilla, the University of Córdoba, and the LUISS University, Rome. After retirement in 2014, he was a part-time faculty member in the doctoral program in Humanities at Málaga University (2014-) and Philosophy and Neuro-Sciences at Vita Salute University, Milan (2014-2017). He served on the advisory board of Praxis International, The European Journal of the History of Economic Thought, the Croatian Journal of Philosophy, Ethics & Politics, and Notizie di Politeia.
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Papers / English by Sergio Cremaschi
This is the paper submittet to the Iberian Journal of the History of Economic Thougth
Please quote from the published version retrievable at:
https://revistas.ucm.es/index.php/IJHE/article/view/83973/4564456562031
The paper uploaded is a draft accepted for publication by Taylor & Francis in 'The European legacy' 2020. Please quote from the published version available online: http://www.tandfonline.com/10.1080/10848770.2020.1758411.
I intend to dismantle a piece of historiographic mythology created by self-styled ‘Revisionists’ (Hill, Alvey, Oslington, etc.). According to the myth, Adam Smith endorsed several of the traditional proofs of God’s existence; he believed that the order existing in the world is a morally good order implemented by Divine Providence; he believed that evil in the world is part of an all-encompassing Divine Plan; and that the ‘invisible hand’ is the hand of the Christian God who leads the rich to employ their wealth for the greater benefit of the greatest number.
I argue instead that there is a remarkable analogy between Smith’s and Kant’s theory of religion. Smith’s philosophy is a third way between Rationalism and Phyrronism, arguing that doctrines confirmed by reason in every field, from natural science to theology, are nothing more than combinations of ideas agreeable to the imagination; if we try, on the basis of both Smithian texts and their context and co-text, to reconstruct his lectures on natural theology, all kind of evidence converge in indicating that he reduced proofs of God´s existence to ‘inventions of the imagination’ and argued that philosophical theism is not different in status from primitive belief in invisible beings, or that it is as unwarranted as any system is, and besides that it generates a moral conundrum; he argued also that teleological explanations are no more and no less imaginary than those based on efficient causes, that the teleological order we may imagine in the world is not too bad from a ‘consequentialist’ point of view, and yet it is far below any moral standard; I argued that this is by no means a proof of Smith’s ‘irreligion’ and also that no convincing proof of any turn from religion to irreligion on his part has been provided so far, and finally that the two viable options he left open were either dismal unbelief or Theism on a moral basis.
I defend this third way by proving that what Smith’s lost lectures on natural religion said can be reconstructed with some plausibility and what they did not say with absolute certainty; I argue that he developed a sharp criticism of natural theology, that he argued that at the root of religion there are a number of principles of the mind that make religious belief a ‘natural belief’; I do so by reconstructing, first, the context of the missing lectures (sect. 2); then the contents of their first part, considering the proofs of God’s existence and his attributes (sects 3-4); the ‘principles of the mind’ lying at the root of polytheism (sect. 5), of philosophical monotheism (par. 6), and of pure and rational religion (par.7); I contend, then, that his vindication of toleration is consistent with ‘pure and rational religion’ (par. 8) and that attempts to prove a phantom conversion to ‘natural religion’ or ‘irreligion’ result from misreading (par.9).
My conclusions are the following:
i) Adam Smith claimed that any natural theology is impossible;
ii) There is, in fact, some kind of order in the world, and it proves useful to a point in allowing for humankind’s survival, but it doesn’t meet any minimal moral criterion;
iii) the world is not teleologically ordered; we may indeed, for mental economy's sake, imagine such order, but the world abounds in misery and depravity;
iv) consequences of human wickedness and insanity do, happily enough, deviate from intended outcomes; we may feign invisible mechanisms at work behind, but to mistake them for a hidden mechanism is as childish as the primitive’s belief in ‘invisible beings’.
v) there are indeed themes from theological doctrines in Smithian economic theory, but they are not derived from the kind of rational theology ‘discovered’ by the ‘New View’; they are instead Augustinian and Jansenist themes.
vi) Smith’s theological doctrines did – as suggested by Waterman – have a bearing on his economic theory not by ‘doctrinal dependence’ but – as suggested by Harrison – in the more modest role of a source of blueprints for economic explanations.
Here I try to exploit evidence overlooked by Sraffa, namely his Commonplace Book, where he took notes of his reading verging partly on history, politics, and travellers’ reports on non-European countries, and partly on pure philosophy, that is, epistemology and philosophy of mind, and philosophical and theological topics such as theodicy. Then I combine the evidence assembled with some less unknown evidence found in the correspondence, mainly on toleration, ‘natural’ morality, and again theodicy in connection with poverty and the social question. Finally, I try to illustrate the intellectual context of opinions he disclosed on several occasions on the ethical essence of religion, infertility of theology, impossibility of a theodicy, the unbounded right to religious freedom for everybody, atheists included. I conclude that:
i) Ricardo was apparently far from being an ‘unbeliever’; but belief or disbelief are existential attitude, not theoretical ones; so, one should better say: his own philosophy was a limited kind of scepticism leaving room for religious belief for whoever would like to avail himself of that option;
ii) toleration was justified not by the crude argument that religion is a fake but on the more sensible argument that nobody’s truth is the unique truth a reasonable person may adopt;
iii) he believed speculative theology to be irrelevant; it is an attempt to formulate as scientific truth what is unknowable; this is not an argument for atheism, but it is one more argument for toleration;
iv) morality is independent of revelation, there is a natural morality accessible to every reasonable mind; this is the Enlightenment’s staple, but also is far from being an atheist or exclusively modern view; it was simply an anti-Augustinian and anti-Calvinist doctrine defended in the Middle Ages by Aquinas and William of Ockham, and in modern Britain by every enemy of religious fanaticism.
v) theodicy is impossible for the same reasons why it is so for Kant; this – unlike James Mill, Ricardo’s friend and former Presbyterian minister – is for Ricardo no argument for unbelief; it is instead one more argument for moral responsibility vis-à-vis poverty and also against dogmatic Laissez-Faire optimism of the kind atheist Mill was prone to adopt;
vi) a sense of duty – including a duty to wage war to poverty – derives thus from ‘reason without hope’;
vii) last of all: social science has to be a secular science precisely for theological reasons; or, in other words, the anti-dogmatic kind of religious belief he declared legitimate (independently of the fact of his own belief or doubt – who doesn’t doubt? –) ruled out any kind of dogmatic atheist theology like all kind of Laissez-Faire Metaphysics.
free access to the full paper at:
http://www.tandfonline.com/eprint/9gIFxkEdWcJBqV4CRvU5/full
avoid unending controversy.
I argue that Anscombe’s idea of a “philosophy of psychology” cannot be simply identified with that of “moral psychology ” with which we are familiar now; that her main claim, namely that actions are analogous to language is quite promising; that among the implications there is not only a criticism to consequentialism but also acknowledgement of a central role for judgement, and accordingly not just a blunt refusal, but instead an unaware rediscovery of Kantian ethics; that her rediscovery of the idea of virtue is promising enough, albeit misunderstood by Anscombe herself when she presents it in terms of coming back to Aristotelian and Thomist ethics as contrasted with modern moral philosophy.
Please quote from the published version.
