Will D. Desmond

ZusammenfassungEs ist eine gängige Praxis ethischer Reflexion, zwischen verschiedenen Systemen moralischer Werte zu unterscheiden und dann die einen gegen die anderen auszuspielen. Im Text wird eine Reflexionsform vorgestellt, die gewissermaßen einen ‚Schritt zurück‘ von derartigen vordergründigen Wertsystemen tritt und stattdessen die Quellen des Ethischen betrachtet, Quellen, die wir in unserer alltäglichen ethischen Praxis oft genug nicht beachten oder für selbstverständlich halten. Zu diesen Quellen oder Potentialen des Ethischen zähle ich das, was ich als das Idiotische, das Ästhetische, das Dianoetische, das Eudaimonische, das Transzendentale, das Transzendierende und das Transzendente bezeichne. Ethische ‚Systeme‘ manifestieren diese Potentiale in der einen oder anderen, je eigenen Ausformung. Die ethischen Potentiale gehen auf mancherlei Wegen in ethische Systeme ein, ohne je ganz in einem einzigen System aufzugehen. Der ‚Schritt zurück‘ ist ein Rückgang auf die vielfältigen Quellen des Ethischen in den Potentialen. Er kann uns auch dabei helfen, etwas über die Zukunft der Ethik zu sagen.

Introduction. Why did Cynicism emerge throughout the Greek world when it did? Survey of relevant literature; criticism of previous suggestions and assumptions. Cynic individualism represents a radical internalization of widespread ideals of individual excellence. Cynic asceticism is a paradoxical response to the perceived problems of wealth and poverty in the fourth century B.C.E.: to escape poverty one must embrace it. Outline of chapters. ;Chapter one: Praise of poverty and work. Popular attitudes to work and wealth precede the Cynic praise of po&d12;nov and the paradoxical claim that the Cynic beggar is "rich." Work is morally beneficial as well as economically necessary. Praise of the Greek poor in various authors: the poor are honest, just, and do the most productive work; the rich are often hubristic and exploitative. The critique of wealth from a variety of perspectives: wealth is the "mother-city of all evils," particularly class-struggle; in a democracy, wealth is dangerous given the power of the people; the limited nature of Greek production ensured that the rich could spend their money only on public services or invidious luxuries---benefits possibly dubious to some. The Cynics appear in cities with democratic traditions during times of heightened class-tension, as strident critics of wealth and the wealthy. ;Chapter two: Praise of poverty and war. Poverty trains individuals and nations to martial excellence---strength, courage, temperance, patriotism; therefore, the poor are the best soldiers, as many wars seem to demonstrate. Political theorists of the fourth century recommend that the fighting nobility embrace a voluntary poverty to maintain their preeminence. The Cynics' claim to "kingship" and their boast that asceticism makes them "invincible" vis-a vis Fortune exaggerates the traditional and more recent philosophical link between poverty and the ideal soldier's virtues. ;Chapter three: Praise of poverty and philosophical wisdom. The dichotomy between absolute and contingent Being introduced into philosophical discourse by Parmenides tends to isolate the Greek thinker as an unconventional, even solitary creature whose knowledge and goals are somehow superior to the norm. The ethical implications of this split between the philosopher and the external world become most apparent in two fourth-century versions of philosophic poverty, the Platonic and the Cynic. For both, the temporal and external cannot be really known or possessed and therefore should not be desired. As a result, the ideal sage eschews material wealth as a hindrance from the higher "wealth" of wisdom, which consists in contemplation of timeless Forms or immersion in the present moment.

© 2016 by Ephemerides Theologicae Lovanienses. All rights reserved. I want to reflect on the nature of revelation by means of the idea of the "godsend". While seeming to be ordinary this word carries communication of what is beyond the ordinary. A godsend suggests something like a chink or crack through which something is revealed - a kind of gap, or permeability, a porosity to a light that comes from a source beyond. In that gifted porosity is there an opening to revelation? Does the godsend say something about the surprise of revelation? In response I follow three steps: from word, to idea, to story. I begin by looking at the word and its etymology and consider what this implies. Then I look at the idea of revelation in connection with the claims of philosophical reason. Here my concern is to illuminate some theoretical considerations concerning reason and revelation, from the more reflective conceptual point of view, especially in relation to the modern sense of reason. Third, I turn to story as true to the godsend, and I pay particular attention to a story that witnesses to a kind of fidelity to singularity, the story entitled "Revelation" of Flannery O'Connor.

