Academic literature on the topic 'Clarke, Samuel, Philosophy, English Ethics'

Abstract Samuel Beckett’s interest in tragicomedy has been clear since he attached the subtitle A Tragicomedy in Two Acts to the English translation of Waiting for Godot. This article articulates what exactly Beckettian tragicomedy does. Godot, Beckett’s foremost tragicomedy, stages the interplay of his wide-ranging literary and philosophical influences. Drawing on figures such as Arthur Schopenhauer, Jean Racine, Henri Bergson, Arnold Geulincx, and Fritz Mauthner, the play bends toward tragedy but undercuts any sense of finality with its slow unrolling. More than a metaphysical statement, this temporal model of tragicomedy offers a Beckettian ethics insistent on both the resigned compassion of tragedy and comedy’s power to critique. In outlining Godot’s tragicomic philosophy, the essay charts Beckett’s deployment of the various figures who inspire his play but also shows how this tragicomic paradigm functions in the theater—and how it inspires future dramatists.

Joseph Butler's moral thought and the ethical rationalism of Samuel Clarke, and his followers, John Balguy and Richard Price, are frequently distinguished, as a result of: (a) Butler’s empirical method (e.g., Kydd, Sturgeon); (b) Butler's emphasis upon self-love in the 'cool hour passage' (e.g., Prichard, McPherson); (c) Butlerian conscience, where, on a neo-Kantian reading, Butler surpassed the Clarkeans by conveying a sense of Kantian 'reflective endorsement' (e.g., Korsgaard, Darwall). The neo-Kantian criticisms of the Clarkeans in (c) are consistent with (d) Francis Hutcheson's and David Hume's criticisms of the Clarkeans; (e) modern criticisms of rational intuitionism that follow Hutcheson and Hume (e.g., Mackie, Warnock); and (f) the contention that the Clarkeans occupied an uneasy position within 'post-restoration natural law theory' (e.g., Beiser, Finnis). (d)-(e) thus underpin the distinction between Butler and the Clarkeans in (a)-(c), where the Clarkeans, unlike Butler, are criticised for representing moral truth as the passive, and self-evident, perception of potentially uninteresting facts. This study responds to (a)-(f), by arguing that Butlerian and Clarkean conscience possessed more than one referent; so that conscience meant an individual's experience of his own judgement and God’s judgement and the rational moral order. As a result of their shared theory of conscience, Butler and the Clarkeans held the same theory of moral development: moral agents mature as they move from obeying conscience according to only one of conscience's referents, to obeying conscience because to do so is to satisfy each of conscience's referents. In response to (a)-(b), this study demonstrates that the Clarkeans agreed with Butler’s method and 'cool hour': natural considerations of individual judgement and self-interest were necessary aspects of the progress towards moral maturity in both Butler and the Clarkeans. With respect to (c), it is argued that Butler and the Clarkeans shared the same understanding of practical moral reasoning as part of their shared understanding of conscience and moral development. This study places limits upon proto-Kantian readings of Butler, and neo-Kantian criticisms of the Clarkeans, while making it inconsistent to divide Butler and the Clarkeans on the basis of Butlerian conscience. In answer to (c)-(f), Clarkean conscience shows that the Clarkeans were neither complacent nor ‘externalists’. Clarkean conscience highlights how the Clarkeans positioned themselves within the tradition of Ciceronian right reason and Thomistic natural law. Consequently, in both Butler and the Clarkeans, the intuition of moral truth was not the passive perception of an 'independent realm' of normative fact, but the active encounter, in conscience, with reason qua the law of God’s nature, human nature, and the created universe.

