On humanity's intensive introspection
By: by Joseph Cropsey
Publisher: St. Augustine's Press
Published: 2012
Place of publication: South Bend, Ind
Language: eng
Number of pages: 196
ISBN-13: 9781587316111
Subjects: Philosophy; Political science
Description: "The essays and lectures first collected here span a period of over 25 years and cover the greater part of Joseph Cropsey's illustrious career of scholarship and teaching at the University of Chicago. They are presented in the order in which he wrote them. The central problem of human thought and existence, according to Cropsey, is that it is absolutely impossible for a human being to understand his human condition without understanding his position within the whole of which the human is only a part. Our imperfect knowledge of the whole therefore places limits on our knowledge of ourselves, for we do not know where we stand in relation to the whole that conditions us, and therewith our own condition. What then should we do in the face of our irremediable ignorance and uncertainty?

Cropsey argues that the difficulties currently faced by liberalism arise from the efforts of later thinkers to elevate it beyond its Hobbesian origins in self-preservation and natural necessity. As a result of their flights from nature to morality, the sovereignty that for Hobbes protected natural rights decayed into a mere legalism that undermines liberalism's ability to defend itself."--Pub. desc.
Table of contents: title: Introduction; title: On humanity's intensive introspection; title: Liberalism, nature, and convention; title: Liberalism, self-abnegation, and self-assertion; title: Providential care for democracy; title: On the mutual compatibility of democracy and marxian socialism; title: Activity, philosophy and the open society; title: On the dramatic end of Plato's Socrates; title: Religion, the constitution, and the enlightenment; title: On pleasure and the human good: Plato's Philebus; title: The whole as setting for man: on Plato's Timaeus; title: On ancients and moderns; title: The end of history in the open-ended age? the life expectancy of self-evident truth; title: Nature, God, and the enlightenment: what is at work in the whole.