Sublime

Beyond pursuing certain methods and topics of inquiry, then, philosophy critically assesses intellectual lineages and explores new possibilities for thought.

But all these historical truths, crucial as they are, are unimportant compared with the fact that Aristotelianism is philosophically the most powerful of pre-modern modes of moral thought. If a pre-modern view of morals and politics is to be vindicated against modernity, it will be in something like Aristotelian terms or not at all.

What Sidgwick portrays as failure Moore takes to be an enlightening and liberating discovery. And Moore’s readers, for whom, as I noticed earlier, the enlightenment and the liberation were paramount, saw themselves as rescued thereby from Sidgwick and any other utilitarianism as decisively as from Christianity. What they did not see of course was