Minding the Modern

Minding the Modern: Human Agency, Intellectual Traditions, and Responsible Knowledge by Thomas Pfau, 618 pages

Minding the Modern is a monumental work tracing the development of the concept of human will from the Aristotelian-Augustinian medieval synthesis, through the voluntarism of the late scholastics, and into the mechanistic determinism of the modern era.  Following in the footsteps of contemporary thinkers including Alisdair MacIntyre and Charles Taylor, Pfau charts a gradual shift from a concept of human agency capable of rational deliberation and choice between ends to a model of efficient causation driven and therefore determined by either passion and appetite or by socialized behavior.  While the former is dependent upon a logos which not only orders the cosmos but makes genuine human communication and communion possible, the latter reduces all human relationships to incommensurable perspectives and power struggles; while the former is open to the gift of otherness, the latter is closed off in a buffered self of atomistic individualism.  The book finishes with an extended presentation of Coleridge's critique of Enlightenment determinism.

A professor at Duke primarily specializing in English and German romanticism, Pfau presents his thesis with remarkable thoroughness and subtlety, which makes the book as extraordinarily difficult to read as it is extraordinarily rewarding.  The end - not a conclusion - promises a sequel, which should be awaited with bated breath.