A Thomist reading reveals that Kant sought not to reject virtue, but to place virtue ethics on a rational foundation.
I argue against the common understanding of Kant as a deontologist theorist pure and simple. I argue that there is a line of development connecting Kant’s achievements and his failure to Weber and Nietzsche. Though profoundly influenced by Nietzsche, Weber’s tough-minded realism led him to reject notions of a ‘gay’ and ‘joyful’ nihilism and draw pessimistic conclusions with respect to the future. To the extent that these thinkers failed, and the key aspects of modernity have remained in place, Max Weber remains the central theorist of modernity. The book considers Rousseau, Kant, Hegel and Marx as key moral and political philosophers undertaking the task of recovering the common good that has been lost with the rejection of rational metaphysics and the natural moral law. The book proceeds to argue the case for the importance of St Thomas Aquinas’ epistemological realism, rationalist metaphysics of being and natural moral law as supplying the objective foundations capable of resolving the impasse of morality in the modern world. The modern world is not so much a Nietzschean world which is beyond good and evil so much as a world in which objective moral criteria no longer apply. Weber’s much vaunted polytheism is shown to be an heterogeneity of values, the reduction of morality to value judgements, a conflict of irreducible value positions in which there is no objective way of deciding between them. The book identifies Max Weber as a key figure in giving sociological expression to the moral impasse which characterises the modern world. The analysis charts the dissipation of objective morality from the intersubjectivism and universalism of Immanuel Kant to the nihilism of Nietzsche. This book traces the collapse in the idea of an overarching objective moral framework in a line of development that proceeds from the Protestant Reformation to liberalism, secularism, relativism, and nihilism.
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God Has Skin in the Game shows you how America can become the moral and economic powerhouse that the Founding Fathers intended it to be by, rediscovering and acting on our common metaphysical heritage. Understanding the kind of reasonable political compromise that could come from an improved articulation of these largely hidden positions brings us back to the Founders. The root cause of ideological conflict in America is the inability to advert to which of these two theories of causality we employ, either consciously or unconsciously. The problem is much larger than the absence of classicism it has to do with an inability to synthesize what we already know about energy as it is understood by quantum physics, and Existence as it is understood by religion, into a new and dynamic understanding of life. Some writers, unaware of this more fundamental paradox, have attempted, merely, to link the absence of classical knowledge in our culture to current political and social difficulties. Understanding how an immutable or unchangeable Being can act within and without time, or affect change without changing Itself, might be said to be the puzzle of the ages. Many of the ideas presented may seem shocking, and possibly even intolerant, but they will lead you on an intellectual adventure that can change your life. A modern alternative to the biblical Fall of Man, it challenges the political order to reorient itself towards eternity, and the timeless values of moral and intellectual excellence. O'Reilly's quantum-based philosophy is one that anyone can embrace, regardless of race, creed, or culture. God Has Skin in the Game presents a new framework for the origins of the universe, one that connects the dots between science and religion. As a society, we suffer from cultural and historical amnesia, but most important of all, O'Reilly makes it clear that we suffer from metaphysical amnesia about the soul and its relationship to something higher than itself. If we are to survive as recognizably human, we need to return to a politics of the soul, albeit in a new guise.” Even more poignantly, what is missing from most contemporary political discourse is an understanding of which concept of existence underlies our common thinking and our institutions. It is thereby a perverse politics, an anti-politics and even, in the end, an impossible politics. John Milbank, Professor of Politics, Religion and Ethics notes that: “the politics that we practice today is a politics without the soul.
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