‘Obligation’ and its cognates have had several different uses in the history of ethical thought. The oldest refers to a tie or bond one person can have to another, either by virtue of some action (an oath or the receipt of some service, for example) or just because of the relationships in which they stand (say, parent to child or superior to inferior). Obligation here is personal; one person is bound to another. Thought of in this way, obligations cement individuals together into families, groups, and societies.

A second use points to a different way persons might compose larger wholes or orders, not by being glued part to part (even to a single ‘ruling’ part), but through rules, norms, or laws that govern all. Here ‘obligation’ conveys a prescriptivity or requiredness that is part of the very idea of a rule or norm. Naturally enough, therefore, when philosophers in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries came to argue for the existence of universally binding norms of conduct (‘laws of nature’ or a ‘moral law’), they used the language of obligation to express their idea. Conceived in this way, the bond inherent in obligation is not a tie to others, but a constraint operating impersonally on all. Indeed, it is possible to think, as increasingly it was in the modern period, that personal obligations can have genuine moral or normative force only if they ultimately derive from impersonal ones of this sort. If, for example, parents really owe special obligations to their children, that must be because of some norm or law requiring special care – not a positive law, but one of universal morality or ‘nature’.

BACKGROUND

The ‘problem of universals’, central in mediaeval philosophy, derived from commentaries on Aristotle written by Porphyry and Boethius, both of whom injected Platonist themes into their expositions. The problem concerned the nature of things predicated of many particulars as common to them. How can one entity (a unity) be common to many individuals? What foundation is there in distinct particulars for a common predicate? A more fundamental question concerned the order of metaphysical priority between concrete particulars and universals. Several notions of priority were expressed in the criteria for substances listed by Aristotle. What are the ultimate subjects of predication? What are the entities on which the existence of others depends? What is unchangeable and capable of definition, as subjects of necessary truths and scientific knowledge are supposed to be? Scholastic Aristotelians answered these questions in terms of the doctrine of categories. Individuals in the category of substance (primary substances) meet the first two criteria, and species that exist in primary substances, considered universally (secondary substances), meet the last criterion. In contrast, Neoplatonists gave priority (substantiality) on all three counts to abstract entities that have a mode of existence independent of, and apart from, particulars that resemble them more or less imperfectly. Elements from both traditions were retained in the seventeenth century. But the formulation of issues and the range of acceptable positions were radically changed by the anti-Aristotelian thrust of mechanism. This section sketches the background of this refocusing.

LIFE AND WORK

There are no reasons to doubt that Philoponus bore the Christian name of John from birth, and that he was born in Alexandria. Simplicius informs us that John called himself ‘the Grammarian’ (Simpl. In Cael. 119.7). As regards the surname ‘Philoponus’ (literally ‘the lover of labour’), it is often considered to mean that John was at a certain moment a member of a group of philoponoi, i.e., a militant Christian brotherhood. Probably, however, it only refers to the author’s diligence as a writer. He was born c. 490 or a few years earlier, and first studied philology before engaging in philosophy. His master in philosophy was Ammonius. Somehow Philoponus succeeded in becoming the principal editor of Ammonius’ commentaries on Aristotle, and we may assume that this was his main philosophical activity before 529. In 529, the year of Justinian’s decree prohibiting the teaching of pagan philosophy, Philoponus published De aeternitate mundi contra Proclum, a violent attack against the Platonic (and his own earlier) doctrine of the eternity of the world. After 529 he probably taught philosophy for some time, without, however, being the head of the Alexandrian school himself. In this period he revised his earlier commentaries on the Posterior Analytics, the Physics and the Meteorology in the light of his new Christian philosophy. Philoponus’ Christian about-turn, however, did not involve the Alexandrian school in its entirety. Even before 529, the scholarch Ammonius had been succeeded by the mathematician Eutocius, and Eutocius himself was later succeeded by Olympiodorus, who made no secret of his paganism.

Today the study of the physical world and its contents is principally the concern of the physicist, chemist, engineer, or biologist, rather than that of the philosopher, even the philosopher of science. In keeping with this disciplinary demarcation, non-historical discussions of the nature of body or of the constituents of the physical world make infrequent appearances in volumes or journals devoted to contemporary philosophy. By contrast, the disciplinary demarcations of the early modern period were such that investigations and speculations on ‘body and the physical world’ were legitimate concerns not just of those one would now describe as ‘scientists’, but of most of the philosophical community, who shared a much broader conception of the scope of ‘philosophy’ than is common among philosophers today.

