Eclipse of Practical Reason
Dr George Duke (Deakin University )

August 21, 2012, 4:30pm - 6:00pm
Deakin University

C2.05
221 Burwood Highway
Melbourne 3125
Australia

Sponsor(s):

  • The Alfred Deakin Research Institute, the Centre for Citizenship and Globalization and the School of Humanities and Social Sciences

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Deakin University

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Contemporary expressions of doubt about the possibility of a substantive employment of practical reason generally seek historical support from Hume. Defenders of substantive conceptions of practical rationality, by contrast, tend to draw inspiration from Aristotle, Aquinas or Kant. My focus in this paper is upon developments in the period between 1600 and 1650 for theories of practical rationality. My claim is that an examination of this period, which is perhaps associated most readily with the rise of a mechanistic philosophy of nature, is not only crucial for understanding the motivations for scepticism about practical reason later expressed with particular force by Hume, it also can also clarify the conditions that would need to be met for a successful defence of a substantive account. Such an analysis – or at least so I argue – also demonstrates that an approach to practical reason that adopts suitably modified Thomistic assumptions is better able to meet the relevant conditions than one deriving inspiration from Kant. The structure of the paper is as follows. In section one I sketch the distinction between substantive and procedural conceptions of practical rationality, using the Thomistic and Humean accounts as ideal-types of such theories. This provides the background for an analysis of developments in the first half of the seventeenth century, which is the central focus of section 2. Section 3 closes with some reflections on the lessons of the period between 1600 and 1650 for contemporary debates on the possibility of developing a substantive account of practical reason.

George Duke lectures in philosophy in the School of Humanities and Social Sciences at Deakin University. His research interests include the philosophy of language, the history of analytical philosophy and political philosophy. He has published on Michael Dummett’s theory of abstract objects, theories of abstract singular terms and the conceptual presuppositions of analytical philosophy.

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