http://gogrue.wordpress.com/2009/12/11/what-does-consistency-have-to-do-with-reasons/

Apologies if you’ve already seen this; it’s from late last year.

I actually don’t think the connection to communism worked against Doull or any other Hegelian that much – at least outside the US. I think a great deal of 20th-century interest in Hegel was triggered precisely by his influence in Marx. If anything, the relative lack of interest in Doull by his Cold War contemporaries might have come from the fact that his reading of Hegel wasn’t Marxist enough for them.

From what I have read of Augustine, I don’t think he holds up a great hope for a Christian society on earth – certainly not in his lifetime, probably not ever. One should surely strive for such a thing, but not with the expectation of actually getting there. Human beings are too flawed and fallen for individual or social perfection to ever be realized on this side of the grave.

The little acquaintance I have with Doull’s work, from the book on Google leads me to think that his dull prose and area of specialisation may have militated against him. If he flourished in the cold war era the Hegelian connection to dialectical materialism and communism would have been neither profitable nor popular. The piece I’m reading is his lecture on Plato’s dialogue Parmenides. So far there is no flash of insight that you might expect from someone with classical learning and in depth knowledge of the background. Instead we are offered:

And when he so regarded them there came into view for him one idea over all. In that way was formed for him the attitude of thought to being which in Theaetetus is called true opinion’.

In category (b) how about David Hume and A.J. Ayer?

Dipping into Augustine’s City of GodI find that nothing not built on Christian principles can prosper. This is the only basis for a good life. In fact a society not built on principles of justice etc ceases to be a society as Augustine said was the case with Rome. There is some truth in that. Life under Fascism and Communism was not a time of human flourishing. The Greek polis was supported by slavery. Louis MacNeices’s poem Autumn Journalhas some great lines on this.

The Glory that was Greece: put it in a syllabus, grade it
Page by page
To train the mind or even to point a moral
For the present age:
Models of logic and lucidity, dignity, sanity,
The golden mean between opposing ills…
But I can do nothing so useful or so simple;
These dead are dead
And when I should remember the paragons of Hellas
I think instead
Of the crooks, the adventurers, the opportunists,
The careless athletes and the fancy boys,
The hair-splitters, the pedants, the hard-boiled sceptics
And the Agora and the noise
Of the demagogues and the quacks; and the women pouring
Libations over graves
And the trimmers at Delphi and the dummies at Sparta and lastly
I think of the slaves.
And how one can imagine oneself among them
I do not know;
It was all so unimaginably different
And all so long ago.” -Louis MacNeice, Autumn Journal

I was going to mention Kant but thought the post was already long enough without him. :) One thing I think you miss: Kant doesn’t actually say there is an afterlife. Rather, it’s one of those things we absolutely cannot know one way or another. But – like free will and like God himself – we must assume its existence in the absence of knowledge. (Denying knowledge to make room for faith and all that.)

I might have guessed you’d know Doull. Does it come from being Canadian or just from having a nose for the neglected figures? I came upon him via George Grant, of course (who is himself, I think, much less well-known in the States).

I believe Kant based his proof of the soul’s immortality on precisely the same disappointment Augustine notes, on the grounds that Must implies Can: Since (i) in this life we inevitably fail to achieve perfect virtue (Kant calls it holiness of will, I think), and since (ii) we should perfect our will (see the entire Second Critique), therefore (iii) there is a posthumous existence.

I don’t say that this is an irrefutable (or even a very good) argument, but I’m with you in feeling that a philosophy that doesn’t wrestle with these questions isn’t of much interest.