Please quote from the published version
This is the paper submittet to the Iberian Journal of the History of Economic Thougth
Please quote from the published version retrievable at:
https://revistas.ucm.es/index.php/IJHE/article/view/83973/4564456562031
The paper uploaded is a draft accepted for publication by Taylor & Francis in 'The European legacy' 2020. Please quote from the published version available online: http://www.tandfonline.com/10.1080/10848770.2020.1758411.
I intend to dismantle a piece of historiographic mythology created by self-styled ‘Revisionists’ (Hill, Alvey, Oslington, etc.). According to the myth, Adam Smith endorsed several of the traditional proofs of God’s existence; he believed that the order existing in the world is a morally good order implemented by Divine Providence; he believed that evil in the world is part of an all-encompassing Divine Plan; and that the ‘invisible hand’ is the hand of the Christian God who leads the rich to employ their wealth for the greater benefit of the greatest number.
I argue instead that there is a remarkable analogy between Smith’s and Kant’s theory of religion. Smith’s philosophy is a third way between Rationalism and Phyrronism, arguing that doctrines confirmed by reason in every field, from natural science to theology, are nothing more than combinations of ideas agreeable to the imagination; if we try, on the basis of both Smithian texts and their context and co-text, to reconstruct his lectures on natural theology, all kind of evidence converge in indicating that he reduced proofs of God´s existence to ‘inventions of the imagination’ and argued that philosophical theism is not different in status from primitive belief in invisible beings, or that it is as unwarranted as any system is, and besides that it generates a moral conundrum; he argued also that teleological explanations are no more and no less imaginary than those based on efficient causes, that the teleological order we may imagine in the world is not too bad from a ‘consequentialist’ point of view, and yet it is far below any moral standard; I argued that this is by no means a proof of Smith’s ‘irreligion’ and also that no convincing proof of any turn from religion to irreligion on his part has been provided so far, and finally that the two viable options he left open were either dismal unbelief or Theism on a moral basis.
I defend this third way by proving that what Smith’s lost lectures on natural religion said can be reconstructed with some plausibility and what they did not say with absolute certainty; I argue that he developed a sharp criticism of natural theology, that he argued that at the root of religion there are a number of principles of the mind that make religious belief a ‘natural belief’; I do so by reconstructing, first, the context of the missing lectures (sect. 2); then the contents of their first part, considering the proofs of God’s existence and his attributes (sects 3-4); the ‘principles of the mind’ lying at the root of polytheism (sect. 5), of philosophical monotheism (par. 6), and of pure and rational religion (par.7); I contend, then, that his vindication of toleration is consistent with ‘pure and rational religion’ (par. 8) and that attempts to prove a phantom conversion to ‘natural religion’ or ‘irreligion’ result from misreading (par.9).
My conclusions are the following:
i) Adam Smith claimed that any natural theology is impossible;
ii) There is, in fact, some kind of order in the world, and it proves useful to a point in allowing for humankind’s survival, but it doesn’t meet any minimal moral criterion;
iii) the world is not teleologically ordered; we may indeed, for mental economy's sake, imagine such order, but the world abounds in misery and depravity;
iv) consequences of human wickedness and insanity do, happily enough, deviate from intended outcomes; we may feign invisible mechanisms at work behind, but to mistake them for a hidden mechanism is as childish as the primitive’s belief in ‘invisible beings’.
v) there are indeed themes from theological doctrines in Smithian economic theory, but they are not derived from the kind of rational theology ‘discovered’ by the ‘New View’; they are instead Augustinian and Jansenist themes.
vi) Smith’s theological doctrines did – as suggested by Waterman – have a bearing on his economic theory not by ‘doctrinal dependence’ but – as suggested by Harrison – in the more modest role of a source of blueprints for economic explanations.
Here I try to exploit evidence overlooked by Sraffa, namely his Commonplace Book, where he took notes of his reading verging partly on history, politics, and travellers’ reports on non-European countries, and partly on pure philosophy, that is, epistemology and philosophy of mind, and philosophical and theological topics such as theodicy. Then I combine the evidence assembled with some less unknown evidence found in the correspondence, mainly on toleration, ‘natural’ morality, and again theodicy in connection with poverty and the social question. Finally, I try to illustrate the intellectual context of opinions he disclosed on several occasions on the ethical essence of religion, infertility of theology, impossibility of a theodicy, the unbounded right to religious freedom for everybody, atheists included. I conclude that:
i) Ricardo was apparently far from being an ‘unbeliever’; but belief or disbelief are existential attitude, not theoretical ones; so, one should better say: his own philosophy was a limited kind of scepticism leaving room for religious belief for whoever would like to avail himself of that option;
ii) toleration was justified not by the crude argument that religion is a fake but on the more sensible argument that nobody’s truth is the unique truth a reasonable person may adopt;
iii) he believed speculative theology to be irrelevant; it is an attempt to formulate as scientific truth what is unknowable; this is not an argument for atheism, but it is one more argument for toleration;
iv) morality is independent of revelation, there is a natural morality accessible to every reasonable mind; this is the Enlightenment’s staple, but also is far from being an atheist or exclusively modern view; it was simply an anti-Augustinian and anti-Calvinist doctrine defended in the Middle Ages by Aquinas and William of Ockham, and in modern Britain by every enemy of religious fanaticism.
v) theodicy is impossible for the same reasons why it is so for Kant; this – unlike James Mill, Ricardo’s friend and former Presbyterian minister – is for Ricardo no argument for unbelief; it is instead one more argument for moral responsibility vis-à-vis poverty and also against dogmatic Laissez-Faire optimism of the kind atheist Mill was prone to adopt;
vi) a sense of duty – including a duty to wage war to poverty – derives thus from ‘reason without hope’;
vii) last of all: social science has to be a secular science precisely for theological reasons; or, in other words, the anti-dogmatic kind of religious belief he declared legitimate (independently of the fact of his own belief or doubt – who doesn’t doubt? –) ruled out any kind of dogmatic atheist theology like all kind of Laissez-Faire Metaphysics.
free access to the full paper at:
http://www.tandfonline.com/eprint/9gIFxkEdWcJBqV4CRvU5/full
avoid unending controversy.
I argue that Anscombe’s idea of a “philosophy of psychology” cannot be simply identified with that of “moral psychology ” with which we are familiar now; that her main claim, namely that actions are analogous to language is quite promising; that among the implications there is not only a criticism to consequentialism but also acknowledgement of a central role for judgement, and accordingly not just a blunt refusal, but instead an unaware rediscovery of Kantian ethics; that her rediscovery of the idea of virtue is promising enough, albeit misunderstood by Anscombe herself when she presents it in terms of coming back to Aristotelian and Thomist ethics as contrasted with modern moral philosophy.
Please quote from the published version.
Please quote from the published version
This is the draft accepted for publication in the collection 'Biblioteca analitica'. Please quote from the published version.