The article is a reflection occasioned by an impression of Aristotle’s irritation at the views of the Heracliteans. It offers a reflection that is inspired by, companioned by Heraclitus. It looks at aspects of the approaches of Hegel and Nietzsche as also taking a companioning approach. There is something resistant in Heraclitus’s mode of articulation that makes one diffident in claiming that now at last one is the privileged one to understand him. Heraclitus offers us striking thoughts that strike one into thought—that open up philosophical porosity to the deepest perplexities. In more detail, the author considers what is intended by flux-gibberish and how this bears on the determinacy and constancy of intelligibility. If some pervading sense of the flow of becoming must be granted, how does this bear on the constancy of intelligibility? How can we think the flow and the constancy together?

This is a reflection on the gift of beauty and the passion of being in light of the fact that today we often meet an ambiguous attitude to beauty. Beauty seems bland and lacks the more visceral thrill of the ugly, indeed the excremental. We crave what disrupts and provokes us. Bland beauty seems to be the death of originality. How then be open at all to beauty as gift? In fact, we often are disturbed paradoxically by beauty: both taken out of ourselves, hence disquieted, yet awakened to our being at home with beauty. Beauty arouses enigmatic joy in us, and we enjoy an elemental rapport with it as other. Surprised by beauty, our breath is taken away; we are more truly there with the beautiful yet taken outside of ourselves: both at home with ourselves and not at home, in being beyond ourselves. We are first receivers of the gift of surprise and only then perceivers and conceivers. My attention to the passion of being stresses a patience, a receptivity to what is other. What happens is not first our construction. Our being disarmed by the beautiful I hold to be in tune with our being as marked most deeply by what I call a primal ‘porosity’ to being. Beauty sensuously communicates in and through this awakened porosity. We are a patience of being before we are an endeavour to be. In modern aesthetics and culture, originating receptivity tends to be downplayed as a depreciation of our claims to creative power. The predominant stress often falls on human autonomy, such that we love only what we construct ourselves, not what we receive. By contrast, I argue there is something of the godsend in what is truly beautiful. This might not be a fashionable way of talking but the vocation of the philosopher is not to be fashionable but to be true.

William Desmond: It is a pleasure to welcome Professor Charles Griswold today. I thank him for his willingness to present us with an overview of his new book Adam Smith and the Virtues of Enlightenment , and to participate in a discussion. Professor Griswold is professor of philosophy at Boston University, where he is also the chair of the philosophy department. His new work on Adam Smith might seem like something of a departure from the concerns of many of his prior publications. In particular I mean his writings on Plato and Platonic themes generally. I refer especially to his book Self-Knowledge in Plato's Phaedrus, first published by Yale University Press, and recently reprinted by Pennsylvania State University Press.This book is a close reading and interpretation of the Phaedrus, and was awarded the Matchette prize by the American Philosophical Association in 1987. Needless to say, Professor Griswold has written extensively on classical philosophy. This, however, cannot be separated from a concern with pressing problems of more contemporary currency, especially the role of philosophy in society, and with respect to ethical and political considerations. Hence his concern with the moderns, by contrast with the ancients, implies no slighting of the former, though the question persists as to what both have to say to us today. So it is not surprising to find him engaged with a very influential modern, Adam Smith: an influential, but also complex modern, in that themes from ancient thought receive their own distinctive configuration in Smith's thought.Enlightenment is often marked by a certain turn from the past, oriented to a putatively better future, via a reformed or revolutionized present. But the contrast with the past is sometimes less stark. This one might guess perhaps from the subtitle to the book, emphasizing the virtues of enlightenment. While Smith now is often remembered first as an economist, Professor Griswold's interest is directed to his work as a philosopher, especially his moral and political thought. Many of the themes that Adam Smith explored, and to which Griswold draws our attention, are still very live issues: the virtues, ethical reasoning, sympathy, moral education, the importance of ordinary life and the role of philosophical theory, to name but a few issues.Let me then welcome Charles again, and ask him to first offer us an account of his new work, its purposes and its claims. After that we will begin the discussion with the other participants here

Much has been written on love and friendship, but not a lot on the nature of an enemy, in a manner analogous to the nature of love itself. To understand something about what it means to be an enemy is not at all self-evident. And if we do not know what an enemy is, do we really know what a friend or a lover is? An understanding of what it means to be an enemy might offer us something like the reverse negative of love or friendship. From holding the reversed negative to the light perhaps we can also gain some sight of the "unreversed" original. The article discusses the fact that we live life as something that offers us a certain affirmative delight in the "to be" as good. It explores how this is changed in relation to different forms of threat. It situated the nature of an enemy in terms of the equivocal constitution of the human being as passio essendi and conatus essendi. Different kinds of enemy are investigated by considering the "reversed negatives" of these four forms of love: self-affirming love, erotic love, philia, and agapeic love.