review qq for final exam modern challenges fall 2012

Review Questions for the Final Exam

(Material Since the Mid-Term)

Re-Examining the Conflict Thesis

1. Please be able to answer the following questions about David B. Wilson’s article “The Historiography of Science and Religion”:

(a) What is the “conflict thesis”? How and when did it arise?

(b) What has been the more recent reaction to the conflict thesis among scholars in the 20^th Century?

(d) What explains the continuing influence of the “conflict thesis”?

(e) Please explain what Wilson calls “the complexity thesis.”

2. Please be able to answer the following questions about Colin A. Russell’s article “The Conflict of Science and Religion”:

(a) What, according to Prof. Russell, are the chief “issues of contention around which the real or imagined conflict” between science and religion revolves? (Please make sure you describe all four of them.)

(b) What, according to Prof. Russell, are some of the weaknesses of the conflict thesis? (Please make sure you can describe all six of them.)

Science and Religion: The Two Wings

1. What, according to Pope John Paul II are the “two wings” on which the mind rises to the knowledge of God? (NB: They are not “science” and “religion.”)

2. What is the Catholic Church’s basic judgment about the relationship between faith and reason?

3. In a 1979 address to the Pontifical Academy of Sciences entitled “Faith can never conflict with reason,” Pope John Paul II spoke of “a problem of great importance and great relevance today: the problem of the emergence of complexity in mathematics, physics, chemistry, and biology.” What, according to Pope John Paul, was the problem that beset society at the time of Galileo? What, according to the Pope, must we have recourse to precisely because of the complexity of the universe?

4. One issue the Pope points to is this: “How are we to reconcile the explanation of the world – beginning with the level of elementary entities and phenomena – with the recognition of the fact that ‘the whole is more than the sum of its parts’”? Please explain what he means.

5. Another issues, according to Pope John Paul II, is this: “In his effort to establish a rigorous description and formalization of the data of experience, the scientist is led to have recourse to metascientific concepts, the use of which is, as it were, demanded by the logic of his procedure.” Please explain what he means.

6. What is needed, according to Pope John Paul, to help clarify scientists’ use of such “meta-scientific” concepts? For example, what kind of education should Catholics have to help them clarify such issues? (A related question: Are you getting an education like that at the University of St. Thomas? Or not? Please explain.)

7. Pope John Paul mentions the “working out of new theories at the scientific level in order to take account of the emergence of living beings” – in other word, theories about evolution. According to the Pope, can these theories of themselves constitute an affirmation or denial of the spiritual soul? Can they provide a proof for or against the Christian doctrine of creation?

8. The Pope suggests that there have been great benefits to culture from the “specialization of research.” What else is needed, however?

9. Turning to the Galileo case, the Pope suggests that “a twofold question is at the heart of the debate of which Galileo was the center.” What are the two questions?

10. “From this,” says the Pope in section 6 of the document, “we can now draw our first conclusion.” What is it?

11. What is the “second aspect of the problem”?

12. In section 8 of the document, Pope John Paul remarks on “another crisis, similar to the one we are speaking of” that arose “in the last century and at the beginning of our own.” What was the crisis and what was the “unhappy” response made by some of the faithful?

13. What was the problem, according to Pope John Paul II, with “a majority of theologians” during Galileo’s time? What was the rather different attitude of Cardinal Bellarmine?

14. According to Pope John Paul, “From the beginning of the Age of Enlightenment down to our own day, the Galileo case has been a sort of ‘myth.’” Does he mean to suggest that the Galileo case never happened? Or that the Church made no mistakes? If not, what is he saying?

15. In section 11 of his text, Pope John Paul says: “From the Galileo affair we can learn a lesson which remains valid in relation to similar situations which occur today and which may occur in the future.” Actually, there are two lessons – the second is in section 12. What are those two lessons?

16. In his closing remarks, the Pope suggests that “humanity has before it two modes of development.” What are they, and how are they related?