He argued for consistent application of traditional virtues as the keystone of a new moral and political construction that was called forth to limit and control most evils arising from the principle of population; what is new in Malthus’s approach to ethical issues is instead something almost opposite to Bentham’s spirit. Its mark is modesty, an awareness that there are indeed virtues and moral precepts but there are also greater and lesser evils, and the moral and political science is indeed a moral science not only in the sense that is science of man but also in the sense that it is a applied moral theology, and yet, in so far as it applied, it cannot turn out to be abstract moralizing, the highest the value preached the better. On the contrary Malthus insists that there are indeed consequences of lines of action and policies, and there greater and lesser evils, and policies should be designed for a world made of human beings as they are, not as they ought to be.
https://www.academia.edu/9332030/Adam_Smith_di_sinistra.
My claims are that Adam Smith was an anti-Cartesian philosopher, an opponent of systems in metaphysics, epistemology, theology and politics. This carries consequences in ethics, politics, economics. In these fields, his theories are ‘anti-theory’, arguments starting with the assumption of inevitable limits to both knowledge and active intervention by individuals or collectives actors. Far from being an immoralist, he defends ethical views privileging a select catalogue of private virtues, with prudence, justice, benevolence on top. Far from being a political realist, he defends a normative view of politics, taking three public virtues as normative criteria, namely, freedom, justice, equality. He is definitely an admirer of civic virtue as vindicated by the tradition of civic humanism and is critical of dehumanizing effects carried by modern manufactory economy, but is also convinced that the civic-virtue model is irrelevant now, as modern society makes political participation by the citizens' mass impossible. He is convinced, yet, that the yardstick by which to assess one society’s justice is the condition of the labouring poor, since they are the ones who support the rest of society as well as its majority, and the most elementary considerations of humanity, approved by any moral doctrine, dictate that the priority should be given to the condition of the worst-off.
1. Defining the problem
2. Notions defined
3. The problem’s prehistory
4. Cultural relativism and its ethical implications
5. Consequences in analytical ethics
5.1. The anti-realists’ relativism
5.2. Wittgensteinian contextualism
5.3 Virtues theorists
5.5 Metaetical relativism cum normative antirelativism: Williams
6. Towards universalism without absolutism
1. I intend to clarify the various meanings of the term relativism, to reconstruct the the birth of the thesis named “cultural relativism” and its possible ethical implications, and then to revisit recent discussion of universalism and particularism.
2. The traditional argument for prescriptive moral relativism was the argument from variability, namely, that judgments, rules, and shared values are de facto variable in time and space. The traditional counter-argument was that examples of variability do not prove what the normative relativist contends for.
3. Ancient sophists were either immoralists or contractarians. Modern moral scepticism (xvii century) used to argue that variability as an historical and ethnographic fact supports a sceptical conclusion more moderate than sheer immoralism. Voltaire, Kant, Adam Smith, Reid counter-attacked pointing at something like a universally shared moral sense. Romantics and idealists staged an even more moderate reformulation by pointing at the Spirit of a People which is, first, an alternative to abstract and universal philosophical systems as far as it is lived culture, secondly, an indivisible unity with an inner harmony and a source of normative standards.
4. The alleged 18th c. doctrine of the Noble savage was imagined by 19th century ethnocentric anthropologists such as Edward Tylor, who believed the savage’s moral standards to be simply lower than ours own. Franz Boas reacted by claiming that development of civilization is neither ruled by technical progress nor does it follow a one-way path; instead there are parallel developments (for ex. Agriculture does not follow stock-raising, that until we have understood beliefs and intentions behind behavior we are not yet in a position to compare externally identical kinds of behavior, that we should distinguish among different practices which are only superficially similar, and that the implication is not that we cannot judge behavior by members of other groups but just a recommendation of extreme caution..
Bronislaw Malinowski argued, against Tylor’s and Frazer’s “magpie” methodology, that field-work is required, that a culture as a whole should be observed from inside while individual elements are incomprehensible; that a culture is an organic whole; that its elements are accounted for by their function while avoiding recourse to non-observables.
Ruth Benedict and Melville Herskovitz identified Boas’s approach with the phantom-notion of “cultural relativism”. Benedict claimed that what is normal or abnormal is to be judged on a culture’s own standards. Herskovits claimed that ‘Boas adumbrates what we have come to call cultural relativism, namely that ‘Judgements are based on experience, and experience is interpreted by each individual in terms of his own enculturation’.
5. Analytic philosophy basically misunderstood the anthropologists' discussion. At the beginning of the 20th c., the new view in ethics was hard non-cognitivism. Eric Westermark combines this view with an old-style ethnographic approach in support of relativity of moralities. Moralities are codes, or systems of emotive ‘disinterested’ reactions selected by evolution on their usefulness in terms of survival value for the society that is the carrier of such systems or codes. The moral relativity thesis: there are cases of disagreement that cannot be settled even after agreement about facts. Later on, Anti-realists such as Brandt, Mackie, Gilbert, Harman adopted Westermark’s approach in a more sophisticated version, namely contending that: moralities are codes with an overall function and may be appraised only as wholes; variability is an argument for moral subjectivism; c) apparent legitimacy of deriving shift from ought is legitimized only within one institution d) morality should not be described but instead made, and existing moralities may be improved. I discuss whether this is ‘real’ relativism? It is clearly subjectivism (a metaethical thesis), the claim that there are better and worse codes, and survival values is the normative standard.
Particularists such as MacIntyre, Sandel, Wiggins nad McDowell adopted ‘Wittgensteinian’ prospectivist arguments to support weak-relativist claims.
Kantian universalists such as Baier, Gewirth, Rawls, Apel, Habermas share the claim that justice concerns the right and is universal in so far as it may be based on minimal assumptions and other virtues are relative to context in so far as they are related to comprehensive views of the good.
A metaethical relativist and normative anti-relativist, Bernard Williams, contends that
vulgar relativism may be assumed to claim that: (a) 'just' means 'just in one given society'; (b) 'just in a given society' is to be understood in functionalist sense; (c) it is wrong for one society’s members to condemn another society’s values. It is inconsistent since in (c) uses ‘just’ in a non-relative way that has been excluded in (a). His positive proposal is to keep a number of substantive or thick ethical concepts that will be different in space and time; to admit that public choices are to be legitimized through recourse to more abstract procedures and relying on more thin ethical concepts.
6. The only real relativism available is ‘vulgar’ relativism such as Westermark’s. Descriptive universalism (or absolutism) has a long pedigree, from Cicero on, reaching Boas himself but it is useless as an answer to normative questions. Twentieth-century philosophical discussion seems to discuss an ad hoc doctrine reconstructed by assembling obsolete philosophical ideas but ignoring the real theory of cultural relativism as formulated by anthropologists. A way out of the conundrum might be found in the following considerations: a distinction between ethoi and ethical theories; there are de facto existing systems of conventions; these may be studies from outside as phenomena or facts; there is moral argument and this, when studies from outside, is a fact, but this does not influence in any degree the possible validity of claims advanced; the difference between the above claims and Mackie’s criticism to Searle’s argument of the promising game is that promises, arguments etc. are also phenomena, but they are also communicative phenomena with a logical and pragmatic structure.
