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61-540: Casuistry ( / ˈ k æ zj u ɪ s t r i / KAZ -ew-iss-tree ) is a process of reasoning that seeks to resolve moral problems by extracting or extending abstract rules from a particular case, and reapplying those rules to new instances. This method occurs in applied ethics and jurisprudence . The term is also used pejoratively to criticise the use of clever but unsound reasoning, especially in relation to ethical questions (as in sophistry ). It has been defined as follows: Study of cases of conscience and

122-640: A broader version of "addition and subtraction" which is not limited to numbers. This understanding of reason is sometimes termed "calculative" reason. Similar to Descartes, Hobbes asserted that "No discourse whatsoever, can end in absolute knowledge of fact, past, or to come" but that "sense and memory" is absolute knowledge. In the late 17th century through the 18th century, John Locke and David Hume developed Descartes's line of thought still further. Hume took it in an especially skeptical direction, proposing that there could be no possibility of deducing relationships of cause and effect, and therefore no knowledge

183-471: A foundation of all possible knowledge, Descartes decided to throw into doubt all knowledge— except that of the mind itself in the process of thinking: At this time I admit nothing that is not necessarily true. I am therefore precisely nothing but a thinking thing; that is a mind, or intellect, or understanding, or reason—words of whose meanings I was previously ignorant. This eventually became known as epistemological or "subject-centred" reason, because it

244-551: A free society each individual must be able to pursue their goals however they see fit, as long as their actions conform to principles given by reason. He formulated such a principle, called the " categorical imperative ", which would justify an action only if it could be universalized: Act only according to that maxim whereby you can, at the same time, will that it should become a universal law. In contrast to Hume, Kant insisted that reason itself (German Vernunft ) could be used to find solutions to metaphysical problems, especially

305-453: A genetic predisposition to language itself include Noam Chomsky and Steven Pinker . If reason is symbolic thinking, and peculiarly human, then this implies that humans have a special ability to maintain a clear consciousness of the distinctness of "icons" or images and the real things they represent. Merlin Donald writes: John Azor Too Many Requests If you report this error to

366-791: A method for compromising the contradictory principles of moral absolutism and moral relativism . In addition, the ethical philosophies of utilitarianism (especially preference utilitarianism ) and pragmatism have been identified as employing casuistic reasoning. The casuistic method was popular among Catholic thinkers in the early modern period. Casuistic authors include Antonio Escobar y Mendoza , whose Summula casuum conscientiae (1627) enjoyed great success, Thomas Sanchez , Vincenzo Filliucci (Jesuit and penitentiary at St Peter 's), Antonino Diana , Paul Laymann ( Theologia Moralis , 1625), John Azor ( Institutiones Morales , 1600), Etienne Bauny , Louis Cellot , Valerius Reginaldus , and Hermann Busembaum (d. 1668). The progress of casuistry

427-427: A method of solving conflicts of obligations by applying general principles of ethics, religion , and moral theology to particular and concrete cases of human conduct. This frequently demands an extensive knowledge of natural law and equity , civil law , ecclesiastical precepts, and an exceptional skill in interpreting these various norms of conduct.... It remains a common method in applied ethics . According to

488-425: A model of communicative reason that sees it as an essentially cooperative activity, based on the fact of linguistic intersubjectivity . Nikolas Kompridis proposed a widely encompassing view of reason as "that ensemble of practices that contributes to the opening and preserving of openness" in human affairs, and a focus on reason's possibilities for social change. The philosopher Charles Taylor , influenced by

549-492: A moral decision, "morality is, at the very least, the effort to guide one's conduct by reason —that is, doing what there are the best reasons for doing—while giving equal [and impartial] weight to the interests of all those affected by what one does." The proposal that reason gives humanity a special position in nature has been argued to be a defining characteristic of western philosophy and later western science , starting with classical Greece. Philosophy can be described as

610-414: A natural order that was itself understood to have aims. Perhaps starting with Pythagoras or Heraclitus , the cosmos was even said to have reason. Reason, by this account, is not just a characteristic that people happen to have. Reason was considered of higher stature than other characteristics of human nature, because it is something people share with nature itself, linking an apparently immortal part of

671-568: A nominal, though habitual, connection to either (for example) smoke or fire. One example of such a system of symbols and signs is language . The connection of reason to symbolic thinking has been expressed in different ways by philosophers. Thomas Hobbes described the creation of "Markes, or Notes of remembrance" as speech . He used the word speech as an English version of the Greek word logos so that speech did not need to be communicated. When communicated, such speech becomes language, and

