Melissa Merritt aims to locate one of the limits of Kant’s Aristotelianism. While it is widely supposed that Aristotle is the most relevant ancient reference point for Kant’s conception of virtue as “moral strength of will” (6:405), Merritt argues that Kant draws primarily on Stoic ethics. Much of what may seem Aristotelian in Kant’s remarks about virtue — such as his likening it to “the state of health proper to a human being” (6:384) — should be read as nods to a pervasive tendency of ancient Greek thought, which views ethics as a dimension of natural teleology. Ethics, so conceived, is centrally concerned with how the human being develops naturally towards the telos of virtue, conceived as the completion of our essentially rational nature. While this is a feature common to Aristotelian and Stoic ethics, Merritt argues that Kant favors a specifically Stoic approach, one that has a notion of “appropriate” or completion-promoting action — officium — at its heart.

Carla Bagnoli takes up a worry about Kant’s version of constitutivism about moral norms, which says that the norms of rationality are too abstract to account for the exercise of rational agency and fail to do justice to the significance that the consequences of action have for moral assessment. Bagnoli argues that: (i) the constitutive norms of practical reason are not meant to provide normative reasons for action by themselves. So, the incompleteness of constitutivism about practical reason is not a bug, but an essential feature of the constitutivist agenda; (ii) the full story about determining rational action includes reference to the consequences, which are importantly comprised in the Kantian account of the agent’s description of the action under assessment; (iii) to explain how this works, it is best to deploy a strategy that deserves to be called Aristotelian – that of placing action in its circumstances.

According to Suárez, each of Aristotle’s four causes counts as a cause because it inflows being to another, and each has a proper influx. Several scholars regard Suárez’s account of the influx of the final cause as unsatisfactory. These interpreters overlook his identification of the influx of a cause with its causality, and his view that the causality of a cause is an entity, a res or a mode. I argue that, on Suárez’s view, the influx or causality of the final cause is a component of the mode of action, and that this account satisfies the demands of his influx theory of cause. I also uncover some unfamiliar elements of Suárez’s view of final causality: that it is simultaneous with efficient causality and that, wherever an end is a real cause of some effect, its causality is an intrinsic feature of the action by which that effect is produced.

The authors run through the major arguments for the existence of God: Anselm’s ontological argument (and also Descartes’s version), arguing that the very notion of God a priori proves hs existence; Aquinas’s cosmological (or causal) argument, that God is needed to stop an infinite regression of causes from the present to the past; and the teleological argument or the argument from design, that the design-like natural objects of this world demand a designer. Then they raise the standard objections: Gaunilo’s criticism that the ontological argument proves the existence of perfect islands, which is ridiculous, and Kant’s objection that you cannot infer matters of fact by a priori reasoning; Dawkins’s criticism that the cosmological argument raises the unanswered question of what causes God; and Hume’s criticism of the design argument, and Darwin’s subsequent demonstration that natural selection can explain final causes naturalistically, and so there is no need to invoke a Designer God.