Samuel Loncar

This chapter situates John Milton’s “antitrinitarianism” within its historical context—that of the Protestant critique of heresiology. For this reason, we problematize the concept of heresy, for its use begs the very question that seventeenth-century theologians were asking: What should we believe? Such inquiry arises in the context of humanistic scholarship and the growing sense of historical consciousness. Erasmus’ rejection of the Johannine Comma and Valla’s exposure of the Donation of Constantine are perhaps the two most famous examples, and this chapter examines in detail the work of Milton’s contemporary, Gerardus Vossius, who was the first to show that what we now call the Pseudo-Athanasian creed was spurious. His scholarship is significant for it justifies our methodological framing by demonstrating that theological questions, such as belief in the Trinity, were still live issues in the seventeenth century. Protestant scholars continued to ask themselves what needed to be reformed. Milton’s Arianism derives from this concern. He was unable to justify the doctrine of the Trinity from Scripture, his only authority, and so Milton developed the most original formulation of the Reformed doctrine of election in the seventeenth century, asserting three centuries before Karl Barth a clear doctrine of Christ’s eternal election in the divine will. Milton’s arguments derive from Scripture, and we show in the final section of the chapter the ultimate implications of the Protestant position: no one knows the truth. Milton argues for a form of Protestant ecumenism and doctrinal relativism because reformers cannot establish—and the state should not impose—the content of faith.

In recent scholarship, the science and religion debate has been historicized, revealing the novelty of the concepts of science and religion and their complex connections to secularization and the birth of modernity. This article situates this historicist turn in the history of philosophy and its connections to theology and Scripture, showing that the science and religion concept derives from philosophy's earlier tension with theology as it became an academic discipline centered in the medieval, then research university, with the centrality of Scripture changing under the influence of historical criticism. Looking at Thomas Aquinas and Friedrich Schleiermacher on theology and Scripture's connection to science, it offers a new framework for theorizing science and religion as part of the history of philosophy.

: This article argues that Kant’s doctrine of radical evil and the doctrine of conversion which is its consequent reflect developments in Kant’s thinking about moral agency and his realization that his theory of freedom was inadequate to the problem of moral evil; that the changes Kant makes to accommodate evil result in a significant though subterranean shift in his concept of agency, resulting in two incompatible concepts, one explicit but inadequate, the other implicit yet necessary; and that the problems Kant encounters with radical evil and conversion and the concept of agency they push him towards provide an important link between Kant and German Idealism.

This article articulates a fundamental crisis of disciplinary philosophy—its lack of disciplinary self-consciousness and the skeptical problems this generates—and, through that articulation, exemplifies a means of mitigating its force. Disciplinary philosophy organizes itself as a producer of specialized knowledge, with the apparatus of journals, publication requirements, and other professional standards, but it cannot agree on what constitutes knowledge, progress, or value, and evinces ignorance of its history and alternatives. This situation engenders a skepticism that threatens the legitimacy of disciplinary philosophy. The article proposes a response to this skepticism, rooted in the conditions that philosophers evince a specific kind of awareness of their own activity and its professional and cultural location, demonstrate this awareness by articulating it in the practice of philosophy itself, and recognize that precisely such articulation lies at the core of the Socratic idea of philosophy as a form of self-knowledge