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732-482: A pope, both Catholicism and Protestantism permit the use of ambiguous statements in specific circumstances. G. E. Moore dealt with casuistry in chapter 1.4 of his Principia Ethica , in which he claimed that "the defects of casuistry are not defects of principle; no objection can be taken to its aim and object. It has failed only because it is far too difficult a subject to be treated adequately in our present state of knowledge". Furthermore, he asserted that "casuistry

793-457: A result. Pope Francis , a Jesuit, has criticized casuistry as "the practice of setting general laws on the basis of exceptional cases" in instances where a more holistic approach would be preferred. Reasoning Reasoning involves using more-or-less rational processes of thinking and cognition to extrapolate from one's existing knowledge to generate new knowledge, and involves the use of one's intellect . The field of logic studies

854-539: A sin one day, re-commit it the next, then generously donate to the church and return to re-confess their sin, confident that they were being assigned a penance in name only. These criticisms darkened casuistry's reputation in the following centuries. For example, the Oxford English Dictionary quotes a 1738 essay by Henry St. John , 1st Viscount Bolingbroke to the effect that casuistry "destroys, by distinctions and exceptions, all morality, and effaces

915-465: A synonym for "reasoning". In contrast to the use of "reason" as an abstract noun , a reason is a consideration that either explains or justifies events, phenomena, or behavior . Reasons justify decisions, reasons support explanations of natural phenomena, and reasons can be given to explain the actions (conduct) of individuals. The words are connected in this way: using reason, or reasoning, means providing good reasons. For example, when evaluating

976-451: A system of logic. Psychologist David Moshman, citing Bickhard and Campbell, argues for a " metacognitive conception of rationality" in which a person's development of reason "involves increasing consciousness and control of logical and other inferences". Reason is a type of thought , and logic involves the attempt to describe a system of formal rules or norms of appropriate reasoning. The oldest surviving writing to explicitly consider

1037-412: A way of life based upon reason, while reason has been among the major subjects of philosophical discussion since ancient times. Reason is often said to be reflexive , or "self-correcting", and the critique of reason has been a persistent theme in philosophy. For many classical philosophers , nature was understood teleologically , meaning that every type of thing had a definitive purpose that fit within

1098-418: A way that can be explained, for example as cause and effect. In the explanation of Locke , for example, reason requires the mental use of a third idea in order to make this comparison by use of syllogism . More generally, according to Charles Sanders Peirce , reason in the strict sense requires the ability to create and manipulate a system of symbols , as well as indices and icons , the symbols having only

1159-490: A way that is consistent with monotheism and the immortality and divinity of the human soul. For example, in the neoplatonist account of Plotinus , the cosmos has one soul, which is the seat of all reason, and the souls of all people are part of this soul. Reason is for Plotinus both the provider of form to material things, and the light which brings people's souls back into line with their source. The classical view of reason, like many important Neoplatonic and Stoic ideas,

1220-414: A whole. Others, including Hegel, believe that it has obscured the importance of intersubjectivity , or "spirit" in human life, and they attempt to reconstruct a model of what reason should be. Some thinkers, e.g. Foucault, believe there are other forms of reason, neglected but essential to modern life, and to our understanding of what it means to live a life according to reason. Others suggest that there

1281-434: Is based on reasoning alone, even if it seems otherwise. Hume famously remarked that, "We speak not strictly and philosophically when we talk of the combat of passion and of reason. Reason is, and ought only to be the slave of the passions, and can never pretend to any other office than to serve and obey them." Hume also took his definition of reason to unorthodox extremes by arguing, unlike his predecessors, that human reason

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1342-488: Is based on the knowing subject , who perceives the rest of the world and itself as a set of objects to be studied, and successfully mastered, by applying the knowledge accumulated through such study. Breaking with tradition and with many thinkers after him, Descartes explicitly did not divide the incorporeal soul into parts, such as reason and intellect, describing them instead as one indivisible incorporeal entity. A contemporary of Descartes, Thomas Hobbes described reason as

1403-468: Is not just one reason or rationality, but multiple possible systems of reason or rationality which may conflict (in which case there is no super-rational system one can appeal to in order to resolve the conflict). In the last several decades, a number of proposals have been made to "re-orient" this critique of reason, or to recognize the "other voices" or "new departments" of reason: For example, in opposition to subject-centred reason, Habermas has proposed

1464-511: Is not only found in humans. Aristotle asserted that phantasia (imagination: that which can hold images or phantasmata ) and phronein (a type of thinking that can judge and understand in some sense) also exist in some animals. According to him, both are related to the primary perceptive ability of animals, which gathers the perceptions of different senses and defines the order of the things that are perceived without distinguishing universals, and without deliberation or logos . But this