René Descartes, Meditations 1, 2, and 3

1. In the first of his Meditations, Descartes discusses “of the things that we may doubt.” Describe his argument and its conclusions.

2. In the second of his Meditations, Descartes discusses “the nature of the human mind” and its relationship to the body. Describe his arguments and its conclusions.

3. In the third of his Meditations, Descartes suggests that, along with the knowledge of his own existence, there is at least one other “clear and distinct” idea in his mind that cannot be doubted. What is it? Please describe his argument and its conclusions.

4. How does proving the existence of God – a being who is all-good, all-powerful, and all-knowing – help Descartes out his skepticism and doubt?

Jacques Maritain, “The Cartesian Heritage”

1. According to Jacques Maritain (“The Cartesian Heritage”), with his philosophy, Descartes satisfied “a fundamental need of the growth of thought.” Please explain what he means.

2. What, according to Maritain, is “the most deep-seated characteristic” of Cartesian thought?

Explain.

3. What, according to Maritain, are the three “principal fruits” of Descartes’ thought? Please describe each.

Immanuel Kant, “What is Enlightenment?”

1. Please describe the notion of “enlightenment” put forth by Immanuel Kant in his essay “What is Enlightenment?”

2. Please discuss Kant’s distinction between “public” and “private” reasoning.

Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger (now Pope Benedict XVI), “The Anthropological Foundations of the Concept of Tradition”

1. Please describe what Joseph Ratzinger means by “the anthropological foundations of the concept of tradition.” Please discuss why, according to Ratzinger, “tradition” can also endanger our humanity.

2. According to Cardinal Ratzinger: “The rise of the natural sciences, as exemplified by Kepler, Copernicus, and, above all, Galileo was far from being an uprising against tradition on the part of a reason divorced from tradition.” Please explain what he means.

René Descartes, Rules for the Direction of the Mind

Please discuss briefly each of Descartes’ first four Rules for the Direction of the Mind.

Pope John Paul II, Crossing the Threshold of Hope

1. In Crossing the Threshold of Hope, Pope John Paul II sets out to answer the question, “If God Exists, Why Is He Hiding?” He points out that the question has its roots in the thought of Descartes. Explain how, according to Pope John Paul II, the thought of Descartes has affected the way we think about God. Why does Pope John Paul II suggest, to the contrary, that God may have gone “too far” in revealing Himself to man?

2. Similarly, in answering the question, “What Has Become of the ‘History of Salvation’?” the Pope similarly points to the philosophical tradition tracing back to Descartes. Please explain how “modern rationalism” and “the great anthropocentric shift in philosophy” have made it harder for man to perceive the acts of God in history.

Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, “The Boundary of the Modern Understanding of Reality and the Place of Belief”

Please explain Cardinal Ratzinger’s argument in the section entitled “The Boundary of the Modern Understanding of Reality and the Place of Belief” from his Introduction to Christianity.

René Descartes, Treatise on Man

Please discuss how Descartes describes the human person in his Treatise on Man.

Leon Kass, “Nature, Ethics, and Modern Science”

1. In the section entitled “Nature, Ethics, and Modern Science” in his book The Hungry Soul, Dr. Leon Kass argues that modern views concerning the relationship between nature and ethics have changed from those of almost all previous views, both Eastern and Western. Explain.

2. Kass suggests that the source of the change resulted from a new idea of nature, first promulgated by Galileo, Descartes, and Bacon in the early seventeenth century. Please explain why, according to Kass, modern thought has come to teach the uselessness of natural knowledge (that is, knowledge of nature) for ethics. (Each sentence in this paragraph is crucial. Kass is giving you an outline of sorts of his position.) Please also be ready to trace the background of these ideas in the writings of Galileo, Descartes, and Bacon that you have studied in this class.

3. Please explain why, according to Kass, “As broadcast popularly through our society, these doctrines embarrass the ethical claims of our traditional philosophical or religious teachings”?

