Sari Kivistö

The Vices of Learning

In The Vices of Learning Sari Kivisto examines scholarly vices, such as pride, plagiarism and the desire for fame, in over one hundred Latin dissertations and treatises from the late Baroque and early Enlightenment periods.

Medical Analogy in Latin Satire

Contents Acknowledgements Introduction: Medicine for the Sick Soul Medical Meta-language: Renaissance Commentaries and Poetics on the Healing Nature of Satire Painfully Happy: Satirical Disease Eulogies and the Good Life Wonderfully Unaware: Sensory Disabilities, Contemplation and Consolation Outlook and Virtue: Morally Symptomatic Physical Peculiarities Satire as Therapy Appendix: The Anthologies Used in This Study Notes Bibliography Index

Kantian Anti-theodicy and Job's Sincerity

Immanuel Kant’s “Uber das Misslingen aller philosophischen Versuche in der Theodicee” (“On the Miscarriage of All Philosophical Trials in Theodicy”, 1791), inaugurates the modern theodicy versus antitheodicy debate. This chapter offers an exposition of Kant’s essay and sets the tone for the antitheodicism of the book. We argue that the “authentic theodicy” Kant proposes—and finds in the Book of Job—is an antitheodicy and that we should follow Kant in rejecting theodicies not only for intellectual but also for ethical reasons. This argument is developed both philosophically and by drawing attention to Kant’s use of literary figures, particularly those appearing in the Book of Job. According to Kant’s reading, Job’s key virtue in contrast to his “friends” is his sincerity, Aufrichtigkeit. This notion plays a major role in the argument of the subsequent chapters.

Evil, Absurdity, and Nonsense: Beckettian and Wittgensteinian Reflections

This chapter deals with what Kivisto and Pihlstrom call Wittgensteinian antitheodicism, exemplified by D.Z. Phillips’s and other Wittgensteinian philosophers’ work, as well as the kind of absurdity of suffering explored by Samuel Beckett in Waiting for Godot (1951). While the general topic of meaningless suffering is a theme running through the entire book, the Wittgensteinian focus on questions of meaning and the explorations of nonsensicality in absurd drama make their own contributions to understanding the nature of suffering. We propose a “Kantian” approach to Wittgensteinian antitheodicism as dealing with the conditions for the possibility of meaning and communication. Meaningful language-use in the context of religious forms of life itself breaks down in theodicies. Absurd literature can be seen as examining such situations of “breaking down” and offering reflexive challenges to the antitheodicist project itself.

Conclusion: The Transcendental Antitheodicy of the “Sick Soul”

The final chapter examines whether, and in what sense, the ethical arguments against theodicies presented by post-Kantian thinkers seeking to determine the moral inappropriateness of theodicies are Kantian-like transcendental arguments. The basic structure of a successful antitheodicist transcendental argument is sketched. In addition, the question of what degree of truth can be achieved by employing transcendental arguments is approached by re-examining the relevant notion of truth in pragmatist terms. The concept of truth joins the literary and philosophical investigations of the book. The conclusion also reaches metaphilosophical results concerning the relativity of the distinctions between the transcendental and the empirical and between the transcendental and the transcendent.

Pragmatism, Suffering, and Truthfulness: From James to Rorty to Orwell

The discussion of William James and pragmatism in this chapter reinvokes the issues of sincerity and truthfulness in a context in which a reading of George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four (1949) turns out to be necessary for serious engagement with the problem of evil and suffering. This context invokes the debates over pragmatist conceptions of truth and neopragmatism exemplified by Richard Rorty’s work, which also contains a controversial reading of Orwell’s famous novel. Through a study of James (and of Rorty’s reading of Orwell), Kivisto and Pihlstrom suggest a way of viewing the problem of evil and suffering as a frame of moral philosophy. This presupposes antitheodicism. The chapter contains extended analyses of the ethical dimensions of James’s pragmatism and of Orwell’s dystopia. The reflexive examination of antitheodicism itself continues in this chapter through the Orwellian worry that truth itself might become fragmented.