1525-451: Is not qualitatively different from either simply conceiving individual ideas, or from judgments associating two ideas, and that "reason is nothing but a wonderful and unintelligible instinct in our souls, which carries us along a certain train of ideas, and endows them with particular qualities, according to their particular situations and relations." It followed from this that animals have reason, only much less complex than human reason. In

1586-420: Is not yet reason, because human imagination is different. Terrence Deacon and Merlin Donald , writing about the origin of language , connect reason not only to language , but also mimesis . They describe the ability to create language as part of an internal modeling of reality , and specific to humankind. Other results are consciousness , and imagination or fantasy . In contrast, modern proponents of

1647-413: Is one of the ways by which thinking moves from one idea to a related idea. For example, reasoning is the means by which rational individuals understand the significance of sensory information from their environments, or conceptualize abstract dichotomies such as cause and effect , truth and falsehood , or good and evil . Reasoning, as a part of executive decision making , is also closely identified with

1708-548: Is seen as the most pure or the defining form of reason: "Logic is about reasoning—about going from premises to a conclusion. ... When you do logic, you try to clarify reasoning and separate good from bad reasoning." In modern economics , rational choice is assumed to equate to logically consistent choice. However, reason and logic can be thought of as distinct—although logic is one important aspect of reason. Author Douglas Hofstadter , in Gödel, Escher, Bach , characterizes

1769-481: Is the goal of ethical investigation. It cannot be safely attempted at the beginning of our studies, but only at the end". Since the 1960s, applied ethics has revived the ideas of casuistry in applying moral reasoning to particular cases in law , bioethics , and business ethics . Its facility for dealing with situations where rules or values conflict with each other has made it a useful approach in professional ethics, and casuistry's reputation has improved somewhat as

1830-411: Is the way humans posit universal laws of nature . Under practical reason, the moral autonomy or freedom of people depends on their ability, by the proper exercise of that reason, to behave according to laws that are given to them. This contrasted with earlier forms of morality, which depended on religious understanding and interpretation, or on nature , for their substance. According to Kant, in

1891-534: The Online Etymological Dictionary , the term and its agent noun "casuist", appearing from about 1600, derive from the Latin noun casus , meaning "case", especially as referring to a "case of conscience". The same source says, "Even in the earliest printed uses the sense was pejorative". Casuistry dates from Aristotle (384–322 BC), yet the peak of casuistry was from 1550 to 1650, when

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1952-684: The Society of Jesus (commonly known as the Jesuits ) used case-based reasoning, particularly in administering the Sacrament of Penance (or "confession"). The term became pejorative following Blaise Pascal 's attack on the misuse of the method in his Provincial Letters (1656–57). The French mathematician , religious philosopher and Jansenist sympathiser attacked priests who used casuistic reasoning in confession to pacify wealthy church donors. Pascal charged that "remorseful" aristocrats could confess

2013-488: The 18th century, Immanuel Kant attempted to show that Hume was wrong by demonstrating that a " transcendental " self, or "I", was a necessary condition of all experience. Therefore, suggested Kant, on the basis of such a self, it is in fact possible to reason both about the conditions and limits of human knowledge. And so long as these limits are respected, reason can be the vehicle of morality, justice, aesthetics, theories of knowledge ( epistemology ), and understanding. In

2074-559: The 20th century German philosopher Martin Heidegger , proposed that reason ought to include the faculty of disclosure , which is tied to the way we make sense of things in everyday life, as a new "department" of reason. In the essay "What is Enlightenment?", Michel Foucault proposed a critique based on Kant's distinction between "private" and "public" uses of reason: The terms logic or logical are sometimes used as if they were identical with reason or rational , or sometimes logic

2135-643: The Neoplatonic view of human reason and its implications for our relationship to creation, to ourselves, and to God. The Neoplatonic conception of the rational aspect of the human soul was widely adopted by medieval Islamic philosophers and continues to hold significance in Iranian philosophy . As European intellectual life reemerged from the Dark Ages , the Christian Patristic tradition and

2196-543: The ability to self-consciously change, in terms of goals , beliefs , attitudes , traditions , and institutions , and therefore with the capacity for freedom and self-determination . Psychologists and cognitive scientists have attempted to study and explain how people reason , e.g. which cognitive and neural processes are engaged, and how cultural factors affect the inferences that people draw. The field of automated reasoning studies how reasoning may or may not be modeled computationally. Animal psychology considers