4. Please explain why, for Kass, the “gap between the ethically sterile nature studied by science and the morally freighted life lived by human beings has become the tremendously important in the present day.”

5. Kass worries that many of his readers will not “recognize themselves or their stake in this controversy.” But, he insists: “We are all rationalists, and we are, at the very least, influenced by corporealism.” Please explain. (Again, nearly every sentence in this paragraph is crucial.) Please also be ready to trace the background of these ideas in the writings of Galileo, Descartes, and Bacon that you have studied in this class.

6. On p. 8 of his text, Dr. Kass warns that, “At the very least we are confused: on the one hand, we necessarily trust (because daily life demands that we do) our own experience and the surface appearance of things; on the other, we at least tacitly believe in the deeper truth of the abstracted scientific view.” Why do we do that? Please be ready trace the background of these ideas in the writings of Galileo, Descartes, and Bacon that you have studied in this class

7. Toward the end of the selection I have given you, Kass agrees to “come clean” about where he begins. Please discuss his view.

Hubert Dreyfus, On the Internet

1. What did researchers at Carnegie-Mellon University find about people who were given access to the internet? What is missing, according to the study’s authors, in on-line interactions?

2. At the end of his introduction, Hubert Dreyfus suggests that we should at least entertain the possibility that, “when we enter cyberspace and leave behind our animal-shaped, emotional, intuitive, situated, vulnerable, embodied selves, and thereby gain a remarkable new freedom never before available to human beings,” we might necessarily lose something as well. Please discuss the sorts of things that, according to Prof. Dreyfus, we might lose.

3. What in 1922 did Thomas Edison predict would revolutionize our educational system? Did it? Were there similar predictions in years to come? Did those predictions come true? Explain.

4. According to Prof. Dreyfus, “insofar as education consists in sending facts from something who has a lot of information to those who don’t have it, the Web works well.” How does such a view of education treat students? Is that how you view your role as a student?

5. In the remainder of chapter 2, Prof. Dreyfus goes through each of the stages in which a student learns by means of instruction, practice, and finally apprenticeship, to become an expert in some particular domain and in everyday life. His question is: “can these stages be implemented and encouraged on the Web?” Below, I have listed for you each of seven stages. Please discuss briefly why, according to Prof. Dreyfus, the Net cannot sufficiently facilitate instruction at each stage. (In other words, please discuss in each case what is it that the Net can’t supply that face-to-face interactions can.):

(a) Stage 1: Novice

(b) Stage 2: Advanced Beginner

(d) Stage 4: Proficiency

(e) Stage 5: Expertise

(f) Stage 6: Mastery

(g) Stage 7: Practical Wisdom

6. At the end of ch. 2, Prof. Dreyfus posits the following conditional statement: “If telepresence could enable human beings to be present at a distance in a way that captures all that is essential about bodily presence, then the dream of distance learning at all levels could, in principle, be achieved.” Accordingly, he then poses the following question: “how much presence can telepresence deliver?” Answering that question is the business of ch. 3 of his book. Please discuss what, according to Prof. Dreyfus, we will lose if we limit ourselves to disembodied interactions?

7. The enthusiasm for the internet and distance-learning that Prof. Dreyfus chronicles at the beginning of his book may likely stem from the basic Cartesian presuppositions of our modern culture – especially idealism and dualism. Please explain how.

8. Now let us suppose for a moment that your religious tradition teaches that the body is important – indeed, an essential element of human flourishing; in fact, something that will continue to exist after death. Please discuss the sort of challenges, both moral and doctrinal, that a culture such as the one described by Prof. Dreyfus (influenced as it is by technologies such as the internet and distance-learning) would pose to your religious tradition. Please discuss the sort of response you would suggest making to these challenges?

“Debate? Dissent? Discussion? Oh, Don’t Go There!”, Michiko Kakutani

What is the character of contemporary college student discourse according to author Michiko Kakutani? Discuss how this tendency might have been engendered by the philosophical idealism of Descartes. (Please don’t forget to describe philosophical idealism.)

