Mark Larrimore

Comparative philosophy remains an outsider even in our time. The most common such work, comparing the philosophies of “East” and “West,” tends to reinscribe stereotypes we have learned to suspect as Orientalist. Critics of the enterprise have noted that the very concept of philosophy is culturally specific; the search for non-Western philosophies would be a subtle imperalism even if it did not so often turn up empty-handed. Instead of abandoning ourselves to Eurocentrism we might do better to regard comparative study as an opportunity to learn to see beyond the limits of Western philosophy as now practiced. For the questions raised by comparative work are not so very different from those raised by new work in the history of Western thought.

This dissertation challenges two myths about Leibniz' Theodicy: that it is primarily concerned with the problem of evil, and that its ethical implications are reactionary. ;Leibniz' neologism "theodicy" connotes not the justification of God, but the justice of God, a justice Leibniz is at pains to make us realize is no different from our own; we are "little gods." This makes God's world-choice a models for an ethics and politics of imitatio dei, and undermines the unspoken "theodicy or ethics" assumption of much modern thought. The purpose of the Theodicy is "edification"--the encouragement of active piety in charity. Not evil but "mistaken notions of liberty, necessity and destiny" are Leibniz' main concern. ;The "best of all possible worlds" argument is a priori, thus insusceptible to empirical confirmation, rejection--or application. Any knowledge of the nature of the actual world is a posteriori, incomplete and fallible. This applies also to our knowledge of "evil" which, while no more than privation, is experienced as real. Language of "privative beings" has its place not in philosophical reflection on evil but in ethics, where the perception of privations defines the sites for action. ;The model for just choice is God's choice of worlds, and the contours of our ethics may be discerned in the way God's antecedent will to produce all goods and prevent all evils results in the consequent will to produce the goods and permit the evils of the best possible world. All antecedent wills survive in the consequent will, so all permission of evil must be attended by regret; only God in His omniscience can transcend regret. We must anticipate God's antecedent wills, not the consequent, and cannot escape regret. ;Leibniz' anti-voluntarist ethics forces us to think of goods in the context of possible worlds, while his understanding of freedom as "indirect" means that action must be understood in concrete and necessarily social ways with reference to the actual world. As I explore in an epilogue, this makes necessary a particular politics

Christian Wolff's 1721 Discourse on the Practical Philosophy of the Chinese is generally read as championing the autonomy of ethics from religion. This is too simple: Wolff's ethics was an antivoluntarist religious ethics. The example of the Chinese confirmed for Wolff that revelation is not necessary for knowledge or practice of genuine virtue, though he held that the Chinese achieve only the first of three “degrees of virtue.” (Most Christians, including the Pietists who drove Wolff from Halle shortly after he delivered the Discourse, did not, in his judgment, achieve even that.) China's being perceived as outside of Western (and sacred) history made it a congenial example for the ethics and moral anthropology that, in Wolff's time, were struggling against the voluntarism of a Christian ethics premised on original sin.

This _Reader_ brings together primary sources from philosophy, theology and literature to chart the many and changing ways evil has been approached and understood, and to examine the diverse implications it has had for belief and unbelief. Will fill a major gap in the publishing market. Provides primary source readings for courses on religion and evil. A key issue in religious thought - this book will change the way the subject is taught. Author is one of the brightest young religious philosophers in America

The concepts of "religion" and "happiness" are deceptively simple—domesticated products of the modern liberal order—but probing their connections can be illuminating. Seeing religions as means to a generic kind of happiness blinds us to the promise and danger of religious difference. Seeing religion as compensation for the absence or unjust distribution of happiness reinforces unexamined worldly conceptions of happiness. To learn to think about religion and happiness beyond modern consumerist pieties, examination of prosperity religion, the metaphysics of William James's "religion of healthy-mindedness" and the prosperity of the Biblical Job helps more than a survey of views of human fulfillment and joy in the "world religions."

Fortschritt und Vernunft establishes that Immanuel Kant’s little-known philosophy of history is serious, important, and consistent, coherent with his critical philosophy as well as with his ethics. Pauline Kleingeld argues persuasively that the “specifically Kantian” elements of Kant’s views are lost when the “somewhat awkward sentence ‘Kant claims that there are reasons to assume that there is progress in history’ is shortened to ‘Kant claims that there is progress in history’”. It is these “specifically Kantian” aspects that Kleingeld illuminates and finds still of possible use today. Fortschritt und Vernunft begins with careful readings of the arguments of Kant’s essays in the philosophy of history of 1784–95, along with Sections 82–4 of the Critique of Judgment and the third part of The Conflict of the Faculties. Part 2 considers the status and foundations of the philosophy of history in Kant’s critical thought, attending especially to the “conceptual swamp” of the conative language of “needs of reason”, to different accounts of teleology, and to the divergent arguments about the “highest good” in the three Critiques. Part 3 explores and draws together the historical narratives which are at work in Kant’s writings in political philosophy, anthropology, aesthetics, religion, education, and ethics. Historical progress requires far more than the mere working out of “unsociable sociability”; it is the process of cultivation and moralization whereby humanity learns to appreciate and act in accordance with the principle of morality.