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Seventeenth-century reformers had developed rigorist approaches to vocational discernment and the choice of a state of life (marriage, religion, or the priesthood) that endured in western Catholic religious culture. The author argues that, during the nineteenth-century Catholic revival, clerical leaders adapted this tradition in a manner that strengthened the culture of clericalism. While maintaining the principle that one's salvation depended on choosing the state of life to which one was called, they downplayed the concept of lay vocation, since the revival of Catholic institutions demanded that large numbers of youth voluntarily enter religious life and the priesthood. This strengthened the perception, in the pre-Vatican-II era, that vocation was not a concept relevant to the laity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In For the Life of the World: Toward a Social Ethos of the Orthodox Church, there is a clear preference for the "democratic genius of the modern age." This preference for democracy is due, in part, to the long experience of the Orthodox Church with other governmental forms, especially autocratic and authoritarian states. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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This article examines one of Marie de Gournay’s forays into religious controversy in her short text “Advis à quelques gens d’Église.” First published in L’Ombre de la damoiselle de Gournay (1626), the text is an indictment of the abuse of the sacrament of confession by both penitents and confessors, and points to a rigorist stance on the part of the author nearly twenty years before it became the dominant position of the church once again. Tackling a range of thorny questions such as the aim of confession, deferred absolution, and the nature of sin, Gournay examines confession as a societal institution, outlining how it fails utterly to reduce the daily experience of petty injustices and wrongdoing. Placing that failure squarely at the feet of the clergy, Gournay includes advice for the confessors, making of the text a secular “manuel des confesseurs”—an extraordinary undertaking for a laywoman at the time. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In an important passage in Kant's Groundwork, he says: "[W]e cannot do morality a worse service than by seeking to derive it from examples. Every example of it presented to me must first itself be judged by moral principles in order to see if it is fit to serve as an original example—that is, as a model: it can in no way supply the prime source for the concept of morality" (4: p. 408). This is an important methodological pronouncement, and it appears to commit Kant to what might be called a "top-down" procedure for constructing an ethical theory—or at least for defending substantive moral principles. A contrasting method we might call "bottom-up" would attribute to what are commonly called intuitions, especially those concerning concrete cases, a basic epistemological role in such a theoretical normative project. This paper undertakes, first, to clarify both kinds of procedure and to sketch a philosophical methodology that can do justice to certain merits of each procedure; second, to explore, drawing on a methodological analysis the paper will outline, Kant's actual operative method in much of his ethical writing, particularly but not exclusively the Groundwork; and third, to appraise some aspects of Kant's actual methods of theory-building as it is seen in his development of his ethical framework. The concluding reflections will show that Kant's overall achievement in moral philosophy does not depend on certain of his metaphilosophical views. The paper will also indicate some directions of moral inquiry that may be promising for both Kantian and other approaches in moral philosophy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of Clio. Femmes, Genre, Histoire is the property of Belin Editeur and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

Copyright of Journal of Historical & Cultural Studies an Academic Magazine is the property of Republic of Iraq Ministry of Higher Education & Scientific Research (MOHESR) and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

Properly understood, Kant's moral philosophy is incompatible with constitutivism. According to the constitutivist, being subject to the moral law cannot be a matter of free choice, and failure to comply with it is to be understood as a deficiency in one's integrity as an intentional agent. I reconstruct Kant's arguments to the conclusion that immorality, moral evil, consists in choosing to give one's unity as an intentional agent supremacy over the moral law, and that one's being subject to the moral law must be one's own free choice. And I explain how Kant's doctrine of radical evil, according to which we cannot be subject to the moral law without actually being morally evil, protects this conclusion from entailing the denial of the unconditionally binding character of moral principles, which character constitutivists correctly identify as the central concern of Kant's – or any – moral philosophy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of Archives de Sciences Sociales des Religions is the property of Editions EHESS and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

In this article, originally published in French under the title "Les jésuites et la morale économique" (Dix-septième siècle 237, no. 4 [2007]: 739–54), Paola Vismara presents the Jesuits' major contributions to the teaching of moral economy from the sixteenth to the eighteenth century. In particular, Vismara explores Jesuit doctrines on moral economy and focuses on various Jesuit approaches to the problems of contracts and the management of capital, with particular attention paid to lending at interest. Retracing the most significant early modern Jesuit theologians' contributions to issues of moral economy, including the treatise of Leonard Lessius, Vismara paints a complex picture, highlighting the new ideas contained in the works of the Jesuit theologians, shedding light on disputes between probabilist and rigorist theologians, and discussing the Roman Church's responses to various theological orientations to moral economy over three centuries. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the late eighteenth century and early nineteenth century, the practices of fasting and abstinence were less and less respected by Italian Catholics. However, fasting and abstinence continued to be strongly defended by the moral theologians who were Daniele Concina's followers, including Antonio Maria Boranga, Gian Vincenzo Patuzzi, Giovanni Antonio Borgovini, Faustino Maria Scarpazza and, in the 1820s, Paolo Sperone. The preachers also favored a rigorous morality and tried to preserve the observances of Lent. Their teachings, however, were contradicted by the facts: in the Italian peninsula, the pope and the bishops were forced to grant each year considerable mitigations to the law of Lent. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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Critics often charge that Kantian ethics is implausibly rigoristic: that Kantianism recognizes a set of perfect duties, encapsulated in rules such as 'don't lie,' 'keep one's promises,' etc., and that these rules apply without exception. Though a number of Kantians have plausibly argued that Kantianism can acknowledge exceptions to perfect duties, this acknowledgment alone does not indicate how and when such exceptions ought to be made. This article critiques a recent attempt to motivate how such exceptions are to be made, namely, the constitutive approach developed by Tamar Schapiro. I argue that the constitutive approach is vulnerable to the objection that it is too permissive, justifying many morally dubious exceptions to perfect duties. I conclude by briefly outlining an alternative 'fine print' approach to the rigorism objection that appears to avoid the objection leveled at Schapiro's approach, focusing on how modifying the constituents of agents' maxims can change the deontic status of an act of a generally impermissible kind. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The problem of the applicability of moral principles is one of the most significant issues of practical reflection. With Kant's practical philosophy, the ethical demands of universality and individuality came to seem incompatible. After reviewing the outlooks of Apel and Simmel, who both offer paradigmatic answers to the "rigorism" of the categorical imperative, this article presents the issue from the perspective of Maliandi's "Convergent Ethics". It suggests that Maliandi's recognition of an "a priori of conflictivity" and of the bi-dimensional character of reason surmounts the shortages of both Apel's and Simmel's philosophies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of Clio. Femmes, Genre, Histoire is the property of Belin Editeur and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

The connections and influences of “Jansenism” to and on the Holy Roman Empire were for a long time an underestimated field of research, especially for the period of the seventeenth and early eighteenth century. The article offers a research overview to show that Jansenism was also received in the Holy Roman Empire during this period, for example in German translations of Jansenist works, in first publications of Jansenist influence published in the Holy Roman Empire, and in the actions of certain local or regional actors against Jansenist writings and their supporters. It concludes by arguing that a shift from the term “Jansenism” to concepts such as “rigorist Augustinianism” may methodologically help to open up further aspects of investigation for these areas.