Willing Evil: Two Sixteenth-Century Views of Free Will and Their Background
In this article, I present two virtually unknown sixteenth-century views of human freedom, that is, the views of Bartolomaeus de Usingen (1465-1532) and Jodocus Trutfetter (1460-1519) on the one hand and John Mair (1470-1550) on the other. Their views serve as a natural context and partial backgroun...
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| Format: | Electronic Article |
| Language: | English |
| Check availability: | HBZ Gateway |
| Journals Online & Print: | Drawer...
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| Fernleihe: | Fernleihe für die Fachinformationsdienste |
| Published: |
Philosophy Documentation Center
[2020]
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| In: |
American catholic philosophical quarterly
Year: 2020, Volume: 94, Issue: 2, Pages: 305-322 |
| Online Access: |
Volltext (Verlag) Volltext (doi) |
| Summary: | In this article, I present two virtually unknown sixteenth-century views of human freedom, that is, the views of Bartolomaeus de Usingen (1465-1532) and Jodocus Trutfetter (1460-1519) on the one hand and John Mair (1470-1550) on the other. Their views serve as a natural context and partial background to the more famous debate on human freedom between Martin Luther (1483-1556) and Erasmus of Rotterdam (1466-1536) from 1524-1526. Usingen and Trutfetter were Luther’s philosophy teachers in Erfurt. In a passage from Book III of John Mair’s commentary on Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics from 1530, he seems to defend a view of human freedom by which we can will evil for the sake of evil. Very few thinkers in the history of philosophy have defended such a view. The most famous medieval thinker to do so is William Ockham (1288-1347). To illustrate how radical this view is, I place him in the historical context of such thinkers as Plato, Augustine, Buridan, and Descartes. |
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| ISSN: | 2153-8441 |
| Contains: | Enthalten in: American catholic philosophical quarterly
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| Persistent identifiers: | DOI: 10.5840/acpq2020312201 |