Reviews for Fallen Freedom: Kant on Radical Evil and Moral Regeneration

The average rating for Fallen Freedom: Kant on Radical Evil and Moral Regeneration based on 2 reviews is 2 stars.

Review # 1 was written on 2008-04-22 00:00:00 Kathleen Baker I devoured this book. Behe you fool! You can come up with no greater argument than Cicero's own watchmaker hypothesis? Idiot. The same so called "Reasons" for the gods are still the best we can do with all of our technological advances since Rome? Bastards. In praise of Cicero who for his time was highly critical in his critique of not only the existence of gods but what their inherent nature must be. Good for you Cicero and shame to all those who have done no better since him, prattling the same so called "proofs" when so much has been gained as of late. The reasons this work must be read: 1. To gain an appreciation for the vastness of ideas surrounding the so called "gods" of his time, including those not taking human form such as worship of the sun, the universe, and various elements and virtues. 2. The identification with another human living at such a vital time in Roman history who as is very apparent not only possesses the rational arguments best equipped to him in his own human form but brilliantly presented as extended dialogue between characters. 3. To enjoy the views of the Epicureans and the Stoics of the day huzzah! 4. To gain an appreciation for what Rome had gained in knowledge from the Greeks as early as this! They knew that the stars were the same as the sun. That the sun was bigger only because of relative view! They knew that the earth was a sphere~! They knew that there were other universes similar to our own that were uncountable. What treasures we lost since then and what pains had to be taken to recover this information. The dark ages truly were dark indeed! To be fair I will warn you Cicero does not fully develop all of his ideas, in fact he does not finish the book and many parts of it are rumored to be missing. The main flaw is that despite his rigorous challenges to a general belief in god he falls back on what seem to be long old assertions because perhaps of social pressure as many atheists were killed at this time and also perhaps because this is the best he can do. What a sad and unappealing ending to so many good thoughts and so much willing banter. Ah Cicero would you have been born in our times the greatness of your mind could more fully have been used to continue your eloquence on these matters! Tragedy! For Tragedy! If you want to read a book to be convinced on the nature of god yourself, the existence of or the disproving of (despite the authors intent) this may not be the read for you as the book is for obvious reasons outdated in many of its references. But if you want to hear ancient philosophy in tow and marvel at the mind of man and his cognitive abilities to think through circumstance when heavily steeped and pressured by society to avoid such by all means enjoy as did I this short work.

Review # 2 was written on 2011-09-08 00:00:00 Robert Desmarais My goal to read this in the original Latin has emerged partially intact: I read big chunks of each book untranslated, but not quite all of it. I read the intervening sections in translation. It was a fascinating way to read a piece of history and piece of philosophy. The slowness (and, mostly, the fact that I was reading it for a class) allowed for a good bit of outside reading, which enriched the experience. It also allowed for an appreciation of Cicero's language, which is really pretty wonderful sometimes. On the other hand, the close focus on translating the material meant that I often couldn't see the forest for the trees (it often felt as if I were just staring really closely at the bark). Cicero's De natura deorum is a dialogue between three Roman philosophers: the Epicurean Velleius, the Stoic Balbus, and the Academic Skeptic Cotta. I only had the vaguest idea of what these labels entailed going into this text, and in a lot of ways I think that was a good way to approach it. One of Cicero's main reasons for writing his philosophical works was to introduce / expand the audience for Greek philosophy in the Roman world. Because of this, each book acts as a nice encapsulation of Epicureanism, Stoicism, and Skepticism, all presented in nice Ciceronian prose. Since its manuscripts survived the course of 2000+ years better than the manuscripts of the Greek philosophers who inspired it, De natura deorum provides us with quite a bit of what we know about Stoicism, Epicureanism, and Skepticism. It's also gone on to have quite an illustrious history of influencing great thinkers, from Augustine to Aquinas to Milton to Spinoza to Hume to Voltaire. In the course of three days our three philosophers traverse the theological and philosophical landscape of contemporary Rome: do the gods exist, and if they do, in what manner? What shape do they take, what degree of concern do they have for human affairs? What is the nature of the cosmos, and what does that imply about its gods? And is there any way to know or to prove, really, if the gods exist at all?Despite the fact that they could easily just be mouthpieces, Cicero imbues each of his spokesmen with a nice sense of personality and humanity which breathes a lot of life into the text. Velleius has a nice sardonic wit, Balbus is effusive, Cotta is wary yet earnest. There are passages that are very clever and passages that are very beautiful. I also like that the dialogue on a wonderfully ambiguous note. Cicero had inserted himself into the dialogue at the beginning of the text, but he's just an observer. Once he arrives and is invited to listen, he essentially disappears and does not speak another word until the work's last line. He the states the following: Haec cum essent dicta, ita discessimus, ut Velleio Cottae disputatio verior, mihi Balbi ad veritatis similitudinem videretur esse propensior. Roughly translated, it reads When these things had been said we all went our own way. To Velleius, the argument of Cotta seemed more accurate. But to me, the argument of Balbus seemed to closer to the likeness of the truth. This is all kinds of fun, particularly because Cicero spends a solid portion of the introduction to his dialogue defending his choice to align with the Academic Skeptics - Cotta's school, not Balbus's - despite their relative unpopularity at the time. Lots of classicist ink has been spilled trying to figure out exactly what Cicero was playing at here: whether he was lying to protect his reputation against accusation of atheism, if he was really a closeted Stoic, or if he was simply demonstrating an application of Skeptical open-mindedness. I'm not sure that anyone really knows or will ever really know. But it's just a fun example of much thought and possibility is packed into almost every line of this text. It's the sort of work you can read over and over again and find new things each time.