By way of conclusion, first, cultural relativism, as a name for Boas’s methodology is a valuable discovery, and in this sense we cannot avoid being relativist; ethical relativism, as an alleged implication of cultural relativism, has been argued in a philosophically quite unsophisticated way by Benedict and Herskovits; philosophers apparently discussed ethical relativism in the basis of a rather faint impression of what cultural relativism had been; a full-fledged ethical relativism has hardly been defended by anybody among philosophers, and virtually no modern philosopher really argued a prescriptive version of the thesis; we may accept the grain of truth in ethical relativism by including relativist critique to ethical absolutism into a universalist normative doctrine that be careful in separating open-textured formulations of universal claims from culturally conditioned particular prescriptions.
His whole polemics with intuitionism was vitiated by the a priori assumption that what was really worth considering.was common-sense morality, not the theories of intuitionist philosophers.
In spite of the naïve positivist starting point Sidgwick was encouraged by his own approach to explore the fruitfulness of coherentist methods for normative ethics. Thus Sidgwick left an ambivalent legacy to twentieth-century ethics: t
he dogmatic idea of a ‘new’ morality of a consequentialist kind, and the fruitful idea that in normative ethics we can argue rationally albeit without shared foundations.
1. Fog on the Channell
2. 1903-1949: when people believed that philosophy needed to be depurated from cant 2.1. Cognitivism and non-cognitivismo 2.2. The naturalistic fallacy 2.3 Hume’ss law 2.4 Hume’s fork 2.5 Intuitionism, naturalism, emotivism
3. 1949-1958: when ethics was depurated from the ‘third person’
3.1 Hampshire’s diagnosis 3.2. Criticism to the The naturalistic fallacy 3.3. Criticism to Hume’s law
4. 1958-1980: Kantian elements
4.1 The Kantian element in the good reasons approach: Kurt Baier 4.2. The Kantian element in pragmatism: Clarence Lewis 4.3. The Kantian element in utilitarianism: Harrod, Hare, Brandt 4.4. The Kantian element in post-intuitionism
5. 1971-2002: Kantian normative ethics
5.1 Reasons for the normative-ethics revival5.2 Gewirth 5.3 Donagan 5.4 Nagel 5.5 Kantian constructivism 5.6 Kantian contractualism
6. The recent Kant and Aristotle rediscovery and the forthcoming Price and Whewell rehabilitation
7. Provisional concluding remarks: analytic philosophy from Hume to Kant
An overview of criticism by Ronald Dworkin, Robert Nozick, Alan Buchanan, Amartya Sen and John Harsanyi.
The Introduction by Sergio Cremaschi reconstructs the background of ideas, concerns and intentions from which Moore’s Principia Ethica originated. It stresses the role of religious concerns, as well as that of the Idealist legacy. I argue that PE is more a patchwork of incompatible lines of argument than a consistent work. It compares PE with Rashdall’s almost contemporary ethical work, suggesting that the latter defends the same general claims in a different and more plausible way, one that manages to answer decisive objections. I end with the suggestion that the emergence of Analytic Ethics was a more ambiguous phenomenon than the received view would make us believe and that the wheat of this tradition, that is, what logic can do for philosophy, has to be separated from the chaff, that is, the confused, and besides mutually incompatible, legacies of Utilitarianism and Idealism.
Il risultato è che hanno avuto circolazione allievi minori di Anscombe stessa come MacIntyre, una sua stravagante allieva come Iris Murdoch, e si è avuta la lodevole presentazione al pubblico italiano di due raccolte della sua principale collaboratrice e seguace Philippa Foot (per merito del Mulino), mentre proprio alla più importante collega Elizabeth Anscombe questa attenzione è stata negata.
Il primo saggio (in ordine cronologico) compreso in questa raccolta è “Mr. Truman’s Degree” del 1956, il pamphlet in cui la giovane Anscombe pronunciava una magistrale invettiva contro i colleghi incapaci di ‘percepire’ la rilevanza morale di una decisione come quella di sganciare una bomba atomica su vecchi, donne e neonati e dava la colpa di questa loro insensibilità alla filosofia morale contemporanea che avrebbe avuto l’effetto di allevare dei “daltonici morali”, anticipando gli sviluppi del suo lavoro sia nella direzione della rinascita della filosofia dell’azione sia in quella del salvataggio dell’etica normativa. Si noti che la raccolta in due volumi curata dalla figlia e dal genero (Human Life, Action and Ethics, ed. M. Geach - L. Gormally, Imprint Academic 2005; “Human Life, Action and Ethics”, ed. M. Geach - L. Gormally, 2008) non comprende questo saggio – forse semplicemente perché Cambridge University Press non ha concesso l’autorizzazione – ma comunque con l’effetto di nascondere un’immagine di Anscombe scomoda per i cattolici ultratradizionalisti, che non è quella da loro prediletta dei contributi su sessualità e contraccezione.
La raccolta, oltre a rendere disponibile il nocciolo dei contributi principali di etica teorica, offre due “pacchetti” di materiale di un certo interesse per la discussione pubblica: il tema della guerra giusta, tornato anche da noi al centro della discussione dalla prima guerra in Irak in poi, e il tema della contraccezione, il prossimo tema su cui riprenderà la discussione nella Chiesa Cattolica.
It reconstructs the history of a still open dialectics between several ethoi, or codes of shared rules, moral traditions, or self-aware attempts at reforming such codes, and ethical theories, or reflections on the nature and justification of such codes and doctrines showing that this history neither amounts to a triumphal march of reason dispelling the mist of myth and bigotry nor to some other one-way process heading to some pre-established goal, but instead to a chain of controversies where the partners’ will to win unintentionally yields a wealth of insights on human existence that has still something to teach us.