“American Satyricon, “R. R. Reno, First Things

1. Discuss the contrast R. R. Reno makes in this article between the “Promethean” ambitions of our Enlightenment forebears and the more “Protean” character of modern American students.

2. What sort of discipline does Prof. Reno suggest would be especially bracing for modern American students, and why would this sort of discipline be especially instructive?

Allan Bloom, “Our Virtue,” from Closing of the American Mind

1. What, according to Allan Bloom, is “our virtue”?

2. According to Prof. Bloom, what is the danger modern students have been taught to fear from absolutism?

3. Prof. Bloom compares the old view of what it means to be an American with the view inherent in the recent education of openness. Please describe both.

4. Prof. Bloom suggests that “It was possible to expand the space exempt from legitimate social and political regulation only by contracting the claims to moral and political knowledge.” Please explain what he means.

5. According to Prof. Bloom, “relativism has extinguished the real motive of education.” Please explain what he means.

6. Bloom suggests that the sort of openness inculcated in modern American students actually results in “American conformism.” Please explain why.

7. One of the techniques of opening young people up to different cultures is to require a college course in a non-Western culture. The point of requiring such a course, says Bloom, is to force students to recognize that there are other ways of thinking and that Western ways are not better. What is ironic about this way of going about teaching this lesson?

8. Prof. Bloom identifies two kinds of openness. What are they? Please describe each.

Allan Bloom, “Relationships,” from Closing of the American Mind

1. According to Prof. Bloom, students today “look at themselves with irony when it comes to the big moral questions.” Compare what Prof. Bloom has to say on this subject with what R. R. Reno suggests on the same topic in his article “American Satyricon.”

2. According to Prof. Bloom, America is no longer experienced as a common project. Why has this happened, and how is it experienced instead?

3. According to Prof. Bloom, what have been the results of the decay of the family?

4. According to Prof. Bloom, what are the results of the indeterminate or open-ended future and the lack of a binding past on the souls of modern American students?

5. Prof. Bloom discusses the difference between the notion that the relations between men and women and parents and children being determined by natural impulse or the product of choice and consent? Please discuss the difference.

6. At one point, Prof. Bloom comments that “The aptest description I can find for the state of students’ souls is the psychology of separateness.” Explain.

7. What, according to Prof. Bloom, is “the most visible sign or our increasing separateness and, in turn, the cause of ever greater separateness”? Explain.

8. According to Prof. Bloom, students do not usually anymore say “I love you,” and never, “I’ll always love you.” Why not? Connect what Prof. Bloom has to say on this score with what he describes later as “the inharmoniousness of final ends.”

9. According to Prof. Bloom, “All our reforms have helped strip the teeth of our gears, which can therefore no longer mesh. They spin idly, side by side, unable to set the social machine in motion.” Please explain what he means. Why has this state of affairs come about? How is it a situation that was fostered by a way of thinking that began with Descartes?

“Aims of a New Epoch,” Charles Taylor, Hegel

Discuss what Charles Taylor has to say about what distinguishes the modern notion of the self from the basic perspective that characterized ancient views.

“Faith and Diversity in American Religion,” Alan Wolfe

“Teenagers Mix Churches for a Faith that Fits,” Neela Banerjee

1. What do modern teenagers mean when they report that they are “spiritual,” but not “religious”? Compare what Alan Wolfe has to say on this score with what is reported in Neela Banerjee’s article entitled “Teenagers Mix Churches for a Faith that Fits.”

2. In his article, author Alan Wolfe suggests that, “Religion has returned to America, not as an alternative to the value relativism and personal seeking associated with the often quite secular 1960s, but as the logical extension of the cultural revolution first glimpsed at that time.

