The invention of autonomy : a history of modern moral philosophy /
J.B. Schneewind.
- Cambridge ; New York, New York, USA : Cambridge University Press, (c)1998.
- xxii, 623 pages ; 24 cm.
Themes in the history of modern moral philosophy -- The rise and fall of modern natural law. Natural law: From intellectualism to voluntarism. Setting religion aside: Republicanism and skepticism. Natural law restated: Suarez and Grotius. Grotianism and the limit: Hobbes. A morality of love: Cumberland. The central synthesis: Pufendorf. The collapse of modern natural law: Locke and Thomasius -- Perfectionism and rationality. Origins of modern perfectionism. Paths and God: I. The Cambridge Platonists. Paths to God: II. Spinoza and Malebranche. Leibniz: Counterrevolutionary perfectionism -- Toward a world of its own. Morality without salvation.
This book is the most comprehensive study ever written of the history of moral philosophy in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Its aim is to set Kant's still influential ethics in its historical context by showing in detail what the central questions in moral philosophy were for him and how he arrived at his own distinctive ethical views. In its range, its analyses of many philosophers not usually considered in histories of ethics, and its discussions of the interweaving of religious and political concerns with moral philosophy, this is an unprecedented account of the developments that led up to Kant's ethics. Extensive quotations allow the reader to understand the philosophy through the vocabularies that the philosophers themselves used.