Jonathan Edwards's Moral Thought and Its British Context

by Fiering, Norman; Crisp, Oliver D.

• ISBN13: 9781597526180
• ISBN10: 1597526185
• Format: Paperback
• Copyright: 2006-04-01
• Publisher: Wipf & Stock Pub

Summary

The problems of moral philosophy were a central preoccupation of literate people in eighteenth-century America and Britain. It is not surprising, then, that Jonathan Edwards was drawn into a colloquy with some of the major ethicists of the age. Moral philosophy in this era was so all-encompassing in its claims that it encroached seriously on traditional religion. In response, Edwards presented a detailed analysis and criticism of secular moral philosophy in order to demonstrate its inadequacy, and he formulated a system that he believed was demonstrably superior to the existing secular systems. In this comprehensive study, Norman Fiering skillfully integrates Edwards's work on ethics into seventeenth- and eighteenth-century British and Continental philosophy and isolates Edwards's particular contributions to the ethical thought of his time. In addition, Fiering traces the chronological development of Edwards's thought, showing the relationship between his wide reading and his writing.

Author Biography

Norman Fiering is Director and Librarian Emeritus of the John Carter Brown Library

Table of Contents

Preface	p. vii
Introduction	p. 3
An Intellectual Context	p. 13
The Republic of Letters	p. 14
The American Setting	p. 23
A Yale Education?	p. 28
Locke and Arnauld	p. 33
Malebranche	p. 40
Other Reading	p. 45
The Moral Achievements of "Natural Understanding"	p. 48
Edwards's Method	p. 49
Common Grace	p. 61
Synteresis	p. 62
God's Retribution	p. 67
Conscience and Symmetry	p. 70
Beauty	p. 80
The Trinity	p. 82
The Morality of Nature	p. 84
Clarke	p. 87
The Depersonalization of Providence	p. 93
Final Thoughts on "Natural Understanding"	p. 105
Secondary Beauty and Conscience	p. 110
Spiritual Sense	p. 123
Wollaston, Hutcheson, and the Moral Sense	p. 129
Conscience and Sympathy	p. 138
Sentiment versus Reason	p. 145
The Permutations of Self-Love	p. 150
The Definition of Self-Love	p. 151
The Legitimacy of Self-Love	p. 167
The Inroads of Self-Love	p. 174
The Meaning of Gratitude	p. 184
Natural Affection	p. 192
Hell and the Humanitarians	p. 200
The Doctrine of Hell in the Early Eighteenth Century	p. 203
Edwards's Personal Involvement	p. 207
The Finer Points of the Doctrine	p. 213
The Opposition	p. 225
Edwards's Reply to Whiston and Others	p. 238
The Problem of Pity	p. 247
Morality and Determinism	p. 261
The New England Background	p. 262
Hobbes	p. 272
The Clarke-Collins Debate	p. 277
Edwards's Early Notions	p. 283
The Libertarians (or Arminians)	p. 292
Motives	p. 305
Habits and Moral Necessity	p. 308
Merit and Psychological Necessity	p. 313
Action and Passion	p. 316
Moral Theology	p. 322
The Corollaries of True Virtue	p. 328
Edwards and Malebranche	p. 341
Edwards and Utilitarian Ethics	p. 346
True and Counterfeit Virtue	p. 356
Appendix	p. 363
Bibliographical Note	p. 371
Index	p. 381
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