Preface
1. Introduction: Malthus the Utilitarian vs. Malthus the Christian moral thinker
2. Eighteenth-century Anglican ethics
ETHICS IN THE CONTEXT OF CAMBRIDGE EDUCATION
A NON-CALVINIST ETHICAL TRADITION
CAMBRIDGE MORAL PHILOSOPHY AT MALTHUS’S TIME
Hey
Watson
Paley
Watts
NON-OFFICIAL SOURCES
Tucker
Hume
3. Malthus’s metaethics
MORAL ONTOLOGY
Happiness
Laws of nature
MORAL EPISTEMOLOGY
Religion, morality, and the veil of ignorance
Conscience
The Golden Rule
The test of Utility
The function of general rules
MORAL PSYCHOLOGY
Mind, inertia, and the need for stimuli
Passions and self-love
Moral sentiments
4. Malthus’s early normative ethics: a morality of freedom
MALTHUS’S 1798 POLITICS
MALTHUS’S FIRST THEODICY
THE PLACE FOR MORALITY IN A DISMAL WORLD
MALTHUS’S FIRST THEODICY UNDER FIRE
5. Malthus’s intermediate normative ethics: a morality of prudence
PALEYITE THEODICY AND THE PLACE OF MORALITY
Paley’s Theodicy
Malthus’s second theodicy
NATURAL VIRTUES
Benevolence
Chastity
ARTIFICIAL VIRTUES
Respect for rights
Love of equality
Love of liberty
PRUDENCE
6. Malthus’s mature normative ethics: a morality of humanity
HUMANITY
THE MALTHUSIAN CONTROVERSY QUA APPLIED THEOLOGY
Critics from the right and critics from the left
Evangelicals: Gisborne
Evangelicals: Sumner
Evangelicals: Chalmers
MALTHUS’S THIRD THEODICY AND HIS RESTYLED ETHICS
Malthus’s1806 ethics
Malthus’s 1817 ethics
PARTIAL CONCLUSIONS: MALTHUS THE MORAL PHILOSOPHER
7. Malthus’s applied ethics
WAR ON POVERTY AS MORAL REFORM
Inequality as evil
More swings than ratios
Policies of self-reliance
FROM SEXUAL MORALITY TO PROCREATION ETHICS
INDIVIDUAL RIGHTS
REFORM
CATHOLIC EMANCIPATION AND THE IRISH ISSUE
WAR AS EVIL
ABOLITION OF THE SLAVE TRADE
8. General conclusions: strengthening the theological foundations
1. Plato and a response to ethical scepticism; 2. Aristotle and the invention of practical philosophy; 3. Diogenes and philosophy as a form of life; 4. Epicurus and ethics as care for oneself; 5. Epictetus and ethics as therapy of the passions; 6. Philo and the reconciliation of Torah and Platonism; 7. Augustine and Christianity as Neo-Platonism; 8. Moshe ben Maimon and the reconciliation of Torah and Aristotelianism; 9. Al Farabi and the reconciliation of Islam and Platonism; 10. Aquinas and the reconciliation of Christian moral doctrine and Aristotelian ethics; 11. Francisco de Vitoria and casuistry; 12. Michel de Montaigne and the art of living
13. Pierre Nicole and neo-Augustinianism; 14. Samuel von Pufendorf and the new science of morality; 15. Richard Cumberland and consequentialist voluntarism; 16. Richard Price and intuitionism; 17. Adam Smith and sentimentalism; 18. Jeremy Bentham and utilitarianism; 19. Immanuel Kant, the practical use of reason and judgment; 20. Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel and a critique of Enlightenment universalism; 21. Friedrich Nietzsche against Christianity and the Enlightenment; 22. George Edward Moore and ideal utilitarianism; 23. Edmund Husserl and the a priori of action; 24. Bertrand Russell and non-cognitivism; 25. Elizabeth Anscombe and the revival of virtue ethics; 26. Richard Hare and neo-Utilitarianism; 27. Hans-Georg Gadamer and rehabilitation of practical philosophy; 28. Karl-Otto Apel and the revival of Kantian ethics; 29. John Rawls and public ethics as applied ethics; 30. Beauchamp and Childress and bioethics as applied ethics.
Acknowledgments
Preface
Chapter I From the death of ethics to the normative turn
Twentieth century ethics after the death of ethics
Three Diagnoses of Death for Ethics
And one Prognosis of Resurrection with Transfiguration
The anti-normative turn: the Anglo-Saxon version
And the Continental version
Chapter 2 From the Normative Turn to the Controversy between Utilitarianism and ‘Deontology’
1949-1958: freeing moral discourse from the “third person”
1958: From Moore’s anti-naturalism to Anscombe’s, Geach’s and Foot’s anti-anti-naturalism
1958: Baier’s way from metaethics to normative ethics:
1958: Lewis’s discovery of Apel’s performative contradiction
1966: Searle’s infringement of Hume’s Law
1960-1983: The Continental Normative Turn and the rehabilitation of practical philosophy
1960-1983: The Continental Normative Turn and discourse ethics
1936-1981: Utilitarianism redivivus
1971-1998: a resurrection of several kinds of ‘deontological’ ethics
The new controversy between Utilitarians and Kantians and the emergence of a third way
Theoretical and Practical reasons for the revival of practical philosophy
A few intermediate considerations
Chapter 3 The applied ethics revolution
Conscientious Objectors and Ethical Committees
The methods of Applied Ethics
The New Political Philosophy qua Applied Ethics
A slightly odd example: development ethics
Applied ethics is not ethics applied
Applied ethics is a ‘Kantian’ approach for non-Kantians
Applied Ethics is Deliberation
Applied Ethics is Reverse Subversion
Applied Ethics is a Gift from Zeitgeist
A provisional moral
The first chapter tries to reconstruct a plot, or a hidden agenda, in the twentieth-century ethical discussion. It singles out two starting points for the Anglo-Saxon and the Continental discussion, to be identified with the philosophies of Sidgwick and Nietzsche, both supporting some kind of ethical scepticism. It discusses how far the diagnosis formulated by Karl-Otto Apel of a ‘parallel convergence’ between Existentialism and Analytic philosophy in separating facts and values and thus justifying ‘decisionism’ is useful in making sense of the agenda of the discussion.
The second chapter discusses the reasons for two parallel U-turns at about 1958 which brought back to the forefront two traditional schools of normative ethics, Kantian and Utilitarian, and the reasons for criticism from the heterogeneous alignment of virtue ethicists.
The third chapter discusses the phenomenon of emergence of ‘applied’ ethics from the Seventies, the reasons, both theoretical and political, for the revival, the point to which applied ethics may look like a grand return of casuistic and natural-law ways of thinking, and the difficult coexistence between general normative ethics and procedures to settle issues reasonably while ethical dissent is as alive as ever.
This book is a collection of contributions to classical philology and the history of Latin literature by Carlo Cremaschi, parallel to the other book 'It should have been a revolutionary upheaval', a collection of his political writings. As suggested by Tarcisio Pacati in his critical essay, there is a link connecting both books. The Ciceronian studies are inspired by a will to compare the present – namely Italy between 1943 and 1953 - and the times of the Roman republic. These times are conceived by the author precisely as "classical". Cicero’s experience is taken as an archetype of the author’s own lived experience, the fall of Fascism, World War II, the maquis during Nazi occupation, and the beginnings of the First Republic.
It is worth recalling that, in the years between the end of the war and the first stages of the Democratic Republic's life, alongside academic publications, Carlo Cremaschi, in collaboration with Renato Verdina, edited two anthologies of Italian literature, respectively for the junior and senior high school, inspired by the intention to revise that canon of classics of a national literature which Fascism had imposed making a different choice of authors, suitable for the education of a new generation of citizens of a Democratic Republic.
The collection is followed by an Appendix including critical reviews by C.A. Pacati, J.G. Préaux, and G. Scarpati.
Table of contents
Prefazione p. 7
Scritti di Carlo Cremaschi
1. Sull’atteggiamento di Cicerone di fronte all’esilio p. 11
2. Vita Tibulli p. 41
3. Nota su L’Alcesti di Euripide p. 44
4. Un manoscritto del secolo XV di Tibullo, Properzio, Catullo p. 54
5. Cicerone p. 66
6. Introduzione al ‘Cato Maior’ p. 121
7. Cicerone intimo p. 135
8. Francesco Occha umanista bergamasco ignoto p. 182
Appendice
Recensione a Cicerone, di Jean G. Preux p. 199
Recensione a Cicerone, di Giuseppe Scarpati p. 199
Carlo Cremaschi studioso e docente, di Tarcisio Pacati p. 201
Nota biografica p. 213
Bibliografia degli scritti di filologia e letteratura p. 215
The editor hopes to have spared some toil to students of local history and perhaps have produced a reading of some interest for some of our children and grandchildren, who may wish to read not just some of the historical works that now allow rethinking the events of that period with some impartiality, starting with serious, albeit questionable, interpretative hypotheses, but also to take a look inside the feelings, dreams, attempts to understand, and eventually shocking blunders of those who lived those years without flinching.
