Our focus in this chapter will be the role the pride has played, both historically and contemporarily, in Christian theology and philosophical theology. We begin by delineating a number of different types of pride, since some types are positive (e.g., when a parent tells a daughter “I’m proud of you for being brave”), and others are negative (e.g., “Pride goes before a fall”) or even vicious. We then explore the role that the negative emotion and vice play in the history (...) of Christianity, with particular attention to a number of influential figures. We conclude by exploring how pride connects with a number of other central issues in Christian theology. (shrink)

The claim that ordinary ethical discourse is typically true and that ethical facts are typically knowable seems in tension with the claim that ordinary ethical discourse is about features of reality friendly to a scientific worldview. Cornell Realism attempts to dispel this tension by claiming that ordinary ethical discourse is, in fact, discourse about the same kinds of things that scientific discourse is about: natural properties. We offer two novel arguments in reply. First, we identify a key assumption that we (...) find unlikely to be true. Second, we identify two features of typical natural properties that ethical properties lack. We conclude that Cornell Realism falls short of dispelling the tension between ethical conservativism and ethical naturalism. (shrink)

Después de que Friedrich Nietzsche expusiera el fenómeno del resentimiento mediante un supuesto desenmascaramiento de un complejo emotivo oculto, autores posteriores, como Max Scheler y René Girard, matizaron el análisis nietzscheano aplicándolo a diversos ámbitos antropológicos y sociales. Muchas de las principales aportaciones de estos análisis contemporáneos encuentran sus precedentes en autores anteriores, modernos y medievales. Seis siglos y medio antes de Scheler, Tomás de Aquino ofrece en dos cuestiones de su Summa Theologiae dedicadas a la acedia y la envidia (...) una serie de precisiones conceptuales y observaciones psicológicas que coinciden en gran parte de su fondo y, en ocasiones, en la forma, con ciertas caracterizaciones del resentimiento. Demostramos, apoyándonos en numerosas referencias textuales, los paralelismos entre la fenomenología scheleriana del resentimiento y la exposición tomasiana de los vicios capitales. (shrink)