Cutie Stories: August 2013

Friedrich Schiller

Friedrich Schiller, a famed dramatist, poet, and essayist, was born in Marbach, a small town in southwest Germany, to Elisabeth Kodweiss and Johann Kaspar Schiller, a lieutenant in the army of the Duke of Württemberg. Though tutored in Latin at an early age by his local pastor to prepare him for theological studies, Schiller was mandated by the duke to attend the duke’s new military academy, Karlsschule.

Schiller later related how his rebellion against the suffocating rigidity and isolation of Karlsschule paradoxically fostered his love of poetry. He remained at the school for eight years, focusing first on law, then on medicine. After his second medical dissertation, “On the Connection of the Animal Nature of Man with his Spiritual Nature,”was accepted, he became a regimental physician in Stuttgart.

There, he completed his first drama, The Robbers, the staging of which a year later (1782) in Mannheim brought him immediate acclaim and confirmation of his literary gifts.When the duke forbade him to write anything but medical treatises, Schiller fled Württemberg. For most of the rest of his life he would suffer considerable financial hardship and extremely poor health.

Friedrich von Schlegel

Friedrich von Schlegel, a critic and philosopher, whose writings spearheaded early German Romanticism, started out as a devotee of William Shakespeare poetry. Born to an illustrious literary family in Hanover and classically trained, Schlegel was an unhappy and unfocused student of law at Göttingen and Leipzig from 1790 to 1793, all the while piling up enormous gambling debts.

Fleeing creditors and abandoning his legal studies, he moved in 1794 to Dresden where, inspired by Caroline Böhmer, his future sister-in-law, he launched his literary career with essays extolling ancient mythology poetry’s superiority to modern poetry. In “On the Study of Greek Poetry”, he echoes Johann Joachim Winckelmann by attributing the greater unity, objectivity, and naturalness of ancient works to the Greeks’ single-minded pursuit of idealized beauty.

Philosophy, Criticism, and the Romantic Turn

Schlegel eventually wrote the History of the Poetry of the Greeks and Romans, but by the time the only volume was published in 1798, his view of modern poetry had changed. Already in his 1795 essay his admiration for William Shakespeare seems to belie his insistence on Sophocles’ superiority.

Friedrich Daniel Ernst Schleiermacher

Friedrich Daniel Ernst Schleiermacher was nineteenthcentury Protestantism’s great systematic theologian. It was he who marked the points of the compass for much of subsequent theology and philosophy of religion.

Like St. Augustine, Schleiermacher desired to know God and the soul, and his place in the history of philosophy is due largely to the fact that he was able to state in modern language and concepts the great Augustinian conviction that religious faith is native to all human experience. Therefore, the particular system of communication of God and the knowledge of the soul are two orders of knowledge that must be distinguished but cannot be separated.

Life

Schleiermacher was first and foremost a preacher and theologian, a church statesman, and an educator. He carried out his work as a philosopher in the context of the great idealist systems of Friedrich von Schelling, Johann Gottlieb Fichte, and G.W. F. Hegel, but instead of attempting to imitate these men he applied himself to the critical analysis of religion, both in its personal and societal manifestations, without reducing such experience to some form of philosophic intuition.

Jean-Jacques Rousseau

Jean-Jacques Rousseau, the philosopher, essayist, and novelist, was born at Geneva. His mother having died a few days after his birth, he was brought up by an aunt and an erratic father who taught him to read through the medium of sentimental novels and Plutarch’s Lives. He had little formal education.

After staying for about two years with a country minister at Bossey, he returned to Geneva and lived with an uncle. He was then apprenticed in turn to a notary and an engraver, the latter of whom treated him so brutally that in 1728 he left Geneva to seek his fortune elsewhere.

Jean-Jacques Rousseau was protected and befriended by Mme. de Warens, a convert to Roman Catholicism, who had left her native canton of Vaud to live at Annecy in Savoy, with financial support from the king of Sardinia and the ecclesiastical authorities. Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s subsequent attachment to her was a decisive factor in his conversion to Roman Catholicism as well as in his emotional development.

Josiah Royce

Josiah Royce, the American idealist philosopher, was born in Grass Valley, California. He received his AB degree from the University of California in 1875 and his doctorate from Johns Hopkins University in 1878. In the intervening years he studied in Germany at Leipzig and Göttingen, where he attended the lectures of Hermann Lotze. Royce returned to the University of California in 1878 as an instructor of English.