The author of the writings collected here found himself soon pushed out of political activity, and did not seek other locations in the political arena of the time out of a feeling of fidelity to choices he had made, but neither did he try to start some reflection on what had gone wrong nor did he opt for non-party social activism instead of party politics. Compared to many of his generation, he was perhaps not one of the worst. Still, he was not among the few who were able to give to the following generation some hints about how they could try to start the hardly needed ‘revolutionary upheaval’ again. What went wrong with his generation in the first years of the democratic Republic, is still not completely clear. It would not be reasonable to expect an answer from this book, but an answer should still be given and for historians there is still work to.
Carlo Cremaschi, born at Calcinate (BG) on January 22 1917 to a peasant family, passed the University entrance examination at the Liceo Paolo Sarpi in Bergamo in 1937, received his MA in Classics at the Università Cattolica in Milan in 1941. He married Maria Rosa (Marussia) Galmozzi, a fellow student, in 1942. Between 1944 and 1945 he held organizational responsibilities for the “Brigate del Popolo”, the partisan brigades of Christian democratic inspiration in occupied Northern Italy. In 1946 he was elected to the Constitutional Assembly, and in 1948 to the first republican Parliament. He died on July 27 leaving his wife and 10 children. .
TABLE OF CONTENTS
Prefazione
Saggio Introduttivo
PARTE PRIMA
Interventi politici
1. La restaurazione della scuola
2. Giovani, Avanti!
3. Noi e la scuola
4. Ciò che noi vogliamo
5. La Punta polemica. Noi e Loro
6. Giovani a convegno
7. Del fenomeno dell’uomo qualunque
8. Fuori dagli equivoci. Lettera aperta al signor Garlini
9. Semplicemente a un semplicista
10. L'ombrellone democristiano
11. Ciò che ci deve distinguere
12. A Congresso
13. L'opposizione all'opera
14. Chiarificazione
15. La casa brucia
16. Note romane
17. Note romane. Embrassons Nous
18. Note romane
19. Noi e i comunisti
20. Note romane: A Montecitorio si discute il progetto di Costituzione
21. Note romane
22. Note romane
23. Intervento all'Assemblea Costituente sull’autonomia regionale
24. Abbiamo votato sì
25. Bilancio dell'opposizione
26. Il problema della scuola. Politica di un bilancio e bilancio di una politica
27. Potenziamo il partito
28. Parole chiare ai cattolici della palanca
29. Note da Roma
30. Nulla di fatto al Parlamento?
31. Cos'ha fatto il parlamento
32. Preventivo 1949
33. Il governo per la ripresa edilizia. Case e lavori pubblici
34. Europa e Italia. Parole chiare alle quinte colonne di casa nostra
35. La demagogia comunista scherza coi pensionati
36. Dove andiamo
37. A un punto delicato la pratica per dar acqua alla pianura bergamasca
38. Il Deputato non è il Padre Eterno
39. Come spira l’aria di Natale nell’attuale situazione italiana
40. Dopo il congresso. Per la vita del partito
41. J'accuse, signori industriali
42. La scuola base della democrazia
43. La scuola popolare in Italia
44. Se l'Europa non saprà rinnovarsi sperimenterà la rivoluzione
45. Vale ancora la pena di sperare e morire?
46. Quello che i giovani aspettano dalla patria
47. L'irrigazione della media pianura e le sparate a vuoto de L'Unità
48. Motivi di propaganda
PARTE SECONDA
Tormenta (Mario Zeduri)
La guerra continua
Gli anni duri
Vita a Valmaggiore
La fine
A dieci anni
PARTE TERZA
Memorie
1. Poarì gh’è mort to pader
2. A Gorlago
3. I venti mesi
4. Natale 1943
5. Un bombardamento aereo
6. PlatzKommandantur
7. Prosciutto e farina bianca
8. 25 Aprile
9. L’assemblea costituente
10. A Montecitorio
11. 1945-‘46
12. Il cannibalismo fraterno
13. Il "metamorfosato"
14. Le correnti DC
15. Felici incontri
16. I papaveri sono alti alti
Nota biografica
Bibliografia degli scritti politici
Letteratura secondaria
Indice dei nomi
The new science of natural law carried a fresh start for ethics, resulting from a mixture of the Old and the New. It was, as suggested by Schneewind, an attempt at rescuing the content of Scholastic and Stoic doctrines on a new methodological basis. The former was the claim of existence of objective and universal moral laws; the latter was the self-aware attempt at justifying a minimal kernel of such laws facing sceptical doubt. What Bentham and Kant did was precisely carrying this strategy further on, even if restructuring it each of them around one out of two alternative basic claims. The nineteenth- and twentieth-century critics of the Enlightenment attacked both not on their alleged failure in carrying out their own projects, but precisely on having adopted Grotius’s and Pufendorf’s project. What the counter-enlighteners have been unable to spell out is which alternative project could be carried out facing the modern condition of pluralism, while on the contrary, if we takes a closer look at developments in twentieth-century ethics or at on-going discussions on practical issues, we might feel inclined to believe that Grotius’s and Pufendorf’s project is more up-to-date than ever.
Chapters five-seven cover Continental thinkers from the first half of the century. One chapter is dedicated to the philosophy of values and particularly to Hartmann; another to its critics, from Freud to Heidegger and Sartre and de Beauvoir; one more chapter is dedicated to twentieth-century Christian theologians and Jewish religious thinkers, mainly inspired by a post-liberal attitude as a reaction to the liberal theologians’ reduction of religion to ethics.
Chapters eight to ten are dedicated to the three main currents in normative ethics after the 1958 normative turn, Utilitarianism, Kantian ethics, and Virtue ethics. Among the Kantians, Gewirth and Donagan enjoy an extended treatment. Among utilitarian philosophers, Brandt has been given the most detailed presentation; Hare, Lyons, and Smart follow. Among virtue theorists, Bernard Williams has pride of place, followed by MacIntyre and others.
Chapter eleven is a follow-up to the abovementioned three chapters. It presents the revolution of applied ethics stressing its methodological novelty, exemplified primarily by Beauchamp and Childress principles approach. Rawls’s distinction between a “political” and a “metaphysical” approach is interpreted as a formulation of the same basic idea.
Chapter twelve illustrates the fresh start of meta-ethical discussion in the Eighties and Nineties and the resulting new alignments: metaphysical naturalism, internal realism, anti-realism, and constructivism.
Italian edition with commentary
This is one more edition of Voltaire's "Candide" , meant to highlight the wealth of philosophical and theological discussions hidden behind the apparently innocent veil of the most renowned fable of modernity. The rather extended apparatus accordingly consists in a series of short chapters by Filippo Bruni on the Enlightenment and Metaphysics, and in more detail, on theology, Free choice, the problem of evil, and happiness in an imperfect world and another by Sergio Cremaschi on the Enlightenment and morality, and in more detail on moral universalism, on religion without metaphysics, toleration, and pacifism.