This study examines the role of history in the writings of the English deists, a group of heterodox religious controversialists who were active from the last quarter of the seventeenth century until the middle of the eighteenth century. Its main sources are the published works of the deists and their opponents, but it also draws, where possible, on manuscript sources. Not all of the deists were English (one was Irish and another was of Welsh extraction), but the term ‘English Deists’ has been used on the grounds that the majority of deists were English and that they published overwhelmingly in England and in English. It shows that the deists not only disagreed with their orthodox opponents about the content of sacred history, but also about the relationship between religious truth and historical evidence. Chapter 1 explains the entwining of theology and history in early Christianity, how the connection between them was understood by early modern Christians, and how developments in orthodox learning set the stage for the appearance of deism in the latter decades of the seventeenth century. Each of the following three chapters is devoted to a different line of argument which the deists employed against orthodox belief. Chapter 2 examines the argument that certain propositions were meaningless, and therefore neither true nor false irrespective of any historical evidence which could be marshalled in their support, as it was used by John Toland and Anthony Collins. Chapter 3 traces the argument that the actions ascribed to God in sacred history might be unworthy of his goodness, beginning with Samuel Clarke’s first set of Boyle Lectures and then progressing through the writings of Thomas Chubb, Matthew Tindal, Thomas Morgan, and William Warburton. Chapter 4 charts the decline of the category of certain knowledge in the latter half of the seventeenth century, the rise of probability theory, and the effect of these developments on the deists’ views about the reliability of historical evidence. Chapter 5 is a case-study, which reads Anthony Collins’s Discourse of the Grounds and Reasons of the Christian Religion (1724) in light of the findings of the earlier chapters. Finally, a coda provides a conspectus of the state of the debate in the middle decades of the eighteenth century, focusing on the work of four writers: Peter Annet, David Hume, Conyers Middleton, and Edward Gibbon.

The popularization of academic spaces that combine Buddhist philosophy with the literature of the Romantic period – a discipline I refer to as Buddhist Romantic Studies – have exposed the lack of scholarly attention Samuel Taylor Coleridge and The Rime of the Ancient Mariner have received within such studies. Validating Coleridge’s right to exist within Buddhist Romantic spheres, my thesis argues that Coleridge was cognizant of Buddhism through historical and textual encounters. To create a space for The Rime within Buddhist Romantic Studies, my thesis provides an interpretation of the poem that centers on the concept of prajna, or wisdom, as a vital tool for cultivating the mind. Focusing on prajna, I argue that the Mariner’s didactic story traces his cognitive voyage from ignorance to enlightenment. By examining The Rime within the framework of Buddhism, readers will also be able to grasp the importance of cultivating the mind and transcending ignorance.

Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz (1646–1716) is one of the most important and influential philosophers of the modern period, offering a wealth of original ideas in metaphysics, epistemology, ethics, and philosophical theology, among them his signature doctrines such as substance and monads, pre-established harmony, and optimism. This volume contains introductory chapters on eleven of Leibniz’s key philosophical writings, covering youthful works (“Confessio philosophi”, “De summa rerum”), seminal middle-period writings (“Discourse on Metaphysics”, “New System”), to masterpieces of his maturity (“Monadology”, “Discourse on the Natural Theology of the Chinese”), as well as his two main philosophical books (New Essays on Human Understanding, and Theodicy), and three of his most important philosophical correspondences, with Antoine Arnauld, Burcher de Volder, and Samuel Clarke. The chapters, written by internationally renowned experts on Leibniz, offer clear, accessible accounts of the ideas and arguments of these key writings, along with valuable information about their composition and context. By focusing on the primary texts, these chapters enable readers to attain a solid understanding of what each text says and why, and give them the confidence to read the texts themselves. Offering a detailed and chronological view of Leibniz’s philosophy and its development through some of his most important writings, this volume is an invaluable guide for those encountering Leibniz for the first time. However, the chapters also contain much material that will enrich the understanding of those already familiar with Leibniz’s ideas.

This chapter concerns God’s nature. It focuses especially on the Christological debates between Daniel Waterland and his era’s most influential Christologically heterodox polemical divine, Samuel Clarke. Firstly, it examines how Newtonianism or Lockeanism could produce different conceptions of God. Secondly, it anatomizes the competing historical narratives which demonstrated how and why the ancient, primitively pure of Christian thinking about God got perverted. Finally, it explains why charges of imposture were so prevalent in eighteenth-century English polemical divinity.