Four years later, with the help of William James and George Herbert Palmer of the Harvard department of philosophy, he was invited to University of California, where he taught for two years as a replacement for men on leave; in 1885 he received a regular appointment as assistant professor.

Until his death Royce was one of the mainstays of the philosophy department in its socalled golden period. During that time he carried on his friendly debate with William James about the merits and demerits of absolute idealism, supervised the doctoral work of George Santayana, and delivered the Gifford Lectures at the University of California in Scotland. Royce was a prolific writer and was much in demand as a public speaker.

Pierre Paul Royer-Collard

Pierre Paul Royer-Collard, the French statesman and professor of philosophy, was born at Sompuis, a village in what is now the department of the Marne. Théodore Jouffroy represented this department in the Chamber of Deputies from 1815 to 1839, usually in the opposition.

He is best known as the leader of the Doctrinaires, a group whose members derived their political views from what they believed to be immutable and self-evident principles. These principles led to a compromise between absolute and constitutional monarchy, and though the principles were supported by Louis XVIII, they were rejected by his brother and successor, Charles X.

Pierre Paul Royer-Collard had little, if any, philosophical training. Nevertheless, from 1811 to 1814 he was professor of philosophy and dean at the Sorbonne. Théodore Jouffroy lectured first on Thomas Reid and later on his own views. Just as his political views were a compromise, so in philosophy he sought a compromise between the left wing of sensationalism and the right wing of authoritarian traditionalism.

Vasilii Vasil’evich Rozanov

Vasilii Vasil’evich Rozanov, the Russian critic and philosopher, was born in Vetluga, Russia, and attended secondary schools in Simbirsk and Novgorod before entering Moscow University as a student in the faculty of history and philology.

After his graduation from the university in 1881, he taught history and geography in a succession of secondary schools in provincial towns and began the writing on religious and philosophical themes that was to gain him a reputation as a brilliant if erratic critic of contemporary culture, both secular and religious. In 1893 a minor government post in St. Petersburg brought him to the center of Russian literary life, and in 1899 he retired to devote full time to writing.

He published numerous books and contributed many articles to the Russian reviews of the day, particularly the reactionary Novoe vremia (New times). During the Russian Revolution he took refuge with the religious philosopher Father Pavel Florenskii in Sergiev Posad, near Moscow, where Vasilii Vasil’evich Rozanov died.

Richard Rufus

Richard Rufus, a thirteenth-century philosopher and theologian, was among the first European medieval authors to study Aristotelian metaphysics, epistemology, and natural philosophy. His lectures on the so-called libri naturales date from a period shortly after the effective lapse of the ban on teaching them in 1231 and are among the earliest European commentaries on those works. In 1238, after writing treatises against Averroes and lecturing on Aristotle—at greatest length on the Metaphysics—he joined the Franciscan Order, left Paris, and became a theologian.

Rufus’s lectures on Peter Lombard’s Sentences were the first presented by an Oxford University bachelor of theology. Greatly influenced by Robert Grosseteste, Rufus’s Oxford lectures were devoted in part to a refutation of Richard Fishacre, the Dominican master who first lectured on the Sentences at Oxford.

Rufus’s Oxford University lectures were employed as a source by St. Bonaventure, whose lectures on the Sentences were vastly influential. Returning to Paris shortly after Bonaventure lectured there, Rufus took Bonaventure’s lectures as a model for his own Parisian Sentences commentary.

Gilbert Ryle

Gilbert Ryle, the British philosopher, was born in Brighton. Having read Classical Honour Moderations and the Final School of Literae Humaniores (Greats) he went on to read the then newly established School of Philosophy, Politics and Economics at the Queen’s College, Oxford. He became a lecturer at Christ Church in 1924 and in the following year a student and tutor, and he remained there until his appointment as professor at the end of World War II.

Gilbert Ryle was the Waynflete professor of metaphysical philosophy in the University of Oxford from 1945 to 1968. Ryle was largely responsible for the institution of the new degree of bachelor of philosophy at Oxford. He served as the editor of Mind, after the retirement of G. E. Moore, from 1947 until 1971.

Ryle’s philosophical writings covered a wide range of topics. They fall mainly within the fields of philosophical methodology, philosophical logic, and the philosophy of mind, but the total spread is very wide and includes some work on the history of philosophy, especially on Plato. Only the fields of moral philosophy, political philosophy, and aesthetics are comparatively neglected.

