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- Ekenberg, Tomas, 1972-
(author)
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Augustine on Second-Order Desires and Persons
- 2016
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In: Subjectivity and Selfhood in Medieval and Early Modern Philosophy. - Cham : Springer. ; , s. 9-24
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Book chapter (peer-reviewed)abstract
- Examines Augustine's view of the will and the self and explores parallels between Augustine's and Harry Frankfurt's hierarchical accounts of personhood. Throws new light on Augustine's views on moral responsibility by showing that even if Augustine may have abandoned certain libertarian assumptions as to the nature of human free will in his mature works, he retains the underlying view of personhood as dependent on a capacity for a certain form of second-order desiring.
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| 2. |
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| 3. |
- Ekenberg, Tomas, 1972-
(author)
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Voluntary Action and Rational Sin in Anselm of Canterbury
- 2016
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In: British Journal for the History of Philosophy. - : Informa UK Limited. - 0960-8788 .- 1469-3526. ; 24:2, s. 215-230
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Journal article (peer-reviewed)abstract
- Anselm of Canterbury (1033–1109) holds that freedom of the will is a necessary condition for moral responsibility. This condition, however, turns out to be trivially fulfilled by all rational creatures at all times. In order to clarify the necessary conditions for moral responsibility, we must look more widely at his discussion of the nature of the will and of willed action. In this paper, I examine his theory of voluntariness by clarifying his account of the sin of Satan in De casu diaboli. Anselm agrees with Augustine that the sinful act cannot be given a causal explanation in terms of a distinct preceding act of will or desire or choice. He thus rejects volitionalist accounts of Satan's sin and thus of voluntary action in general. He moves beyond his predecessor, however, in insisting on the necessity of an explanation in terms of reasons, and his theory of the dual nature of the rational will is designed to meet this demand. A comparison of Satan's case with the case of the miser of De casu diaboli 3, finally, shows that Anselm's account requires that acts of the will or ‘willings’ qualify as voluntary, a suggestion as interesting as problematic.
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| 4. |
- Stöpfgeshoff, Alexander
(author)
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The Structure of the Virtues : A Study of Thomas Aquinas’s and Godfrey of Fontaines's Accounts of Moral Goodness
- 2018
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Doctoral thesis (other academic/artistic)abstract
- This dissertation is a study of Thomas Aquinas’s (1225–1274) and Godfrey of Fontaines’s (d. 1306) moral philosophies. In this study, I conduct a detailed analysis of two Aristotelian commitments concerning the character virtues, namely, The Plurality of the Character Virtues and The Connection of the Character Virtues. Both Aquinas and Godfrey think that there are many distinct character virtues (such as moderation and justice), however, one cannot (perfectly) possess these character virtues in separation from each other.In Chapter I, it is established that Aquinas believes in the plurality of the character virtues not because of a specific account of the human soul, but because he is committed to a plurality in what he calls “the notion of goodness.” In Chapter II, it is argued that Aquinas’s account of virtuous action requires that there be a likeness between a person and their actions in terms of the notion of goodness explored in Chapter I. Chapters III through V lay out my account of how to reconstruct both Aquinas’s and Godfrey’s arguments for The Connection of the Character Virtues. The focus here lies on finding an interpretation that provides a valid argument for the connection of the character virtues. I argue that we ought to focus on a dependence between prudence and the character virtues. A central problem for this analysis is how to account for prudence as a unified virtue. On this issue, Godfrey provides an explicit argument that conceives of prudence as unified because prudence strikes a balance between the character virtues. Chapter VI investigates whether different groups, such as men and women, possess different types of character virtues. Godfrey offers a novel argument for the impossibility of male- and female-specific virtues. Finally, Chapter VII explores the question of how we should understand Godfrey’s account of prudence itself. I show that his discussion emphasizes the variable nature of ethics and that he endorses a view that has certain affinities with ethical particularism (in the contemporary sense).
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| 5. |
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Subjectivity and Selfhood in Medieval and Early Modern Philosophy
- 2016
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Editorial collection (peer-reviewed)abstract
- This book is a collection of studies on topics related to subjectivity and selfhood in medieval and early modern philosophy. The individual contributions approach the theme from a number of angles varying from cognitive and moral psychology to metaphysics and epistemology. Instead of a complete overview on the historical period, the book provides detailed glimpses into some of the most important figures of the period, such as Augustine, Avicenna, Aquinas, Descartes, Spinoza, Leibniz and Hume. The questions addressed include the ethical problems of the location of one's true self and the proper distribution of labour between desire, passion and reason, and the psychological tasks of accounting for subjective experience and self-knowledge and determining different types of self-awareness.
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