Vicious, Antisocial, and Sinful - The Social and Political Dimension of Moral Vices from Medieval to Early Modern Philosophy (VAS)
Table of contents
Project description
The project Vicious, Antisocial and Sinful (VAS) analyses the social and political dimension of human vices in medieval and early modern philosophy. The key concepts, moral vice and its theological counterpart sin, are approached from two perspectives.
First, VAS investigates the definition and use of these concepts in medieval moral literature. Medieval authors left behind a vast and heterogeneous body of works on virtues and vices (Bloomfield et al. 1979; Newhauser and Bejczy 2008). VAS is the first serious attempt to study this material from a philosophical perspective. The project focuses especially on philosophical conceptualisations of vices and how the social aspect is mapped to them.
Second, VAS examines the role of vices in the context of medieval and early modern works on political philosophy. Authors of this period acknowledged that human beings often seek to satisfy their vicious desires at the expense of the common good. This belief influenced their political theories in many ways. VAS examines in particular how Aristotle’s remarks concerning vicious, bestial, and apolitical human beings were understood in the context of scholastic commentaries on Politics and other works on political philosophy. The main focus is on the dynamic relation between human wickedness and potential for social, asocial, and antisocial life.
In addition to medieval scholastic tradition from the thirteenth century onwards, VAS charts the continuities and discontinuities between medieval and early modern periods. Close examination of early modern theories against their scholastic background is expected to show that a superficial break in the tradition does not mean that all the underlying philosophical ideas would have been abandoned. Early modern political philosophy distances itself increasingly from theological considerations concerning human sinfulness, but the idea of human frailty and wickedness can be seen as a unifying factor between Aristotelian/Augustinian political theories and their early modern counterparts.
By focusing on the concept of moral vice, VAS approaches the history of political philosophy and ethics from a novel perspective. It results in new knowledge concerning the formative period of modernity, as it reveals what vices are, how they affect human sociability, what consequences human wickedness has on political theories, and how it bridges different philosophical traditions. VAS also has potential for contributing to our understanding of contemporary societal problems.