“The Pursuit of Happiness,” Robert Bellah et al., Habits of the Heart

1. In the first section of Habits of the Heart, Robert Bellah and his colleagues describe the lives of four different individuals: Brian Palmer, Joe Gorman, Margaret Oldham, and Wayne Bauer. Please describe each person’s conception of the goals of a good life.

2. Although all of these four people have very different views of the good life, Bellah describes them as “Different Voices in a Common Tradition.” Why? What do all four share in common?

3. How, according to Robert Bellah, do Americans tend to think about success? How do they tend to define it?

4. How, then, do Americans tend to think of freedom? What is the central paradox that arises for Americans given their usual notion of freedom?

5. How does our American tradition encourage us to think about justice? What is lacking, however, in this conception of justice?

“The Three Waves of Modernity,” Leo Strauss

* NB: The first and most obvious question you should be expecting on this reading is: "What, according to Leo Strauss, are the "three waves of modernity"? Please describe each. In order to foster your understanding of the reading, however, there are a few specific preliminaries.

1. How does Leo Strauss describe what he calls "the crisis of modernity"?

2. As Strauss points out, there is a very widespread view that "all knowledge which deserves the name is scientific knowledge." What, in Strauss's view, is the problem with holding this view – especially with regard to political philosophy?

3. There is also, as Strauss points out, along with the view mentioned above, another "less widespread but more sophisticated view." Describe this view and explain the attitude of those who hold this view toward the question of right and wrong.

4. According to Strauss, "modern culture is emphatically rationalistic, believing in the power of reason." What happens if such a culture loses its faith in reason's ability to validate its highest aims?

5. Who, according to Strauss, is the first political philosopher who explicitly rejected all earlier political philosophy as fundamentally insufficient and even unsound?

6. According to Strauss, the work of the person mentioned in Question 5 work was really only a continuation, albeit in a very original manner, of what had been done in the first place by an earlier writer of the Renaissance. Who was it?

7. According to Strauss, there are two utterances of Machiavelli which indicate his broad intention with the greatest clarity. What are they?

8. According to Strauss, what Machiavelli calls the imagined commonwealths of the earlier writers is based on a specific understanding of nature which he rejects. What is this earlier understanding of nature he rejects?

9. Why, according to Prof. Strauss, does Machiavelli reject this whole philosophic and theological tradition?

10. How, according to Prof. Strauss, does Machiavelli reinterpret the notion of virtue?

11. Strauss claims that for Machiavelli, "the political problem becomes a technical problem." What does he mean?

12. According to Prof. Strauss: "In order to do justice to the change effected by Machiavelli, one must consider two great changes which occurred after his time but which were in harmony with his spirit." What are they?

13. With whom does the "second wave" of modernity begin? How does this "second wave" alter the notions of rationality, freedom, nature, and society that characterized the "first wave"?

14. Whose work typifies the "third wave" of modernity? Please describe the fundamental elements of this "third wave."

Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan (chs. 13-15, 17, 18, 47)

Chapter 13

1. What, according to Hobbes, is man’s “natural condition”?

2. There are two major objections that can be leveled against Hobbes’s description of man’s “natural condition” in this chapter. The first is that human nature is not as naturally fierce as he suggests. The second is that there never was a time when there was “the war of all against all,” such as he describes. Hobbes defends himself against both of these objections in turn. How?

3. When men are in the state of the war of all against all, what follows about justice and injustice according to Hobbes? What follows about property and ownership?

4. Having described “the ill condition in which man by mere Nature has been placed,” Hobbes suggests that there is a possibility of coming out of this state, partly due to the Passions, partly due to his Reason. What are the Passions that entice men to Peace according to Hobbes? And the precepts of Reason that direct men to peace, what does Hobbes call these?

Chapter 14

5. How does Hobbes define the “Right of Nature”? (which he associates with the Latin term Ius Naturale). Compare Hobbes’s notion of ius with Thomas Aquinas’s use of that term. How, then, does Hobbes’s notion of ius naturale differ from Thomas Aquinas’s use of that term? How, for example, is Hobbes’s position similar to that of Callicles in Plato’s Gorgias? How is it different?

