Is it a sin to read modern philosophy?

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If you are insulted, it is the Church that is insulting you, not me. The Church placed certain books on the Index because they could lead the faithful into error and endanger their souls. It is a bit more than “sending someone to pieces”. We are all obliged to avoid near occasions of sin, and for those who need to avoid reading error and heresy — whose faith, intellect, or will is not strong enough to resist being led astray — certain books should be avoided. If there is some need to read them (academic obligation, knowing the errors in order to refute them, etc.), then that is one thing, but for a weak and struggling person, possibly at a confused place in their life, and liable to be led into error, heresy, or moral degeneracy, it is better to avoid such writings.
 
Yes, amen. That is the still binding moral force of the list. And really all such writing even that has come out since.
 
Thanks. I am not speaking on behalf of struggling people, in some fasion confused. I am getting up in age and I am Catholic by choice at this point. I like to think I know why that is. I have done enough reading to know ideas that are not Orthodox but also ideas that were once considered unorthodox that turned out to be quite Orthodox. Maximus the Confessor is a name I chose here as a great example of this latter truth. A personal hero of mine Catholics should read his history. WHY he was a “Confessor” and his fortitude to stick to his guns. They don’t always get it right. I learned this by reading. You can add to this list Tielhardt and Meister. Reading and scholarship brought the writings of these great Catholic writers back to the forefront. Even in the face of that list.
So I speak for myself and Catholics perhaps whose faith is grounded in some maturity for lack of a better term. The issue of straying I leave to my prayers and faith in a God who is all good and deserving of all of my love. In Miesters own words," if the only prayer one says IN YOUR ENTIRE LIFE is ‘Thank You,’ that would be enough."
 
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Just found this in a book by Dietrich von Hildebrand and thought I’d share.

“We must, above all, protect our faith from all temptations to doubt. From the lives of many saints, of course, we learn that God often inflicted on them severe tests of faith. But our concern here is with those ‘tests’ which we can blame on ourselves alone. Thus, thanks to a presumptuous evaluation of our own strength, we may read books hostile to faith, books that turn us away from Christ and the true Faith. To counter such dangers, we must cherish and preserve our faith as a precious gift from God; and in all humility we must be aware of our weaknesses.”
 
A sin? Maybe, maybe not. It can be hard to tell when modern philosophers give us stuff like:

“We can clearly see that there is no bi-univocal correspondence between linear signifying links or archi-writing, depending on the author, and this multireferential, multi-dimensional machinic catalysis. The symmetry of scale, the transversality, the pathic non-discursive character of their expansion: all these dimensions remove us from the logic of the excluded middle and reinforce us in our dismissal of the ontological binarism we criticised previously.”
 
StudentMI said:
Just found this in a book by Dietrich von Hildebrand and thought I’d share.

“We must, above all, protect our faith from all temptations to doubt. From the lives of many saints, of course, we learn that God often inflicted on them severe tests of faith. But our concern here is with those ‘tests’ which we can blame on ourselves alone. Thus, thanks to a presumptuous evaluation of our own strength, we may read books hostile to faith, books that turn us away from Christ and the true Faith. To counter such dangers, we must cherish and preserve our faith as a precious gift from God; and in all humility we must be aware of our weaknesses.”
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And deconstructed here: https://physics.nyu.edu/faculty/sokal/dawkins.html
 
At what point does faith devolve into blind obedience and a reliance on ignorance to save me from myself? Where theology is based upon the Universe orbiting around the earth? Or our finest wonder if antipods are not in need of Baptism because they are not desended from Adam?
 
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I don’t really see how that deconstructs what Hildebrand wrote. I’ll stick with him thanks. God bless.
 
I don’t think my point was to deconstruct. I made a very personal statement. I did not intend to question application to others, I do not see an absence of utility as a guidepost for someone thinking about reading a given book.
My objection is something much more subtle. As you know.
 
Oh I was replying to Freddy, not you, when I mentioned deconstructing.
 
Maximus1 said:
At what point does faith devolve into blind obedience and a reliance on ignorance to save me from myself? Where theology is based upon the Universe ocrbiting around the earth? Or our finest wonder if antipods are not in need of Baptism because they are not desended from Adam?
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My apologies Max. I quoted your post when I should have quoted Grizzly’s. My bad…
 
I think you are confusing your own personal ethical beliefs with the concept of ethics as a field of academic study. While you are personally entitled to hold your own views about moral relativism, you cannot claim that moral relativism is inadmissible as a philosophical position. In academic philosophy, moral relativism and moral objectivism are equally respectable positions to hold, and both positions are supported by highly distinguished scholars.

I cited the example of the Princeton professor Gilbert Harman, for example. Harman is a laureate of the Jean Nicod Prize and the Howard T. Behrman Award for Distinguished Achievement in the Humanities, an academician of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and a fellow of the Cognitive Science Society and Association for Psychological Science. His books are published by some of the world’s most prestigious academic publishers, including the university presses at Oxford, Princeton, MIT, and UMass. His writings have been translated into fifteen languages and reprinted many times. You simply cannot say that Harman’s body of work cannot be regarded as an admissible contribution to the field of ethics because you personally disagree with him.

