Kana

【American Literature】

《week 2》

Jonathan Edwards: Jonathan Edwards was a Christian preacher, philosopher, and theologian. He is “widely acknowledged to be America’s most important and original philosophical theologian,” and one of America’s greatest intellectuals. His greatest work is Freedom of Will (1754).

“The God that holds you over the pit of hell, much as one holds a spider or some loathsome insect over a fire, abhors you, and is dreadfully provoked”.

Freedom of the Will

l   Summary: Having graduated from Yale at the mere age of seventeen, Jonathan Edwards is ranked among America's most pre-eminent philosopher-theologians. Edwards wrote Freedom of the Will in 1754 while serving in Massachusetts as a missionary to a native tribe of Housatonic Indians. In this text, Edwards investigates the contrasting Calvinist and Arminian views about free will, God's foreknowledge, determinism, and moral agency. As Edwards attempts to resolve the contention surrounding these topics, he relies on a variety of textual resources including the Bible and philosophy works of enlightenment thinkers. This book can be challenging due to Edwards' emphasis on philosophical reasoning, but Edwards strives to educate his audience by frequently defining confusing terms and explaining controversial passages in depth. Freedom of the Will is relevant to every Christian because it addresses difficult questions about desire, choice, good, and evil.

• Part1 section1: The Nature of The Will
• Part1 section2: The Determination of The Will
• Part1 section3: The Meaning of ‘necessary’, ‘impossible’, ‘unable’ and ‘contingent’
• Part1 section4: The Division of Necessity and Inability into Natural and Moral
• Part1 section5: The Notions of liberty and Moral Agency
• Part2 section1: the Arminian notion of liberty of will as consisting in the will’s self-determining power – its obvious inconsistency
• Part2 section2: Two Attempted escapes from the foregoing reasoning
• Part2 section3: Can Volition Occur without a cause? Can any event do so?
• Part2 section4: Can volition occur without a cause because the soul is active?
• Part2 section5: Even if the things said in these attempted escapes were true, they are quite irrelevant and can’t help the cause of Arminian liberty; so that Arminian writers have to talk inconsistently
• Part2 section6: What determines the Will in cases where the mind sees the Options as perfectly indifferent?
• Part2 section7: The view that freedom of the will consists in indifference
• Part2 section8: The view that freedom of the will rules out every kind of necessity
• Part2 section9: How acts of the will connect with dictates of the understanding
• Part2 section10: Volition necessarily connected with the influence of motives; criticism of Chubb’s doctrines and arguments concerning freedom of the will
• Part2 section11: The evidence that God has certain foreknowledge of the volitions of moral agents
• Part2 section12: God can’t have certain foreknowledge of the future volitions of moral agents if they are contingent in a way that excludes all necessity
• Part2 section13: Even if the volitions of moral agents are not connected with anything antecedent, they must be ‘necessary’ in a sense that overthrows Arminian liberty
• Part3 section1: God’s moral excellence is necessary, yet virtuous and praiseworthy
• Part3 section2: The acts of the will of Jesus Christ’s human soul were necessarily holy, yet truly virtuous, praiseworthy, and reward able
• Part3 section3: Moral necessity and inability are consistent with blameworthiness. This is shown by the case of people whom God has given up to sin, and of fallen man in general
• Part3 section4: Command, and the obligation to obey, are consistent with moral inability to obey
• Part3 section5: A close look at the sincerity of desires and attempts, which is supposed to excuse the non-performance of things that are good in themselves
• Part3 section6: Liberty of indifference, rather than being required for virtue, is inconsistent with it. More generally, ‘liberty’ and ‘moral agency’ on the Arminian pattern are inconsistent with any habits’ or inclinations’ being virtuous or vicious
• Part3 section7: Arminian notices of moral agency are inconsistent with all influence of motive and inducement in both virtuous and vicious actions
• Part4 section1: What makes dispositions of the heart and acts of the will vicious or virtuous is not their cause but their nature
• Part4 section2: The falseness and inconsistency of the metaphysical notion of action and agency that most defenders of the Arminian doctrine of liberty, moral agency and seem to have
• Part4 section3: Why some people think it contrary to common sense to suppose that necessary actions can be worthy of either praise or blame
• Part4 section4: ‘Moral necessity is consistent with praise and blame, reward and punishment’ – this squares with common sense and men’s natural notions
• Part4 section5: Two objections considered: the ‘no use trying’ objection and (near the end) the ‘mere machines’ objection
• Part4 section6: The objection that the doctrine defended here agrees with Stoicism and with the opinions of Hobbes
• Part4 section7: The necessity of God’s will
• Part4 section8: Discussion of further objections against the moral necessity of God’s volitions
• Part4 section9: The objection that the doctrine maintained here implies that God is the author of sin
• Part4 section10: Sin’s first entrance into the world
• Part4 section11: A supposed inconsistency between these principles and God’s moral character
• Part4 section12: A supposed tendency of these principles to atheism and immoral behavior
• Part4 section13: The objection that the arguments for Calvinism are metaphysical and abstruse

The Revolutionary Period: The American Revolution was a political upheaval that took place between 1765 and 1783 during which the Thirteen American Colonies broke from the British Empire and formed an independent nation, the United States of America. The American Revolution was the result of a series of social, political, and intellectual transformations in American society, government and ways of thinking. Starting in 1765 the Americans rejected the authority of Parliament to tax them without elected representation; protests continued to escalate, as in the Boston Tea Party of 1773, and the British imposed punitive laws the Intolerable Acts on Massachusetts in 1774.