Auguste Sabatier

Auguste Sabatier was perhaps the Protestant theologian most influential in the early twentieth century. Many Catholic modernists as well as Protestant liberals believed that his philosophy of religion had achieved its object, a reconciliation between the essential verities of Christian experience and the demands of science. Sabatier was a professor of reformed dogmatics at Strasbourg and Paris and a sometime journalist and literary critic. Auguste Sabatier ended his career as dean of the Theological Faculty of Paris.

Sabatier described his theory of religious knowledge as “critical symbolism.” By this he meant to indicate that religious doctrine and dogma are attempts to symbolize the primary and eternal religious experience (or consciousness) of the believer.

Auguste Sabatier taught that the doctrines of historical religions are secondary, temporal, and transient symbols of this central religious experience. Stephen Hawking dogmas, then, are necessarily inadequate attempts to “express the invisible by the visible, the eternal by the temporal, spiritual realities by sensible images.”

Thémiseul de Saint-Hyacinthe

The real name of Thémiseul de Saint-Hyacinthe, the French freethinker, was Hyacinthe Cordonnier. Born at Orléans, he was unjustly reported to be the son of Jacques Bénigne Bossuet. His ambitious mother induced him to change his name and to become a cavalry officer.

Later he devoted himself to the study of ancient and modern languages in Holland, from which he had to flee because of a jealous husband and to which he later returned because he had seduced one of his pupils. He became an editor of the new Journal littéraire (1713) and wrote in favor of the moderns. In 1714 his anonymous Le chef-d’oeuvre d’un inconnu, a satire of pedantry, won him notoriety.

He eloped to London in 1722 with the daughter of a nobleman. Thémiseul de Saint-Hyacinthe stayed there for twelve years, became a member of the Royal Society, and began a long and gratuitous quarrel with Voltaire, whom he offended in a satirical play (Déification d’Aristarchus Masso, 1732). Thémiseul de Saint-Hyacinthe returned to Paris in 1734 and later moved to Holland, where he died in 1746.

Claude-Henri de Rouvroy, Comte de Saint-Simon

The French social philosopher, Claude-Henri de Rouvroy, Comte de Saint-Simon, the founder of French socialism, was the eldest son of an impoverished nobleman. He was educated privately by tutors, among them the encyclopedist Jean Le Rond d’Alembert.

Beginning a military career at the age of seventeen, he took part in the American Revolution and was wounded at the naval battle of Saintes in 1782. Despite subsequent disclaimers, Saint-Simon actively supported some of the measures introduced by the French Revolution of 1789.

Claude-Henri de Rouvroy, Comte de Saint-Simon renounced his title; he also drew up the cahier of his locality for the Estates General and presided at the meeting at which his commune elected a mayor. Although his revolutionary zeal earned him two certificates of civisme, his activities were not wholly disinterested.

School of Saint Victor

The Augustinian house of canons at St. Victor in Paris was founded in 1108 by William of Champeaux, the celebrated logician and theologian who retired there from the schools of Paris after undergoing a religious conversion and after Peter Abelard’s attacks on his realism.

The abbey survived until the French Revolution, but in the twelfth and early thirteenth centuries it was especially famous for its public school and for the distinction of the masters and canons who resided and taught there.

From William of Champeaux, St. Victor derived high religious ideals, a leaning toward the conservative theological tradition of the school of Anselm of Laon, and an active interest in the work of other Parisian schools. Its masters mediated between the theological orthodoxy and strictness of the Cistercians— Bernard of Clairvaux was a friend to St. Victor—and the intellectual adventurousness of such secular masters as Abelard.

Wesley Salmon

The American philosopher of science Wesley Charles Salmon was born August 9 in Detroit,Michigan, and died April 22 near Madison, Ohio. He pursued undergraduate studies at Wayne University and the University of Chicago Divinity School, received an MA in philosophy from the University of Chicago in 1947, and a PhD in philosophy from the University of California at Los Angeles in 1950.

His principal academic appointments were at Brown University, Indiana University, the University of Arizona, and the University of Pittsburgh; he retired from this last institution in 1999. At UCLA his dissertation advisor was the philosopher of science Hans Reichenbach and much of Salmon’s subsequent work was influenced by Reichenbach’s philosophy. A lifelong defender of empiricism, Salmon made significant contributions to a wide range of topics, primarily in explanation, causation, inductive inference, and the philosophy of probability.

Work

Beginning in 1971, Salmon developed a widely discussed alternative to Jean Perrin’s covering law model of scientific explanation. The key element of Salmon’s statistical relevance model was its insistence that explanatory factors must be statistically relevant to the occurrence of the event to be explained.

