The Will of God and the Damned

This big awful essay I wrote on early modern approaches to the problem of theodicy and their potential links with the logic of capitalist apologetics is just too much of a mess for anyone to want to publish in its present state, and I won’t have time to devote to overhauling it for quite awhile.

I think there’s a lot of interesting stuff in it, though, and it’s a shame for all that work to go to waste. So here it is!

Abstract: In this article, I reconstruct the central aspects of an extended debate between Leibniz, Malebranche, and Arnauld concerning the nature of the will of God and the restricted economy of salvation, known as the ‘Jansenist controversy.’ I show that their respective positions exemplify different visions of the hierarchy of divine attributes, and disagreements concerning the nature of God’s volition and its relationship to the good. The article seeks to contribute to the philosophical and historical study of early modern theology and metaphysics, and at the same time to develop resources for a critique of capitalist political theology.

Running Notes on Kant’s First Critique

The link below will take you to a PDF file that contains my running notes on Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason. They are unfinished and ongoing; I will be updating this file periodically.

At present the notes begin at the start of the Transcendental Logic; I may go back and add notes on the Prefaces, Introductions, and Transcendental Aesthetic at a later date. For now my plan is to continue moving forward through the text. As you can see, I am currently working through the transcendental deduction of the categories.

Feedback is welcome as always, especially if in your estimation I have misunderstood or misconstrued any of Kant’s text. I am aiming to be faithful, clear, and accurate; hopefully these notes can be of some help to you.

Update 10.24.2021

The notes now include a commentary on the Ideal of Pure Reason.

Update 10.29.2021

The notes now include commentaries on the B Introduction, the Transcendental Aesthetic, and about half of Book Two of the Transcendental Analytic.

Update 9.16.2022

The notes now include commentaries on the A Preface significant portions of the Transcendental Dialectic, including some of the Antinomies and the whole of the Ideal.

https://drive.google.com/file/d/1phmJasP4263jK0YsW1kIqSKtOgCMREuj/view?usp=sharing