The Reformed theology that dominated Cambridge in the mid seventeenth century tended strongly towards a voluntarist conception of God’s relation to morality, on which God’s will is the sole determiner of moral truths. This chapter demonstrates that over the same short period (c. 1642–51), the Cambridge Platonists all took a controversial stand against the voluntarism of their Calvinist colleagues, arguing for a kind of moral realism on which God’s goodness precedes, and in a sense even constrains his will. They did this despite the fact that their realist position was routinely denied and condemned in Reformed preaching about predestination. Whichcote, More, Cudworth and Smith’s arguments against voluntarism and in favour of realism in this narrow time period suggest close intellectual contact while also matching Tuckney’s description of the doctrinal profile of Whichcote’s ‘learned and ingenious’ Plato-loving scholars.

The conclusion proposes alternative ways to think about Christian normativity, drawing on the concepts of polydoxy and religious autonomy from Alvin Reines, with additional support from Catherine Keller and Laurel Schneider, and the concept of theological disobedience, derived from Louis Michael Seidman’s notion of constitutional disobedience.

The conservative side of the quest for true Christianity – what traditionalists call the “rule of faith” – can also be organized in terms of doctrine, culture, and politics. The second chapter begins by looking at the doctrinal quest, which focuses on the retrieval of “historic Christianity.” John Henry Newman, Karl Barth, and C. S. Lewis represent key moments in the rise of retrievalism among Protestants.

The widespread view that so-called Socratic ethics is fundamentally different from Platonic ethics is examined. The so-called Socratic paradoxes are discussed (Section 4.1). The idea of Socratic ethics as independent of any metaphysical assumptions is critically examined (Section 4.2). The so-called Socratic intellectualism is examined and the claim that in Protagoras Socrates rejects the idea of incontinence is criticized (Section 4.3). The account in Protagoras of “being overcome by pleasure” and the possibility of incontinence are examined as a possible key to differentiating Socratic and Platonic ethics (Section 4.3). The connection between virtue and happiness in the “Socratic” dialogues and in the “Platonic” dialogues is explored. What is the connection between happiness and the Idea of the Good (Section 4.4)?

Interpreters have long recognized that there is a problem about determining what kind of activity Aristotle thinks happiness is. Some of his remarks appear to favor a single best kind of activity, intellectual contemplation. Other evidence suggests that it is an overarching activity that has various virtuous activities, ethical and intellectual, as parts. Interpreters typically view these as incompatible theses and try to show that one or the other apparent thesis is merely apparent. The problem of determining which of two incompatible theses Aristotle believes is the Dilemmatic Problem of Happiness. But the arguments that rival interpretations amass exert pressure to think that Aristotle really is committed to both of the allegedly incompatible claims. The problem of showing how he can coherently endorse both is the Conjunctive Problem of Happiness. Any dialectically satisfactory interpretation of Aristotles theory of happiness must solve it. None has done so. It cannot be solved while laboring under the weight of three common assumptions. Chapters 2–4 argue for the falsity of those assumptions and provide materials for constructing a solution to the Conjunctive Problem.

Svetlana Evdokimova explores the enigma of the Russian intelligentsia itself as a cultural body that has been defined in highly disparate ways. Evdokimova reviews the ambiguity of the term in Russian society while staking out Chekhov’s own tormented relationship with this group as its harsh critic and devoted champion. How could Chekhov both fault the intelligentsia for its multiple perceived flaws and use the terms intelligentnost’ and intelligentnyi approvingly as a marker of refinement and culture? Evdokimova identifies the reason for this seeming contradiction not so much in any inconsistency on Chekhov’s part, but in the instability and varying usage of the term “intelligentsia.”

Ready-made histories of 1960s cultural development might easily overlook Robert Hayden. His apparently genteel politics, reflected in commitments to racial cosmopolitanism and substantial reverence for the Western canon, distinguished him from many of the innovators and experimentalists of 1960s Black radical poetry. However, Hayden’s distinctive contributions to the decade played a key role in the evolution of African American poetics. His political aesthetic became an important model for successful Black poets of the later twentieth century. These academic poets, whose professional and intellectual lives were distanced from the economic and cultural exigencies of the Black majority, learned much from Hayden’s theory of aesthetic distance. While a powerful Black aesthetic of the 1960s called for art that appeared to spring from the heart of the Black folk masses, Hayden honed a deeply introspective Black poetics, which contemplated the experiential distance that stretched between the “colleged” poet-speaker and the Black folk world.