Voltaire
Candide
Italian edition by Sergio Cremaschi and Filippo Bruni
Firenze: La Nuova Italia, 2001, pp. 208. ISBN 88-221-3750-7
Table of contents
I. Before the text
A trick for priests
A scandalous book
Garden with view
II. Text
Candide or optimism
III. Context
Biography
1. The seven years war
2. Calvinists and Socinians
3. Jiansenists and Gesuits
4. Marranos and inquisitors
5. Conquistadores and slave-traders
6. Paraguay under the Jesuits
IV. Co-text
1. Enlightenment and Metaphysics
1.1. Theology
1.2. Free choice
1.3. The problem of evil
1.4. Being happy in an imperfect world
2. Enlightenment and morality
2.1. Universal morality
2.2. Religion without Metaphysics
2.3. Toleration
2.4. Pacifism
3. Enlightenment and the images of other places
3.1. The image of Eldorado
3.2. The image of Paraguay
3.3 The image of the Islamic world
3.4. The image of the Jew
4. The conte philosophique
Bibliography
Lexicon
Index of names and concepts
V. Reader’s guide
Italian edition by S. Cremaschi
Firenze: La Nuova Italia, 2000, 240 pp.
This is the first Italian translation of the Deontology, based on Goldworth edition carried out on original manuscripts. The translation goes with a rather extended apparatus meant by the editor to give the student some information needed in order to locate Bentham’s ethical theory within its own context, for example about the forerunners of Utilitarianism, psychological associationism, Bentham’s campaigns against the oppression of women and against cruelty to animals, as well as about nineteenth- and twentieth-century critics of utilitarianism
Table of contents
I. BEFORE THE TEXT
1. Bentham’s legacy
2. Bentham the Reformer
3. Bentham and the enlightenment project of a reformed morality
4. The principle of utility
5. Deontology or private morality
6. Utilitarianism as «eudemonologism»
II. TEXT
Deontology
I. Deontology: theoretical
II. Deontology: practical
III. CO-TEXT
1. Biography
2. The reform of legislation
3. The Philosophic Radicals between the French revolution and the Industrial revolution
IV. CONTEXT
1. Forerunners of Utilitarianism
2. Psychological associationism
3. The oppression of women
4. Cruelty against animals
5. Parsimony and industry in Hogarth’s prints
6. Followers
6.1. John Stuart Mill
6.2. Henry Sidgwick
7. Critics
7.1. Romantic, conservative, and Christian critics
7.2. Socialist critics
8. Consequences: neo-utilitarianism
9. Consequences: critics of utilitarianism
9.1. Deontological critics
9.2. Perfectionists critics
9.3. Sceptical critics
10. Bentham’s legacy for contemporary ethics, by Bikhu Parekh
Bibliography
Lexicon
Index of names and concepts
Reader’s guide
Reviews
Gaia Barazzetti, Iride, 15 (2002), n. 26, pp. 436-437.
Jlenia Quartarone, Segni e comprensione, 15 Nuova serie (2001), n. 44, pp. 108-113
Armando Massarenti, Aumentare la felicità come unico dovere, IL SOLE-24 ORE, Domenica 22 aprile 2001, pagina VIII http://lgxserver.uniba.it/lei/rassegna/020106c.htm
The book is a study in Adam Smith's system of ideas; its aim is to reconstruct the peculiar framework that Adam Smith’s work provided for the shaping of a semi-autonomous new discipline, political economy; the approach adopted lies somewhere in-between the history of ideas and the history of analytic tools; my two `theses' are:
i) The Wealth of Nations has a twofold structure, including a `natural history' of opulence and an `imaginary machine' of wealth. The imaginary machine is a kind of Newtonian theory, whose connecting links are "principles" provided either by `partial' characteristics of human nature or by analoga of physical mechanisms transferred to the social world;
ii) a domain of the economic, understood as a self-standing social sub-system, was discovered first by Adam Smith. His `discovery' of the new continent of the economic was an `unintended result' of a deviation in his voyage to the never-found archipelago of natural jurisprudence.
I
Imaginary machines and invisible chains: natural philosophy and method.
The first chapter reconstructs Smith's views on method in natural philosophy, presented primarily in the History of Astronomy (HA). The peculiar kind of semi-skeptical Newtonianism which permeates the essay is highlighted. Its reconstruction of the history of one natural science is shown to be based on the assumptions of Hume’s epistemology, and to lead to a self-aware deadlock. Smith's dilemma is between an essentialist realism and a skeptical instrumentalism; the Cartesian presuppositions he shares with Hume and with the 18th century as a whole make it impossible for him to overcome his dilemma. The following chapters will show how, on the one hand, Smith's sceptical methodology encourages him in the enterprise of `carving off' a new self-contained discipline and how, on the other hand, his epistemological dilemma is reflected in the inner tensions of his moral and political theory as well as in a number of basic oscillations concerning the status of the new discipline.
II
Chessboards and clocks: moral philosophy and method
The second chapter reconstructs Smith's views on method in the parallel field of moral philosophy, including the theory of moral sentiments and natural jurisprudence. I argue that, when read along with the Lectures on Jurisprudence, where Smith's peculiar version of a `weaker' form of natural law is presented, The Theory of Moral Sentiments wins special interest, not only for the history of ethics but even more for the history of political theory and the social sciences. The two most striking features of Smith's work in this area are highlighted. First, his effort at reformulating the `practical science' is a methodologically self-aware attempt at applying the Newtonian method to moral subjects. Secondly, this attempt ends in a stalemate as two distinguished kinds of normative order are introduced: one ultimate order of Reason, ultimately justifiable but inaccessible, and one weaker order of our `natural sentiments', to which we have empirical access, but which is so variable as to lack any ultimate value as a basis for grounding our normative claims. These two parallel conundrums may arguably account for the author's inability to publish during his lifetime both The History of Astronomy and the projected history and theory of law and government.
III
Wheels, dams, and gravitation: the structure of the scientific argument in The Wealth of Nations
The third chapter provides the core of the book, dealing with the structure of the argument in WN. I argue that the main presupposition that makes the shift possible from a `natural history' to a `system' approach is the Newtonian contrast of `mathematical' with `physical' explanation; that is, Smith drops any discussion of the "original qualities" of human nature that could account for economic behaviour, while introducing, as `principles' for the system, a set of `hypothetical' statements of `observed' regularities in human behaviour and of `observed' super-individual self-regulating mechanisms. In bringing this presupposition to light, the coexistence of a teleological with a mechanistic approach is clarified; fresh light is shed on the notion of the invisible hand by a comparison of its occurrence in Smith with the occurrence of the same expression (until now overlooked) in the correspondence between Newton and Cotes. Finally, the peculiar semi-prescriptive and semi-descriptive character of political economy is highlighted, and the consistency of Smith's `impure' semi-prescriptive social science, when understood in his own terms, is defended against familiar charges with inconsistency and against even more familiar strained modernizations.
IV
Apples, deer, and frivolous trinkets: the construction of the economic
The fourth chapter draws consequences from the third, examining how Smith's achievement in political economy, marking its transition to scientific status, carried a re-description of the phenomena, creating the comparatively independent and unified field of the economic. Smith's achievement is interpreted not as the `discovery' of an autonomous character already possessed by the economy out there, so much as a Gestalt-switch by which our perception of social phenomena is modified making us `see' the partial order of the economy as an isolated system. To sum up, the autonomy of the economy in social reality and the autonomy of the economic in social consciousness are two sides of one process.
