Criminal Justice Ethics Scrapbook

For example , Plato Aristotle , St . Augustine , St . Thomas Aquinas , Baruch Spinoza , and G .W Leibniz all in quite different ways sought to gain knowledge of the nature of things (3 ) Within the contexts of their philosophies , these thinkers sought the foundations of morality in the nature of man , his place in the cosmos , and his constitutive relationship with the divine Acting morally meant realizing man 's nature (4 ) It made sense for Augustine to urge "Become who you are (5 ) because the nature of any being could be fully understood teleologically . One

's true nature was understood as the actualization of a potency that exists in the nature of things

After the beginning of the Christian era , although the metaphysical understanding continued to reign , it was inevitable that its teleologies would be understood theologically . Man was still defined primarily by reference to the nature of things , but now with specific reference to the nature of the ultimate thing : God . As Dante Alighieri put it faithful to the Thomistic synthesis that animated his great poem "The glory of the One who moves all things permeates the universe but glows in one part more and in another less (6 ) Dante defined the parts of the universe by how and to what degree God glowed in them

2 . Immanuel Kant and the Shift to Epistemology

The "Copernican revolution " effected by the critical philosophy of Immanuel Kant changed the focus of basic philosophical inquiry from the nature of things to the characteristics of the human mind (7 ) The world as we experience it can be under stood philosophically , Kant argued only when we understand the ways in which its basic structure is rooted in the conditions of the possibility of all knowledge imposed by our minds . Knowledge begins not with metaphysics or teleology but...