6. How does Hobbes define Liberty? How does it differ from Augustine’s notion of “free will”?

7. How does Hobbes define a “Law of Nature” (Lex Naturalis)?

8. How does Hobbes describe thfe relationship between the Right of Nature and the Law of Nature? How does Hobbes’s understanding on this score differ from that of, say, Aquinas?

9. What, according to Hobbes, is the “first and fundamental Law of Nature”? What is its justification or cause? What are the “two branches” of the first Law of Nature?

10. What according to Hobbes is the second Law of Nature? How does it follow from the first Law of Nature?

11. In his analysis, Hobbes mentions what he calls the “Law of the Gospel.” How does it fit into his system?

12. In this chapter, Hobbes discusses the origin of “duty,” of “obligation,” of that which we “ought” to do. How does it come about?

13. Why for Hobbes is “injustice” a species of “absurdity”?

14. How does Hobbes define “Contract”? How according to Hobbes are “Contracts” made? Why are they made?

Chapter 15

15. What according to Hobbes is the third Law of Nature? How does it follow from the second?

16. Oddly, Hobbes described the origins of “Injustice” in the previous chapter (14), but he doesn’t get to the origin of “Justice” until this chapter (15). Why? What is the source for Hobbes of Justice and Injustice? What is definition of “Injustice”? What is necessary for there to be either Justice or Injustice, according to Hobbes? Why is this so?

17. Why according to Hobbes is Rebellion contrary to Reason (and thus contrary to Justice)? How does Hobbes’s discussion about why Rebellion is contrary to Reason help to confirm the third Law of Nature?

18. The third Law of Nature, says Hobbes, is the fountain and origin of “Justice.” In what follows in Chapter 15, Hobbes will discuss, first, a series of distinctions important to understanding “justice,” and second, another series of “laws of nature.” With regard to the first – the categories of Justice – Hobbes repeats a basic distinction, well-known to the tradition, between Commutative and Distributive Justice. How are these two defined traditionally, and how does Hobbes define them?

19. What are Hobbes’s fourth, fifth, sixth, and seventh laws of nature? (NB: There are more, but they need not concern us for the present.) How do all of these follow from Hobbes’s first three laws of nature?

Chapter 17

20. What according to Hobbes is the final end or purpose of men (who naturally love not only their own liberty, but even dominion over others) allowing themselves to be restrained such as they are in a Commonwealth?

21. What does Hobbes say about the “Laws of Nature” (he means the third, fourth, fifth, and all the rest) “of themselves without the terrors of some Power to cause them to be observed”? What according to Hobbes is the relationship between these Laws of Nature and our “natural passions”?

22. Hearkening back to a famous example given by Aristotle in the Ethics, Hobbes claims that, although bees and ants may live sociably with one another, human beings will not. To support his claim, he adduces six arguments. What are they?

23. Since humans will not live sociably one with another “naturally” (as do the bees and ants), what is necessary?

24. What, therefore, according to Hobbes, is the source or origin or cause of the Commonwealth? Why does it arise? How does it relate to the first three laws of nature?

25. How are Hobbes’s “laws of nature” different from those of Aquinas? You should be able to answer (a) How are they different in terms of content, and (b) How they are different in terms of their source or cause or origin?

“The Person and Society,” Jacques Maritain, The Person and the Common Good

1. According to Jacques Maritain (“Person and Society”): “personality tends by nature toward communion.” Why? Explain.

2. Maritain suggests that the common good is “common” precisely because it is received in persons (or to put this another way, it is “participated in” by persons). Why? Explain what he means.

3. Describe Maritain’s notion of “common good.”

4. According to Maritain: “On the one hand, to assure the existence of the multitude is something morally good in itself; on the other hand, the existence, thus assured, must be the just and morally good existence of the community.” Why? Explain.