PERIPATETIC NATURAL PHILOSOPHY

The Peripatetic tradition was the intellectual framework within which most seventeenth-century philosophers were educated and within which many of them pursued their philosophical careers (see Chapter I). Peripateticism, in whatever propaedeutic form, was the earliest contact they had as individuals with serious philosophical and scientific concerns. However unsatisfying it became for some of them, at least it comprised a rigorously organised body of doctrine that included a systematic interpretation of the diversities of nature. It showed the thoughtful student of nature that an intelligible and comprehensive account of natural phenomena was a prima facie possibility. At the same time, and perhaps inevitably, Peripatetic natural philosophy was the principal object of criticism for many of those who participated in the philosophical and scientific revolutions of the period.

By the time he escaped from slavery in Maryland in 1838, Frederick Douglass had had his fill of the religious pretensions of his erstwhile masters. In reflecting upon his twenty years of lifelong bondage, he would later, in his perennially popular autobiography, spare no words for his disdain of the variety of Christianity that he had encountered on American plantations. “I … hate the corrupt, slaveholding, women-whipping, cradle-plundering, partial and hypocritical Christianity of this land,” he asserted in the appendix of his published memoir. “I look upon it as the climax of all misnomers, the boldest of all frauds, and the grossest of all libels.” Further, he condemned the apparent hypocrisy of those who would dare instruct others in the ways of moral living and spiritual enlightenment while apologizing for slavery and rationalizing oppression as a positive good. “The man who wields the blood-clotted cowskin during the week fills the pulpit on Sunday, and claims to be a minister of the meek and lowly Jesus.” Even worse, such men denied the slave access to literacy and the Bible, just as they concurrently condoned practices that ruptured enslaved families at the auction block, deprived enthralled couples of the sacrament of marriage, and robbed bondspeople of the fruits of their labors. To assure his readers that his attack upon the turpitude of certain individuals professing to be Christians was not due to any native hostility toward the gospel, Douglass expressed sincere fondness of “the pure, peaceable, and impartial Christianity of Christ….”

When the Framers drafted the U.S. Constitution in 1787, the only mention of religion was the remarkable text of Article VI, which states, “[N]o Religious Test shall ever be required as a Qualification to any Office or public Trust under the United States.” That ground-breaking language marked a shift from prior practice in Europe and the states. At the time of the Constitution's drafting, most states had religious qualifications for government officials, following the pattern in Britain, where the monarch was required to be a member of the Church of England. In Europe the guiding principle was cuius regio, eius religio: the religion of the people is determined by the religion of the ruler.

Many of the Framers, especially James Madison, believed that the new Constitution protected liberty of conscience by creating a government of enumerated and separate powers that gave Congress no authority over religion. During the ratification process, however, constitutional critics demanded greater protection of individuals from the power of the government. In order to secure the Constitution's ratification, the new Congress drafted a Bill of Rights that protected religious freedom in the following language: “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof.” Upon ratification by the states in 1791, the language about religion became the First Amendment to the U.S. Constitution. The two Religion Clauses of the First Amendment are known as the Establishment Clause and the Free Exercise Clause.

The centuries-long effort to reclaim the Iberian Peninsula from North African Muslim invaders known as the reconquista ended in 1492 with the fall of the last Moorish stronghold, the city of Granada. In the same year, Fernando of Aragon and Isabel of Castile, known as the Catholic Kings for their service to Christendom, embarked on the transatlantic venture that would bring the crusading spirit and sense of providential entitlement of the reconquista to the New World. From the outset, the spread of Roman Catholicism was an immediate and pressing concern. The faith provided not only an identity for the budding Spanish Empire, but a legal and moral justification for the conquest and colonization of what was generally referred to as Las Indias (the Indies). There, being Spaniard was synonymous with being Christian, and no expedition set forth without at least one priest, whose task it was to minister to the troops and convert the natives. Saying that the sword went hand in hand with the cross has become a truism.

CONQUEST AND CONVERSION

The inextricable tie between the Church and the state is one of the most salient features of the Spanish evangelization efforts in the Indies. In a series of bulls issued in 1493, Pope Alexander VI granted possession of the newly discovered territories to the Spanish crown. In 1501, another bull assigned the tithes obtained from the territories to the crown for the purpose of founding and endowing new churches.