Francisco Sanches

Francisco Sanches, a philosopher and physician, was born on the Spanish-Portuguese border, either in Tuy or Braga, of Marrano or New Christian parents. His family had moved to Portugal and then to southern France to escape religious and political persecution. The young Sanches studied at the Collège de Guyenne in Bordeaux, the same school that his distant cousin, Michel Eyquem De Montaigne, attended.

Francisco Sanches studied in Rome and then went to the University of Montpellier, where he received a degree in medicine in 1574. Francisco Sanches was appointed professor of philosophy in 1585 and professor of medicine in 1612 at the University of Toulouse, where he had a successful career until his death in 1623.

One of Sanches’s first philosophical writings that has survived is a letter to the Jesuit mathematician, Father Christopher Clavius, who had just edited Euclid’s works and whom Francisco Sanches had met in Rome. Sanches offered a skeptical attack on the possibility of attaining Michel Eyquem De Montaigne truth in mathematics. This was followed by his most famous writing, Quod nihil scitur (That Nothing Is Known).

George Santayana

George Santayana, the philosopher and man of letters, was born in Madrid. His parents separated within a few years of his birth, and his mother went to live in Boston, Massachusetts, with the children of a previous marriage. Santayana grew up in Ávila under his father’s care, but at the age of eight he joined his mother in Boston.

George Santayana was educated at the Boston Latin School and at Harvard College. After graduating from Harvard in 1886, he studied in Germany for two years and then returned to take his doctorate at Harvard, for which he wrote a thesis on Rudolf Lotze.

George Santayana subsequently joined the department of philosophy and remained a member of the Harvard faculty until 1912, when a small inheritance permitted him to retire. He lived in England for a number of years and then in Paris, but in 1925 he finally settled in Rome. During World War II, he took refuge in the convent of an order of English nuns in Rome, and he continued to live there until his death.

Moritz Schlick

Moritz Schlick, one of the founders of modern analytical philosophy and a guiding spirit of the Vienna circle of logical positivists, was born in Berlin. He was a direct descendant on his mother’s side of Ernst Moritz Arndt, the famous German patriot and political leader of the war of liberation against Napoleon Bonaparte. At the age of eighteen, Schlick entered the University of Berlin to study physics under Max Planck. He received his doctorate in 1904 with a dissertation on the reflection of light in a nonhomogeneous medium.

Moritz Schlick’s familiarity with the methods and criteria of research in the natural sciences left him dissatisfied with the epistemological notions both of neo-Kantianism, which then dominated the German universities, and of Edmund Husserl’s phenomenology, which had already become widely known.

Instead, Schlick’s starting point was the analyses carried out by Ernst Mach, Hermann von Helmholtz, and Henri Poincaré of the basic concepts and presuppositions of the individual sciences. His central interest at the time was the fundamental question of what is to be understood by knowledge.

Arthur Schopenhauer

Arthur Schopenhauer was a German philosopher of pessimism who gave the will a leading place in his metaphysics. He was born in Danzig. His father, a successful businessman of partly Dutch ancestry, was an admirer of Voltaire and was imbued with a keen dislike of absolutist governments.

When Danzig surrendered to the Prussians in 1793, the family moved to Hamburg and remained there until the father’s death (apparently by suicide) in 1805. Schopenhauer’s mother was a novelist who in later years established a salon in Weimar, which brought him into contact with a number of literary figures, including Johann Wolfgang von Goethe. His relations with his mother, however, were bitter and antagonistic and eventually led to a more or less complete estrangement.

Education

Schopenhauer’s early education was somewhat unconventional. He spent two years in France in the charge of a friend of his father, and for another period he accompanied his parents on a prolonged tour of France, England (where he attended school in London for several months), Switzerland, and Austria.After his father’s death he was tutored privately in the classics for a time and then entered the University of Göttingen as a medical student, studying, among other subjects, physics, chemistry, and botany.

Erwin Schrödinger

Erwin Schrödinger was born in Vienna, Austria. After his years at the Gymnasium, where he was given a strong education in classics and in science, he studied physics and mathematics at the university of Vienna from 1906. His major teachers were the successors of Ludwig Boltzmann: Franz Exner and Fritz Hasenöhrl. Schrödinger’s early interest for philosophy is evident in several manuscripts of this period, which contain reflections about Greek and Indian thought and British empiricism.