5. “On the one hand,” says Maritain, “the common good of civil society implies that the whole man is engaged in it. Unlike a farmers’ cooperative or a scientific association, which require the commitment of only part of the interests of the members, civil society requires the citizens to commit their lives, properties and honor.” And yet only a page later, he says: “For this reason, it would seem appropriate to consider the common good of a state or nation as merely an area, among many similar areas....” What is the reason why, although the whole of man is supposed to be engaged in the common good of civil society, the common good of a state or nation does not engage us completely?

6. What does Maritain mean when he says that “the person, as person, requires to be treated as a whole in society”? Give me an example from your own life of how this principle would apply. Let’s say, for example, that you walk into a doctor’s office. How do you want to be treated? How might Maritain’s insights in this chapter guide your self-understanding of your situation?

7. According to Maritain, “The common good of civil life is an ultimate end, but an ultimate end in a relative sense and in a certain order.” Explain what he means. Then explain how your answer to this question can help explain the following paradox. According to Maritain: “the common good of the city or of civilization—an essentially human common good in which the whole of man is engaged—does not preserve its true nature unless it respects that which surpasses it....” Explain why. Similarly, explain why, according to Maritain: “In the measure that human society attempts to free itself from this subordination and proclaim itself the supreme good, in the very same measure, it perverts its own nature and that of the common good.”

8. According to Maritain, “When, against social pressures, the human person upholds right, justice, fraternal charity, when it raises itself above social life to enter into the solitary life of the spirit, when it deserts the banquets of common life to feed upon the transcendentals, when, seeming to forget the city, it fastens to the adamantine objectivity of beauty and truth, when it pays obeisance to God rather than to men, in these very acts it still serves the common good of the city and in an eminent fashion.” Explain why. Similarly, says Maritain: “when the person sacrifices to the common good of the city that which is dearest to it, suffers torture and gives its life for the city, in these very acts because it wills what is good and acts in accordance with justice, it still loves its own soul in accordance with the order of charity more than the city and the common good of the city.” What does he mean? How can this statement be reconciled with the one above?

9. According to Maritain: “We see, then, that the true conception of political life is neither exclusively personalist nor exclusively communal ... it is both personalist and communal in such a way that these two terms call for and imply one another. Hence, there is nothing more illusory than to pose the problem of the person and the common good in terms of opposition. In reality, it is posed in terms of reciprocal subordination and mutual implication.” What does he mean?

10. Explain why for Maritain, the state may in some cases legitimately ask its members to risk their lives for its protection, even though the end of the person surpasses the state?

11. St. Thomas Aquinas held two very different propositions. The first suggests that “Each individual person is related to the entire community as the part to the whole.” The second says “Man is not ordained to the body politic according to all that he is and has.” How does Maritain reconcile these two?

12. According to Maritain: “Anarchical individualism denies that man, by reason of certain things which are in him, is engaged in his entirety as a part of political society. Totalitarianism asserts that man is a part of political society by reason of himself as a whole and by reason of all that is in him (“all in the state, nothing against the state, nothing outside of the state”).” Explain both, and then compare them with Maritain’s position on the relationship between the person and political society.

13. According to Maritain: “Man is constituted a person, made for God and life eternal, before he is constituted a part of the city; and he is constituted a part of the family society before he is constituted a part of the political society.”

Joseph Ratzinger (now Pope Benedict XVI), “Truth and Freedom”

1. In the mind of contemporary man, says Cardinal Ratzinger, “freedom appears to a large extent as the absolutely highest good.” “In contrast,” however, “we are inclined to react with suspicion to the concept of truth.” Why?

* the term truth has already been claimed for many opinions and systems; and the assertion of truth has often been a means of suppressing freedom
* in addition, natural science has nourished a skepticism with regard to everything which cannot be explained or proved by its exact methods; all such things seem in the end to be a mere subjective assignment of values

2. What, according to Ratzinger, is Karl Marx’s “ideal of freedom”? Is this idea common today?

* ideal: to do one thing today and another tomorrow; to do just as I please: the right and the opportunity to do just what we wish and not to have to do anything which we do not wish to do; Said in other terms: freedom would mean that our own will is the sole norm of our action and the the will not only can desire anything but also has the chance to carry out its desire.

