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2 results

  • Chapter 2 - Godless Dunces: Alexander Pope

  • James Bryant Reeves, Texas State University, San Marcos
  • Book:
    Godless Fictions in the Eighteenth Century
    Published online:
    06 August 2020
    Print publication:
    09 July 2020, pp 73-104

  • Summary

    In this chapter, I argue that Pope’s poetry is profoundly concerned with the deleterious effects of unbelief and that, at the same time, he found atheistical materialism creatively productive. First, I chart Pope’s career-long engagement with religion, paying special attention to his numerous clarion calls for unity across confessional divides and to atheism’s negative role in bringing this unity about. I address broad swathes of Pope’s work, including the Essay on Criticism (1711), The Rape of the Lock (1714), the Horatian imitations and Moral Essays of the 1730s, and, most critically, the Essay on Man (1734). After tracing Pope’s ecumenical impulses, I turn to the 1743 Dunciad, showing how the final iteration of Pope’s mock-epic masterpiece incorporates and expels godlessness at almost every turn: from the replacement of Lewis Theobald as King Dunce by Colley Cibber, whose gaming addiction Pope consistently ridicules and aligns with atheistic notions of chance, fortune, and chaos, to the dunces’ intellectual vacuity and Pope’s “Epicurean” method of composition, I show how the poem is haunted by God’s absence from start to finish.

  • Chapter 5 - Metaethical pluralism: how both moral naturalism and moral skepticism may be permissible positions

  • Edited by Susana Nuccetelli, St Cloud State University, Minnesota, Gary Seay
  • Book:
    Ethical Naturalism
    Published online:
    05 January 2012
    Print publication:
    08 December 2011, pp 89-109

  • Summary

    This chapter deals with the relation between two metaethical theses: moral naturalism and moral skepticism. Moral naturalism and moral skepticism are certainly not contradictories; they do not exhaust the space of metaethical possibilities. It is usual to think of them as contraries, for surely to embrace one position is to reject the other. The chapter explores the possibility of an irresolvable indeterminacy between moral naturalism and moral skepticism. David Lewis located one potential node of indeterminacy: between moral naturalism and error theoretic moral skepticism. The chapter investigates the potential undecidability of the debate between cognitivism and non-cognitivism. Rudolf Carnap invites open competition with his cognitivist rival. Having discussed Lewis and Carnap, it seems apt to end with the philosopher who best connects them: W. V. Quine. Faced with the nodes of indeterminacy, the author counsels neither sectarianism nor ecumenicalism in particular, but rather what might be called "metaethical ambivalence".