Philosophy at the beginning of the seventeenth century was in many ways continuous with the philosophy of the sixteenth century. Aristotle and Aristotelianism continued to be taught in the schools, and thrived there. Furthermore, Renaissance naturalism, Neoplatonic thought, and the occult tradition continued to exert influence (see Chapters 15 and 16). However, quite striking in the late years of the sixteenth century and the first years of the seventeenth is a new interest in another non-Aristotelian tradition, that of atomism, and, more generally, in what were later to be called mechanist views of the world. Mechanists tended to see the world as a great machine, on an analogy with a clock, for example, and tried to explain the manifest properties of things in terms of the size, shape, and motion of the insensible particles that were taken to compose them. With those new natural philosophies came new conceptions of body and the contents of the physical world. Although the so-called new philosophers agreed that the form and matter of their teachers must go, they disagreed about what these were to be replaced by, what the physical world was to contain, what the nature of body was, whether bodies were active or passive, the nature of the place or space in which they are found, among many other questions. The views of the new philosophers can best be understood by examining first their view of the physical world in the early part of the century; second the view of the physical world held by three of the important mechanist system-builders in mid-century, Gassendi, Descartes, and Hobbes; and third later views on body and the physical world, including reactions to earlier mechanist conceptions of body, and attempts to escape the bounds of the new mechanist orthodoxy.

The continent of Africa can be viewed as a site of enormous, long, and ongoing creativity in relation to orality as a vector for the production of social life, religious beliefs, and the constant constituting and reconstituting of society, ideology, and aesthetics. If it is language which has a crucial role in the production and reproduction of society, then in the case of orality it is often language combined with the performativity of the body, and enacted in both the public and the private space. If it is justifiable to call the African continent “the oral continent par excellence” we need to ask why this is so. What precisely might it mean and what conclusions could flow therefrom? Orality needs to be seen in the African context as the means by which societies of varying complexity regulated themselves, organized their present and their pasts, made formal spaces for philosophical reflections, pronounced on power, questioned and in some cases contested power, and generally paid homage to “the word,” language, as the means by which humanity was made and constantly refashioned. Orality was the means by which Africa made its existence, its history long before the colonial and imperial presence of the west manifested itself. In this sense, orality needs to be seen not simply as “the absence of literacy” but as something self-constitutive, sui generis. The accepting of this proposition has consequences for an understanding of world culture: namely, it is neither possible nor accurate to take one model that valorizes the written word as the blueprint for how the human race has developed.

The Civil War was the central event of American history, and religion was central to the American Civil War experience. Religion did not cause the war, but it did magnify and intensify social, cultural, and political differences that contributed to sectional distrust and eventually disunion. Before the war, religious ideas informed the debates on slavery and the character and destiny of the Union; and, indeed, the divisions within religious bodies over the slavery issue both foretold secession and defined political loyalties during and after the war. When war came, religion gave Americans a rationale for fighting and dying, a means for understanding life and death, a moral compass, and institutional resources for providing relief to soldiers in the field and people suffering on the home front. Then, too, the civil religion of America as a chosen people gained greater force, if also one with regional permutations. The war also made possible African American aspirations for freedom and autonomy, which they expressed most powerfully in their own churches. Religion later helped rebuild the defeated South and explain defeat to white southerners, as it also spurred northern interest in Reconstruction, however imperfect and impermanent such interest proved to be.

From the antebellum period through the Civil War era, the United States was an overwhelmingly Protestant country, notwithstanding a growing Catholic presence almost everywhere and strong, if also numerically small, Jewish congregations in eastern seaboard cities. Protestantism largely defined the dominant American culture.

One of the most significant elements of social, intellectual, and cultural movements among black people has been the progressive development of the idea of Africa as an inspirational concept of collective affirmation and endeavor in the modern world. This concept, proceeding from a comprehensive vision of African peoples, societies, and cultures as constituting an all-encompassing entity, served as a model of thought and action that gave force and direction to pan-Africanism as well as to the local manifestations of nationalism in Africa that derived ideas and impulses from the global consciousness of race implied in the pan-African idea itself. The historical connection between pan-Africanism and African nationalism is evident at the ideological and political level of their expressions; there is an obvious sense in which the former laid the foundation of ideas for the latter (Bakpetu Thompson 1972; Esedebe 1994). But it is in the literature that the atmosphere of feelings, the deep affective responses to the conditions of existence that determine the processes by which these ideas were articulated, came to be fully conveyed.

