Minding the Modern by Thomas Pfau - 9780268038441

Minding the ModernHuman Agency, Intellectual Traditions, and Responsible Knowledge\nAuthor(s): Thomas Pfau\nFormat: Paperback\nPublisher: University of Notre Dame Press, United States\nImprint: University of Notre Dame Press\nISBN-13: 9780268038441, 978-0268038441\nSynopsis\nIn this brilliant study, Thomas Pfau argues that the loss of foundational concepts in classical and medieval Aristotelian philosophy caused a fateful separation between reason and will in European thought. Pfau traces the evolution and eventual deterioration of key concepts of human agencywill, person, judgment, actionfrom antiquity through Scholasticism and on to eighteenth-century moral theory and its critical revision in the works of Samuel Taylor Coleridge. Featuring extended critical discussions of Aristotle, Gnosticism, Augustine, Aquinas, Ockham, Hobbes, Shaftesbury, Mandeville, Hutcheson, Hume, Adam Smith, and Coleridge, this study contends that the humanistic concepts these writers seek to elucidate acqu.