3. What are the steps in Ratzinger’s history of the concept of freedom in modernity?

* Luther: the freedom of conscience vis-a-vis the authority of the Church (but not political freedom): Redemption now meant liberation, liberation from the yoke of a supra-individual order
* Even if it would not be right to speak of the individualism of the Reformation, the new importance of the individual and shift in the relationship between the individual conscience and authority
* Enlightenment: the will to emancipation: dare to use reason for yourself: individual reason must break free from the bonds of authority; reason shall reign, and in the end no other authority is admitted than that of reason.
* Two diverse, even antithetical philosophies:
1. natural rights and constitutional democracy (limited government)
* rights are naturally present in man himself prior to all legal constructs and to the state
* a demand that the state and other institutions respect the rights of the individual: but then: man’s nature is able all to possess rights against the community, rights which must be protected from the community; institution seems to be the polar opposite of freedom
2. Rousseau, which aims ultimately at complete autarchy
* everything which owes it origin to reason and will is contrary to nature, and corrupts and contradicts it
* total, absolutely unregimented freedom.

Marxism:
1. freedom must be the freedom of all; freedom is tied to equality. But what that means: the community takes precedence; the subordination of freedom to equality and therefore the right of the community vis-a-vis the individual
2. the freedom of the individual depends upon the structure of the whole and the struggle for freedom must be waged not primarily to secure the rights of the individual, but to change the structure of the world.
* the lie of the new man

* Is democracy true freedom?
1. how free are elections? To what extent is the outcome manipulated by advertising, that is, by capital, by a few men who dominate public opinion? Is there not a new oligarchy that controls what enlightened men think? Who could still believe that the welfare of the community as a whole truly guides the decision-making process? Special interests. The will of individuals to prevail over one another blocks the freedom of the whole. (MacIntyre)

The Question: What man is and how he can live rightly both individually and collectively.

* Sartre: man condemned to freedom, because he has no nature; but the result is not the supreme enhancement of existence, but the frustration of life.

4. How does Ratzinger describe “the essence of human freedom”? How does divine revelation help him elucidate his notion of human freedom?

* being from (Son)
* being for (Father)
* being with (Spirit)

5. What does Ratzinger mean when he says that “man’s freedom is shared freedom”? He then continues: “Freedom must measure itself by what I am, by what we are?” What are we? What is the truth about the human person?

* freedom in the conjoint existence of liberties which limit and thus sustain one another.
* law, just order, the right – is not the conceptual antithesis of freedom, but rather its condition. What we are is “being-for”

6. Ratzinger admits that there have been “counterfeit” notions of the right, which have resulted not in freeing people but enslaving them. We must search, therefore, for the right rule and measure. In this regard, he says that: “In the search for the right measure, the whole of humanity must be kept in mind and again – as we see ever more clearly – the humanity not only of today, but of tomorrow as well.” Please explain what he means.

7. Why, according to Ratzinger, is responsibility an important concept?

* Because freedom can no longer lie simply in giving more and more latitude to individual rights; increase in freedom must be an increase in responsibility, which includes acceptance of the ver greater bonds required both by the claims of humanity’s shared existence and by conformity to man’s essence.

And Finally:

Okay, now for the coup de grace. Choose one of the following three “hot-button” topics, either euthanasia, abortion, or contraception, and explain how and why our current culture and the ideas that have shaped the culture have made it challenging for people in our society to understand the Church’s teachings on that issue. (Note: I am not asking you to agree with the Church’s teaching. I am not even asking you to defend the Church’s teaching. What I want to see is whether you understand the cultural context within which those teachings are being delivered, and why it is hard for them to get the “listening” they deserve, even among Catholics.)