2257-448: The discovery of the foundations of morality. Kant claimed that these solutions could be found with his " transcendental logic ", which unlike normal logic is not just an instrument that can be used indifferently, as it was for Aristotle, but a theoretical science in its own right and the basis of all the others. According to Jürgen Habermas , the "substantive unity" of reason has dissolved in modern times, such that it can no longer answer

2318-623: The distinction in this way: Logic is done inside a system while reason is done outside the system by such methods as skipping steps, working backward, drawing diagrams, looking at examples, or seeing what happens if you change the rules of the system. Psychologists Mark H. Bickard and Robert L. Campbell argue that "rationality cannot be simply assimilated to logicality"; they note that "human knowledge of logic and logical systems has developed" over time through reasoning, and logical systems "can't construct new logical systems more powerful than themselves", so reasoning and rationality must involve more than

2379-399: The essential difference between right and wrong, good and evil". The 20th century saw a revival of interest in casuistry. In their book The Abuse of Casuistry: A History of Moral Reasoning (1988), Albert Jonsen and Stephen Toulmin argue that it is not casuistry but its abuse that has been a problem; that, properly used, casuistry is powerful reasoning. Jonsen and Toulmin offer casuistry as

2440-407: The example of Islamic scholars such as Alhazen , emphasised reason an intrinsic human ability to decode the created order and the structures that underlie our experienced physical reality. This interpretation of reason was instrumental to the development of the scientific method in the early Universities of the high Middle Ages. The early modern era was marked by a number of significant changes in

2501-477: The formulation of Kant, who wrote some of the most influential modern treatises on the subject, the great achievement of reason ( German : Vernunft ) is that it is able to exercise a kind of universal law-making. Kant was able therefore to reformulate the basis of moral-practical, theoretical, and aesthetic reasoning on "universal" laws. Here, practical reasoning is the self-legislating or self-governing formulation of universal norms , and theoretical reasoning

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2562-535: The heart of his Natural Law . In this doctrine, Thomas concludes that because humans have reason and because reason is a spark of the divine, every single human life is invaluable, all humans are equal, and every human is born with an intrinsic and permanent set of basic rights. On this foundation, the idea of human rights would later be constructed by Spanish theologians at the School of Salamanca . Other Scholastics, such as Roger Bacon and Albertus Magnus , following

2623-419: The highest human happiness or well being ( eudaimonia ) as a life which is lived consistently, excellently, and completely in accordance with reason. The conclusions to be drawn from the discussions of Aristotle and Plato on this matter are amongst the most debated in the history of philosophy. But teleological accounts such as Aristotle's were highly influential for those who attempt to explain reason in

2684-403: The human mind with the divine order of the cosmos. Within the human mind or soul ( psyche ), reason was described by Plato as being the natural monarch which should rule over the other parts, such as spiritedness ( thumos ) and the passions. Aristotle , Plato's student, defined human beings as rational animals , emphasizing reason as a characteristic of human nature . He described

2745-521: The influence of esteemed Islamic scholars like Averroes and Avicenna contributed to the development of the Scholastic view of reason, which laid the foundation for our modern understanding of this concept. Among the Scholastics who relied on the classical concept of reason for the development of their doctrines, none were more influential than Saint Thomas Aquinas , who put this concept at

2806-521: The marks or notes or remembrance are called " Signes " by Hobbes. Going further back, although Aristotle is a source of the idea that only humans have reason ( logos ), he does mention that animals with imagination, for whom sense perceptions can persist, come closest to having something like reasoning and nous , and even uses the word " logos " in one place to describe the distinctions which animals can perceive in such cases. Reason and imagination rely on similar mental processes . Imagination

2867-447: The mid-18th century, "casuistry" had become a synonym for attractive-sounding, but ultimately false, moral reasoning. In 1679 Pope Innocent XI publicly condemned sixty-five of the more radical propositions ( stricti mentalis ), taken chiefly from the writings of Escobar, Suarez and other casuists as propositiones laxorum moralistarum and forbade anyone to teach them under penalty of excommunication . Despite this condemnation by

2928-460: The personal and the subjectively opaque. In some social and political settings logical and intuitive modes of reasoning may clash, while in other contexts intuition and formal reason are seen as complementary rather than adversarial. For example, in mathematics , intuition is often necessary for the creative processes involved with arriving at a formal proof , arguably the most difficult of formal reasoning tasks. Reasoning, like habit or intuition ,