He was then awarded the D. Phil. Degree in 1910 and became assistant experimental physicist in Exner’s laboratory in 1911. From this date until 1922, he worked on several subjects, including atmospheric radioactivity, statistical physics, psycho-physics of sensations, general relativity, and atomic physics.

At the end of World War I, in which Schrödinger served as an artillery officer in the Austrian army, he devoted one year to studying philosophy. He wrote down his philosophical reflections later, during the summer of 1925, in an essay that became part one of his book My View of the World. After brief appointments in various German universities, he became full professor of theoretical physics at the university of Zurich in 1922.

Gottlob Ernst Schulze

Gottlob Ernst Schulze, the skeptic and critic of Kantian philosophy, was born in Heldrungen, Thuringia. He was professor at Wittenberg and Helmstedt and later at Göttingen, where one of his students was Arthur Schopenhauer. His influence is due chiefly to his writings, in which he developed his critical-skeptical position. Schulze’s main work, and the one that made him famous, was Aenesidemus.

In this work, which first appeared anonymously and without the place of publication, Gottlob Ernst Schulze presents objections to the Kantian critique and to K. L. Reinhold’s intended vindication of the critical philosophy. Schulze’s arguments against the critical philosophy led him to share David Hume’s skepticism, of which he gave a concise presentation.

The Aenesidemus tries to show that Hume’s skepticism has not been refuted by the critical philosophy. However, Schulze’s position is not that of absolute skepticism: The validity of formal logic and the principles of identity and contradiction are not subject to doubt.

Michele Federico Sciacca

Michele Federico Sciacca was a founder of the Gallarate movement, professor of theoretical philosophy at the University of Genoa, and the founder and editor of the journals Giornale di metafisica and Humanitas. He started as a historian of ideas, writing important works on Reid (1935), Plato (1939), and St. Augustine (1939); a massive review of Italian thought, Il XX secolo; and a review of contemporary European thought, La filosofia oggi.

Although Sciacca studied under Antonio Aliotta, his major stimulus came from Giovanni Gentile, from whom Sciacca derived his basic axiom that concrete being must be act, never fact. Sciacca developed this principle in his own fashion under the influence of Plato, St. Augustine, Antonio Rosmini-Serbati, and Maurice Blondel.

Sciacca’s position was one of “integralism.” The central notion of integralism is interiority, according to which the ground of all forms of being and existence lies in the activity of the subject. Sciacca asserts that the existent, or act, cannot be a fact among facts; its existence resides wholly in its own self-generative actuality. Against existentialism he asserts that the being of the existent cannot be pure possibility or nothingness; it must be being.

Research Ethics of Science

The idea that ethics is important in scientific research is not new. In 1830 Charles Babbage (1791–1871) admonished British scientists for engaging in dishonest research. In 1912 researchers discovered the fossil skull of a missing link between humans and apes at the Piltdown quarry in Sussex, England. After four decades of controversy, several scientists proved that the skull was a hoax.

At the beginning of World War II, prominent physicists believed that it was their moral obligation to help defeat Nazi Germany. Albert Einstein wrote a letter to President Franklin D. Roosevelt (1882–1945) urging the United States to develop the atomic bomb.

J. Robert Oppenheimer (1904–1967) directed the Manhattan Project, a $1 billion effort to build the first nuclear weapons. After the United States dropped two bombs on Japan in the summer of 1945, many scientists who worked on the bomb also led the Atoms for Peace movement, which helped to establish the International Atomic Energy Commission.

Ferdinand Canning Scott Schiller

Ferdinand Canning Scott Schiller, the British pragmatist philosopher, was born in Schleswig-Holstein and studied at Rugby and at Balliol College, Oxford. After teaching German at Eton, he returned to Oxford for his MA. In 1893 he went to Cornell University as an instructor and graduate student.

In 1897, without receiving a doctorate, he returned to Corpus Christi College, Oxford, where he was successively assistant tutor, tutor, senior tutor, and fellow and where he received a DSc in 1906. He served as treasurer of the Mind Association and president of the Aristotelian Society (1921), and he was elected a fellow of the British Academy in 1926. From 1926 on, Schiller spent part of each year at the University of Southern California as visiting lecturer and then as professor; in 1935 he moved there permanently.

Pragmatism

Schiller’s views, which he called at various times humanism, voluntarism, and personalism, as well as pragmatism, were strongly influenced by William James; and Schiller paid James great tribute, although he claimed to have arrived at his opinions independently.