In this chapter, I set out Merleau-Ponty’s critique of intellectualism, which understands perception proper in terms of the top–down imposition of scientific and proto-scientific concepts on our sensory deliverances by way of judgements. Intellectualism begins with Descartes and is refined in parts of the B edition of Kants First Critique. The scientistic reading of Kant is propounded most notably by Léon Brunschvicg, one of Merleau-Ponty’s early teachers. I outline Merleau-Ponty’s critique, to the effect that intellectualism neglects pre-conceptual perception, motivated attention and action and our early and exploratory acts of learning. It also neglects the singularity of empirical things and of the somatically and cognitively constituting subject. I go on to show how Merleau-Ponty takes up ideas from Kant that are not tied to intellectualist suppositions, including the synoptic synthesis of apprehension, the schemas for pure and empirical concepts, orientation in space, the feeling of perceiving and the productive imagination.

An exploration of intelletualist and non- or anti-intellectualist approaches to practical action, focusing on the central role of tacit belief in establishing propsitional/rational foundations for political judgment and action.

Having examined the judgment crucial to the hylomorphically structured act of choice, this chapter turns to the act of choice itself, which is a volition. It does not yet offer an account of choice’s hylomorphic structure but lays important groundwork for doing so in Chapter 5 by shedding light on Aquinas’s general account of volition and its dependence on judgment. It first argues that a volition differs from judgment because it involves a world-to-mind rather than mind-to-world direction of fit. It then examines how volition depends on judgment. Aquinas himself characterizes judgment as the formal as well as the final cause of volition. The chapter suggests that these are two descriptions of one and the same dependence relation: judgment orders volition to an end, which makes it a final cause, and in so doing it also determines the volition’s kind, which makes it a formal cause. The last two sections deal with Aquinas’s view that the will “moves itself.” They argue that this does not imply any freedom of the will to operate independently of reason. In short, the chapter advocates a strongly intellectualist account of the will’s freedom.

Frederick Douglass’s relationship to education was multifaceted and at times paradoxical. Douglass’s accounts of his denied access to education while enslaved, his history of unsanctioned self-education, his role as an activist-educator and promoter of Black education, and his evolution into an iconic subject for education on U.S. slavery and Black history more generally demand that a discussion of Douglass and education be addressed from several angles. This essay traces the consonance of and tensions between the various ways we must consider education’s place within Douglass studies. Douglass’s overrepresentation in educational materials for children further compounds tendencies to view Douglass in more simplistically individualistic terms. Though exceptional in his ability, learning methods, and educational circumstances, Douglass is best understood within the larger historical context of Black education. Moreover, Douglass himself recognized that education was not a simple cure for racism and criticized the educational elitism attached to prestigious institutions and occupations.

Provides a philosophical evaluation of the Socratic views discussed in the main body of the book. Is this an ethical philosophy we should admire, or one we should reject? What should we make, from a contemporary philosophical point of view, of Socrates’ commitments to motivational intellectualism, to a craft model of ethical knowledge and achievement, and of his proposals for how we should go about ethical self-improvement? Scholarship aims to understand the thoughts of others. But once we do understand them, it is appropriate also to consider how we should assess the actual philosophical merits of the positions attributed to the focus of scholarly attention. What should we think of Socrates as a philosopher?

Socrates was a motivational intellectualist, which means that he believed that all actions follow the agent’s belief about what is best at the time of acting. This intellectualism entails that all human ethical error involves cognitive error. How do people come to have false ethical beliefs, and how can the processes of evaluative belief-formation be made more reliable? Explores the Socratic account of different etiologies of evaluative belief-formation in such a way as to explain human error but also to indicate ways to improve one’s ability to make appropriate ethical judgments. Discusses the role of punishment in improving one’s ethical condition, not just by causing suffering, but by changing the ways in which a wrongdoer generates and sustains evaluative beliefs.

The introduction does the following: it lays out the scope and argument of the book; it explains different senses of free will, a broad sense, which does not presuppose the ability to do otherwise, and a narrow sense, which does presuppose it; it presents broad definitions of historiographical labels: intellectualism and voluntarism, which respectively refer to theories that explain free agency mainly with reference to the intellect or the will; it summarizes the commonly accepted narrative of the fall of the angels, of which medieval thinkers discuss particular aspects in connection to free will; and it presents a brief chapter outline.

In the earlier chapters of the book we have seen that various forms of embeddedness in practices, conventions and behaviour that remained below the threshold of awareness for many, nonetheless served to complicate and shape people’s apparently more rational aspirations and conduct.This chapter examines a range of activities concerned with music and bodily movement, which most radicals treated mostly with a degree of disdain, rejecting them as corrupting of the young and fostering interests in fashion and in frivolous pursuits – such as dance, music and singing.Nonetheless, these activities were often central to the way in which people in the period experienced the world and it often served to ground them both in particular social milieu and in a set of narratives of the inevitability of the status quo.Loyalism did much to exploit the practical engagement of men and women in concerts, parades, balls, etc., as a basis for re-affirming their loyalties to the government and the nation. Radical intellectualism, in these circumstances, was often marginalised and weakened as a result.