The rooted connection between the various forms of black affirmation in the modern world is exemplified, in an arresting way, by the historical and thematic links between the Harlem Renaissance and the Negritude movement, forming a defined current within the cycle of responses through which black writers and intellectuals on both sides of the Atlantic have related to each other within the black world and to the vicissitudes of a common historical experience. But before examining the specific nature of these links, it is essential to consider the historical and sociological background that determined the context of black expression in the twentieth century, a context in which the idea of Africa has featured as a prominent theme.

MAIN CURRENTS IN SEVENTEENTH-CENTURY LOGIC

Until fairly recently, the study of the development of logic in the seventeeth Century suffered from a certain lack of comprehensiveness, depth, and historical sensitivity. Yet, there can be little doubt that during this period some remarkable changes in the conception of that discipline took place. Indeed, it would be misleading to treat the seventeenth century as a kind of organic unit in the history of logic. In point of fact, there is a marked discontinuity between the principal features of the varieties of viewing logic that were predominant in roughly the first half. The century and the way of viewing logicthat came to the fore in the second half.

The first half of the seventeenth century may becharacterised by a general tendency to continue teaching logic in one of the versions that had been handed down from the remote or near past. Among those traditional forms of logic, Artistotelianism, either of a scholastic type or more independent of mediaeval interpretations, maintained its strong position. The scholastic type of Aristotelianism, elaborated in the spirit of such influential thinkers as Thomas Aquinas and John Duns Scotus or adapted to the ideals of the Counter-Reformation by members of the Jesuit order, flourished especially in Roman Catholic countries but had considerable impact on the teaching of logic in the other parts of Europe as well. Authritative expositions of orthodox Thomistic doctrines are the treatises on logic included in the Collegium Complutense philosophicum of 1624 and in the Cursus philosophicus Thomisticus published by the Portuguese Dominican John of St. Thomas in 1634, while the part dealing with logic in Johannes Poncius's Integer Philosophiae cursus ad mentem Scoti of 1643 is a good specimen of the Scotist approach.

Decades of scholarship reconsidering the nature of the early modern Catholic Church has yet to erase popular perception of this institution as a rattling, decrepit hulk, one groaning under the weight of overfed monks, bejeweled cardinals, and ignorant indolent parochial clergy. To be sure, this perception reflects in part the influence of early Protestant historiography. For Martin Luther and many of his Protestant contemporaries, informed by the apocalyptic sensibilities of their age, the Church by 1521 was in its final days. Its imminent destruction was part of a divine plan leading to the return of Jesus and the final judgment of the quick and the dead. The Church was irredeemably corrupt, and its leader, the pope, was the Antichrist. Luther certainly had good reasons to complain about the Church of his day, but he proved incorrect in predicting its imminent destruction. Indeed, by 1600 the Catholic Church still presided over the single largest religious tradition in Western Europe, even managing to reassert its spiritual authority in some formerly Protestant regions while extending its reach to the New World. If we are to appreciate its remarkable resiliency in the face of Protestant challenges, and more pertinently its influence in shaping cultures across the Atlantic after 1500, we have to view the Church through multiple lenses, of which only one is the Protestant Reformation. This broader perspective brings into the foreground an institution that was by any measure a great international power.

“The conquest of the earth,” declares Charlie Marlow, principal narrator of Joseph Conrad’s 1899 novella Heart of Darkness, “which mostly means the taking it away from those who have a different complexion or slightly flatter noses than ourselves, is not a pretty thing when you look into it too much.” “What redeems it,” he continues, “is the idea only.” Thus does Marlow look back on his voyage up the great African river, at the moment when the King of the Belgians was tightening his grip over what he called the “Congo Free State,” at the cost of close to six million African lives. The remark comes at the opening of Marlow’s extended “yarn,” both a bitter memory and the canny opening gambit of a master storyteller. Marlow’s first words represent the closing remarks of a history whose moral climax turns on the evasion of last words. Though he has witnessed the horror that resounds in the life of that “remarkable man,” Mr. Kurtz, Marlow’s “inconclusive experiences” in Africa are – so we are given to understand – not amenable to final judgments.

Heart of Darkness is, for better and worse, both a chillingly clear-sighted account of imperial violence and a self-implicating instance of the moral blindness it denounces. Conrad’s story raises the discourse of empire to an excruciating pitch of self-consciousness. Deliberately provocative and self-loathing, the text combines a frank acknowledgment of colonial brutality with an exquisite aversion to moral judgments; and it opts, ultimately, to align itself with what it sees as the corrupting lie of “civilized” morality.