The aftermath of the French Revolution forced European thinkers to confront the problem of restoring and preserving social stability. Could a revitalized Christianity ensure that the great mass of the population would not be swept up again in revolutionary fervor? If Christianity could no longer perform the task of teaching contentment with their lot to the disenfranchised and poor, what could do so? The consequences of trying to reform society had proven devastating in France. No one wanted to bring such upheavals upon Europe again. Was every reformist doctrine as dangerous as the doctrine of the rights of man? Or was some sort of reform a price to be paid for the restoration of order?

Revolutions and reform movements during the first two-thirds of the century kept such questions alive. In British and French moral philosophy between the French Revolution and the Franco-Prussian War the question of the role of intuition in providing moral knowledge was a central theme. The recurrent social and political crises of the period help explain why. Those who shaped opinion agreed that general acceptance of Christianity was essential to social stability. Philosophers who took intuition to provide the basis of morality were taken to be supporting religion. Most of those who rejected intuitionism were not. On both sides, the epistemological issue had two parts. One concerned the ultimate justification for moral belief. Almost no one thought morality was wholly a matter of feeling. What rational warrant, then, could it have? The other concerned the extent to which warranted moral beliefs are available to everyone whose conduct they should guide. Can we all think out for ourselves what we ought to do, or must some people – perhaps the majority – take their morals on authority from others?

In the first three Propositions of his Idea for a Universal History with a Cosmopolitan Aim (Idea), Kant tells us that nature intends all natural human capacities to be developed to their fullest in the species, though not in the individual. Moreover humans are meant to provide, by their own efforts, whatever they enjoy of happiness and perfection (8:18–20). In the Fourth Proposition Kant lays out the means nature employs to bring about this result. It is what he calls the “unsocial sociability” (ungesellige Geselligkeit) of men. We have, he says, a “propensity to enter into society.” But we also have a “thoroughgoing resistance” to this tendency so that we are always liable to isolate ourselves and tear society apart (8:20).

This seems an unfortunate combination of basic character traits, but Kant does not find it so. On the contrary, he sees in it the goad needed to make us overcome our natural laziness. We do not want to live solitary lives. But we find in ourselves a strong desire to have everything go as we want it to. We know we would resist this desire coming from others, so we expect the others with whom we want to live to resist our desire. The resistance stirs us to try to overcome it.

The title page of Christian Wolff’s Vernünftige Gedancken von Gott, der Welt und der Seele des Menschen of 1720, the so-called “German Metaphysics,” shows a brilliant sun beaming through dark clouds above a peaceful rural landscape. A Latin phrase over the sun explains the picture: “light restored after clouds.” Many other philosophy books published in Germany during the first part of the eighteenth century carried similar pictures. In at least two the word Dispellam is shown at the top. Enlightenment or Aufklärung was the sun dispelling the clouds. The sun was reason; the clouds were ignorance and false belief. The darkness they caused was favorable to despotic government, overbearing priests, misguided religiosity, abusive nobility, repressive laws backed by ferocious punishments, unjust taxation, and stultifying economic practices. Enlighteners opposed these by trying to reform legislation, government, and penal systems, to increase religious toleration and the freedom to think and publish, to spread scientific knowledge, to improve education, and to rationalize economic policies. Success, they thought, depended on removing the dark clouds inherited from the past. Reason was the tool for the job. And philosophers were taken to be among those best equipped to show what reason could do and how it could help.

Moral philosophy today is not what it was in the Athens of Socrates and Plato, nor what it was in Montaigne's France. Philosophers today tend to think their task is, as Alexander Nehamas puts it, “to offer systematically connected answers to a set of independently given problems.” Philosophy is understood, moreover, as a largely if not wholly theoretical enterprise. Montaigne did not see it that way; and if we want to understand his relation to moral philosophy we need to begin by asking what he could have taken it to be. We must moreover include some consideration of how he saw the good life. With everyone else, he took it that in ancient philosophy - the philosophy he mainly studied - the pursuit of philosophy and the pursuit of the good life were inseparable. In this chapter I examine his reactions to some views of moral philosophy that he scrutinized with great care. I then consider what bearing his responses had on the moral philosophy that came after him, which for convenience I will refer to as modern moral philosophy.

The great covered cisterns of Istanbul were built during the sixth century of the common era. Their roofs are held up by row upon row of stone pillars. Many of these pillars were made specially for the cisterns, but others seem to have been pieced together from whatever broken bits of column were available to the builders: a pediment of one style or period, a capital of another, a shaft from yet a third. The provenance of the parts did not matter. It sufficed that this material from the past served the present purpose.

Architects have other ways of using the past. Consider New York City's old Pennsylvania Station: it was meant to look like a Roman bath, perhaps in order to transfer the grandeur of the ancient empire to the modern railroad company that was displaying its wealth and glory. Or consider some of the post-modern buildings now on display in our cities: Gothic arches atop glass-fronted skyscrapers after Corbusier or Mies, with additional odd bits and pieces of whatever style it amused the architect to incorporate. The elements are meant to recall the past, if only to dismiss it, even while they are intended to function in a striking new structure.

This volume shows that philosophers have as many ways of using the past as architects have. The chapters here assembled were written for a conference on the role of Hellenistic philosophy in the early modern period.