I do not know where you got the idea that I do not agree with the application of scientific method or that I may be a supporter of witchcraft or New Age beliefs. You are quite right that a chemistry teacher must teach material that falls within the field of science. Equally, a philosophy teacher must teach material that falls within the field of philosophy. Moral relativism does fall within the field of philosophy whether you agree with it or not.

Imagine taking a course on cosmology. Some professors will believe in the hypothesis that there are many universes (a multiverse), while others will believe in the hypothesis that there is only one universe. Both positions are entirely respectable and both have been proposed by some of the most distinguished scientists in the field. A professor who advocates the multiverse hypothesis will not say that it is “unacceptable” to advocate the hypothesis of a single universe and vice versa.

Or consider a course on the Reformation. Some professors will advocate the view that the Reformation in the 16th century was the culmination of long-term changes beginning in the 14th century and that Protestantism enjoyed wide popular support. Other professors will advocate the view that the Reformation was an abrupt break with the Catholic Church and that it was largely imposed by an elite while most ordinary people had remained strongly Catholic right up until the early decades of the 16th century. Both positions are eminently respectable. Both positions can be supported with evidence and scholarship. Whatever one’s personal beliefs, neither view can be considered inadmissible.

Education is not about reinforcing your own personal beliefs. In any academic discipline you must be prepared to give due consideration to all sides of an argument. In moral philosophy, that includes giving consideration to both objectivist and relativist approaches.
 
do_justly_love_mercy said:
a philosophy teacher must teach material that falls within the field of philosophy. Moral relativism does fall within the field of philosophy
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Of course it does. Philosophy includes everything. But not everything is compatible with the field of Ethics.

I may reject the possibility of absolutes in Logic. But the Geometry teacher may say for the purpose of this course, acceptance of some absolutes in Logic is a necessity.

I may reject absolutes in Natural Philosophy a/k/a Science. I can find some where in Philosophy to discuss my views. But for the purpose of this Natural Philosophy course, the instructor may justly require acceptance of some absolutes.

You may, within the Philosophy department, argue there is no such thing as Beauty, no absolutes are possible. But within the Aesthetics course the teacher may require acceptance of some absolutes.
 
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do_justly_love_mercy said:
Some professors will believe in the hypothesis that there are many universes (a multiverse), while others will believe in the hypothesis that there is only one universe. Both positions are entirely respectable
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Both sides accept the same absolutes. They follow the same Scientific Method, assume the same permanent universal principles of Physics. They require their students to hold to the same basic assumptions, though they may make varying hypotheses where the data is still incomplete, and can reach different conclusions consistent with the shared absolutes.

This is comparable to the Ethics teacher presupposing some absolutes, but allowing different conclusions. The moral relativist, or for that matter the Physics Relativist, may find a place in Philosophy but not in Ethics, or Physics class.
 
No, it’s not a sin. First of all, the index of forbidden books no longer exist.

We have to study modern philosophy in the seminary. We read Descartes, Locke, Hume, Nietzsche, Heidegger, and Sartre, just to name a few. It is profitable to have a working knowledge of their basic ideas.
 
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I think the thing that you seem to be consistently failing to accept is that ethics is a branch of philosophy and that within the academic study of ethics there are no absolutes. The views of Peter Singer, for example, will be completely different from the views of Roger Scruton. Within an ethics course one must be allowed to study, and potentially agree with, both points of view.

Of course there are some things that must be presupposed. In a trigonometry course one could presuppose that a triangle has three sides and three angles. But I cannot see what could legitimately be presupposed in an ethics course. The whole point of studying ethics is that there is no consensus of agreement on ethical values. I appreciate that you are personally strongly opposed to moral relativism, but that does not mean that moral relativism is beneath consideration as an ethical framework. Relativism is one of the principal ways in which philosophers think about ethics. It is simply not possible to study ethics if one starts out from the premise that relativism is inadmissible.

As I have tried to explain before, the purpose of an education in philosophy is not that the students should receive dogmatic instruction. A philosophy professor is in the business of teaching his students how to think, not what to think.

Perhaps I can settle the matter by quoting from ‘Philosophy in all Honour Schools including Philosophy’ from the University of Oxford’s Examination Regulations:
Ethics

Candidates will be given an opportunity to show some first-hand knowledge of some principal historical writings on this subject, including those of Aristotle, Hume, and Kant, but will not be required to do so. Questions will normally be set on the following topics:
    1. The Metaphysics of Ethics: including the nature of morality and moral properties, the truth-aptness of moral judgements, moral knowledge and moral relativism.
    1. Value and Normativity: including good and right, reasons, rationality, motivation, moral dilemmas.
    1. Self-interest, Altruism, and Amoralism.
    1. Ethical Theories: including consequentialism, utilitarianism, and contractualism.
    1. Specific Moral Concepts: including happiness, well-being, rights, virtue, fairness, equality, and desert.
    1. Moral Psychology: including conscience, guilt and shame, freedom and responsibility.
    1. Applied Ethics, including medical ethics.
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Note the inclusion of “moral relativism”.
 
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