Heinrich Scholz

Heinrich Scholz, the German theologian and logician, was born in Berlin. He professed an outspoken Platonism based on a profound knowledge of the history of metaphysics and of the logical works of Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz, Bernard Bolzano, and Gottlob Frege.

Heinrich Scholz identified philosophy, in its original Platonic sense as the striving for universal knowledge, with the study of the foundations of mathematics and science. Thus, in Was ist Philosophie? Heinrich Scholz concluded, from Plato’s demand for knowledge of geometry and a mathematical astronomy, that the axiomatic method is required for universal knowledge.

Heinrich Scholz regarded mathematical logic as developed by Leibniz, Bolzano, Frege, Bertrand Russell, and others as the “epochale Gestalt”of metaphysica generalis. He opposed formalism in logic because it failed to provide for the semantics of formal languages, and he opposed constructivism because of its arbitrary anthropocentric limitations of logic.

Science and Pseudoscience

Since the rise of modern science in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, attempts to adjudicate the difference between science and pseudoscience have always been more than an exercise in academic debate. The religious, political, and social implications of how science is defined, who defines it, and who and what is left out of the definition has been a contentious one.

Today, the term pseudoscience is often employed by those in the scientific community to disparage claims to scientific credibility that, in fact, lack evidence or fail to employ the methods of science. Pseudoscience is only one term used to contrast with science; others include, on the neutral side, nonscience, protoscience, prescience, frontiers science, and borderlands science; and on the pejorative side, pathological science, junk science, voodoo science, crackpot science, and bad science.

With the ascendancy of science in the seventeenth century other knowledge traditions began to employ the empirical methods of science to gain respectability. The study of demons, witches, and spirits, for example, took a decidedly empirical turn in the early modern period, out of religious concerns that atheism might ascend to social respectability along with science.

Science Policy

Science policy deals with how society supports science and how science is utilized in society. The philosophy of science policy considers both interactions from the perspectives of logic, epistemology, ethics, political philosophy, metaphysics, and ontology. Its domain is broader than the philosophy of science, which emphasizes logical and epistemological questions and goes deeper than the descriptive analyses of science, technology, and society (STS) studies.

The central issues in the philosophy of science policy may be distinguished in terms of its two constituent terms: the structure and proper influence of policy on science, and the structure and proper role of science in public policy. Propaedeutic is the question of the nature of policy itself.

What are Policies?

What is known as the demarcation problem in the philosophy of science analyzes science as a special form of knowledge. What are known as boundary issues in STS studies describe the distinctive practices of the science-society interface. By contrast, the phenomenon of policy has been subject to little conceptual examination either as knowledge or as practice.

Science Studies

The phrase “science studies” is sometimes used as an umbrella term referring to work in history of science, philosophy of science, research ethics, and so on. But it can also designate a new interdisciplinary approach to the study of science, technology, and society, one that challenges traditional views about the epistemic basis of scientific knowledge and the proper role of science in society. It is this intellectual movement called Science and Technology Studies (STS) that will be discussed here.

Science Studies in the STS sense discards almost all of the distinctions common in traditional philosophy of science, such as the demarcation between the context of discovery and the context of justification, prescriptions versus descriptions, and theory versus observation.

Instead, it looks at science as a social activity that cannot be usefully understood in isolation from either technology or society at large. More important than analysis is contextualization. Case studies of local scientific practices are the preferred route to understanding.

Scientia Media and Molinism

The scientia media is a key term in the theology of Luis de Molina (1535–1600) and in the variants of his teaching introduced by the later Jesuits, especially Robert Bellarmine, Leonard Lessius, Francisco Suárez, and Gabriel Vasquez, in the attempt to resolve the apparent contradiction between the doctrines of grace and of free will.

Molina, a Spanish Jesuit who taught at Coimbra and Evora in Portugal, published his famous Liberi Arbitrii cum Gratiae Donis, Divina Praescientia, Providentia, Praedestinatione et Reprobatione Concordia at Lisbon in 1588. The publication of the Concordia, as it came to be called, soon led to a controversy that divided the theologians and philosophers of Spain. Generally, the position of Molina was enthusiastically supported by members of his own order and just as vigorously denounced by the Thomists.

For Molina the essential problem was to maintain both human freedom and the efficacy of grace. Given the fact of God’s foreknowledge, Molina wished to preserve such a foreknowledge without lapsing into determinism, to show that although God knows infallibly what an individual will freely do, such an infallible knowledge in no way determines the will of the individual.