V
General Concluding Remarks: Political economy and the Enlightenment halved
A few suggestions on the status of economic theory two centuries after The Wealth of Nations in its relationship to ‘practical philosophy’ are illustrated
Ch. I
'Anima' and 'res cogitans'. The Cartesian idea of nature and mind as a residual concept
1. The idea of nature in Cartesian physics
2. The Mind as a residual concept
3. Nature as a biological entity and nature as a machine in Spinoza
4. The mind as 'vis' and the mind as 'res cogitans' in Spinoza
The first chapter discusses the genesis of the concept of mind in Cartesian Philosophy; the claim is advanced that res cogitans is a residual concept, defined on the basis of a previous definition of matter as res extensa; thus, a contradictory ontology of the mind is Descartes's poisoned bequest to the following tradition of 'scientific' psychology.
Ch. II
The Mathematical method in the theory of the mind and the passions
1. The idea of a 'spiritual automaton'
2. Man as subject matter of theoretical knowledge
3. Mind as ruled by deterministic laws
The second chapter discusses the first ambitious attempt in this direction, namely Spinoza's theory of the mind and the passions in Ethics II and III; the topics treated are Spinoza's program of a mathematical science of the mind and his transformation of the genre 'treatise of the passions' into a would-be mathematical science of the motions of the soul.
Ch. III
The definition of affections and the impossibility of reducing inadequate to adequate ideas
1. Imaginations, affections, volitions as made of simple ideas
2. Connexions by causality and by association
3. Mathematical method qua canon of the science of the mind and qua definition of the attribute 'mind'
The third chapter discusses a tension in Spinoza project of a theory of the passions, namely a need to reduce concepts to pure mathematical definitions and the opposite need
To keep inadequate imaginative definitions of the phenomena under scrutiny, namely the passions, in order to avoid a radical reduction of the subject-matter to the only truly existing reality (the world order in itself) that would leave the theory without any subject-matter at all.
Ch. IV
'Conatus', 'potentia', 'vis'. Concepts of force in the theory of passions and the impossibiity of eliminating occult qualities
1. Concepts of force in Spinozean metaphysics
2. Concepts of force in Spinozean physics
3. Concepts of force in the third book of Ethics
4. Explanation through concepts of force in Ethics III
5. A possible 'Newtonian' use of Spinoza's psychological doctrines
6. The impossibility of eliminating occult qualities
The fourth chapter discusses the troubles arising in the original project deriving from difficulties in the treatment of dynamic concepts, such as the notion of conatus, which were unavoidable consequence of Cartesian assumptions.
Ch. V
Overview and discussion
1. The doctrine of the genders of knowledge and twentieth-century epistemology
2. How far the project of a 'more mathematico' inquiry on man is carried out
3. A regulative function for mathematical intuition and the impossibility of eliminating imagination
4. To sum up
Chapter five tries to draw a general discussion, focusing on the tension between the Cartesian assumptions and the actual practice in the new post-Galilean sciences, including attempts at giving birth to psychology or a science of man.
Appendices
I. The mind-body problem in Spinoza
II. Concepts of force in Newton and Spinoza
III. Materialist readings of Newton and Spinoza
IV. On the opposition of materialism and spiritualism and Geisteswissenschaften and natural science
V. Conatus, idea of liberation and social theory in Spinoza
Reviews
• Carlo Vinti, Libriper, n. 10 (June 1980)
Sergio Cremaschi’s work consists of a reading of Book III of Spinoza’s Ethics, De Affectibus, and an examination of Spinoza’s program of dealing with the mind and the affections as if they were lines, bodies, and geometrical figures.
The claim advanced is spelled out clearly and proves its novelty in comparison with familiar Spinoza scholarship. Spinoza, according to Cremaschi, in examining the mind and the passions, tries to do what the ‘new science’ is doing, he joins a discussion, an horizon of arguments, an archipelago of bodies of knowledge and of ideological assumption within whose framework he tries to work a theoretical solution “without 'being always able to remember' of considerations and theories that have been left in another drawer of his writing desk” (p. 9). These considerations and theories are those in the first and second book of his Ethics, that is, his metaphysics.
The theoretical framework within which Spinoza treats the subject of the passions is the one of the new Galilean and Cartesian science and, in more detail, “turns out to be similar to the theoretical framework of Newtonian physics” (Ibid.). In other words, first Spinoza in psychology, and then Newton in physics work within similar theoretical frameworks and their inquiries are bound to head with analogous stalemates. In Spinoza the problems arise from the fact that terms such as vis, potentia, conatus, whose definition is never fully spelled out, seem to imply kinds of concepts that have been avowedly ruled out. Newton in a similar way tries to establish a foundation of the concept of force.
• Diego Marconi, Filosofia 31\ 1 (1980), pp. 144-147
• Mauro Fornaro, Rivista di Filosofia Neoscolastica, 73\2 (1981), pp. 441-2.
2. The making of Ricardo’s political economy
3. "A man from another planet”?
ISBN-10 : 0367669498 ISBN-13 : 978-0367669492
Nuova Corsia, Milan. The paper starts with a controversy between Norberto Bobbio and a few Italian colleagues occasioned by the first Iraq war and then proceeds to examine arguments form Kelsen and Walzer on just war to which Bobbio and his partners referred in the course of the controversy.
Before Economics is hosted by Dr Ryan Walter, Senior Lecturer in Political Economy at the University of Queensland. Dr Walter is an intellectual historian working on the history of political and economic thought, focusing on Britain in the ‘long eighteenth century’. His current work examines how political economy was absorbed – or rejected – by Parliament and British society as a source of authoritative knowledge.
Political economy was a patriarchal discourse in the sense that it routinely took the patriarchal household as a model for the government of a state or nation. As a result, gendered language has often been used when describing the texts under study to convey the original meanings.
Sincere thanks to the following interviewees: Lorenzo Cello, Keith Tribe, Terry Peach, Richard van den Berg, Michele Chiaruzzi, Marco Guidi, Karin Sellberg, Leigh Penman, Richard Devetak, Richard Whatmore, Sergio Cremaschi, Mauro Simonazzi.
Niyi Adepoyibi was the sound engineer for the podcasts. This site has been created with the assistance of David Kearns.
The lessonsI draw from the case study is that the controversy does not yield persuasion – its ostensible aim. Rather, its "benefit" seems to lie in an unintended result – clarification and deepening of contrasting approaches to the discipline – due to its peculiar dynamics. In so far as the history of a discipline requires a reconstruction of such contrasts, it is indispensable for it to take into account the controversies where they emerge, and to view both the positive doctrines and the methodological posture of the contenders as parts of a wider framework, that is a scientific style.
The main claim is that the study of controversies, as a kind of rational practice carried out in an inter-subjective framework, is able to offer a privileged ground for the construction of a bridge between both main methodological approaches that have confronting each other in the last decades, let us say, rhetoric and methodology.
1.the status of moral codes
2. A case study: Islamic morality and Arabo-Islamic ethical thought
3.The idea of toleration and its consequences on education in a liberal-democratic society.
The lectures were delivered in Spring 2016 to an audience of secodnary-school teachers in Milan metropolitan area.