2989-421: The question "How should I live?" Instead, the unity of reason has to be strictly formal, or "procedural". He thus described reason as a group of three autonomous spheres (on the model of Kant's three critiques): For Habermas, these three spheres are the domain of experts, and therefore need to be mediated with the " lifeworld " by philosophers. In drawing such a picture of reason, Habermas hoped to demonstrate that

3050-639: The question of whether animals other than humans can reason. In the English language and other modern European languages , "reason", and related words, represent words which have always been used to translate Latin and classical Greek terms in their philosophical sense. The earliest major philosophers to publish in English, such as Francis Bacon , Thomas Hobbes , and John Locke also routinely wrote in Latin and French, and compared their terms to Greek, treating

3111-562: The rules by which reason operates are the works of the Greek philosopher Aristotle , especially Prior Analytics and Posterior Analytics . Although the Ancient Greeks had no separate word for logic as distinct from language and reason, Aristotle's newly coined word " syllogism " ( syllogismos ) identified logic clearly for the first time as a distinct field of study. When Aristotle referred to "the logical" ( hē logikē ), he

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3172-538: The same " laws of nature " which affect inanimate things. This new understanding eventually displaced the previous world view that derived from a spiritual understanding of the universe. Accordingly, in the 17th century, René Descartes explicitly rejected the traditional notion of humans as "rational animals", suggesting instead that they are nothing more than "thinking things" along the lines of other "things" in nature. Any grounds of knowledge outside that understanding was, therefore, subject to doubt. In his search for

3233-544: The substantive unity of reason, which in pre-modern societies had been able to answer questions about the good life, could be made up for by the unity of reason's formalizable procedures. Hamann , Herder , Kant , Hegel , Kierkegaard , Nietzsche , Heidegger , Foucault , Rorty , and many other philosophers have contributed to a debate about what reason means, or ought to mean. Some, like Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, and Rorty, are skeptical about subject-centred, universal, or instrumental reason, and even skeptical toward reason as

3294-464: The understanding of reason, starting in Europe . One of the most important of these changes involved a change in the metaphysical understanding of human beings. Scientists and philosophers began to question the teleological understanding of the world. Nature was no longer assumed to be human-like, with its own aims or reason, and human nature was no longer assumed to work according to anything other than

3355-458: The ways in which humans can use formal reasoning to produce logically valid arguments and true conclusions. Reasoning may be subdivided into forms of logical reasoning , such as deductive reasoning , inductive reasoning , and abductive reasoning . Aristotle drew a distinction between logical discursive reasoning (reason proper), and intuitive reasoning , in which the reasoning process through intuition—however valid—may tend toward

3416-426: The word. It also does not mean that humans acting on the basis of experience or habit are using their reason. Human reason requires more than being able to associate two ideas—even if those two ideas might be described by a reasoning human as a cause and an effect—perceptions of smoke, for example, and memories of fire. For reason to be involved, the association of smoke and the fire would have to be thought through in

3477-403: The words " logos ", " ratio ", " raison " and "reason" as interchangeable. The meaning of the word "reason" in senses such as "human reason" also overlaps to a large extent with " rationality " and the adjective of "reason" in philosophical contexts is normally " rational ", rather than "reasoned" or "reasonable". Some philosophers, Hobbes for example, also used the word ratiocination as

3538-563: Was interrupted toward the middle of the 17th century by the controversy which arose concerning the doctrine of probabilism , which effectively stated that one could choose to follow a "probable opinion"—that is, an opinion supported by a theologian or another—even if it contradicted a more probable opinion or a quotation from one of the Fathers of the Church . Certain kinds of casuistry were criticised by early Protestant theologians , because it

3599-487: Was readily adopted by the early Church as the Church Fathers saw Greek Philosophy as an indispensable instrument given to mankind so that we may understand revelation. For example, the greatest among the early Church Fathers and Doctors of the Church such as Augustine of Hippo , Basil of Caesarea , and Gregory of Nyssa were as much Neoplatonic philosophers as they were Christian theologians, and they adopted

3660-412: Was referring more broadly to rational thought. As pointed out by philosophers such as Hobbes, Locke, and Hume, some animals are also clearly capable of a type of " associative thinking ", even to the extent of associating causes and effects. A dog once kicked, can learn how to recognize the warning signs and avoid being kicked in the future, but this does not mean the dog has reason in any strict sense of

3721-559: Was used to justify many of the abuses that they sought to reform. It was famously attacked by the Catholic and Jansenist philosopher Blaise Pascal during the formulary controversy against the Jesuits, in his Provincial Letters , as the use of rhetorics to justify moral laxity, which became identified by the public with Jesuitism ; hence the everyday use of the term to mean complex and sophistic reasoning to justify moral laxity. By

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