This book describes a lost tradition that can be called reasonableness. The tradition began with Aristotle, was recommended to Western education by Augustine, flourished in the schools of the Renaissance through the nineteenth century, then got lost in the academic and philosophic shuffles of the twentieth century. Representative of the tradition is John Locke's story of a King of Siam who rejected reports of the existence of ice. The King would have had to risk too much trust in another man whom he did not know too well -- a Dutch ambassador -- in order to believe that elephants could walk...

This collection brings together a variety of responses to the ancient questions of whether we are -- individually and collectively -- destined for evil. The history of the previous century brought this question into the open more poignantly than perhaps any other before it. Not surprisingly, then, what you will find here is a wide spectrum of opinions concerning the mystery of evil formulated throughout the twentieth century and at the very threshold of the twenty-first, which has inherited all of its open wounds and nightmarish memories. The pieces included here come from diverse fields:...

In Kant's philosophy, virtue is defined as the moral strength or resolve to adopt obligatory ends and to act upon only those maxims that can apply equally to all. But how is virtue acquired? To answer this question, this project turns to Kant's moral anthropology, broadly conceived, in which he considers those -subjective conditions in human nature- that both facilitate and hinder the quest for virtue.Tailored to the specific constitution of human beings, then, are a number of moral-anthropological strategies for strengthening and promoting moral principles. Drawing on Kant's own discussions...